BLACK-EYED SUSAN
by Mike LesterThe blinds were shut, but the morning light somehow found a way in. I pulled a pillow over my face, trying to block out the sun and postpone the inevitable. No deal. I was officially awake.
Sleep had been elusive the last week or so. Darkness didn’t help. Colors played across my closed eyelids, slithering, changing, green deep-set eyes peering, leering. Horrible and true. Everything comes home, eventually. Back to the starting place. A snake biting its own tail. Everything returns to the bloated blue face of the neighbor boy cradled in his stumbling father’s arms, noose still tightly bound around his neck. And to the boy on the bicycle, petrified, watching the father stumble across the lawn toward him like Frankenstein’s monster with a dead child in his arm
