Who, exactly, were the “they” in this whispered conversation? Brian had a suspicion. There had been reports over the past few days of strange military behavior all over world. There had been sightings in the sky, dismissed as drone tests. Former military officers had warned of years of sightings of aliens, but no one seemed to pay much attention. After all, Elon Musk was trying to shut down the IRS.

That was when Brian did something very out of character. He stopped what he was doing without another thought, and ran to his car. Brian was a city planner who came to work in Detroit after being swept up in the joy of rebuilding a city run roughshod by economics, bad leaders and racism.

He jumped into his 2007 Mazda 3 and tore out of the parking garage. When he had moved to Detroit, there was a joke that red lights were optional because so many people ran them and the police rarely stopped anyone. Today, it was true. Brian floored it down Jefferson Avenue toward Grosse Pointe, where he had settled on the edge Detroit. His appetite for urban pioneering had ebbed when his daughter reached kindergarten.

He ran the first stop light and then accelerated. He saw that no one was on the sidewalk and jumped the curb and went past the next light. Horns blasted and one guy actually threw something out his window at him. Brian almost slowed down at this point, but he flicked his eyes at the clock. In 2 minutes, the press conference would begin. He accelerated and passed cars on the left, tearing past a Jeep factory.

When he reached Grosse Pointe Park, one of the five lakeside communities tucked between Lake St. Clair and Detroit, he did slow down. He couldn’t afford to have the cops stop him so close to home. The announcement was being made now. He heard the news coming in on the radio.

“We are expecting a global attack to occur and it could begin at any moment. The best thing to do is to seek shelter in basements and wait for more information to come. We have limited information, except that there are more than 10,000 UAVs in the upper atmosphere, spread across most of the largest population areas of the world.”

Brian drove onto his lawn. He ran up the steps to his bungalow and burst in. His wife yelped as she saw him scan around with panicked eyes.

“Brian! What the hell!” Mandy said. “What are you doing?”

“Mandy, I need you to grab whatever food you can from the pantry and shove it in a bag and bring that case of water from the basement. We need to leave this house in 15 minutes, or less. Where is Eve?”

“What in the hell is going on? What is wrong with you?” she said, fear shadowing her face.

“It’s the end of the world, babe. The aliens are invading and I am not actually fucking around if you can believe it. We have to be out of here as fast as possible. They can shut down anything with electronics. I have a plan, though. But we have to go right now.”

“Eve is upstairs. She just got home from school,” Mandy said. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

Brian didn’t answer. He just pelted upstairs and got out his biggest suitcase. It was an oblong and had wheels. He looked at his dresser and closet for a minute and tried to imagine what he would need. He put in every pair of underwear, three pairs of socks, his three favorite t-shirts, two zip-up hoodies, a pair of jeans and a swimsuit. He found the single South African gold krugerrand hidden in his drawer given to him by his parents and threw that in as well.

Then he stuffed in a very similar set of clothes from his wife’s things. How many bras should he pack? Three? He looked at the clock. He had 10 minutes left. He ran into his daughter’s room and began stuffing clothes into the bag. It was starting to get too full to hold much more. They would have to figure things out later.

He pulled the comforter off his bed and dragged the suitcase down the steps.

“Where do things stand?” he said, looking at Mandy stuffing boxes of food and canned food into a gym bag. She had pulled the case of water from the basement and it was sitting by the front door.

“I almost have everything we can fit for now,” she said. “Eve is freaking out. I am freaking out.”

He nodded and swept his arm around the kitchen. “Maybe grab a couple knives, a can opener and a pot. Then we need to get the hell out of here. I mean it.”

Mandy nodded and grabbed the big kitchen knife and also grabbed a lighter from a drawer and stuffed it into the bag. It wasn’t much. It wouldn’t last them long.

Brian rushed outside with the bag and put it in the trunk of the car. His neighbors were outside now and everyone was staring at his car in the yard. They were talking to each other and he could hear them talking about the invasion. All he was thinking about was the military and what they had said. No one would be able to leave soon.

He ran back inside and Mandy was leading Eve out of the house. His 5-year-old was wearing a coat that she didn’t need in the warm early autumn weather. Mandy had grabbed her favorite MSU sweatshirt and tied it around her waist and held a box of tampons in one hand and the duffle bag stuffed with food in the other.

Everyone outside heard a faint whine and saw what looked like a plane move across the sky at an impossible speed.

“Let’s go,” Brian said, ignoring his neighbors. He was single-minded now. He didn’t know how long he had until the power went out.

When Eve was snapped into the back, he backed off the lawn and raced down the street. He was headed to the marina where his 25-foot Catalina sailboat was moored. The boat had been his father’s and he gave it to him when he moved to Florida two years ago. He wasn’t that great at sailing it, but good enough for a desperate escape.

He drove into the city park where his boat was stored and right through a gap in the fence, past the parking lot. He dodged barbecues built into the ground and pulled next to the boats. Urging his family to rush, he grabbed the tiny collection of things they had brought. He wasn’t sure they had even locked their doors at home.

As soon as he was on the boat, he started the small motor that helped them navigate the marina. If the power went out before he could get out of the berth, it would be hard to get to the lake.

With the ropes off, he pulled out of the slip, banging one side on the bumpers and then he shot the boat forward out of the marina. It cleared the breakwater when they heard a “whoomp” and the engine shut off. His phone turned black. Silence reigned. Only the sound of the boat splashed through the water could be heard.

He and Mandy quickly put up the main sail and he turned north. The only hope they had was to head up the river and keep going north, away from the populated areas. Detroit would be a mess with cars stopped everywhere and no electronics.

Mandy looked at him and shook her head. They had barely spoken since he had rushed in the front door. Eve whimpered and clung to her as the boat picked up speed and Brian unfurled the jib.

“I don’t have any pictures. Nothing,” she said.

“We’re alive,” Brian said. “No matter what happens. I am glad we did this.”

Well, we’d ‘downsized’ from a large home – and I needed a home office (because I work from home). We’d decided to make a xeriscaped Japanese-style garden – so I decided to build a “Tea House” of my own design – and I did 100% of the work myself…

I’m actually not good with heights – so getting the curved roof beams erected was a bit terrifying, The roof curves in all three directions – so there was quite a bit of CAD work that went into that bit…

It’s designed to look like it’s very old – so we used heavy timbers, stained to look old. The cheap limber I bought cracked – and that really adds to the ancient up-close appearance.

Here’s the final thing… I put off-white-blinds behind the windows to give it the look of paper walls…

The interior shows off my complicated woodwork…

It has a Mini-split airconditioner/heater – and is a very practical home office…

It looked SO cool in winter…

…and also at night…

We moved to a larger house a few years later – I was sad to have to leave it.

I’ve done some bigger and more complicated DIY jobs since then – but this is the one I was most proud of because I did the *ENTIRE* job.

Our latest house move is to a 115 year old house which needs a LOT of work…it has details that badly need rescuing…the electrical system is *SO* bad…it’s twice tried to kill me!

MOURNING FIRE

by

S. T. Seitz

Calida yearns to be the peony in her garden, the one being strangled by bindweed. How much easier it would be to give up and lay her head on the ground the way that plump bloom rests on the soil. Easier than finding the strength to keep breathing, to keep moving. To put on her gardening gloves and cut back those choking vines before they take over her yard. What would be the point, anyway? If she pulls those ugly serpent weeds, they’ll just grow back. Even if she digs her hori hori knife deep into the newly thawed soil and pulls the full length of the pale rhizomes free, other weeds will just take their place. And if they don’t, the peonies will still die, eventually. They’ll shrivel under the remorseless summer sun. Or at the unforgiving, icy hands of winter. Everything dies eventually. Some sooner than others. So what’s the fucking point of any of it?

She runs through this tired argument as she stares at the garden out the kitchen window. Her elbows are propped on the edge of the sink, the reek of the stacked dishes inside twisting up her nostrils but hardly registering.

“Go dig a hole and crawl in then,” she tells herself.

This is not her giving up. This is what she knows she needs to hear. Stubborn is what people call her when they’re being kind. Obstinate is a more accurate term. So obstinate, in fact, that even when it’s her telling her to do something, she feels viscerally compelled to do the opposite.

“Fuck you.” She tells herself, tells the world, then stomps to the door, pulls her gardening gloves off the hook above the light switch, and marches outside with more conviction than she’s had in two months. Then she’s had since she lost them.

She kneels in dirt still moist with morning dew. Prickly pieces of mulch and the occasional sharp rock press into her flesh through the thin sweats she’s been wearing for—well, too long to remember. The pain is a welcome sensation against the numbing callous of grief. She breathes it in, savors it in the back of her throat, in the pit of her stomach, then drives the hori hori blade into the Earth. The sharp point of the serrated shovel reveals a tangle of smooth white roots, each of them giving rise to a spindly vine. The rhizomes are easy enough to track through the earth. She slides her fingers along them, pressing into the dirt as far as the spring thaw will allow. Then she pinches and yanks back.

As long as you go deep, the roots are simple enough to extract. The vines, less so. At least, now that they’ve had time to twist around the thick stems of the peonies.

Calida takes the serrated edge of the shovel and meticulously slices away at the bindweed. The tool has retained its razor’s edge from when she sharpened it last fall and makes quick work of the first strangling mass. Once she’s yanked away the tangle, she runs her hand down the unfettered stem and over the bloom, propping it up so it can feel the sun. Those petals burn like flames in the light, orange at the edges and a deep ember-red in the center. Morning Fire. Her very own cultivar, one she bred through trial and error for no other reason than to feel the pride of creation.

That feeling rings through her now, but the sound is a hollow thud against the remnants of destruction that coat her insides like tar. She can’t think that word—destruction—without looking to the sky. She’s certain she’s not the first person to be stricken by this affliction. For millennia, man has turned to the heavens with meager hopes of understanding their suffering. But the deity she wants answers from is not some divine spirit. It’s a writhing ball of rainbow gas that stares down on her with as much odium as she casts up at it.

Near Earth Celestial Anomaly. That’s the official name. Calida prefers Fenrir, caster of flame, destroyer of worlds. Her world, anyway. For so long, that iridescent ball of nebulous gas with its black cat-eye center had been harmless. And then, as if it just got bored one day, it spit out a massive, matter erasing flare. The thing crashed to Earth with the same fervor as the meteor that fucked over the dinosaurs, leaving a seventy-mile-wide crater in its wake.

It was just (very, very bad) luck that she was standing farther away than they were when it hit.

With every second she stares into the obsidian eye of that heinous rift, her resolve wains. She could spend all day out here slicing away the weeds, but the bloom in her hand will still die. Eventually.

A sob hits her like a convulsion, whipping her head forward and doubling her over. She catches her face in her hands. The jagged teeth of the hori hori clutched between her thumb and forefinger slide across her cheek, ripping flesh and sowing blood. She curses, then rips the peony she’d been holding from its stem and shreds it, littering the ground with red and orange petals. With soft pieces of flame.

The blood snakes down her cheek, tickling nerve endings like the gentle caress of a lover. By the time she reaches the bathroom, the trail of crimson has made it to the frayed collar of her tee-shirt, saturating the dingy fabric until the stains fade to uniform red. Cleansing them in its way.

Calida stares at herself in the mirror and wishes very suddenly, very deeply, for the same. The cleansing touch of blood. To bathe in it. To feel it vellicating her body as it cleanses the wounds time will never heal. She leans across the counter, reaching for the hori hori. As she does, a drop of blood frees itself from her jawline and catches her hand.

She stares at the splattered crimson. “Do. It.” The words come through her teeth.

Her spine snaps straight and her jaw muscles pulse in that obstinate way. Forgetting the knife, she bends for the bottom drawer, meaning to dig out a bandage for her cheek. But when she reaches inside, it isn’t a box of band aids she finds, but a nest of gauze and hair ties with a foam elephant snug in the center.

Her body goes cold.

How long she stands there before reaching down, she doesn’t know. But eventually that elephant-shaped stress ball ends up in her hands. Weeks ago, friends had boxed up her husband’s and daughter’s possessions. They said it would help. Calida’s not sure it did, and she’s certain it does nothing to ease the sting of finding this last trace of her daughter—the last evidence of her playful soul, so bursting with love that she’d dedicated an afternoon to finding an elephant-shaped hunk of foam the perfect place to sleep.

Calida rolls it around in her hands, feeling warmth where it no longer exists. This object was once alight with her daughter’s touch. She knows it. She feels it.

It isn’t until the third mindless rotation that she notices the white tag hanging below the elephant’s stubby foam tail. On it are three lines of text. The first reads, Intermountain Division, DioMatics Inc. Below is an address—an address less than fifty miles from where she is standing.

Before the flare ripped through the atmosphere and claimed her family, Calida was vaguely aware of a young billionaire buying up companies faster than the other heartless magnates. But it wasn’t until people on social media started dropping the names “XpaceDM” and “DioMatics” as being potentially responsible for the flare, that she came to learn that these companies and this person were related. Calida hadn’t paid much mind to the rumors, because they were only rumors. But as she stares at the address, she can’t help but replay those claims. What if this company is responsible for their deaths? What if the perpetrator of her grief is a mere hour’s drive away?

Without removing her gaze from the elephant, she reaches for the hori hori and wraps her fingers around the hilt, bringing the toothy blade closer. With the snap of her wrist, she slices the air and separates the tag from the foam body of the stress ball. She tosses the knife back onto the counter and lifts the text so she can better read the address.

They’re just rumors. Just baseless accusations formed out of grief and pain. But it’s only an hour away. What harm could come from driving up there?

The End

Cincinnati Chili

Have your chili 3, 4 or 5 ways, Cincinnati style. This is also great on hot dogs, smothered with shredded cheese.

Yield: 5 to 6 servings

Ingredients

Chili

• 1 1/2 pounds lean ground beef
• 2 medium onions, chopped
• 1/2 cup chopped celery
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons mild chili powder
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1 1/2 teaspoons dried basil
• 1 1/2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• 1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
• 2 (14 1/2 ounce) cans diced tomatoes
• 1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
• 1/2 cup water

Have It 5 Ways

• 1 pound spaghetti, cooked
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 1 cup finely grated Cheddar cheese
• 1 (15 1/2 ounce) can kidney beans, rinsed, drained and heated
• Hot sauce (your favorite)

Instructions

1. Brown ground beef, onions and celery in a large skillet, drain off all fat.
2. Place slow cooker ingredients into a slow cooker and stir well. Cover slow cooker and cook for 7 to 9 hours on LOW, or for 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 hours on HIGH, stirring during last part of cooking if using HIGH setting.
3. Cook spaghetti 1/2 hour before chili is done.
4. To have chili 3-ways, serve it with spaghetti, chili and cheese.
5. To have chili 4-ways, serve it with spaghetti, chili, onion and cheese.
6. To have spaghetti 5-ways, serve it with spaghetti, chili, beans, onion and cheese.
7. Douse chili liberally with hot sauce, if desired.