>CAM<

I am the president of Salt-lick Fence Corporation. We have been in business until the day I am born. Word in the trade publications is that I am not pregant or pregnant or is. I don't really care but it would be nice sometimes to know... to sometimes have a crow in my ear.

My company is dedicated to the cause of allowing Horses the freedom to destroy their boundaries if they want to. If they're getting enough salt elsewhere then they probably won't want to - not sure actually. Deer are another matter. We proudly arm each of our fences with a sensitive anti-Deer device that shoots them - that turns them into a puddle of sentient mucous inside a sausage-like membrane.

Best wishes,

-Helen Drivle

Tanny and Me

One day I ate some stale crackers.
The next day I had some more stale crackers along with some cheese doodles.
The next day I didn't have anything, just sort of rolled around a bit between sleeps.
Wasn't feeling too good the day after that. Had a headache and a fever. I went swimming in the marsh outside my shack, just floating actually, didn't feel too good but was better than lying indoors. It was still summer, the water was warm and soothing but the salty smell and taste started to give me yet another headache. I ate some oysters and kelp that I found stuck to the side of my porch.
I scraped my foot climbing back into my shack. Some barnacle-particles were stuck in my tender instep.
After that a few days went by before I was willing to leave the house. I stayed in bed and lived on a bottle of cough syrup and some hard licorice that I found on my bed stand. That was a pretty good day actually, finding the licorice really cheered me up.
My friend Tanny payed me a visit late one night (wasn't sure how much time passed since the licorice -- stopped keeping track). He wouldn't say what he wanted and just sat in a chair in a corner of my room.
I didn't hear him come in and didn't even notice his presence until I struck a match. I woke up from a dream (something about snakes in the Elymus mollis) . I squirmed around my bed looking for the matches that I knew I had folded into a secret pocket in the bed sheet.

Striking a match after a troubled dream is a good way to clear the head, it's become a ritual of mine to just peer around and get a good look of my room whenever I have one of these dreams, but this time the light revealed Tanny unexpectedly sitting in the corner looking at me.

I saw him through the narrow bars of my foot board

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For some reason I wasn't really startled, but I wasn't curious either, I was still thinking about snakes when I started to ask questions. I don't even remember the words, but it didn't really matter because he just kept staring at me. I invited him to spend the night in the chair or on the floor or where he would and went back to sleep.
When I woke up the next morning my friend had apparently left, but I found his canoe still on my porch. I thought: maybe he decided to swim home.

lawrence

flace

Sadly I could no longer watch while my best friend repeated her fall from the bicycle. She wasn't ready to go the distance so we put the training wheels back on. Maybe she would never be ready. Maybe re-learning to ride was too hard. My sorrow pinched me somewhere fleshy but I bit my lip. I could feel sunlight in my breast in spite of the drizzle on my scalp.