January Writing Prompt: A Little Fun, A Little Creepy, A Lot Too Real

Before Mick's Gram left him for good, she said he'd meet someone true next year. Of course, he didn't understand who she was talking about. Most days it felt like he was listening to someone who kept tuning in to different radio stations. At the nursing home, she'd talked of first loves, first pets, the time she got in the fight with someone's mother at a track meet when clearly his father won the broad jump.

Oh, he listened to Gram Ileen a lot. Always had. After all, she would make him waffles any time of the day and the woman clearly knew a lot about bacon because it was always perfectly crispy.

There were a lot of her secrets he didn't know and probably wouldn't now. She'd been sent to the memory unit and she didn't know him anymore.

Mick decided he'd just dream about what Gram Ileen had told him. His last breakup, he didn't see coming. Of course, she said she knew all along it wouldn't work.

"She didn't like to eat when you two went out. Always, making you suffer," she'd told him. Even so, it didn't make Mick feel any better about his situation. Mick fell in love easily, but it never seemed to last.

Here he was, nearing thirty, and hadn't started a family yet. He worked at a feed store in a country town. Yet, recently, he was either at Gram Ileen's side or trying to fix up the old house she had given him. 

Mick lived out in the country. It was a few miles out of town on Highway 67, and he was all alone. How in the hell was he supposed to meet anybody?

Then, one night, he heard something calling him. It was a bone-chilling moonlight night. He pulled on his boots and zipped up his parka just to walk down to the creek bottom. Something awful must have happened, he thought. He looked far and near with the headlight of his phone, but nothing.

Mick winced tears in the cold. He was afraid he might give up. 

Next thing he knew he awoke to his five a.m. radio clock, "Money for nothing..." rang through his bedroom. Mick sighed. He wasn't even in his boots or his parka, just his flannel bottoms and no socks. 

He went to make coffee, wondering what got him so worked up last night. Still, he knew something was calling him. Probably, a cat, he thought. It wasn't long until he was nursing creamed coffee and wishing he had more than instant oatmeal.  

Before he knew it, the day began. He headed off in his old pickup truck down the dusty road. Of course, he drove real slow by the creek bottom just to see if something awful happened. Maybe wayward teens slaughtered each other or just a javelena terrorizing a dog.  

Mick blinked. Why would he think such terror? Had something horrific happened? He didn't mention such nonsense to anyone at the feed store. Nothing ever happened at Tommie Mac's Feedstore.

Mick suddenly remembered the time Toby Jentry took a swing at him. They fought for no good reason. Mick came out of that one with a black eye and folks still thought Mick was the reason Toby jumped off the bridge and broke his neck.

Well, that was high school. Mick didn't think much about it now until he looked in the corner past the sacks of hog and sheep feed where it happened. They'd been young bucks back then with no sense of direction.

 Mick shook his head. Why in the hell was he still here and Toby wasn't?

"If only I could understand things better," he remembered telling his Gram. And she'd smoothed down his tucks of hair with her old bony hand. Her only answer was, "Sometimes, you won't know the answer until they are long gone."

Mick nursed his bottom lip now. Tommie, from his motorized wheelchair where his tiny limp legs made a home, asked what the problem was.

"Nothing, I guess," Mick shrugged back.  

"Boy, you need to get that education," Tommie told him he had no business settling in this one-horse town. Mick just grinned. It was the usual conversation. After all, he'd stayed behind to help Tommie who came to depend on him for farm auctions and such.    

Finally, Tommie told him to go home, but Mick wouldn't go. There was a lot to do even if it didn't look like it. There were his quarter horses to feed, and hounds to tend to. All the while, Mick kept that haunting feeling that something was calling his name. Maybe.

About two before school let out, Mick saddled up Casper that Tommie trusted him with. Mick thought maybe if he checked out the creek bottom on the speckled pony was a destiny of some kind. With a jolt, he was on his way, and he dreamed of the days when his daddy rode the range with Gramps. 

But then maybe he was dreaming, by the time he got to the thicket where the water ran full, he could hear a rattler. An uneasy feeling sank to the bottom of his stomach when he saw the blood-soaked jeans with the red rising up the torso. 

Mick was awake and it was hardly alive. Honestly, he wasn't sure what it was hidden in the straw of grass. He gasped, knowing he'd have to crush the rattler with a rock before he could do anything else. 

He picked up a heavy rock and cracked the rattler's head open without a second thought. When he got closer to the water, he could see her foot was in the teeth of the trap. Mick could hardly focus as he reached for his phone in his back pocket. Thank God it was charged.

"Mick, is that you," her breathless voice asked while he was calling 911.  

"Yeah, how long, you, been this way?" He squinted. Although, all he could see was gray.

"Since yesterday," her weak voice grew raspy.

"I thought," he didn't really want to tell her about that dream. He told her the ambulance was coming to get her. Everything would be OK. He asked for her name.  Catrina.  She was Toby's little sister. She was just out walking but forgot her phone.

Her tender hands raised, reaching for him. "My brother always said you were the best," she told him. 

Mick blinked tears for no good reason. He didn't want to believe her and yet he wanted to.