Hear the Author number... um... seven!

Hard to believe we've already done six of these "read something and post it to your blog" thingies.  Originally demanded by Robin, this time we are inspired by our wonderful friend, Paca (that's DOCTOR Paca to you... well, to us all, I guess).

UPDATE:  Sylvia has put together a list of all of us playing this round.

My reading, in the podbean below.  I apologize for the crappy sound quality.  I blame the equipment available (a Rock Band USB microphone connected to my Mac mini) and an utter lack of understanding of how to work with sound on a computer.

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And the full text of the story is below in case you want to read along.  This story did not win any awards in the contest, but I still like it.

Alone

Up here in the branches, the wind slithers under my coat and tightens around my arms. My breath freezes in my beard. This new rope scratches, but it warms my neck.

Wind whistles through the barn nearby, and ice breaks with thunderclaps on the river. Smoke escapes from the farmhouse chimney, disappearing into a gunmetal sky. As if from nowhere, one big crow flaps onto a close branch and stares me down with coal eyes and a black icicle beak.

Through cracking lips, I croak, “You never seen a man hang himself before?” My teeth chatter. I grasp the trunk to keep from slipping. “You come to stop me?”

“No.” The quiet voice visits my mind directly. The crow cocks its head to the side, its beak shut. The voice is Sarah’s. “I’ve come to witness.”

I glance to the ground, skin prickling. Sarah might be there, my shovel still buried in her naked chest, her blood staining the gray snow. Jefferson might stand next to her, headless. I whisper, “Begone, adultress witch,” and I shiver in every bone, right to my soul.

Sarah’s voice coos, “You will be warm enough, husband, when you join your brother in Hell. I bear no fault. He took me by force.”

“Begone!” I swat at the crow. My foot slips. I pitch forward and swing down in a slow arc, feel the rope cut my throat and freeze my breath. A gauzy haze drowns my vision, and the crow ascends through barren branches.

Ducklings Reprise

Remember yesterday?  No, neither do I, usually.  But yesterday we had ducklings.

Today, the mom and the seven wee ones came back.  They came quacking into our front yard.  We're not sure if they came looking for the one injured duckling, or if they were simply terrified out of a neighbor's yard by the gardener's leaf blower.  I prefer to think the latter.  I prefer to think they don't care about the little one that is now on its own at the hospital, never to be reunited with its mama.

Anyway, two new pictures.  I like the second especially.

Mama and ducklings walking on our side path.

Mama and ducklings choosing the perfect
moment for to be photogenic.

Make way for ducklings! with photos!

My younger son called me on my way home from work today.  He's 11 and still has that munchkin voice, but he's losing his little-boy lisp.

"Dad.  When will you be home?  We can't get the ducklings out of the pool."

"Ducklings?"

"Yeah, a mom duck and eight ducklings.  They can't get out.  We saw on youtube someone made a ramp from a lawn chair.  We're waiting for you to get home."

Twenty minutes later, I arrived to find, indeed, eight ducklings and one mama duck swimming around in our pool.

First, we grabbed two lengths of old, useless baseboard and lay them into the pool as a narrow ramp.  I had visions of Ping boarding his boat from the Yangtze.

We herded the mama (with her lings in tow) toward the ramp, but the mama kept jumping out next to the ramp and quacking urgently to her brood.  They, of course, eschewed the ramp and tried for the more direct route--jumping out like mama did.  But it was no good.  Even the best of them could only manage a couple of inches out of the water, a good six inches below the lip of the concrete coping.

At the insistent pleas of my younger son, the one who had seen the youtube video, we removed the useless baseboard and slid one end of a lounge chair into the pool.  It made for a much wider ramp, but it's a plastic weave and the ducklings simply hopped through the holes instead of climbing out.  The mom seemed overwrought trying to quack her ducklings into jumping higher.

About this time, the neighbor boy arrived to help.  He noticed that one of the ducklings was no longer swimming with the rest.  He was just floating around, one leg hanging limp.  We don't now how it happened, but we think he maybe broke it getting into, and then out of, the skimmer (where the water gets sucked into the filter).  I used the baseboard (not so useless any more) to lift him up and out of the water and deposit him onto the patio.

Mama duck seemed far less agitated but still unable to extract the rest of her family from the pool.

Finally, I got sick of the failed ramps and went to get an old sheet of beadboard left over from a long-ago bathroom remodel.  I lay the beadboard in the pool upside down, and it made a fair beachhead.  (You can see the lounge chairs in the background.)

Within minutes, mama duck led her kidlets up and out.  The exit wasn't so kind to the little ones, with the top of the ramp three inches off the ground.  One by one they tumbled off the edge onto their heads, popped right back up, and waddled off through the gate behind mama.

Unfortunately, the injured baby could not walk and was left behind.  Maria scooped him up into a box and took him to the Lindsay Wildlife Museum, which has an extensive and top-notch wildlife rescue program.  They whisked the duckling into the back room (stat!) and asked for the whole story.  They will fix him up good.  I am imagining him on the gurney with a blood pressure monitor and an IV drip and a team of surgeons just like in Grey's Anatomy.  Here's the little guy on his way to the hospital, sitting on a dish towel.

When mama got her babies out, she hightailed it out of our yard and across the street.  The seven mobile kids seemed not one bit upset about leaving the wounded behind, and the little injured one seemed to take a philosophical approach to the whole affair.  We have no idea where the family skedaddled off to.  They went into another yard, under a fence.  They're probably stuck in another neighbor's pool as I write this.