A wt ee i i eh Eee te bet Oh! Oh! Dick's arm is wet. TRIO A NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK FRED BLUTH This street that the tree sits by wanders away to the west, and | can walk on it free. The street goes on until farms with chickens and horses stop it’s running. ls a fine street with signs on the sides of it about mph. White and black signs on white wood poles shot through and through with holes of rifle bullets. (The slug hit: and sang as it pulled the black paint of 6 through the punctured metal.) Through the window morning sunlight pours laughing into the house. The glass that had been the window ‘s scattered and reflects sun light on the floor. Sand that the wind had bounced in through the shaggey hole in the glass covers some of the smaller shatters of glass. Dust piles up in the gray corners of the floor. Hardwood floor planks crack quietly in the red sunlight. Sour mortar still wet with rain holds loosly to the brick walls. Small crumbling rectangles of hard clay pile on top of each other in the early sunlight. Glass fragments shine steadily. The mountains on the other side of the broken glass still sleep in their own blue shadows. He was a friend of the family, and his clothes showed it. His clothes hung loosely over the arms of the they ate the leaves, and he sat tele- watched and vision with the little girl. The little girl thought her mommy and daddy had funny friends because one of them wore loose clothes and watched television with her. The little girl smiled at the man in the loose clothes and said pleasantly she All my world is red and moves when | moved my head. Sunlight turns red through the blood of my eyelids. Easy warm sun too brightly shines in a spring sky. Open my eyes, look away from the sun, and there are wrinkled dry leaves of a maple tree that will never come alive again. I remember this tree. Four years ago it got bugs in it, and as chair wanted Yogy. to change channels to see The man with the loose clothes got out all the leaves died. This is a fine land to live in. | can do what | want here. Most of my friends don’t like it though. They haven‘t found a way out of it as | have. See this tree and sky? they're mine. | can burn the tree and smoke the sky to a lovely gray because | know what to do. of the chair and told her, no, But the little girl leave it alone. changed the channel, and the man with the loose clothes went into the little girl’s kitchen and found a butcher knife and came back and stabbed the little girl four times and left the knife in her and went to the fine grained wood living room door and pulled on the brass knob and opened the door and ran home. (22) DAVID HESTER The wind blew cold that dismal October afternoon as Dr. Gorman and | drove the last sixty yards to the splintered barn. | think the cattle within its make-shift, re-enforced walls kept them standing as much as did the sparsely located two-by-fours. We had received a telephone call from the owner of the farm that one of his “prize cows” was in “bad shape.” “How long has she been that way?” asked Dr. Gorman. He held a pencil between his thumb and his fore-finger and near the tip. His fingers slid down the shaft to the eraser. He turned the pencil over and reversed the process. “Only about a week,” was the angelic reply. “I been taking care of her myself.” “What have you been giving her?” asked the doctor, still playing with the pencil. : “Jist a good creasote ‘n’ dose of linseed oil’n shots,” came the unfor- tunately honest reply. That was the call that brought us to a musty, cob-web infested excuse for a barn. It was not an uncommon call. The patient lay huddled in one corner of the “barn,” motionless. | put my hand on her chest, hoping to feel a faint palpitation. The Holstein quivered, displaying a dim ray of life. She apparantly had caught her hoof (23) in a wire fence. A deep gash showed about six inches above the left hock. | scraped off three layers of creasotesoaked rags to get to the wound. Even in October the flies had found their way to the raw, inflamed, pus infected wound. They flocked to it as the old Southern darkies flocked to a revival meeting. Her temperature read well over one hundred and eight, with one hundred and four a maximum normal. Her eyes were dialated and seeping, not unlike those of a person who had just been hit on the bridge of the nose. The infected hock looked as if the two hind legs had been bound together by some undetectable grafting of the skin. Dr. Gorman lanced the infection, and a heavy stench rose from the wound. It burned my nostrils; my eyes watered as if | had peeled an onion. The warm pus squirted up on my forearm as | held the swollen leg. Dr. Gorman applied a sterile dressing. He fed her vitamins and antibodies intraveniously in an effort to curb a rising threat of anemia. Her black and white hide already stretched tightly across a set of flagrant ribs. The owner shuffled into the barn. “Afternoon, Doc. How is she?” he asked, casually leaning on a rotted two-by-four. “| don’t give her much chance,” Dr. Gorman answered, not bothering