Bullets of Rain by David J. Schow Read Free Book Online Page A

sympathy or pity: no one to mourn me. If I were a poet, I'd say beware oh all the ways in which love can become a lie. I truly believe love is the single most difficult human endeavor, and almost no one is prepared to deal with all oh its ramifications. We are all amateurs, and I hailed.
         If you are reading this, and ever see the face of love, try your best not to hall short oh its demanding mark. It is very important that you understand…
        The note appeared to be the middle page of a multipage tract, since there was no salutation and no signature. The page began and terminated in midsentence. The blocky handwriting could have belonged to a woman, or a man. To Art it was particularly confounding. If it was one of a million gag notes thrown into the sea every year by pranksters, why wasn't it better rehearsed, more definitive? If it was for real, had its author really wanted to leave the earth with so few words, whoever he or she had been?
        Epitaphs were always concise.
        Maybe the tombstone pieces of the jetty had depressed him or her, and she'd decided to end it in a grand, spasmodic gesture of self-murder. For some reason, people who killed themselves in the ocean always felt compelled to go in naked. Had she pitched her bottle, divested herself of clothing, and dived in? Had there been more than one note? Was that the reason for its brevity-she'd had to write it ten times, or a hundred?
         It'd be easier to Xerox, in that case , thought Art. I want to make sure everybody reads this little haiku I wrote to my wife, not that they'll be able to figure it out, and I'd like two hundred on gold-enrod and two hundred on astral blue, please.
        The page had inevitably gotten damp during the homeward jaunt, and the ink had blotted. This was handwritten, probably this one time, by someone who very possibly was dead now. A jagged shiver wriggled up the back of his neck and nested in his scalp… not from that conclusion, but from Art's sudden realization that he had already assigned the mystery scribe a default identity as female in his imagination.
        His inner caveman advised he merely needed to get laid. The serpent around his heart sighed, softly and with self-satisfaction, and resumed grinning its evil snaky grin.
        The bone Blitz had salvaged was slender and tapered, less than a foot long, picked clean and bleached by the sea. It looked like one of the two forearm bones, the ones that crisscrossed every time you turned your wrist. Art was not certain; he'd have to look it up. It had arrived on the scene simultaneously with his disinterment of the bottle. Were they related?
        His lunch plans aborted, Art decided to check on the local storm conditions and saw the word hurricane a lot.
        
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        Hurricanes. What did he know about them? He knew that typhoons and cyclones were both hurricane types that preferred the Pacific Northwest to the California coast. They rarely manifested around here with the severity dealt to tropical islands, the Gulf of Mexico, or most sodden Southern states. He knew they were basically caused by air movements-upward spirals that gathered heat and energy through contact with warm ocean water; the more sea surface water that evaporated, the stronger the storm got. He had a radio in the garage that would pick up the watches and warnings broadcast by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and assumed that if things grew serious, he would listen for tone alerts and await advice, which usually meant evacuation- in which Art was not interested. His outer walls were sixteen inches thick and his shatterproof windows featured louvered metal shutters that dropped down at the touch of a button… or via hand crank, if the power took a dump. He knew one of the United States's most catastrophic hurricanes killed over six thousand people in Galveston, Texas, in 1900, most of the casualties due to what was called