Within an Ace of It

Ron Koppelberger

Within an Ace of It

Adjacent to the luscious bougainvillea scrub and marigold bushes lay a splintered wooden guide, a separation of daydream barbecues and backyard millenniums. The wooden fence was the defining line between fate and mythical commons of secret hell.
Sly’s neatly tended yard, patio and lawn furniture were centered around a large brick pit. Pig roasts and turkey barbecues for the holidays, a cool brew and a dose of sunshine. The sweet smell of flowers in bloom was subdued by the odor of fresh dirt and wounded earth, his neighbors yard was an amalgamate of backhoes and bulldozers, men in plastic overalls and all surrounded by yellow police tape.
Sundays child, he was Sundays child in fortune and happenstance. His neighbor had knocked on the front door on Sunday, “Hey, can ya help me partner, my wife, she’s bleeding.” In reality she had stopped bleeding and breathing weeks earlier. “Can ya help me brother?” his neighbor had called with a feigned urgency through the front door. Sly had considered it for a moment when the phone rang. A gentle whisper across static filled lines, “Snares of homespun hell, homespun hell!” then the line went dead. A call from the other side covered in graveyard dirt, a warning in simple measures of spirit. The call had distracted him long enough, he’d live to breath, he’d survive the monsters call.
“Sure thing!” he said out loud intending to give his neighbor a hand, a good Samaritan, he was or at least he hoped he was; he‘d help his neighbor. The swath laid bare, a rush of forward speed, a drama ensnared……by what….homespun hell? The neighbor had left before he had gotten to the door, returning to his house. The front door was open, unimpeded by the man’s presence. “Can ya help me brother?” he had said. Sly shut the door and a rain of delicate gypsy moths flittering near the sliding glass door caught his eye. Flittering, evanescent scarcely there yet ever trifling with the currents of moted sunshine and summer warmth. He watched the tiny tempest of moths flutter near the wooden fence. A separation between paradise and hell. It was a dark secret, darker than the light at nights deepest dream and worse for the closeness of its chance.
He had tried chance and the forty or so bodies buried on his neighbors property were now in the care of the F.B.I.; he sighed, he had been within an inch of it, an ace and a hair.