Fall in May

~46~ The House of the Rising Raisins

The other thing more irritating to me besides the oppressive silence is the dirty air here. At home by the beach, we have the constant ocean breeze of clean sea salt spray. Combined with the fragrant scent of brine mixed with rust oxidization. But here in San Fallcon, the air just smells dirty to me. Not like smog or Santana fire winds, but just like dirt smells ...that earth dirt smell.

Worse yet, when the still wind does decide to twitch a little from time to time? I get a hint of what I can only assume is the stench of cow crap through the open window. I think that maybe somewhere out there, some Raisins must be keeping hamburger cows captive for milk pets or whatever?

For the first time since the bad years after my father died, I am having trouble sleeping at night again. My old night terrors have come back with a vengeance. Just when I am beginning to drift asleep, a get a shock feeling like I am falling into the silent void. By three o'clock in the morning, it's clear to me as winter water that my old friend Mr. Insomnia has returned to me, to take up his forlorn watch.

After I watch the moon set over Mount Diablo, I get up to go to the bathroom. But one step out into the hallway and I make an instant discovery about the Raisins old-time alarm system. Every panel of the wood flooring between my room and the bathroom feels the need to betray me with a violent creek. I can already tell it's going to take me at least a week to learn how to silently ninja my way across this nightingale floor to the bathroom and back, without waking up the Raisins.

On the upside at least this will give me something to do for the next couple of hours. So I drop down on all fours and start slowly crab-crawling down the hallway towards the bathroom ...one slow yoga inch at a time. The slow crab crawl to the los baños and back to my-not-fathers room takes up about an hour of my nighttime life.

As the rising sun gloams the underside of the dry sky I start to drift out, just as the heat of summer starts to roll into the San Fallcon valley in ever dryer waves. Instead of the clean smell of the salt ocean roiling I smell the dry dust dirt, as the prevalent cow crap smell only seems to get worse in the heat.

At home, the first of the dawn patrols will be rolling out of bed and hitting the sands. The Old Timers with their longboards, and the wild Riders with their sharp razor sticks and tricks. The legion of Gidgets and Grommets doing paddle practice in the soupy shallows. All just another great summer day in Sunset Beach. Today is the day that Grommit and the other Setter kids will start their first day of summer lifeguards, where I should be...but I am not. I am in hell, and in the one day and night I have been here ...it's already been an entire lifetime.

SCREEEEECH!!!! CRASH! BANG! ...BANG! BANG! BANG!

I heave awake to the angry to the sound of crashing thunder. I know in my pounding dark heart something has gone terribly wrong. The Kiddie Pimps are attacking my house and I need to fight or die! I launch off the floor beds, rip the ancestral baseball bat off its stand, and slide into my combat stomping boots. My heart is rage ripping through my sweaty chest, and my eyes are wide with adrenaline-infused crazy hate. I am Set to go to start taking out Kiddie Pimps and their Swine ninja minions, or Taliban terrorist, or whoever the hell has started this war. I glare red rage towards the closed door waiting for whoever The They sent after me to come bursting in. Cause I am not going down without a fight, it's time to Ride or Die.

"Irish? Are you okay?" My grandfather guy yells down the hallway from his bathroom. Oddly I can hear the unmistakable amusement in his gravely old morning voice.

"Yes Aces, I'm quite fine thank you." The Irish Antichrist who claims she is my grandmother, singsongs back from the kitchen. "Breakfast is almost ready in five."

"Alright Irish, sounds like a plan." Aces bellows back down the hallway past me closed door.

I try to shake off the redrum rage and focus on what's important in the moment. All the strange oldness of everything around me.