Rotting in a Shallow Backyard Grave!

Still underestimating the boy’s evil genius, I ignored the water from the sprinkler that went rap-tap-tap on the plastic tarp that had been stretched out over my head. The noise was torture, but I was distracted from the monotonous back and forth intervals of the fake rain - by focusing my ire instead on the disgusting looking rooster which was now strutting right outside my tiny, concrete-block, maximum-security prison cell.

Through the narrow spaces between the concrete blocks that the Wolf Pack had stacked up around me, I nervously watched the crazy attack-rooster with a foreboding sense of impending death worse then what I had felt when I was trapped in “the hamper of death’ underneath Edna’s great big Buick (if that were possible - see POST 6/5/13). Without the use of my hands, I couldn't see any way out of this latest predicament other than by way of mortuary. 

I offered up the words my seventh grade teacher, Sister Edith, said we should say before we die, “Lord I love you and I’m sorry for my sins.”

 I wondered if any other 12-year-old in the world has ever said those words as much as I have. I felt like was beginning to wear them out – like eating too much Captain Crunch cereal that begins hurts the top of your mouth or like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz who clicked her heels together three times and said, “There is no place like home.”

My question is, “How many times can you say that and still have the magic work?  When does it become presumptuous or so overused that it loses it effect? I began to worry about whether God would let my stinking corpse into heaven should the skin rot of my bones in this forsaken backyard grave?

The motivation of the oozing-pink-and-red-patches-of-skin-and-feathers that patrolled the boarders of my solitary confinement was not that of a mindless minion doing the evil bidding of the Wolf Pack.

Instead, the determined raptor paced inches from my face as though I was his prize, as if I was a bleeding man in a shark cage.

I think the hideous rooster was trying to send a message to the cat that sat glaring from the kitchen window without so much as a blink.  The fighting cock looked up to Chewbacca’s pampered cat (that pompously peered out the window as though it owned the butter and the counter-tops inside) as if threatening the scabby feline that this was his territory and that I was his prize and that it had better not even think about touching one paw in its sovereign domain – or else! The rooster crowed and scratched at the dirt as if saying, “You have used up all nine of your lives in the fraternity fire cat – so don’t even think about it” (Post 2/8/14). I felt flattered that I was being fought over even if it was just by a rooster that wanted to tear the flesh from my face.

That’s when it happened… the noise of groaning bricks over my head brought me back from the imaginary world where animals talk and act as despicable as humans. 

Epiphany! 

I understood!  I got it!  I figured out the diabolical genius of the Wolf Pack.  The plastic tarp - the sprinkler - the water -  the bricks - everything! I didn't now how things could be worst than being buried in a hole in the backyard, NOW I KNEW!  

This was brilliant! Those stupid hippies weren't so dumb after all. Puke Breath and his slide-rule had come up with a way for a time release murder.   

While they were away at Tuna Canyon in Malibu the tarp would fill up with water and eventually pull in the concrete-construction blocks...crushing my skull and caving in the igloo. 

They had the perfect alibi. I would be dead, then eaten by the rooster while the commies would be on a happy play-date in Malibu. 

The yellow tarp begun to bulge under the weight of the water it had been collecting, and had begun pulling the large blocks closer and closer to the inside rim of the encasement so that they would fall in on me...  

"Oh Lord I love you. I'm sorry for my sins.. there is no place like home... and these words feel like Captain Crunch tearing up the top of my mouth...in the land of the free and the home of the brave...Amen"

"Help!  Help! Save me Mrs. Blaser! Save me Edna! Kippy...Tommy... Mrs. Lennon...Anybody!" 

Anyone... but the person who just walked out the back door. Just when I didn't think it could get any worst. IT DID .. IT DID GET WORST.   Now I prayed for a quick and sure death!