Listen, I’m going to tell this tale. But you need to understand something… Hold on, I’ve got a primitive alert system rigged across this hillside and one of my alarms is jiggling something bigger than a ground squirrel.
Denton breaks open his double-barrel and drops in a pair of blood-red #6 duck-shot, the only type of shell that remains in his collection. He pockets two more, clamps the ammo can shut and slips out the uphill door of the cabin.
This time of the season, corn fit to reach the sky, squash and beans resting while they wait for first frost, I see vandals come up the valley from that cesspit of a town. I hate to waste shot, but if I don’t, they think they can come back with a mob.
He heads across the slope avoiding the sight of anyone trekking across his fields toward his house. His gardens are below in a broad swale that stays naturally moist throughout the summer; the dry heat elsewhere burns crops to desert bones. His wide descending arc brings him to his plot, this end showing rows of peppers, deep green, crimson and gold. A woman is walking oblivious, straight through his gardens.
Would you look at that. Talk about brazen disregard for your own safety. She’s not stopping to steal or to even marvel at my work. What she going on…
… continued over here…
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
I got PH “liking” another of my recent posts. I’m poised for the attack, coming from any direction.
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Constant Vigilance.
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Why the hell not add a little more joy to the world, eh?
Johnny opened the last can of lukewarm, over-hopped craft IPA from some now defunct commune of androgynous hipsters. Remember them? The funny hats, designer chuka boots? He chuckled to himself, shook his head with the irony of it all. He’d been living lonely on salvaged air tanks, patching the acid burns on his radiation suit with pieces cut from the suits of corpses scattered like a bunch of Sunday newspapers in a high wind. Now he was it, as far as he knew. When he ripped off his mask, chugged the beer and jumped into the radioactive clouds boiling below the cliff mankind was done.
“As good as it gets, ” he mumbled.
“Tell me that isn’t true.”
“Huh?” He turned, there she was. Of all the people on Earth left alive. His wife.
“Got another one of those?”
“No… I was about to –”
“With a radioactive beer? You’ll be dead before you can jump.”
“I hadn’t thought of –”
“Of course you hadn’t. You wanted to drink the last beer on Earth, by yourself. Selfish to the end.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“You wished I was dead. I’m wearing the Victoria’s Secret teddy you bought for your secretary.”
“Here.” He handed her the beer, ripped off his helmet, plunged over the cliff. She watched him bounce a few time on the clouds before he dissolved, threw the beer in after him, screamed “You know how much I hate beer!”
A giant methane gas bubble rose up from the roiling clouds, burst in front of her overpowering her air filter.
“And farts!!!!!”
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We all used to complain about beer farts, but I think we must have been mistaken. I’m sure it was the garbage we ate while inebriated that was the source of the sulfur dioxide.
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I blamed it on the dog
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