Pool by Author Brain Michael Barbeito

I was staring once for hours at some small part of nature, which was actually a tiny red insect of some sort that had crawled on my book, a choose your own adventure story. I stopped reading the book and just watched the red ant-like thing and as it crawled I didn’t harm it but just let it go where it wanted all around the pages wandering and wandering,- when a commotion started. A bunch of bad men came and broke into the yard to swim and we had to in a way fight them off. Someone called the police and we all went to the house of the bad men. The bad men threatened the police and told them that they, the police, were interrupting their party. There were three of us but I was small then, and there was about twenty bad men and two police officers. One of the bad men threatened someone’s life and then one of us threatened the bad man’s life. It had gone from highly uncomfortable to actually dangerous. Then one of us challenges the bad men again. But the police broke it up. I turned to go down a valley away from the police, the bad men, and even the good men, who were all still arguing. But I stopped. I had never been in that valley at that time and I could taste the darkness there, a dark literal, figurative, immense and formidable in all ways. I was stuck quite literally between the plight of man and the dark valley abyss, the unknown. I can’t remember what happened next. After church at Sunday mass we would go down to where the bad men lived and look around and sometimes write down their plates and see what was going on there. It was strange, – the liturgy of the word and Eucharist and such,- God and all that,- and then going on the way home to the dangerous place. Everything was strange- ghosts, the sound of the Holy Spirit in the ears constantly, terror, beauty, the men who could come back and do something at any time if they decided, the church itself, which was a house of hypocrisy for the most part,- strange, strange, strange,- my double crown, the ghost looking for help, myself,- an orphan,- the valley,- the northern lakes and the southern seas,- the ravine,- the whole thing through and through didn’t have one thing that could be called normal by most anyone’s metric or standard.