Vignette: Run and hide

You think you can run and hide.

But you know what?  It's like there's this all-seeing buzzard doing lazy figure 8s in a blinding white desert sky, and you're the last piece of meat on earth.  You run and run until, parched and exhausted, you collapse and fade into the superheated haze.

When you wake up you're floating on an air mattress in a resort pool with a shapely white-uniformed nurse standing in the water taking your pulse with a heavenly smile.


As you try to grin and focus through sunburned skin and stinging eyes, you see that under the blond curls and starched hat, she is in fact the buzzard, a slobbering abomination coughed up from a tar pit, giving you a bored look as it gnaws on your arm.

And oops, the pool is really all your goddamn blood, boiling off at the same rate as your brain and leaving a dull red residue, the same color as a barn.  A barn full of animals too dumb to know their destiny, just like you, leaking all over and making a mess...

(I've filed this under the topics Birds (the buzzard) and Weather (because the past few sweltering days softened up my brain enough to post it).)