The Book of Sarah

I can see you, but you can't see me. It is I, the disembodied spirit. I don't mean to play with you, but I can see you, all of you. So tell that bartender in Singapore to take his hand out of the till. And that sixth grade hotsie-totsie better keep her eyes on her own paper, 'cause Missus Buttwasher is closin' in for the kill. That's the hotsie-totsie in Aukland I'm talking about. There's a wild party full of drunk, barfing seventeen year olds in Flosmoor, Illinois and no, that vomit stain on the new, Henerdon couch will not come out. So some soon to be busted, little mister big stuff is gonna have to do without his new k'nect, or whatever the hell they call it this year. Look, I am just trying to put off the inevitable. I do not enjoy being the bearer of bad news. But the Jersey Klan got Bob. Oh, come on, you knew it was Bob. What? Did you think it was gonna be Baylah? She already told you she would not be the first one down. And you better get in the habit of believing what she says, because Baylah don't play like that. But Bob is gone. And it was not pretty. The Jersey Klan saw that posting on the web, the one that shows him launching Barbra's sloppy, old head up into the air, just like it was a bottle rocket. You remember Barbra, Bob's eighty something year old Big-Mama-Nazi wife? Well she had some runnin' buddies over the bridge in Jersey and some of them, the old ones, the great grand daddies of the current bunch of head bangers, recognised Bob from way back when. They downloaded the picture and sent it out to all their fellow travelers. Now he would have been safe if he'd listened to Edith and the other Pineys. They told him to stay inside. But he was restless. That's how Bob gets. He just can't spend the night tucked inside with all the others watching Jimmy Kimmel and eating potato chips (everybody but the vampires that is). No, he has to go roaming around out in the woods. True, he didn't have to worry too much about the rattlers, or the bob-cats, or the bone crunching snappy turtles, or the occasional black bear, or even the half dozen or so fully grown Jersey Devils they got gyrating around in these parts. But he never banked on stumbling into a pack of shit-faced Jersey Klansmen doing their best to maintain an investment in a brand new, shiny copper, state of the art still. Bob didn't know. He thought he'd discovered a passel of South Philly wise guys planting some of the competition. But them Klan guys got fast reflexes. One of them had a copy of that web picture stuffed in his back pocket. He sees Bob. He pulls it out, eyeballs it and starts yelling - It's him! It's him! It's that no good puzzlingly young race trader what killed 'Mother' Barbra!! Well, they grab brands from the fire and give chase. Now you know Bob gets rattled real easy. And you know he ain't got much brains for a supposedly, immortal, omnipotent, supernatural guy and all. So he does what he did back in Rittenhouse Square Park when Annie and the hounds was after him. He shimmies up a tree. A dry tree. An autumn tree. A November tree. Do I have to tell you the rest? Them J.K.M.'s (Jersey Klansmen) use their flaming brands to set fire to that tree. And a couple of the new guys go running back to their truck for a big, old container of high octane gasoline. Yes siree, high octane, only the good stuff for our Bob. So they lobbed the volitile fluid right into that over-sized burning bush and whoosh!!! We got a human (or formerly human) sacrifice going on right here in Burlington County! They was whooping and jumping like a regular bunch of wild Indians, gettin' all sweaty and poppy-eyed and spittin' and dancin. And you know it is dangerous to get so over heated out in the deep woods on a cold November night. Those boys could have caught pnemonia. As it was, one of them smashed a foot right into the den of a fixin' to hibernate rattler and got hisself bit real bad. And Bob tried to run down that tree and sublimate through the flames. But the only thing is some of his atoms got mixed up with some of the  aerasol (did I spell it right?) fire-oil atoms that were bouncing around in the air, so when he commenced to solidifying poor Bob found out that he was sorta made of fire. Looked a little bit like Flame from the comic books. Oh, you could smell him burning. And you could hear him shrieking and hollerin' and all. I guess one of the worst parts was when his eyeballs exploded. But seeing as I ain't got no physical body, I can't rightly tell which part smarts the most. Damn, I like this country livin'. I think it kinda suits me. Think I'm gonna look up the ghost of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline and have a hoe-down or something. The other vampires heard the noise. They ran out and saw it all from a little ways off. It's sad. It's not like they truly liked Bob, but they felt the loss. And for the last forty, fifty years or so he was doing his best to make up for past transgressions. But now he is gone to the Great Beyond. And the way I hear it, he is trying his darndest to set things right with them little toddlers (and their teacher-wimmen) he originally exploded all those years ago.