Grendel found some slacks he liked at Kohl’s, so he bought a half dozen pair. All pastels—robin’s egg blue, butter yellow, blush pink, etc. They looked good with a simple mock-T and the woven-topped loafers he’d picked up at a twofer sale at DSW. This became his uniform that summer, and he wore it everywhere: attending an art installation in the park, terrorizing villagers, cruising the lake on his Ski-Doo.
He was mulching the roses one day, in slacks that were a particularly bloodless shade of pistachio, when a mole stuck its head out of the ground. He’d had a lot of trouble with moles and their tunnels, so when this one showed itself Grendel snatched it up between his thumb and forefinger with a zesty “Hell, yeah!”
The mole looked like a fetus, and he thought about eating it. Blind little booger, screwing up his lawn. That made him think of the Saxons, other interlopers, and how their limbs had tasted in the middle of the night. Sometimes, when he allowed himself to be melancholy, he would wonder how life might have turned out had he been friendlier, more outgoing, instead of slaughtering everyone he met. But, at the end of the day, he preferred solitude. He was a non-joiner. That’s just the way he was.
He carried the mole inside and found an empty Easter basket, still full of artificial grass and the empty halves of plastic eggs. He put the mole in the basket and sat down at the breakfast table with a cup of decaf. He watched the mole sniff around in the basket, making a nest in the plastic shreds. He sipped the coffee and slipped his loafers off. He rubbed one foot against another. He wished he had X-ray vision, so he could look deep inside the mole and see its organs. Scan its tiny soul for lumps.
A SmokeLong Summer 24!