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Michael returns from the Town Meeting to find that his five year-old son Jason is feeling much better, the flu symptoms are gone. Excerpt from the collaborative writing novel FLESH at Pan Historia.
Waking up in the early morning Michael could hardly believe the events of the previous few days. The early morning light was like a soft shower of gold dust through his bedroom curtains. Last night had been so different – so wonderful. His son was definitely better. Not only had Jason eaten a full dinner, played a game, but he’d been reluctant to go to bed, back to his old self. After he was down and sleeping without that feverish fretfulness Julianne and Michael had padded quietly into their son’s bedroom several times to check his temperature, and notice that his cheeks had returned to a normal healthy pink, rather than the red flush of his brief illness.
“Perfect temperature, darling.”
Julianne quietly put the thermometer away and the parents finally satisfied had retired to their own room to have a good night’s sleep after the anxiety of the last couple of days.
It was no wonder that Michael woke up with a full on woody. Smiling he rolled over to face his sleeping wife. She had her back to him, but he nuzzled her neck, his hands moving down to slide her sleeping t-shirt up over her lovely round ass. She murmured, smiled in her sleep, and as his hands caressed her more, easing her blissfully into wakefulness she purred up against him, pressing her backside towards his thrusting advances. It had been a few years since they’d woken each other up with morning sex, but Michael just felt so good with the worry washed away.
After the sex Michael dozed spooning with Julianne until she finally pulled herself away with a little mewling noise of regret, and got up and put on her robe.
“I think I hear Jason stirring. I better get his breakfast started.”
Later on Michael, dressed for a day in the fields, joined his son. Jason’s appetite wasn’t as good as last night’s, but his color was still good, and no sign of fever. In celebration Michael didn’t even put on the radio. He didn’t want to hear about troubles in the rest of the world. He was satisfied that if the town was quarantined his family would remain safe. Outside he could hear Orlando humming as he started his work day.
When Jason was finished pushing his breakfast around the plate he jumped up and demanded that it was time for him to collect the eggs and check on the hens. Michael felt the joy radiate from his chest. His eyes met Julianne’s as the parents shared a happy relieved smile. Jason was back to normal. All was right with the world.
Jason tumbled out the back door, letting the screen door slam, which Michael would normally have reprimanded him for, but not today. Today was like birthdays and Christmas all rolled up into one. Michael casually followed, strolling down the lawn towards the chicken coop that was set off to one side, near a stand of sugar maples. He watched as Jason reached up for the latch on the coop door and stepped in, carefully closing it behind him so that the birds didn’t get out into the yard instead of the run. There was the sound of clucking as Michael imagined Jason eagerly reaching his little arm under warm feathered hens to retrieve their eggs. But then the sound escalated from annoyed clucking to upset squawking. One of the birds started their alarm call from inside the coop. Michael could hear the sound of chicken bodies hurtling around in side the coop. He broke into a trot and moved quickly towards the door, calling out:
“Jason, buddy, you all right? Need a hand in there?”
There was no reply just the sound of terrified hens and a low growling. Michael grew terrified that Jason had surprised a fox or a raccoon in the coop. He quickly yanked open the door and was instantly sprayed in the face with a gout of arterial red blood from the gapping neck wound of a chicken. The bird with once white feathers, was still flailing, its wings insanely flapping, even though it had lost its head. Jason had it firmly grasped in his little hands, his fists around each leg, while he bit off the head and started chewing down on the neck and body, his face smeared with chicken blood. The rest of the birds were going nuts, and Michael saw other bloody white carcasses.
He stepped backwards in horror and shock. Jason looked up from his gruesome raw meal, his face covered in blood and gore, a feather stuck to his cheek. Michael saw how blank his son’s eyes were. The boy dropped the bird and growled. The bird still bounced, jumping around blind and headless. Jason reached his arms out to his father and started to lurch forward. Michael reacted quickly and slammed the coop door on his son, quickly latching it closed. Inside the chickens screamed and shrieked, while Jason threw his body against the inside of the door, screaming himself, banging it with his fists. There was no articulate sound that came out of his mouth.
“Michael…”
Michael turned to face his wife who was standing behind him, having followed him down from the house just a minute later. She stared in horror at the blood on his face and cringed at the sounds inside the chicken house
The tension is building in Wessex Falls as more news comes about the ‘zombie flu’. Michael and Julianne refuse to believe their child could be affected. The rest of this story appears in the collaborative fiction novel FLESH at Panhistoria.com.
Jeff Fields stood up to the podium. The level on the mike screamed and momentarily silenced the buzz in the room, but just as soon as the scream stopped the voices started again. Jeff adjusted his papers, tapped the mike, and generally looked nervous and uncomfortable. Michael was standing at the back of the room, his arms folded over his chest. The town manager looked like he was sweating. Normally Michael would have been enjoying watching him come under fire from the town, but not this afternoon. The fact that he and that the five members of the Selectboard all looked harried, pale, and nervous was making the whole room sweat. Just what was happening?
“I’m going to call this meeting to order…”
Jeff was prevented from proceeding in an orderly fashion as the room erupted into bedlam. Everyone was shouting. Michael watched as his neighbors shouted over one another to be heard, each one yelling about the ‘zombie flu’ that they had heard reports of on the news, and others about the school closing, while others mentioned the case of the boy who’s parents had been found in a gruesome homicide suicide.
“Didn’t Jason Lawler bite another boy at school?”
The voice was booming and Michael heard it loudly over the Tower of Babel that the Town Meeting had quickly degenerated into with Jeff, the Town Manager, totally unable to control. There was a rise in decibels and then it seemed as if no direction was going to be taken and so Michael pushed himself forward from the wall and shouted above the crowd.
“Everyone shut the hell up and let’s have one person speak at a time. I’ll start. Is it true that the Lawlers were found dead at their home?”
There was a general hubbub of assent.
“And the symptoms of this flu we’ve been hearing on the media include madness and biting?”
“Yes, Mr. Valentine, it’s true, and this is why we called this meeting today.”
The voice that now spoke was clear, calm, and female. It belonged to the most recent member of the Selectboard Eleanor Croft.
“And now that Mr. Valentine has so adroitly gotten your attention can I please call this meeting to order and get down to business? We have received official word from Montpelier and from Burlington that this thing is real, it’s happening, and it’s nationwide. Already the Government’s resources are over-extended dealing with the big cities like New York and Boston. We’re last on the list for vaccines or aid.”
A hand went up in the audience.
“So there is a vaccine?”
“One of our memos from Montpelier said that there was one in the works but Jeff has been on the phone all day and no one seems to have any – or if they do they’re not sharing it.”
An old farmer that Michael knew stood up, patiently waiting for the latest clamor to die down.
“Why don’t we quarantine the town, ayup?”
Any other time Michael would have smiled at the severity of the man’s old time Vermont accent and colloquialism, a vestige of a passing era, but today he was just concerned with the health of his son and the safety of his wife.
“That’s a damned fine idea.”
Michael’s support of old Mr. Winthrop’s suggestion was greeted with a swell of yeas, and then a call to order again. The Selectboard was quickly silenced when it tried to proceed in a ‘business as usual’ fashion.
“Frankly Mrs. Croft, members of the Selectboard, we don’t have bloody time for by the book. Judging by what is happening around the country so let’s make sure we keep the rest of the populace safe and strangers out of town.”
“I have to bring it to your attention, Mr. Valentine, and could you please use the mike and stop shouting from the back of the room, that the flu is quite possibly already here and it might not be in the best interests of your son to quarantine the town.”
“My son has the common flu, not this thing, this whatever it’s called.”
A number of people turned to Michael in surprise and shock, many voices murmuring about the Lawlers.
“The Lawlers were redneck woodchucks with a history of violence. There is no hard evidence any one was sick and their kid was acting out more of the same.”
Paul Albert, a librarian in a corduroy jacket, flew up out of his seat and shoved Michael in the chest.
“You’re an asshole, Michael Valentine.”
Michael looked at Paul, affronted by the usually mild-mannered librarian’s liberal outrage at Michael voicing what everyone in town actually felt, and brushed him aside.
“Or I can believe my son is doomed and the whole town is already infected.”
It was like the sound of metal tray dropping in a silent church. Michael could almost feel the collective intake of breath. After that business went very quickly as person after person volunteered for phone trees, road block crews to help the Sheriff’s department, and any number of measures required to lock down Wessex Falls from the outside world.
Parents Michael and Julianne Valentine are reluctant to believe their child is infected with the ‘zombie flu’ they’re hearing about on the media, but the concern runs deep. The town is starting to become alarmed and a special meeting of the Select Board has been called.
“You’re kidding me?”
Michael’s eyes moved quickly in the direction of the open kitchen door where he could see Julianne with Jason on her lap. She was trying to get him to drink some warm broth. Michael’s neck cradled an old-fashioned phone receiver so he was tethered by the length of spiral cord to the hall desk phone. The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Ogden Spitzer, a middle-aged farmer that was so ingrained with the soil of his native Vermont that that he seemed old as the Green Mountains themselves, right down to his thick Vermont patois. He, too, was on a old-fashioned landline.
Ogden, usually noted for his dry down home style humor, was not talking with any humor today. Unlike Michael he was widely liked in the community and held a seat on the Select Board.
“Nope, can’t say I am kidding you, Mike. Fact is folks are mighty worried around here.”
The word ‘here’ came out like ‘hee-year’, long and drawn out, but the tone was hard and serious.
“They think this is some kind of zombie flu? And my son could have it, is that what you’re telling me?”
“Don’t take it personal, Mike. We’re just going by what the media is telling us and the call from Montpelier.”
“So what the fuck are we supposed to do about it? Are they sending vaccines? What about treatment?”
“So far no one seems to have either, Mike. It’s looking bad. I hear they’re actually calling out the military in the big cities and just shooting sick people.”
Michael tried to let the news sink in, but he was having a hard time digesting the concept that there was a virulent form of flu that was sweeping the country and the only thing the authorities could think to do was to kill the victims. It was beyond a nightmare.
“So what you’re saying is that the sick people are attacking and killing people? That’s the symptoms?”
“Ayup. Though it’s like a flu first, you know with the running nose and fever and all.”
“Well my son isn’t attacking people.”
The unspoken part of that thought was that the boy that bit him clearly had been attacking people.
“How is the infection spread?”
Michael had heard some stuff on the radio, but somehow it was all more real coming from the mouth of down-to-earth pragmatist Ogden Spitzer.
“The usual, they say, saliva, mucus, blood, sneezing, and all.”
“Biting?”
“Well of course, Mike, biting. That’s got spit and broken skin and blood.”
“I’ll be at the meeting.”
“Ayup.”
Michael slammed the phone down even though he wasn’t angry at Ogden. Ogden was a good man and likely to give it to Michael straight. He was one of the few in town that got on with Michael and that Michael, in turn, respected, but then that was probably because he was a farmer with similar challenges and a similar point of view to Michael’s. Right now, though, farming was the farthest thing from Michael’s mind, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have to take those ripe tomatoes down to The Bushel Basket before they rotted in the cases. Looking at his watch Michael calculated that he had just enough time to carry out that errand before heading over to the High School to attend the emergency Town Meeting called by the Select Board.
“Julianne, I gotta go – it’s ok if you stay here and look after Jason?”
“Of course, honey. Find out what the hell is happening. I’ll be here.”
Julianne smiled at her husband. He knew her well enough to see that the smile did not move to her worried eyes.
From the FLESH collaborative novel at Pan Historia: the plague is spreading even to small town America.
The greenhouse was peaceful, but its sole occupant was not. Michael’s deft but calloused fingers seemed to dance over the vines as he searched diligently for pests, flipping leaves over, tickling the tiny hairs on the stems, pinching out a sucker here, a brown curled leaf there. The tomatoes were just green globes of promise but today Michael’s mind was filled with worry over his sick son. The news reports on NPR hadn’t helped. NPR wasn’t known for being an organ of alarmist news and to hear non-stop broadcasts about the swine flu that was being dubbed by a few wags in the media as the ‘zombie flu’ because of the high incidents of violent behavior, including biting, that was an unexpected new symptom. Michael had turned the radio off in the greenhouse just to get away from it, but his mind wouldn’t let go anymore than a bulldog would let go of a bull.
When he had first woken up he’d been furious at the school and particularly at Jason’s teacher but over the morning his anger had metamorphosed into total terror on behalf of his little boy. Jason had been bit. Maybe whatever school yard fight he had gotten into had been a fight after all but what if the other boy, the biter, had this swine flu. Even in the echoing hospital corridors of Michael’s panicky mind he refused to say ‘zombie flu’. Finally he threw down his clippers and headed back to the house.
Julianne sat at the kitchen table with a pale feverish Jason in her lap. The boy had his thumb jammed in his mouth, something he had quit doing about six months ago. Michael’s hearted tightened as if it had a rubber blood pressure cuff placed around it. Julianne’s hand lain, palm down, on the table right next to the phone. She’d been trying to get through to Dr. Willard all morning, and still it was busy. A call around to some of her friends who had kids in school had revealed that the office was open only swamped with patient.
Julianne looked up at Michael with anxious eyes as he grabbed the phone and punched in the numbers from the school.
“I want some answers. If that kid that bit Jason has this swine flu that’s going around why haven’t they called us to alert us of the danger?”
All Michael got was a recorded message that the school was closed for the day. A quick call to one of the select board who was also all the school board eased Michael’s need to take action more than it eased his mind.
“They closed the school because there were so many kids and teachers out sick. They’re sterilizing it before they let the kids back in. He didn’t know if there would be classes tomorrow.”
“Good God, Michael, this is a nightmare.” Julianne placed her hand on Jason’s forehead. “He’s burning up.”
“Let me run a cold tub, baby. Let’s bring that fever down.”
A few minutes later Orlando poked his head around the door for instructions in the garden.
“Just do what needs to be done and don’t bother, me, ¿comprendes?
Young Jason has been bitten at school by a new classmate in my collaborative fiction novel FLESH. The kid that attacked him went crazy and out of control and the teacher ended up kicking the student to avoid being bitten herself. No one is yet aware of what is really going on.
“I can’t believe that bitch just dismissed us – like whatever fucking phone call she had to take could be more important than Jason being bitten by a classmate? I intend to follow through and make sure this Ms. Croft loses her job.”
“I suppose we should hear her side of it?”
Michael looked over at Julianne and gave her a loving smile.
“Aw, baby, you’re so sweet. Even after that incompetent teacher let our son get bitten by another kid in the classroom you can think about being fair and objective? Nope, sorry, I’m not buying it. That silly cow even had a fight with the other student too. She clearly has no control of the classroom, and so she shouldn’t be responsible for people’s children.”
“Yes, you’re right. I was just trying to be fair.”
Michael’s eyes swiveled up towards the rearview mirror so he could catch sight of Jason. In sync Julianne turned her head and leaned over towards the back seat where Jason was sitting quietly, but not looking terribly perturbed or upset. He had a small Batman Band-Aid on his arm where he had been bitten.
“How do you feel, Jason? Does your arm hurt?”
“It’s ok.”
“Well then, sport, what do you say? Do you want to go swimming at the river?”
Suddenly the quiet child became animated and he bounced in his seat, all trauma clearly forgotten for the pleasure of a dip in their favorite swimming hole.
“Oh boy, do I? Please Daddy, can we?”
Julianne’s face relaxed into a beatific smile as she realized that her son was alright and she could let go some of the stress of the event. Instead they could put it behind them (besides making sure that Ms. Croft had her just desserts) and enjoy the rest of this lovely Vermont afternoon.
Later, sandy from the little beach on the river, and Jason so pooped from his exciting day that Michael had to carry him into the house and lay him on his bed, Julianne and Michael relaxed on their porch with glasses of red wine. As the sun dipped slowly below the horizon it seemed to Michael that nothing much could be wrong with the world. His concern for his son had been allayed by the family outing, and now the wine mellowed his blood and soothed his temper. If he could have he would have carried Julianne in his arms to their bedroom on the second floor, but he settled for chasing her, both of them giggling, up the stairs where he tumbled her onto the bed and stripped her naked with his teeth.
Married as long as they had been it was not every night that Michael got amorous but when he did he made up for it with his inventiveness and ardor. It was a good thing that Jason was tuckered out after his day, and such a sound sleeper.
Much noise and mussed sheets later Julianne was drifting to sleep in her husband’s arms when there was a small tentative knock at the door. It took Michael a moment to shake off his sleepy languor so that his brain could register the sound. He moved gently to slide his arm out from under his wife, but as he sat up, the knocking at the bedroom door transforming into the turning of the knob, Julianne sat bolt upright next to him as if the sound they heard had been a fire alarm and not simply their five year-old son entering the room in flannel pajamas with Winnie the Pooh on them.
Michael clicked on the bedside lamp. Jason’s face was puffy with sleep, his eyes a little red, and so was his nose.
“I don’t feel good. I had a bad dream. Can I sleep with you?”
Julianne lifted the covers to let her little cub crawl in. Michael put his hand over Jason’s forehead.
“Honey, I think he’s running a fever.”
Julianne peeled back the Batman Band-Aid.
“Oh my god, Michael, look at his arm.”
The last quiet night in the small Vermont town of Wessex Falls – it all seems so innocent. Posted for the collaborative fiction novel FLESH at Pan Historia. To read the entire story with all characters you need to register to Pan. Basic registration is always free.
“Don’t kick your feet under the table, honey.”
Julianne placed a plate of fresh veggies and a pork cutlet in front of Jason. Wide-eyed and serious Jason stopped kicking and tucked his napkin down the front of his tee-shirt. His mother smiled in approval and placed Michael’s plate down before joining her family at the table.
“Jason, eat your green beans.”
“They’re gross, icky.”
“Remember when you helped Daddy plant them? You said you would try them.”
Michael reserved his most calm and patient tone for his small son. There was nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for the boy. In all the years since Jason had been born Michael had never lost his temper, or raised his voice to the child. The birth of his son had filled an empty hole in Michael’s core that he hadn’t even been aware of until it was no longer there. Much as he loved his wife, Julianne, it was ordinary compared to what he felt when he gazed upon the face of this unique little being that had sprung from their love.
Dutifully Jason began to eat his beans. Julianne put some ketchup on the plate for him and that soothed the process.
“I’ll need you early in the morning, Jules. The bush beans are really coming in and the bean beetles are peaking too. We’ll need to get the crop in and then rototill the vines under so I can plant the fall spinach there.”
“Do you have orders for the beans?”
“A couple of bushel, no more. I guess it’s dilly beans.”
Julianne sighed and cut into her pork cutlet. Making cases and cases of dilly beans was no joke. She’d have to stop in at the hardware store after she dropped Jason off at school to pick up some more canning jars and then get the pickling salt at the grocery store.
“I can drop off those beans if they’re going to The Good Earth.”
“Yeah, they are. That would be great.”
It was always best if Julianne dropped off the produce at The Good Earth natural foods market in downtown Wessex Falls. The high priced little store with its snooty owners and hippy clerks always put Michael in a foul mood. Too often he’d given the produce manager a piece of his mind about prices and walking the walk not just talking the talk. He’d been banned from the place one whole summer and it really hurt his pocketbook. He’d finally had to bow to the inevitable and apologize to get back in. Of course Gary the produce manager had been equally pressured because customers had been demanding Michael’s tomatoes and writing complaint notes. Julianne was more diplomatic. She also knew how to keep from mouthing off to the other vendors when they showed up.
After dinner the family stayed together to help Jason with a little homework followed by a board game. Once Julianne took Jason upstairs to get him scrubbed and packed in PJs Michael turned to his books to start studying for their trip to Costa Rica this winter to help coffee farmers learn organic farming techniques.
Posted on July 8 for FLESH at Pan Historia, a collaborative author’s community. I apologize in advance for all the bad Spanish. I have been using an online translator – if I were to take this farther I would need the services of a human to make sure it’s good dialogue, but this is a new character for me.
“¡Saludos Orlando! ¿cómo está usted hoy?”
Wendy Patterson waved at the migrant laborer as he walked along the lane, about a mile from Michael’s place.
“¡Saludos Wendy. I am good.”
Wendy stopped, her dog Penny pulling at the leash, uncertain why they were stopped, but then with a short attention span began to dig in the dirt. Wendy was Michael and Julianne Valentine’s closest neighbor. She had seen enough to know that it was not Shangri-La at the Valentine farm. Orlando’s expression was guarded and he fidgeted nervously. He was the only one of the laborers that Michael had ever used that had come back season after season. Wendy had no idea how the kindly Mexican could stand it.
“Are you sure, Orlando? You seem… distracted.”
“Sí, sí, senora, I am fine.”
“Cuéntame. Está bien.”
“It’s just that I am worried about my family back home. There is this terrible flu. The news says it is much worse than the swine flu. I fear for my children, for my madre.”
Wendy had to admit to herself she was relieved that it was not his employer, who she suspected of abusive treatment of his migrant workers (not that anyone would believe her if she told them because of his standing in the community – he was well respected, though not well liked), but a little disappointed it was not gossip about Michael. For some reason she disliked the man so intensely she was thirsting for proof that she had good cause. So far it was just that he’d butchered their pet pig two years ago when she and her husband had asked Michael and Julianne to look after their place while they were away for the summer. Michael had said, later, as way of apology that never included the words “I’m sorry” that he had misunderstood and didn’t realize they had kept a pig as a pet. He thought he was doing them a favor in putting it in the freezer and smoking the hams and bacon. They’d ended up giving the whole hog to the Valentines because no one in Wendy’s house could bear to eat the animal they had raised from a piglet and whom their daughter had named “Wilbur” after the character in Charlotte’s Web.
Of course it didn’t help that Michael had been partially right. He’d been the connection to procure the piglet in the first place and the plan, since they’d moved from New York City to the country, had been to raise their own meat and do all the things that country people did. Julianne Valentine had been very kind with her time and shown Wendy how to can and how to do any number of things related to the garden. But Wilbur had become part of the family and by the time it was butchering time everyone in the Patterson family had quite firmly removed the fact from their minds that he was going to grow up into a 500lb animal with tusks and a bad temper.
Still – it hadn’t been his place to kill their pet pig when they were away on vacation, even if it was something of a solution a problem they had not wanted to face, not without talking to them about it. The man was just so high handed and always acting like he had the moral high ground. It drove Wendy mad.
“I’m sure your family will be fine, Orlando. You know how the media likes to blow up these things.”
Of course Wendy was just saying this to sooth Orlando. She was already scheduled for her and her family to get flu shots just in case. It didn’t hurt to be careful.
This story is being posted as I post it at Pan Historia. It’s the start of a new chapter in my zombie horror fiction for the collaborative role-play novel FLESH. FLESH has been around a long time, but the beauty of the setting is that one can tell many different stories. Having come to the end of several plots, I decided on a new one set in a small New England town with a very different kind of character for me. Michael is a hero and yet I hope he’ll be a little unlikeable. As a note this is the same character I use for my Turnskin novel about werewolves. The man is similar in character, but different in particulars.
Michael stopped and looked out over the fields, orderly and green under the New England morning sun. It was a modest farm, seventeen sunny open acres surrounded by sugar bush, and yet it had served him and his family well. Right now Julianne was taking their small son down to the henhouse to collect eggs. Jason was holding the basket with both hands, his face alight with anticipation. He was a serious little boy, having inherited his father’s stoic seeming exterior and propensity for few words, and he, chip off the old block, had already embraced the concept of making money. Even though he was only five, the chickens were his venture, and his father had promised him all the profits from selling the eggs, after he factored in his expenses such as chicken feed.
While his hands were calloused and ingrained deep into the skin with dirt Michael, at the age of forty, was finally learning to relax a little. The fields of organic vegetables were actually being tended by two Mexican migrant workers that Michael housed on his property in a small rustic cabin. Michael’s own house, which he had built with his own calloused hands, was large and in the saltbox style. A few hundred yards to the right was a round sweat lodge built of slate. Of course – in a farmer’s life ‘relaxation’ was a relative term. To the right of the house were the large A-frame greenhouses that Michael had built and right now he was on his way to check over the five hundred tomato vines that grew on stakes within, each one trained to some semblance of order, patrolled by trichogamma wasps, lady bug beetles, and praying mantises. August was the middle of Michael’s tomato season and so the vines were heavy with ripe red fruit. While he grew an assortment of vegetables for his stands at the various local farmer’s markets it was tomatoes that he was best known for. He had them earlier and later than any other farmer in the region, and while there might be better flavored ones around his were reliable and unblemished.
Right now he had several boxes ready to ship out to a couple of the local restaurants, as well as the local natural foods store “The Bushel Basket”. Just the thought of the local store put a scowl on Michael’s face which was alleviated by the sudden presence of his little boy at his feet. Jason pushed his basket forward, his studious face bright with a contained joy.
“Look Daddy, I got a whole dozen today.”
Michael looked down at the brown eggs in the basket, cradled in a little straw. Julianne stood behind Jason.
“And how many is a dozen, Jason?”
“Thirteen!” Before the word was out of his mouth Jason reconsidered. “No! Twelve!”
“That’s right. Thirteen would be a Baker’s dozen.”
Michael ruffled his son’s sandy-colored hair and Jason grinned, finally letting out the joy he was feeling.
“Come on, Jason, it’s time to get ready for school.”
Julianne took their son back to the house while Michael continued on to the greenhouses.
“Hey usted, moron, tenga cuidado con esas podadoras.*”
The radio was on in the greenhouse. Orlando had it set to the local Spanish station but Michael switched it to NPR.
He listened to the local news station with only half an ear as he set to work pruning the vines, making sure that all the energy went into the ripening fruit.
“Oh no, senor, there is more about that new swine flu.”
Orlando shuddered because the death toll was mounting back in Mexico City and he had family there.
To Michael, with his farm nestled in the Sugar Maples of Northern Vermont, the news of a killer flu in Mexico City seemed irrelevant. He was happy when programming changed to music.
******************************************************
Please excuse my Spanish – while Michael might know Spanish I have to use an online translator service.
