Why it frightened her:

It had been almost two years since she had dropped out of a favorite listserv, allfaiths.com. It had been such a time waster! Shortly before dropping off, she'd been involved a round-robbin writing thread. The story line, as is true of all round-robbins, where one person writes a scene based on the previous entry, had become wild. It was an old-west meets New York City fantasy with everything from robots to vampires centered on an old country house. City slickers trying to imagine old tractors and farm dogs made it extra wild. Each character had a favorite comfort from hot tea to Jim Beam Whiskey. Among those who played in the round-robin was a character by the name of Dingo. He came complete with straw hat and baggy coveralls. It was all in good fun and some terribly fun ideas had been birthed by the group. Overall, the quality of the writing was amazing.

One day, Katie mentioned shooting a manuscript off to a publisher. It was simply a figure of speech. Before she knew it, Dingo was playing with the idea in all sorts of terrible ways. "Katie git yer gun," or "Katie's cleanin' up her gun," "Katie's on a rampage! Better find that gun o' hers before she gets here or we'll all be dead!" or "We're gonna have to run, Katie's got 'er gun!" It had gotten out of hand and it made her miserable. Dingo was stuck on the idea and no matter what, he wasn't leaving it alone. She quit the thread and quit the list serv.

Just about a month before the firs of the threatening emails came, she'd started visiting the list serv again. Almost the day she returned, she had said something in a discussion on the subject of the war in Iraq and Dingo had become irate. He wasn't the least bit subtle about it, either. He was cold. Katie thought the post had been quite inoffensive, really, and thought he'd misread what she'd written. She tried to set the matter straight, but every post she wrote boomeranged on her and he simply became more angry. It puzzled her that others seemed to take his side. She even tried rereading her own post to see what could have been so offensive. It was certainly inadvertent. That was the first time it ever occurred to her that the man was a little off-kilter.

But now, here were those same things mentioned in these emails that related so perfectly to the things Dingo had been saying in the round-robin. Except they were threatening, not just uncomfortable. And now the other Steven Kingly thriller characters were being introduced. It all made sense now. And she had a good idea that the person threatening her was either Dingo or somebody else who had participated in the round-robin.

It wasn't that the risks of playing around on the Internet had never crossed her mind. She'd always been alert to the possibility, but no red flags had ever flown over the innocent games the group of writers had been playing. Wisdom reminded her that this would have always been the case. People don't ever associate with weird people like that knowingly.

Notes: (So, I don't lose my notes, I'll write them right in.) A year and a half later she catches Dingo doing the same thing on the list serv that he'd done to her to another woman.

My burden:

In a square of cloth I place my woes:
The desire for what's been lost;
The ache for those when my love fell short;
the regrets for things I didn't do
and for the things I did.
I gather up my fears, remember each
and how I ran, then drop them in.
I should have trusted you.
And shame! For when my pride was hurt
--as though pride is ever good
or served myself or you.
It's big and bloated and oozes shame,
I wipe my hands of it.
Trembling, I recall mistakes I've made.
What I valued that I shouldn't,
What I should, but didn't.
Regrets! They're heavy and they hurt.
I cry as I shove them to the pile.
What time I've wasted--
when a second can have such impact,
and I whiled away my hours.
The pile of sins, the wrong's I've done,
the burdens that bore me down.
Ashamed, I'd rather hide.

I gather the four corners of the cloth,
and pull and center, tie the bundle closed . . .
with all my strength I lift it, and struggle out the door.
Beyond the tree and down the path
until I reach the summit of the hill
and there I lay my burdens down at his feet,
and offer up the me that is in it.
I feel a soft, caressing breeze,
an almost unheard whisper.
The bundle shrinks,
it floats aloft,
weightless in his unseen hand.
I'm free, unfettered,
tearful for the joy.
I'd promise to not build another pile,
but spend my time as seconds count
and his will, mine.
Where you will me, Lord!
My burden--yours.

The Perfect Murder

*Yes, I am going to write this. Even if y'all think it is stupid! It keeps playing on my mind and I do think that if I pull it off, it is a great idea! And it is a rough draft . . . *

Another weird email turned up in her email defense. Kate saw it and knew what she was looking at simply from the title. It said it was from the 5th 3rd Bank. It could have just as easily said it was from EBAY or PayPal or any other financial type of concern. But she knew if she opened it, there would be a threatening addition at the bottom. She knew it would play off a famous Stephen King thriller--one she had not read. She knew that herself and the main character shared the same first name. She knew it might be written as though it was nonsensical gibberish, words strung together in a way that suggested they might have been shuffled, some sort of code, as though if she printed it out and cut them apart she could reassemble them to say something very specific. She knew that it could very well threaten her for her religious views and she also knew that it could very well and very clearly state that she was going to die.

She double clicked and opened it. Briefed through it. Confirmed her fears. Hit print. Took the freshly printed pages from the printer and tucked them at the bottom of the pile that she'd been keeping front and center on her desk right above her keyboard. This one would be the thirty-second message she had printed out and she'd allowed even more than she had kept go to delete heaven.

The same old questions haunted her. Was it a real threat? Some of the posts had been addressed to more than one address. She'd checked most of them. One batch had been sent to all the email address beginning with the same letter as her own email address through her Internet Service Provider. She called them on that one. Some had been emailed to her alone. Should she take it to the police? That was the action that her ISP had recommended. But then her daughter had told her that she'd received some too--which made little sense because Internet wise, the two never crossed paths--different web interests--and her daughter lived three-hundred miles away, had an unrelated email address and a different ISP. Along with talking to her ISP and her daughter, she'd checked for scams and it wasn't listed among them. Besides, what kind of scam is a murder threat using a character named after yourself? Finding no answers, she'd continued to work over the same sparse evidence for a month now--mentally, always mentally. Other than printing out the posts, she had done nothing else. One thing was certain--she had no intention of taking the time to decipher the message. It seemed to be an act that would play into the monster's hand.

Brandishing the pile, even fanning them with her thumb, she rose from her chair and, like a person hypnotized, walked into the living room where her husband was watching the television. She sat down on the edge of the couch, nerves taut. She flipped the pages again, noting an odd word here and there. Would he think it was foolishness?

####################################################################################


The day was perfect. The sky was a clear blue, the air clear, the hint of fall that is typical of September days that you can't quite explain--like a smell--marked the end of hot summer days. As Kate dexterously rounded the near-right-angeled curve going 35 mph on the road to her house, she felt the numb, painful dryness of her lips and wondered how, when the weather was so beautiful and not at all dry, her lips should feel January-arctic-front dry.

When did it begin: Very beginning & Ultimatum:

I'm searching for a way forward while holding onto the ideas that I've had. This is truly a discovery draft but meets my daily requirement. Note that I never write straight through a story incrementally so the very first post for this story was, "I hate this place." But to read it somewhat in order: the first section here, When did it begin, I hate this place, the second section here. Confusing, huh? And if the idea continues to appear to have merit, each small segment would probably be expanded into a chapter. Its a rather strange veiw into the creative mind, perhaps.

*****

Driving home on a sunny day in early fall--one of those perfectly glorious days when the weather is exceedingly perfect--Grace felt her physical misery and wondered again, as she had so many times, what could be causing it. She ran her bitter-tasting tongue over her dry, rubbery lips and questioned how it could happen that her lips were chapped when the heater hadn't even been turned on yet. The symptoms mystified her--and her doctor.

For one, when she had these spells, her urine would take on a hue not unlike ethanol--red-orange and heavy. Culturing it turned up nothing, no infection, no bacteria. And yet, mysteriously, the antibiotic did seem to work. Logic said that it couldn't. Grace remembered the conversation with the nurse:

"Your culture was negative, but doctor says to go ahead and take the antibiotic. That's all you need."

Grace paused as questions raced through her mind, confused, she asked again, "What do you mean, it was negative?"

"You don't have an infection."

It seemed as though the nurse's words stopped dead before reaching her understanding. Was it possible? The pain and the blood had stopped the day she began the antibiotics. It was the same old story, test after test came out negative. She'd gone through the barium radiological proceedure [find out name of test]. She'd suffered one blood workup and all came back good--not counting a slightly high cholesterol ratio [?].

All through the fall and into winter the symptoms increased. The other set of symptoms took center stage for a while. For a woman who hated salt, salt seemed to be oozing out of her pores. Her lips tasted salty and the microhairs around her lips seemed to become caked with salt crystals. With the salt came cold sweats that started at the roots of her hair and flowed down through her body. She couldn't even figure out where all that salt could come from. The most frightening thing about this set of symptoms was that when she rested sometimes her nerves would jerk spasmodically and the jerks could be so hard that twice she suffered back injuries from them. At night, she would drool and sometimes it felt as though spittle was gathering at the corners of her mouth and she would have to wipe it away--whereas she'd never been a drooler. Terrified, she never spoke to the doctor about these symptoms in hopes that they would just go away. Her greatest fear was the possible onset of multiple schlerosis. If that was the case, the diagnosis would come too soon, she thought.

*****
(flash forward to another chapter)

Hurrying to get her teeth brushed before leaving for church, Grace took a swig of mouthwash. It burned. She spit it out and rushed to rinse her mouth. Several handfuls of water didn't seem to stop the burning sensation. She grabbed a toothbrush and applied a squirt of toothpaste and began brushing her teeth vigorously. Half way through her bottom teeth, she suddenly saw she'd grabbed her son's toothbrush. As though she could undo the mistake, she stopped brushing and rinsed it thouroughly, placing it back in the toothbrush holder. Her own toothbrush was in the other bathroom. She'd forgotten. But really, she thought, what good would brushing do, anyway. She rinsed again.

After drying her mouth she saw the bottle of blue mouthwash on the vanity. Her first thought was of her son--what if he used it? She held it up to the light and noted, with a grimmace, that it was only half as blue as it ought to have been. Instinctively she dumped it. The blue liquid raced down the drain. It all happened so quickly that Grace hadn't ever thought of saving it. She needed evidence--just in case.

On her way out the door, as she donned her green jacket, she cooly said to her husband, "That's it. I warned you. I said just one more time and I would leave. Thanks for the mouthwash!" And she grabbed the doornob and hurried out without giving him a chance to respond--or not.

Later, while sitting in the church, she felt the burning creep up into her left nostril--on the side she had not brushed. The creep went up, buring her eye. The burning felt as though it would cause her nose to bleed. Just in case, she wiped the bottom of her nose when she felt a hint of dampness gathering there. 'I'm such a fool!' she thought. 'To think I let him get me again.'

When did it begin?

It was just a routine morning, a routine act. Grace unscrewed the sprayer-head from the automatic coffee maker. As she pulled it out, she saw that it was completely full of white stuff. It puzzled her, so she examined it more carefully. It looked almost like a clump of flour had gotten stuck in the center of it. It was fine enough stuff that it should have gone through the sprayer holes. Still puzzled, Grace went to the sink and held it under the stream of water from the faucet. It washed out easily with no scrubbing or rubbing whatsoever. After rinsing it, she held it up and examined it, ensuring that all the holes were completely clean, and returned to the coffee maker to finish cleaning it.

Following that discovery, she noted as she wiped down the lid to the resevior that there was an unusual build-up of what seemed to be calcium deposits around it and on the plastic grid the water was poured through.

It was only later that the mystery began to take shape in her mind. As it did, the initial and most horrible thought that continued to haunt her whenever her thoughts ventured in that direction was her worry about her own sanity. Was it possible?

An hour or so later, she returned to the coffee maker and lifted the lid to the resevoir again and peered down into it where the still evident excessive lime buildup under the grid could be seen. She regretted her haste and thoroughness in cleaning it earlier. Careful examination netted a very thin line of white residue along the raised outer edge of the resevior. Grace licked her finger and rubbed it off, then touched it to her tongue. It had a salty flavor, saltier than she would have expected, but then she wasn't in the habit of tasting lime buildup on coffee makers.

Truth just wouldn't quite dawn on her for quite some time. When it really began to take solid shape in her mind was while in the midst of other household cleaning chores, she was searching through the cupboard beneath the sink for some misplaced bottle of cleaning fluid, when she noticed a large box of trisodium phosphate that had taken front and center. The logic of that defied her--how can a box of harsh soap that is only used as a painting prep take front and center? Finding what she was looking for, she returned to work, but the box of soap didn't get forgotten. Finally, curious to solve the mystery, she returned to the kitchen and pulled the box from beneath the sink, examined it, wondering, then repeated the moistening of the tip of her finger and touching a bit of soap dust inside the lid, then touching it to the tip of her tongue, tasting it. Her taste memory kicked in--it had that same slightly salty flavor as the supposed calcium deposit that had come off the plastic so easily earlier that morning.

That's where she left the problem for a couple of days. Every morning, she drank her usual two or three mugs of coffee. But that third morning, while wiping down the outside of the coffee maker, she noticed a fine white powder on the shiny black base. It reminded her of the discovery she'd attempted to hide from herself a few days before.

She paused and looked blankly at the machine trying to imagine a way that a white powder--say it was flour--had landed there near the heating element pad. Then slowly, almost with trepidation, she unscrewed the sprayerhead again and peered into its black interior. What she saw there was quite different than what she had seen a few days before.

In the very center there were several small clear floppy looking crystals. There was no confusion whatsoever that it could possibly be a sudden influx of calcium deposits from the water. If her mind could stagger, it did at that moment--she'd only cleaned the coffee maker three days before. They were clearly different than anything that she had ever seen before. The mystery that had seemed so insane, so deniably crazy just three days before, instantly crystalized itself into something real.

"I hate this place!"

Finding the front door standing wide open, she stepped in onto the dirty bare wood floor, paused and glanced toward the two doors that lead into the recesses of the house. "Hello?" She heard a rattle and followed the sound through the door that lead into the kitchen. The first person she saw was the heater repairman sitting on the hallway floor and then her husband's head behind the stove. It was surreal that they seemed not to acknowledge her entrance, that the silence seemed to be able to mute the clank of a wrench as it thumped to the floor.

The cold came through her jacket and she noted that the back door stood wide open, too. Even with both doors wide open, the stale odor of urine mingled with the odor of latex paint and the thick atmosphere felt difficult to breath in.

Breaking the silence again, she said, "I hate this place!" The heater repairman glanced up at her briefly, then returned to his work. Her husband's head bobbed behind the stove.

Most of the time we live thinking that there is order to our lives. We build our plan for our tomorrows on the basis of that order. We think we know where we will be tomorrow and who we will be with and where we will live. But sometimes the unexpected, even the unbelievable can happen and it can change everything in a blink of realization. The continuing thread of our lives is snapped in two--the plan we had for tomorrow becomes ridiculous and what we did yesterday, in light of our discovery, becomes stupid. Denial is usually the first response. Then slowly truth wars with denial and we take a step back, examine the evidence, frown, face it and fear it. But the change, undesired and unexpected, makes the denial impossible. Suddenly the future is rife with questions. The unknown can be frightening, a place where our worst fears may be realized. Then all we can do is devise a new plan and hope that lady luck will smile on our future and make it secure.

"I choose life," she said. She said it boldly and then repeated it to herself more quietly. That was the absolute choice, the writing on the wall. It was a choice between death and life. Choosing to live should be simple enough, but it didn't seem that way. The echo of that statement colored the days that seemed to net altogether too little progress in the right direction. She was ready to move, to solve the dilemma, but barriers stood in her way. With every step since the day the truth began to dawn on her those words seemed to vibrate through her limbs. Fear and fury! It took fear to move her and fury to energize her.

Remembering now the many events that accumulated over the years, this day of change shouldn't have been unexpected. When had it begun? Was it in the fall of 2000 that she experienced the first symptoms of the disease? Six years! That's a lot of denial. But of all the possible causes this one--this one--was the most difficult to accept or believe.