01 January - the drowning at Los Gatos

I can see the air itself

7:14AM CST, Wednesday, January 28th

the top of Cooper's Hill, Leasburg, Missouri

("With only 3 days left, this will undoubtedly be the coldest January in decades.")

– WIL Radio 1230 AM

High is medium and low is medium. But medium is a place that's unusually hard to find. In fact, the more we think about medium, the smaller it gets until it seems like medium never existed in the first place. It's a fact. An absolute fact.

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From the top of the very small hill at the edge of the very small town, Avery Cooper did his best to ignore the sounds outside his window. It wasn't easy. Tree branches, you see, were breaking all around his smallish home. Snap. Snap. Snap.

"Pizzmire," Avery hissed.

"Pizzmire," he said again while shaking his head.

Then he stepped toward his kitchen window where he was greeted with a cloud of his own breath. Through that cloud and through the yellowy-brown windowpane, he began watching a gray squirrel running back and forth across the length of a low hanging branch. Near the tip of the branch was an icicle blocking the squirrel's path. Beyond that was one of the millions of invisible bridges leading from one tree to another that only squirrels can see.

Avery leaned closer. He looked at the squirrel, the tangle of tree branches, and the distance between each of them. After carefully weighing all the math and mysticism, he said, "Nineteen seconds." Then he began tapping out the time with his foot as if the sound might encourage the squirrel to jump from one tree to the next before the deadline was reached.

Unaware of his own movements, Avery tilted his head and swiveled his shoulders mimicking the squirrel as it scampered back and forth. After eight seconds, Avery extended both index fingers pointing them this way and that. Hoping to guide the squirrel around the icicle. Hoping it would leap across the gap.

After thirteen seconds, Avery got distracted by the thought that no number would divide equally into nineteen. He quickly did the arithmetic in his head, but he lost track of time and forgot to keep counting. In the end, he missed nineteen altogether.

After twenty-three seconds, both Avery and the squirrel gave up. The squirrel hopped off the tree and ran down the side of Cooper's Hill praying it might find some uneaten remnant from autumn's banquet of acorns, chestnuts, black walnuts, and those devilish helicopter seeds that spiral down from sugar maples.

Avery just shook his head and mumbled, "Dumb animal."

Then he paused for a moment and added. "I was counting on you and it was so simple. All you had to do was hop to the branch above and then over the icicle. Such a stupid animal."

Avery Tecla Geronimo Cooper passed each day alone in his kitchen making small wagers like this one. Which bird would land on which branch? Would a cloud block the sun for five seconds or ten? Would a squirrel figure out how to escape the maze of branches and icicles so it could leap from one tree to the next? For each question, there was only one right answer and hundreds of wrong ones, so Avery spent his days trying to sift through all that was wrong to find the single answer that was right. It was who he was. Or anyway, that's what he told himself. He was fond of saying that his mother was Italian and that his father was angry. The combination (according to Avery) produced a gambler who couldn't keep his mouth shut. But the truth of the matter was different. In fact, Avery knew little of his origins. He just liked how the words sounded. And for a fact, Avery was no better than any other man, woman or child at guessing what would happen next on God's not-so-green Earth.