The Dog Boy, a 39-year-old man child, is being forced from his home. He has nowhere to go. Charon's Crossing, a failed racehorse, will be put down unless she wins her next race, but she has lost each one of her previous 64 races. The worst is certai...
Billy Greene inhaled sharply and then pushed the air rapidly from his lungs. Since he had been enjoying a slower than usual morning, the sound he made was more like a groan than a purr. But then with surprising energy, Billy grabbed his ankles like he was pulling up riding boots and hopped to his feet beside his bed.
As he walked by his bedroom window, he ran his finger across the condensation on the glass. Streams of dirty water flowed beneath his fingers and raced each other to reach the bottom. For no more than a second, he watched the streams merge and speed toward their personal finish line. When it was clear which stream would win, he said aloud, "No time to waste. Today, I become a cat."
Billy took a cab to Pimlico that day. With light traffic, it took no more than 15 minutes to get to the track from his home at the Maryland Avenue Motel. On the entire ride over, the driver complained about the fog. Billy handed the man a double-sized tip for his troubles. Then he swung out his arm like he was introducing the foggy mist to someone who had never seen it before. He said, "Has there ever been a prettier day?"
It was past noon and the fog was still thickening.
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the Earth exhales
God's Good Earth exhaled at noon that Monday and continued to blow out that same breath for the next five hours. What started as damp air after several chilly days was quickly transformed into fog rising from the Earth. Like any decent pioneer, the fog moved westward. On the east side of Baltimore (and witnessed by no one at all), the world's tiniest creatures hitched a ride on that breath and floated in the mist. Each miniature droplet was a world of its own. It carried passengers like minerals, dirt, and hundreds of living microbes. Though these little scavengers had spent their entire brief lives in east Baltimore, they floated all the way across the city that day and landed on Pimlico's backstretch.
For microbes, death is the ultimate zero-sum game and they are always prepared to work no matter where they are or what time it is. For them, death is nothing personal.
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