The Child in Tears

Lack of sleep had seared his brain to the point of madness as he yelled to me "I'll kill you if you drive by my house again".

Having been no where near for a year, I wondered, and approached the car to see what was yelling at me.

There I found a tired, working man, covered in cotton and grime and a child in a yellow dress, face soaked with tears.

A shotgun waits for you, he told me again.

Looking at him, I said, you have the wrong man.

As he drove his old Chevrolet away from the near-crime scene, he looked straight ahead, and the child looked back at me, still in tears.

(true story. I was in the military, and had not been around for about a year. My brother had been driving my car; "flirting" with his two daughters; and probably keeping him from sleeping (as he worked the midnight shift). I told my brother not to drive by the house again.)