Two Stories

by Greg Mulcahy

Lurching like some too-stiff McGuiggan, Hoarder Doug claimed he knew them all—Boscowe, Goerske—even Gertz.

Difference of a dollar-store hairbrush in that claim.

Asked about any one, all Hoarder would say was—That was a strange son of a bitch.

And all that junk. Scattered. Piled.

Fix it how?

Hoarder Doug would hang it from the trees, if Hoarder Doug could.

Had not heard of dream of dispossession.

Simple, held, for him, simple nothing.

He had not meant to come upon the folk tale.

Got to it in something related to the dead and presumably murdered fossil man as he browsed to pass the time.

Who could not relate to the dead fossil man?

Murdered. Arrow shot. In treachery, no doubt.

Treachery as old as the species, one might be sure.

At least.

Fossil man come back only as fossil.

Dead.

But in the folk tale, the man returned to his village from under the sea or enchantment or both, as these things went, and recognized nothing.

And what life that?