Carbine: Stories

Catch and Release

 Catch and Release = It was the pin prick prick. Sometimes his knee, sometimes his side. Or his abdomen, though there not so sharply. He knew it was nothing, but he was afraid. He was afraid because he thought he had heard, or maybe read, somewhere, that there was a horrible neurological disease that usually began in middle age and initially manifested itself as the prickly sensation of random pin pricks. But he thought that if this were true, and he suspected that he had, as usual, got the details wrong, and it was not true, there would be a lot of pin pricks. Not one every three or four days but thousands, millions. They would be constant. Massive. Debilitating. Chronic. So he was okay, but soon, it would be something, some chronic this or constant that. That’s the way it was for everybody, and there was no use trying to defeat reality. In Colorado, they released the pretty lynx. It made the news, and the paper had a picture of the lynx shoulder-deep in snow. Apparently they were getting rare, at least in that part of the state, so the officials released some captive lynx in hopes they’d repopulate the wild. Toni told him the lynx weren’t extinct there. She told him, too, that the released animals were wearing radio collars so the fish and game people could track them. Probably they were losing habitat to development. Maybe they were hunted too. More likely trapped. They had beautiful fur; there was no disputing that. He hoped, as he supposed most people did, that the lynx would do fine out there. Colorado, after all, the mountains, you know, forests and streams and so forth—there was a place for all that. But then the farmers and the ranchers—they might not be too happy about having another predator in the area. Toni, though, was so excited about these wildcats. She was hoping there would be reports about where they were going. Well, where could they go? They’d run around the forest, right? Even if there were a graphic on TV, that graphic would show what—dotted lines on a topo map? It was forty degrees, and the ice was melting on the back of the house, that drip, drip, drip, and though the sky was a heavy, moist gray, the air smelled spring-like, and though the garage was cluttered with the old weight set and beer crates and potting soil, pots, tools, the broken lawnmower —he had seen something scurrying, he thought, in there the other night—he thought it was a field mouse taken up winter residence, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it or whether he needed to do anything about it, for it might be best simply to leave the thing alone—in spite of all this, he recognized for a moment something inside him, something he felt, physically felt inside his chest, and it was, it was a feeling, and it was a feeling , a familiar feeling, for a moment, of possibility. He got into the car. The feeling went away. Today was the conference. The conference was, in theory, better than going to the office, except that instead of going out to the industrial park, he had to go downtown to the big hotel, which was not in itself a bad thing, but there were the traffic and the parking. However, the hotel had a ramp. But the ramp was expensive. He would, though, he could, put in for reimbursement . If the ramp were not full, because if the hotel ramp were full, he’d have to find another ramp nearby. He knew, roughly, where there was one, but that rough knowledge was the problem: With all the construction and one-way streets downtown, he was not sure where to enter or how to get to the entrance. The conference was about The Future. Maybe it was good they were sending him, or maybe they picked him because he was the most expendable. They told him to go and hear what the experts had to say about the future. He knew enough to know that the experts would have dramatic predictions about the future and its attendant challenges. That was their job. He never believed those predictions. Sure, there might be some technological advances, but it took awhile for the effects of anything to ripple out, and what change he really had to worry about would come...