Nauvoo, Illinois: 1835

Blood. Water. Spirit.

That’s how this story begins and that’s how this story ends (go ahead, check it out). More importantly, however, that is how every story begins and ends.

One eternal merry-go-round in one little playground at some little daycare in a corner of the cosmos that God’s great granddaughters^10,000,000 spend some segment of some form of time on. Round, and round, and forever round. Constant motion with no real destination. Their absurd laughter is Plato’s music of the spheres, but all I hear this guy I’ve got tied to a tree whimpering some nonsense and sputtering blood all over my shoe.

Blood on my shoe. If there was a beginning, this would be it.

I tell him that blood, water, and spirit is all there is to this, all there is to anything he’s ever done.

Well, it’s really more complicated than that, but a man about to meet whatever powers there may be doesn’t have time for a primer in biology and philosophy.

In fact, I’ve learned that a man tied to a tree quivering like a cell phone with a broken ringer only has three neural pathways that allow three primal thoughts. Chloroform is virtually inconsequential at this point.

Three thoughts.

These are:

1. Oh God please, no
2. Oh damn, oh dam, o dam
3. Oh God damn it, please no, o Goddamit, please no, ogodammitpleesssno…

He starts mumbling something about number 1, but I can’t make it out because his upper left bicuspid just shot out, slurring his speech to:

“Oh gawthdadathphfulllooo”

The tooth rattled the forest like a comet that only comes once every 513.34 years, and even then, only according to the Mayan calendar.

You should see this, I tell him.

Of course, he can’t he’s tied to a tree.

But if he could, he should.

I crouch down to see how the earth handles it’s latest intruder and some blood gently showers my head much like I imagine that the mist that “went up” in the Garden of Eden kissed the face of Mother paradise before everything got shot to Hell with the whole Adam and Eve and Lilly and whoever else mythology.

My friends the ants have the bicuspid now, and if I know them, they are going to give this thing some meaning. That’s how they roll.

I say, look, Sammy, you upper-left bicuspid is getting put to good use.

Shortly, they’ll be sitting in their holy of holies offering sacrifice on an alter than any dentist would be proud of.

I bless the ants.

Ants, I proclaim, bring ye all the tithes to the storehouse. Lie it on the bicuspid and I shall pour you out such a blessing that you will not have room enough to receive!

You see, ants are my friends because we both move large amounts of dirt and draw great pride from our dirt-moving accomplishments. Right now, the ants of this grove are working on their sixth level of their fourteenth anthill. The others were carelessly kicked down by the completely unintentional actions of those simply roaming the countryside looking for their own dirt to move. Paramount among them is a curiously grizzly fellow I keep running into that is never satisfied in moving dirt unless it was the dirt that someone else was trying to move first. The irony of the whole situation is that in his obsession to find and pillage other people’s dirt organizations, he ignorantly and repeatedly stomped my ant friends’ ziggurats into unrecoverable matter unorganized, never gaining any satisfaction whatsoever from the colossal wreck.

First rule of life: You only derive pleasure from destroying something if you know you are destroying it. Otherwise, other beings misery is meaningless.

I stand up and kiss Sammy, that greasy pudge-factory. I’ve got three ropes keeping him to this earth via a fig tree. His adipose couldn’t be held, though. It was a determined rebellion that flopped over the ropes, declaring its superiority. Silly adipose. Enjoy it while you can. In a hundred years, you’ll be conquered by a vacuum cleaner. You are so last century.

You ask, “How does a simple horse-thief from who-the-hell knows and who-the-hell cares Missouri know about wisdom teeth?”

I say, because of these letters from my grandpa. They are typed, size 12 New Times Roman, double-spaced. Not sure what all that means, but it seems that people in the future don’t like looking at lines that come from each other’s brains, they prefer that words be put into a “word processor” (don’t ask) so that everyone is the same. This is their Zion. One mind.

Know he’s on number 3. When they get to number 3, right where I want him to be. At number 3, he’s getting loud and starting to cry. His tears mix with blood, and that’s almost like water. 2 out of 3, we’re almost there.