Gray Areas

Gray Areas

“Where's your uncle Ed?” my dad asked.

“I don't know, it's not my Tuesday. I think it's mom's turn to talk him down.”

“My ass, she did it last week. This is the day she makes her peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise sandwiches for the week. Get up and get the ladder, Jason, he's on the second floor roof this week; something about the full moon.”

This was a normal day at my home for the criminally insane. I was the most normal one there because I wanted to be a proctologist, and considering the fact I'm surrounded by assholes, I figured I might as well get rich from the experience.

Every other Tuesday Uncle Ed—my dad's younger brother—crawls up on the roof with a sack lunch and waits for his friends to come get him. He was in the war—all five in the twentieth century to hear him tell it—and was fed a steady supply of beer, bourbon, home grown and some pretty good nose candy while on guard duty. Now he claims he's a six-time abductee, and I'm not talking for ransom, I'm talking the Orion people. I stood on the top rung of the ladder and said:

“Uncle Ed, where do you think you're going?”

“This trip? Alucia said we're going back to Neptune, I left his suit there. He told me: Don't come back until you find it.”

I couldn't resist. “What color was it?”

“You know what color, dumbass, it was gray—what else?”

“How much food you got there?” I asked.

“Enough, now git!”

“Did you get him down?” Dad asked.

“No, I left him up there.”

“Why'd you run the push mower around the back yard in a circle?”

“...what circle?”

WC 300