Hudson high school football score tonight |

Chapter 1:
Jerry Brenson was having a hard time not getting pissed off at the way the car kept jerking around, making it damn near impossible to roll his tightly held cigarette. What a piece of shit it was anyways, it looked like the cross between an impregnated white pill and a scarecrow with all its frayed edges of tobacco poking out like straw.
"Would you stop driving like a goddamn animal!" he bellowed at the driver. Then he resumed his work on unraveling the piece of shit and evening everything out. The tip of Brenson's tongue stuck out of his mouth as he worked at it. Within a few seconds the passenger side front tire plunged into a half-foot pothole and Brenson's jaw clenched shut on that tender red meat sticking out of his face. In an instant it resembled a tiny pink balloon swelling up and getting ready to pop.
"FUCK!" Brenson screamed after a long second of seething white pain, which was now commencing to roll like waves through the bottom of his jaw, and somehow up into his fucking forehead! Before he had time to return from the moments that threw his whole being into a chaos of agony, he knew with dreadful certainty that he had bit off a chunk of his tongue. He would see it there if he opened his eyes and looked down. And with that, an image of a huge bulging red thing on the floor that was flopping around like a decapitated fish came to him. With wide eyes that seemed to burst open like fireworks, both hands flew to his mouth so that Brenson suddenly looked like a little girl getting the best birthday present of her life.
And then, hallelujah, he thinks, praise Jesus, God, the Buddha, anyone and anything that saved his precious tongue. It was still there. Hurt like hell but it was still there. He looked around on the floor in a sudden surge of paranoia (maybe a part of it really was down there) and to his blessed relief the only thing he saw were a pair of work boots stuffed onto his oafishly large feet.
All of this occurred in about 3 seconds, after which Brenson's brow contorted into a fierce angle of rage, and a powerful sense of the injustice and incompetence and of all the damned stupid negligent habits of this buffoon of a partner settled on him. He turned to the driver and smacked Dale Enrsten upside the head.
"Ouch!" Dale wailed in his deep Mississippi drawl. The car swerved to the left when Dale's arm instinctively went up to protect his face. "What the hell was that for?" He asked stupidly.
"For nearly getting my tongue bit off asshole. Now drive."
Dale returned a frown towards Brenson, and tried as he may to appear the least bit intimidating, Dale looked more comical than anything. There was something about his fat head and thin brown hair on a receded hairline that gave the air of an overly large boy preparing for boarding school.
Dale turned back to the road and decided that what would cheer him up would be a couple of chili dogs, add the cheese please, with a bud light and a pack of skittles. There ought to be a gas station in the next mile or so, god knows when the last time they saw one passing through this shit hole was. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a smoke, no two smokes, then handed one over to Brenson.
"My apologies captain. This road's covered in more potholes than your mom's vagina."
Dale cackled out a wheezing laugh and then lit up his smoke. He puffed out a large plume of white smoke that was torn away by the passing air out Dale's open window. He looked out that window, and glanced nervously at all the red stone. Their surfaces were inundated with marbled cracks. Every so often he'd see a pale bush growing between a couple of rocks. They looked more like skeletons than plants. Yes it was true, Dale Ernsted hated the desert. He hated all deserts. They made him feel like a clock was always ticking, and when it went to zero baby, oh my oh my, Dale baby if you’re out here, you gonna be fish food. Well not out here I wont, he retorts back to his own morbid fantasy, more liable to be lizard food, or coyote. Yeah, that's right, Dale thinks there probably are coyotes out here, and if the car broke down, well not a lot to eat out here but a couple of dehydrated dying men. What would be a better treat for a pack of hungry canines?
And following this train of thought Dale wonders what it would be like if Brenson and he really were surrounded by a pack of coyotes, how many would it take, maybe five? Six? Would Dale watch Brenson go first, or would it be Dale who Brenson catches a glimpse of getting his arm torn off from the shoulders down when the wolves begin demanding his own full attention. Look at that, now they turned into wolves. He didn’t think there were wolves out here. His expression changes into a frown of contemplation.
"Are you listening to me?" Dale hears Brenson angrily ask. The wolves go away. He realizes Brenson had asked him something.
"What's that?"
"Find a place to pull over I need to take a leak"
Dale's small eyes dart around at the escarpment and mesas and the fine layer of brown dirt swirling over the two-lane highway.
"No, I think there's a gas station up a bit. Not too much farther now."
Dale doesn't say anything else. He turns the knob on the radio until Bon Jovi is playing We’re Not Gonna Take It, and guns the Camry down the long stretch of desolate waste before them.
The desert sun was lowering in the west, making the car’s long shadow race ahead of them. By the time they see the dusty gas station with a white roof and big red letters painted on a discolored sign reading QuikStop, the sun was almost touching the horizon and Brenson had to pee like a mad horse. One or two stars could be seen faintly wavering in the turbulent purple sky fading into black.
Dale pulled up to a gas pump and he and Brenson got out of the car.
“Well” Brenson stretched out the word just as he was stretching out his back, leaning heavily into it with his arms on his hips, “Give me the money and I’ll get some food and beer. You get the gas”.
Dale reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty.
“Two cheese chili dogs and skittles” he said miserably. Brenson did a quick nod and walked off.
Dale found that he wasn’t doing anything but standing there watching Brenson walk closer to the gas station when the thought popped into his head: you know I think might kill that fuck, yeah I might. And then he turned around as if it was just a cloud passing by.
He was listening to the gulping sounds of gasoline filling up his tank when he saw a white toyota pull up and park on the side of the gas station near the ice chest and propane tanks. There were two people in the car. They looked like Mexicans to Dale. A man and woman. They got out of the car, shut the doors, walked around the corner, and entered the gas station. Dale wasn’t particularly interested in them but then something caught his eye. He thought he saw movement in the backseat of the toyota.
There it was again.
He realized it was a child.
It was a girl with long brown hair tied up in a ponytail. A little Mexican girl. Kids shouldn't be left in a hot car all alone he thinks righteously. But what should he expect from these people? Look at that piece of shit rig. He realized again that he was in a trance, staring angrily at the back of the Toyota.
Dale's eyes surveyed from the Toyota to the gas station entrance. The glare of the sun reflected everything outside so it was impossible to see in through the windows. Then something inside him went on autopilot. He had something to do he realized, and he had to do it fast.
He fastened the nozzle back onto the pump and briskly walked over to the white Toyota. His heart began racing. He peered in at the girl in the backseat. No one else was in there. She was wearing a blue tank top and black shorts. There was a doll, something from a disney cartoon in her hands, Dale insanely thinks, but is barely aware of any of these thoughts as the door of the Toyota slowly opens up and the girl turns her head away from her doll, up towards her mama with a smile, and sees Dale’s huge head lurching in like a troll plucking a princess from a tower.
Her face shrivels into a scream but before she can let out the breath, Dale’s meaty hands are over her mouth, and without any effort he pulls her out of the car and clutches her entire body in a bear hug. There's a heart pounding moment when she sounds like a grunting dog struggling in a trap and he knows her scream will escape from his sweaty armpit. Then there's an instant of pure lucid absurdity where he seemed to see himself from the outside. What would the girl's parents do if they walked around the corner right now? He couldn’t just put her back in there and go about pumping gas again could he? Oh I'm just ole friendly Dale giving your girl here a nice good hug cuz I could hear her cryin' for mommy.
Then he kicks the Toyotas door shut for god knows why and scrambles to his car. He hustles to the trunk, realizes the switch is up front, and skids to his knees at the driver's side door. He’s pressing the girl so hard against his chest he can almost feel her head bouncing off his beating heart.
Then he hears the satisfying click of the trunk unlocking, and with surprising speed he places the girl in the bed of the trunk, takes a bandana out from his back pocket and ties it like a rope around her mouth. The girl’s eyes, shaking with terror, watch grimly as the troll closes out the darkening sky with a metallic clink.
Then Dale jumps into the driver's seat, turns on the engine, and cranks up the radio. Another song by dear old Bon Jovi by god! Dale feel’s exhilarated. He doesn't even know it yet. All he knows is this music sounds better than anything he’s ever heard before, and why wouldn’t you look at that, he’s not even sore with Brenson anymore for slapping him in the face earlier. He can’t wait to have a beer! And there's ole Bren heading back towards the Camry now.
But then Dale realizes with a jolt of panic, the parents! The girl’s parents are going to be out any minute! With the mother of all anxiety attacks Dale’s car speeds towards Brenson as he walks out of the gas station at a magnitude that probably made Brenson think oh fuck I’m going to die by the look on his face, but Dale’s car screeched to a halt just a few feet away.
“What the fuck’s that about” Brenson sneered. The sneer was more one of habit than anything else as Brenson was so surprised that there wasn’t really room for anything else. His arms were full of supplies and he almost dropped them all over the ground.
“Get in now!” Dale yelled. He reached his arm over and threw open the passenger door. Brenson sat down and before he could shut the door, Dale shut it himself by accelerating in a curve out the gas station parking lot, and wouldn’t you know it, he didn’t even use his turning signals when he brought the Camry onto the highway and raced into the black eastern sky.
Chapter 2:
“Jesus man, you think I robbed the place?”. Brenson was unsure what had gotten into him. “Shut up for a minute. Give me a beer”.
Brenson had never seen Dale so serious. The man’s face looked like a machine. His thin lips were pressed so tightly you could barely see them. And he was scowling at the road. His eyes kept bouncing to the rearview mirror. Brenson could see beads of sweat rolling over Dale's pockmarked forehead. And the odometer was reading 95 mph. He sure as hell hoped he wouldn’t suddenly get another dose of Dale’s special potholes. He made sure his tongue was planted firmly on the roof of his mouth and his seat was buckled.
“Uh Dale..are you alright there partner?” Brenson asked.
“You seem like somethin just bit you in the ass.”
Dale guzzled down his bud light, burped and wiped his mouth, then reached for another one. After he cracked it open and took a good long gulp, he bellowed “Wooo! Lordy..oh yeah” He was heaving deep breaths between each word. Then his gaze turned away from the road and locked with Brenson's eyes.
“Pal, when you were over in that gas station there..” he paused and glanced towards the backseat of the car as if someone were sitting back there. He couldn’t keep it hidden from Brenson now could he? They had 100 miles left to drive.
Brenson looked back and then over at Dale again.
“ain't quite sure how to say this", the look on Dale's screwed up face as he thought about what to say next made Brenson think of a large boy again, one that was trying to work out a hard math problem like how much his groceries would cost.
"I may have picked up a passenger,” Dale finally said.
“What?” That came out of left field and Brenson didn't know what it meant.
“I just kind of..took her” he said this last as if Dale himself was surprised at what he was saying.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Brenson was getting a sick feeling. What fuckup did Dale just get him into now? He knew Dale liked cats and sometimes he would take them off the streets or out of people's yards if he liked how they looked. And he knew Dale had about 9 cats stuffed away in his trailer, but Brenson wasn't hearing any meows coming out of the back seat now was he? And Dale's eyes were looking at something far away, unfocused on something so far away like Venus.
And then Brenson noticed a muffled sound like there was a load of groceries rolling to the side in the trunk as Dale took them around a tight bend. For just a moment he was worried that maybe he had put the beer back there and it was gonna get all fizzy, but then he remembered the beer in his hand and the rest on the floor by his feet near that imaginary chunk of meat flapping around down there. He felt the tip of his tongue and took a swig.
"What the fuck did you do" Brenson remembered the two Mexicans that walked into that gas station. He had eyes on them the whole time.
“Dale?” Brenson asked with a looming understanding that sped towards him like a Mack truck. Dale had done something magnanimously fucked up.
“What the fuck did you do!”
“She was boiling back there!” Dale pleaded. He was an eight year old child again, explaining to an angry stepmom why she had found a drowned cat in the bathtub. He didn’t have any choice, it had bit him and that was not okay, that was not okay by any standards of civilized man. What else could he do?
“Dale!”
“I saved her Bren!”
They were both yelling now.
“She was gonna be dead back there! You saw those mexis didn’t you?”
“Pull over!” Brenson demanded.
“No.”
“Pull over now!”
Dale kept on speeding. The odometer read 105. To Brenson it felt like the flimsy car could at any moment flip over a hundred times if the slightest gust of wind brushed against them.
“Pull over right fucking now or I’ll beat the shit out you right here!”
Brenson’s fists were clenched into a barb of hairy knuckles. He was really going to do it Dale observed, and then they’d both be piles of scrap strewn all over the road.
Dale gave a defeated sigh and took his foot off the accelerator. He was going to have to show Bren one way or another. They were already miles past that shit hole station anyways. What the hell. The Camry disengaged from warp speed and soon Brenson could hear the crinkle of gravel under the tires as the Camry pulled off onto the shoulder.
Outside the night was as silent as the land was empty. A brilliant splash of stars painted the canopy of the sky in a way that gave Dale a cosmic sense of his own importance. He shuffled over to the back with Bren, a disappointed look of guilt was likewise splashed across his face, why no mah, I’m not the one that drowned Muffin, but ya know, she wouldn’t stop biting. But Dale remembered the feeling of her slick fur bunched up between his fingers and the way her intricately delicate neck felt like so many scrawny bones. A jolt of disgust seemed to roll through him like a shockwave and he tried to shake off the memory of that limp cat as fast as possible.
Then that cave of darkness opened up and it was nighttime outside, and the girl saw with a cold panic that made her cry that there were two trolls looming over her now. They were both huge and disgusting. The one on the left looked like a giant baby with patches of wiry fur in tufts up and down its neck and chin. Its teeth were yellowed and it was smoking a cigarette. She didn't like how it was eyeing her, like she was some kind of precious crystal that it wanted badly.
The other was just as big, not as fat though, more muscular. He had a mop of scraggly black hair and a full beard covering the mouth. He looked like a biker. And he looked like he was really mad at her. She heard herself crying.
"Mamá" She tried squeaking through the rope. "Donde mi mamá"
And then, no, no please, everything was getting dark again. She howled and squirmed but the lid of the trunk did not care.
Brenson was biting his bottom lip. He was supremely pissed off now. What the fuck was this lunatic thinking! He looked at Dale and was about to begin a royal case of pummeling his fat ass into the ground for getting Bren caught up in this bullshit, lord knows he's had a clean record apart from a mild six months in Kentucky State Penitentiary when he was twenty two years old. And this asshole, this stupid fat asshole made him an accomplice to whatever crazy bullshit was flying around in that fat fucking head of his!
But Bren noticed that far away in the direction they had come were a pair of tiny headlights. They were heading this way.
Instead of beating Dale into a mess worthy of the crime of getting Bren caught up in kidnapping charges, he said "Lets get the fuck out of here". And then jumped back into his seat, slamming the door.
"Come on!" He yelled out when he saw that Dale was still standing on the side of the road like an idiot. Dale hurried up, revved on the engine, and the Camry was back on the highway doing 92 mph. Bren cracked open another beer and drank the whole thing in one go. He didn’t complain about the speed.
Chapter 3:
It was about two in the morning when they pulled up to Bren’s trailer. Bren got out and walked around to Dale’s side. He was mildly drunk. Bren put his hands on his knees and bent down as if he was going to say something to Dale, but in the end he turned around and left without saying anything. He was too pissed off.
“See you in the morning.” Dale called out after him in an annoyingly loud voice, but Bren didn’t turn around. His thin white door shut loudly and Dale pulled away and drove off to his own trailer at the end of the gravel road.
At this point he had a conundrum on his hands. He had to get the girl inside without her making a lot of noise. And then once inside..what? Tie her up? Keep her in his bathroom? It’s not like he had a basement to put her in. And what the fuck was he doing anyways? His hand reached for his forehead. He was thinking. Then he unlocked the trunk and when the dim light in the trunk came on he saw with stabbing horror that the girl was dead.
“NO!” He shouted at her as if it were her fault.
"Oh dear Jesus no!”
He felt like he was about to cry. It was the cat all over again. He really didn’t want to kill it. But then he saw the rhythm of her small diaphragm. She was sleeping. Dale oh dale oh dale, what are you doing?
He wiped the sweat off his brow, then reached in and picked her up. She weighed about as much as a pillow, and when Dale opened the door of his trailer, a cat seemed to catapult itself outside making him trip over his own feet. "Shit! Henry!" He gave an involuntary yell over his shoulder when he saw which one did it. Then, understanding that he totally did not have anything under control, he stopped in his doorway and simply stood there with the little girl cradled in his arms. She felt warm. His girl. Yeah, that sounded right. It was his girl now. His little Mexican girl.
A few more hungry cats came out of the shadows begging for food. He shushed them and kicked his leg around without putting any real effort into it just to make them go away.
He had to secure his girl.
But how was he going to get any sleep tonight? He had to be absolutely sure that she could not get away. Then as he was walking in, thinking about how he would tie her up (he did have some duct tape, rope, maybe some wire ties..oh but he didn't want to hurt her wrists), he felt a sudden uneasiness about Brenson. Did Dale think he'd go to the cops? Maybe he should have kept his mouth shut and the music loud. He should have slowed down when Bren asked and he should have… Wait, just wait one cotton pickin minute Dale, he says to himself. The girl. The girl first, then Bren. Maybe Bren was still awake and he'd pay him a little visit, have a little chat just to make sure they were square, just to see if everything was cool, but only after he was sure the girl could not escape.
But should he actually leave her alone?
"Get moving!" he said to himself. And then walked into the back of the trailer where he kept a tool shed. The girl was still sleeping in his arms. Whatever nightmares she could possibly be having, would she really want to wake up?
He chose duct tape, the principle reason being it was easiest to reach while clutching a small human being. And although she felt like a feather before, the longer Dale held her in that death grip, the heavier she seemed to get.
He laid her gently down on a Layzee Boy and found himself holding his breath and needing air when he was certain she was still sleeping. Dale unfolded the leg rest, and then very delicately began unwinding the duct tape around her legs. This turned out to be a bitch because the duct tape was prone to making offensive scratching sounds as it was unpeeled from its spool.
About an hour later the girl was strapped in the chair in an extended position. Mounds of duct tape secured her arms, legs, torso, hands and feet. He took special care to untie the bandana from her face, knowing that she could suffocate in her sleep if it stayed on there. That special feat gave him a sense of pride for remembering. He already got one point in the game of taking care of her by damn. Though he'd have to figure out how to keep her quiet. Lastly, he strapped down her head using a generous supply of tape.
Now he surveyed his work like a skilled practitioner, his mouth closed, eyes narrowed, and giving short nods of satisfaction. Yes he did do a good job. Both on the tape job, and on the girl. She was adorable. He was imagining what it would be like three years from now, when she had forgotten all about that old shit hole family she had, a fact that Dale would NEVER bring up, and how happy they would look playing in a park, eating hotdogs. He's pushing her on a swing and look at that! At the very end of the pendulum's arc she leaps through the air, legs pointing like arrows in perfect form! She glides through the air and lands on her feet. Both arms reach up into the sky, she beams at Dale saying look what I just did daddy! Then she's running, his little girl is running right at him! She leaps into his arms and oh god how he hugs her, squeezes her, suddenly he notices that her skin is so soft, there's a gleam in her eye, he looks at her mouth
Somebody knocked twice on his front door.
The force of that sound coming from that door made Dale almost scream. The cloudy glaze over his eyes burned away as fast as if Jesus Christ had just now ripped open a hole in the sky and let all of heaven's mighty armies come march on through.
His head jerked up and banged against the corner of a kitchen cabinet that he had been standing near but he barely felt it because panic and paranoia were through the fucking roof ladies and gentlemen. That's right, Dale Ernsted was about to melt into a puddle and seep into the floor.
But he had to do something about the door. He crept slowly, as if the slower he moved the more invisible he would become. At this point he was trying to make himself as flat against the wall as possible so he could peek out the curtains without the intruder noticing. He quickly poked his face into the curtains and looked out the window. There was a man still standing at Dale's door. And the man instantly turned towards Dale and looked him in the eyes.
Dale screamed and put a hand over his mouth.
It was Bren. It was just fucking Bren. He pulled away from the window and noticed he was breathing like he had run a half marathon.
Dale opened the door and there was Bren pissed off as ever before. He didn't ask to come inside but came inside he did, brushing past Dale without saying a word. He stood in Dale's living room, hands on hips, something like concern on his face, and was just standing there gaping at that girl stuck in all that mound of duct tape. He was shaking his head in disbelief. Then Bren turned around and said in whispered tones, "What in fucking Christ is going on here Dale?"
They both walked outside and Dale shut the door.
Inside the trailer the girl remained taped to the Lazee Boy, breathing those deep occasional breaths that are only ever seen in people deep in REM sleep. Then she opened her eyes. If Dale could see those eyes now he would say they looked evil. To Bren, who had a larger vocabulary than Dale, he would say cunning.
In truth she had never been asleep. And although she heard only a little of the conversation between the two ogres that captured her, she knew that Baby Face, as she thought of Dale, believed she was asleep. And for this she thought he must be the dumbest person imaginable. What moron would think anything but a tranquilized rhinoceros was asleep after all that had happened to her.
She played through the sequence of events that led her to this terrible situation. It was an unreal situation. How could this happen to her? But that's not useful, she thinks, it isn't useful to wonder about why, only how and what to do about it.
She took the opportunity while the two trolls were outside to scan as much of the room as possible. Looking for doors, windows, anything that could be used as a weapon. Although she knew she had little chance of using anything but a gun against either of those two guys. They were big and mean looking. But she thought Baby Face probably had a gun, either on him or by his bed, maybe in a closet.
She would have to escape. She knew there was a door in the back, though she couldn't see it, because Baby Face had brought her back there and she could feel the outside air coming in. It seemed to be some kind of extension to the trailer. And when Baby Face had stood on his toes reaching high up to get something off a shelf, she stole a glance and saw that it was some kind of shed that led outside. There were at least two doors. It was going to hurt so bad to take this tape off. She didn't know what to do about that yet. She could barely move any part of her body.
Then she heard one of the men approach the door and the hinge began to squeak open.
Dale poked his head in and stared at her for a good ten seconds. She was still sleeping. Good. Then the door closed.
Her name was Mariana and her eyes were now looking up at the ceiling, lips quivering, trying to hold back the tears from escaping. One did though and it traced a small trail down her cheekbone before it finally fell to the floor. She hoped her cheek would dry before the trolls came back inside.
Chapter 4:
That same morning Bren woke up to a pounding headache that felt like a vein was about to burst from the left side of his head. His bones creaked as he got out of bed and he walked to his refrigerator and pulled out a beer.
He wasn't trying to get drunk, those days were long past him. It was just to get rid of the headache. He had work today. And it was Bren's turn to drive so he was gonna have to waltz over to dumb fuck Dale's house and drag his ass out of bed. Although he wasn't so sure how much stock he put in folk traditions and rules of the game, so to speak, now that his relationship with Dale has been, shall we say, tested.
Although he wasn't as angry as he was just a few hours before while he chewed out Dale for being the stupidest motherfucker he ever laid eyes on, he still felt he should give him an ass pounding after he, Bren, resolved this entire state of affairs. Because it would be Bren, not Dale, who would have to do that. As much as he wished he could abandon Dale and just say fuck it, he was deeply concerned about his own involvement in what transpired the night before, and he was gravely imagining getting fifty years behind bars because of some lunatic he decided to take up a business deal with. Who was the real retard here, Bren thinks in a self deprecating way, who would get into business with someone like Dale?
Never mind all that, he would have to do something about this. He could not allow Dale to go off on his wild fantasies. Bren's chief concern was that Dale would fuck up somehow and land Bren in prison. He was slowly shaking his head back and forth as he sipped his beer, realizing just how deep the sinking sand really went in this case, all the anger he felt the night before came rushing back tenfold as he realized what he would have to do. What he would make Dale do. As punishment.
Meanwhile Baby Face was still sleeping. Mariana heard him snoring. She decided to let herself sleep after he had passed out on the floor near this duct tape prison. She would need her strength and people need to sleep as much as they need to eat was what she convinced herself with to even allow her to try to sleep. It wasn't even a guaranteed deal. Who could sleep during something like this?
But she found that when she closed her eyes and knew that Baby Face was drunk out of his mind, and that meant he would probably be asleep for awhile, then she could sleep. And oh how she drifted down, pulled down just as she was pulled out of that car, with a monster waiting for her at the bottom. A monster that looked like some huge grotesque baby thing that had snot pouring out of its nose like a fire hose held her, its decaying fingernails scraped at her, and it cackled at how amazing she was, licking her back and purring like a cat.
She screamed and then she was back in her car with all her things! Not in a dream, she was actually back in the car and her parents had told her they would pick her up a snickers.
She knew Baby Face was out there. Scrambling up on her elbows she looked for him out the window. He was pumping gas and smoking a cigarette at the same time. What a stupid freak! Yuck! But he was going to come over here. She watched him looking at something over at the entrance, and then his head was turning towards her. She ducked. And then slowly peeked her head up and saw that he was walking over here. He looked like some kind of rodent, like a rat that was sniffing out cheese.
She needed to leave. Mariana grabbed the door handle and shaked at it but it wouldn't open. None of them worked. She was trying to remain calm, kept finding her right hand reaching up and twirling her hair and then stopping herself. She licked her chapped lips. She had an idea.
The door opened and before Baby Face stuffed his stinking head in through the open door, Mariana turned around and asserted herself. She loudly and very clearly said "Dale! Where is your gun?"
The monster stumbled backwards as if shot, and fell slightly to its knee. The way its knees popped back and forth and the way its elbows gesticulated in erratic ways made Mariana think it wasn't even alive. It was some kind of zombie. And when its head rolled back up, and it looked at her, its teeth clacking together like a puppet being pulled up by the strings too quickly, she saw that Baby Face, Rat Baby Face, had long white whiskers and huge front teeth. They were stained with cigarette smoke but they still looked sharp.
It said in a gravelly voice choked with beer and chili, "under my bathroom sink, where I always keep it.", driblets of chili dripped down its white gums, which also held a healthy portion of gooey chewing tobacco. Beer froth dripped out its eyes as it jumped into the car with Mariana and began stroking its long bony fingers through her hair saying all the while in the voice of a corpse "How pretty..how pretty..how pretty". She wanted to puke and get away from it but - then Rat Baby Face opened its mouth and bit into her neck.
Mariana woke up blinking away tears. She swallowed and took in a deep breath through her nose, somewhat rocking back and forth, but otherwise totally immobilized.
That's when she heard Baby Face snoring. That's also when she noticed the bathroom out of the very furthest edge of her peripheral vision.
Mariana knew what she had to do.

Hello there :) first off let me say I hope that this finds you healthy and safe :)
Well a little about me you ask I assume, lets see what I can dream up. I am a currently working on my weight with some success, I am about 270 lbs, but clocking in at 6'1. I live in the Pacific north west so I am very much on the pale side :P
I like to think of myself as a giant dork who would prefer to keep things lighthearted and fun, but can be serious when the situation calls for it. I love to be sarcastic and you should assume most of what comes out my mouth is sarcasm (still waiting on reddit to make that sarcasm font)
I love all things sports, my favorite being hockey, I can and will chat your ear off about if you give me the chance. I also love following college football and a few other sports. I played soccer trough high school and use to be on a snowboarding team. I have not been to the mountain in years but miss it a lot.
I like to play video game with my friends. I play a lot of random sports games, your normal shooters and what not. My friends play DBD and Phasmaphobia on a regular basis and are always looking for a 4th.
I am very ADD so I will always have an audio book ( I listen to mainly LITRPGs and SCI-FI) or I will have some random show going in the back ground (Think Scrubs, HIMYM, Thats 70s show) Or whatever movie is currently peaking my interest.
I am going to school right now part time to work on a degree in mechanical engineering. I love to know how things work, not exactly sure what I want to do with it yet. I go part time because I work full time and a little.
I could go on and on, but that would kill all the mystery :P I hope to hear from you :)
Have a great day :).
Garret

So, for some background on my application: I am an undergraduate student in my junior year planning to apply DO. I currently have a 3.3 gpa and I took my MCAT one time and scored a 498- that being said, I have a retake scheduled for May. I have tons of clinical experience working as a scribe in the ER and as a medical assistant for a cardiology clinic. I also have lots of research experience and 3 poster presentations. I have a lot of meaningful volunteer experience such as volunteering at the food pantry, hospice, and crisis line. I am a biology tutor at my school and also the leader of a mental health club.
If I were to score highly on my MCAT in May, lets say 510+ ( I have been scoring 508-510 on practice tests) would that change my chances this cycle? Should I wait to apply with my senior year gpa which I can increase to a 3.4? Or do I just plan to do a SMP at my top choice?
Please be brutally honest with your thoughts on this.

When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.
What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.
Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.
Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.
On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.
For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.
They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.
They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.
They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.
But, again, that's all town gossip.
What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.
Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.
So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.
Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.
The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.
The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.
Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.
They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.
The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.
It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.
Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.
Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.
When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.
When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.
Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.
The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.
Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.
When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.
When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.
When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.
"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."
He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.
He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.
He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.
Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.
He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.
And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.
I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.
So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.

Hi everyone! Long time lurker, but I thought I would try my hand and ask for some advice here. I’m about to graduate from college (F22) and I’m heading to grad school in NYC. My biggest questions are:
Am I setting myself up for success, total failure, or somewhere in between? How much in student loans should I take out, and what should my plan for the future be with them? What’s a good general budget, and what am I forgetting?
Some caveats: assume I’ll be net-zero from now until this summer, and starting in this place come September 1.
Currently: I have about $18k in savings. I work a part-time job that will be ending in May. I take home about $800/month, and can make up to $500 a month with side gigs (although it’s usually less). I’m not planning on getting a job this next year so I can focus on school, and will only be making income from side gigs, which maybe average $200 a month if I’m hustling a lot.
Expenses: I’m lucky enough to have recieved a full tuition scholarship for my program (which is three years long), so my main cost is housing. Luckily, my program offers below-market university housing, which I’m planning on applying for.
My options are a studio apartment for around $1,500 or a one-bedroom for $2100. They come fully furnished and include all utilities except cable (which I don’t need) and phone (I’m still on my parents’ plan). I’d prefer the one-bedroom, since I plan on having lots of visitors and would like some more space after living in a dorm room for four years, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it, financially. They also have a limited number of one-bedrooms, so there’s a chance I wouldn’t get one and would be placed in a studio anyways.
I technically have $2500 in student loans from undergrad, but my parents are either going to pay for it or wait for it to be forgiven. Other than that, there is no debt to my name. I pay of my credit cards in full every month and have a credit score in the mid-700s.
I have a Roth IRA with almost $8k in it (I maxxed it out last year but haven’t yet this year. Do you think I should max it out with funds from my savings, or not?). I try to put in $20 a month just to add a little in. I also have an individual brokerage account with $400 in it that I’m trying to sit on, and I add a little bit to it ($25/quarterly) from time to time, but I don’t really know what I’m doing. Happy to take any advice here. I don’t have any 401(k)s or anything else.
Other expenses: Food: How much should I budget a month? I’m planning on cooking for myself, maybe going out or ordering takeout a few times a month. Living in Manhattan so I know it’s expensive…
Health insurance: I’m on my parents’ health insurance still, but it has a high deductible so any expenses of mine are essentially full price. I’m physically pretty healthy, but am medicated for depression and ideally would like to see a therapist every week or every other week. My parents split that cost with me right now, so it costs me about $30/visit. How much should I budget for general medical costs, knowing my parents would help me out if it was something serious/we usually hit our deductible halfway through the year?
Recreation: What’s a “normal” amount to budget for recreation? Is $500 a month crazy? I like going to bars/clubs, would love to see some Broadway shows, etc…
Other: What am I totally forgetting to include?
Thank you all for your help!

When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.
What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.
Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.
Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.
On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.
For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.
They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.
They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.
They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.
But, again, that's all town gossip.
What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.
Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.
So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.
Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.
The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.
The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.
Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.
They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.
The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.
It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.
Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.
Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.
When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.
When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.
Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.
The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.
Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.
When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.
When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.
When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.
"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."
He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.
He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.
He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.
Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.
He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.
And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.
I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.
So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.

So, for some background on my application: I am an undergraduate student in my junior year planning to apply DO. I currently have a 3.3 gpa and I took my MCAT one time and scored a 498- that being said, I have a retake scheduled for May. I have tons of clinical experience working as a scribe in the ER and as a medical assistant for a cardiology clinic. I also have lots of research experience and 3 poster presentations. I have a lot of meaningful volunteer experience such as volunteering at the food pantry, hospice, and crisis line. I am a biology tutor at my school and also the leader of a mental health club.
If I were to score highly on my MCAT in May, lets say 510+ ( I have been scoring 508-510 on practice tests) would that change my chances this cycle? Should I wait to apply with my senior year gpa which I can increase to a 3.4? Or do I just plan to do a SMP at my top choice?
Please be brutally honest with your thoughts on this.

When Jamison March, owner of March Mortuaries, put a sign out in front of his business saying that he would be selling honey, people thought it must be a joke.
What kind of mortician would sell honey? Would he sell it next to the caskets in his showroom? Would he offer it graveside at the cemetery? No one knew, but there was much speculation about that little sign.
Those who asked Jamison were in for quite a treat. Jamison told them that he would be selling his honey right here at the mortuary and even gave them a sample so they might tell their friends. What they sampled was supposedly the best honey any of them had ever eaten. They went on and on about the texture and the taste and the strange, exotic flavors within the honey. They said how they couldn't wait for Jamison to sell his honey, and they would be buying as much as they could on the opening day.
Others began to question where he was keeping his bees? They saw no beehives on his property, a two-bedroom apartment above the mortuary. They saw no hives on the mortuary property at all, in fact. They saw no hives in the cemetery or near the crematorium, but still, the honey came.
On the third of March, the first jar of that miraculous concoction appeared in the front room of Jamison's Mortuary. The mortuary was crowded for the next several days, and by Friday, not a jar was left to be purchased. Again, people praised the texture in the taste, as well as the myriad flavors that one would find within that jar. One of the buyers, Burt Lancaster, owned a large honey operation of his own. It is said that when he tasted Jamison honey, he proclaimed that no bee in his field had ever produced anything so sweet. Some would tell you that he burned his beehives that very afternoon, but that's a little more than town gossip.
For that summer back in 1986, no one could get enough of Jamison's honey.
They say Hellen Price used that honey to defeat her arrival, Linda Moore, in that summer's Fourth of July dessert bake-off.
They say Bert Cavill put that honey in his mead and could not make enough of it to satiate the local drunks.
They say Mary Sanders was taken to the hospital over at Oakley when she ate ten jars in a day and was reaching for an eleventh when her stomach ruptured.
But, again, that's all town gossip.
What is fact was the discovery made by Randall Smith, a local tabloid writer, in the fall of eighty-six.
Randall had a reputation for being less of a journalist and more of a mudslinger. If there was a nasty rumor started, Randall could usually be traced back to it. He had grown pretty tired of hearing about Jamison and his amazing honey. Randall was of the opinion that if something was too good to be true, then it likely was. He thought Jamison's honey must have some sort of secret ingredient that got people addicted to it. Maybe it was even a cover for some kind of dope operation that Jamison was running out of the mortuary or the cemetery. Whatever the case, Randall could smell the story, and it would be sweeter than any nectar the old mortician could produce.
So one night, as the moon hung full over Pleasant Rest Cemetery, Randall and his friends, Rooster Mallory and Charles Drainer, took a trip out to the cemetery to have a look around. Someone had reported earlier that week that they had seen some larger-than-normal bees around the cemetery grounds and speculated that these may be the source of Jamison's honey. It was the only lead that Randall had and seemed as good a lead as any. So after a couple of drinks at the Legion hall, the three men piled into Rooster's old Chevy and headed down to do some late-night snooping.
Randall still tells anyone who will listen how the graveyard was as silent as its namesake. The gate was locked, sporting a brand new Academy Security Lock, one of the big, thick gold ones that graced the sheds and fences of discerning security buffs in town. So, the three men had to find a different way in. This was strange since the cemetery had never been locked before. Jamison had always let people come and go as they please, but just recently, the old man has gotten a little cagey about many things. For one, the cemetery was now locked after nightfall. For another, no one was allowed in the basement of the mortuary, not even the man who came to deliver the bodies from the families. For third, no one but his two sons were allowed to work in the mortuary anymore, and both of them were under pain of death should they reveal the secret of Jamison's honey.
The three men had walked around the cemetery fence before they found a spot where the last windstorm had knocked down a thick old pine. It lay on the sharp points around the top, creating a rude bridge over the wall. None of them being particularly spry, they had them all carefully shimmied up the fallen tree and then dropped down into the cemetery, careful not to get stuck on the spikes. They all felt a chill as they stood in the quiet boneyard, and Randall claims that Rooster looked ready to brave the spikes if it meant being out of there.
The wind rattled the skeletal trees on the grounds, and the little flags that had been stuck on some of the graves for Labor Day snapped mischievously and startled them more than once. They had brought flashlights, but the big old traitors' moon that looked down on them was more than enough to keep them from tripping into an open grave or smashing their shins on an ill-placed tombstone. The quiet cemetery was enough to sober even the bravest of them, and it was probably why they heard the shovels before they saw the men.
Crouching behind a particularly large family headstone, Randal saw two men digging in a fresh grave. They were exhuming a body by the light of that pregnant moon, and Randall knew whose it was to boot. He had been to the widow Hadley's funeral that day, and it appeared that whoever these men were, they were taking her from her freshly dug plot. As they watched, the corpse flopped to the surface unceremoniously, followed by March's sons, Hannibal and Gavin. Hannibal hefted the body, leaving his younger brother to fill in the hole as he took it deeper into the cemetery. Gavin went to his work and bent as he was; he didn't notice the three men as they snuck around him and followed his older brother. Hannibal had been a football player, a linebacker for the local high school team in his day. He toted the frail old woman as easily as someone might a sack of grain. As they followed him, the three men weren't sure what they expected to find, but Randall was certain it would be something that would add a macabre twinge to the story he was working on.
They followed Hannibal as he came to a newly built mausoleum, the name across the door reading March. He unlocked the door and unceremoniously tossed the old woman into the crypt. The men hunkered low behind a pair of tombstones, but they needn't have bothered. Hannibal was a big boy, but his night eyes left something to be desired. He no more saw them than he did the place marker that he nearly tripped over on the way back to his brother, and as he stomped off into the cemetery, the three men approached the crypt.
The mortuary was a nice new one. Sunk into the ground a little to protect any caskets placed down there, it would have looked more at home in New Orleans than this Georgia backwater town. To the knowledge of anyone in town, the Marches did not have a family crypt until very recently. The only March buried there would be Jamison's wife since his mother and father were buried up in Macon at their own family plot. Hannibal may not have been the smartest March in town, but it appeared he was smart enough to lock up behind himself. Another one of those big, thick locks that had been found on the front gate greeted them, and the three men were forced to prowl around the mausoleum to see what they could find.
It was Charles who found the little vent in the mausoleum, but it was Randall who saw the horrors that lay inside.
Randall and Rooster had been looking for a window or perhaps another entrance when Charles had come hoofing it back to them to say that he had found a little vent that opened into the crypt. Randall asked him to show them where it was, and the three men found a little opening big enough for a large child to fit inside. Charles and Rooster were pulp wooders and much too big to squeeze into holes. However, Randall had made a career of squeezing into places he was not wanted.
Opting to stick his head in to get a better look, Randall had his friend hold his legs while he shimmied into the vent. Charles and Rooster slid him in as far as they could, and they said his flashlight could be seen through the slats at the top of the mausoleum.
When Randall started screaming and yelling for them to pull him out, it sounded like the devil himself had gotten a hold of him.
When they pulled him out, they said he was white as a sheet and said they had to tell the sheriff immediately.
Whether the brothers were gone when they made their escape or not, they missed them entirely as they beat a retreat back to town.
The sheriff took some convincing to get him out of bed, but when Randall told him what he had seen down in the crypt, he came with three other men and the biggest set of bolt cutters they could find at the station.
Jamison's sons were leaving when the sheriff and his boys pulled up, so they didn't end up needing the bolt cutters after all.
When he laid it out to the two young men that they could either cooperate or sit in the same prison cell that their father was about to occupy, they decided it might be in their best interest to show him what they'd been doing.
When the sheriff asked the boys if they would need suits, the two shook their heads. "The bees are mostly docile," Hannibal told them, and, sure enough, when they cracked the door, not a one came charging out. They descended into the ground, and by the light of the sheriff's flashlight, they saw the horrors below. The bees swarmed the small pile of corpses, taking whatever they used to make the honey back to the hives. The hives covered the walls of the crypt, making a sticky webwork of combs. The corpses down below were fresh, most of them having died very recently, and the bees were taking to them with gusto. The brothers said they came down once or twice a week to harvest the honey and that the vulture bees were taking to the warm Georgia summers quite nicely.
When the sheriff interrogated them, both said this had been their father's idea. He had read about the vulture bees and thought they sounded like an interesting idea. Then when their mother died, he did a little experiment. He had put her in the mortuary basement and procured some vulture bees of his own. The boys had been horrified when he showed them what he'd been up to, but even they had to admit, the honey had been the sweetest they had ever eaten. Something about the readily available nature of the local pollen, mixed with the bee's instinct to collect whatever they got from the corpses, had made for a potent and delicious treat.
"She was the catalyst for all this," Hannibal had said, "those first few jars he handed out to the people for tasting were honey made from mom's body."
He began to cry then, but the sheriff had all the evidence that he needed to proceed.
He arrested Jamison March that very night, but there seemed to be some confusion on what to charge him with. Couldn't really get him for murder because he hadn't killed anybody. Couldn't really get him for fraud because he buried those bodies just like he said he would. In the end, they got him on simple corpse desecration and misdemeanor fraud for not telling the families what he intended to do with the bodies.
He got less than five years in prison, and I hear that the warden let him keep the beehives in the prison garden.
Seems like his talents didn't go to waste even behind bars.
He left town when his time was served, he and his boys. The funeral home has been empty ever since. The police found the beginnings of his beekeeping in the basement. That, and a secondary hive with a swarm of angry vulture bees. Jamieson tried to sell the mortuary, but nobody seemed to want the place with that sort of reputation. It collapsed under a late February snow back in two thousand twelve, and they destroyed the mortuary they found all those bodies in about a year after Jamison went to prison.
And that's the sorted tale of Jamison March, and his bees.
I have no idea what they did with those bees after they turned them out of the March Mausoleum, they likely just turned them loose into an environment that was alien to them.
So, if you should be traveling through the Georgia back roads and see some larger-than-average bees or taste sweeter than average honey, be very suspicious about its origins.

So, for some background on my application: I am an undergraduate student in my junior year planning to apply DO. I currently have a 3.3 gpa and I took my MCAT one time and scored a 498- that being said, I have a retake scheduled for May. I have tons of clinical experience working as a scribe in the ER and as a medical assistant for a cardiology clinic. I also have lots of research experience and 3 poster presentations. I have a lot of meaningful volunteer experience such as volunteering at the food pantry, hospice, and crisis line. I am a biology tutor at my school and also the leader of a mental health club.
If I were to score highly on my MCAT in May, lets say 510+ ( I have been scoring 508-510 on practice tests) would that change my chances this cycle? Should I wait to apply with my senior year gpa which I can increase to a 3.4? Or do I just plan to do a SMP at my top choice?
Please be brutally honest with your thoughts on this.

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“She’s a witch.”
“I think you said bitch wrong.”
It’s hard to laugh when you’re exhausted, but Marti was never not able to get one out of us. Between panted breaths we laughed. Tommy’s face growing red with anger and embarrassment at the joke at his expense.
“I’m serious!” He managed to blurt when the laughter finally died down enough to get a word in.
“So am I!”
Again, laughter erupted from the bottom of our thirteen year old hearts once more breaking the silence of the forest we were supposed to be hiding in if by chance the cops were actually called as a result of our impromptu prank just a few minutes prior.
Living in a small town meant a lot of boredom. Some kids had big problems like gang violence and drive-by shootings, drugs, and crippling poverty, and even though those problems existed for your typical small town Ohio kids, at least to some extent. Our biggest problem was always boredom.
As a matter of fact, every problem that every small town had ever had could probably be traced back to boredom in one way or another. Why is that guy doing heroin behind a Walmart? Because once upon a time he was sixteen and bored, so he stole some of grandmas pills. Why did the schools football teams locker building get burned down? Because some kid was bored and decided to ruin the football team’s stuff. Why are there a bunch of kids laughing in the middle of the forest just outside of town? Same reason, they were bored and decided to ding dong ditch the senile old lady down the street.
If I’d had known for half a second . . . If I’d even had a hint of foresight about how everything would’ve turned out for us then I’d have suggested something else. Anything else, but hindsight’s 20/20. Especially for young kids.
“Guys, I’m freakin serious. Okay?” Tommy doubled down. His fists now balled up. His voice breaking a little bit with the overwhelming irritability at the laughter. “Anyone who’s ever messed with Ms. Abernanthy has been cursed.”
“Come on man.” I said trying to diffuse Tommy’s anger a little bit. “There’s a lot of places in this world, beautiful places! Jamacia, Hawaii, Switzerland. All sorts of places a powerful witch could have a good ass life, and you think there’s one living in that little brown double wide on Sycamore street? In London Ohio?”
A few more chuckles amongst the group of friends before Tommy finally resigned his argument with an exasperated sigh. As we came around from our fits of laughter and jokes we began to realize that the sun was setting.
“Wow, what a surprise.” Charlie spoke up. “No one cares that their doorbell got rang! Looks like our outlaw days are done y’alls. Just in time for dinner too. Convenient full pardons are convenient!”
“No doubt.” I responded as the group made their way out of the forest and began to cut across the large meadow towards town. “Marti, you eating with us tonight? Dad says it’s fine.”
“Appreciate it dude, but mom says we’ve got plans tonight. We’ll steal your dads Marlboros some other time okay?”
More laughter as the friend group split ways and headed home . . .
Ding
Dong
Diiing Doong
At first when I heard the doorbell ring, I just sort of brushed it off. I’d thought that maybe it was just some part of a dream I’d been having or something. Even in my almost full sleep state I knew that no one in their right mind would be ringing our doorbell at three in the morning. As I adjusted my pillow and threw my head back down on it though I heard it again. Resonating throughout the otherwise silent house in a way that was almost maliciously haunting given the time of night.
Ding
Dong
Diing Doong
It hadn’t been my imagination. There was someone at the door. Before I could even get up however, I heard the gruff and commanding voice of my father as his heavy footsteps stammered groggily past my room.
“I swear to Christ if that’s one of your goofy friends.” He mumbled to himself as he staggered past my room in his barely lucid state.
Several moments later I heard the front door open. Followed by my father shouting in surprise as several loud bangs and clashes filled the house with a chaotic cacophony of sound.
I ran out as quickly as I could towards the front room of the house to see my fathers silhouette fumbling for the light switch. As he turned it on, and my eyes adjusted to the sudden flash of light. I could see that he was intently scanning the front room. His bright green eyes bouncing back and forth like a radar scanner. Laying on the ground around him was a broken ash tray and several books that must’ve gotten knocked off of the shelf they’d previously been resting on.
“What happened dad?”
Quickly he put his finger out in a sort of ‘stop talking’ gesture as his eyes remained transfixed on the room around him. After a few moments of nerve wracking silence, he finally responded.
“There’s a bat somewhere. Flew in when I opened the door.”
“Who rang the doorbell?”
As if remembering what it was the led us to the front room in the middle of the night in the first place my dad looked back over his shoulder to the wide open front door, and the dimly lit street beyond it. He peaked his head over the threshold and looked around for a moment before closing it.
“No one . . . Some kids ding dong ditching maybe. Crazy ass teenagers, when do you guys even sleep nowadays?”
I laughed quietly at dad’s remark before looking around the front room to try and spot the bat.
“You’d think it’d be freaking out or something you know? Like, fluttering around and trying to find a way out?”
“Yeah . . . You’d think.”
A thorough search of the front room gradually turned into a thorough search of the entire house, but aside from the fallen books and ash tray in the front room there was nothing amiss. Just another normal small-town house in its small town neighborhood. Finally after about an hour and a half of searching my dad threw his arms up in defeat.
“Screw it, guess he’s staying. I gotta get ready for work anyways. Go back to bed kid, we’ll find it tomorrow. No one ever got killed by a stray bat.”
Although I wasn’t necessarily comfortable with the idea of sharing a house with a wild animal for the night. I knew he was right. It was almost four thirty in the morning now, and I was tired. Besides, if it’s afraid then it’ll probably just hide, and they sleep during the day so it shouldn’t be a huge issue . . . Hopefully.
“Alright, night dad. Have a good day at work.”
“Yeah. . . .”
Ding
Dong
Diing
Donng
I had just slipped into that sort of half realm between awake and asleep when I was abruptly brought back to consciousness by the doorbell ringing again. The red digital illumination of my alarm clock read 6:33am. I sighed to myself in annoyance and frustration as I turned over on my back to prepare to pull myself out of bed once again to try and discover who was ringing our doorbell again, and that’s when I saw her.
Suspended from the ceiling upside down was the darkened shadow of a person. Long tangled hair draped low and messy, almost touching the floor. From within the tangled mess of hair were two bright yellow eyes that burned through me like fire. As I screamed and clambered my way to the headboard of my bed to try and pathetically create some distance between myself and this horrible thing in my room the figure reached its arms out in a sort of ‘crucifix’ posture. From the aurora of its terrible yellow eyes I could see a wide mouth full of sharp teeth. I screamed again at the top of my lungs as the room filled itself with the mind numbing sound of the doorbell coming from the figures wide open mouth.
DIIIINNNNNNGGGGGG
DOOOOOONNNNNNNGGGG
DDIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNGGGGGGG
DDDOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNGGGGGGGG
DIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGG
DOOOOOOONNNNNNNGGGGGGGG
As the deafening noise trembled every ounce of my being the figure contorted its way off of the ceiling and plopped onto my bed in an awful and grotesque fashion. Even in my panicked state I couldn’t understand how it could’ve moved the way it did without breaking its neck and spine.
I tried to make a jump from my bed to the door, but I wasn’t quick enough. I got to the edge of the bed before I felt a tremendous weight pin me back on to the mattress and hold me down. Sitting on my chest was the figure. Those horrible eyes burrowing into my soul. That wicked mouth hanging open as if it were going to swallow me whole.
She’s a witch.
The memory of Tommy’s voice echoed in my head.
I don’t know what came over me. I don’t know if it was just the fear, and Tommy being the only name on my mind in that moment. I don’t know if I’m just a selfish coward. I just . . . Don’t know, but as that god awful thing sat on top of me. As her mouth and those evil yellow eyes drew closer and closer to my face I shouted at the top of my fear fueled lungs.
“IT WAS TOMMY! IT WAS TOMMY! HE RANG YOUR DOORBELL! IT WAS TOMMY! PLEASE!”
Suddenly, with no warning, and no possible way of occurring. The weight was off of my chest, and the figure was gone.
I don’t know how I managed to fall back asleep, maybe it was just the adrenaline dump that knocked me out, but before I knew it I was waking up to the image of my sun filled room.
After a lot of talking to myself. I had barely managed to convince myself that last nights events were just the result of a horrible dream. I had read somewhere that waking up in the middle of the night and then going back to sleep could result in very lucid dreams. That, I decided. Was what caused that awful dream.
Ding
Dong
Diiing
Doong.
I felt an anchor drop into my stomach as the doorbell rang. Slowly I made my way to the front door and with a lot of hesitation finally managed to open it.
Standing at the other side of the door was Tommy’s mom. A look of obvious concern on her face.
“Did . . . Uhm, Did Tommy by chance come to your house last night? I’ve been to everyone’s house that he knows, and no one’s seen him. I don’t understand why he would just leave the house like that. Please. If you know something, please just tell me.”
They never found Tommy. Not even the faintest glimpse of a clue. Everyone eventually stopped looking for him after about a year. Everyone but his mom, she never stopped looking. She died last year. I heard she was staring expectantly at the hospital door the entire time. Waiting for her son to come walking through . . . The police say he either ran away, or was kidnapped and killed by some vagabond who had seen us in town the day prior.
I’m the only one who truly knows what happened to him, and I’ve never been able to tell anyone that It was all my fault.
Tommy was right.