Short Story Snip #1

Shelly's dad was a cop at the time. She and her cop dad and her alcoholic shut-in mother and a pair of vicious outdoor Dobermans lived next door to us on one side. On the other side, past a small yet dense patch of trees and scrub was uncle Dale's place. We never really called it Dale's house because it was never exactly a home in the proper sense. Dale bought the land real cheap back when daddy was still alive and I was just taking my first steps. April, of course, hadn't been born yet.

Dale and daddy drew up plans for the house Dale and his third wife, Aunt Dora, would start building in the spring. They had one of those pre-built trailer homes pulled in on a pair of semi-trucks that fall. I can nearly remember sitting there with momma watching them try and turn the truck around so it could back in to the lot and drop the second half of the house next to the first half and fit them together just so. Uncle Dale and daddy were out in the road blocking traffic (or what constituted traffic that far from town). Momma says I laughed and laughed at them out there in the street waving their arms and pleading with what soon became a dozen or so angry motorists after the rig had blocked the road. The driver had inadvertently backed the truck down off the road's shoulder and hung its axle up on the stone wall that ran the length of Zeke and Emma Ezekiel's sheep pasture. Luckily, the noise and bustle of the men and the semi and scared all the sheep to the far side of the hill earlier in the day. They were all safely penned by the time the big-rig tow truck dispatched from neighboring Kensuke County managed to yank the semi and its half-house payload up outta the ditch followed by about twenty feet of hundred-year-old stone wall.