Nando peered through the grimy kitchen window at the chain-link fence that was bothering him. He was a slightly built young man of twenty-three who almost looked muscular under his baggy clothes but if you looked closely you could tell whatever tone there was to his body came from leftover youth and not from working out. His name was really Fernando but people who knew him mostly called him Nando.
The house he dwelt in was a clapboard-sided two-bed one-bath that had been built in the 1940s when the neighborhood was young and solid working-class couples raised kids who went on to own bigger and nicer houses in newer neighborhoods that radiated ever more outward from the city’s core and the owners here, much like their abodes, gradually grew older and more decrepit. The owners died and were buried, the houses gained new lives as rental properties, and the neighborhood fell farther into disrepair until it became “the hood.”
This house had belonged to Nando’s grandmother, he thought. Sometimes he didn’t remember. His parents had rented it out after she died but when the last tenant left Nando had been allowed to move in. His folks didn’t want to throw him out onto the street but they didn’t want him at their house with their two teenaged children.
At the moment Nando was obsessed with the chain-link fence that encircled the back yard. His next-door neighbor, a thirty-something black man who had moved in only two months ago, had erected a six-foot wooden fence across the back of his yard that abutted the alley. Nando envied that fence. He couldn’t stop thinking about how nice it looked with the wide dog-eared pickets and golden brown stain. He thought it might be fun to throw a softball against the fence and hear it thud against the boards. He thought it would be convenient to throw his empty beer cans over the fence into the alley. Man, that was a nice fence, and he wanted one for his own yard.
Mr. Miller was playing a video game inside his house when he heard an odd metallic noise. It wasn’t exactly a “clang” nor was it exactly a “clink,” but something in between. Was it his water pipes? The gutter? He heard it a second time and then it became regular.
Clank.
Clank.
Clank.
Mr. Miller opened his back door and saw his young Hispanic neighbor hacking at the chain-link fence with a machete. He was somewhat startled. He suspected the young man used drugs but he seemed harmless. He walked over to Nando, who continued to abuse the thick metal pole that constituted the fence’s top rail.
“Hey, bro, whatcha got goin’ on here?” asked Mr. Miller calmly.
“I’m gonna take down this fence and get me a new one,” replied Nando.
“The way you’re goin’ I think it’s going to take you a while.”
Nando did not reply and continued to hack, but the cadence slowed a bit.
“Well, good luck,” said Miller and returned to his video game.
The noise abruptly stopped and when Miller looked outside, the machete was on the ground and Nando had disappeared.
yes, it turns out the office mummy is quite a ham! It's tough having a cadaver on the premises when you just don't know what to do with it. Mummy sits on a stool an no one notices. Mummy perches on a cubicle and stares over the walls, preventing people doing their work. Mummy circulates among the cubes producing screams. It's only a matter of time before mummy gets locked away.
Ed & I are continuing our nightly excursions around the warehouse an hour or so past the witching hour - or should I say the skunking hour? Our chief companions are kildees and striped skunks. On the best nights we may see three skunks and an owl. Once we saw a possum, but it scurried up a tree and hid itself so well we gave up trying to find it with a flashlight. The skunks aren't usually afraid but we don't get too close to them either. One night a skunk was rooting in the dirt directly in front of a ground-level spotlight and I got about five feet away to get a good view but walked away without it noticing me. We have learned the owls tend to perch on top of the tall spotlights located in the parking lot or along the street, probably to get a good view of potential prey. We think they, or it, is a barn owl. We don't know if it's a single bird or if there are several. It's amazing how silently they fly. We've spotted another smaller bird that's probably an owl. We saw fewer skunks last week and thought maybe the weekend fireworks exhibitions might have disturbed them a bit. Or maybe they are trying to avoid us. We're going to schedule some walks before midnight to see if there's a bigger party then. Supposedly baby skunks are usually born in May and may stay with their mother for up to a year but the skunks we have seen have all been solo explorers and none of them seem small enough to be juveniles. I'm not finding much detailed information about skunks on the web and haven't yet found a book about skunks that's not written for children. Adults want to know, too!
When I was thirteen my family joined the hordes of Dallas' "white flight" and moved several miles to a new neighborhood inside the westerly edges of the city limit. It was a hastily constructed neighborhood, one of many developments springing up to house anglo families trying to escape the newly integrated schools closer to the inner city. We had never lived in a new house so it was exciting for my brother and me even though the house itself was somewhat shoddy and the neighborhood was sorely lacking trees and had only rudimentary lawns. There was a nicely-wooded park down the street with a small creek that afforded an occasional crawdad if you were patient enough to sit on the concrete drainage pipe for several hours with a scrap of bacon tied to a string. 
