Fishfood -------- I saw him hammering the tacky wooden cross into the edge of my lawn while I was mowing. So, without concern for tact or sensitivity, I killed the mower and stormed over to him. "What are you thinking, putting that in my lawn?" I demanded loudly. "Fishfood," he replied without looking up. Rather taken aback by this unexpected response, I could only gape. "How do you suppose they get fishfood into those thin flakes?" he asked, seeming to ignore my question entirely. Suddenly he looked up, straight at me, straight into my soul, his open, innocent 16-year-old's face with its deep, gray, 60-year-old's eyes seeming to look right through me. "That's what we were talking about. Not politics. Not God. Not war or solar power or global warming or love. Fishfood." He paused for a moment, the mallet hanging at his side, forgotten as he remembered. "And as we came around this corner," he resumed, nodding towards the curve in the road, "I asked him. I said, Billy, I said, how do you think they make those flakes? And Billy said, 'Well, I think ...'" I leaned forward, expectantly, drawn in, in spite of myself, to this strange tale, although I had no idea what he was talking about. He was silent, and I waited. He was silent so long, I thought maybe he had forgotten I was there. Abruptly his eyes refocused on mine, and he snapped his fingers right under my nose. "And then he was dead." Before I could even take in the import of his story, he resumed hammering in the white cross, lovingly hand-lettered with the message "William Wesley Hinckle. Brother, I love you." And then he picked up a walking cane, and limped painfully back to his car. The same car I had seen in the ditch across the road a week or two before. The garbage bag over the passenger's side window flapped in the wind as he slowly drove off.