Nocturne One – The King and the Dark Beauty
The infamous King of Killers was watching as Sheherazade ran out of the caverns calling for Doctor Blake. His sour face was smudged with oil and soot from his daring rescue of the beautiful female pirate. No one knew how much his heart ached for her. Seven years he had watched her flirt with Elvis, Blue Death, and even Ensign Pavel. Seven years of wishing and hoping and planning which had all come to naught. Sooner or later one or both of them would die in combat. Probably sooner now that Tron had made the horrible mistake of taking up with Goofy Dalgoda again. The Goofer was a pure Jonah, poison to the corsair band.
Sheherazade found the puny little doctor by his ATV. The scrawny medico was patching up war wounds. He could prevent scars with Imperial medical tech, but no pirate would forgo a chance for a real battle scar. Patching was all he was allowed to do. Blake was both a doctor of medicine and a top notch combat pilot, but in King’s studied opinion, he was a prissy little nerd, with luminous lady’s eyes and a pencil thin… moustache.
The doctor rushed down the tunnel as soon as Sheherry relayed the order from Tron. He was gone from view in a flash. Not so with Sheherry. She lingered, slouching alluringly. The brass bikini she wore covered only the ends of ample bosoms and the areas critical to earn a PG-13 rating. Was she conscious of the effect she had on men? Surely she must know.
“Thanks for what you did today,” she said without looking in King’s direction.
“You know I didn’t want to lose a good pilot. I may need you to cover my butt next time.”
“Don’t worry, King. You have a pretty butt. I would never let anything happen to it.” She looked him square in the eyes and smiled evilly.
King Killer blushed. He hoped the soot kept the red from showing. He was not the sort known for blushing.
Sheherazade straightened herself up to her full, beautiful height and walked over to him with the slink of a leopard in her own jungle domain.
“You have orders from… erm, the boss?” he said with an uncustomary stumble.
“Maybe, but other matters have been weighing on my mind too.”
“Like what?”
“Like why you stare at me constantly but never say anything. Like why you blush when you hear me say dirty words. King, you are a man of action. You are cool under fire and unshakable. What is it about me that shakes you up?”
“Well, I, uh…”
“Could it be that you love me, but are just afraid to say the words out loud?”
“No, erm… I mean…”
She laughed. She ran her ebony hand along the line of his jaw, and then kissed him on the lips. It lasted longer than he would have ever expected.
“After what you did today,” she said, looking him steadily in the eye, “I realize that your feelings are no longer just an amusing detail for me. I need you as much as you need me. I’ve been watching how much Maggie and Tron love each other. I need that too. And, I know, it’s you, King. You are the one for me.”
“What about Elvis?” asked King in his hard, cool combat voice.
“The man’s a pig. I could never love him the way I do you. Don’t tell me I’m wrong about you. I’ll die if you shoot me out of the air now.”
Something changed for the first time in King’s life. He cracked his first real smile. He kissed her again.
“The Captain can marry us, you know.”
“Yes,” she said. “I already asked Tron to do it for us at about twenty hundred hours this evening.”
Catch a Falling Star 
The 13th Sense
I know that you are probably thinking, “What the heck are you thinking, Mickey? There are really only five senses!”
And I am probably thinking, (ignoring the fact that I should know for certain what thinking is present at least in my own stupid head), “Oh, I think you are probably wrong about that,” considering carefully that I should only think this and not say it out loud, because people get mad when you suggest that you are smarter than they are.”
Besides the five senses we all claim of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, there is also that one people often refer to as “the sixth sense”, and by that phrase they don’t necessarily mean that you “see dead people who don’t know they are dead”. Instead, that sense is kinda like a sense of intuition. A feeling that you simply know what is about to occur, or you know something about something that you could only really know if you have ESP… Or if you are Spiderman, it is your “Spider Sense”… wiggly lines radiating from your comic-book head.
And what about the sense of hot and cold? Or the sense that you can’t breathe the air in the same room with your cigar-smoking Republican uncle? You know, the one with all the toxic opinions you are forced to listen to too often? And there’s a sense of contentment. Or the sense of happiness. A sense of dread. There are all kinds of senses that your magnificent stupid-old brain constantly responds to that you really haven’t been counting.
,
Of course, I am not writing about any of those today. I am writing about that old “Sense Number Thirteen”, the sense of certainty that every pessimist lives by, the sense that your natural daily bad luck won’t kill you today, but only because it would all be over and prevent more suffering tomorrow if it did.
Yes, it is Sense Number Thirteen that makes you prepare yourself for the worst, because you simply have the sense that it is destined to happen. I dread going to the mailbox. I know I will hate what I find there. This week I found a letter from the IRS, who has already accepted my 2017 return and the first installment of my tax payment, suggesting that they may reopen my case in order to determine if I owe them more money. And I got the hospital bill that I have been dreading because I cannot afford to pay it.
I dread walking the dog also because there are two pickup trucks, one black and one silver, that routinely roar through the 30-mile-an-hour neighborhood doing sixty or seventy. One of them is going to run over my dog while she has me on the leash, or maybe even run over one of neighbor Frank’s grandchildren. Anyway, we are preparing by organizing a neighborhood petition and complaining to the police. The Thirteenth Sense really screws with my life. But it forces me to prepare.
The hospital payment department told me that they are going to send paperwork that will help me pay the debt by forgiving part of it since I am already bankrupt over medical bills. I was taken pleasantly by surprise by that. I have so far successfully avoided thinking about the IRS. Those jack-booted shock troops apparently aren’t going to show up at my door until next week. And the police cruiser has been on our street twice already since I last talked to Frank, and they put out one of those speed limit signs that shows you in bright red lights how much over the speed limit you are going.
So, there’s the saving grace. A pessimist gets to be happier in the long run than the optimist. By preparing for the worst, the pessimist is ready for the bad thing to happen, and either deals with it as it comes, or is pleasantly surprised at an outcome devoid of extra suffering. A pessimist is never taken by surprise for the worse. I’m glad I have a 13th Sense. It helps me be a HAPPY stupid old pessimist.
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