The mouse

It was black and shaped like a computer mouse, and Rock rolled it back and forth on a card table. He hadn't played cards of any sort in at least twenty years but sat in the back room of a house at a family reunion attempting to justify his purchase of this device designed to enhance the chance of success in a game of poker.
He was joined by a sixty-year-old gray-haired man, dressed in black jeans and a crewneck sweater, who looked exactly like NBC reporter Keith Morrison.
"Those things work really well," he told Rock. "But why do you fidget with it so much? That will wear it out in a hurry, and I know how expensive they are."
Rock explained that his behavior with the mouse was a byproduct of his high-strung nature.
The man left for another engagement, and Rock walked to the living room to rejoin his father, stepmother Lilian, and several aunts and cousins to try the beer the gray-haired visitor brewed.
"I hope y'all like it," he had said. "I'm proud of it."
Someone poured a pint or so of it into a Mason jar and dunked it in an aquarium filled with water and ice cubes.

Something amiss

Central Arkansas's quarterback walked past Rock near Estes Stadium and barely acknowledged him. He resisted eye contact and muttered no more than a semblance of hello as he walked past. A feature story about him by Rock ran as the front center package in the paper that morning, and of course, Rock worried that something about it was amiss.
"To tell you the truth, we were all laughing about it and giving him a hard time this morning," an offensive lineman explained to Rock.
"You know, I haven't even seen it," Rock said. "What was wrong with it?"
The lineman handed a copy of the sports page to Rock, who placed it on a picnic table near the front door of the coaches' offices and the players dressing room.
"It just seemed a little flowery or something," the lineman said.
Rock read the first three paragraphs and found them packed with adjectives and adverbs he had never used. The story read nothing at all like anything he had ever written.

Tree rider

It was impossible to understand. As Rock and an overweight blonde friend of his stood on the back deck of her apartment, they saw a man on horseback desperately gripping a rope slung over a branch at least 150 feet above a dry, rocky riverbed. Submerged in the mystery of this circumstance for Rock was how the horse kept from falling from between the rider's legs, but most of all, he had no idea how the man's strength was possibly adequate to support his own weight and that of a thousand-pound horse.
Obviously, there was more. "What's happened here?" Rock said. "How did he get in that position?"
"I don't know," his friend said. "All I know is that if he lets go, he's dead."
The man screamed for help. Rock could think of nothing to do. The man fell, and he and his horse smashed into the rocks and gravel below. They both lay still as Rock reached for his cell phone.

No escape

Man's time was short. Rock learned from an old college friend that a wave of fire had already begun to spread around the earth and that it would reach them by evening, an hour or two hence.
They were in a small Indian town north of New Dehli in an old abandoned filling station. Rock and his friend stood in what was once the office, but a large group of the friend's former fraternity brothers—men Rock vaguely recalled from Wyoming—was gathered in an adjacent two-bay garage.
Rock was immediately impressed that they seemed at ease with the coming flames. One of them said he heard the fire would miss higher levels of the Himalayas, but Rock subsequently learned the mountains were more than four-hundred miles away and that they would not spare anyone from death anyway. People there would be instantly frozen.
"We found out too late to make it," Rock's friend said. "I mean, I think I'd rather freeze to death than get burned up."
"Same here," Rock said. "This is awful."

The hospitality cabin

There's a long hospitality cabin, painted white with a green roof and shudders, next to the Burns Park Golf Course driving range. It sits in front of an old, battered range-ball dispenser that has dropped yellow golf balls into green plastic buckets for as long Rock can remember. He had seen the cabin there since 1986, thirty feet below and two parking-lot levels away from the clubhouse, but he had never once been inside. Best he could recall, he'd only seen anyone in or around it one time, maybe twenty-five years earlier.
Now he waited there for his cousin Crutch and sat at a long wooden table with platters of dinner rolls and fried pork chops stacked on it. Crutch was supposed to come in from Russellville, seventy-five miles away, but Rock didn't know when he would arrive. He wondered how long he would have to wait and how well pork chops freeze.

The stray big leaguer

It didn't seem at all odd to Rock that a stray Siamese cat from his neighborhood had made the roster of a Major League baseball team. The cat was clearly fit and well nourished. Rock was happy for it.

A blowout revisited

Rock was on the sideline early in the first half of a Dallas Cowboys game at Cowboy Stadium. Dallas was already so far behind that Rock was reminded of the one-hundred-and-six-to-nothing loss he and his Worms Titans teammates experienced in Heidelberg, Germany.
He spoke of it to an overweight, balding middle-aged man who stood beside him. "Man, we played that game more than forty years ago," he said.
The man's eyes widened.  "Believe it or not, I think I know the game you're talking about," he said. "Was it in the fall in of—let me think—1972, or maybe 1971?"
Rock was stunned. "That's incredible," he said. "It was 1972. Don't tell me you were there."
"Well, not that year, but I played there the next two seasons. The guys were still talking about it."
The man told Rock the coach of those Heidelberg teams had retired to Fort Worth.
"His house can't be more than a few miles from here," he said. "As far as I know, Coach is still there."