Odd names

The Arkansas-Little Rock men's basketball team played a home game on the night after a pop concert was held in the same Little Rock arena. When the game was over, Rock stepped into a banquet hall and therein was introduced to two young women who apparently starred in the concert. Someone in the hall turned on an audio device that played one of the women's songs, and it was exactly the kind of contemporary music Rock liked most—a sort sung ever-so-slightly off-key, usually by women.
Rock estimated these singers were somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years old, both cute but of the emo ilk, with bright colors dyed into their hair and multiple tattoos. One of the two was clearly drunk, and she handed Rock a small plaque. It was an award, something like an Emmy, Rock assumed, and when he read it, he was surprised by the oddity of their first names. He saw that the drunk woman was named Myok and the other Shiebold and knew those names had to have been changed from whatever their birth names were. He turned to Myok and asked, "What does your mother think about that name?"
Myok laughed. "Not too much," she said. "In fact, I think she hates it."

Number one

It was clear that Rock had created the number most English speakers learn first—the number one—and, as a result, had acquired all of the world's wealth and power. He let his cat Jo out a little after midnight and sat to contemplate this new circumstance.
He wondered where his bifocals were and how all of this would affect a round of golf scheduled for Sunday morning.

Lakeside

Rock sat in the back seat of Ron's and Elaine's four-door Jeep, with the top removed, as they rode in a caravan of Little Rock Hashers and dozens of their vehicles on a winding lakeside road. Everyone behaved as if they were in the festive sorts of spirits typical of any Hash outing, and Rock was engaged enough to not have noticed Ron's wide right sweep onto an observation platform near the edge of the lake.
Ron suddenly veered left, and Rock looked to simultaneously see why he had made the adjustment and that it had come too late. In the next instant, the Jeep rolled down a ridge and into the lake. Water and panic washed across Rock, but he was easily able to swim away from the vehicle and saw that Ron and Elaine had also escaped. His fear vanquished, Rock swam to shore with Elaine by his side.
"What is Ron doing?" someone on the shore said.
"I don't know, but it doesn't look like a good idea," a Hasher nicknamed Amy Winehouse said.
Rock stood on the slick rock face of the shoreline and watched Ron dive straight down underwater toward his Jeep, which had come to rest at least fifty feet below.

Mass arrest

Lists were handed out that included the names of several people Rock knew. Each were wanted for questioning by several state and federal agencies, and some feared this might preface some sort of mass arrest. One of the men listed told Rock it reminded him of the days that proceeded Yugoslavia's collapse into Serbia and Croatia nearly thirty years earlier.

The San Francisco treat

Like a holiday scene from Rock's childhood, there were ten or more festive people in his maternal grandmother's kitchen in Nashville, Arkansas. Among them were several newcomers, including Rock's friend Erin, who walked in with her arms around two brown paper sacks stuffed with groceries.
Rock looked through one after she placed them on a counter near the oven and was surprised to find a box of Rice-A-Roni.
"Rice-A-Roni?" he said. "What, is this part of the holiday tradition for Chris' family?"
"It is," Erin said. "He really likes it."
She agreed to let Rock help with the preparation, and he was pleased to see ways in which she had doctored the ingredients. Erin told him when to add the piles of shredded carrots and diced celery and onions as a large pot of water came to a boil.

Hole in the wall

A platform of old, rotten wooden cylinders was built on the back of Rock's house. The cylinders were about the size of large cans of chunky soup and seemingly served no purpose.
The back walls of the house faced an alley that served as a route for service and utility vehicles, most commonly garbage trucks in Rock's experience. In this case, he looked out of his kitchen window to see a Levy city pickup crunch along the alley's gravel surface. Among the bearded men on board, Rock saw one he had known fifteen or twenty years earlier from the gate crew at Oaklawn Park, a racetrack in Hot Springs, Arkansas. He couldn't remember his name but recalled he had admired him and figured he would know exactly what to do with the crumbling cylinders.
This man from his past stepped from the truck and walked to the platform with a sledgehammer. With four or five swings, he knocked away the cylinders and, to Rock's horror, nearly twenty square feet of his back wall.
Infuriated, Rock ran into his backyard and tried to scream at the men on the truck, but he had lost his voice and could manage no more than a raspy whisper. Apparently, he was heard. As the truck rolled away, the man he remembered yelled back, "You're not going to sue anyone, motherfucker."

Far too long

A pretty nurse with short, frosted blonde hair and an eastern European or Russian accent ran down the stairs behind Rock as he tried to hurry out of the downtown medical clinic. It seemed to Rock he had sat in the waiting room far too long. He thought he had a cold, but it cleared up as he waited, and he had fallen asleep beside the nurse.
When Rock heard her shoes click on the marble steps as she descended toward him, he remembered he was supposed to pick up some medication.
"You have to get your medicine, sir," the nurse said.
Another nurse behind the countertop of a small pharmacy handed Rock his prescription, which was a plastic bag filled with pills and what looked like a three-dimensional puzzle of some sort, with shiny metal pins and white cubes about the size of Captain Crunch cereal bits.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" Rock asked his doctor.
"Just follow the instructions," he said.

Dick and Nance

Rock's longtime friends Dick and Nancy Lewis were in town from their home in Bellingham, Washington. They chose to stay at John Czarnecki's modest home in west Little Rock, and Rock drove over from Levy to jog with Dick and his five-year-old daughter.
Dick and Nancy were about forty-five years old, same as when Rock met them in the summer of 1980, which seemed about right.
When Rock arrived, Nancy asked him if there were local ordinances in place that concerned exercise routines for children. "I'm not aware of any, Nance," he said. "Obviously, child welfare is far more regulated than when you raised your boys or when we were kids, but I don't know anything about any jogging rules."

End of time

A multinational information technology firm had launched a system of enormous satellites and nearly planet-sized orbital telescopes designed to gather every bit of data from the entire known universe. It had been turned on the night before, and the result was a backlog of information so infinite that it began to shut down computers around the world, in itself an unprecedented calamity.
It was all too much. Everything that had occurred over the previous 13.8 billion years, every detail since the instant of the Big Bang, would eventually crowd out the present universe. Nothing would be the same. Life itself would soon have no room to function.
When Rock turned on his television just before daybreak, he was surprised to see that reports of this end of time were not on every channel.
Bit by bit, he began to understand that nothing was out of order. He knew that every media outlet would have no choice but to broadcast nonstop news of the most significant cosmologic event since the start of everything, particularly in light of its manmade origin.

Running

It had been years since Rock had felt this good while running. Indeed, he had never felt better, and it had been this way throughout his trip for the paper. He was at a racetrack somewhere in Texas. The people in the press box and racing office were the same he worked with at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, and he explained to one of them how he had learned to appreciate airports.
"They're great for running in," he said. "I had never noticed that before, but in a lot of them you can go miles without getting in anyone's way."
Shortly thereafter, he ran along a highway that connected the track to the airport and felt great, as if he were floating.

A former Hasher

Rock's tiny one-room house shook from an explosive collision. It sounded and felt as if it came from a block or so away, and as Rock walked toward his back door to investigate, someone knocked loudly.
Rock opened the door to see a middle-aged, overweight man who had attended a handful of Little Rock Hash runs ten to fifteen years earlier.
"Hey, man," Rock said. "You're Rick, right?"
"That's right, Rock. It's good to see you."
"Same here. Did you hear that noise?"
"As a matter of fact, I just ran my truck into a house back there," Rick said as he pointed toward a row of houses obscured by sheds and garages along the alley that ran past Rock's back door.
He later explained he had rented the main house of the property Rock had shared with several people over the proceeding ten years.

Some things

A Little Rock Hasher named Ben, also known as Amy Winehouse, asked if he could have access to Rock's car. He reminded Rock that he had left some things on the driver's side floorboard of the back seat during the Arkansas Traveller 100-Miler a month earlier, and Rock readily granted him permission to look.
Rock was engaged with others in the front yard of a working-class-neighborhood home near the UALR campus when Ben returned to say the things were gone.
"Man, I'm really sorry, Ben," Rock said. "What did you leave back there?"
"Well, it was some pretty important stuff."
It was clear to Rock that Ben was angered.
"What was it?" Rock said. "Was it very valuable."
"Yes, it was," Ben said. "It was worth about two-thousand bucks."

Story idea

There was a game, early in the season, during which Rock watched a fantastic first play run by the Texas Longhorns. The play involved such intricate timing that it was clear the team had rehearsed it hundreds of times, and it worked perfectly against whoever Texas played that day. Rock agreed to write a story about it, but he realized this story idea would require too much effort, particularly on a Saturday morning in the middle of a college football season.
He would have to talk to somewhere between five and ten players and coaches, almost all of whom were no more than a few hours away from game times. Besides, he couldn't find the play anywhere on the internet.
Rock was immeasurably frustrated. He was furthermore fearful the paper would no longer offer him assignments.

A bad turn

It was as though Rock never stopped dipping snuff, though he indeed had more than eight years earlier. He put in a dip of Copenhagen as he waited for halftime interviews in the University of Central Arkansas men's basketball team's locker room. He placed the can of snuff on a random surface, perhaps a table or desk. Unfortunately, he would soon forget.
The team's starting point guard walked in during the closing seconds of the half and spoke to Rock of the opposition's point guard. "He's really good," the player said. "Their whole team is good."
Rock had all he needed and walked out of the locker room, headed toward his courtside workstation. As he did, he passed the rest of the team and its coach as they left the court, and it suddenly occurred to him that he had forgotten to retrieve the snuff can, which seemed to him direly problematic.
Somehow, Rock imagined a scenario in which the coach erupted in anger toward his players, as in, "I want to know right now which one of you brought this snuff in here."
He believed this could only turn disastrous.