Disguised

There was no rule against owners betting on their own horses, but Rock felt as if a disguise was necessary. He put on a pair of paper sunglasses he recently bought to watch the coming solar eclipse and couldn't see anything. Nevertheless, he was confident no one would identify him as he tried to walk to a nearby wagering terminal.

No escape

Without investigation, there was no telling whether the world Rock found himself in was the real thing or merely a product of some website. He had already been through several of those, each easily distinguishable from either of the two bedrooms in which he most commonly awoke.
Rock was fully aware of the snares of internet life, the way their complexity at first appealed but later so fully consumed him and everything in and around his life that there was no escape.
After a moment, Rock knew his back bedroom floor was no longer composed of the wet, slick clay he and a friend had encountered the day before at Little Rock's Hindman Park. Everything looked in place.

Worthless change

All Rock had was a twenty-dollar bill, which he placed in the banknote validator of a stamp machine. Shortly after the machine dispensed the four stamps he needed, it also began to dispense change in the form of silver-dollar sized gold-colored coins. There was soon a pile of heavy, shiny tokens on the counter top.
Rock looked up at the smiling postal clerk. "Please tell me you can cash these for me," he said.

The only people left

Hard rain fell throughout the St. Louis Cardinals' victory over their World Series opponent, and whereas it had not affected the game played in an indoor version of Busch Stadium, the dressing room and adjacent media facilities were flooded.

Rock and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Cardinals beat writer—the only reporters there—waded through a foot of water. Lights remained on, but Cardinals media personnel were unable to print box scores or play-by-play sheets. It was a nightmarish circumstance, particularly for the St. Louis writer, who seemed put out by Rock's lack of concern.

"Man, I'm just here to write a follow-up," Rock said. "We'll probably use your game story."

It seemed as if he and the other reporter were the only people left at the stadium, and Rock realized that even a feature story for later in the week would be difficult to complete. He also began to worry that the paper might have expected a game story from him. It was late, at least eleven o'clock at night, and he couldn't remember a single play from the game. Indeed, Rock knew he had failed to watch any of it.

Half-naked

A large gold shipment had arrived and Rock and several other reporters had watched heavily armed agents escort it from an armored car into an old four-story office building near downtown Russellville, Arkansas. They were there in a government van, and each had been required to strip naked and cover themselves with robes made of particularly coarse burlap.
The gold had been moved perhaps a half an hour earlier, and the original reporters, other than Rock, left the van moments afterward. Two were replaced by women, each of whom Rock assumed wrote for large east-coast newspapers. They were fully clothed and did not acknowledge him in any way, though he was sure they were aware that he wore nothing but a polo shirt just long enough to cover his crotch, and that his blue jeans and red boxer shorts were on the floorboard at his feet.
Rock had rarely felt this sort of discomfort or embarrassment, having become familiar enough with government inaction to know that no one had bothered to explain to these women why they had been placed next to a half-naked man.

Lying

Years earlier, Rock and an old girlfriend had sat in the bleachers of this same softball field, the one across Cantrell Boulevard from Cajun's Wharf where he and his workmate Todd Trobb now sat.
Rock remembered that his girlfriend had said something about how fun it might be to have sex on the plush grass of the outfield, perhaps late at night as a band played on the deck of Cajun's.
Rock's memory was accurate, but he told Todd of the product of his former girlfriend's imagination as if it had actually occurred.
Todd seemed skeptical.
"Really?" he said. "That seems like something you would've told me a long time ago."

Doomed

Life on earth was doomed unless Rock could find an antidote to whatever contagion had begun to overrun everything. He was not in any way qualified for his task, but there was apparently no one else left who had any chance to help.
There was something else he had agreed to do. Elaine Gimblet had tried to tell him something about it, but surely this saving-mankind business was more critical than anything she would have arranged. Rock wasn't certain of anything, except that he needed something to eat.

J.T.

Much to Rock's surprise, James Taylor appeared at his house near daybreak. There was no way Rock could've anticipated this. He and James had been close friends through college and for the first few years after they graduated, but over the last twenty to twenty-five years, they had seen each other sporadically, by coincidence if at all since the early-1990s. When Rock last saw him, at least ten years earlier, James sat in a restaurant in Little Rock's River Market with his then two-year-old son.
Not long after, a mutual friend told Rock that James had moved to Fayetteville. He was apparently doing very well at his work as a videographer for the University, but here he was, out of the blue, in Rock's living room. He looked just the same, Rock thought.
"It was time for me to come home," James said. "Before I left, I knew my music had turned stale, and I was in dark places. I had to shake it all away. The pain finally faded while I was in Fayetteville, and I felt I was ready to start over."
"Well, heck," Rock said. "It's great to have you back."
"You're one of the main reasons I returned," James said. "I'll tell you, Rock, I've watched you over the years, and the simplicity of your life has inspired me."
It seemed perfectly normal to Rock to have this aging pop start in his house.

A racing disaster

It was impossible to tell exactly what was happening, but Rock knew a racing disaster was underway. He watched on a monitor under the Oaklawn Park grandstand and found from the track announcer's voice and the jumble of fallen horses on the screen, a few of them lying flat and unmoving, that this was unlike anything to have ever occurred at Oaklawn or anywhere else.
"This is terrible," the announcer said. "I don't know what else to say."

The trouble with deadlines

Rock wasn't sure, but he thought he had agreed to write a preseason prospectus on UCA's football team. He was somewhat panicked, particularly when it occurred to him that most of the players were out of school for the summer.
The story was due by nine o'clock that night. It was late in the afternoon, and Rock had nothing. He got out of bed and considered driving to Conway.

Who cares?

It was the end of the semester and Rock suddenly realized he had never attended a physics class he enrolled in at UALR. What was different from all the times before when he had panicked about such oversights is that he didn't care. Furthermore, he was fully dressed.