Great Catch! Copyright © 2020 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Published in Black Static #75, May-Jun 2020

One day I was wandering around the Internet, as we all do, clicking a link on a page, then clicking a link on that new page, a link on the next page that loaded, like walking through a funhouse maze of mirrors, and came across a video of a dog running backwards in a yard, jaws pointed up towards the sky, mouth open. It was obvious he was tracking a thrown ball's trajectory in the air, getting ready to catch it in his mouth, to make his master proud of him.

After a few moments, the ball fell into view, bounced off the grass. About fifteen feet away from him. I have to admit, I cracked up. Poor doggy. The rest of the video showed him trying to find the landed ball, running five feet past it, sniffing the ground, reversing, missing it again, striking out in a new direction, finally proudly snatching it up, in his yellow fangs, off the lawn.

So it wasn't a great catch after all.

In the American remake of The Ring, Naomi Watts finally rescues the little girl with the black hair hanging in front of her face from the well.

Tells her son, I saved the little girl!

Her son's horror. You WHAT?

Misunderstanding is a powerful theme in horror. And life. We think we know the situation, but we don't. Not really. Our assumptions are based on a misperception of what is actually occurring. Often, because we want to believe things are okay, even when they're not. Because if things are okay, that's easier to deal with.

Sometimes we're too involved in ourselves to really notice the outside world.

In Shaun of the Dead, in a brilliant scene paralleling an earlier scene, Simon Pegg walks out of his home, stumbles across the street, head down, hand scratching the back of his neck, not noticing the zombie activity shuffling farther down the street, even not noticing the bloody handprints on a cooler door as he selects a canned drink.

Soon after Mary and I decided one night, after three months traveling the highways of America, sitting down at the typical round table almost always found in a motel room, to get off the road, settle down again, this time in Texas, first in San Antonio, great city, but no jobs, then in Dallas, Mary and I, renting an apartment in north Dallas, planted crops on our balcony. Maybe it was our way of literally putting down roots.

Our apartment complex had a contest. Whoever had the best display of produce growing on their balcony would receive one month's free rent.

The woman across the white lines of the parking lot from us hauled out, cigarette dangling from her lips, shoulders hunched, all kinds of heavy pots, plopping them down, going back behind the reflections of her sliding glass doors to come back out with the wavy tops of tomato plants, bell peppers, jalapenos. Bad hair, short-shorts, really struggling. We were impressed with the effort she was making. It was a real commitment towards getting that one month's free rent.

Driving to the local nursery, we bought all kinds of paper seed packets ourselves, fronts of the packets optimistic with delicious-looking colors. A number of tall, orange-brown plastic pots. Sagging bags of potting soil.

We're farmers!

But kind of inept farmers.

For example, we bought corn seeds. Once we got home, tilting the cold glass rims of beer bottles up to our lips, reading the back of the seed packet for corn, we realized corn rows should be planted 30-36 inches apart.

Well, we're planting them in pots. Which means the first seed we plant is in the dark brown soil within the pot, but the next seed would be suspended in mid-air about two feet outside the rim of the pot. Not really practical.

In the end, almost everything we planted that weekend stayed in the ground. The only planting that was successful was our lima beans. We saw a modest green bush emerge upwards from the pot, like a Facebook post with a lot of likes, one bean pod sagging within the leaves. When it looked ripe, we 'harvested' it. In other words, pulled off the bean pod. Brought it inside through the sliding glass door of our own balcony. The Talking Heads playing on our turntable.

Using the edge of my thumbnail, I split the green pod open. Peeled apart the curved green halves of the pod. Four lima beans inside, looking fresh and ready to be eaten.

But we were afraid to eat them.

Because they hadn't been vetted through a supermarket. Eventually, I did eat one of them, first taking a swig of beer for courage, putting the lima bean between my teeth with some trepidation, like letting a sugar cube laced with LSD dissolve on my nervous tongue.

We misunderstood how growing edible plants worked. We didn't pay enough attention.

John Hurt is investigating one of a series of alien eggs when the top of a tall egg bursts open, a face-hugger clamping over his head from ear to ear. Later, back on the spaceship, the crew assumes the danger is gone once the jointed creature leaves his face, leading up to the infamous dinner scene when the chest-burster emerges.

We don't often see a menace initially.

In day to day life, there's so much we don't know. And that lack of knowledge makes us unprepared for the reality shuffling down the street.

We were told the Coronavirus was going to have a minor effect on our lives. On January 22, 2020, in a television interview with Joe Kernen from CNBC News, Trump was asked, "Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?" Trump replied, "No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It's one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It's going to be just fine."

But as of this writing, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who are infected, and thousands who have died from the virus, here in America. We do not have it under control.

It's like the White House saying, Yes, there are zombies eating the flesh of the living, but we're confident they're going to soon eat so many people they'll feel bloated and settle down for a nap, like normal people do after a huge Thanksgiving dinner, watching football. And then we'll get rid of them while they're snoring.

Households across America are running out of eggs. They're running out of bread. Running out of onions. Running out of toilet paper. One article I read advised Americans to consider the idea of cleaning their asses with water and their left hands. Just like the old days.

Sometime after I saw that video of the dog hilariously missing that ball, it was on the Internet again. This time, in the comments, the person who created the video, the dog's owner, explained why the dog had had so much trouble catching the ball.

The dog was blind.

Once the ball hit the lawn, he ran towards the noise of the impact, then sniffed his way towards his master's smell on the ball.

You think things are one way. The dog is stupid. Then find out the truth. You're the one who's stupid.