Outburst — 2: Marvin & the Unexplainable

Something was going to happen. Marvin felt it racing with the blood through his body.

GUYMON, OKLAHOMA

Switching off the flashlight, Marvin walked from the tiny bathroom into gloom. The dim radio dial a beacon, he kicked his way through layers of trash carpeting the shack’s combination living room/kitchen/bedroom. His sister, before she died last year, would come over and scold him, trying to change his world. As soon as she left, Marvin brought in the trash bags, dumping them back onto the floor. He wanted his home to feel lived in.

Still, he missed Melinda. She was all the family he’d had. All that would admit to it, anyway. Sometimes he tried to remember where she was buried.

As Marvin sat down in his tattered recliner, Brutus screeched and shot from the chair into the piles of trash. Brutus was the largest of the twenty-something cats that shared his abode. Never a believer in locking up animals, Marvin left a screenless window raised, so they came and went as they pleased.

He preferred a hands-off approach to life.

As he turned up the volume knob, a man’s precise voice flooded the room. News. Good. He hadn’t missed the start of The Unexplainable.