March 16, 2024
Serial Killers, Black Holes, and Stupid Apps
There was nothing quite like it, hearing your alarm go off in the morning, knowing it was Saturday. I silenced my watch and stayed in bed, snuggling my wife until the sun came up. When I took the dogs outside, the birds were making a ruckus. The morning was sunny and while I had the day off, nature was hustling and bustling, preparing for spring. My wife joined me outside and told me the maple tree in our backyard was forming leaves. I inspected it and saw the tiny buds were forming into baby leaves smaller than my pinky’s fingernail. On the top of the tree, where the maple touches the branch of an overhanging pine, three large red leaves grew.
After some morning coffee, we changed clothes and headed into Wilson to drop off a package at a shipping store, but the small business was closed. We proceeded to Lake Wilson for a morning walk along the trail that circled the water. The weather at the lake was warm and welcoming. The sky was bright, which made the water look appealing as it reflected the gray clouds and sporadic patches of blue sky. As we entered the trail and rounded the corner, I caught my first glimpse of the lake. It looked, to me, exactly like fall, full of vibrant colors with the blossoming trees in fiery reds, radiant oranges, glistering pinks, and glittering golds. It was hard to pay attention to the trail when the vista was constantly calling out to my eyes.
When we rounded the small inlet on the north side of the lake, the spell was broken as my wife spotted a pile of dead fish. There were sixteen six to eight-inch fish that looked like gizzard shad lying in a pile. There was no apparent trauma to the fish, but their numbers made the entire scene suspicious. As we continued along the trail that bordered the lake’s bank, we saw more and more rotting fish. For the entire two-mile loop, dead fish of the same size and type were floating near the bank, carried by the lake’s current. Yellow pine pollen floated in the water around the fish, making the scene even more dismal. What happened? We set out to formulate our best educated guesses.
At first, I thought a lighting strike hit a school of fish. Why else would it be one species of the same size? But once we realized the fish carcasses covered the entire lake, I had to shift to the theory that lightning struck the school while it swam in the middle of the lake. My wife suspected some illness, but wouldn’t that have affected other fish or wildlife? I felt unsure about the theory as I watched a pair of mallards swimming lazily through the dead fish, disinterested and unaffected. Probably multiple lightning strikes. Wait, did it even rain?
After much deliberation, we finally solved the mystery. It was obvious. There was a fish serial killer on the prowl, probably a Bundy Bream. A bream is a type of fish for you city folk out there. We rounded the last bend in the trail and spotted another dead fish with its tail eaten clean off, hard evidence of cannibalism. Scratch the Bundy Bream, we were dealing with a Dahmer. Oddly enough, I had never seen a dolphin in these waters. More proof that we were dealing with a highly intelligent, sophisticated, and calculating monster. I grabbed my phone to call the FBI, the Fish Bureau of Investigations. I couldn’t find the number. What up with that?
The last part of the trail featured the Lake Wilson Dam. We paused atop the noisy concrete wall, watching the lake seep over the edge into a rushing torrent on the other side of the dam. In the lake a fish’s corpse floated slowly toward the dam, and we wanted to see it fly out the other side. The fish moved slowly towards the black hole, being sucked in by its immense gravity. Once it passed the event horizon, things moved more quickly. We saw it approach the edge, so we turned and moved towards the opposite railing, holding our breaths. At first nothing happened, and then suddenly, the fish shot down the dam and disappeared into the foamy abyss. It was the highlight of our walk.
Famished, we headed straight to Cracker Barrel, where we planned a victory feast, for having both witnessed the inner workings of a black hole and solving the crime of the century. The last time we went to the restaurant, I signed up for their membership and downloaded their app, which, conveniently, included a way to get on the waitlist. This created a dilemma. When should we sign in? In an ideal scenario, we would get on the list at just the right time, so when we arrived, we could walk in and go straight to our table. We didn’t expect miracles, however, and we just wanted to cut down on the long wait times that were common at this time of day. Of course, we also didn’t want to be absent if our table was ready before we arrived.
We made calculations that put A Wonderful Mind to shame, finally deciding to join the waitlist through the app at a particular intersection. When we arrived at the corner where Firestone and Culvers sat, we made the leap. The app immediately signaled back that we were second in line and that they would seat us within five minutes. We were still ten minutes away. Ugh. We had used all our superpowers solving that damn fish crime and other science voodoo. When we arrived at the restaurant and went to the hostess, she immediately got on her stupid little headphone, telling someone “hey, they’re back”. What? Back from where? As we were being led to our table, I snickered and looked at my wife. Regarding the hostess’s comment, I wanted to say “I don’t want her pork chop, I want her life…”, but I wasn’t sure if my wife had seen the movie Blood In Blood Out. I still laughed out loud at my joke.
My wife ate and was feeling better. The day was going great. On the way out of Cracker Barrel, we stopped by their shop because my wife wanted to get a card and a small gift for my mother. I purchased a vinyl sticker (are there any other kind?) for my wife with a drawing of a dog standing too close to a fire. The sticker said “this is fine”. I thought it was fitting for my wife’s daily experience in medical school. When she got home, she put the sticker on a small medical reference book she carried in her lab coat. I didn’t open it, but I was pretty sure the book was full of spells and witchy recipes.
The evening was lovely. We had a mouse situation that resulted in two blind mice, as dead mice can’t see. I was still searching for the third one, seeing how they run. I took a walk into the woods while my wife studied matters of the heart, not love stuff, but the actual organ that seems to have multiple ways of killing people. We grilled a ribeye on the Traeger for me and a beautiful cedar planked salmon fillet for her. My wife also made a delicious salad with kale she battered. Not as in frying, but actually hitting it repeatedly until it stopped resisting. My wife had to work the next day, but her brain kept her awake, so I read her the last three journal entries in bed while she giggled. It was time for sleep.