Poison Arrow

The opening day of Mowing Season is always bittersweet. Sweet, because after my lawn looks nice, I am free to judge my neighbors' shabby landscaping skills; bitter because I have to actually do work before getting down to the judging.

This year, as I was mowing around the flowers on opening day, I found an arrow. Yeah, an actual arrow, as in bow and arrow. I immediately blamed my shitty neighbors across the street, but their arrows were usually sonic. A few minutes later I found another one hidden in the grass. It didn't look like anything on the porch had been punctured, but it's not everyday that you find a quiver of arrows on your front lawn, so I was a little concerned.

I knew that there hadn't been any Indian attacks here in at least a hundred years, and even if the warpath had heated up, why start with me? Why not hit the sheriff or the ... stagecoach manager or something? I'm just an innocent homesteader, trying to scrape out a living here on my property.

Of course, they might not be recent arrows. They might be mystical revenge arrows launched from an ancient burial ground that was razed to build my house. That would explain quite a bit, actually, like why I've had to replace my TV 3 or 4 times, or why that faucet drips blood occasionally.

The cursed arrows. Hey, that's an awesome band name!

Using knowledge of the ancients, I submitted the arrows to a lengthy and intense cleansing ceremony, sort of like the one Billy Jack had to endure before kicking the crap out of those rednecks.

And hey, as an aside, ever notice how many southerners will claim some microscopic amount of Native American blood to make some tenuous claim of...well, I'm not sure exactly. Like, "Well, I'm actually 1/32 Cherokee," or "There's some Creek blood on my mother's side." Who do they think is buying that stuff?

Actually, I just left the arrows on the back porch and sort of forgot about them. 

Last week I put the haunted arrows in a bag of yard trash. You could see the tips of them poking out of the bag. I was a little concerned about the garbagemen getting cursed, but figured they probably had to take training on that sort of stuff, what with people regularly throwing out possessed dolls and ouija boards and whatnot. 

Yesterday when taking in the recycling bin, I noticed something was amiss. The trash bag was still there, but the arrows were gone. Some mystical Native American spirit took them from the Hefty bag and transported them back into the Land of the Dead. That, of course, is the only scientific answer to what could have happened.

With the arrows gone, I'm pretty sure any and all curses on the house have been lifted, but I might have to undergo another purification ceremony just to make sure. Or I might have to embark on an epic quest, like the time I searched for my niece in Comanche territory for five years. But that is a story for another time.

The view from my porch