SLIPPERS

You may be able to walk across a slow shallow stream, but you won’t be able to run. It’s because of the moss. Most people miss that.

My gramps taught me that when I was 5. We was fishin’ in the stream. Well, he was fishin’ I was wandering up and down the bank on the opposite side, looking for buried treasure. I had just cornered an imaginary pirate when who should pop out of the bushes, but Sally Jones. I hated that Sally. Partly because my paw hated her paw, but but mostly because she was always tryin’ to kiss me.

This day ‘twarn’t no different. She come a runnin’ up to me all puckered and ready, so I lit out across the bank toward gramps at a dead run. I looked back just before I hit the water, and there was Sally, she was just walking as calm as casual as could be. I thought I’d have me a good head start to my escape, but once my bare feet hit the mossy stones, I went all kinds of ways except forward and ended up with a bloody forehead and a loose tooth from the fall.

Of course Gramps was there beside me to help me up and clean me off, but so was that darn Sally, who insisted that her darn kissin’ would make it all better. That’s when Gramps explained that the fastest way to cross the stream may look like the slowest, but it aint. Sally knew that already.

One day, many years later, that little bit of advice came in handy.

I was stashing my goods in that same ole bank where I used to look for treasure. Heck the only people who knowed about it was Sally and me, oh and gramps, but he was dead. Died the week after Sally and me got hitched.  “I always knew you two had the hots for each other” he winked at the reception. When we got back from Vegas, he was already buried.

I’d been lifting the cash from Filthy Joe’s dresser drawer now for 5 years. It wasn’t like I was stealing from a bank or anything, Filthy Joe got his cash from the girls who danced at Tango’s. He called it the cream-off-the-top-less. I called it cash-off-the-clueless.

Anyway, I didn’t know it yet, but while I was stashing, there was somebody watching me stash. I got up, rinsed off my hands in the stream, and scrambled up the bank to walk home. I just happened to take a look over my shoulder, and saw some big dude digging up MY buried treasure!

I shouted “Hey! You!” and that was enough to set him a-runnin’ so all I had to do was heed my gramps’ lesson. I walked down the bank, and right to the creekbed, shore enough, that would-be thief had run hisself right into the slippers which was what we called the moss covered rocks. I picked up my box of goods, and ran home!