On getting naked
I could not have been more naked. Six months ago, I stood behind an open car door. It was the only thing blocking my man-parts from an entire grass-field-turned-parking-lot full of people on a...
Author: Brad Willis
My blood runs cold…
The boy had just finished his homework in the playroom of our house. We were alone when he broke into song…a song a seven-year-old boy probably shouldn’t be singing. After I heard it, I...
Halloween story 2011
If you have been a reader of Rapid Eye Reality for a while, you know that once a year I release a story that doesn’t really fit in these pages. It’s my Halloween gift...
Saturday Night Lights
The backfield tackle was the kind in which the quarterback is hit, hit again, and finally collapses under the weight of blockers, tacklers, and the inevitability of yet another sack. Less than two minutes...
To the victims of 9/11: I’m sorry
I honor the memory of the heroes and innocents who died ten years ago on September 11, 2001. I honor their bravery, their sacrifice, and their families and friends. Whether by chance or by...
Rapid Eye Reality turns ten
Two weeks before nineteen men crashed airplanes into my country, I started a blog. This blog. It was an exercise, an outlet suggested to me by my friend, Susannah. We were eating shrimp and...
Notes on fear
The note read, “If I die.” Nothing else. There was no last will and testament. There were no instructions. There was only a flower blossom picked from somewhere else. I was soaked with sweat...
Promises
There is nothing uplifting about a downmarket Las Vegas hotel. It’s simple living, hours in a stiff bed comforted by a flickering laptop screen, whatever junk food I could liberate from the giftshop downstairs,...
The Last Poker Game
This story originally appeared at Up For Poker in January 2007. I’ve been thinking about that night a lot recently. What I learned more than four years ago seems more relevant with every passing...
Alarm
The roundest person in the entire gym was the firefighter who came to save our lives this morning. He was 350 pounds if he was an ounce. The sweaty struggle it must have been...
Thank you to everyone but the guy in the middle of the road
There was a guy in the middle of Stone Avenue. My wife and I had just pulled out of The Handlebar and were on our way to visit with a bunch of old friends....
Those aren’t ants in my pants
It’s a little more than 17 miles of county roads–open fields, farm land, red barns, private air strips, luxury homes, views of the Blue Ridge mountains, moo cows, and lose-yourself hairpin turns–between Campbell’s covered...
Missing Gulfman, five years later
For the last three days, it has rained from the sunshine. We live in one of those places where half the people you meet aren’t natives. It’s not like Florida, a place northerners settle...