THE HORNS OF SEPTEMBER

Wendy Potocki

CHAPTER 1

Strange things happen in September. It’s a known scientific fact. Numerous double-blind studies have proven that it’s true. The odds of things going awry in September far outweigh simple chance. You take January for instance. You can start a project and complete it like clockwork without a hitch or dark cloud even making an appearance on the horizon. You take that same activity and start it in September, and you’ll end up with a cabal, a nightmare, a conflagration, a confluence of potent missteps spelling certain disaster, a Kafka on bennies plague that will travel into the marrow of the idiot starting such an endeavor – roosting until it can blossom into a disease that will lay waste to the fool in the most horrible way imaginable. He’ll be begging for death long before it’s all over. These are just some of the travails that are assured to befall the initiator of such lunacy and, I might add, long before the transgressor of the laws of nature even remembers what the hell he set out to do in the first place. The thing is, I knew all this – even knew about what those in the know call, “The Horns of September.” This charming euphemism stands for the propensity of the unlikely accident of two long, sharp horns perfectly splintering each butt cheek while a thousand more barbed ones – having been shoved deeply under your skin –simultaneously and successfully worm their way to your heart thereby carvin’ you out a new one happening with startling regularity to September’s trespassers. I knew and was well-versed in not beginning things in this malevolent month and thereby inadvertently putting out a welcome mat for horrors to enter one’s life. Horrors of such gravity that they could make the hells outlined in Dante’s Inferno look like starting kindergarten knowing the alphabet, having two peanut butter sandwiches in each pocket and being supplied with enough chewing gum for everyone in comparison. I can only sit here and wonder why in spite of my being cognizant of all the misery that goes hand-in-hand with being so dim-witted as to begin an enterprise in this most unfortunate of months, I threw caution to the wind and chose the month of September anyway.