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know how you keep it all so neat."

The women turned and started for the living room. Lauren took the young woman's forearm and gave it an affectionate pat. "Thank you, it's really just a matter not letting it get out of hand..." She glanced over her shoulder, and added in a louder voice, "Right dear?"

Sebastian automatically scanned the kitchen for empties. "Oh yes, may God help us if it ever gets out of hand."

Lauren grasped the coveted last word. "Speaking of getting out of hand - that lawn will need some attention this weekend."

Larry waited until they were out of the room, then shook his head in amused sympathy at Sebastian. "Rock and a hard place, huh?" He laughed, then added with exaggerated concern, " Buddy, you just better watch yourself at that mower shop. I don't want to hear about them finding your hide hanging on the wall out there."

Sebastian dismissed the warning with a chuckle. Not that he relished his next encounter with the proprieties, but she remained a secondary authority. The ultimate force that rules a man is the unbounded one, and it occupies a hallowed space in the psyche. It sits high on a supreme throne, uncertain and infinite in nature, with nothing beyond itself to impart perspective. It is limited only by the imagination. There can be but one such force in any man's life, and it inevitably diminishes all others.

2.

Larry was right about the mower shop being creepy. Sebastian stopped on the way home from work last week, but missed it on the first pass because it was so overgrown. On the second drive-by, he spied a dilapidated singlewide trailer tucked back in the weeds, at the end of a rutted red-clay drive.

Broken, rusted push mower skeletons, the forgotten casualties of forgotten lawn wars, lay scattered around the front lot. Monstrous-sized weeds - dandelions and milkweeds - sprouted up, around, and through their stripped frames and fractured handles. An eight-foot chain link with a razor wire crown protected a back lot that was just as rough as the front. Sebastian worked his way up the drive, stepping over gulleys that were a foot and a half deep. A 99 Taurus, missing two of its four wheels, sat high-bottomed out at the top of the drive, so he had to step off the drive and into the weeds to get around it.

Sebastian stopped on the second step to scrape some mud off his boots, but gave up because the freestanding, rickety structure was shaking so badly. A wide gap separated the stairs from the trailer, so he leapt across it to the trailer

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