EXTRACT FOR
Miller Time
(Craig M. Sampson)

        Ed hated bugs. Period. Ever Since he had been a kid growing up on that God-forsaken farm back in Iowa, he had hated bugs. If it crawled, flew, buzzed, hovered, flitted, hummed, droned, or just sat there doing nothing Ed Martin took it upon himself to hasten the creature along to insect Valhalla. In the many spare hours he had to kill in the cornfields and the alfalfa fields back home, he had often wondered....just what purpose did these winged pests serve anyway? Just an inconvenience and annoyance as far as he could see. From his very early years, Ed had relished his role as the personal executioner of as many of these flying and crawling disease-laden irritations from the small corner of his world as possible.



      Other kids he knew just seemed to tolerate them.....TOLERATE THEM????? Not Ed.....Ed had developed this seething, blinding, red-hot, all-consuming hatred of them...all of them. The mosquitoes that turned pleasant summer evenings into a miserable biting and itching festival, the ants that seem intent on destroying his father's garden and lawn with their relentless burrowing and tunneling, the bees and wasps and hornets with their searing injections of poison, but most of all he hated the moths. Those goddamn moths....every year they arrived like clockwork and covered all the farm equipment and their home like a blanket, leaving their excrement behind that he then had to clean.