The wind was picking up outside. The sky was an unhealthy shade of sunset-red, as if were infected. Looked like a storm was brewing.

“Let’s go check it out,” I suggested to Thing Two. It was hot in the house. The dead leaves whipping by the window suggested there might be a cool breeze in the backyard.

We stepped onto the patio. Thing Two closed the sliding door behind us so the cats didn’t get out. (Like aging action movies stars, they think they’re outdoor cats, but are actually old and fat and lame – easy pickings for hungry coyotes or paparazzi.)

We watched the trees lean away from the wind, their branches rippling. Clouds clumped together and charged across the sky like Black Friday shoppers squeezing through Wal-Mart doors at 5:00 AM. The setting sun spilled its fiery red sheen across everything.

“I’m scared,” said Thing Two. She’s five, and has issues with storms.

In time, I’ll insist that she face her fears — a little thunder never hurt anyone, and odds are lighting won’t hurt you – but for now…

“Okay, let’s go back in.”

She pulled on the sliding door. It didn’t open. Locked? I tried.

Locked.

Realization hit me like a slap: I’d turned the knob on the way out, thinking I was unlocking the door, when in fact it was already unlocked. I’d locked it. And the front door was locked too. And my keys…

My keys were in my other pants. Along with my cell phone. Safely inside the house — along with my shoes, and my daughters’ shoes as well. My beautiful locksmith wife had keys, of course, but she was out with Thing One.

Thing Two started to cry.

“I’m really scared,” she said.

I smiled the “Don’t worry, Daddy will take care of this, everything’s going to be fine” smile I’ve been working on for the past 9 years.

“Let’s go to the neighbors,” I said. “We’ll call Mommy, and she can come home and let us in.”

The neighbors kindly let us in, and even more kindly did not laugh in my face. They handed me the phone. I stared at it blankly.

“For calling your wife,” they suggested.

“Right…” The thing was, I didn’t know her cell number. It was pre-set on my phone (which was safely nestled in the pocket of my jeans across the street), so while I called it every day, I never actually dialed it.

“Um…” There was no way to ask this without sounding like the idiot I was. “Do you… have my wife’s cell number?”

They did. I made the call, we were back in the house within the hour, and I learned a valuable lesson: anecdotes make great blog entries when you’re putting off starting that short story you should be working on.

Looking for a thrill? Hoping for a taste of excitement that shoots adrenaline straight into your heart?

Well, here you go. It’s Bound, this week’s Worth a Thousand feature, a short story about honor, identity, and awesome suits of armor, inspired by a speed-painting from Mu Young Kim.

After a two-week hiatus dedicated to pursuing day-job deadlines and long-overdue dental work, the Worth a Thousand feature is back!

This week’s story is entitled, appropriately enough, When Valehaven Fell, and it’s illustrated by Mu Young Kim, whose speed paintings I’ve been finding particularly atmospheric and inspiring.

In other news, I’ve decided to take another run at reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. More to the point, my wife has decided that she’s waited long enough for me to read to the things; if I don’t catch up with her in the next month, she’ll start spoiling them for me, one book a week, until I finish them. I finished The Gunslinger yesterday (for the third time, though the first this decade), and plan to start Drawing of the Three today. I read it once before, back when it was the only Gunslinger sequel available. Now there are what, six? Seven? If we had some way to hook Stephen King up to the power grid, we could keep New England in electricity from his sheer output.

I’m on a quest. I’m on a deadline. Wish me luck.

I didn’t want to die in Nebraska.

To be fair to the cornhusker state (motto: “Show us corn and we shall husk it!”), I wasn’t keen on dying in Colorado or Iowa either, but hadn’t felt my life in any particular danger in either of  those two states. It was in Nebraska that our tire blew out.

The car was packed with myself, my wife, our two daughters, and a half-ton of blankets, toys, books, markers, and crumbs from the “eat this ’cause we’re not stopping for lunch” food group. The trunk was likewise packed with suitcases. We were on a road trip dressed in a black, a multi-state journey of mourning with a funeral as its destination. We’d been on the road since 7:00 and making good time.

The road was making a funny, rumbling noise. It was a construction zone, with odd pavement. No surprise. But then the noise got considerably louder and less funny. The steering wheel started tugging in my hands, like it had something really cool to show me over here, on the side of the road.

“I think it’s the tire,” I said, and started pulling over.

There wasn’ t much of a shoulder to pull off onto inside the construction zone. It was a narrow strip of highway, just wide enough for a single car and a person to squat next to it, peering at a tire. On one side was waist-high concrete barrier. On the other other was a constant death-stream of vehicles rocketing by at 75, shaking our car in their wake.

“It’s the tire,” my wife confirmed from the passenger side door. “It’s mostly gone.”

Very aware of how close the car was to incoming traffic, we got out and put the girls on the far side of the construction barrier. There was no actual construction going on over there, but there was a quarter-mile strip of mud, so they’d have something to occupy their time while not being reduced to pulp by passing semi trucks.

“Where are we?” asked my wife. I had no idea. I was just the driver; how should I know such things? There was a watertower on the horizon in front of us, suggesting a town of some sort. Behind us was… another vehicle? Yes, an SUV parked on the shoulder a little ways back with its hazards on and a woman inside. I decided to visit our freeway neighbor and see if she knew where we were.

“Outside Omaha,” our neighbor said. “I’m out of gas. Trying to call triple-A. It’s a rental. Thank you.” She rolled her window back up.

Back at the car, my wife asked, “Think we can change the tire?”

Of course! The spare! In my shock, my lizard brain had totally forgotten that we even had a spare tire. I pulled the suitcases out of the trunk and started digging under the secret floor. I found the tire, then the tire iron (which will always seem to me more weapon than tool), but not the jack.

“I don’t think it’s in there,” said my wife. She’d loaned it to a friend, who’d never returned it.

I headed back to the SUV, to see if I could borrow a cup of jack from our neighbor. She was on the phone and couldn’t be disturbed, but a Nebraska highway patrol car pulled up behind her while I was there. An officer who looked like he’d been spending all afternoon squinting into the sun looking for John Connor stepped out of his vehicle and asked what was going on. I explained, he nodded, and I headed back to the car.

“They’re sending a van,” I told my wife. “They’ll have a  jack.”

Here’s where I give a big shout-out to the volunteers of the Nebraska Motorist Assist Program. For it was these fine folks who had the van — and the jack — that made the rest of our journey possible. With the help of a retired dude in a fluorescent vest, we were able to get the spare on, get enough air in it so we could actually drive on it, and limp into Omaha to replace the blown tire.

Safe at home again, I’m thinking of writing a pair of letters to the state of Nebraska: the first praising its NMAP as the highway heroes they are, and the second suggesting they change to nickname to the “corn-and-tire husker state.”

This week’s entry in the Worth a Thousand collection is a pseudo-fairy tale called Hearts, with an illustration provided by Mu Young Kim. Mu joins Bradley K McDevitt and Patrick McEvoy as an artist whose work is both a) awesome, and b) featured in the Worth a Thousand fiction collection.

Are you an artist? Would you like to join these illustrious (pun intended) ranks? Drop me a line, and let’s make some magic!