After 3 months of concern of being followed, my brother Howard went missing. It was October 20th 1989 and my brother was out on a hike with his girlfriend in the Uintah mountains in Utah. I was at home, asleep. My mother came in around 7:30 asking me if I had seen my brother at all since the night before when he left, my response was no. After a 10 minute conversation about how she thinks his car needed new tires before he drove up mountains to go hiking, my mother said she was going to go back to bed and that he had probably just slept in at his girlfriends house or maybe was at another of his close friends houses. Howard was really

shy, and introverted, so he practically never did anything with people besides us and his girlfriend, who was also very introverted herself. By 9am my mom had started freaking out, asking things like, “what if he crashed his car because of the damn old tires” and, “What if he fell” but nothing quite stuck to me like the last question my mom had asked me, “What if he was murdered”. That word. Murdered. That hit where it hurts, just for my brother to be taken from so easily in the case of murder, taken as if he was just a pile of sand in the beach that one day had to be dug up to build a new beach house. That word. Murdered. What if? what if he really was murdered, what if someone cared so little about themselves that they would burden someone else by taking what meant so little to them in the first place. That word. Murdered. How could it be that someone could even hate my brother that bad, how could it be?

 It was now 2:30pm, exactly 24 hours from the last time he was seen, my mom could now file a missing persons report. This missing persons report was the last little bit of hope my mom had in the last little while, I mean she lost her job just 2 months earlier, her father, killed in a tragic work accident, her mother now widowed and alone. This was the last thing straw for my mother and her smoking, she smoked while my and my brother were little kids, but she never smoked around us kids. Even after all the recent stress she said that she would not pickup another cigarette because she couldn’t stand to see all of the elders sick with their lung cancers. But this, this was the last thing holding her back.
After she had finished filling out the missing persons report she went outside and started smoking a cigarette, I wasn’t at the police station so I didn’t notice that she had started smoking, but now I did because I had rode my bike from our house to the local police department and saw her outside, with a halfway smoked cigarette between her fingers, crying and shaking. This was the only time I would not say anything about her smoking, because I knew she really was under enough pressure.
I was also shaky but I thought I knew that he would fine, or at least I thought I was fine but a police officer saw me and decided to do a slight medical test on me. I’m assuming that I was probably shaking bad because they had done seizure protocol  on me.

3 weeks later, there was still no sign of my brother, we had sent out search parties, searched the road he disappeared on. We only found his car, which was just as usual as normally.
 2 months into the search we get a phone call from his girlfriends mother, she said that Amy had came home, but that she was in bad shape and didn’t know where Howard might be, only that they heard ruffles in the bushes next to them and she ran and never saw him again.
 A large question arose, what took her so long to return home? So my family met up with her and asked her this question, she said that she had been stuck and lost in the woods and had been surviving purely off river water and her backpack full of snacks. 
 My brother was found 9 months later in a construction site, well, what was left of my brother.
 This small story was dedicated to my family. I hope this never happens.

Every morning, when Howard awakes from his Taurus like slumber, he checks how the date, of which today is May 15th, 2021, affects his horoscope. This chooses his outfit for the day, if the date does not match his horoscope, and it says that it will be a bad day, he will literally change his outfit to match the sadness. His family thinks he might be goth based off the fact that his horoscope always says today is not “compatible” so he wears all black to match these sad, sad days. He is quite a slim man partially because of his diet, which is purely influenced by ‘how someone of the Taurus horoscope should eat everyday’ catalogue, and the other parts is his great metabolism. He’s tall along with his slimness, with a towering height of six-foot-two, of which he uses to battle his enemies. His enemies you ask? They are none other than the opposing horoscopes, his ex’s, horoscope haters, and some new trend called the rise of the “Karen’s”. Yes, yes our friend he does stay trendy. As we mentioned earlier he does choose his outfits each morning based off of his signs compatibility to the day, but not only this is chosen by the sign, but even his career. After each morning of doing his daily horoscope research he gets out of bed, gets dressed in the compatible outfit of the day, and heads downstairs to the kitchen to make his meal, today’s meal, which is the same as every other day, eggs and bacon, but it’s different because his eggs are cooked as the book says. Next thing is to use his royal blue toilet, well because it’s royal blue it means that he must be royal, no? No he is not, the horoscope told him that his bathroom should be royal because he is in fact royalty to the Taurus, but the bathroom part I have no idea. He then gets into his Prius, now he might not be the most proud Prius owner, or the most environmentally centered person there is considering that he used to work for an oil mining company prior to finding out his destiny in horoscopes. Outside his Prius there is not a single dent, not one, although his ex girlfriend did key his car on his quarterly horoscope prayer date. The inside of his Prius is completely clean, almost as if he might have some sort of OCD but he does not, it’s his trust in the horoscopes that tell him he must keep a prestige Prius, because what could be more manly in the little rural town of Lindsborg Kansas than a bright blue, clean energy, clean air, clean paint, clean inside with a goth driving Prius. On his way to work he stops at the same diner, for the same item, a small pure black coffee, with a clean bagel, again because the horoscope told him to do so. Around twenty minutes after he left the diner he’d be at work, which he worked at an office, a crayon recall office, of which he’d answer calls of people complaining about the companies crayons qualities, can you guess the reason why he decided to get this job, and move from his half million dollar house in Texas, to a cheap trailer in a ghetto trailer park? Well you probably guessed it, based off of how we know Howard so far, you probably said that it was the horoscope, and yes you are in fact correct in your guess of saying it was the horoscope, because he got the job because of the horoscope. It was a major pay cut but it was all worth it in Howard’s mind. The horoscope tells him everything in his life, it got to the point where it would tell him what his type of girls is, so bad that he ended up breaking up with his 9 year long girlfriend. It also chooses what friends he is allowed to have, even removing his best friend, Gary, who is now married with Howard’s ex, was upset at first, but got a wife out of the fight and is now settled. This goes as far to tell him when he can see his family, saying that only two days a year should be used to see family, April 22, and November 24. These two days are in fact random but that’s what the horoscope wants. Dedicated to Sammy, my good friend, Sammy.