Dream a Little Dream. Debra Clopton

pounds of bull out in broad daylight? Or maybe Sylvester had been standing over the hill where she couldn’t see him.

      He wondered if she was having nightmares. Though she’d seemed fine on the ride into town after he’d rescued her, he wondered. Sometimes adrenaline got a person through a close call. Lowering his hammer, he let his gaze wonder out across his pastureland.

      A Christian man, no, any kind of man worth his salt, Christian or not, would step up and see if she was okay.

      Especially the man who knew he had a bull with problems.

      Before church on Sunday morning Molly was sitting in her apartment lost in thought.

      After her maddening encounter with Bob the brute on Saturday, she’d met with his insurance adjuster alone. He had given her an assessment of the damage to her poor darling car. Her little Bug had taken a beating from that bull-headed bull on the hood and both side panels. The adjuster had assured her the news was good, that Sylvester’s damage was actually minimal. Some new doors, a little bodywork, a new paint job and her car would be as good as new.

      Easy for him to say. New paint jobs were never as good as the factory. Everybody knew that, but it served her right for trespassing. What had she been thinking?

      About a story.

      Everything in her life was about a story. It was true, but she liked it that way. Still, it seemed a sad fact that she’d stood in the middle of the street taking pictures of her car as it was being towed away that day. But the photos were for “just in case.” Just in case she got over her fright and an idea for a story should arise from this incident. That was the way she was wired. Many would argue that her wires were really messed up.

      Who was she kidding? She felt no real desire to look for an article angle. Looking at the car had brought all the trauma of the experience back to her. She sucked in a long breath and forced the thoughts away. She refused to think any more about the bull attack. She couldn’t. She had just a few days left to get her column in for the week, not to mention the magazine articles that loomed in a consecutive wave of deadlines. She’d scrapped the follow-up on Bob and now she had nothing.

      Nothing.

      For a girl with endless ideas, the fact that she had no desire to write was unbelievable. She always wrote, had always created several ideas at once.

      Specifically, she’d been writing columns about Mule Hollow for almost a year. Now suddenly for the first time in her life she was drawing blanks.

      She hadn’t had an idea since the attack on Friday—the day Bob told her to stop writing about him.

      For the past two mornings, as she’d done most mornings since her arrival in Mule Hollow, she’d risen at five o’clock, dressed quickly, strapped on her backpack and jogged to the edge of town. She’d taken the well-worn path she’d created across the open field where town gatherings were held, past the grove of mesquite trees and finally stopping at her special spot—a flat rock on the top of a knoll overlooking a sweeping valley. There she’d sit. She loved watching the sunrise, bringing with it inspirations—the sparks that ignited her creative mind.

      Until now.

      Until she’d been given the order to halt all tales of Bob.

      She hadn’t completely realized exactly how much her column about Mule Hollow had truly revolved around him.

      Why was that?

      This morning, after not sleeping most of the night, she had sat on the floor in the middle of her apartment surrounded by weeks and months of copies of her column. And lo and behold, to her surprise, the maddening man had been right.

      Completely, unexplainably right.

      He had been in the papers more than the President!