A Desperate Plea Unanswered.

Tyler, Texas is a lovely city.  I've lived in several locations there while attending Tyler's well respected Tyler Junior College.  My younger brother, apparently wiser than me, moved to Tyler as soon as he got out of high school, and he never came back.  He lives there still, and is now happily married.

My brother is a very likable fella, he speaks to any and to all.  He'll learn your name and not forget it, and you'll be glad to know him as well, if you get the chance to meet him.

At one point in time, my brother lived on Chisholm Street with a friend of his who looks for all the world like he'd be his brother, which is to say...I look somewhat different, and just have a different sort of vibe, I suppose.


There was a man on Chisholm Street who lived in a large two story red brick home, the homes in the area are nice homes, but older.  They are nice homes still today, and will be - as Tyler is a great city to live in.

Tyler, Texas is known as The Rose City for its famous rose gardens, but in this instance, one might be somewhat reminded, after a fashion, of the terrific and timeless short story by William Faulkner, "A Rose For Emily."

The man in the large red brick two story home was older, and becoming very eccentric.  His family had had some money, but if he had any children, they weren't anywhere near, or perhaps they were never fond of him.  I do not know if the man had ever had children, and I do not know either if the man had ever been married.  What I know is he'd become rather....eccentric.

There'd been an angry dispute with the city water department, and the man refused to pay the bill.  The inevitable happened, and the water department shut the man's water off.

I guess at this point I should relate how I was being very kind to use the word "eccentric."  The man bought a large supply of ziplock bags, and into it went his urine, and his feces, and those were stacked, in bags, in one of the bathtubs.

None of these sorts of things were actually known at the time, you could say, if you wish, that things tend to come out in the wash.

My brother is fond of animals, and he always was.  My brother is just fond of living things, and seldom does my brother meet a living thing he doesn't see value in.  He'd see the man out in his yard, and he'd speak to the man.  He came to know the man in the red brick two story was fond of parrots, and other sorts of exotic bird that a man can teach to repeat things said to it.

One day a woman from out of town came to visit the old and eccentric man in the red brick two story house on Chisholm Street in Tyler, Texas.  The woman was a relative.  Perhaps she'd come from out of town for having not been able to get in touch with her increasingly eccentric relation via the usual channels.  What would I know about it?

The woman knocked on the door...but the door was locked...she heard from within the repeated words

HELP ME!  HELP ME!

The police were called, the house was broken into.  Their caregiver, having been dead for a week or so, had been unable to feed the birds.  The options he'd left for them as sustenance, were his own rotting flesh.