Bob Gibson is walking toward you…

Robert “Bob” Gibson is walking toward you.

His fastball has been described as “blazing,” which doesn’t do it justice, but that doesn’t much matter now — Bob Gibson doesn’t seem like he will be using his fastball. His slider would make you buckle into a heap of flesh, make you faint — which makes you wish he would throw it — you don’t want to be conscious when Bob Gibson gets to you — but that isn’t happening either. Bob Gibson is walking toward you.

Where is your spine, you ask yourself. It seems to have fled — and you’d be wise to follow it if you were capable of movement. Or, your spine has changed into something other than bone — a windsock, perhaps. Your spine has become a windsock because Bob Gibson is walking towards you.

Bob Gibson saw such a windsock once when he was in high school. It wiggled lazily in the breeze and then tried to lay down a bunt on him. You know what Bob Gibson did to that windsock then? He ate it. Bob Gibson ate that windsock, and now he is going to eat your windsock spine after he rips it from your rice-paper flesh. Yes, as Bob Gibson walks toward you, it appears he has an appetite for a windsock. Bob Gibson has been craving windsock since he ate that windsock back in high school.

Bob Gibson is walking toward you. Or, you assume he is still walking toward you. All you can see now is stars, so you don’t really know for sure. All you can hear is something like the rhythmic thump of shovelfuls of soil hitting a casket top. Are you in the casket? Are you a blind bystander at your own funeral?

You are a speck of dung nestled in the turf, and Bob Gibson has walked right over you.