Live Like You Were Dying by Michael Morris

I’ve played it safe, never taking real chances. Then something happened . . . I found out I had a spot on my lung and the job I thought only I could do got turned over to somebody else. My world got knocked upside down. You know, looking at the world from a different angle, you figure some things out pretty fast. Somewhere back there I stopped living and ended up a walking dead man. I’m fighting to make sure that never happens again.”
    Chewing the straw, Ham kept a gaze on me the same as I had on his bull. A voice called out over the intercom that the pole-bending event was about to start, and I got up to leave. I’d had my say. Now it was time to move on.
    Before I could get past the drink machine, Ham’s graveled voice called out. “You gonna have to sign a release. You got a problem with that?”
    Turning, I smiled and said, “Don’t worry. That’s one thing I’m getting pretty good at.”
    After Ham came to terms on a fair price for training me, my father and I drove out to his place north of town. He lived on a state road dotted with farmhouses and scrub oaks. His place had a painted sign that looked like homemade: Rancho FuManChu. Seeing as how the bull was his prized possession, I wasn’t as surprised by the name as my father. “Naming someplace after a bull,” he mumbled and pulled into the driveway littered with crushed beer cans and rocks.
    I’d figured that my father would’ve been harder to convince than Ham, but after vowing that he wouldn’t call Heather, he rubbed his chin and shook his head. “We’re all terminal, remember,” I said.
    A black-and-brown sheep dog met us at the house. His tongue was dripping from the dry heat. “Shadow, get back here,” Ham yelled as he eased down the back deck that hung from his house. South Fork Ranch, it wasn’t. Ham’s modest block home with dusty red shutters looked more like a garage with some windows tacked on to the front. Rows of birdhouses painted in different colors of the rainbow were scattered across the deck railing. “You made these?” I asked.
    â€œYeah, gives me something to do between gigs with FuManChu. Sell ’em at the rodeos.”
    â€œHow much does a house like that one with the church steeple go for?”
    â€œDepends,” Ham said, rubbing his jaw and looking back at the birdhouse. “Between seventy-five and a hundred.”
    Ham flipped on a light switch inside the tin-roof building that housed a lawnmower and a mismatched set of two-by-fours. The smell of planting manure and gasoline met us at the door. Ham never seemed to notice when he kicked over a bucket and nails scattered across the concrete floor.
    â€œNow, this here is what they call the electric bull,” Ham said while yanking a blue, tattered blanket from the machine. Underneath, a saddle-shaped iron machine was bowed down in submission. “You ever seen one of these before?”
    I stopped short of commenting about the one I’d seen in the movie Urban Cowboy and just shook my head no.
    After Ham jumped up on the machine backwards and held up his fingers to show me how to grip the rope, I gave it a try. The ease of motion made me think of riding a baby calf, and I let my hands go free. “Yee, dogies!” I yelled. “Man, please. Is this all she’s got?”
    Without warning the machine dipped and bucked, becoming nothing less than a full-fledged bull with daggers in his side. When I tried to reach for the rope, the smile I’d been wearing was ripped from my face. Flying upward, I came falling down against the metal saddle, landing smack-dab in the middle of my groin.
    I wasn’t thrown off, really. It was more like I slid off, rolling around on the blue pad, eye to eye with Ham’s silver-tipped cowboy boots. “Ride ’em, cowboy,” Ham called out as my father leaned over the riding lawn mower, trying to hide the laughter