Golf Swing Analyzer » Golf Grip

Golf Tips for Beginners

admin — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 01:53:41 +0000

You will find that advice will fly at you from all over if you let people know that you are about to originate learning golf. Here are some general points for you to consider:

1. Go to your local golf club and introduce yourself to the local PGA Pro and tell him what you are thinking. Have a chat with him, get to know him and choose if you can characterize to him. Do you like him? Find out how he is going to residence about teaching you the game.

You want someone to inaugurate with the small, short, slow aspects of the game and slowly build up to a full swing. Do not try to jump in at the deep end. Remember when you learned to drive a car… the first lesson was not tedious the wheel of a Porsche at 100 miles per hour. Start slow, get confident, and build up.

2. Don’t beget your head with theory. You will only accumulate confused.

3. Be patient with yourself. Do not expect to go out and be Greg Norman after five hours. Learn to feel what you are doing. Don’t worry about where the ball goes or how far it goes just try to feel at ease with the new feelings that golf brings to you when you accumulate started; grip, stance, swing and so on. It is all very different when you start. Patience is the key.

4. Golf is just a game so have fun and the learning process must be fun too!

5. Don’t spend any money on golf gear until you are absolutely obvious you are going to stick with the game. Your local pro can provide all the gear you need to encourage you learn and come by started. If you rush out and buy stuff and then find the game isn’t for you… well, you’ll have some nice dust collectors to show to your friends!

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Golf Teaching Aid – Strengthening a Weak Grip

admin — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 13:51:35 +0000

For many golfers, overlooking the importance of the proper golf grip is very celebrated. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the biggest key elements in playing good golf.

A weak grip can create all sorts of problems out on the course. You’ll lose distance with your shots, and because a weak grip makes the clubface open, you’ll tend to slice or hook the ball.

So, what is a weak grip and how can I tell if that’s my problem?

Take the club in your hands and hold it like you would on the course. Are your thumbs lined up straight down the shaft? Is the “V” pointing directly up to your chin? If so, you have a weak grip.

When you have a old grip the clubface is open, and you’ll tend to try and acquire up for this imbalance by changing your swing path more to the left of target in order to factual the problem. The results are predictable. You’ll see wild hooks, slices, and topped shots.

What can I do to solve this issue?
The good news is that with a little practice, you can invent the necessary changes and correct the problem.

Here’s a tip you can try at home. Stand up and let your arms hang down. When you do this, you will notice that the palm of your hand will always face a little towards your back.

Now, take a golf club and grab it with your left hand. Once you’ve gripped the club, allow your hand to face the same way as it did when you fair let it hand down, a little bit toward your right side.

Next, be sure your club is square with the ball. Now grip it with your right hand and you should feel a big difference.

Go ahead and address the ball and take note of where the “V” is pointing. You should only be seeing two knuckles when you look down. If you examine three, your grip is too strong.

You may have to work with this for a while and practice intelligent and re-gripping once you start hitting golf balls. It may even feel a bit uncomfortable for a tiny while, but you’re unbiased overcoming an improper grip. With practice, you’ll notice a huge difference.

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McCain’s Bulldog Grip on Obama’s Pantleg is Difficult to Shake Off

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 02:29:52 +0000

The first debate went off as scheduled in Oxford, Mississippi tonight, no small feat, given John McCain’s threat to boycott the affair. Why would John McCain insist that he wasn’t going to participate, because his expertise on the economy was needed in Washington, D.C.? Could it be….oh…..SATAN! (to quote the Church Lady on SNL).

Or could it have been fear…dreary unadulterated fear. McCain must know, by now, that speaking is not his greatest strength, and he couldn’t send the garrulous lady from Alaska out there to carry the banner. He was on his own, and he was outclassed in the intelligence department. Yes, he’s been in the Senate since the earth’s crust was warm. All the more reason to blame him for this mess, not let him off the hook!

McCain, tonight, reminded me, the most, of “W” in the famous debate where he was wearing some kind of electronic device under his suit (an electronic box on his back) so that advisors could “feed” him answers to tough questions. Bush ended up looking like Quasimodo, that night, and McCain, or Aged Lizard Lips as I am going to dub him because of his habit of darting his tongue in and out (he does speak with forked tongue, so this is probably routine for the species) repeatedly, looked ill-at-ease, stressed, and, — well, weak.

I watched all of the debate, and several things struck me.

First, McCain was as nervous as the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof. After doing everything he could to evade having to appear at the debate at all, he looked uncomfortable and ill at ease and could never once look his opponent in the eye. Nor could he pronounce the name of the President of Iran. (And this is supposed to be McCain’s status of “strength? “)

I remember going to talk to a teacher at my daughter’s school once, and the man could not look me or my husband in the see. When we left the room, I said, “We’ve got to get (our child) out of that man’s class.” Why? His inability to look either of us in the contemplate, but only to view at a tile on the floor while speaking, while off-putting, gave him away as a liar. We moved our child from the class, and that child prospered elsewhere.

Obama did not attack as much as McCain did, and analysts, after the debate, were distinguished of Obama for not “going after” McCain in a more hostile, aggressive manner. I disagree.

This is exactly why I befriend the man: he is capable of disagreeing with someone (Remember Hillary in one debate where he declared her “likeable enough”? ) without attacking him or her in a hostile manner. Such forbearance is a hard skill to master. It requires great self-confidence and self-control. I know that I don’t have it and never will have it. The degree of “nice guy” projection that Obama can pull off while the feeble dog (McCain) has attached himself to his leg and is biting him through his pantleg is amazing! I wish he could bottle that and sell it. I’d buy a case! While McCain may have self-confidence, he lacks the latter quality, and his bad temper has been well documented.

My accepted mental picture of McCain’s temperament remains the cartoon that Robert Smigel did for Saturday Night Live that showed McCain banging his head against a wall, off-screen, and then returning to half-heartedly support the man (Bush) who had beaten him using Karl Rove dirty tricks like the push poll that suggested he had fathered a black baby out of wedlock. (It was, actually, McCain’s adopted Indian daughter from Mother Theresa’s orphanage, Bridget, who wife Cindy had brought home.) McCain obviously personally loathed George W. Bush, bear hug or no bear hug. And it probably didn’t help that Bush is such an idiot that he attempted to have McCain raise his hands above his head in a victory hand-hold, when McCain, due to his war injuries, cannot physically lift his arms above his head in this manner.

McCain’s personality is this: if he hates you (as he obviously does Romney) the waves of aggressive dislike roll off him like surf at the beach. There’s no disguising it, hard as he might try, and, this night, with the clenched teeth and the grimacing and the squirrelly looks, he looked like the cat that had just eaten the canary and was suffering indigestion as a result.

Obama, on the other hand, is so calm, cool and collected that the difference, musically, would be like hearing Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyrie theme (McCain) versus some icy jazz (Ramsey Lewis Trio? Pat Metheny? ) McCain is just not “cool” under pressure. He’s a hothead who crashed something like 5 planes in his pilot days. His temper is legendary. (He is even rumored to have called his wife, Cindy, the ‘c” word on a bus full of reporters while in a snit, but that seems extreme, even for McCain.)

Obama was supposed to be the lightweight in the site of foreign affairs, tonight’s announced major topic. He certainly did not seem to be spoiled to McCain in this field. He showed a grasp of the topics and insight into them, while McCain failed to acknowledge that all this greed and corruption and mismanagement happened on his (and the Republicans’ ) watch.

I often wonder if the “analysts’ are trying to influence the outcome of the election by declaring it for the guy who is really winning (as Billy Bush did on that memorable night long ago when Gore was declared to have been bested by Bush, despite much evidence that this conclusion, at best, premature, and, at worst, dead wrong.)
The second debate in Nashville, which is to focus on the economy, should be a doozie!

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Simple Steps to Learn How to Golf

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:27:23 +0000

Now that I understand golf more it is one of my favorite sports. In the beginning I had no clue what the word birdie meant. I literally thought that it was a flying bird I had know clue that it was a term musty when golfing. Now I understand and I love it, and I know that it is somebody out there that is just like I was, but I am gonna give you clues on plan the ground rules in golf.

Now don’t waste your time and money trying to hire a golf instructor it’s not necessary and the fee that is charged can be expensive. You need to learn the basics of the game and once you have the basics the game will begin to be remarkable more fun for you. Golf mainly consist of putting the little white ball in the hole yet it is so considerable more. Going to your local book store or video store, or you can go on line and purchase items that will best help you in your experience to learn to golf. Note that you will not be a pro over night playing golf. Some people such as myself have found golf to be very intimidating at first only because it seems like alot to understand. You will need a golf hand glossary first starting out because there is alot of terms that you will not be familiar with that will be used out on the course.

Brilliant how to use the clubs and what each one of them is for is something that you can start out with. The proper scheme to grip the club and swing is another thing that you will definitely need to know. If golf is a sport that you really want to play then you should buy a set of clubs and get very familiar, get a beginner golfers dvd and and put it in your player and practice and practice.

Tips and hints from your family and friends that already know how to play golf will give your beginner stages as a golfer true insight of the whole sport if that play for fun or as a career. Learning and knowing what each hole represent is key fair get focus on the game and you will see. You will love this sport unprejudiced like I do it bewitch a little time to everything down, but trust me you’ll net it if you stick around. Watch others and practice and focus on the swinging diagram and you will be able to do it. Remember that you do not have to gather a high pay instructor to show you the game of golf you can learn with cheaper products and advice from other and be a colossal beginners golfer.

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The Ear

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 05:43:46 +0000

Kelly walked the beach with her head down, scanning the sand for unbroken shells. It was early, the clouds hovering over the Atlantic, attractive orange and red as the sun began to peak out over the horizon, her approved time of the day to be out shell shopping. An occasional jogger would glide by, nod with a smile or time a brief good morning between breath cycles as they pass. On the rare occasions that she had been out here later in the day during the summer, all she’d gotten were whistles from boys and young men that hadn’t yet figured out that that is the surest way to eliminate any chance of the fantasies inside their salacious minds becoming a reality. Even when she didn’t hear the degrading cliché whistled in her direction, she felt their eyes on her, trying to dig beneath her clothes, as if there’s anything there that isn’t on every other human being of her gender. She always tried to ignore this type of attention, but it made her feel uncomfortable, like she’d been put on display. So the early mornings before going home to work with her finds had become her routine.

The mornings also provided her best finds. First crack at anything new that the tides brought in during the night, before they get trampled by children, sun worshipers, and wanna-be surfers. There were no real surfers on this side of the country. Once they actually got good enough to stand on their board for a short ride on a Carolina wave, they usually packed up and headed west for the other coast where the waves lasted longer than a handful of seconds and the curls occasionally broke above one’s knees. But this was their training ground, for the attitude as well as the sport. They’d be running towards the water, surf board tucked under one arm, and conclude in their tracks to watch Kelly walk by, undressing her with their eyes, oblivious to the glance of disgust directed at them with her possess eyes. So certainly during the summer months, Kelly stuck with the mornings when the wanna-be surfers slept off the previous evening’s beach activities and the vacationers were unruffled gathering for an over-priced breakfast at Rosie’s Cafe.

There was nothing new about New Lake, North Carolina. In fact, after living here for three years, Kelly was yet to even see a lake. But the town’s stagnant growth had been part of the appeal to her when she had first arrived. This was a place that had chosen not to move on with the rest of the world. There were no McDonald’s or Burger King or Denny’s. And even though New Lake’s continued existence depended on its annual draw of vacationers, there was no Ramada, Holiday Inn, or any other chain of any kind within the borders of the quaint, small town. The town’s forefathers had long ago voted to support out all tag name chains in order to sustain the feel of history and simplicity; however, several chains owned by some of the names unprejudiced mentioned had opened for business a few miles outside the town’s border, where the Freeway intersected the Region Highway that led to New Lake. Every now and then, some brand name company like Blockbuster or Tru-Value would come to town and try to petition a need for their particular expertise, but they never stayed long. New Lake was not going to change.

Rosie’s was the only restaurant in New Lake that opened for breakfast. Most of the others were open by noon. There were four more restaurants in town, eight small motels with names like “The Sea Breeze”, “Waterview”, and “Motel.” There were also three Bed and Breakfasts, and two gas stations with rickety old dispensers that detached showed the gallons and price on a spinning wheel and didn’t take credit cards at the pump. There was Missy’s Hair Salon, Bob’s Hardware where you could also rent beach supplies and surf boards by the day, and Crystal’s Market where townies could still rep credit if they came up a little short at the checkout. There was an eighteen-hole putt-putt golf course in bad need of repair, and an adjoining small run track lined with worn tractor wheels to keep the kids and the go-carts on the pavement. The only theater in town had just one substantial screen and only showed second runs of films, shortly before they were released on video. All were locally owned and family run, some going on their fourth generation.

Fresh Lake consisted of little more than 5000 year-round residents, but the population more than doubled from the beginning of June to the end of August with a constant onslaught of ever revolving vacationers. Money was tight in the off-season, but throughout the summer, everyone worked and usually made enough to get them from one season to the next. Kelly made things out of seashells and gave them to Rosie and Missy and several other local shops that were willing to attach them on note in their stores and then sell them to admiring vacationers. It was purely a consignment deal, Kelly’s take being 75%. Most of her creations sold for less than ten dollars, but she had to work very hard during the off-season to keep up with the summer demand of her trinkets.

Rosie had been encouraging Kelly to open up a little knick-knack shop of her own to sell them in, but Kelly didn’t want the responsibilities and headaches and worries that usually accompanied ownership of a business. She didn’t like the selling part, just the creating. Her creations sold like hot cakes during the towns prosperous months and every June she was ready with hundreds of little shell configurations that she had diligently put together for that purpose. She made tiny shell people and shell animals and shell furniture, carefully gluing tiny shells together to form their shapes and designs, mounting them on small blocks of driftwood. She made shell necklaces and bracelets and earrings. Her best seller was the simplest idea of all, shell bookends. Whenever she found a particularly large, heavier wrap-around shell (technically called a ficidae, but Kelly wasn’t interested in what the different shells were called, just what they looked like and that they were intact) she would glue it to a varnished wood mount and voila, a book end. If she found two that were very similar in size and color, even better, a set of bookends. Vacationers bought her bookends as quick as she could procure them and put them together. She didn’t make a lot of money, but it effect food on the table, paid the rent, and most importantly, it kept her busy.

It was the beginning of June and the vacationers had just started their annual invasion of the tiny ocean-side town. The seashells seem to be slim picking this morning and Kelly’s mind wandered as she slowly scoped the area on the north side of the beach near a natural rocky border, an state where she usually found her best shells. The vacationers tended to stick to the southern side where it was all sand and water.

Kelly was alone in the world. She was an only child and her parents had been killed by a drunk driver on her nineteenth birthday. Two years later she had married. Her husband, a young Modern York City attorney fresh out of grad school with a very promising future, had been shot and killed when refusing to relinquish the keys to their original car to a mall parking lot mugger two weeks after they’d returned from their honeymoon. After the funeral, Kelly had taken the Greyhound south with no particular destination in mind, just a strong desire to forget and to start over. Somehow she had landed in New Lake. It was opposite everything she had experienced in her life in the city and felt it would be a superb place to start a new life of solitude. She didn’t possess a car. She bought a bicycle for any treks too far to walk, but the town was small enough that her bike stayed locked up in the garage for the most part. Three blocks from the beach, she had rented out half a duplex from Rosie, who lived in the other half and had also become her best friend.

It had been Rosie that had given Kelly her first job as a waitress when she had decided to stay in New Lake. Waiting tables for the locals in the off-season hadn’t been so bad, but once the vacationers started rolling in during her first summer in Current Lake, she knew she wasn’t carve out for the job. Rosie had agreed but was still willing to keep her on if she had wanted to stay, but Kelly only continued waiting tables long enough for Rosie to find a replacement. She had already started toying with seashells as a hobby to pass the time and occupy her mind, piecing them together into exiguous figurines and stringing them into jewelry, and it had been Rosie’s suggestion to display them for sale in a glass container by the cash register. Three years later, it was hard to walk into any place of business in New Lake and not accumulate some of Kelly’s creations displayed for sale somewhere within the shop.

She hated thinking about her past, what might have been, and Rosie was the only one she had ever told her depressing record to. She didn’t want people feeling sorry for her, wasn’t comfortable with their pity. To most who asked, though thankfully few ever did, she simply explained that she was from a big city and had desired a change of scenery.

Walking the beach usually helped her fight off the melancholy that occasionally tried to invade her thoughts. She found a larger, unbroken shell and put it to her ear, listening for the echoes of the ocean that had brought it ashore. A simple pleasure for a simple life. Feeling a little better with a good find, she carefully placed the shell in her tote aid and continued her search. Another shell caught her eye and she picked it up, wiping away the caked wet sand. As she flipped it over in her hand, she immediately dropped it back into the sand as though it had burned her fingers.

At first she thought she had found a severed ear, but it felt no different than any other shell she had ever picked up as she had brushed away the sand. Regaining her composure, she stooped over the shell for a closer survey without touching it. It looked like none she had seen before. She could tell that it wasn’t actually a severed ear, but its resemblance to one was uncanny. Even the color had a fleshy pink tone to it. She flipped it over with her toe, still hesitant to pick it back up again. The smooth, rounded back side looked like any other seashell. She toed it over again in the sand. The hollow side had the same ridges as a human ear and swirled into a dark, exiguous indention in its center. Tentatively, she picked the shell back up and, as she always did with each new find, do it to her ear.

* * * * *

The sun was high in the sky when Kelly awoke. A boy, no more than seven, was standing a few feet away staring at her curiously.

“Jake! Accumulate over here! Don’t go bothering other people, now. Come back here right now!”

The boy turned to the voice of his mother who was lying on a blanket forty yards south, a book resting open on her chest. “Her face is all red!” he exclaimed loudly, as he trotted succor towards his mother.

“Well, that’s why we use sunning lotion,” she said as the boy approached. But the boy was just a few feet away from his mother by then, her say had been discretely lowered, and Kelly briefly wondered how she had heard that reply from so far away.

Still shaking the cobwebs out of her mind, she tried to make sense of why she was waking up on the beach. She wasn’t a sun worshipper. Her skin was attractive and burned easily. She loved the beach and the ocean, but she never stayed out too long for fear of turning into a lobster. The sky was filled with large, white clouds shading the beach, the sun playing cover and seek tedious them. A cool perambulate came in off the ocean running its fingers through her long auburn hair. Looking at the placement of the sun, it had to be almost noon. She calculated that she had been asleep for more than three hours and had probably burned the side of her face that had been exposed. She glanced worriedly at her left shoulder that would have been equally exposed to the sun during her nap, and was surprised to see that it looked fine. A diminutive extra color, but certainly not burned. She touched the left side of her cheek. No wound. No burn.

Brushing the sand from the right side of her face and out of her hair, off her honest arm, and both her legs, Kelly stood up and tried to remember falling asleep on the beach, but she couldn’t even remember lying down. She’d been looking for shells when…when what? It took a moment’s pondering, and then she remembered. She’d found the exclusive looking ear-shaped shell. But that was all she could remember. Next was the boy standing over her, staring at her.

She looked around in the sand next to where she had been lying for the odd seashell, but didn’t see it anywhere. She picked up the tote bag that carried her morning finds and dumped it out into the sand, thinking maybe she had dropped it in before she had fallen asleep. It wasn’t there.

Shrugging it off, deciding it really didn’t matter anyway, she piled her morning’s take back into the tote back and started the three block slither home. Dropping the tote bag on the kitchen table where she did most of her work, she went to the refrigerator. She suddenly felt very hungry, as though her morning nap had drained most of her energy. Usually she skipped lunch, not because she was worried about keeping her trim figure, but merely because she wasn’t a great eater. A light breakfast and a healthy dinner was her routine. But when she opened the refrigerator, she spied the hamburger she had been thawing for dinner and her mouth was practically watering for it. She pulled out the hamburger and placed it on the counter while turning on the stove. She grabbed a frying pan out of the cupboard and put it on the burner. She opened the package of hamburger and started molding the meat into a patty with her hands. The scent of the fresh meat made her mouth water even more. She raised the raw patty to her nose and closed her eyes as if beholding the unusual smell of a succulent rose for the first time. She took a mammoth bite. Somewhere in her mind, she knew she should be disgusted by this, but instead she took another bite of the uncooked hamburger. She belief she’d never tasted anything better and before the stove had even warmed, she had devoured the entire patty as well as the rest of the raw meat from the pound package she had pulled out of the refrigerator.

She stood there in the kitchen for a moment, frozen as though in a trance, as her eyes shifted from the clean frying pan to the empty cardboard bowl that the hamburger had been packaged in. Had she really just eaten an entire pound of raw hamburger? Her mind refused to accept it as fact. She looked at her hands. They were sticky and smeared with remnants of raw hamburger and suddenly she felt sick to her stomach. She ran to the bathroom and saw her reflection in the mirror. Raw hamburger was smeared all over her lips and cheeks. The left side of her face was bright red as though it had been severely burned during her nap on the beach. Her brown eyes looked wild and wide mixed with panic and disgust. She leaned over the toilet, mercurial opened the lid, and threw up before passing out on the floor.

Kelly dreamed that she was in a forest, hunting. She could smell her prey in the wind. It was not far now and she knew it could sense her presence. She could smell its alarm. She was crouched in the tall weeds, silently closing in on the rabbit. Then she leaped and was on it, biting instinctively into its neck, sinking her long, provocative teeth into its squirming body as it place up a useless final fight. She drained the life from it and then she was flying. She had a bird’s eye view of a field, a hawk’s eye view of the gophers running in and out of their homes in the ground. Swooping down, she snagged a fat one, crushing it with her powerful talons before it even knew what had interrupted its day and she soared off into the sky again in search of an aerie to feast on her catch. She felt exhilarated, alive, invincible, and she heard herself roar. Now she was running chunky tilt on all four legs, chasing a family of deer. The youngest one stopped for the briefest moment to turn and look for its stalker, giving her just the extra second she needed to pounce on it, snapping its neck in one bite. The blood smelled fresh and tasted sweet. Then she was in the water, swimming through a school of small fish, her gaping mouth collecting all that was in her path.

A fly woke Kelly up. She was lying on the floor, still in the bathroom at the unfavorable of the toilet. She couldn’t see the fly walking across her cheek and onto her lower lip, but she felt it. And she could hear it. Before she consciously knew what she was doing, she snapped her mouth open and the sail was trapped as quick as a frog snagging it with its long tongue. As she swallowed, another wave of nausea hit her and she got to her knees and leaned over the bowl as if she was going to throw up again, but nothing came up.

Confused, sore from lying on the hard tiled floor, she tried to pull herself together. If it hadn’t been for the flit and the dried raw meat stuck to her lips and chin, she’d have tried to convince herself that it had all been part of the disgusting dream she’d had. She stripped off her clothes and climbed into the shower. The water felt too hot and she turned the knob to the left, unsatisfied until the knob wouldn’t turn any farther and the water was icy cold.

Still unable to understand anything that was happening to her, she dried herself and got dressed. She needed to see a doctor. Lying out on the beach in the sun must have made her delusional. Looking into the mirror, she noticed her whole face was now a bright red and she decided she needed to survey the doctor immediately.

She’d only been to Dr. Fendler’s office once, shortly after arriving in Modern Lake. He had given her a prescription to help her sleep at night as she was still having danger at the time coping with the recent tragedies in her life. She hadn’t told him of all that had happened, but merely that she was not getting any sleep. He operated out of his home, living upstairs and working downstairs. The nearest hospital was thirty miles away in Morehead City. He was a kindly old man, semi-retired, but all the townies went to him when not feeling well. She got onto her bicycle and headed towards his home office. A dog came bounding towards her barking as she biked past its home territory on the street. She turned the bike towards it, leaping off as she reached the grass and charged it. The dog, terrorized as powerful as she was by her sudden aggression, stopped wagging his tail and only had time for a whimper before she was on it, snapped its neck with her hands as her teeth sunk into it, all in a single fluid motion, unprejudiced like she remembered doing in her dream.

It was like she was on auto-pilot. She knew what she was doing but could stop gnawing on the dead dog no easier than one could stop their absorb heart from beating at will. She was so disgusted she wanted to throw up again, but she continued to rip and tear at the dead dog’s meaty throat, licking the blood from her lips between bites. She thought she was going insane.

A man appeared in the doorway of the house next door to the dog’s domain. He yelled something at her but she didn’t listen. She dropped the dog, forgetting about her bicycle lying in the street and started running towards the beach. The wind blew relieve her hair. She felt something twitch on the left side of her face and instinctively brought a hand up to wipe away whatever was there. As she reached her left ear, she felt it move under her fingers. She touched it and realized she could only feel the touch with her fingers, her ear felt nothing at all. She pulled at the lobe and it retracted from her grip. If she didn’t know that it was impossible, she would have sworn it had shifted away from her grasp.

Just as she was about to accept the fact that she was truly going insane, she remembered the chain of events from the morning’s promenade on the beach. She remembered finding the ear-shaped seashell. She remembered putting it to her ear to listen for the ocean. And then she remembered passing out. She realized at once what had happened. Somehow that ear-shell had been more than a seashell. It had been a living entity. It had attached itself to her head, replacing her ear with itself, and had planted roots into her brain. She would have laughed at such a lunatic idea before today, but in her mind, she knew that was exactly what had happened. She had to get rid of it. She had to get the doctor to amputate her ear. It was the only way and she knew she was right.

Running down the beach, Dr. Fendler’s beach-front home office only another two blocks ahead, she saw a young girl playing in the sand with her plastic shovel and bucket. Her course changed and she couldn’t stop herself. She was running straight for the girl, fresh blood, unique meat, overwhelming her mind.

No! This isn’t happening, she screamed at herself. She was going to attack this little girl and didn’t think she had enough control over herself to end. “Run! Get out of here! Go!” she started yelling at the girl as she charged.

The girl looked up from the bucket she had been busily filling with sand and smiled innocently, giving Kelly a shy wave. She didn’t understand. Her five year old mind couldn’t steal the approaching threat for what it was. She wasn’t going to move. Kelly was going to do to this itsy-bitsy girl the same thing she had just done to the dog, snap her neck and have a taste of her flesh and blood. Running full tilt, Kelly purposely tripped up her feet sending herself flying face first into the sandy beach twenty feet before reaching the little girl. By now the miniature girl was figuring out that this wasn’t the procedure adults usually acted and she started to salvage up to accelerate away. Kelly pushed herself back to her feet and continued her pursuit.

“Gloria!”

It was the mother. She had just noticed her daughter running towards her, away from a madwoman who appeared to be trying to wobble her down. The mother began running towards her daughter.

One part of Kelly’s mind thought that was fine, all the more blood to drink and all the more meat to eat. The girl was almost within her reach. Another couple of seconds and her need would be sated. The other share of Kelly’s mind, the fragment that couldn’t understand what the hell was happening, the part that was terrified beyond conception and seemed to be watching her own actions as though from a different body, did the only thing it could think of that had worked before, if only for a moment, and crossed up her running legs causing her to prefer another dive into the sand. As she pushed against the ground to get back to her feet, her left hand fell on a large stone in the sand and her fingers wrapped around it as she stood. As she started running at the child again, she brought the stone up and smashed it into the left side of her skull, aiming for her ear. She missed and her enjoy blood started running down her face from the gash in her skull just above the ear. With one hand she reached out for the girl, just out of reach from her finger tips. Another step, maybe two and she’d be on her. The rock came smashing against the side of her head again, this time knocking her back to the sand. She pounded a third time, then a fourth, distinct she was killing the ear. She pounded once more with all of her might and the world went dark.

The little girl ran into her mother’s arms, tears now streaking her shocked face. Her mother hugged her tight, burying her face in her shoulder so she couldn’t watch the madwoman stoning herself to death with a rock. When the woman in the sand stopped inviting, she backed away, slowly at first, then turned and ran as fast as she could towards town, leaving her purse and blanket forgotten in the sand.

* * * * *

The event didn’t originate the news. The police hadn’t believed the mother when she had told them that Kelly had been planning on murdering her child. Nor did they believe the aged man when he told them Kelly had killed his neighbor’s dog with her bare hands before starting to feast on her extinguish. That type of thing impartial didn’t happen in New Lake and they certainly didn’t need that kind of publicity if they were to survive the off-season. Her death was labeled a suicide brought on by severe depression once Rosie had informed Dr. Fendler and the sheriff of Kelly’s recent tragic past.

Later that evening, unprejudiced before the sun was dipping back out of sight for the night, a limited boy was sitting next to his Dad on the beach, watching the waves roll in. He had a bucket full of collected shells sitting on his other side. He noticed a shell of a slightly different color, kind of a pretty pink, peaking out of the sand at his feet. He dug it out and rolled it around in his shrimp hand.

“Look, Daddy,” the boy said. “This one looks like an ear!”

Not taking his eyes from the hypnotic motion of the evening waves, his father chuckled. “Well, you should certainly be able to hear the ocean good from inside that one then.”

“Yeah, I bet you’re fair” the boy replied excitedly, as he brought the oddly shaped shell up to his own ear to give it a listen.

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