The Real Gold

  That's right. I found a solid gold bullet. They are used for killing werewolves, and sidehill gougers, and dreams of success. It turns out that five hundred years of silver bullets have caused lycanthropes to build up an immunity that can only be circumvented by the use of golden ammunition. Someone must have missed, as the bullet is intact, which means he or she was probably eaten after the stray shot plunged into the icy salt water of Penobscot Bay. This was a propitious find for me, due to the recent increase in local murders attributed to cryptozoological anomalies, and the fact that I can reuse it for self defense.

  Ok, so it's not gold. It's copper-coated lead. But I thought it was gold and got very excited for a few seconds. Physically excited. I mean, almost erotically excited. Gold! It's not gold. It looks like gold. Then I looked around at the abandoned winter beach I was detecting. The frigid waters rolling up onto the expansive, shell-strewn, nearly frozen sand of the shoreline--interrupted occasionally by cruel outcroppings of the ancient, weather battered rocks and boulders that define coastal Maine. The awful wolf moon howling in the sky and twitching on the uneasy salt sea surface. The dwindling timeless twilight of a New England February dusk settling around me, and I remember why I'm here, and what I'm really looking for, and it isn't golden bullets.