The walk to Salvatore’s was a little over six miles across town, and Eddie Brown had decided to wear his only suit and a pair of pleather cap-toed Oxfords to the interview. His mother had told him that people didn’t get a second chance to make a first impression, and he badly needed what Salvatore’s had to offer.
The rental car’s radio faded to static right as the interview started to get interesting. Of course, Nadine thought. The way inspiration had eluded her lately, she would expect nothing less.
I’m out target shooting in the country when I hear the gravel crunch and somebody yells “Hey asshole, what are you doing?” Without thinking, I turn and shoot him. Well, shit, nobody should sneak up on somebody and scare him like that. Before, I can check him out; somebody comes running up with a handgun and screams “You shot my brother.” I turn around and shoot him too. Him carrying the handgun, I figure it is self defense. The first guy was sort of an accident.
Jim Elm knew there were no such things as happy endings. Someone lives, someone dies, someone carries on.
She pulled out the Nuclear option and tossed it on the table like the Ace of Spades.
Nothing to do but bluff.
He then called her back and said “Let’s not ruin three lives here. Stick to the current agreement. ”
“Ok, but you better make your payments every month. Get a job at Starbucks.”
“Yes. I will,” he replied not knowing exactly how he was going to do that.
And that was it.
Henry’s knuckles turned white as he clutched the scarred armrests, listening. The time has come, he thought. The oakwood throne suddenly seemed little more than a pile of firewood.
But the sound died in the halls.
Henry eyed the heavy old door. It looked forbidding, yet it let everyone come and go. Everyone but him, and him only.
It just sort of came out.
They were sitting on the couch. Dave was watching and laughing at a screwball comedy where, during their honeymoon, the hero and his wife get their signals crossed. She winds up in Bermuda at a four-star hotel while he finds himself with the Inuit eating muskox somewhere near Greenland. Somehow, they reunite.
The worms are hook shaped, tiny translucent segments with black antennas and bulbous brown eyes, specks floating.
I can see them in the corner of my eyes, wiggling and multiplying.
They have to come out.
The doctor thinks I’m crazy. I tell him about the worms squirming away in my eye, swimming in my tear ducts. I see them, whether my eyes are open or closed. I feel them, the same way I could feel a bug in my ear, a spider in my mouth. The relentless whisper of antenna against my eyelid makes it twitch nonstop.
I stared at the black homespun dress, large bonnet, prayer cap, and starched white apron that covered her from neck to ankles. She held the hand-lettered sign that read, IOWA. I pulled off onto the shoulder. “You’re not from around here, are you?” I asked.
In this year of unrest, Daniel Luis was sharing a small house with his mother, sister, his pregnant wife, and daughter. He needed work.
“You will be the new janitor at the Municipal Theater,” his uncle said, “It pays little, but the work is easy. Clean up after every performance. Do your work and be invisible, and maybe in time, I can find you something better. Here is the key to the door. They say the theater is haunted, so wear your crucifix.”
Continue reading “Theatrical Spirits by Kilmeny MacMichael.”
