The German was nineteen or twenty and had bright blue eyes. He’d taken some grenade shrapnel in the stomach and he kept moaning, rolling around like it was the end of the world. It wasn’t a mortal wound, or even a bad one. Just bloody. The German spoke some English and between moans he kept looking at one or the other of the Americans.
The note reads:
‘Dear Garbage man, Please make sure you get ALL the trash out of the can.
Thanks! The Brewsters’
I stand there just holding the damp piece of paper. The A-L-L scrawled in all capital letters and underlined. The exclamation mark after the ‘Thanks.’ I look over at the white house nestled among the pruned Spanish oaks and ball the note up. The bathwater rain makes rivulets of space between the white maggots humping up my arms as I hoist the cans in the back of the truck. They feel muscular and clean inching their way under the cuffs of my gloves. My back burns, and the smell of cat urine puffs out of a half-tied bag as it smacks the bottom of the compactor. I grind my teeth and think about how Mrs. Brewster’s wrists must be so silky and warm. About how her perfume would just touch the air around my nostrils as I bit into her heavy breast. A drop of my sweat would fall in the deep divot between her collar bones and how she would moan about how strong I am. How powerful my arms are. I pound the side of the truck and give my driver the thumbs up. Next house.
Lianne skipped from her brother’s room. She was bored and left him with his trains. He was fixated with them. She really did think boys were stupid.
Jake steps into the hall and comes across a staircase that he had never noticed before. The staircase leads to a suite of lavishly furnished rooms. This old house is grander than he had known.
It happened in the town that had no butter, a town where little popcorn was sold and nearly every person was thin. Most people living there liked to run. On a snappy dawn some of them ran marathon distances without breaking a sweat, climbing often into the lower ranges of the Smokies. If butter was in town, the butter packers brought it, illegally.
Well here we are at Week 184, it’s a follow on from 183 but it won’t be half as intelligent!
I’ve written quite a few times about double standards. This irony keeps popping up in life and it gives us a lot of ideas and things to write about.
Continue reading “Week 184 – Drinking Alone, Large People And Testicle Mutilation”
He often told his wife about his twenty-first birthday. He and his father had sat under a bright red canopy on a dark, starless night. They were at some nameless Chinese restaurant in one of the metropolitan corners of Atlanta, just a few blocks south of Terminal Parkway, where commercial airplanes stitched long blinking lines across the sky. A half block away, he remembered, a street cleaner inched across the asphalt, brushes spinning in a lopsided, broken rhythm.
Some decades ago the bishop of Evona discovered himself to be the victim of what in his opinion was a monstrous deception.
He didn’t feel the same way about being hurt that you or I would, that’s for sure. He treated each injury as an adventure.
“See this slash running down my leg? Got that last week at the demolition derby. Sailed clean across the hood. Just got caught on the tiniest edge of twisted metal buckled down from the roof. Gonna leave a beautiful scar, isn’t it?”
It’s sort of hard to put into words.
Well, it happened a long time ago. You’ll think I’m wasting your time. But I’ve been thinking about it, going over and over it. And it means something.
literally stories 