Down the street the girl with bright hair ran. She’s running still, in her own way. Trying to avoid the thing she was made to do.
It’s been years, and nobody knows. Except for her.
Hair streaming in the sun.
It reminds her of blood. She’d like to wash it away.
Slowly scrub the stain.
‘Salt.’ Granny would insist. ‘Use salt.’
There’s salt in her tears. It’s not the same.
Yeah, it’s a new blind, built it last week. Saturday. Out all day. Phyl made me a sandwich for dinner. Ham and swiss. Said she was tired. She gets tired a lot lately.
Yeah. I heard you stopped by.
You could have kept that longer, if you needed it. But thanks for bringing it back.
Yeah, you take something of somebody’s, you return it the way it was when you took it. I know, sometimes you can’t, but still…
i
I met Joey Schaffalinski at an alcohol treatment centre in Fresno, though that’s not important. Not yet, anyway. He had one of those put-upon faces. Like life had beaten him with a sack of hammers for his first few years and when you got to know him, you understood why. You’d have the same face if you were playing his hand.
In any other time, in any other place Joey would have been one of those “one in a million” babies that Fox News like to close on after injecting Mid-America with its nightly dose of fear, if it wasn’t for the fact that there was another… right beside him in fact. Rather than see the odds of two children born at the same time both with Adenosine Deaminase deficiency SCID, as a one in a million X a million, the news outlets ignored it.
Continue reading “Joey Schaff (AKA Genes and Seafood) by Dave Louden”
This is without a shadow of a doubt the most disgusting, pig sty of a tattoo shop I have ever had the displeasure of visiting. It’s in the bathroom of an abandoned Shell station about ten miles off Highway 99 just south of Fresno. It reeks of urine and feces and is littered with used condoms and equally used sanitary napkins.
The walls are smeared with what looks like dried feces and graffiti written in the same substance. I hold my breath as I address the two thin, bearded white men in immaculate white doctor jackets with name tags reading, Alphonse and Dupree. Despite the doctor jackets, they are somewhat lacking in bedside manner.
I was baaaawwwwn. In a one way cul DE saaaaaac.
“Is that actually possible?”
“Is what possible?”
“A cul-de-sac being one way. How would you ever leave?”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
I set my beer on the bar and give Frank the look.
Jack drives and I give direction. He stops at a smaller war grave cemetery in the countryside around Ypres. Large trees grow here and there, two by the entrance. He puts his hand on one of them and looks up along the trunk. He caresses the bark and repeats it on the other tree. Once in a while a car drives by, bird song comes from the tree tops and if you listen carefully you can hear the canal behind the bunker. We pass a few graves on the way to the bunker. Despite the daylight the inside darkens quickly, after only a few meters. Four small rooms, too small for Jack to stand up. He strokes the smooth mold. I also do. He closes his eyes towards the inner wall and breathes in and out. In and out. I step outside. A small brook flows below, not deep at all and it probably risks freezing every winter. Jack still kneels in the darkness. I call for him and he gets to his feet. He stops by the bulletin board outside. In Flanders Fields. Jack reads the poem by John McCrae and stands silent in front of it for a minute. He looks out over the thousands of poppies and says:
That was a person, right? That was a man.
Minka’s knee is already way too close to the steering wheel as she brakes hard. The car stops just short of a short tree. She knows that tree. Coca.
Shit.
She looks forward, not into the rear-view, because behind her is the curve. There’s no seeing around curves.
She hears thumping, dull, rhythmic. It’s her right hand smacking the map next to her, again-again, crinkling all of Colombia down into the seat cushion.
Shit.
Continue reading “You Don’t Say No to Ituango by Amanda McTigue”
For years after I retired I couldn’t change out of the freshly pressed suit that I always relied on to get me through the day, looking and feeling the best I could be. The only things that changed were the fit and the age of my hands when I looked down on them. Theresa had died a few years after I left the company and as such that left no-one but our sons Samuel and Beckett to tell me if my trousers were too long over the tops of my shoes. I was always indecisive about things and other people’s opinions mattered to me more than they should. Back when I was younger it was okay if you could feel the drag of the cotton of a tailor-made trouser leg way longer than it ever should have been behind you as you walked those long, glass framed, shimmering hallways looking over all of that success. I missed looking over it.
“We’re really so sorry Craig. She was an amazing woman.”
“The best of the best.”
“She was so sweet, so gentle. We all loved her.”
“Amy was one of a kind, she didn’t deserve for this to…”
“I broke your pie dish.”
He wanted the whisky on his breath. The cigar that he had just smoked lingered, he was happy about that. It would remember both those details.
He considered sexuality. He considered power. He didn’t give a fuck about either. It wasn’t as simple as that.
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