I wondered where the wonder went. Another bottle of wine, another moment gone, carelessly misplaced along with the forgotten tomorrows. I picked at the bandage above my eye.
I thought of the millions of self-help books I had read.
“Allow yourself to go to a different place, a better place, in times of difficulties.”
“Embrace your inner child.”
“Breathe.”
“Be kind to yourself.”
“Stay positive.”
She knew from the moment that the notion entered her mind that it was surely a terrible one. The odds were too high that he would fully transform. It seemed these days that the slightest annoyance and the stiff orange hair the color of an emblazoned sun would streak the ridge of his spine and he was all claws and jagged teeth. He bit a boy on the playground last week. A smaller boy who’d done nothing more than deny Wallace the privilege of destroying his small diligent sandcastle. It was like watching a Godzilla movie if Godzilla were an outraged baboon decapitating beach condos with shoddy foundations instead of a giant lizard. And then they had all spent three hours staring at the sterile screaming walls of the ER while both boys were tested for rabies.
Roscoe Griffin, sheltered by the corner of the three story windowless building, waited for the procession of cars to begin drifting into the parking lot. Morning was just breaking and the autumn sun converted the chemical fumes coming from the stacks on top of the building into a mosaic of colors. Colorful though the fumes were, they held a deadly future. The smell, as the fumes drifted down, made Roscoe’s already nauseated stomach even worse.
Continue reading “Where the Air Tastes Like Copper by Lee Conrad”
I’m one lucky son-of-a-gun. I’m not boasting or complaining. I didn’t create my good luck. It was something that just dropped on me. I’m not talking about that fool’s gold good luck of winning the lottery or a bet on the Kentucky Derby. I’m talking about the real meal deal like when you bend down to pick up a dime, and there’s a hail of bullets hitting the wall where your head was seconds ago. My kind of good fortune steers me out of harm’s way, and when I do enter the danger zone, I leave pretty much intact.
I was driving at 85. The night was darker than it should have been. There was nothing on the road, not in the windshield, not in the mirrors. I was so sure that we were not coming back. That we would go into the dark and then never appear at the other side of the road. She lay on the back seat staring at me like a voodoo doll. Oh, and she was dead. Did I tell you she was dead? She was. The wind whistled past me through the window like running away from something. The trees beside the road ran back. I looked at her once and she blinked. I turned back and focused on the road.
Justin and the campesino, Santos, spent the morning hiking deep into a ravine, carefully picking their way down narrow goat paths and occasionally chopping through vines and thickets. Now they were at the bottom of the ravine and sitting on a boulder that sloped into a stream snaking around gray rocks and lush vegetation. Santos was tired, a man who had lived well past fifty, pushing sixty maybe; it was difficult to tell. He had been evasive about his age, gesturing with his callused hand and saying, “Viejo. Old.” The younger man Justin had stated boldly without shame that he was twenty-seven.
We have every now and then done things a wee bit differently. This is one of those times.
So with that in mind, I hand you over to Diane who will explain more about the story and why we are publishing it.
On occasion we receive submissions that miss the guidelines by miles but for whatever reason they catch our attention and demand an outing. We thought that this story Sawdust was in that category so here is a little extra treat for our readers.
Diane
Continue reading “Week 98 – Sawdust, Alterations And What’s Missing?”
In the bedroom, upstairs, front corner, blind amid the toss of linens he had known intimately for seven long years, in touch with passing traffic and summer conversations when the windows were open, Jack Derrick lay in the middle of sound, in the middle of darkness. His left leg, or most of it, set upon by diabetes and the perfection of the surgeon, was elsewhere; his right hand was stained by nicotine, the index finger and close companion yellowed as shoe leather, and those fingernails bore fragments of that same deep stain. Gray, thin hair, most of it about his ears except for one thatch above his forehead as if an odd bird, at length, would roost there, drooped like fallen stalk. The stubble of his beard sprouted as off-white as an old field of corn waiting the last reaper.
Nathan Bellamy hunched over a cardboard box on the floor of his bedroom closet. He sorted through a stack of yellowed papers: insurance policies for cars long sold; records of mortgage payments that Loraine filed away during their first years of marriage. They’d lived in the house on a quiet street in Pacific Grove for more than four decades. Nathan felt her spirit in every room that he’d cleaned out, even in the musty closet with its dark corners filled with old shoes and empty suitcases.
Eric slammed the fridge door in disgust. It had definitely gone. He’d been looking forward to that can of cherry cola all morning and somebody had taken it. It was the audacity of it that really got to him; who would be so brazen?
Clutching his plastic clip-top box of ham sandwiches closer to him, he slunk back to his desk, eyeing up his co-workers with suspicion as he went.
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