“Isn’t this place just perfect?”
Jan was talking to herself as she wandered around her new home. He hadn’t moved from the lounge.
No! It isn’t. It’s fucking yours! Your house! Your money bought the fucking house! Yours!! Everything is yours!! It will always be yours! God!! I FUCKING HATE THIS!!!
His thought induced tantrum died down. He took a breath and thought of puppies. Eddie liked puppies.
“… There’s a little green frog swimming in the water a little green frog doing what he ought-a … Alright all you gladers… there are 15 species of frogs and snakes in this here swamp and the most deadly of all is Captain Dwayne’s trouser-snake responsible for breaking hearts and busting up trailer parks on both sides of the Okeefenokee. This here’s injun land compadres. You’re on an Indian Reservation and the spirit of the hawk and the water dragon oversees these waterways. Now you calls em gators but we calls em draaaaagons… and if you let old captain Dwayne rev up this here rusty metal wildebeest to 150 miles per hour we’ll just see if we can rustle up some draaaagons for ya … ” [vrooooom!]
I, the most hated and reviled, the duly convicted mass murdering, monster calls and he, the newly anointed great red, white, and blue America white hope, comes to me like I knew he would. He enters with a mouthful of self-serving, homogenized bullshit.
“You’re just one insignificant member of a tiny, marginalized extremist group. You stockpiled weapons and hid in the shadows of normalcy and plotted your cowardly attacks. Death is a reward for your kind. Life without parole is a more fitting punishment, and it robs you of your martyr status.”
Like the agonizing drip of a faulty faucet, they file into the church of my youth. They wear black clothing and looks of pity. There are many of them and they mean nothing to me.
I sit far away from the others, perched in the pew like a crooked angel on top of a spruce tree, uncomfortable and temporary. The austere wooden seat is familiar from the Christmases and Easters I spent here, the two days of the year my mother thought it important to be Christian. Two too many, if you ask me.
For a pure moment trucker Gene Denport had felt above it all, above dawn at its tatters, above the voice coming at him from day’s edge. King of the throne he was, king of the hill, the road having slammed under him all night long. The 455 horses loose in the Volvo 670’s D-13 truck engine sounded their endless music, hummed under his seat bottom, talked lightly to his wrists; the way a woman might have it, he’d often thought, when the road took the edge off his mind. (Controlled rampage, the voice had said long before he used to think about owning a rig like this Volvo, Earth-mover, star-hauler, space traveler. Piling the superlatives on top of each other would be done at endless ease.)
House-big, highly modified for cruising, like a humdinger Lincoln Town Car in a sense, the Volvo 670 went over the crown of the hill.
He froze on the edge of the seat.
Continue reading “Long Haul Driver by Tom Sheehan – Adult Content”
The door was unlocked and he was taken into the room.
“We’re right outside if you need us Doc!”
The two guards watched as he sat and then they left.
‘A judge tells a condemned man he’s going to hang next week, but he won’t know when until the hangman comes a-knockin’. The judge only says one thing, that it’ll be a surprise.’ The man with dark rimmed spectacles pauses to smoke, his hair is black and slick with Brylcreem.
‘So, when he’s locked up and waiting to be hung, this guy thinks to himself: “This shit ain’t fair, they have to tell me when I’m going to die. I’ve got rights.” So he decides to work it out. He figures if hasn’t been hung by Thursday, he can’t be killed on Friday because it wouldn’t be a surprise, he’d know it was coming.
“I blame that Lord Longford muppet. All he did was encourage you do- gooder visitor pricks! You have sprouted up like a cancer since that old fuck died.”
James stopped, “Now this was an agreement! People know that I am here!”
The two men nodded and shook hands.
“Please sit. What do I call you?”
“Dymphna.”
“I’m Terry.”
“Pleased to finally meet you.”
Terry wondered about the grin, “…Has everything been done to your satisfaction?”
Dymphna looked around the empty office and nodded.
They call him Stumpy. Not his mum, she calls him by his real name, Ryan, but the others call him Stumpy. Nobody remembers where the name came from. It’s not as if he’s particularly short and he has all his limbs intact. The name seems to have grown around him and there it is.
His limbs are intact but his mind, well his mind is a different thing. If the kids who teased him had possessed a modicum of intelligence it could have been that they realised his brain is stumped but that’s probably a bridge too far for them.
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