A gust of wind blew around the outside of the house as Mike pried the bottle cap off his fourth beer with his teeth. It was a trick one of his old classmates had taught him—a trick he used to use to impress women in bars, but now, domesticated, he only used when he couldn’t find the bottle opener.
Continue reading “You’ll Let the Storm In by Nicholas Siegel”
Tommy lay in the middle of the train tracks looking down between the railroad ties. It was fifty-feet to the shallow river that ran underneath the trestle. A low growl made the wood and metal shudder.
Eight years locked in bed by an accident, his wife’s life an obscene penalty, Peirce Keating was left with only imagination. And little hope, though today might prove different. He loved his wife May, the sea, and bright company. Old pal Gary Mitman was this day’s gift, this day where hope might gain one foothold. That and viewing mirrors he controlled by head movements.
“Fran,” Beth says, “do you know that tall people do not live as long as short people? It’s a scientific fact, and most likely why basketball has never caught on in Okinawa.”
Have you ever read the future in a thin blue line, as you wait in the handicapped stall in the fourth floor bathroom? Your stretched out knees have made a run in your pantyhose, which are cheap and rough and aggressively tight, so you slide out of your worn kitten heels and tug them off to pass the time. Balling them up and stuffing them into the little maxi-pad trashcan uses up about twenty seconds. Pregnancy test seconds, as any woman in the know will tell you, pass even more slowly than microwave seconds. Whether you are bound to be relieved or disappointed or tremulously hopeful and filled with joy, the waiting is the hardest part. Once you know, you know. You can confront that emphatic little mark and all its implications head on. When you know, you have options. “Options,” you whisper to yourself, hoisting up your skirt with the grooved thumb-grip clamped between your teeth.
Watching every move about the campfire, studying each face lit up by the flickering flames, the fiddler Sam Plumbeck idly held onto his instrument, waiting for the proper moment. Time, he could feel, was pressing down on him; it had different parts that moved in different ways. The stars all the way to the horizon dip were many and miraculous, the horses silent for the most part even though a coyote cry filtered in now and then, and the darkness beyond wrapped them like a giant robe spread under those stars. He had ridden in, apparently aimlessly to all the trail hands, and joined up with them on their way back to their ranch, the promise of music being hailed by all the hands who had delivered the herd, were through with the drive. He alone, out of all these trail hands who had hit the jackpot, knew what was coming down on them. Nothing is supposed to be perfect or fair; at least this side of heaven, or the mass of a blue sky, or the dash of sunlight on a rainy day. And he, just a picker of strings, with not a coin of the gold in the lot having his name on it, could only wait it all out, hoping for the best and only seeing the worst coming up.
I had been at University six months when I got the call to tell me my old school friend Eamon Donovan had died. Drug overdose. He wasn’t the partying kind; it was a different kind of drug overdose. An entirely intentional one. Eamon was from the north of the city, like me; The Bone. That particular stretch of hopeless home-front had given rise to a nasty habit of suicide. In the years I had been out of my working class no-man’s-land I’d stopped counting the amount of associates who had taken the off-ramp. It had become so frequent that it had been dubbed the North Belfast Green Card.
By dusk, he could feel the coming of another sleepless night, so after Helen left for her book club meeting—stooping from the weight of the pregnancy—he left a note on the kitchen counter and walked out the front door. It was a beautiful evening, and maybe that was why he didn’t feel like sleeping. The dying light in the west cast a rusted glow from the horizon, and the air was warm and slow. The only traffic on the road in front of his house was a beat-up brown station wagon gliding past. He watched it disappear up the road, no trees to block his view.
Auburn hair and freckles sprinkled across his face, a red hat that he was never without and grubby sneakers that were ripped and torn, I first met Alvin when I was say, three or four. Alvin simply emerged in the middle of the grocery store parking lot that was really a sandbox that only I could see. He tapped on my shoulder as my mom was loading bags into the backseat of the car and from that moment on, from the second I laid eyes on his crooked teeth and goofy half-smile, we were inseparable.
6:47
Clint’s sleeping body takes a breath, stretches and rolls over. The large man wearing a white coat scribbles notes on his pad while the dim sunrise light peeks through the window. Clint’s body rolls back to its original position. The white coat checks his watch and then checks off a box on his notepad.
