I probably wouldn’t be in Mexico if there hadn’t been a knife on the counter at the Bad Dog Bar last Tuesday. I been going to the Bad Dog for two years, since I been working the graveyard shift at Drake Manufacturing. If you ever spent eight hours attaching table tops to the leg frames, you know why that kind of work goes better if you got a couple beers in you. One of the evening bartenders at Bad Dog is Hitch. He was working last Tuesday with Sheila, who waits tables. She ain’t much of a waitress, to put it gentle. She gets orders wrong ever night, even in a place like Bad Dog where most everbody orders the same cheap beer. Sheila’s popular, though, with them low-cut blouses. Most of the Bad Dog customers are guys don’t care what they’re drinking as long as they’re looking down a woman’s blouse. That’s one reason my brother liked Bad Dog right away. Plus he didn’t have to walk far after work. Then he got me to going. And I gotta say about Sheila and them low-cut blouses, when you look down that valley, you know there’s a better world waiting when you get there.
Continue reading “A Sharp Knife for Cutting Limes”Tag: free reading
Rage by Paul E Goldberg
The guitar player began. The two younger women, the singers, looked to the dancer, then to one another and laughed. Everyone knew the dancer was crazy. What would happen tonight? What madness revealed when, after standing stock still, face intense, concentrating, ugly, man-like, she would explode in sudden but precise movement. Arms and legs lashing out, a burning, erotic anger masked behind the frozen expression on her face. After moving across the stage, she would come to a sudden, freezing halt, slamming her foot down on the floor—loud. The women startled even when they knew it was coming. The dancer looked at the man—her partner. She always chose a younger man. He looked back, smiled but at a distance. She glared at him then suddenly moved again, whirling, white skirt flaring out to reveal a flash of the carmine lining.
Continue reading “Rage by Paul E Goldberg”Chalatenango, 1983 by J. Paul Ross
Warning: Extreme content – see tags.
Running.
Gasping.
Retching, the son of Olayo Mejia charges toward his village amid the stench of burning wood and searing flesh. The odor is heavy and it is moist and it fills the valley beneath him in a haze of squalid yellows and heavy browns. It covers the fog-laced treetops and mingles across the terraced fields and, as gunfire again bursts over the Salvadoran hills, its reek grows sharper with every footfall and every wild swing of his arms. Its taste lingers in his mouth, its fumes choke his lungs and he wants so much to pause and catch his breath. He wants to fall to his knees and weep in terror but he knows he cannot, for the helicopters are prowling above him, the smoke is billowing high into the morning air and his home is very far away.
Continue reading “Chalatenango, 1983 by J. Paul Ross”Why Is Jake Always So Lucky? by Paul Crehan
As a kid, he was the one who found nickels, dimes, and quarters on the sidewalk, got two candy bars to fall into the well of the vending machine when he had only paid for one, and succeeded where so many others had failed in bashing open the piñata. Two or three times, when he wasn’t ready for a test, the teacher wouldn’t show up. Test cancelled. Stuff like that. His whole life.
Continue reading “Why Is Jake Always So Lucky? by Paul Crehan”Late-Night Theological Breakthrough by Michael Bloor
The pub had closed, the last bus still hadn’t arrived, the thin drizzle gave way to rain of biblical ferocity. Jimmy stood sheltering in the entrance to the dress shop, like a novelty dummy, while Willie (his tongue loosened by seven pints of IPA) explained about the likely existence of A Deid Agnostics’ Processing Panel.
Continue reading “Late-Night Theological Breakthrough by Michael Bloor”We Two Soldiers by Mark Schafron
I’d never been blown up before.
We were patrolling in the middle of nowhere during the late afternoon of another 110 degree day, with nobody around except a goatherd in the distance, tending a few scrawny goats. The IED must have been under a pressure plate in the road.
A slow-motion movie sort of thing is how I’d heard survivors describe explosions. Not me. One minute, I was in the Humvee’s right rear seat behind the vehicle commander, Staff Sergeant Bennett, getting my kidneys pureed on the rough road. Then I heard a roar like the sound of a passing locomotive. A white light filled the cabin like some nuclear camera flash and I felt a searing wind on my face. Then I was somersaulting through the air with my synapses flashing, envisioning how hard I might land. Pretty hard, it turns out. The ground rushed towards me, and I heard a crunch as I landed face-first in the dirt. And then the lights went out.
Continue reading “We Two Soldiers by Mark Schafron”The Narrow Gauge by Ed N White
On this first day of May, I return to the abandoned farm I once owned and stand in a pasture now overgrown with creeping jenny vines and clumps of brilliant yellow buttercups. Slatey gray clouds collide above me and fold into each other in a birdless sky. A whispering breeze ruffles the tops of the leafing red maple trees. Half a century ago, I found an abandoned narrow-gauge rail track set on hand-hewn locust ties at the back of the farm. I was unaware of their presence until months after the purchase and could only guess their purpose. Shuffling several ideas, I thought they might have been used to bring wheeled carts of fieldstone or firewood to the bottom of the hill. Or, perhaps maple sap to boil in large vats for spring syrup. I enquired at the local historical society and asked my neighbors, but no one had an answer, only more guesses.
Continue reading “The Narrow Gauge by Ed N White”March by Sarp Sozdinler
March was a bitter month for everyone involved. Jodi was born into one, like Eric Clapton, her childhood idol. In another March, thirty years ago, Clapton’s four-year-old son ran into a hole in the wall. The hole was supposed to be a window, but it had no glass on it. A scream tore through the house, and the mother understood right away that it didn’t come from the boy; the boy was busy plowing through the air, down fifty-three floors.
Continue reading “March by Sarp Sozdinler”Emergence Delirium by Danielle Altman
They found me floating face down in the motel swimming pool, a seedy place off the Sunset Strip where we’d been partying. A janitor heard the splash. He dragged me up to the patio and slapped my cheeks, which was funny. I was already blue, and now some random guy was hitting me. We kissed. His breath choked me. I woke, briefly. Curled over, shivering on the lip of the deep end, my reflection rippling beneath as my lungs spasmed dry.
Continue reading “Emergence Delirium by Danielle Altman”Garf and the Purple Pickles by Landon Galliott
When Garf opened his refrigerator, he saw a jar of purple pickles beside the carton of expired milk. This was strange as, only yesterday, they were green. Garf stood in his itchy annoyance before the refrigerator, his red, black-striped robe hanging off his slumped body like an old, worn-out curtain.
Continue reading “Garf and the Purple Pickles by Landon Galliott”
