It happened in the town that had no butter, a town where little popcorn was sold and nearly every person was thin. Most people living there liked to run. On a snappy dawn some of them ran marathon distances without breaking a sweat, climbing often into the lower ranges of the Smokies. If butter was in town, the butter packers brought it, illegally.
He often told his wife about his twenty-first birthday. He and his father had sat under a bright red canopy on a dark, starless night. They were at some nameless Chinese restaurant in one of the metropolitan corners of Atlanta, just a few blocks south of Terminal Parkway, where commercial airplanes stitched long blinking lines across the sky. A half block away, he remembered, a street cleaner inched across the asphalt, brushes spinning in a lopsided, broken rhythm.
It’s sort of hard to put into words.
Well, it happened a long time ago. You’ll think I’m wasting your time. But I’ve been thinking about it, going over and over it. And it means something.
He was a shit junky, a shit shoplifter and a shit human being.
Those were his words. Nobody else bothered enough to comment.
“Brisling!” yelled his boss Marquis, “if you don’t get out of the way, I’ll kick your ass for good.” And Marquis, darker but plump himself, wearing an atrocious suit with orange lines in it, smiled that puffy-cheeked grin he’d always use, like it was punctuation itself. I’m the boss and you’re the slob, it said. It was nothing less than a tongue speaking right at Brisling’s ear. Even commas and periods were in place, the exclamation points by the fingers. If there were question marks, he’d know them. He bet he could quote him verbatim, all the ways the boss man moved. All of it was catalogued, scored, filed away in his mind.
The knots in Alexander’s tie were becoming tighter with every twist and loop he made. His fingers moved in rhythm with his jaw, teeth grinding to the furling and unfurling of the silk in his hands. Again and again he coiled the fabric, feeling as it constricted against his skin. He had to admit, the first knots were sloppy, smeared in the sweat of the unstable fingers that made them. But, the further down they went, each became more and more precise. Practically a work of art.
There it was, in black and white: Cecily VanDeGroot, dead at 88. Rich. Well-known. A good-sized family who’d want a good show. One I could give them.
Damn. “Services provided by Eternal Rest.” Lo’Retta had beat me out again. Early bird gets the worm.
And so do the dead. But we don’t tell the customers that.
Continue reading “To Sleep Perchance to Dream by Stephen J Matlock”
Bailey and I met two years ago. Since then, we’ve found comfort in quantity, since quality failed us before, and so many times. We found each other on the same platform we often fiddled with—two people fighting the conventions of monogamy at the time—fed up with a pattern of receiving the short end of the stick in previous partnerships.
Continue reading “Neither of Us Are Boyfriends by D.T. Mattingly”
Starry-eyed couples who take moonlight strolls along the Sea of Love do so at the risk of their hormone-driven happiness; for the beach along Sea Of Love is littered with “Globsters”–those unidentifiable, high smelling, amorphous sacks of putrescent goo–which, to paraphrase the words of the Munchkin Coroner, are not just really dead, but are most sincerely dead.
First, the powers-to-be, as Ransom Kegler called city hall and its tight-fingered allies, the politicians and the developers, had squeezed a piece of land out of him and were going to make money on it. They had cut him out of the profits when, post-sale, they had engineered a zoning change. The profits of the change promised to be immense. He had come alert too late, but it was better to come up breathing than not breathing at all.
Now, on top of this damn thievery, he was put on the spot by, of all persons, his youngest grandson Talbot with a barrage of questions, so simple coming and so complex moving on.
Continue reading “The Knock on Ransom Kegler by Tom Sheehan”
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