Old Scott’s Mill had given off odd sounds since the day it closed down. Now it gave off a sense of passage.
Tag: loss
Borrowed Fragments by Vince Barry
“. . . ?”
How can you help? Hmm, how can you—
“. . . ?”
My mother? . . . Okay, we can start there. . . . My mother—my mother came from a large family, a very large Irish Catholic family. Do they make them any more? I think not. . . . At any rate, as a boy, a young boy, no more than eight or nine, I would employ the template of the Baltimore Catechism to sort them out and keep them straight—the Faheys I mean . . .The catechism’s set formula, y’see, helped me convey the essential and fundamental content of the Fahey family. Beginning—
Crawfish Prayers by G.A. Shepard
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.
Reflections Aft by Tom Sheehan
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.
The Banshee’s Bargain by Suzanne Murphy
The first time I heard the cry of the banshee was three days before the full moon. My blood ran cold because I knew exactly what it meant. In my youth, my grandmother entertained us with fantastic fairytales and spooky stories. The haunting tale of the banshee had been one of my favorites, so when I heard the strange keening, I immediately recalled the legend. The story about a witch who announced the imminent death of a loved one was common throughout Ireland. There was even a poem that children sometimes chanted in the schoolyard, often around Halloween:
A Thin Blue Line by Anne M Weyer
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.
Hail Caesar! by David Louden
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.
Sleep by Cameron VanderWerf
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.
Guy and The Baby Doll by Edward S Barkin
He had lost all interest in the newspaper, even though it was the Sunday edition and contained fourteen sections in all. When he had bought the paper late that night, he had assumed he would read it from cover to cover; but in actuality he had read only two articles — one about how the stock market had dropped 350 points the previous day and another about how the CIA was pushing for a looser interpretation of the law which prohibited it from engaging in political assassinations. If he had been either heavily invested or a liberal, one of these articles might have stimulated productive thought in his mind. As it was, however, the only thoughts which he entertained were homicidal or otherwise insane. Continue reading “Guy and The Baby Doll by Edward S Barkin”
Don’t Pass the Onions by Nathan Driscoll
The grapes of wrath were just grapes, or so I think. I never read the book. The forbidden fruit was merely an apple. And, the pizza margarita Julia Roberts passionately lauded in the movie Eat, Pray, Love was but a simple symmetry of bread and cheese. So, I had to ask myself, were the onions under the edge of Mauricio’s knife really the onions of lost, undying love? Or just onions?
Stiff waves of oniony scent circulated around the kitchen, so harsh that I double-checked the window. It was doing the job I’d assigned, blinds drawn up, half-open, sifting the light in while letting the place breathe, yet my eyes watered. Mo’s too were spouting onto his tanned cheeks as he chopped away, however those tears weren’t aroma-induced. Only a week had passed since the lovely split, after all.
Mo put the knife down and lifted the cutting board, carrying it toward the hollowed out heads of iceberg lettuce on the counter. “Onions in first,” he said, voice frail. “Just how she did it.” He tapped the edge of the wooden board to let chunks of onion fall into each of the two lettuce heads. “Isn’t that right, Nick?”
“For sure,” I said, thumb in the air, dripping in sarcasm. “Got to go in first.” The dents in the carpeting from Penny Triano’s now-removed sofa hadn’t even risen before Mo wanted to wallow in her dirty bergs. A head of iceberg lettuce stuffed with onions, ground sausage, peppers, and grated cheese, cheddar jack preferably. Really it was mediocre cuisine, at least now without the snarky comments.
“Penny always burrowed right down to the bottom for these,” Mo whispered. He ran his finger around the rim of a berg, peering inside. “Like her fork was a drill. She couldn’t leave the onions alone.”
And Eve couldn’t leave that damned apple alone, I thought, which is cause for this sobfest of human imperfection to begin with, if we’re to listen to my Grandma Jean. I was actually content with Penny’s departure. When one’s best friend since college is returned from two years in a plastic wench’s purse and wiped off her to-do calendar, gratitude trumps sympathy.
“I miss her so much already.” His quivering hands opened the oven, offering a meaty twist to the onion smell.
“Yeah, sucks man,” I dully said. Eyes dried, I stepped forward and enjoyed a whiff of the sausage pan. The eyes across from me, of course, remained damp.
The sausage found refuge in the bergs, and Mo plucked from the fridge a pre-sliced bag full of red peppers and made way for the microwave. “She would’ve never cooked like this,” he said with a wounded chuckle. “She’d be ashamed.” A high, whiny-type noise was now seeping from his mouth that fell beyond recognition. A laugh? A sob? A precursor to a bowel movement? The final straw was losing hold.
“Who cares what that bitch thinks?” A tinge of hurtful profanity was worth a shot to snap him out of it.
He faced me. “What’d you say?”
“You heard. You’re better off without Penny. Mo, you’re a thirty-year-old man, not some lapdog for a prima donna with too much bronzer. This is your chance to move on, now take it.” The bite marks lined on my tongue were healing, freeing it to let rip.
“I can’t belief you,” he said. The Latino in his voice spiked, a flash of Venezuelan in his oft-American pan. “You know I still love her. And saying that while making the recipe we wouldn’t have if not for her!”
“Do you see me helping? I wanted pizza.”
Mo gasped dramatically, mouth open, some gelled hair and stubble away from a soap opera cameo.
Then came delicate knocks on the front door.
“Stay here,” he said, storming past me. “We’re not done.” The draft of outside air tickled the back of my neck once the door creaked open. “Penny?”
I whipped my head around, praying Mo had been mistaken, but no dice. Bleached blonde extensions, push-up bra, makeup fit for late October, all in the doorway.
“Hello, Mauricio,” she said. “May I come in?”
Mo stumbled, shot, though not by a gun. “Of, of course,” he said, wiping his eyes. “C’mon in.”
The humanity. Like the last week never freakin’ happened.
The click-clack of those cheap heels followed Mo inside. I quickly turned to avoid the displeasure of locking eyes with the hyena.
“Nicholas,” she said sharply. Her enormous black purse collided with my arm on her way past.
“Penny,” I grumbled, eyes glued to the floor as per usual.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Mo said. “Look at what I was making.”
“Awe!” exclaimed the dirtiest of bergs. “Baby, my dish! You’re so sweet!” Her extensions rustled as she hugged him.
“Just for you, baby. Want some?” I peered up to see Mo toss some peppers and cheese into my lettuce head before putting it all on a plate. “Here you go.”
Penny snatched the plate with a “thanks sweetie,” grabbed a fork, and dug it so deeply into my dinner. “Onions first,” she screeched, wilting my eyebrows. “You should start cleaning up in here, though, Mauricio. It’s a mess.”
“Okay, honey.”
The fork had its haul and was about to deliver an onion-filled bite. The fading sunlight through the window turned a fiery red, or perhaps that was just my vision. Akin to an involuntary twitch, my arm leapt into action without warning and drove through the fork and plate, knocking both downward. The plate shattered while the lettuce head erupted in a flurry of meaty chunks that coated our lower halves. Mo and Penny were speechless, slack-jawed, like they’d seen a ghost. Not a ghost, just a friend who’d finally had enough.
I cracked a smile. “So…who wants pizza?”
Nathan Driscoll
Header Image: CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1417092
