‘I need a lift you see.’
My voice strains to be heard outside Mike’s house. There’s a hot stink of ale chasing him out the door, a cigarette resting along his ear, and a slapped cheek look about his face. He looks down from his considerable height, bolstered by the chunky doorstep. He is a statue on his plinth and I’m a beggar with a crutch.
– I’d get yer ginger man from Billions on the tv on a boat, take him out there to Mutton Island and let him do some inside-trading on me.
The other two shrieked with laughter. It was the three cleaners’ second smoke break since lunch.
Odd, peculiar, freakish people roll into my life as regular as the tides, but with the most unexpected, extraordinary, and bizarre results.
After a short rest, when she thought he might fall asleep, Amy reached round to slap her sweaty lump of husband on the back.
“Get off now.”
With a groan, Brad peeled his slick torso from hers, rolled off and collapsed, naked and vulnerable. Their mixed sweat chilled the front of Amy’s torso, but she didn’t have time to shower.
Her name is Kristy or Kristal or Kelly, I’m not sure which, so I just call her sweetheart and babe and she never seems to mind. She’s too busy talking about her ex-boyfriend anyway, a guy who’s still her boss at work.
A Few Rings of Hell’s Bell Ago
The little god of unfounded happiness at an unlikely place seemed to be smiling on me. I was up 500,000 bit-pesos at the online Uruguayan poker site, and someone had finally restocked the Snax Machine in the lobby with chili-cheese Fritos. Yes, the good guys were winning, and no one was supervising my activities. I fondly recall whistling “Dance Ten; Looks Three” from A Chorus Line, prior to carb-loading for that long elevator ride back to my office, deep in the bowels of the Smiling Face of Darkness.
Continue reading “Glooning the Chartreuse Lemon by Leila Allison”
I sat a long time before going up to the house. Vanessa lived on the left side of a duplex behind the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge. There was a pink beauty salon chair on the white paint chipped front porch. Weathered cardboard boxes filled with National Geographic magazines and empty Marlboro 100 packs were stacked in the corner. After I knocked at the door, it opened and I saw Vanessa standing there before me. I knew her as the regular who always asked for extra soymilk in her reusable coffee mugs but my manager called her Fat Madonna. I didn’t get the joke until he showed me a picture on his phone one day.
On impact, the demon exploded out of the steering wheel airbag and ripped my husband away from this world.
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