“Well as big Rod once sang, ‘Tonight’s The Night!”
“It’s tomorrow.”
“I know but the joke wouldn’t work! So tonight is the last night of you being alone. I think that was a Heart song. Did you like the one about her picking up a guy for a shag cause her hubby was a jaffa? There is a shit line in it about planting a tree!”
Continue reading “Overthinking by Hugh Cron – Adult Content”
There is – I wouldn’t call it a hole, rather a hollow – in the ground outside my house. When it rains it fills up to form a puddle and when the sun shines it evaporates, back to a hollow. The last few summers the puddle hasn’t dried away. Perhaps the sun shone less or perhaps the branches of the tree just above it grew a little thicker, but the puddle remained throughout the season. I can see the puddle from my bedroom window. The puddle, the tree and the green area around it, the little playground outside a kindergarten and a convenience store.
‘A judge tells a condemned man he’s going to hang next week, but he won’t know when until the hangman comes a-knockin’. The judge only says one thing, that it’ll be a surprise.’ The man with dark rimmed spectacles pauses to smoke, his hair is black and slick with Brylcreem.
‘So, when he’s locked up and waiting to be hung, this guy thinks to himself: “This shit ain’t fair, they have to tell me when I’m going to die. I’ve got rights.” So he decides to work it out. He figures if hasn’t been hung by Thursday, he can’t be killed on Friday because it wouldn’t be a surprise, he’d know it was coming.
I walk down the three steps, step out onto the sidewalk outside her house and lean my head back to the sky. Raindrops land on my face, neither warm nor cold. No breezes, but I hear the wind in the leaves on the trees along the avenue. Few people are up, light from maybe one or two windows. The street lamps light my way down the avenue. The asphalt is wet, which gives the city a fresh smell of concrete and cars. I like the smell of both; cars and concrete. It must have rained harder an hour ago. Streams run along the sidewalk picking up dirt in a slow pace and pouring it down the sewer.
(Une tranche de vie, inbound)
This morning D’Espirito “Dez” Carmine knew that one of his passengers was in trouble.
Dez shifted gears of the twelve-seat bus as he came out of Revere onto the highway north, his eyes, as ever, studying the dozen passengers on their way to work, determining a snarl, a scowl or grimace, as a straight-out give-away. Oh, they were splendid facial characters, make-up aficionados, the mostly imperturbable cast for his play-going. Each one of them he knew almost intimately, their habits, likes and dislikes, their temperaments; how they showed impatience or worry. The lip biters were evident and the knee tappers, the finger squeezers and the puckered, silent whistlers. Who slept around, who was prone to wander come of an evening after work, he knew. Evidence of it came from eye flight or hair disarrangement, an early exhaustion showing itself off or a head yet rolling in a kind of rhythm. The morning body electric, he heard a voice say in the back of his head.
Continue reading “Driving on the Sausage Run by Tom Sheehan”
The thin penetrating whine dragged him from the warm recesses of sleep. He pawed at the air as he sank back into slumber but his swipe was ineffectual and the incessant drone continued. He turned on to his side. The insect followed. He sat up in bed, groaned and shook his head.
“Light”
The bedside globe reacted to his command painting the room a dusky yellow.
Where are you, you little…
He rubbed his eyes and scanned the ceiling. No sign of the intruder and no sound to track it by. Resigned to have to start hunting he stretched a lazy arm across his body to pull back the covers.
Ahh…there you are.
“This truck is so old, Chief Sitting Bull drove it to his senior prom,” I said to Larry Kicking Bird as he got onto Highway 18.
“Quit your bad mouthin’ on my truck, James Eagle. How on earth do I get to Sioux Plains from here?” Larry asked.
“Easy, easy. Sioux Plains is pretty close to where Sitting Bull grew up. Put your truck on cruise control and it’ll remember where Sitting Bull’s senior prom was.” Larry sped up to about 80 miles an hour, but not long after, a cop tailed us.
With a bang not a whimper, that’s what they said. At the end it’ll be a fierce cataclysmic implosion and all will be gone in seconds.
But it’s wasn’t, it’s not.
Continue reading “With a Bang Not a Whimper by Diane M Dickson”
Arnold Dupree, the right-hand man and the representative of President Smith, shook hands with Oscar Bojanovic, the head of the voting facility. Oscar gave him a keycard and a badge and led the way.
“If you direct your attention to the screen, we can observe which question the voter is currently answering.”
114.B-222.
You witness a fight between two equally strong men. Do you;
God help me. God help me be patient. God help me harness my anger and control my paranoia. I don’t want to go off on Carol again. Night Hawk completing weather analysis for scheduled high-speed run in forty-six hours, twenty-seven minutes. Alright, I take a deep breath, and I clear myself for take-off for a fifty-minute flight in the turgid air of psychobabble.
I open the door and start to greet Carol, Major Greer, but there is a linebacker looking white dude with blond hair and a neat little beard. Where the hell is Carol? This is her office. Did I get the time wrong or maybe the wrong day?
“Major Harris, I’m Doctor Clark. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
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