grab and go
On the night before Thanksgiving, Jim Bob stopped in at JD’s to meet up with Ricky and Gizzard Thomas. Nothing unusual, the three men gathered at the bar on most nights after fishing or working or doing much of nothing. But just like their town, and their country for that matter, the old watering hole was... Continue Reading →
My work places me inside people's homes. They invite me in with haste, flustered and babbling and talking with their hands. And once I'm in--after the pooch huffs and puffs, sticks a snout to my crotch--it's back back to the routine. Forget all about the quiet guy fixing the leak or putting in that vessel sink in the half bath. I observe the way people... Continue Reading →
I sat at the stoplight in a daze, ignoring the urgency of chilled air prattling through the vents. It was 7:34 on a sticky summer evening. I yanked at my tie, but my worry refused to be distracted by the yammer of sports talk. My head pulsed with the bits and pieces of four workday meetings, my short breaths... Continue Reading →
They called it a Derecho. And the sucker came out of nowhere on a hellish hot day in August. No rain. No thunder. Just wind. Tree-bending gusts that roared like a train pulling into the station. I’d just finished up my route and was dreaming of Canada when it hit, stealing my hat right off my... Continue Reading →
The gig with at the Appomattox Courthouse was the perfect way to spend the summer. History. Outdoors. Acting. As far as becoming a Civil War reenactor went, getting paid was just a perk. I caught on quick as Private Edwin Francis Henny, Second Corps of Northern Virginia. And I can honestly say, I learned more in a... Continue Reading →
How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free? How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see? --Bob Dylan *** They stumbled into the dressing room. Dark and cloudy, far removed from the glitz of the stage lights. When the door slammed shut,... Continue Reading →
It wasn't the first time I'd awoken to a gunshot. Miss Baker liked to scare the bejesus out of us. It worked too. “Keeps you honest,” she was fond of saying, putting two bullets in her ivory handle .38, spinning it shut, then pointing it from boy to boy. Click Click “Let God decide,” she said. Most of us... Continue Reading →
My eighteenth birthday began with a bang. I stumbled down the hallway, groggy and half asleep only to slip on a banana peel. I went down with a thump. Dad hopped out of the kitchen, his thumbs in his suspenders as he paraded around with laughter. “Gotcha!” I grumbled as he helped me to my feet. “Never gets... Continue Reading →
It was getting dark by the time I got my driveway clear. Clean, precise scrapes that glimmered in the dusk. I couldn't help to think what the boys back home might have thought about me, Charlie Casola, out here in prairie land freezing my balls off. But it beat the alternative. I threw down a cup of salt then looked... Continue Reading →
I'll never forget the day I met Dee. I came home from playing ball, all set to grab a shower when two powerful smells collided in my nostrils. One was food. Good food, not old leftovers from the freezer. The second smell wasn't pleasant but more a caustic blast of brain-stinging cologne. It was then I remembered Mom... Continue Reading →
Lunch Break Fiction 