grab and go
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 →
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 →
Clyde Kilroy showed up for the Lancaster Seat and Feet show with an empty chuckle. That Collins had sent him made it clear, he thought, watching the drops of rain blur his windshield. This was payback. For what he couldn't say. Could have been a million things. Clyde knew he wasn’t easy to work around,... Continue Reading →
“How bad could it be, Glenda?” Rupert sighed, turning away from the PriceBusters website. It was always something with that woman. “I don’t know, Tom,” she said, in that way of hers that meant that she did know and was on the verge of telling him, in painstaking detail, just how well she knew. “For... Continue Reading →
Of course we’re late. Because someone thought t would be a good idea to have a scav hunt at eight am on a Saturday morning. Now we’ve got less than twenty minutes to get moving when I bust into Tia’s room. I leap onto her bed, knocking over an uncapped bottle of water onto her comforter,... Continue Reading →
I hung up the phone and held my head in my hands. The dark walls of my apartment felt like a tomb as my mom’s voice rattled around in my head. “Your father’s frozen.” Sounds dramatic, but I had a hunch about what had happened. I’d dumped the brunette for a blonde, only the brunette turned... Continue Reading →
Officer Artez watched the situation unfold across the street from his window seat at the freshly minted Bojangles on Route 12. A spotless ’97 or ‘98 Buick Century pulled into the gravel turnaround. After a few moments a tall, elderly man emerged, hobbled to the passenger side, and assisted an equally aged lady out of the car. The... Continue Reading →
The Ramones were on the stereo the day it happened. Emma and I were dancing. All of us were dancing. I was seven but the moment is set into my memory like a scar. My parents were drunks—maybe they still are—but they were never angry or fighting like the ones on television, just happy drunks. Anyway, Emma and I were... Continue Reading →
Lunch Break Fiction 