Category: Scene
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No One Makes Money at Landlocked Bars on Holiday Weekends
If I only knew the time, he thought, I would know it all. Standing behind the bar on a slow holiday weekend he would wax philosophical. Something outside would catch his eye and the thought would skip away. Like how the awning of the place retracted with one of those poles you slipped through a…
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Bagel Bar
After that first night not sleeping, they went for breakfast sandwiches at the cramped bagel joint overlooking Main Street. The two of them ordered at the counter, but Clyde waited for the tray of food to be prepared. He took the tray and approached the empty stool next to her hoisted bottom and dangling legs.…
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Pink Bow Untied
Rain would have been more fitting. Clouds. Torrential downpours. Some freak hurricane. Not this nurturing warmth that was carried in the breeze along with the songs of springtime robins. The boys were out with their father picking up new fishing poles and getting something for lunch. Patrick felt it best that Isabella, his wife, the…
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Burning the Tracks
A red glow washed over the amorphous designs on the table. Thin, bent tubes housing neon bordered the metallic siding. She sat in the hollow space carved out by the fish tank wall wrapping behind their customary booth. He hadn’t answered her question, the question she had asked him her to pose. She knew he…
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The Only Three Hobos in Boulder
“Who are you?” “I am just a man.” The long-trunked, dark-skinned man who the gruff guy with anger in his eyes called Cisco pleaded for more of an explanation with childlike inquisitiveness in his glistening eyes. You know how when a kid’ll ask you something you know you shouldn’t tell them the real answer to,…
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Route 8 East (Tralnor Hunting Pt. 1)
“Dude,” Hector Christman pushed through clenched teeth, “that was a cop car.” “No it wasn’t,” the driver shot back, his voice cool, metallic. “That car is always parked there. Trust me. It may have been a cop car at one point, years ago. Now it’s an old taxi cab. Vehicular evolution is a follows: police…
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Temperance of Permanence
She met him when neither of them could stand to be alone. They remedied this by getting together. Now they’re face to face and he’s trying to tell her how now he can’t seem to be with anyone. The tightrope walk between being available and being alone is an act he’s made his own. Acrobats…
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Measurable Time
INT – A MODEST DWELLING – LATE NIGHT The slim frame of ALEC passes a doorway where a man with grey in his beard sits facing the other direction. BARRY stirs in his chair and calls the figure he hears rustling in the other room to come speak with him. BARRY speaks, inaudibly, to the…
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The Driving Southbound Rain
There was more rain than he had seen in one place. It was less like driving through rain and more like driving while a five-gallon bucket emptied over the windshield over and over. The wipers thudded in sloppy rhythm as he reached for the final inch of coffee waiting cold in the styrofoam cup. About…
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Fodder for Retrospect
The limp expression on his face was nothing new, but it still tore gently into Monica’s chest each time she looked at her son. With each tear in the fabric of motherhood, she buried the urge to give up, to send him to another doctor, to admit to the nagging suspicion that she might be…
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Four/Twenty-seven
The woman who has just taken the empty seat next to me wears the same fragrance I have been programmed to tie to you. I, for a moment, forget where I am, forget who I am, and mesh again as the being we formerly referred to as Us. These senses take command and they tell…
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Consonants and Vowels and Eggs
This guy’s been here almost every day this month. He always ends up sitting in the same stool, but only after sitting down at table 14, looking up and down the bar, walking back toward the door to pick up a Globe and scan the headlines. Then he pulls out the crossword and studies the…
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Mr. Most Likely to Succeed
I started another restaurant job yesterday. The kid who trained me my first day introduced me as the guy who was voted most likely to succeed for his high school yearbook. He grinned and chortled like a tranquilized banshee immediately after divulging that information then proceeded to tell me how important it was to drink…
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Flies Dance in the Floodlights
It had now become a ritual that after every break-up he would go for a walk in search of a baseball diamond. If there were bleachers there, he would sit and wait for a pickup softball game to begin and he’d watch it to completion. There were seldom others spectating at these low-stakes games, and…
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Outside the Ellison Duplex
The young men wore smirks of a mutual malice. Their expressions were either meant to ward off or attract simple-minded questions, depending on who may happen to be doing the asking. Questions like the kind that Hopscotch Joey had trotted up and asked last week as the little band of twenty-something tough guys stood outside…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 