Tag: Fiction
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Gas Money, Honey
Eastern Pennsylvanians love their hoagies. I’d pulled into a gas station after driving six hours north. The place advertised 2 for 1 liters of cola and state minimum cigarette prices. A ‘70s style goose sweeping across a setting sun illuminated above their door. Mosquitoes flocked to its luminance. I parked the car in the rear…
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Ringtone (Killing Trevor Pt. 3)
Henry hadn’t set an alarm for a reason. That waking up to a machine nonsense was only a necessary means to an end. A crutch to maintain his place in the realm of responsible adulthood. That morning, he wanted to see how far his body could go naturally catching him up on the sleep his…
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Thirst (Killing Trevor Pt. 2)
She opened the door to the gas station half expecting the counter to be unmanned. Phillip, the greasy-haired attendant who worked the night shift, had a habit of stepping out the back to smoke a hand-rolled cigarette, leaving the counter empty. He’d stand within earshot of the bells that hung from the front door and…
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Headache (Killing Trevor Pt. 1)
The rain pounded on the metal roof of the car. It smattered against the glass. Filtered by those creeping droplets on the windows, the streetlight shadows animated the surfaces of the couple’s still faces. Cynthia, her thinly plucked eyebrows raised, looked at his hands as they gripped the steering wheel. A nervous tick of his,…
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A Line at Twin Rivers
I look up from my watch and hock a wad of phlegm into the mulch trying to seem more ticked off than I am because we’d been standing in line for forty-five endless minutes. I could have watched half a movie in this time. I keep thinking about and that thought makes me irritable. So…
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Top Score
Whenever I would get to see you, when it was our time, I felt I was stepping up to the challenge of an arcade pinball machine. Feeling below the cabinet for that hidden power switch, I’d seek you out. Reaching into my coat pocket for my busted burner phone and punching in the sequence of…
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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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A Plate for Pickles
There are many things Nancy does regularly. She looks out the window in her flat for hours on end. She sees people leave for their jobs in the morning. She sees them return to their homes in the evening. She cleans her flat every morning. She picks up the phone and has lengthy conversations. She…
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Bad Business
Habit had me walking home along the trolley rails late at night when no one else was on the road. A girl with a bag hanging on her hip was coming down the hill next to my building. She saw me stepping off the rails and onto the sidewalk. She passed my door as I…
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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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Open Wide | Uber Ride
This one time when I was young the casing of a popcorn kernel hugged a hind tooth in my mouth for the better part of a month. That tooth has a number. My dentist is in her early 30s and she has that early 30s pep about her that most girls that age have forfeited…
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Cinematic
It is a little-known fact that when you look at the back of a movie poster you see a mirror image of the picture on the front. The same goes for how the images look when you stand behind the movie screen itself. Spend enough time in the seats of a cinema, and you will…
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Middleton
Middle age endows its members with, amongst strands of grey, bushels of gifts. Most are neglected, others embraced, but none must go unnoticed. Years accumulate, begging the excavation of long-buried relics—memories tucked under blankets of time. Unlike meticulously dusted deposits of Jurassic carbon, the artifacts of days past have a tendency to uproot hurriedly from…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 