The sunset was beautiful. Probably.
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
He didn’t answer.
“Would anything make your life better?”
He didn’t answer.
“Would you like some coffee?”
He nodded.
Man on the Ledge
Genre: Fiction
Canada’s Highway
Adam showed her his employee card. His full name was Adam Garfield Trash. Lea wrote it on the schedule. She kept an eye out the window for Donald and Daisy, the ducks who lived by the picnic tables on the fifty feet of dead grass between Mr Bowtie’s Drive-Thru Burgers and 16 Avenue North. She hadn’t seen them yet today. Travis mocked her for naming them.
“They’re gonna die. This is no place for wildlife. This is Canada’s highway.”
Mistaken
I felt the nerves of a first amorous encounter, just as if I was face to face with a stranger I desired intensely, something inconceivable given that our conjugal relationship had just celebrated its first decade. If these feelings took me by surprise, it was not because I was indifferent to my wife’s body, nor that my wife had been ugly before her plastic surgery a few years earlier: her lips, already full, were now perfect, and her slightly aquiline nose now had an ideal shape. Her silicone breasts were finally worthy of my adolescent fantasies, while her shapely body and statuesque legs completed a dream physiognomy which, twinned with a sweet personality—of which, I should point out, she was in possession before all these improvements—has filled me with unparalleled happiness for all these years. But with the passing of time, I admit that I no longer noticed these alterations; so used to them had I become that I barely gave them any thought.
Plaza Montclair, Early Spring
Marybeth pivoted on the bench to look through the depanneur window. The portly clerk behind the cash counter had a moustache and some amount of hair on his head. He wore a yellow uniform polo shirt with a nametag pinned to the breast. Jono arrived at the cash register with a bottle of wine. He placed it on the counter. Marybeth puffed on her cigar and watched Jono and the clerk have a discussion. Jono put some money on the counter. He pushed the bottle a little closer to the clerk. Then he pushed the money closer. The clerk crossed his arms and rested them on top of his gut. He shook his head. The two stared at each other. Jono reached into the pocket of his trench coat and drew a yellow water pistol. He pointed it at the clerk.
You Couldn’t Undo a Night of Drinking at Sixteen
It’s worse than that. You know it’s worse than that. The other guy’s an ass, making an invisible mess of his life. You have the evidence of your dumbassery on your hands. Your goddamned hands.
Bicycle Times
Kids with sun-bleached hair and darkened skin, pool passes pinned to the corners of the towels draped around our necks, wearing bathing suits, sneakers and nothing else, watching us saddle up and roll out of the driveway in formation to our destination, eight of us on BMX bikes, some with crash pads, none of them, like my one-of-a-kind vehicle, modified with a banana seat.
I stopped and smiled brightly at him, to let him know that it didn’t matter one bit. But it was too late. He had already followed his guilt into his shop and closed the door.
Something changed that day. As my friends and I rode to the pool, jumping off the highest sidewalks, standing on cross bars, riding with no hands, I knew something was different.