We’re halfway through the set and my hand is on fire. My white guitar is smeared red with blood. The walls are sweating and the crowd in front of us seems endless. It isn’t, I can see the back staircase, but in my mind we’re at the start of something real here.
I finish my solo at the end of the song and step up to the mic. “I know Georgie said he was inviting everyone he knew, but I didn’t think he had this many friends!”
A soft laughter comes from the crowd and Georgie taps the drums behind me in response.…
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The prickly pear tea brought him back to Santa Fe — brought him back to her. It had been years since that week in the small adobe brick shack outside of town, nestled amongst the rolling dunes and the looming saguaros. How long ago had it been? Seven years? Ten years? He would have been a younger man then, just turned twenty-one and she, an older woman. She had seen decades of change in the city before he was even born. And still more before he had even stepped foot off the train into her strange land. She fascinated him — in the way she thought, in the way she spoke, in the way her strong-legged silhouette straddled him in the flicker of candlelight. He bowed to her gospel.…
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Stanley was driving fast enough to beat the minutes, checking off mile marker after mile marker, hurtling over the rivers and through the woods in his mad dash to get up there before the warden departed, the pizzas breathing in Stanley’s back seat, heater vents wheezing to keep them warm, buckled in to keep them from sliding and spilling downwards, toppling onto the chassis floor, hungry pies made of God knows what, corporate-certified The Works©, masses of fatty meat and regimented veggie shards, scattered across prefabricated crusts, smothered in low-grade salt-ridden bulk-manufactured warehoused tasteless cheese, which All-American Pizza© delivered daily by the truckload to All-American Pizza Courts© scattered across America like plastic houses on a Monopoly© gameboard, yet still, despite their All-American mediocrity, their aroma, warm and savory, strapped in place in Stanley’s back seat, locked up with him alone at the helm in the confines of his lonely dashing car, provided Christmas hope, for indeed it was Christmas Eve, and despite all the red tape the warden had wrapped around it, finally, to Stanley’s surprise, miracle of miracles, the warden granted permission for Stanley to cut through it all and purchase the pizzas for one last gathering of his Correctional Education class, just like in the outside world, a pizza party on the last day of class.…
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When the bus lost contact with the pavement, it was still traveling the path of the road, but in the wrong lane. And uncomfortably aloft.
As we sailed forward like a low-flying plane, I hoped I might drift toward the windshield with enough intention and elbow room to at least guard my head with my forearms. But I was not alone floating above the seats toward the front of the bus. The full load of passengers was gliding airborne through the pasturelands lining the Pan-Am Highway—and perhaps a few knots faster than the bus itself. There would be no clean landing.
The driver, moored to his seat by virtue of bracing himself with the steering wheel, was madly stomping on the brake pedal, a wild grip paling his knuckles.…
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The back door slammed shut. The woman looked up from her laptop and ran her fingers through her short gray hair. Her sister?
She plodded downstairs in scruffy slippers, one hand gripping the oak handrail, the other clutching drugstore reading glasses. It wasn’t her sister.
It was the boy.
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The boy’s mother had knocked on her door two years ago. They had just moved in next door. Her boy had tripped on a maple seedpod and scraped his hand. Did she have a Band-Aid?
The woman grabbed a bandage from the bathroom and handed it to the mother. The boy was studying his sneakers. He looked lost in an oversized Eeyore sweatshirt.
His mother brushed the boy’s black curls away from his big eyes. She explained that the boy did not like talking to people other than her.…
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The man with the white hat sat half-awake at the bar, neck deep in a bottle of whiskey. When he came in, he boasted about killing a Texas Ranger. Over and over again, he said, He shoulda never crossed my path! I got ‘im with five shots. As people became sick of him, they bought him one drink after another. Soon enough, he could barely see what was in front of him.
The bartender checked his pocket watch. It read 11:56.
Somewhere out in the desert, a hand that shouldn’t have moved touched a hole in a head that shouldn’t have been awake. The hand circled the rim of the hole over and over again and clenched into a rotten fist.
With a shaky hand, the man with the white hat pressed a shot to his lips.…
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When the creek dried to a trickle, my brother started walking the spine like he was looking for something he’d lost. He’d come back with junk in his pockets: a rusted hinge, a fisherman’s lure, a child’s shoe, just the one.
He stopped coming back for supper. Ma left his plate on the table until the gravy skinned over.
I found his boots by his bed. Caked mud was falling off in shapes. The laces were still tied. The insoles held the shape of his feet.
The sheriff asked if he left a note. He didn’t. The riverbed didn’t, either.
– J.M.C. Kane…
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