Rick Slickman ached from his neck to his toes, and his joints creaked louder than the wooden floor in his room, but he kept a smile on his face. At 72, every trip to the shared bathroom down the hall in the old house on Bewildered Street felt like an Olympic event.
“Hey Ron, how’s the freezer warehouse job?” They talked while taking care of business. “Nice seeing you. Well, someday, you will meet the woman of your dreams.” He advised, “Don’t get her pregnant.” The fellow was in his fifties and the son of his cousin Charley.
Rick made it back to his tiny room and dropped into the lumpy recliner. His wrecked right knee had ruined his dream of a college scholarship, but he had stubbornly refused to have it replaced.…
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This story based on Stephen King’s prompt in his book “On Writing” comes with a 30-year delay.
Did she have an imaginary friend? Yes, she did. Nelly would say he was quite real, even if other people could not see him. His name was Sinbad like the cartoon character. He had huge dark eyes, tawny-brown skin, a turban and those funny pointy-toed shoes on his feet. Sinbad came to her house when her mother moved out. Her mother Jivka changed her name to Jane when she left for London. Sinbad kept calling her Jivka despite Nelly’s feeble protests. He had a thing about names – he used to call her Nell and he shortened her father Dickens’s name to Dick. Just that.
Nell liked the name Nell.…
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The first time Liz Chaffin saw Mickey dancing was at the funeral of the dead Mexican boy. She had long since forgotten the Mexican boy’s name, but she remembered that they kept the pine coffin closed because the boy had died from a shark attack. Her father offered no more details, but the closed coffin, topped with exotic flowers from the Yucatan, was sufficient for her imagination. They kept Mickey’s coffin closed too, not because of an irate shark, but because of what he had done to himself.
The obituary explained that Mickey had died of heart failure, which was technically true, Liz supposed. They buried him next to their grandfather, Titus Chaffin. There wasn’t much of a ceremony. Mickey’s best friend, Terrance Figgins, showed up looking stoned, but it was the first time she’d ever seen Terrance in a tie.…
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Most Illinois residents probably don’t know that the extreme southern tip of their state includes the beautiful and rugged landscape of the Shawnee Hills. Most of the people in Illinois live in Chicagoland, which is about as far away as you can get from the Shawnee Hills and still be in the same state. The hugely popular residential area near Lake Michigan is famously flat while southern Illinois features picturesque canyons and knobs. Bordered by the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, two mighty ancients of North America, this lesser-known rugged terrain is part of the South. Think Kentucky, which dozes just across the Ohio.
It’s a long drive down there from Chicago, and Marty and I always left the office too late in the day, trying to do one thing too many after arriving late to work after striving to finish up one more chore at home. …
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Luke weaved between honking, fume-belching metal to catch the bus coming up the other side of the road. The bus stopped just after taking off from a bus stop to let Luke on.
The quizzical faces inside the bus facing Luke espoused: “Why did he get on here?! Him?!”
No tourist sights existed where Luke had boarded, where English was limited, traffic chaotic, crossing streets perilous, traders screaming out prices, pedestrians mixing with horn-blowing vehicles, everything just missing each other as if controlled by satellites.
The bus’s aisle separated foreigners from locals in an Apartheid-like divide, the air inside the bus fresh after frying-meat smell and fumes mixed with dust. Luke’s sweaty face and the sweat patches on his shirt contrasted with that clothes-pressed-to-perfection enclosure. One of Luke’s shirt collars was up, the other down.…
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Christi had a birthday party scheduled over at The Glass; a gritty, cozy, and unwilling place to be. It was a bar and that was enough for me, I guess. Wednesdays are a good night to drink just like any other day of the week and it was one hell of a day. It was Christi’s twenty-third birthday and although the day was shit, I tried to have a good time. She phoned me.
“Are you coming tonight?” she asked. “It’ll just be a few of us. We’re meeting at The Glass at 7:30.”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
After work, I avoided the traffic on the highway and hit Dry Mill Road instead. It is a popular road for locals to bypass the highways, but too many people have caught on and now the traffic is just as bad as the main roads.…
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It was early August. On that steamy Saturday night, which was slowly changing over to a Sunday morning, the temperature was still in the 90’s. Under the heat dome, there was no relief.
Kevin was smoking and pacing in front of the pizza place. He checked his watch and saw that it was ten till midnight. Kevin looked out at the street, but there was no sign of Wayne, who’d promised that this last run of the night would be really quick.
There was nothing Kevin could do, so he sat on the curb to finish his cigarette. He felt his anxiety building. He was anxious about when he would get done with work. Anxious about how much time he’d have at the bar before last call.…
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