No planes left to fly, for two weeks we of the 21st Pursuit Squadron stumble across Agoloma Bay on shaky legs, our bodies weak from dysentery and a diet of rice mashed with the occasional monkey or lizard. We’ve cleaned out the west coast of the Bataan Peninsula; nights, the Japanese have been trying to clean us out across Bataan’s neck, sending invasion barges along the China Sea and Manila Bay coasts. They’re closer to cracking our front lines every hour. Agoloma Point, Captain Dyess announces one night, back on base at Marivales. Grubby-kneed, he sways, slaps a mosquito from an arm already dotted pink with bites, then the map. There’s about fifty holed up there, plenty of snipers to boot. We gotta strike from behind enemy lines if we’ll have any chance in hell.…
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He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. Suddenly waking – choking on some saliva that slid down his windpipe. He rolls clumsily off the sofa and lands hard on the threadbare shag carpeting on all fours.
Struggling to breathe through his nose while at the same time barking hoarsely in an effort to expel the slime trail of drool invading his trachea.
Once he stops coughing. Catching his breath. Aware of the strange click coming from the phonograph console, a relic from the 1970s that had belonged to Jennifer. It was one of the few possessions she had brought into their lives when they moved in together in the late 80s.
He remembers now that he’d been listening to The Very Best of Loretta Lynn.…
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Jack and I sat like gods on nice, flat chair-sized rocks right outside the mouth of the mine shaft. We looked down and watched the two idiots hop across the mossy creek stones. Sure enough, the fat one slipped and landed on his butt. I looked at Jack. He shook his head, took a short nip out of the pint bottle, and tucked it in the back pocket of his jeans. I didn’t consider that to be a safe place to store a glass bottle, especially when you’re inside a mountain, mining gold. My little brother isn’t as smart as me though.
The idiots finally made it across the creek and started climbing up the slag pile. They didn’t look like much, but that’s what you get when you recruit your help out of the Crazy Horse Saloon.…
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The day was gray and calm. The river, a sheet of ripple-less obsidian, stretched before Alan and his stepson, Travis. Alan’s line was taught in the water, the pole pinned between two large rocks, while Travis’s pole laid between the fishermen as Alan fed line through the eyelet of a treble hook. Alan worked his thick fingers around each other with gentle precision a couple of times to complete the knot.
“Livers, please,” Alan said, studying the hook in his hand and giving it a tug to test the knot.
Travis extended the open container, Alan retrieving a slippery liver from the soup with a slurp.
“Closer ‘er up,” said Alan, massaging the treble hook into the liver, then calling for string.
Travis riffled through the tackle box before extending a spool.…
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I see them vaguely in the darkness. Their eyes glow green in the firelight and their sharp white teeth shine hungrily in their wide mouths, plumes of steamy breath floating forcefully into the frigid air. They wait. They are patient, but I can see the desire in their dreadful grimaces, in the long, slow strings of saliva descending from chin to ice-covered snow.
I watch the play of the fire as the harsh wind gusts past the slim shelter of the overhang, pushing the blaze nearly flat, threatening to shrink it to nothing. Then the gusts abate briefly, and the flames flare upward again. Icicles melt slowly from the stone roof. The drops hiss as they plop into the flames. I feel no heat. My legs are frozen, and the numbness spreads slowly up my torso.…
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“Dad, you need a new For Rent sign. The edges are torn. The letters are faded.”
“This’ll do the job,” Leo said. He smiled at Alan to soften his tone. “I’m renting your apartment, not the sign.”
Leo finished taping the tattered For Rent sign to the front door of his two-flat. His son and daughter-in-law were moving to California. They’d asked him to move with them, and if he could’ve moved his home too, he would have gladly left Chicago.
It’s not that he didn’t like Chicago. He’d been born and raised on the city’s south side. The winters, though, were getting harder. Los Angeles weather would be kinder. But he couldn’t leave his two-flat. The two-flat was where he and his wife had raised their boy.…
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Ashley turned off the busy interstate highway. She drove down one long overpacked road after another. Ten miles took nearly thirty minutes to reach her destination. She turned down the river road. It was almost deserted as most people raced from one job to another, or perhaps to their sleeping places.
She paused at one of the drive through pull-offs. A brown and muddy river had been beautiful many generations ago. Dead limbs stood where trees had once towered over the river. Sludge filled; the oily stream struggled slowly downstream to join the ocean.
The pull-offs had been designed to make this a place to eat between jobs for today’s workers. Few wanted to stop here and contemplate what their grandparents had done to the environment.…
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