Jerry by Hobie Anthony

Hey folks:

Glad to see ya. Here is a subtle piece of flash from Mr. Flash himself, Hobie Anthony. What I love about Hobie's work is that it isn't flashy. It doesn't showboat, but there's always a razor or two that'll cut you. And later that day you'll wonder why you're still bleeding.

Enjoy,

XOXOXO
DSH

Jerry paced back and forth, a towel wrapped around his left fist, waiting for another customer to walk down the stairs to the basement bar for a drink. He wrapped the towel tighter and let out a sigh, all he had was two barflies, a couple of low-lifes who couldn't see fit to leave him alone on a Sunday night. It was getting on to 2am and Sports Center was showing the same old highlights it had for the past, well, for a while. He pressed play on the cd player and Whisky River came to life.

He checked his watch. No call from Marnie. He tightened the rag.

Jerry poured more brandy and refilled his glass of beer. He wrapped the towel tighter. Jerry looked at the television to see another incomplete pass from Favre and punched the bar.

The door opened and a group came in. He knew their drinks from memory the second he laid eyes on them, a few different beers and a couple highballs; he gave them a good price and made a clean fifteen bucks on the tip, putting his jar at about fifty bucks, judging from the looks of the jar so far. He could maybe break even for the day if more people came in, and came in quick.

The two barflies at the end looked around nervously and ordered a pitcher and two whiskys each.

At two fifteen, a crowd started streaming in. More bar people from up and down the street. There was the buxom blonde with the big, Cheshire-cat grin whose laugh echoed off the drop ceiling and popcorn-covered floor; the kid with his arm in a sling; the guy with awful bleached-blonde hair that he had cut himself after too many cocktails; the guy who usually kept quiet except for when he was too loaded to know better. There was the girl with the lazy eye and dreadlocks who propositioned him one night, a blow-job if he'd give her drinks for free after hours. That offer stood good.

He talked to the Cheshire-cat blonde. About Marnie. She gazed into his eyes and told him to bring shots for the two of them.

The tap poured and shots were filled and refilled again as bottle caps went flying towards of the trash, landing on beat to the jukebox. Games were played and change was made, and the tip jar filled with ones and fives and tens. No time for brandy. No time to think about that young thing who split, left town without the courtesy of a good-bye. Nothing to do but tighten the bar rag, wipe up spills and empty ashtrays until last call.

Hobie Anthony writes prose and poetry in Portland, OR. A native of the South, prodigal son to Chicago, and new NorthWesterner, he seeks to understand this America. He can be found or is forthcoming in such journals as The Los Angeles Review, Crate, Prime Mincer, The Other Room, R.kv.r.y., Ampersand, Pank, Prime Number, and Soundzine, among others. His novella Silverfish can be found here: SILVERFISH

The Window by Catherine Campbell

Howdy folks:

I'm posting/reprinting (with permission) this lovely short piece of fiction for your reading enjoyment.

xoxox
DSH

The Window by Catherine Campbell

My mother loved my writing very much. She took my stories from my hands like newborns. She leaned down into them and hummed songs that she never hummed to me as a child, and she hummed to them as she slowly curled each story in on itself. She tied them with twine and hung them upside down from the rafters in the room we called Our Room. We did not have a refrigerator. We did not have a trunk.

I paced up and down our room beneath white bouquets of paper. I perpetuated our spring. The walls and floor and ceiling were chestnut planks and they threatened me with their darkness, so I wrote stories as quickly as I could. Sometimes I had to tell the same story again. My mother would take it from my hands and read it and she would smile as usual, but she would not touch my cheek as she did when I wrote a new story. She curled the paper up and hummed, and then cried because she could not have something new to dream about that night.

My father, who lived in Daddy's Room, was not here very much and when he was he did not stay for very long. I heard him enter his Room late in the evening when I was supposed to be asleep. He came with friends. I listened to them talk, their voices deep and well-worn like mud boots. I repeated their words over and over into the dark, up to the rafters above me, hoping to imprint the paper with my breath. What pieces I remembered I built into the next story. Those were my mother's favorites because they were from The Real Outside. Sometimes we opened the door from our room to look out there. We took turns turning the knob. My mother and I were free. But we just stood there, breathing, looking. We closed the door as quietly as we could, as if it had never happened.

Daddy's Room stayed empty one time for three weeks, then a few years. I waited to hear him come back one evening, but he never did. I wrote stories about what might have happened to him, but I quickly learned that these made my mother cry, and I didn't like to see her cry, so I wrote stories about her and my father together. I wrote about the wonderful places they saw in the Real Outside. I wrote about their sailboat, and their cave of crystals, and the time they danced in a deep forest and slept until they were covered with sand.

My mother died with twine in her fingers. I buried her beneath the floorboards with one of my stories covering her eyes so she would have something to see on her way. She never taught me to bundle my writing so the bouquets above me yellowed. The floor, instead, grew white. I waded through loose papers. The stories mixed themselves up. The silverfish came. The moths crowded my eyes so I could not see what I was writing. One day I took our axe for wood and chopped a window into the chestnut wall. I pulled up a chair to the hole in Our Room, and felt the moths desperately flutter around my body, bumping into my neck, confusing my skin for the brightness of the Real Outside. They spilled out into the fresh air and disintegrated. I pulled my pen from my dress pocket and set it in my lap. Then I pulled a pack of matches that I used to fight the dark. I lit one and dropped it at my feet.


Catherine is an MFA candidate at Queens University of Charlotte. She can be reached at lostsurfboard@hotmail.com or Twitter: @bookish_type.