Tag: fiction

Darren knew the moment he opened his eyes that it was too early to be awake. Pale light illuminated the dusty blinds, but did nothing to combat the morning darkness. The old radio beside the bed pronounced the time in blue: 5:47 a.m.

For a moment he stared up at the ceiling and took in the stillness. It’d been years since he last came home, years since he’d slept in this bedroom and woken up with his parents down the hall. They slept in separate bedrooms now; no sense in sharing at their age. In the room that’d once been his sister’s, his mother’s oxygen machine wheezed gently behind a closed door, pumping air into lungs that could no longer be trusted. He imagined his father was already awake downstairs, hunched over his coffee.

Darren sat up, pushed the old quilt aside, and placed his feet on the chilled wood floor. It was a motion he’d repeated every single day for nineteen years, yet now he marveled at the oddity. He knew this room inside and out; knew better than anyone that there were still probably stickers on the inside of the closet door and that he’d once hidden a dirty magazine behind the loose bit of wall paneling now hidden by a dresser. It was the newfound emptiness that skewed the space and made it unrecognizable. Nothing from the old days seemed to remain.

Careful to be quiet—though he imagined his mother couldn’t hear much over the machine strapped to her face—Darren snuck down the stairs, skipping the sixth step out of habit because it probably still creaked. The kitchen light wasn’t on. His father must still be sleeping.

He fumbled around the kitchen by what little light had begun to leak in through the window over the sink. The coffee dripped sluggishly into the pot as it brewed. He watched the dark liquid rise behind the glass and, when there seemed to be enough, he poured himself a cup that wasn’t quite two thirds full. The tendrils of steam rose like phantoms.

He unlocked the back door, wincing as it creaked, then slipped outside and took a seat at the ancient picnic table. The sky was pale blue, lingering on the edge of darkness. His arms and legs were uncomfortably chilled by the morning air. This, at least, stirred some memories.

The old tom cat that’d greeted him when he arrived the day before slunk up onto the patio and snaked its way between his legs.

“Are you taking care of them?” he asked.

The cat sat down under the table and stared back with big yellow eyes.

(Fiction by Kayleen Burdine)

“You gotta be shitting me,” Gulliver said for maybe the third time since striking up a conversation with the Asian guy whose car broke down along the freeway near the store. “You traveled all this way, halfway around the world, just because of some fortune teller? That’s one of the craziest damn things I ever heard.”

Edmond couldn’t help but overhear the conversation, or at least Gulliver’s half of it, while restocking the beef jerky on the opposite side of the shop. Fortune teller vaguely registered through Edmond’s zombie-like state, but over the years Edmond had come to tune out most of things Gulliver lauded over with the customers.

The Asian guy laughed and said something Edmond couldn’t make out, but he could tell the guy had an accent.

Edmond checked his watch. Only forty-two more minutes before he could go home and binge on some National Geographic.

“So what kind of treasure are you expecting to find out here?” Gulliver asked the man.

Fortune teller. Treasure. Edmond stopped hanging the jerky packages and listened.

“I don’t know for sure. Gold and jewels, maybe,” the man said. “But she also said I’d find treasures worth far more than anything I could imagine.”

Edmond jutted up from the aisle to face the foreign traveler. Mid-twenties, wearing a polo and khakis, grinning like he just got off an amusement park ride.

“And you believed that?” Gulliver gawked. “Sorry, buddy, but it sounds like a scam to me.”

“Maybe.” The traveler shrugged. “However, I paid the fortune teller nothing. She told where to find the treasure in exchange for ten percent of what I find. Why would she do that?”

Edmond glided out the jerky aisle, intently watching the two men chat at the counter.

“Well, you got me there.” Gulliver said. “But not everybody would just up and leave like you did.”

The traveler’s grin faltered momentarily. “Well, it wasn’t as easy as that,” he said.

Gulliver pointed out the front windows to a tow truck coming down the freeway. “Buddy, you’re ride is here.”

“Wonderful,” the traveler said. “Hopefully it won’t cost a fortune to get that thing fixed, cuz I haven’t found mine yet.”

The two men laughed. Edmond stared wide-eyed at them from the slushie machine. The traveler thanked Gulliver for the phone call and the company, then moved for the door.

“Hey,” Edmond called out. The man stopped and turned around.

“Where are you from?” Edmond asked as he walked towards him.

“Japan.”

“From Shinshiro?” Edmond said.

“I-yeah.” The traveler cocked his head at Edmond. “How did you know?”

Edmond stopped directly in front of the man, next to the sunglasses kiosk. Their reflections bounced back at them from the dozens of lenses.

“I saw a fortune teller once. She told me that if I traveled to Nagashino Castle in Shinshiro I would find a great treasure.”

“Oh,” the man nodded. “But you didn’t go.”

“No. I didn’t.”

The tow trucks horn honked.

The man looked Edmond in the eyes, then left the store.

“Holy Hell, Edmond,” Gulliver said. “What was that about?”

Edmond watched the traveler hop into the tow truck and vanish down the freeway.

“Gulliver,” Edmond said. “I quit.”

(Fiction by Wesley Martin)

The lingering heat ruined the rain. There was no torrential downpour sweeping in on a cool wind. It didn’t cleave the sunbaked summer in two. It didn’t arrive with low, auspicious thunder and purple bolts of lightning. Instead, it fell in unsatisfying specks for days, exacerbating the already oppressive humidity, clogging every throat and drawing the sweat from every pore. It rushed down the street in brown torrents, pooling in the lowest intersections, and helped tires to grind asphalt into fresh potholes. The weeds had already begun to triple and the sodden, sucking earth didn’t yet allow for mowers to grind them back into stumps.

He woke up each morning with the sheets clinging to his body and showered only to sweat again within the hour. He suddenly favored juice over coffee, welcoming the cool slide of citrus down his throat each morning as the briefest possible reprieve. He dressed in shorts every day, but even that wasn’t enough to keep the sweat out from behind his knees, from beneath his arms, from sliding down the nape of his neck. His front door was sticking, suddenly, in a way it hadn’t before, bloated by warmth in its frame and he sighed when he realized the particularly large, ugly orb weaver that’d made its web between his porch light and the awning hadn’t yet been knocked away by the stuttering downpour.

He felt like he hadn’t been able to breathe in weeks.

The house on 14^th Street, the house that wasn’t his own, seemed to have taken the weather to heart. The trim running beneath the gutter looked more chipped than ever; he’d been meaning to repaint it for the last four years. He would mow the grass just as soon as the lawn dried out, but for now the Yellow Mustard was slowly creeping ever-higher, halfway to his knees and sure to be taller when he showed up again tomorrow. Rain’s phantom speckled the sidewalk and his skin in tandem.

A withered reflection behind the door groaned when he stepped inside, shifting in the old brown armchair with the worn-down and fraying arms, looking older than it had just hours ago. His father had recently begun to sleep there, when walking to his bed had become too grand an effort. The carpet beneath his father’s feet was stained with every substance imaginable. For half a decade it’d increasingly become the solitary site of his life’s every moment, spent wiled away in front of an ancient television sat atop a rickety end-table drawn close to account for failing eyes. The numbers on the controller had worn away completely months ago.

He took a seat on the sunken sofa, next to a toppling stack of old newspapers, and sucked in a lungful of dust. A piece of him wondered if he’d begun to visit too often. “You alright?”

His father grunted, pulled in a labored breath. “Been better.”

(Fiction by Kayleen Burdine)