Judd glanced up from the ground he was plowing and saw movement on the river. He let go of the horse’s traces and trudged down to the riverbank.
He glared as an empty rowboat glided smoothly down the middle of the river. For a moment, he thought about letting it go on by, but he grudgingly doffed his boots and swam out to catch the boat and guide it onto dry land.
Posted in fiction
Tagged abandonment, embarrassment, farm, fiction, ingratitude, mail order bride, marriage, rowboat
“You have hope chests at this sale, is that correct?” Eloise asked.
“Oh, yes,” the auctioneer’s assistant said. “Right over there. We’ll probably get to them in about twenty minutes.”
“Thank you.” Eloise walked in the direction the man had pointed. She gave each chest only a quick once-over; the one she hoped to find was distinctive.
Eloise tried to tamp down the constant flare of anger she felt toward her late sister’s daughter and that rogue she was married to. After Marnie’s death, Junie – doubtless prodded by Fred – sold her mother’s hope chest at a yard sale. Fred had conned the buyer into thinking the chest was a valuable antique that the family ever so hated to let go, but you knew how it was.
Antique it may have been, but its value was primarily sentimental.
Posted in fiction
Tagged auction, death, family, fiction, heirloom, hope chest, Kaiser, love, World War I
Carey gave his fuel gauge a concerned glance. It was showing low, and he hadn’t yet collected the crucial information he needed.
“Low isn’t done, though,” he said quietly to himself.
Posted in fiction
Tagged car, fiction, fuel, love, reconnaissance, relationships, unrequited
Maureen’s fear of driving had never abated, and her foot constantly rode the brake of her two-year-old ’62 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. She had had the brake lights replaced twice. The mechanic didn’t know about Maureen’s bad habit and chalked it up to bad bulbs, missing an opportunity to warn her about the impending consequences of her actions.
Inevitably the day came when it did not matter how hard Maureen pushed the brake pedal or how near to the floor it came: the car would not stop. She was too flustered to think to use the parking brake or to shut the car off. Death and property destruction ensued, but Maureen survived and was released from the hospital after two weeks.
Maureen finally embraced the bitter truth: even when using the brake full time, driving was – for her – unsafe. From now on, she vowed, on those occasions when she had to go beyond walking distance, she would rely on her lucky friends and on taxi drivers.
Some people just seemed to float through traffic, leading charmed lives, never suffering the problems of ordinary folks. It wasn’t fair, she muttered, but that was life.
“Behold, the symbol of our faith and the focus of our works.”
The priest opened the small, sturdy wooden box. The interior was lined with bubble wrap, and the relic lay on a thick velvet cloth. The relic gleamed as the priest held it up in the fading light of the sunset. The members of the small congregation stared at the relic, their eyes filled with longing.
“Be of strong faith and good cheer,” the priest intoned, “in the certain hope that our efforts will bring about the Second Coming of the Power that will light our way once more.”
Satan slouched on his throne, one leathery wing idly beating time to the off-key tune its owner hummed.
He watched the parade of souls stream by him. Some quailed and screamed at the sight of the overlord of evil; others, hoping to be spared a little misery, genuflected before the throne, not realizing that Satan fried every 417th person to do that.
As the endless line of wrecked humanity slunk past him, he would meditatively torture one in a particular fashion and another in a different way. For the better part of an hour, he drilled holes in various sordid souls so that he wasn’t the only one in Hell who was bored.
A flash of movement caught his eye; he turned his horned head to see one of his lieutenants rushing toward him. The demon bowed before his infernal lord.
“What?” Satan demanded.
“My prince, there is … something odd. Something new, and none of us in Admissions can explain it.”
“Two million dollars,” Fisher said, handing over the backpacks.
“Briefcases are traditional,” Panchera said, frowning.
“I had backpacks.”
Fisher waited with forced patience as Panchera unzipped the overstuffed purple backpack and checked the stacks of currency. One of his men opened the orange backpack and did the same.
“While you’re counting to two million,” Fisher said, “maybe you could bring my sister out.”
Dirk leaned back on the couch, looking up at the angry woman and the four men she had brought home with her.
She sure knows some losers. Not one of ’em is tough enough to be water boy for the chess team. But he was outnumbered, and the tall, young blond man with the button-down collar and the white-knuckle grip on the baseball bat looked angrier than Beth did. He’s in love with her. Poor kid.
“Something you wanted to tell me, Sweetheart?”
Beth smouldered. “Get the hell out of my apartment and get the hell out of my life.”
“And these gentlemen are the moving company?”
“We are if you’re not out of here in two minutes,” the baseball bat kid growled.
Dirk decided he meant it. The guy had never been in a fight in his life, but anyone that tightly wound wouldn’t stop once he got started. It’d take a shampooer to get all of me out of the carpet.
The lord looked out a window of his magnificent castle and nodded at the fluffy white clouds below him, all brilliantly lit by the winter sun. The clouds looked like snow, and that was all the more he needed of snow. A lackey had told him that it was snowing in the valley, which was the best place for snow.
Still, it was cold, and the fire in his bedroom would need tending soon. He walked across the expanse of the room so he could look out another window. He often did so to watch the endless line of peasants as they walked out of the clouds – or on a clear day, the treeline – bearing the things he required. They regularly brought food and water and wood, piled high on their backs. As each one deposited his load in the assigned place, he was given a small coin – and only one: the lord kept close track of his money, and none of his lackeys were generous with it more than once. Then the peasant joined the line going back down the hill. Strange how their backs were still bent even though they had been relieved of their burdens. Who could understand the ways of peasants?
The lord looked out the window.
* * *
“The city’s swimming pools were full again today as we wind up our record-breaking third week of 100-plus-degree days,” the TV weatherman said over images of children splashing around. “My, doesn’t that look nice and cool! They’ll likely be there again tomorrow and the next day as there’s no relief in sight.”
Craig looked up from his tablet and scowled. He picked up the remote and muted the volume. It was bad enough to suffer the heat without listening to some idiot prattle on about it. Almost unheard over the window air conditioner, his children splashed happily in the horse tank he had filled for them to swim in. The nearest town with a swimming pool was ten miles away, and the water was too heavily chlorinated for Kathy to tolerate.
Jane glanced briefly at the now-quiet TV and her husband. She kept working to get the family’s dinner ready. The water for the spaghetti was about to boil. “It’s really too hot for this,” she said to herself. “Can’t live on sandwiches all summer.”
Posted in fiction
Tagged climate change, energy, farm, fiction, fluorescent, grid, heat, incandescent, LED, light bulb, rural, swimming, tractor
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Copyright © 2008-2011 Bryon Cannon.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
