Fiction: Time in a Bottle
With a respectful nod to the late, great Jim Croce for the title
The door to the bar opened, spilling a little fresh air and a gringo inside.
A few of the locals looked up from their beers and their cards to study the gringo. He was young but not a boy. He was nicely dressed but not expensively. He was clean but he had been sweating in the southwestern heat. He was not one of them, but the pain in his eyes made him an honorary citizen of their little bar so they left him alone.
The gringo took a stool at the bar, leaving a few polite open spaces between himself and the other man sitting there.
“Una cerveza, por favor,” the gringo said. The bartender nodded his graying head and produced a lightly chilled bottle of beer. The gringo stared at it for a long time. At last he spoke quietly: “All the time I have left is in this bottle.” He picked up the beer and downed half of it.
Fiction: Rearview Mirror
Lewis had worked out a simple plan: Load the old propane tank on the ton truck. Back over the gas pump by the old barn. The truck’s hot tailpipe and some fortunate sparks ignite both the gasoline storage tank and the fume-filled propane tank. Half the farm goes up in a massive explosion.
It should be a quick death, he figured, and best of all it would look like an accident; the insurance company would pay off.
Lorna would be at work at the diner, and Sarah would be in school. They wouldn’t get hurt, and they wouldn’t be around to see it happen. He’d sent them both off that morning with smiles and hugs and kisses, so there would be no reason to suspect he’d taken his own life. And they’d have a last happy memory of him.
Fiction: Bridging the Years
Felisha walked out to the middle of the bridge’s pedestrian sidewalk. She looked over the edge into the blackness far below. There wasn’t much to see of the river at a quarter to midnight, but she could hear it.
As she threw one leg over the railing, a single car lit her briefly as it crossed. She paid no attention to it and didn’t notice that the car came to a stop at the first opportunity on the other side. Nor did she notice the man who got out of the car and began walking toward her.
She swung her other leg over the railing. She faced the bridge with her feet still on the walkway and her hands on the cold metal but her entire body on the wrong side of safety.
Fiction: Last Call
Arnold put a bullet in each of the six chambers.
“Talk about overkill,” he muttered, and made himself chuckle.
He took a last look around his apartment, at the peeling wallpaper in the living room, the leaking faucet dripping on a stack of dishes in the kitchen, the worn carpeting, the old furniture that wouldn’t last long enough to become antique – and it wasn’t his to sell if it did make it that far.
He looked at the stack of bills he had permitted to accumulate on the corner table. They weren’t even all his bills; the previous tenant’s overdue notices were still arriving even after four years.
Arnold looked at the phone. The service had been cut off, but he remembered the last time he had used it. That memory brought him right back to the gun in his hand and the main reason for its being there.
Last words, he thought. I should say something, even though no one is here to listen.
He thought for a couple of moments but nothing interesting came to mind. He finally settled on, “The hell with it,” and raised the gun to his mouth.
The telephone rang.
Fiction: Tag
The handsome young man nervously smoothed his silk tie again. He stood outside the 52nd-floor office of an international trading company, peeking through the door’s small window and waiting until his quarry was in position.
Then he opened the door and strode in quietly. The receptionist barely had time to look up before the man crept behind Gundersen, who was in a conversation with the company president. The intruder smacked Gunderson’s back, firmly but not to hurt.
“Tag! You’re it!” the young man shouted before fleeing the office.
It took Gundersen a moment to extricate himself from his boss, his coffee mug, and the office to chase after his assailant. “I’ll get you!” he yelled down the corridor. “You can’t escape!”
Indeed, there was the young man, standing before a closed elevator door. He was prying the door open.
“No!” Gundersen yelled. “You won’t get away from me!”
The other man summoned every erg of energy he possessed into the muscles of his arms and forced the doors open. He flung himself into the dark, dirty abyss and his laugh echoed down after him. Forty-six floors later, it abruptly stopped.
“Damn you!” Gunderson shrieked. “Damn you!” His howls of outrage now filled the tall space the laughter had vacated.
The young man, William Snyder Craftt IV, left behind a burgeoning law practice and his grief-stricken mother and father, who could not possibly have known that their son was one of a handful of endlessly reincarnated souls who had played tag through the ages and preferred dying and being reborn to being “it.”
But then, children are often unthinkingly cruel to their parents.
Fiction: Crossing the Bridge
In the light of the full moon on a cloudless night, Ron walked to the middle of the bridge and put one leg over the guardrail, and then the other. He stood on a narrow catwalk meant for the use of painters and inspectors. Ron planned to use it as a launching pad, to launch himself into the deep waters of the Tondoscinewa River and end it all.
He took a deep breath, and released it. Depressed as he was, he thought perhaps he should get right with God before jumping. Of course, jumping itself was guaranteed to get on God’s bad side, and there was no point in asking for forgiveness and then committing the sin. So, no prayer.
Ron took another deep breath, thinking it would be his last. Then he heard the footsteps approaching slowly from the tree-laden far end of the bridge. He blew out the breath and wondered who was coming.
Fiction: One Big Joke
A man is at his lawyer’s office. The lawyer says, “Geoff, this is your third divorce. This is stupid. Tell you what you do: just go out every five or six years, find a woman you can’t stand and buy her a house.”
A kid comes up on a man’s porch. “Say, mister, did you see the truck that hit your dog?”
“No!”
“Neither did your dog.”
NEKWE
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