telephone | catsignal

Rocco had spent a lot of time in the dingy warehouse on the lake. He had done a lot of work here – messy work that few other people had the stomach for, even in these dangerous times.

He put down the newspaper, which was a little over his head, and picked up a deck of cards to play solitaire. This, too, was above his abilities, but it was better than pure boredom as he waited for the phone to ring.

“Red seven on the … red nine? No, that’s not right.”

As Rocco puzzled over the intricacies of the game, Pentz sat quietly in his chair and said nothing.

“Black queen on … nothin’. I got nowhere to put it.” He set the rest of the deck back on the desk. “The hell with it.” He looked at Pentz. “You sure haven’t had much to say.”

Pentz proved Rocco right.

Continue reading “Fiction: Two Games of Solitaire” →

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.

Continue reading “Fiction: Last Call” →