Croxen sat down in the booth across from Pereson and, without a word, opened a vial containing a white powder and emptied it into Pereson’s coffee.
The vial went back into his left jacket pocket and he waited.
“Just like that?” Pereson asked, and Croxen nodded.
“Just like that. If you spill it, I have more.”
Pereson stared at his cup and looked fretfully around the little coffee shop.
late spring night –
looking by lightning
for a tornado
The ghost was back again. Every day in the early evening, just for an hour.
“Listen!” the ghost said cheerfully.
Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat.
Warren tried to work around it, tried to do the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, tried to wash the dishes, tried to weed the flowerbed. He could hear it wherever he went in and around his house.
Continue reading “Fiction: Little Drummer Boy”
vacuuming the car –
bird whistles
E-major triad
There were seven public rooms in the museum, and Jalene Naysure had seen them all a thousand times. She had gotten friendly with the curator, Aileen Royer, and had been in the private office many times.
That left one room Jalene had never seen, the one that was off limits to everyone but the curator. It was an oddly placed addition to the house and was accessible only from the outside. Someone unfamiliar with the floor plan wouldn’t have known of the room just from walking around inside. It was behind a bare wall decorated only with a little molding and two brass candle sconces.
“I’ve never been in there,” said Arnold Pinkhause, a retired volunteer fire chief and one of the volunteer docents. “Cora says it’s just storage.”
“Oh, odds and ends,” Cora Belling, chief volunteer docent, told Jalene. “Junk, really, but junk no one’s made the decision to get rid of over the past fifty years. I’ve never been in there myself, but there’s nothing worth looking at in there.”
Continue reading “Fiction: The Orient Club”
wings and bodies
beat against metal mesh
spring night
Ed had been keeping a loose eye on the young black man outside his store for nearly an hour.
The man was maybe in his mid-20s and was dressed casually: tattered blue jeans, a dark purple shirt, and an old jean jacket. He was standing near the public bench on the sidewalk as though he were waiting for someone. And while he waited, he was giving a quietly impressive display of his abilities with a yo-yo.
He checked his space before doing an Around the World, making sure he wouldn’t hit anyone or anything. He Walked the Dog in a little circle around himself, and even walked it around a bored collie tied up at the other end of the bench. Then a Pinwheel and a Skin the Cat.
hummingbird
hovers, sips
vanishes