All tagged fiction

This was different from his initial story to the cops. He told them he had heard someone shout “gun!” He’d turned to the woman behind him, who only a moment ago had asked where in the mall the women’s shoe store was, as if that were something a guy like him would know. “Gun,” he hissed to her, afraid his voice would alert the shooter. Then panic: “Gun!”

But in the later tellings of what he alone called the Galleria Mall Shooting he definitely heard the shot as he was shopping for new headphones. A blast that’d make you taste foil.

I got into the liquor business at a young age, and despite what anybody might have you believe, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. My knack for logistics was something I discovered along the way. It’s funny how successful folks like to hide a thousand mistakes behind one big breakthrough. And let me tell you, I made plenty of mistakes.

My sister called me that night. I sat on my bed, with the lights off, as she talked. If I couldn’t see anything of my room, I could imagine I was home and she was talking to me from across the bedroom we’d shared all through our childhood. I could imagine she was telling me secrets about the boys she had crushes on and the teachers she hated. 

She was on her mother’s boat, wearing a floppy hat that let her long blonde hair have just enough freedom to appear wild and refined at the same time. As I grew to know her, I learned that she was exactly that: the perfect balance of wild and refined.

I knew the Lord was testin me, but I also knew he had not abandoned me. I watched the trees grow shaggy and buds erupt. The colors and the insects returned. He was resurrecting the world yet again. And if he could do that, year after year after year, I knew I could go on. 

She’s saying something else, but I’m out of reasonable earshot, so it’s socially acceptable to pretend I don’t hear her now. It just so happens I did forget something, not capers, but a sauce for my spaghetti. I’m making dinner for Judy, my wife; she says I don’t surprise her enough. Tonight, I’m proving her wrong. 

On the television, the women who are after the bachelor sit for interviews.  Each talks of how she can't understand what the bachelor sees in the girl who got hypothermia.  They tell the camera of her lack of social skills, how she doesn't get along with them.  How they want to rip her throat out.

She wished they’d realized this before she’d traded in her elastic-waist pants for less flexible slacks. In hindsight, maybe she shouldn’t have pulled out her harmonica when asked about hobbies. Anyway, at some point during her drunken escapades, this flyer had appeared in her lap.