Clyde Byrd came home Friday afternoon and took his 12 gauge shotgun out of the closet and loaded one shell. He was set. As soon as Mattie gets home from work, he intends to arrange his fake suicide scenario. This will get her attention—and, maybe he can find out the truth about a certain situation.
The first inkling I have that this is not going be an ordinary workday is when I drive into the parking lot. My car is swarmed by a horde of middle-aged women all screaming like they thought Elvis suddenly lost his damn mind and decided to drive up to the hotel in a 1971, puke yellow Pinto, with no air-conditioning in the middle of August. Please ladies, get a grip. We’d known he was going to stay at the hotel and at first I’d been as excited as everyone else, but by the time he showed up I could have cared less. Having him stay there was just a pain-in-the-neck with no upside as far as I could see. The chances of actually meeting The King, or even laying eyes on him, were slim to none judging by all the security everywhere.
Here are our nominees for the Best of the Net Anthology, from Sundress Press. It’s been a great year at Drunk Monkeys, and we hope to build on this success in the year to come. Thank you to every one of the writers and artists we’ve come to know.
The blind girl is blind so she can’t see, but she has the most terrific sense of taste and that has to be some kind of consolation. This is what she tells me. She says she can take a sip of wine and count how many virgins have stomped on the grapes. I don’t believe her. I say, “Even if you could, you can’t tell a virgin by how they taste.”
SHORT STORYSubjectiveby Lise Quintana
I refer to the text of this story, but it just says “They chatted through dinner.” It doesn’t say whether I am supposed to laugh at his offensive jokes or even whether I find him attractive. I don’t find him attractive. He’s quite a few years older than me, although with his toad-like build and complexion, he could be much younger and just aging badly. I find the bartender, a man in his mid-30s with short hair razor-parted on the side, the sleeves of his white button-down shirt rolled up to his elbows, much more attractive, but in this flashback the text doesn’t mention him at all, so I can barely even look his way.