Posts published in “Fiction”

Julian pushes the supermarket brand hotdogs around the grill growing impatient at the fact that they are not yet ready to eat.  He wishes they would spit and sizzle and flare up the way they do in the hotdog commercials, but they languish on the not-nearly-hot-enough-to-cook-anything grate.  Once there was grass around his cousin Lester’s forlorn little grill, but the battle against the grease and ash from these summer cookouts has been lost, revealing the dry dirt beneath.  Julian turns a hot dog over to check if it somehow had achieved doneness while he had stopped paying it attention for a moment—it had not.  He throws the barbeque tongs on the table beside the grill and contemplates the cooler filled with beer before recalling Dawn sitting directly behind him, feeding their toddler applesauce.  She doesn’t like when he drinks and fear of her has kept Julian sober many nights he’d rather have drunk away.  

The caffeine was coursing through Philip’s blood and making his heart dance in a way that made him regret having three cups of coffee and not eating anything before leaving the house.  The walk between his apartment and the 72nd and 2nd Avenue subway stop was not long, but it felt like hell in the mornings and especially so this fine day.  He had come to notice three distinct zones between his apartment and the entrance to the subway over his repeated morning treks.  The first and easily most pleasant part of his entire day was the fresh bread block.  That was the block that always smelled like fresh bread in the mornings and smelled like nothing at night, so, aptly, he named it the fresh bread block.  That is where the pleasantness stopped.  The second section was the block that passed the park which he referred to internally as Dog Shit Hell.  It wasn’t just that the block smelled like myriad piles of dog crap, but that the sheer density of dog crap that was smeared on the sidewalk left him in complete awe and disbelief that so many people refused to pack plastic bags when they took their dogs out to shit.  He ventured on more than one occasion while talking to girls and trying to look smart and funny that if someone measured the ratio of sidewalk covered in dog shit to sidewalk that you would very nearly approach one.  Sometimes he felt bad about his math jokes, but really he just could not help himself.  They never worked the way he wanted.  The third zone is the zone he referred to externally as fish guts alley.  This was, of course, a bit of a misnomer since it wasn’t technically an alley but a two block section along Second Avenue and they weren’t just fish guts but truly encompassed the guts of a large variety of creatures, fish, fowl and anything else that populated the sky, sea and land.  It did not make sense for there to be quite as much animal offal here as there was since the fish market was in the Bronx and the Upper East Side was certainly no booming culinary district sought by those who wanted to dine surrounded by the stench of their dinner’s remnants rotting around them.  It made no sort of sense that he could digest.  

When I woke I stepped out on the balcony and walked over some broken glass and looked over the edge to see Betty face down in the pool, bloated and pale, still wearing her party hat and I lit my cigarette and went back into the house.  Eric was still asleep at the foot of the bed.  My bathrobe smelled like smoke and had that unmistakable tangy hint of vomit.  Luckily enough, my sense of smell was so destroyed by the Columbian whirlwind last night that my house could be on fire and I’d never smell it.  I carefully stepped over Eric who, upon closer inspection, might not have been breathing, and opened the bathroom door.  I found a fresh beer in the sink with some toothpaste spit on the side which I washed off.  I opened the beer; the lukewarm flat piss lit up the pleasure sensors in my brain like flares at the scene of a horrible rainy accident.  I shut off the light to the bathroom as I exited, forgetting why I went in there to begin with.  

Sal, convinced that everyone was out to get him, sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee from the waitress who was shaped like an orange with another orange on top of it wearing a blue apron.  He noticed that her skin was covered in decades of black heads caused by the flaring grease fire roaring behind her since the 60s.  She brought him the coffee and it was too hot; he knew she was trying to burn his mouth with the scalding hot liquid.  He asked her for those little pre-packaged cones of half-and-half with their tips flattened.  She pointed toward the little metal pitcher of cream, but he demanded the flattened little cones.  She rolled her eyes and took her time bringing them over.  She asked him if he was going to order anything, but he wasn’t sure yet so she would just have to come back in a little while.  He just wanted to drink his coffee and be left alone.  

The Ferret—he insisted on being called The Ferret, having eschewed the name his mother gave him except when at work or within his professional life that fucking bitch—dug through the garbage can in the Union Square McDonalds looking for Monopoly pieces on discarded fry cartons and soda cups and big mac wrappers to complete his collection and win the money car trip thing that was the grand prize.  In his pocket he had three of the four railroads, a Baltic thing, some Pennsylvanias, maybe a Lightworks and a Broadway.  The piece he really needed was Park Place, but the chances of that happening were slim at best.  He knew that.  He’d accepted it.  Yet his dream burned brighter than ever before.