Writing

Short Fiction

I’m outside on the patio smoking when Carlos finds me.

“You’re not supposed to be smoking,” he says, but he doesn’t really care.

“I’m vaping,” I say, indicating the little stick I’m holding. It’s weird, but I like it. I can get pineapple, kiwi, watermelon. Fruit cancer.

We’re looking at the ocean. This is the best job either one of us has ever had for ocean viewing. It’s early in the morning, just after six a.m.

“Who said that thing about never dying, just fading away?” I ask. God, it’s beautiful here. California coast. Fucking waves and shit.

I Made This For You | Better Issue 6

“Lemmy,” I say, pulling a clean towel out of the cabinet and holding it up in front of me, “it’s time to get out.”

The four-year old in the bathtub regards me haughtily. He dumps another plastic cup of lukewarm water over his blonde head. “My name Liam,” he says, after the water has cleared his mouth. “Lemmy a baby name.”

It is three days before Christmas and it has not yet snowed in Portland, Oregon, although it is threatening to at any moment. Lemmy’s—Liam’s—father is lying in the bed in the larger of this crappy apartment’s crappy two bedrooms, in this crappy neighborhood way out by the airport. He is dying of emphysema brought on by years of refinishing hardwood floors without using the proper safety equipment, as well as smoking crystal meth and cigarettes like only a true addict can. He is forty-four.

Dead Indian Road | Marrow Magazine

It wasn’t actually called Dead Indian Road anymore, but that’s what all Ashland locals still called the long, twisting Southern Oregon blacktop, even after the city council finally changed the name to Modoc Memorial Highway after many valid and vociferous complaints about cultural sensitivity and the dignity of indigenous people. It had always been a dangerous stretch, and it still was, even after multiple improvements, added barricades, warning signs and constant maintenance. And a name change.

Saunders Brown, who lived up Dead Indian Road, was a nervous driver, and was always careful coming home nights, especially the ones when she stayed late drinking with her friends after her shift at The Blind Cow was over. Billy, the hostile Irish owner who was actually Irish, sometimes got drunk and let the staff drink on the house after the bar closed down. It was great to drink for free, of course, but you were only truly lucky if you weren’t scheduled the next day, when Billy, hungover and regretful, was twice as nasty as usual.