Short Fiction

Inside the information packet he found a copy of the company newsletter, The PanCola Tribune, the lead article for which began, “Did you know that by 1910 the American people were spending more than double on fountain drinks each year than their government was on the Army and Navy?”

In a trice I had reached the ground floor, bleary from the rousing, forced to blink the sleep from my eyes what better to see my butler, a man of some years, whapping the bristle end of a broom on the head of a naked, screaming pillager of digital privacy.

Maggots had already gotten to it when he found the body.

‘What I wouldn’t give to drink the sweat from the underside of her tit,’ Oswald is thinking, though he tries to affect that he is thinking, ‘Why can you no longer find bubble-gum-flavored bubble gum?’

Ever since I left, his letters have been forwarded to me, bundled in twine. They became a sort of jigsaw puzzle of your life, each sheet of ivory bond a piece of you, fitting together to show who you would become. I never needed to see the completed puzzle, though, because of those days with the shoe lady.

At the entrance to the hospital, situated in the foothills to a genuine range outside of our community, we drove beneath its sign, Saint Loretta’s Home for Individuals Disabled by the Loss of Animals, in the compact still under both our names.

The funk of smelling a key, the tang of tasting a key: Clarity has the aroma and flavor of doorknobs.