Welcome to the club. Sit down, kick off your shoes and pour yourself a stiff drink – you’re going to need it. There’s nothing exclusive about this place, even though the waiting list is three decades long and all the non-members seem to be pressing their noses against the glass and miming: ‘How did you get in there?’ and, ‘Should I come in?’ But you just wave them away, cigar in hand, and turn back to your cronies who are leafing through their back-copies of Playboy which they no-longer take for the articles alone. I’m sorry, I’m very...
I don’t know what happened, but I do know that I did a bad thing. It was all so simple once, so simple. I’ll be thirty on the other side of the weekend and it seems so complicated now. I can’t figure out how to hold my drink, to paint it clear, to get back to it. I guess it all started this way about ten years ago or so and I have really managed to wind myself into the yarn. Who once was the guy who helped everyone out of the mess can’t seem to figure out the puzzle. Instead he waits for things to get better, he flagellates himself, points fingers at others. I guess there will be happiness, right? Everyone says it starts getting better on the otherside of this weekend. And it’s lent. And I guess I need to give up my childish...
Ms. O’Connor, my heroRichard said, “I guess that door done gone and got the water in. It’s a full half inch in at the bottom. That kinda thing happens round here this time of the year.” Richard drove a truck for the State. Sometimes it carried salt, in the winter especially when it was cold and the frozen precipitation would spill from the sky. Sometimes it was okra that had seemed to take to the landscape only second to kudzu, another Asian foliage. In summers his whole truck, leased by him, and rented by the state via him, would carry truckloads of okra as far as Raleigh and the Polk Youth Detention Center. He reckoned them boys ought to like okra alright. Hell, from what he had heard, everything went as it wanted to in that prison and things resembling okra were a-okay as well. In the mouth or other places, it mattered not. He measured his successes and failures by the fact that he had never had to eat delivered okra in a concrete building 350 miles from home. Cassard Willoughby bought the inn in town around 1953 and had owned for the last ten years or so. The economy of Shelby had not changed that much in the time despite so many of the local college folk had decided to stay around. He did not know what they did to make a living, nor did he care. He heard there was one man who worked for the United Nations as a translator and was not around that much, always flying on big airplanes to this city or...
Hey Darling, I know it’s hard to get the waves to match, to amplify. Or for there to be any moment, or semblance, of simultaneous empathy. Days seem to be measured out in such a way that getting home makes every hour epic – or at least that’s how I want it to be. Occasionally family stuff comes up – a birthday necessitates a call home, and it feels like it cuts into the long story. Used to be hours felt like short stories, microfiction. Now they want to be that too, but I demand a journey. Of course, I don’t always get what I want. I didn’t realize where you were tonight when I put you to bed. It was a different place from me and a conversation with my father about sports and our favorite teams and the fact that no player should earn over $1 million. That, when we buy Nike shoes, we are paying that $90 million Lebron James got in his contract with the company. It’s important chatter in a way. But it’s not the long story on a night like this. I’m sorry about the way it all went down in the end. Now that I think about it, I should’ve finished the movie with you. Love,...
writer and muse“I don’t think he should be talking to you that way,” he said to her, as he departed for the bathroom. “I think he should only say sweet things, with a girl that looks about like you needs to have sweet things said to her. Otherwise, you gonna run and run far away.” To Pen he seemed like the sweetest specimen of man that she had ever come across. In this place of alkali dryness, rain a few weeks of the year. Cacti grew up out of the barren soil and took root in something much deeper. She was once told that a cactus’ root could extend for miles just to find ample water. She believed it. Her mother lived in Santa Fe and her father in Phoenix, and her kids were now scattered across the country because of the multiple divorces. The one departing for college, and then work in NYC, and she hoped he would be the one that could help keep her up in these “waning years”, as she liked to call them. Her nourishment came in the occasional phone call, a week per summer in Destin, the occasional mariage in the family in which they all, miraculously, managed to return, or to be together. It was a strange phenomenon and it left her satisfied, but feeling a prisoner. Truth is Ricky was a shit. Had been since the day he had caused the great chasm between his mother’s left and right pelvic bones. She believed that he must’ve spit fire upon being extracted. His first word must’ve been “motherfucker.” And as a mother...
Just posting the word PREMONITORY on this site makes bullpencatcher.com a Googlewhack. You see, I had to cheat: I spent the best part of an hour trying to find a Googlewhack on bullpencatcher without any success. Now it is one and I can go to sleep a happy and contented, though slightly pathetic,...
Fourth, on fourth, and Maris is going for the winning run, I made it to the bottom of the well faster and therefore would never be declared the winner. Making our way out of Potemkin and around to a side of equal-bashing buttermilk stew I made a killing with that stuff out on the streets till all hours of the morning as the drunks came and went they sang “Katie Dear” and “Start Me Up” they gazed at the crazy man with the limp who stood on the corner, even at this hour, selling comic books Vintage hero, super whimsy drawn in all color on the cover but just a newspaper on the inside sells them for a quarter but some are worth a whole lot...
I am staring at a circle of feathers. I am standing at my bedroom window and staring down at a perfect circle of feathers, and I know that I have missed something amazing. No, not something amazing, something so ordinary, something that happens every day in at least one back garden in almost every town in almost every county. It is evidence of death, of life, of survival. It is amazing. I want to smoke. I want to celebrate that death with a cigarette just like I celebrate every drink with a cigarette; like I celebrate sex with a post-coital cigarette; like I celebrate a long plane journey with a cigarette, rushing past the baggage claim for the doors of the terminal and breathing in the hot, wet, reeking air; or, like I celebrate waking up in the morning with a cigarette. I am saying: it is evidence of death, of life, of survival. Smoking is a celebration, is a celebration of life. So, I open my bedroom window and climb out on to the conservatory roof, from my shirt pocket I take a pre-rolled cigarette and light it. I am still staring at a circle of feathers. In a nearby field a sparrowhawk perches in the old sycamore, it shifts a little from tallon to tallon, its belly...
Twenty six thousand four hundred and fourty four rare, used and (some) new parts. A call and within twenty four hours you too can have a new alternator for your late model Lincoln. Why shop anywhere else when all that you need is here. The outside may rust, but the inside is more than enough. Please make offer at front desk. Management on duty must approve all sales. Jimmy worked hard with an adjustable wrench and a crowbar for 6 years out of high school. Hubcaps and waterpumps. A guy from Elizabeth City once broke down on the highway and he took the pickup truck out to meet him after the call. Helped to fit the pump on the Duster right then and there at the side of the road and did not charge labor. “Elizabeth City,” that always seemed a funny name. Wayne lived in back of the yard with 3 kids and a doberman pinscher. Funny name, “pinscher.” He had a job at the factory and worked a Stuart’s on the weekend’s short ordering hash browns and fried eggs for late night drunks that had decided to lap it over till Sunday morning. Sylvia had left him three years earlier to follow a mountain man to the gulf coast of Florida. Horton was the oldest’s name. After his grandfather, all hopes were he would be a famous MLB pitcher. He seemed to have no interest in baseball though. Preferring to read the E volume of the World Book Encyclopedia as of late, as he had already made it through the first four volumes. He could tell anyone...
When I am gaunt and pale your heart will flow down drainfloors for a man lamented in subway stations and a girl who was just a whore. A boy that played baseball diamonds, a blind boy, with a billfold, and a dream and a clothes hamperer full of locomotive steam. There were three twenties in the jukebox, by the time we came to lay. A full cheat spread of atomic bones and a girl all dressed in red. If you can’t figure out the rhythm to this, it’s how I found it along the way, make a great leap, into a brand new busy, and forget your tired dismay. But giants are real folks, lets not forget that. I’ve been to Sheila’s tonight and she laughed me in my face. Made a laugh like none of our circle has heard in 15 years. Told me I was a stinking drunk, while she, drunkstunk, balanced on a balance beam. I wish your sweet side would come out right now. I need something to throw my left shoulder on, I’m off-balance and my sister hopes for a morning draw. The steers are rising and the scallops are in my bed. It sounds so good when you say scallops, once you get it in your head. I am a reactionary. Your miles are money and mine are too, or honey. Got gas… will make it. You made it this far passing yourself as a salesman car. What of it jester, I once had a dog named lester. Your house is of immaculate proportions and I believe the party is there. Gatsby! Not...
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