She felt a migraine at the base of her neck. Muscles tensed around the nerves until a painful pressure crept over her skull and pulsed behind her left eye. Sometimes it would go away if she had a Screwdriver and a bag of potato chips. Sometimes things just went dark, and she couldn’t remember who she’d swung at.
The luminosity that came through the window, barely touched few objects, it almost produced no shadows. I knew well the pitfalls of that rebellious house that revenged the years of misuse by clicking worn floor planks, echoing secrets by thin partitions newly installed, watering rain by the holes of the chandeliers, for long opaque of dust and loneliness.
She looked nice on the dating site. A little bit mousy, but nice. She had a shy smile. But her lips were closed. I wonder if I should wear the brown jacket or the blue. Mother says the blue looks more professional. Mother! My god. What will Penelope think when she finds out I live with my mother? I'm thirty-eight freaking years old ferchrissake! Maybe I could say my mother lives with me. Yeah. That sounds a little better. Okay, it's the old family house. But still.
Miles never would’ve imagined that tonight his life would be on the line. He was ordinary. Grab the box. Pack products. Repeat. Get paid. Sleep. Get a day off in between. Life was cut and dry. “Work until you die,” he’d say.
But it’s not that simple.
No, it never is.
Charlie didn’t have the guts to rob the drugstore in Visalia. The woman behind the counter reminded him of his mother—what a chump. His truck needed gas, oil, a new carburetor. No sweat. Now he could buy a brand-new Cadillac.
Charlie nodded at the man in the Air Force uniform. The goon thought himself important in his creased pants, pressed shirt and two rows of medals on his chest. Charlie believed Roswell was a hoax, until now. Sure, he agreed. What crashed must have been a weather balloon.
Las esperanzas engordan pero no maintienen. Hope fattens, but it doesn't keep you alive.
It turned noon as David Alvarez raised the roof of the Crusher. With short little explosive sounds, the Rambler lying in the Crusher’s bed released tension from its new shape, as if it tried to pop its bones back into its joints. The compressor topped up its pressure, and when the gauge showed right for a fast restart, David turned off the diesel.
He removed his earmuffs and hardhat, and the sound in the air flipped from deadness to singing quiet. At that moment, in the time between the crush and the removal of the metal block that had been a car, things felt preternaturally frozen. Then a woman cried out.
Today was a harrowing day. Dozens of wounded came in every hour from fighting around Londonderry. Ciara often assisted her father Chief Surgeon Eion Ó Conchobhair during amputations. When a separated limb lay next to its owner on the operating table, she placed it down on the blood-soaked sawdust floor and quickly returned for the closure and bandaging. Three oversized zinc pails were always filled with amputated limbs; consigned later for burning. The orderlies responsible for destroying them and scouring the buckets from surgeries after the grueling day’s work, were either too busy elsewhere or laying about too drunk to care.
Magda had earned the title of The Break-up Artist, and she grew to like it because it made her feel that what she did was in the same category as dancers, novelists, and those people who draw cartoons of people at Six Flags Over Georgia. As a job title, it had never been her idea, but it worked, so she even used the title for her Facebook page, the business one. The job she was on, or as she sometimes called it if she had to include any surveillance work, her mission, was for her friend, Laney. The two of them slumped down in Magda’s car, watching.
“First of all, I am in awe sitting among Holocaust Survivors who made and actually endured history. No teacher anywhere can truly teach what all of you in this room know from first-hand and tragic circumstances.”
Hamline Lit Link 