Thermite burns at a temperature of four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. You can make it easily, with chemicals you buy at Home Depot.

You can make serviceable napalm by adding Ivory Snow to gasoline until it turns to jelly.

It doesn’t take money to create terror. All it takes is imagination and patience.

I enjoy miniaturized explosives. I make my own C-4 and pack it into soda cans with a bunch of screws and springs for shrapnel, timed fuses powered by 9-volt batteries.

I’ll walk downtown and drop them in trash cans,  long gone by the time the first one explodes.

 

Ole Hank hit on his pint of Thunderbird, surveyed the yard with a cocked eye while the girl waited.

“I ain’t paying extra for them flowers,” was all he said.

She knew they didn’t cost nothing, and besides, she done that after all the other work. It did look nice, and was even funny in its way, though Ole Hank didn’t see the joke.

He grudgingly hauled out his pocketbook and peeled off three soiled bills, held out a grubby hand spattered with liver spots.

She put the money away. “So I come back tomorrow? They’s still plenty to do.”

 

Old timers tell you Mike Fink
was a legend like John Henry
or Paul Bunyan.

Horseshit
he was my great-great-great grandfather
real as you or me

worked up and down this canal and past it
out onto the Missouri,  the Big Muddy
poling flatboats of grain, whiskey, passengers

Mike Fink wore a red feather in his hat
to show he’d fight any man big or small
himself a giant of a man

Fists like Virginia hams
arms like tree limbs
face all creased with scars

He’d bite off an ear
swallow it whole
beat a man’s insides to black pudding.

 

Once this last test is passed I’ll be golden.

That’s what I keep telling myself as I shimmied up the drainpipe.

The first few were so easy they weren’t even a test, though the thing with the dog made me a little sick to my stomach. I love animals.

Still, the test was all about what you could  do, not what you want to do.

Outsiders never understand. They think we’re just a bunch of violent thugs who run around the city in red leather jackets committing crimes. Scaring citizens.

But that’s not it. It’s a brotherhood of the willing.

You never know what’s coming. You might not be able to go to the store, or if you went there it might be all empty. Imagine that.

Imagine the panic, especially if everybody knew them shelves was going to stay empty.

I always keep extras, just like I make sure wherever I go I’m wearing clothes that I’d be comfortable wearing for the rest of my life. I always have a knife, some string, my flint and steel. It wouldn’t be my preference to be stripped down to just them essentials,  but if it comes to it I’ll be ready.

 

Found a journal of the trip he took across the country in 1917. He must have been on his way to enlist. They didn’t have maps then, just a series of vague directions. Turn left at the green barn, go over a wooden bridge for a good while. Road might be muddy in the rainy season. That sort of thing.

He drove a 1902 Pan American made in Mamaroneck, NY. He had won it in a poker game in Baton Rouge, betting his father’s Civil War timepiece to do it.

He came back from France a changed man. They all did.

Friday Fictioneers

Your old man sure has a lot of weird shit.

Don’t you call it that.

Why? That’s what it is.

You stop. My dad’s a collector. Some of these things was made by artists.

Shit artists!

You stop saying that word, Dennis. You think it makes you sound older but it really just makes you sound like trash.

Shit shit shitty shit shit!

I swear to heaven I’ll leave if you keep that up. I don’t need to hear your trash mouth.

Shit cunt fuck! Your dad’s bad luck!

STOP IT!

Oh, you’re crying? What happened to sticks and stones?

 

His words wounded me deep. So ungrateful. He wouldn’t accept it, even as a gift. Of course, paying off my debt was never mentioned at all.

I used to look up to him. “He taught me everything I know,” I used to say.

Him turning his back on me like that changed me somehow. Nothing mattered no more. Not my life. Nothing.

So that very night I buried it deep on the side of his goddamned house. Chances are nobody’d find it, but if they did it’d be on him.

But I marked it, in case he changed his mind.

In my experience you won’t ever find nothin’ more useful than a bog. It hides many a sin, as they say. Oh yes.

Wait here long enough, they start coming back up. Might be only an arm that looks like a tree branch, of maybe an old femur with a bit of chain still on it. See, all of them in the city know about this place, know its usefulness.

And usually when they start to come up, it’s the work of city folks. They ain’t careful like we are out here.

They don’t know this place like we do.

The old man said he’ll pay for it. I’m glad to take him.

He’s an old fool.

Who’s the Ernie he keeps talking about visiting?

You know. His best friend in the war. He was killed at St. Lo in 1944.  You must have heard the story a hundred times.

The one where his buddy got shot while going over a wall? The one that makes the old man cry?

That’s the one.

Well, if he needs to see it one last time, I don’t mind going. Never been to France.

Did you know he was only sixteen when he enlisted?