From above me I heard a sound like somebody killing a dog. After a minute I realized it was singing. I walked up the shattered stairs to investigate.

In the corner of the rubble-filled room, an old man lay on a grimy sleeping bag surrounded by empty bean cans.  He was bony and filthy with long greasy hair, his grizzled beard a tangle, hairs nearest his mouth stained with food and wine and tobacco. He fixed me with his blue eyes, bright beneath bushy brows.

“You ain’t staying here,” he snarled. “But I’d take a cigarette if you got one.”

 

Friday Fictioneers

Things got so bad on the farm that I run off. I figured they wouldn’t waste much time looking for me, but it would be good to get as far away as I could.

I lit out to Frenchman’s Bend. The trains always slow down before crossing the bridge, so I knew I could hop a freight easy enough.

When I got to Jefferson City, my belly was growling. I realized I didn’t have a red cent. I spied a diner and went around the back. I could maybe sweep the floors for food. If not, I had my knife.

 

Friday Fictioneers

“Thirty bucks says you don’t,” Ike bawled at me.

I knew what was coming.

Once Ike started betting on something, he couldn’t leave it alone.

He would keep raising the amount of the wager until it became an improbable sum, just within the realm of what he could possibly pay.

Ike never welched on a bet, a point of immense pride.

He once bet Jeps  he wouldn’t get into a fifty gallon drum and roll down Cemetery Hill into Route 80.

Jeps waited until Ike got to five hundred bucks, then done it.

Ike paid up, though it took him months.

 

Friday Fictioneers

“What the hell are your doing?”

“What’s it look like? I’m getting my bone on. Amsterdam, bra!”

“It doesn’t work like that. You can’t just spark up a joint on the street. You need to be in a licensed coffeehouse. See?”  I pointed to a no smoking sign.

He walked over to the sign and studied it, turned around, the joint in his mouth. “Dude, take my picture! Instagram!” He squatted down in front of the sign and thrust double fuck-you fingers in the air. “Don’t be a fuckin’ pussy! USA! USA!”

I wondered how quickly I could ditch him.

 

Andrew Carnegie spent his cancer-riddled final years trying to give away all his money, but most of the rich bastards he knew weren’t that way. Maybe it was because that they could never be as rich as Carnegie, never be rich enough. Whatever the reason, they decided they wanted to try to take it with them.

The library’s microfiche newspapers had society columns where they would mention Mrs. So-and-so and her famous jewels. You look for a mention where one of these old biddies says she wants to buried with it. There might be a photograph.

The rest is easy.

 

“I have something to show you.”

“Will I like it?”

“I hope so. I like it.”

“Okay, then.”

“I want to tell you about it first. Just a little. Not a long explanation.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but sometimes you find something that just makes you feel better. Feel…whole, you know?”

“I think I know. A little.”

“My old man, for instance. He says he only feels like himself when he’s on the golf course. For my grandma, it’s when she’s baking. Something about kneading dough gives her solace.”

“I understand.”

“Promise not to laugh.”

Friday Fictioneers

 

I watch her through the window, smiling at people like nothing happened.

Like the love between us never existed. Like I’d never even existed.

And it was love.

It’s hard to look at her, even from far away. That smile she gives when she hands people back their change, like she’s giving them a special gift.

She smiled that way at me when I came in. Those white teeth and blue eyes, blue as the sky.

Made me feel like something.

Now she acts like she doesn’t know me, like she never cared.

Oh, she’ll care all right.

She’ll care.

When the shadows first appeared, the press thought it was Banksy or some other street artist having his way with the city.

How clever, people said.

Shadows of people, of objects, of animals. You saw them on buildings and sidewalks, more and more of them as the  days passed.

All the while, people and things were going missing. Man goes out for coffee and never returns.

The postal box on the corner is gone, but its shadow is still there.

Just another of those pranks, they said.

Then somebody noticed the painted shadows weren’t painted at all. They were real.

Three days out of Kingston I got the word the skipper wanted to see me. I climbed the companion ladder and made my way to the bridge. The gale had picked up since I’d gone below, a wicked cross sea rolling the hull as she rose, but I hardly thought about it. I was more concerned with why I’d been summoned. I only hoped the skipper was sober.

Stepping into his cabin, my stomach filled with ice. Sitting in the Skipper’s chair was the boy.

“It would appear we have a stowaway,” said the Skipper. “He says he knows you.”

 

Friday Fictioneers

Ma said when she was a girl the place had red carpets and a polar bear that stood by the front desk. She said her daddy would take her there on her birthday. They would dine in the fancy restaurant on Lobster Newberg and feel like a couple of swells.

No more. It was a ruin now. Broken gutters, black mold. Windblown garbage caught between the spikes of the rusty iron fence that surrounded the hulking ruin straddling the bluff, its armless marble angels on parapets staring down into the city with soot-streaked faces like the ghosts of murdered prostitutes.

 

Friday Fictioneers