“Scale? You going to punch? I hit first, last.” He pointed to his thumbnail’s old, dry wound cleaved to the cuticle. “I hit you in between.”
“I’m saying that time passes and things happen. We have to prepare for what’s to come. You know? winter’s coming and it’s going to get cold. Don’t you remember things that happened to you when you were young?”
“Sure! Sure, man: things.” His eyes lit and moved like a child with so many presents. “They happen, they always happen. Bling blang bloom, they come at you and they move out like, like… Things are always happening. It don’t stop, it don’t start. It just is. Here we are, man. Here we are.”
“But things happen, things change, one after the other, we have these events that change us like a, like a bead of paint running down a wall that can never run upward again.”
“That what you think?” He patted my back with dry, rough fingers pressing. “Sorry, man. That’s a shit way to get these sidewalks and white walls figured. Keep working it. You got money, man. I don’t talk shop because I like you. Need fuel to burn me up. Starting to be stuck on the tight fingers and belly.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a bill. It was a twenty—all I had. He saw it. A twenty wasn’t something to be easily parted with. I had less than three-thousand in checking. Boozing and maintaining an early nineties domestic car, such as the Plymouth Laser, didn’t come cheap.
“Here,” I said.
He stuffed it into the pocket of his cargo shorts, wordlessly. The shorts didn’t suit him. Both he and the manufacturer had spent time fatiguing.
“Where were you born,” I asked. “Do you have relatives?”
He looked around like someone was watching, then headed to a black barbeque grill made of a halved barrel with angle-iron legs. He collected the cans around its legs. “Devil, Devil. Big Nic!” He toppled a Corona bottle to pour its yellow beer. “Mom and Dad were gone. Grandma was a waitress. Ink-black hair with length and eyes for sex-crash; then her face fell to the floor; bones shrunk.” He walked toward the couch beneath the roof’s overhang, throwing cans in his bag. “Devil. Devil. Hmm.” He ran a swollen-knuckled finger along his oily face and neck. “I stepped on a nail in the alleys when I was five-years. We couldn’t afford the shot to keep away trap-jaw. Trappity-trap. Trappity.” He shook his bag of cans and looked through it.
“Did you just wait and see if you would be okay?”
“We went to the guy, the busy guy—slicing, hacking—big slow… fingers! pinky finger not here on this one or there on that one—he was pulling babies out of a screamy—well—the too-old, the too-young whores in a lost freezer of Restaurant.” The Can Man placed the last can inside the weighty bag and slung it over his back. “We’re done here.” He squinted at the sun. “Ain’t no heaven, but I ain’t afraid to be dead. I seen enough for it to be enough.”
Growing up Wired is available on Amazon.com
About the Author
David writes a little of everything, but mostly satire and humor. He’s been writing fiction for practically his entire life. He writes the kind of stories that he’d like to see written and wants to give readers something special and reflective of the exciting times in which we live.
His short stories have appeared in Out of the Gutter, Escape Velocity and the Bizarro Press. Check out his poems at davidwallacefleming.com
With and Without Class Page 14
