52stories

(3 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

 Loading …

My mother always told me, when I was a child, never to talk to strangers. She never told me what age I would be allowed to start.

I mean, she also told me to never cross the street. I think the statute of limitations is up on that one. She told me not to cross my eyes, or they would get stuck that way, she told me not to smoke drugs, and to go to a policeman if I got in trouble. I’ve ignored her, to no great injury, on the first two, and I only wish I could follow her wishes on the last one.

Other homespun bits of wisdom of my mother’s floated through my head; chew with your mouth closed, don’t put your elbows on the table, you are what you eat. I laughed, incongruously, startling Beth. Sparks from the bonfire rocketed towards the stars, making her eyes dance. She turned to me, and said, “What are you laughing at?”

This night had started off normally enough. I had woken on the motel’s industrial strength carpet at noon, tangled in the crappy motel-thin blanket I had pulled over myself. On the bed, my buddy Trav had lay, shivering in the full blast of the window AC unit that we had cranked to drown out the blares of car horns from the nearby state route. From the bathroom came the groans of a straining Carl. As I lay blinking away the crusted eyes of a six-pack sleep, he strolled out into the bedroom, grinning widely. “Dude. Do me a favor. Don’t go in there for a while.”

We had hit the beach by one, running down the flight of stairs down the cliff overlooking the beach, three guys- men, really, cruising for the hot chicks that we felt were our due. We played a little Frisbee, we laughed too loudly and let our errant shots land near some likely looking beach bunnies. Nothing. In a break around two, lounging on the motel’s bath towels, Carl telling Trav that it was high time he took off his class ring. “Dude, only high schoolers wear those. And dude, we are no longer high schoolers, dude!”

Continue reading ‘Folk Wisdom’

(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading …

The day after Christmas, the year I started shaving, my grandfather died.

He had been sick for a long time, a cancer that had started somewhere in his guts, that wasn’t discovered until it had invaded too many organs to count. He had been in bed for a month, eating less and less, talking less and less. What little he did say at the end made less and less sense, as well, as the cancer ravished his body and starved his mind. His lucid periods slipped away, until he sat in the medical bed with the rails, the bed that the hospice had set up around Thanksgiving, sat motionless and expressionless in my grandparent’s living room, as the family laughed and joked and tried not to show tears around him. There was plenty of crying, however it was all done around the corner in the kitchen for the women, or the men would come back from the bathroom with puffy eyes. It wouldn’t do to show fear in front of Pops.

Continue reading ‘Pop’s Story’

(5 votes, average: 3.6 out of 5)

 Loading …

So what did I do? I did exactly what you would have done. I took two steps back and closed the bathroom door. To my credit, I didn’t slam it. Instead, keeping my eyes locked with the wizard - why mince words, why try to rationalize, it’s obviously what he was- I slowly reached out with my right arm, grasped the handle, and swung the door closed, the latch making a gentle click as it snapped into the door frame. I looked down at the handle and counted slowly in my head to ten. The handle was carved, like the head of the wizard’s staff, in the shape of a dragon head. The tongue dangled obscenely out of the mouth, looping to the door to form the main bulk of the handle. I took a deep breath, and opened the door again.

The old man remained in the field. The impossible field. I turned on my heels, and started walking towards the door of the store. When I had taken a few steps, the skin in between my shoulder blades began to itch, as if I were being targeted for a knife in the back, so I began a shambling jog that quickly turned into a sprint.

Continue reading ‘The Bathroom (part 2)’

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

 Loading …

Patrick Sun, of the Phoenix Suns, not the basketball team but the family of Suns that lived in Phoenix, as he liked to joke (fairly unsuccessfully usually, as was involved in Information Technology, and had moved from Phoenix to Seattle to pursue said career, and IT specialists are not well versed in NBA teams, especially NBA teams from cities fairly far away), was on the phone with Patricia Croft, of the Seattle Crofts, which was not nearly as amusing to Patrick. More specifically, he was on the phone with Patricia Croft’s answering machine.

Continue reading ‘Apologizing Over an International Phone’

(4 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading …

Looking back on it after ten years, I think my mother is responsible for my first kiss.

Not in too immediate a fashion. She didn’t point me at the girl and say “Now slip her the tongue, show her some of that Fitzpatrick moxie!” But not in too removed a fashion either. I don’t mean it in the cosmic way, in the “if my mother never had me and raised me, I never would have been alive to have kissed that girl… whoa, man, that’s deep” way, either.

However, in an intermediate fashion, she was responsible, and sometimes, late at night, I wonder what would have happened, what my life would have been like, if my mother wasn’t so pushy and talkative.

Continue reading ‘Pesci’s Fish House’