short fiction
“a quote about how amazing his plays are and how incredible the dialogue”
So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star
CHARLIE DIBENIDETTO HAD MADE IT BIG. That’s what we’d say in the days before any of us ever gave anything a real try, except for Charlie, who was always plucking and strumming away at a guitar when we were kids. His family lived the next block over, on the top floor of a roughly aged three-tenement apartment stack, one of scores that lined the streets of our town, once a textile-mill mecca, now municipal sinkhole.
Standing on the Edge of Some Crazy Cliff
Portrait of New England page 65
IT ALL BEGAN WHEN MAZEL HUBBARD showed up at town hall for a school committee meeting. At first, it was to no one’s particular care or interest, she was just one of a half-dozen townsfolk spread across the ill-arranged metal folding chairs that sat before, but not near the two long, time-worn tables at which were seated the committee’s chairman and his cohorts.
As The Night The Day
THE KID GOT HIT ON THE BRIDGE BY A VEHICLE. My first guess is a sedan or jeep, traveling at enough speed to knock him ten or so feet in the air and then into a tumble another fifteen down the embankment to the creek’s edge. A couple inches of early spring snow covered him up for a day or so, but even with the melt you could see by the streaks of blood running uphill that the boy tried to crawl for his life back up to the road.
Tom Tucker’s Dead Body
TOM TUCKER SAID HE SAW A DEAD BODY BUT when we got there it was gone. I had been minding my business that early evening outside of the house, transistor radio set against the top riser of the front steps, barely catching the signal of the Red Sox game with enough staticky in-and-out data for me to follow with limited frustration. Except, when there’s a hometown home run because it’s always “there’s a drive! . . . ckshckjk . . . way back, way back! . . . crshjkchchskch . . .” and by the time Coleman or Petrocelli’s call breaks through the garbled web of noise it’s too late, the batter’s rounding the bases, or by the deflated tone of Coleman, who seems to live and die with each blast, you know that it was caught on the warning track or at the wall, another spark of glory falling just short of its heroic potential.
A Real Stand Up Guy
THE GREEN ROOM AT LMAO IS NOT REALLY A ROOM AT ALL. It’s a 10 x 20 foot space sectioned off from backstage by musty drapery that often overlaps, making entry or escape a difficult endeavor. Yet, in either witty taste or cheapskate irony, the curtains are all green. At one end of this quasi-room is an old table upon which stand a half dozen plastic bottles of water, a box of snack-sized chips and a camping lamp. At the other, more shadowy side are six metal folding chairs, two of them presently occupied by the comic who had just come off stage after a bad set and the night’s headliner, Tony Starch.
Death Became Them
PLENTY OF FOLKS IN TOWN HAD DIED AT ALL AGES and all times of day or night, some gruesome, some passive, and every one of them referred to afterward as having been ‘too good’ or ‘too young’, or on rare occasions both. That’s what the attendees whispered to each other at the wakes and funerals that seemed to mount one upon the other in such quantity that many a mourner was forced to choose the departed friend or acquaintance who would garner most of their time on a particular evening, a choice which was most often swayed by the amount of liquor being served at each prospective parlor.