Verbal Therapy

“Hello, sir!” she exclaimed as she and two friends got out of their old car.

“Hi,” I replied as I bent over to remove my gas cap.

After fourteen hours of steady driving, my seventy-year-old back hurt, but in two more hours I would be home. Our vacation would then be over.

While pacing behind my car, waiting for my wife and enjoying the warm summer evening, the three teenagers returned to their car parked at the gasoline pump ahead of me.

“Good-bye, sir!” she shouted as she closed her car door before pulling away.

My back no longer hurt.

From Guest Contributor Gerald E. Greene

Billboards

The headlights shine into the speckled misty darkness and my tires shoosh me along the Interstate, still late and many miles from the warehouse. How many hours have I been on this road?

I roar past the billboard that urges me to arrive safely, before I pass one that tells me to drink and drive. Then comes my favourite: the cute white Nivea girl, her frilly chest lit up like cat's eyes. I would love to think about that chest as I close my eyes and drift to sleep, but this vague honking will not let me sleep, just sleep

From Guest Contributor, Garreth Keating

The Agony Of Farmland

Ellie drove while I fiddled with the radio. Neither of us spoke. It had been that way for an hour now. I wasn't angry like before and I was hoping she'd apologize so I could say it was okay. But then she'd sigh in that petulant way and my anger would resurface. There was no way I'd be the first to give in again.

The silence stretched on as the highway grew flatter and the forests were replaced by farmland. She'd better apologize before we reached my parents'. They'd probably side with her like they've done with all my exes.

The Final Accounting

Last night, the sky broke asunder, as if someone had taken a knife and cleaved the horizon in two. The ruptured atmosphere peeled back to reveal a gateway into another realm.

I was driving to work when it happened. The immediate assumption was that the end times were at hand and everyone started clamoring to get home or escape the city as quickly as possible. Of course, if it was the apocalypse, I'm not sure why people were running. You can't run from your final judgement.

I kept driving to work. I figured the world needed accountants more than ever.

Maximum Adrenalin

Jordan Acker feared nothing.

He attacked danger with his shirt off. He used any tool at hand as a weapon, whether a mop or a bottle of mustard, and his kung fu skills sent would-be criminals running and impressed every club bouncer and traffic cop he encountered. His heart beat pounded in his chest more loudly than his fists bounced off the walls. When he drove, people dove out of his way lest they be heedlessly run down. He was the latest breed of action star.

At least that's what he felt like while on one of his cocaine binges.