It’s raining. Jet airplanes, their lights
breaking through the clouds
like minions of apathetic deities
float south towards runways
that used to be neighborhoods.
Category Archives: microfiction
Troll
My adult daughter watches me pack my lunch. I’m on the second of my 2nd shift days. I’ve got two nights of 3rd coming up before the week starts over and I’m on Sunday 1st shift. I pack mixed nuts, an apple, a tuna packet, 2 packets of peanut butter crackers, some coconut water (for electrolytes).
“It looks like you’re packing snack food,” she says. There’s a touch– a SLIGHT touch — of reproach in her voice. It sounds like she gets these flashes of a half-feral father someday living in her attic or basement, some eloquent troll surviving on nuts, fruit, coffee, and peanut butter.
I defend myself by pointing out the tuna packet. She asks me “What do you eat it with?”
“A spoon.”
I really hope I’m eloquent.
upon a salty stack of truck nutz
At a truck stop in Whiteland, Indiana. It’s the usual break stop on our way to Indy for events. This time we were going to work security for a country music concert at Gatebridge Field House. I knew what to expect: the songs all about True Love, Truck Nutz, God, and Country, with an audience that often confused Truck Nutz for Country, Love, as well as God. Even though I always take food with me, I usually buy water or coffee, or both. But this time I splurged on a bag of Combos: cracker and (Real!) Cheddar Cheese, the way God — or Truck Nutz — intended them, unless pretzel is available and it wasn’t. My other options were “Supreme Pizza,” “Buffalo Wing” and — I shit not — “Cool Ranch Dorito” Flavor. What is there to say about a world where a junk chip is so uniquely known that it’s an imitation flavor for other junk foods? The mind doesn’t balk. But maybe it should. All I knew was the world was hyper-real enough without unholy junk food flavors. There was no place in my life for such blasphemy.
