Dueling Pianos By Cynthia Olson He would not dress in such a costume normally, in his normal life, before divorce and alimony and his single-room apartment still sending half the mortgage payment to Roxanne each month. Normally he would dress in a tux, or the grey pinstripe Roxanne got him two-years back. On a normal day […]

Old Orange Shirt contorts his corpulent body and reaches for his wallet. This time he withdraws a fifty and tosses it onto the bar. Brown Eyes, who’s been watching, springs into action. “What’s a girl have to do to get a gentleman to buy her a drink?”

My thoughts are confused, the world is pitch-black, voices from another room are an incoherent chatter.

She was a girl then. She’d gone to Carlito’s Traveling Show with her mother, a woman who died young. Glossy red with white stars, the box rested on a carpenter’s table. Carlito climbed in.

Steve shoved his hands into his pockets and stood at the crossing inhaling faint ethanol, human sweat and Thai takeout. Emotions raced through his mind forming axon networks that blurted dejection

Arriving like a crepe-soled creeper, Edgar tapped gently on the door and she, with a fake whiskey voice pretending to be Rochelle Simonette the french actress, would

Gas. You need it. So into the station you steer your ten year old car. It has bad tires and multiple internal problems. You inch up to the pump. Cut the engine. It shudders and dies. Open the door.