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A Walk on the Noir Side

4/24/2022

by JENEAN McBREARTY

Colt .45 by isuperwang | Flickr

I’d spent two days at Benny Santini’s house in L.A.. “Eighteen more years of squattin’ here, and I’ll own this place,” he said to me. “They call it squatter’s rights. That’s why I stay home a lot.” I didn’t have a place to squat. That’s why I visited Benny, and slept on his sofa a lot. I like to think that gave me sofa rights.

In fact, me and him were sitting on the sofa, passing the bong when we heard this car peel away in the alley. Then Benny’s girlfriend, Stacy, came through the kitchen and pumped two .45 slugs into him. At close range it made a mess of his brains. Surprisingly. I thought after all the meth he’d done, there wouldn’t be anything left of his brains, that his gray matter would deflate and drip out of his nose. But it oozed out of his left side when the left half of his face disappeared.

“Pendejo,” Stacy said, and spat on his body that had slid to the floor. Then she glared at me. “What are you lookin’ at, Puto?”

I sucked in a hit. “I didn’t see a thing. It’s my eyes. I got astigmatism.”

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Two Flash

4/10/2022

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by GRAHAM ROBERT SCOTT

朝州式鱼头锅 by Alpha | Flickr

The Special Special Special Not-So-Special Deal

The lip-pierced young woman at the Carry Out counter frowned when he asked for the special, skimming a scrap of lined yellow paper kept under Plexiglas, tracking her progress with a jagged index nail, before telling him with a tone trained in empathy but edged with boredom that the special had sadly expired several days earlier, whereupon he called his wife and, following furtive discussion, now cupping his hand over the wrong part of the phone, explained to the lip-pierced hostess that they had meant the Special Special deal, prompting an oh, that’s different and another consultation of the lined yellow paper before the hostess replied, this time, do you mean the pizza? and his wife, still on the line and able to hear, hissed no, for God's sake, not the pizza, that has too many carbs and how many specials-called-specials do they have anyway?, to which the husband had no reply and now fidgeted as his wife rifled through mailers and the hostess toyed with her hair and another gentleman joined the queue behind him, already

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A Walk on the Noir Side

Two Flash

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