Shouldn’t have tried a shortcut. I slap the navigation again, but the screen remains dark. Shoulda charged my phone at home. Shoulda bought a car charger. Shoulda shoulda shoulda. Now I’ll miss the start of the game

I hurry into the Easy Mart and ask the lady how to get back to the highway. She tells me to bear right at the drowning man.

… I creep along for about five minutes till I see him. Fortunately. His head barely turtles above the surface of a river running alongside the road. There’s a left curve and both a soft and hard right. Which right do I take? I pull over and go to the river. “Can you hear me?” I shout, noticing the flow rippling around his ears.

Tilting his head back so his mouth is clear of the water, he says something I can’t make out.

I yell more loudly and punch each word. “Which … way …  to … the … high … way?” No response. I stand tall and stretch my arm left, a little right, then far right. The man starts to speak, but, just my luck, goes under. I don’t have time for this. I turn to go, but hear him sputtering.

The drowning man works his mouth, but only a stream of water comes out.

“Say again?”

He gasps one word. I think it’s “Left.”

“Left? The woman at the Easy Mart said bear right.” The man’s eyes look glassy.

I have to make a choice. I read you can believe a dying declaration, so I opt for left. I give the man a thumbs up and white rabbit myself to the car. 

As I go along, the asphalt smithereens to gravel. The road snakes and narrows. Maybe I misheard the drowning man, or he wasn’t thinking clearly. Gravel becomes dirt. Ruts wrench me to a crawl. I’ll be lucky to catch half the game. Tree limbs claw the car. There’s no place to turn around. My arms throb from squeezing the steering wheel. I gasp for breath. My head spins. I’m about to pass out when I break into a clearing, and the road widens. I tell myself to hold on. After a few minutes I’m back on asphalt. Still dizzy though.

I stop and notice the river alongside the road. I hate to lose any more time, but could use a splash on my face. I stumble to the bank, lose my balance and tumble in. The current pulls me out and slams me into a rock. Too hurt to swim, I can barely keep my head above water. My life flashes before my eyes. Suddenly a man appears on the bank. I’m saved!

I cry for help.

The man stands tall and faces left, a little right, then far right.

David Henson and his wife have lived in Brussels, Belgium and Hong Kong over the years and now reside in Peoria, Illinois with their dog Annabelle, who likes to walk them in the woods.

“This is everything I can’t say to you,” he gently presses the crumpled notebook paper into my palm. His eyes are furtive and unfocused, greasy hair drooping down his forehead like an ungroomed Lhasa Apso. He hurries away when the bell rings and I am left standing here. I have never seen him before.

I uncrumple the note and read. Your scar is like poetry on your skin. It makes me want to tell you every terrible thing I’ve ever done and every lie I’ve ever told.

I finger the scar on my cheek. Then I throw the paper away.

Vanessa Capaldo teaches middle school English in Texas. She is a voracious reader of young adult novels and is currently writing one.

I knew this was going to happen. I shouldn’t have let Archie talk me into this whole thing. But it was a done deal as soon as I got into his flivver. He and his gal Grace thought they could show me a grand old time.

“Best time you’ll have this side of the Rouge,” he said. I wasn’t convinced, but I had nothing better to do after getting off from the factory, and it’d been a bit since I had a real drink.

Archie drove us up to the place, which was in the back of a hat shop. It was after hours, but the door to the front of the store was unlocked. The three of us walked to the back where there was a little door hidden behind some display racks.

“This is how we get into the joint,” Archie said. “Joe down at the foundry said you knock five times. Guy asks who wants some tea, and you say Warren G.”

And it went just like that. Five knocks and a harsh voice and Archie giving the code. A bruiser of a guy opened the door and led us down to the basement, where there was a jazz band and about forty guys and gals drinking and having a grand old time. Even the piano man was knocking them back.

“Hooch came in over the river from Windsor,” Archie says. “The Purple outfit has been running some high quality stuff from the Canadians. No turpentine or any of that crap, won’t turn you blue or put you six feet under.”

“How reassuring,” I said, taking a seat next to Grace. She was a looker alright, but I didn’t let my eyes linger lest I piss off Archie.

The three of us were in there for about an hour and thirty minutes before it all went to hell. The barman hit a switch that flipped all the shelving behind him back into the wall, a horrible crunching sound overcoming the playing band. It was all for naught. The fuzz busted in real quick. All of us were pretty loaded, and the only way into the basement was through the stairway, which was where all the heat was. Apparently there was a passageway off to the side, as most of the people in the know snuck out that way, including Archie and Grace. That left me and a few straggler members of the jazz band. A big burly cop decked me in the gut and sent me reeling. When I got up back on my feet, he and his goon partner had me cuffed.

“I didn’t do anything, officer,” I managed. “I just came down here to check the joint out.”

“Well, I assume you know that speakeasies are illegal, and that drinking in one is as well.”

“I guess, I just don’t see the harm,” I managed.

The cop chuckled. “The harm is that you happened to be at this particular establishment, which many of our fellow officers hold in disrepute.”

“This establishment?”

The other cop started chuckling.

“What the sergeant is trying to say is that we are much more amenably inclined towards Morty’s off of Woodward.”

I put two and two together.

“What’s the word?” The cop who decked me undid my cuffs. “They ask who pays the piper, and you say Al.”

“Simple as that?”

“Yeah.”

The cops proceeded to bash in the place with their billy clubs, but they let all of us out. Helluva world we live in these days.

Michael Hughes is an author living in Los Angeles. His novels include Pumpkin Farmer, The Crimson Shamrock, Inland Intrigue, and Loafing by La Brea. 

John Monroe lived on Lost Creek by the covered bridge. John ran cattle for decades and always wore a big cowboy hat. John rode round-up in the fall with Leonard Bradshaw. John would hunt mountain lions with Tom Tibbetts as they both kept hounds, and Tom said John was the best lion hunter in the county. Tom said they’d start off together and split apart in opposite directions so their hounds would not get mixed up during the chase. Improving the family income with bounties on the big cats every winter as each lion brought $50 from the state, and $10 from Jackson County.

John would not have electricity in his home until a short time after a man walked on the moon. He then gave in to his wife and got electricity and a modern phone. They’d had a crank phone for a time, when Lloyd and his brother were kids. In 94 years, John, had only been to Medford six times which was 24 miles away.

Once, John’s sister decided to take him to the ocean in a car and they were gone for 3 days. John saw the Redwoods and went to the beach.

Everyone had a distinct cattle call; each owner’s beasts knew his masters call. Many of the neighbors knew each other’s call. According to Emil Pech, John’s call was a good one, with a “Whoopee! “on the end of it.

John gave up on horses when he got old and drove an International Diesel tractor. John was up the South Fork looking for cows and didn’t make it back one evening. Lloyd, John’s son went looking for John with his brother-in-law. After finding the tractor at the bottom of a steep grade, that went up to Conde Creek, they began calling out for John in the dark, pretty far up the South Fork of Little Butte Creek and up on Hepsie Mountain, past Grizzly Canyon.

Eventually they heard his “Whoopee! “and followed his call in the dark about a half mile from the tractor. He was cold, wet and muddy and had the big hat pulled over his ears with a plastic sack tied round his head to hold it down. Each of the men got a shoulder under the old cowboy and got him off the mountain.

“I think I had a stroke,” John said to Lloyd on the way home in the car, long after midnight.

A few weeks later, John fell while feeding calves, the calves tromped the old man until he crawled under a flat bedded wagon, he hauled the baled hay on.

For a brief time, they put him in a nursing home in Medford. John became so sorrowful because he was embarrassed when they took his clothes away. One day, he found his overalls and his flannel shirt and made a break for it out of the nursing home. After that escape his sons took him home and cared for him there. At the age of 94 John passed, three months after his wife Ida Marie had died. Lloyd said, John would say, of his one trip to the ocean:

“Oh, that’s a mad thing to look at! That’s a mad thing—those waves coming in!”

James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs — the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don’t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA) Flash Fiction and Rue Scribe have all featured one or more of his stories.