On Plugging Myself

Today, an excerpt from my recently published short story, “Sasha & The Whale;” go read it on Chatterbox!

One day she would die. She understood this and relaxed. She graduated from “Unbreaking the Heart” and was deemed to be healed. Gutter and RatCliff threw her a party, and 34 other friends showed up, and they did ketamine off a BPA-free cutting board, drank all the beer, went and bought more beer and some lottery tickets, stumbled with the case of beer and the lottery tickets to the ocean, where someone pulled from a duffel a stack of logs, and they dug a hole in the beach and piled the logs and ripped a piece of cardboard from the box of beer and Gutter took his lighter to a lottery ticket and took the flaming ticket to his cigarette and lit the cigarette which glowed like brake light in the cold black night. She asked for the lighter and bent with her hand behind the flame and lit the cardboard. The flames swallowed the cardboard and the wood popped into smoke heat and light and her friends rolled cigarettes, their blue bags of loose leaf American Spirits tobacco sealed and dropped to the sand, six headdresses in various orientations, and waves drummed and the fire stretched and Sasha did not think of Brian until the morning when she woke up in Tommy Harrison’s bed, who wrote code for drones that specialized in “crypto-hygienic thermal recognition” and with his six figure salary had purchased a life-size bronze statue of Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz, who now stared at her from the corner of his room, glove on his hip, waiting on a signal for a fastball or change-up, retro-jersey draped across him like an emergency blanket on a marathon runner at the end of a race. She remembered the sex and that it was fine and stood and left the room with the door open and Tommy called, still drunk, “See ya!”