Part Four

(It's Fiction Friday! Previous installments can be found here.)


Peter was hungover.

Truth be told, he’d been waking up hungover quite often recently-—and not only since an ill-timed bar bet had landed him sleeping in a trailer with this crew of derelicts and misfits.

Nice boys do not run off and join the circus. Peter used to think he was a nice boy.

Lately, he was not so certain.

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, watching the fireworks that exploded there, and wondered how much it would take to bribe Harry into cleaning up the grounds this morning so the he could catch an extra hour of sleep.

Judging from the snores echoing above him, more than he could afford.

He looked at his watch. 6:30. Don would be banging down the door any minute now, best to beat the other guys out of this dump and avoid the verbal lashing that always came with oversleeping.

“Ouch! Shit!” He stumbled over an empty bottle of Jack Daniels as he climbed out of his bunk.

“Well, that explains the headache…”

He stumbled out into the blazing daylight and wondered for what felt like the millionth time just how exactly he had landed himself in this mess. His reverie was interrupted by Don’s deep baritone voice echoing over the lot.

“Hey! Walker!”

Peter groaned.

“What is it boss? I’m awake, aren’t I?”

“Walker it’s your lucky day.”

Peter groaned again. He had learned very quickly that Don’s idea of “luck” differed quite greatly from that of normal human beings. Visions of the underside of the tilt-o-whirl caused his already-unsettled stomach to churn as Don approached.

“Okay Don, what is it this time?”

“Big Man just bought a coupl’a animals off an outfit that went under ‘cross the valley. Need you to take the trailer and pick ‘em up.”

Peter waited. That didn’t sound so bad at all.

“Okay… that it?”

“Yep.”

“When do I go?”

“Jakes is still out in the truck, checking fliers. Go grab some breakfast, you leave as soon as he gets back.”

“Right. Sure. Okay.”

Don shuffled off with his usual air of indifference and menace, banging on trailer doors and cursing under his breath. Peter breathed a sigh of relief.

Pick up animals? How hard could that be?

Looked like today might not be so bad after all.

[to be continued]

Part Three

(It's Fiction Friday! Previous installments can be found here.)


“Ouch! Damnit!” Gina hopped gingerly up and down on one foot, casting a scowl at the offending rollerblades that were the cause of her early morning outburst.

“Christ… MARK!!” She shouted, to no avail. The house was empty.

It wasn’t necessarily that she minded her brother staying with her for a few months while pulling himself together after a nasty break-up, but she did mind his uncanny ability to leave sporting equipment lying around in inconvenient locations. In the middle of her poorly-lit, upstairs hallway for example.

She examined the damage. Contrary to the throbbing sensation in her big toe, nothing appeared to be broken. She sighed.

“Well, at least he’s getting out of the house. It’s a significant improvement over last week…” She wasn’t certain that the smell of Chinese take-out would ever be entirely eradicated from her living room, but Mark was family. Her brother’s emotional well-being was worth the lingering scent of Kung Pao lurking around her Crate & Barrel curtains.

“I hate those curtains anyway,” she muttered as she made her way to the kitchen, stopping to grab her cell phone charger which Mark had conveniently left in the middle of the living room floor. Her battery had apparently died at the same time as the power had gone out, which seemed serendipitous in a pain-in-the-ass kind of way. She plugged in the phone as she poured a cup of coffee.

Mark may be a slob, but he always made coffee.

Replacing the milk, however, did not appear to be his forte.

Her cell phone chimed—Three New Messages.

“Oh shit…”

She dialed her voicemail.

“Oh… SHIT!”

She dashed from the kitchen, the still-plugged-in-phone flying from her hand and clattering to the floor, her boss’s last message still droning from the ear piece.

The meeting with Arveson. She had completely forgotten.

As she frantically began searching for her shoes, she stumbled, spilling coffee on her white blouse.

This was simply not shaping up to be a good day.

[to be continued…]

Part Two

“You are, without a doubt, the biggest idiot that has ever trod the face of the earth!”

Peter was pacing frantically back and forth on the hot asphalt. How the hell could it be so hot when it was only 9:00am?

“Not only did you run away and join the Circus--the bloody Circus!--which may have seemed like a brilliant idea after several shots of Jaegermeister but was not, in fact, the wisest of career choices; but now, not even one week into this inexplicable venture, you have lost two hippopotami! How in the bloody hell do you lose two animals that weigh more than your truck?!”

He was sweating profusely now, but was clearly on a roll and not to be interrupted.

“Alright, okay, in all fairness they’re not exactly lost. They’re standing right over there having a mid-morning snack. But that doesn’t change the fact that they are out here, in the open, and not, in fact, inside the trailer where they bloody well should be! Ouch! Damnit!”

He extracted his fingernails from his palms and examined the damage.

“And now, to add the crowning jewel to this clusterfuck of a morning, here you are."

"In the parking lot of the Catholic High School.

"Talking to yourself.”

He yanked off his overtly-new baseball cap and chucked it to the pavement in disgust.

The hippos regarded him drolly. Clearly it was everyday fare to see their escort flailing about in a parking lot, shouting to no one in particular.

“I am so fucked.”

He sat down on the median and regarded the iron giants before him. The hippos were nonplussed.

Heaving a sigh, he extracted his cell phone from his pocket and attempted to formulate just precisely how he would explain this predicament to his new boss. His reverie of self-pity was interrupted by the sound of a revving engine as a red compact car blew through a nearby intersection.

“I hear ya,” he mumbled to the unseen driver and returned to formulating his explanation.

Thwack! Tsssss… thubba-thubba-thubba-CRACK!

“What the…?”

The red car had rolled onto the lawn of the High School and come to rest, quite forcefully, against the trunk of an ancient oak tree.

And then he was running, hippos forgotten, irate boss a distant memory, toward the small, blonde figure slumped over the steering wheel…

[to be continued]

Work in Progress

Gina was having a shitty day, and it did not appear to be improving. Cursing silently she slowed to a halt at the 5th consecutive red light on Marshall Boulevard. She checked her cell phone, still no signal.

“I hate driving through the valley,” she mumbled to noone in particular as the light changed back to green. She slammed on the gas, perhaps a bit too forcefully, and began enumerating everything that had gone wrong since she woke up that morning.

Thanks to a power failure that had occurred approximately 10 minutes before her alarm would have gone off, she had overslept by nearly an hour. There was just enough hot water in her shower so as not to qualify as cold, but not enough to qualify as hot either. There was no milk for her coffee. She stubbed her toe on the rollerblades Mark had left lying in her hallway. She tripped over thin air and spilled just enough coffee on her white blouse to merit a change of shirt, which morphed into a complete change of outfit, which resulted in her being even later than she already had been. Of course, she hadn’t thought to call her boss until she’d already driven into the valley where cell reception is completely impossible. And now these damned red lights… GAH!

“I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried…” she mused grimly to herself as the light in front of her shifted to yellow.

She felt a subtle click deep in her abdomen. Her foot hovered over the break for a fraction of a second, and then she gunned the engine, sailing through the light just before it switched to red.

Her momentary elation was stifled by the prompt arrival of unmitigated panic and she began to scan the surrounding area for cops, cameras, or any other entity with the power to invoke a moving violation. A few moments of frantic searching revealed nothing, and she relaxed. No cops. Not a single witness to her vehicular indiscretion. Just those two hippos in the parking lot of St. Ignatius.

Wait… what?

She looked back. She was not mistaken. There were, in fact, two hippopotami munching grass by the walkway leading to the gym.

She began blinking rapidly, as if the resultant strobe effect would transform the intruding gray masses into something less incongruous. Trash cans, perhaps, or a couple of old Chevy Novas. She shook her head as though her brain were an etch-a-sketch, but to no avail.

The hippos regarded her with a heightened degree of disinterest.

Her car began to shake.

Thwack! Tsssss… thubba-thubba-thubba-CRACK!

(to be continued…)