by Roger Real Drouin
Solitudo County
Up here on big flat there’s only the low, constant hum of the compressors. And the wind rough against the truck, whipping against the rig. Oscar sips the last of the coffee from the thermos, and he thinks of his girls, warm inside far away, sound asleep.
He listens for the wolf, listens past the hemlock and cedar, but there is only the wind. Continue reading
by Taylor García
Slow days like this, I consider parking my van somewhere on Garnet Avenue to drum up business. It’s a good idea, but then I’d have to walk back home. Or I could just stay in Pacific Beach all day with the van, but without Pablo, it’s lonely. Plus, I can’t work on my art. I just finished “Closed Tuesdays” this morning. It’s an old wooden frame, the backdrop a combination of postcards we got from St. Croix, rum and beer labels, and fragments of Jimmy Buffet’s book. In the center is a small pile of real sand I hoisted from Frederiksted Beach, and on top of that is a tiny pirate’s chest I grabbed from a client’s kid. This piece would fit right in at that art market, Pangaea, in PB. One day I’ll have my own booth there to sell my work. I’ll call it “Soul Kitchen.” Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by K.C. Lichty
Her mother was full of big ideas. I’m going to join the Merchant Marines, she said, travel the world, she said, sail up the Amazon or the Volta or the Niger and pick cocoa beans right off the tree, make you the freshest, freshest hot cocoa in the world, she said. Instead, it was living with Tom in a gardeners shack behind a great white Plantation house overlooking the Potomac, a retired Merchant Marine, his comb-over sagging after his bath, naked beneath his towel watching from the doorway of the daughter’s bedroom. We’re Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Lawrence F. Farrar
Dick Cooper avoided newspaper obituaries; too many of them concerned people his age or, even worse, younger. Nonetheless, he wondered what the notice of his own passing might be like. He supposed it would be short; his days rendered in bare outline. The wrap-up of most people’s lives didn’t amount to much. He expected the sum of his own life would be no different. Perhaps it would be something like this: Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Wendy J. Fox
In the tiny house they lived in, Kathleen’s three sisters were all older than she was, her three brothers all younger; she was a middle child by chronology but also the last of the girls, the elder to the small boys. Her brother Sammy was the closest in age, just eleven months apart. As children, they were always together, grubby hands clasped, with the two other brothers padding behind. When Kathleen’s sisters were rouging their cheeks and stealing cigarettes, she was in the trees, in a pair of hand-me-down jeans, hair tangled, hands scraped and scabby. One by one the sisters left, into early marriages and cashier jobs, but the house was just as cramped as the boys grew taller, their massive feet spreading into the vacated space, and the drains still clogged with hair as they passed puberty and proceeded to directly balding, like their father. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 