tempus Skewered by Jon Fain

Guy moves into a place the locals call Last Chance City. It’s a squat old strip motel converted into apartments on the outskirts of nowhere special. They did a half-assed revamp on the cheap. They’ve done the plaster thing everywhere with the gritty swirls.

That includes the ceiling, where a fan spins over the dining nook. One cord for the fan, another for the light. Guy works on an old paint-stained card table that he pulls up to in a metal fold-up chair that doesn’t fold up anymore. Soon, fan or not, the place smells of his cleaning fluids, stale take-out, and un-rinsed empties.

It’s just a thing he can do, taking watches and the occasional clock apart, and putting them back together. He’s sold the small shop his father started and that he always hated. Guy Senior would have hated him for giving it up. Among other things.

Right off, there’s an issue neighbors-wise. The walls are paper and there’s Another Guy on the other side who’s violently presupposed. A baby giant acne-riddled assumed son lives with him and has the same character flaw.

Another Guy and Another Guy Jr. battle like Godzilla and King Kong. One time, it sounds like one of them is coming for the other off the top turnbuckle. After, the kid goes behind the building to the sad pine where they tie up their big black matted-haired dog. He puts on a pair of red and white hockey gloves and dukes it out with the yelping, slobbering, jaw-snapping pooch leaping at the end of its chain, bending the tree.

Guy watches through the small window over his kitchen sink. Once the show is over and the dog is panting over his floppy pink tongue, Guy ventures out the back door that isn’t a flush fit and always sticks, where he has a Smokey Joe on a pair of cinder blocks in the weeds and dirt. He doesn’t cook much but likes to grill shrimp on skewers. He soaks them in Paul Newman’s Caesar for fifteen minutes. When they hit the hot grill, they smoke like crazy.

Guy goes in to rinse off the plate for the return trip and takes a good pull off the tall beer he left on the counter. When he turns around, the kid from next door, not gone back inside like Guy thought, is filling the open doorway.

“Smells good whacha platin’?”

In the month he’s been there Guy’s barely talked with Another Guy or his spawn here. No doubt the fat fuck wants a skewer or three. But now he’s taking in what’s laid out on the card table under the slowly rotating fan in the dining nook.

Guy doesn’t say anything, walks toward the kid, who backs up and goes outside first. “What you trying to do… stop time?”

After he takes off the grill’s lid, Guy waves away the smoke, stares at his charring shrimp, waiting to time the turn.

“Because that’s dangerous!”

The dog starts barking, hopping off his back legs, straining at the chain. Perhaps Another Guy Jr. is just a philosophical fool?

“Time doesn’t stop because I’m working on a broken watch.”

“I like to see things in parts too,” the kid says, which gets Guy’s attention. 

“You should see if your dog would like some water or something,” Guy suggests.

Then he squats down and flips the shrimp, which are already past done.

“That’s something he’d go for right there. He’ll eat the whole stick!”

Guy grabs them one at a time.

Later, after he has eaten some and thrown away most he’s back at his beer and his watches. Another Guy and Junior start in again, their loud shouts making him cover his ears.

Guy looks at the place in the wall where obviously there used to be a door, back when a family on vacation might want connected rooms. Now only the poorly plastered-over traces remain.

His father used to yell like that, but Guy never dared throw his own words back. He never even had a stuffed dog to take it out on after. Now the only good part about any of this is that at least there’s no chance of anyone, not even his father, coming through that ghost frame, those gritty swirls.

Jon Fain’s publications include short stories in A Thin Slice of Anxiety and Feign, flash fictions in Shooter Literary Magazine and Punk Noir, micro fictions in Blink-Ink and ScribesMICRO, and a chapbook of flash fiction, Pass the Panpharmacon! from Greying Ghost Press.