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Michael Thurston Joyriding with Uncle Fatback |
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I wouldn’t normally have been out there (joyriding with Uncle Fatback is not my usual idea of fun), but earlier that night I’d run into this girl I knew from high school down at the train station—don’t ask me what she was doing down there because I’m not going to tell—and after she recognized me, which took a minute, her eyes bleary and bloodshot, she started in like we’d just left school and were the best of friends. Well, one thing led to another, as you can imagine, and by the time we were done it was going to be a long walk back to the ranch, so when Uncle Fatback pulled his pickup to the curb and leaned across to open the door for me, I got in and held the bottle. I would have liked to wipe the mouth before I sipped, but Fatback kept watching me. He drove the back streets until it was dark enough to see the burn-off from the gas wells flickering way off against the sky, then he squealed into the Dairy Queen parking lot because nothing’s better after all that hootch than a Beltbuster and a Dilly Bar. The Dairy Queen was closed, though, so we walked around back to use the wall and that’s when we saw it, the creature in the vacant lot. It wasn’t like any animal I’d seen before. It wasn’t well. Seems like we’d turned up just in time to see it die. Fatback figured it was an angel or an alien, something fallen from the sky, which just went to show how little he knew about what was going on down at the Base. Once we were sure that it was dead, we didn’t have to talk about it and just got down to doing the necessary things. I twisted my ankle hunting for kindling but we finally got a good fire going. Fatback seemed to know when it was done, and if you closed your eyes and swallowed fast, it tasted just like chicken. Michael Thurston lives in Northampton, Mass. His fiction has appeared in Confrontation, Fringe, Quick Fiction, and Southeast Review. Another of his stories appeared in KNOCK 2.2. |
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All ideas and expressions contained herein represent the opinions of the authors whose names appear on each contribution, not Antioch University Seattle or the staff of KNOCK. Copyright ©2004-2007 by KNOCK, Antioch University Seattle. Trademark law protects Antioch names and logos. |
