Oh, how her brow furrows. I think she’s beginning to notice me. She cares not for looks. A prodigious nose is a handsome nose, she thinks. So accepting of human flaws, yet so perfect! My god, mein Gott!

“My gut,” she coughs. She speaks! But is it just me or does she look a bit pained? And maybe even a bit purple?

“You’re suffocating me,” she manages to sputter. Am I moving too fast? We’re in love for thirty seconds and already she needs her space! She points to her stomach.

“Your nose,” she says, “is poking me in the gut.”

- Molly Auerbach works as an Editorial Assistant for Electric Literature. She is also the bassist and band manager for art-prog sensation, Thrillington.

In 1979, when I’m eight years old, my dad, drunk out of his gourd on Schlitz and high on crank, runs over some guy with his brand new El Camino.  I don’t know this when I’m eight.  I just think his car is cool.  It’s cherry-red with a huge, white vector stripe and vaguely resembles the Gran Torino from Starsky and Hutch.  He drives it as he leaves town and us later that year.

Five years later, I’m thirteen and visiting Dad for an assigned two-week stint at his crappy apartment in Indy.  This guy Snyder is there—as always—and Dad’s drunk—again—but it’s Milwaukee’s Best this time, not Schlitz.  Dad throws me one and tells me to drink up.  And he tells me the story.

This guy’s sprawled out in the middle of the road, in the pitch black.  Dad’s blitzed as he’s driving down Meridian, so he doesn’t see the guy until the last second.  He doesn’t even try to brake, he says, just cruises right over him.  Dad stops, gets out of the car, walks over and gives the guy a once over.

This is what he sees.  The guy’s naked, hog-tied and has a curling iron shoved up his ass.  Every time my dad mentions the curling iron, he makes this uppercut motion with his fist like he’s actually the one cramming the thing up the guy’s keister.

I’m sure Snyder’s heard this story a hundred times, but he still spits his Beast and slaps his knee.

“I tell you what,” Snyder yells.  “That was one sorry motherfucker.”

Dad does the uppercut movement again and says, “I’m just glad the fucker was already dead when I hit him or I would have been in serious shit.”

My thirteen year old mind processes the information, thusly:  driving around drunk and stoned at three o’clock in the morning is not serious shit so long as the guy you run over is already good and dead.  Or like this:  it is better to be lucky than good.

This is a maxim I repeat and live by for many years, even though I don’t like the taste of beer—Schlitz or the Beast or even Heineken.  I begin to think at some point that this is the only life lesson I will ever learn from this man, my dad.  It is hard to learn life lessons, I guess, when you no longer talk.

But then, twenty-five years later, I talk to my dad for one last time and learn something new.  He has just bought a small-town convenience store and invites me over for a tour.  I peek in and see about what I expect to.  Overpriced packages of diapers compete with Fig Newtons for space on crowded metal shelves.  Stained linoleum runs under our feet, not completely intact at the seams.

As we walk through the store, he explains his hopes for expansion—into gas and liquor.  He pauses for a moment, stretches his arms wide and grins.  Without looking at me, he says the thing to me that I will always remember.  Without irony, he says this thing.  In complete seriousness, he says it.  This is what he says, as he stands in the middle of his run-down mini-mart:  “Son, it’s all legit.  Not a single black market item in the place.  Your step-mom insisted.  How do you like that?”

I don’t know how I like it.  I ask him if it is a rhetorical question that he asks me.

He walks over to a cooler, pitches me a beer—PBR—and says, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I don’t know,” I say.  “I have no idea.”

I toss the beer back his way and tell him I have to go.  And this is what I learn: as good as it feels to go, it doesn’t feel that much better than staying.

On that day in the convenience store, the El Camino is long gone.  Not just Dad’s, but all of them.  Erased from the automotive memory of a nation.  But not from mine.  I love that car, no matter how many people he ran over with it.

- Jason Stout lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and five children. His works have appeared in Every Day Fiction, Twelve Stories, Flashquake, The Battered Suitcase, A Thousand Faces, Loquacious Placemat, Shine! and Pequin. He can be contacted through his website: jasonstout.jimdo.com.

I introduced myself and the middle finger in my breast pocket, whose name was Dick. Dick had a habit of plunging into people’s mouths and fingering around in there like a dentist. Sometimes I just kept my breast pocket buttoned shut.

It wasn’t that Dick was performing an examination, though he couldn’t fail to notice various forms of disease and decay; it was more that he felt lost and alone and a little bit clumsy until he’d fingered authoritatively around someone’s mouth. After that, he could be the life of the party, even putting dollhouse lampshades on his head and strutting around like the Queen of England.

The man’s eyebrows withdrew at once from pointing skyward and formed two tremendous arches over his wide eyes, enticing tunnels for my probing friend. Where such tunnels would lead I have no idea; though the poets among us say they lead to the soul, I only see them leading to someone’s eye getting poked out. The other muscles in the man’s face continued to intimate the existence of a dark stalk of matter in him that desperately wanted out.

So now Dick was running around, and I was the one, as so often happens, who felt lost and alone and a little bit clumsy.

About the author:

Daniel Grandbois is the author of the Believer Book Award Reader Survey Selection and Indie Next Notable Book Unlucky Lucky Days and the art novel The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir. His work appears in many journals and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Boulevard, Mississippi Review, and Fiction. Also a musician, Daniel plays in three of the pioneering bands of “The Denver Sound”: Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Tarantella, and Munly.