The sign for Lucky’s Pub squeaked above him in the night wind. Its hanging plastic had green letters, a foaming mug, and the head of a buck with many points.

Jameson could not see Sadie anywhere. He had barely seen her in the bar, but she had spoken in a low voice, her voice, distinct among the chatter and Kenny Chesney. “I want to see you,” she said, and the heat in his groin burned through his tether to reason. He had closed his tab and rushed to this empty curb.

Twenty-four years ago he failed out of college and came to see Sadie. Two days later he left a note, her, his uncle’s house and Francisville. He got to a restaurant on the West Coast and traded charm for gratuities until a regular asked if he’d considered selling real estate. That was 1998, in Seattle.

He had thought little of Sadie since. Jameson had money to burn in a hot town and he married one of the girls. He did not think of her during the flings that preceded and followed the divorce.

He had sent his RSVP for the reunion on a whim. When the reminder came and he no longer had a plus-one, he tried to find Sadie on Facebook, but then she appeared in Lucky’s and said, “I want to see you.” She had turned to the door almost as soon as she spoke, but she was Sadie. He remembered her voice and the smell of her, and Jameson looked down the road outside the pub and knew where she was.

The Route 66 Diner was a house beside a vacant lot; in some distant decade Sadie’s grandparents had knocked down interior walls in favor of tables, on which they served blueberry pancakes and home fries to loggers. Jameson and Sadie had fucked atop one of those tables on a night when their houses weren’t free and Sadie slipped the key from her mother’s purse. He had poured syrup across her torso and fucked her and she had loved it, and he had masturbated to the memory until he found other girls in his semester at Penn State.

The gutter had pulled away from the porch roof. Faded block letters still read “Route 66 Diner” with “Truckers Welcome” in cursive below, but time or blunt force had torqued the posts and sign into bent ruin. A Coldwell Banker sign on a smaller post offered showings by appointment; it was old, too. When Jameson turned the doorknob it rattled in his hand.

The air smelled stale and he could make out little in the dim light from the street, but peering to the far wall he saw an outline seated on a table, their table. “It’s been a long time, Sadie,” he said.

The fluorescent lights burned his eyes when she flicked them on, and his vision adjusted gradually. “It has, Jameson,” she said. There was no ambient noise here, and she spoke with a smoker’s sandpaper voice. She had patchy gray hair, gray and mottled skin, and a body too thin to look well.

Jameson sat on the next table. He ran his finger through its coat of dust for an excuse to look away. “How long’s it been closed?”

“A few months after Mom died. I hurt my back and gave up.”

“When was that?”

“You got me pregnant, Jameson.”

She lit a cigarette in the silence. As she exhaled he found his tongue. “What?”

“That time right before you left. You got me pregnant.”

“You never told me.”

Her laugh merged into a cough. “You never cared.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Named him Jameson.”

His gurgling nausea thickened, and to suppress it he yelled, “Why would you do that? Why didn’t you find me?”

“I pictured the way you’d cry when you came home and met our son. Then I wised up, and his name was to remind everybody of what you did.”

“Where is he?”

Sadie’s hand trembled as she raised the cigarette. She breathed it deeply before answering. “The cemetery off Belmont Road. Electrical fire. He was six.”

The fluorescents’ hum grew loud while Sadie smoked and Jameson bent his head toward his knees and a carpet stain. It took him a long time to perform the calculation, but the answer was 22.

He asked, “Where were you when it happened?”

“A few thousand miles closer than you were.”

That angered him. He met her glare; she blew smoke toward him. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

She snorted. “Ask around.”

“What do you want?”

“You owe me, Jameson.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yeah, bullshit. A mountain of it. You’re king of the mountain now, aren’t you, Jameson? Go off twenty-four years, buy some drinks at Lucky’s, make sure everybody sees your wallet and fancy watch?” She leaned forward and pointed her cigarette at him. “You owe me, Jameson.” She put out the butt on the table.

Unanswerable questions drifted through the stagnant air. He had to leave; he stood and opened his wallet. He counted and placed the bills on Sadie’s table. “I have $132.”

He waited for release. She watched him with her hollowed eyes and made no move toward the cash.

“There still an ATM outside the station?” he asked. She nodded. “I’ll be back.”

“Sure,” she said. Sadie pulled another cigarette from her pack. “I’ll be right here. Waiting.”

A traffic light hung over the four-way. It wavered in the wind and blinked red onto the gas station and the dollar store across the road. Jameson inserted his card. His finger hovered over the withdrawal button but pushed “Check Balance.” He turned back toward the sidewalk. There was a pet and garden store, a lot with U-Hauls, Lucky’s, a few houses, secondhand and hardware stores with apartments above. The diner waited in the dark beyond. A church needing paint stood just past the intersection; its sign advertised Sunday’s sermon, “The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth.”

He ripped his card from the machine and strode away. Jameson pictured Sadie, moaning with syrup on her young breasts and Sadie, gaunt, cackling smoke from the end of the table as he thrust, and he put down his foot and his rented car sped down Route 66.

Hi everyone!

I just wanted to share that I'll be releasing a collection of short stories on February 1st. Many of the stories in this collection have been featured here, while others haven't. If anyone is interested, you can find it on Amazon here:

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CRQZTJM5/ref=sr_1_1?crid=CRDHZ7RB04E0&keywords=theres+gold+in+those+hills&qid=1704751382&sprefix=theres+gold+in+those+hill%2Caps%2C185&sr=8-1

I'm pretty excited about this and I just wanted to thank The Prose community for being the major reason for this collection. Before I joined this community, my writing was directionlesss and you've help me find direction.

So, thanks everyone!

Ran across this piece of gold this morning. I don't think I've had the honor of reading this writer, well, not narrating this writer, at least not exclusively for a channel feature. I mean, I've been reading his work for years on Prose. Hard to believe I haven't featured him yet. This piece mixes two of my favorite things: Classical music and seduction, namely in a setting encased in art.

Here's a link to the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ2G1qLt7BE

And.

As always...

Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team

From a writer new to Prose., this debut piece sets a lovely tone for their body of work.

Here's the link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckZruNCv1go

And.

As always.

Thank you for being here.

-The Prose. team

the difference in it all is that

even on your darkest of days

I still painted you bright yellow in my mind

you mistook black crayons for light blue

smeared the black over the bolded guided lines

while I sat there and tried to erase

I kept erasing

or at least tried to

but I couldn’t keep up

as your black lines started to become

bigger… thicker …. wider

eventually it consumed the whole page

my light blue crayon broke in half

each piece of it laying on different ends of the paper

trying to still balance what’s left

a fully blacked out page laid in front of us

we stared at it

we stared at it for so long trying to justify what just happened

or at least I did

because underneath all of the black

there was light blue

waiting to shine through to you

but it never made its way from underneath

leaving it to be unrecognizable

unidentifiable

unknown

and eventually to the naked eye

it quickly vanished

no matter how hard it tried

I taped my crayon together

and began drawing again

and again

and again

trying to brighten up the page

but there was only so much I could do

with what little room you gave

There’s an insanity brewing in him as he watches the steady rhythmic blinking of the cursor on his screen. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. The more he stares, the more hypnotic it becomes. Dylan wonders if he’ll ever write this story, or if the blinking of the cursor will drive him into insanity like some kind of linguistic Chinese water torture.

Why do ideas have to be like mirages in the desert? Something that seems so real in the distance. Real enough to touch. But as soon as it gets within reach. Poof. It’s gone. And once again, he’s staring at the barren landscape. Nothing for miles and miles.

The pressure he feels isn’t one put on him by a publisher with a deadline. No. He could only dream of getting there with his writing. This is a self-imposed pressure put on by himself and his own mortality. Dylan is only in his thirties, and in a perfect world he’d live another fifty years. But anyone who’s spent a New York minute on this spinning rock could tell it isn’t perfect, and each day was avoiding a thousand different ways to die.

So he stares at the cursor. Blink. Blink. Come on, God. Give me an idea. Anything. Please. But the ideas that come are nothing new. Just regurgitations of stories he’s already written, or stories that were written better by far more talented authors.

A working man sits in a bar drinking beer. Done that.

A father feels insecure. Wow! Real original.

The mob. No.

A gun. No.

A twist. The guy was dead all along. Dear God, No!

Something different, man. Something different, something new. But what’s new? Is anything new? Hasn’t it all been done?

Dylan takes a deep breath as his fingers hover about the keyboard. He’s scanning the letters. The letters. The story is hidden within these letters. It’s a code. A story is simply a code, he thinks. The perfect combination. The perfect sequence of letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages, and boom! Voila! A masterpiece. A legacy. Something he can pass on to his kids and their kids when he’s grains of sand in a floral patterned clay urn.

He’s no religious man. He’s sure there isn’t anything after death, because ideas and faith stem from electricity in the brain. And once that’s shut off, then there’s nothing. Nothingness, like the days before he was born. Not darkness. Just nothing. But the idea of a book. A hard copy story that was written with his hands, and filled with his ideas. Something that is only his, a selfish manifesto where no one else deserved the credit except for him. Something like that makes him less afraid of death. A lasting legacy.

But he’ll never get there if his fingers don’t start typing. Nothing was ever gained with idle hands, except pressure.

But there’s still nothing there. Not a single word. So he scans his bookshelf filled with great stories, good stories, bad stories, but stories nonetheless. The shelf is filled with writers who wrote, imagine that? Writers who had a dream chased that dream and succeeded.

Dylan still stares at the blinking cursor. Mocking him. Beckoning him.

Come on, write something. Write the story about the drunk in the bar. Sigh. Like that’s never been done. Or better yet, write the one about the misunderstood father who tries his best, but people don’t see that. Eye roll. Wonder who that’s about, eh? How about this? Write about the guy who can’t write. The guy who is so lonely and desperate for companionship that he talks to a blinking cursor on a blank page. But no. That wouldn’t be believable. Would it? Only crazy people do that. Just write something!

So he does. He writes a sentence, then deletes it. Another sentence, then deletes it. He wants to fast-track past all the drafts. All the bad writing that only turns into good writing after hours of editing. He just wants to write it all in one soft, smooth go.

You belong among the Wildflowers. You belong in a boat out at sea.

Why did that pop into my head? He thinks. Then he remembers the Tom Petty documentary that he just watched. Somewhere You Feel Free, he thinks, is the title of it. In that documentary Tom Petty says that the song Wildflowers was the only time in his career where he sat down with his guitar, wrote and played the whole song in one go. Wow! What a masterful piece of writing that is.

Maybe he can write the Wildflowers of short stories or novellas or novels, or whatever his non-existent piece of writing is going to metamorphosize into.

The pressure from his internal deadline is still beating like the thumping of a temple migraine. Thump. Thump.

And it isn’t just coming up with a story. A story with mini-stories placed inside like Russian nesting dolls. It’s trying to figure out the style that will help him expertly weave all these stories together.

Dylan again scans his bookshelf. Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Dennis Lehane, Stephen King. Some of his favorite authors. Great stories. Great characters. Writers with a strong understanding of the task at hand. Writers who knew that they had to write, even before a single soul knew their name. Writer’s with their own deadlines.

And like magic, an idea appears inside his head. It’s clear. It’s right there. Please don’t be another mirage, he says to himself. Please, be the real thing. He types. One sentence, into two sentences, into a paragraph. A paragraph into a page. A page into two pages. He’s off to the races now. He’s smiling. This is the drug right here, he thinks. This is the high of all highs.

Then, after a few thousand words, he stops.

He looks it over. As he continues to read what he’s just written, the smile slowly fades from his face and continues downward into a frown. This is garbage.

He highlights all the words. Delete. They’re gone. And again it’s just him and the blinking cursor. Another mirage.

Blink. Blink. Blink.

You belong among the Wildflowers. You belong in a boat out at sea.

Thump. Thump. Thump. The pressure in his head.

Can I just say

how much I fucking hate being an optimist.

I know what you're thinking,

"Hey, that doesn't sound very optimistic to me."

Well, you're damn right.

I can't stand

how every time I know the outcome of something,

there is a small part of my brain that chimes in and says,

"Just wait, this time will be different"

And I get this ache in my soul

that maybe my brain will be right this time.

Maybe this time when I go out, I will meet someone.

Maybe this time, I'll get more likes on my writing,

Maybe this time, I'll get recognition for all my hard work.

AND BIG FUCKING SURPRISE,

IT'S NOT.

It's just never different.

I feel like Charlie Brown in every aspect of my life

trying to kick the football,

thinking that this time Lucy won't be a fucking bitch

and steal it right from underneath me.

It's always the same

and every time, my hopes are dashed.

But yet,

without fail,

no matter how many times I get let down,

my brain continues,

"But maybe this time..."

If human is to being

As eyeball is to seeing

Then how do we ever know

What we truly are?

In heartbeats and in dreaming,

In silence and in screaming,

We find ourselves at a distance

Existing both near and far.

Our essence isn't living,

But in loving, and in giving,

In questions that take us to new places,

In the darkness and the light.

To be human is to wonder,

What makes the sound of thunder,

To seek the truths within our core,

Always learning, always more.

they say no two snowflakes are alike, but how do you workshop that in writing class? everyone comes with the same story, just with a different structure, and that's when it hits me - I'm as unique as a light fixture, missing the point entirely.

I took a creative writing course once, a long time ago, when I wasn't yet bitter. I sat next to a girl who opened like a flower when it was her turn to give her input. she read a poem of hers out loud, about her boyfriend's mom. but her voice wasn't hers. it was a poet's - I ask you: do snowflakes change shape when they know they're beautiful?

ten years later, it isn't her poem that sticks with me from that class. it was her voice, the way she spoke. how each word became an icicle, right in the eyelid.

I think of "every snowflake is unique" as a parody. but maybe it's the structure, the shadow they cast on each of us, individually.

I wonder if she knows she was an icon. the applause after her reading was electric. all these years later, she is a shadow that exists in winter - unique and structurally sound, even after it hits the ground.