101 Words

“Dad! You’re not watching!”

His son’s little feet shuffle impatiently on the living room carpet, a makeshift cardboard contraption with bed sheets spread at odd angles beside him.

“Then I say ‘Abracadabra’…Dad! Dad, you have to look closely!”

Now he closes his eyes against the memory of his annoyance and disregard, punches the staple through the Missing Child poster with his six-year-old’s son smiling face in grainy sepia. The ultimate disappearing act.

Garish lights hurt his eyes, sear his soul. He turns to the camera and pleads into ether, tears flowing unabashed.

“My little magician, please come back to me.”

Coyote is always waiting, and Coyote is always hungry. (So my mother says to warn me from men. It doesn’t work, of course.)

I stand at the bar sipping my drink—faces diffused by copper liquid and glass. Peering over the rim, I assess the night’s prospects. Senses heightened, waiting for that perfect moment, I smile and dip my hips ever so slightly. Blood and heat fill the air.

I study Coyote, lying next to me. My fingers trace his spine before I run my tongue along the rough of his cheek. Salt and fire swirl together. I open my jaw.

The afternoon he learned he had skin cancer, Mike thought of Josette, the first of his three wives, and the craziest. “Reality is your comfort zone,” she’d said. “It isn’t healthy.” She’d claimed to be the great-granddaughter of a Gypsy king and put a hex on Mike when they split.

“It’s family tradition. You’ve been cursed to live forever.

Don’t worry, it never works.”

He’d visited Josette in hospice years later. She’d said she was confident mystic forces would provide for her.

He cried that afternoon as he remembered her, her ashes now scattered in the ancient Gypsy homeland of Detroit.

Patchouli and pot compete with the sharp tang of sweat as Sylvie helps set up the tent.

“Hope the stakes hold in this damned sand.” Will mops his forehead with a ratty bandana.

Amy passes around barely cold beers. “Area 51, baby! Bring on the extraterrestrial beings.” She stretches out on the scrub grass and points binoculars at the sky.

Will flops next to Amy. “E.T. phone home.”

Sylvie makes sure to laugh before she activates her implant and ‘phones home.’ Her eyes move rapidly behind sunglasses as she logs her latest report on humans and their search for alien life.

Your eyes catch mine on the subway, sending a bolt of recognition through me.

Six months ago, you and I were walking down the same street when a screaming, wide-eyed woman ran toward us. A truck chased in close pursuit. Looking at each other, we silently indicated that neither of us wanted to get involved. Neither of us did. In three blinks, the woman was thrashing, shrieking, being dragged by two men. Then the noise and mess drove away. Without a word, we each carried on with our days.

Now we sit on the subway, pretending not to notice one another.

They’d built a time machine that could only travel forward in time. To test it they sent their chief engineer, Bryan, one minute into the future.

The machine vanished and they huddled around a stopwatch.

Thirty seconds later the time machine reappeared. A much older Bryan emerged, grinning. “We did it, guys! In the future, we enhanced the machine to travel back in time. And we’re testing it by returning to now!”

As the stopwatch hit zero, an explosion rocked the building. The screech of buckling metal told the tale: a catastrophic coming together of two time machines in the present.

“Gahhh!” The white-haired man grasped at his throbbing big toe, peeping through worn-out tartan slippers. On his front doorstep were the glimmering green shards of a cheap lager bottle, now freshly flecked with crimson.

“Ruddy good-for-nothing stinking yobs!” he screamed, flailing his cane at his imagined teenage assailants.

He managed to hobble back into his house, while muttering about the shocking decline of morality in twenty-first century Britain.

Across the road, the curtains of number twenty-five twitched. On the other side of them, a crinkled face smiled.

That would teach the old codger to back his car into his prize hydrangeas.