The dying wildflowers in the median, a late season easy purple, still stand in contrast to the November gray onslaught and they, with their defiant faces smiling up toward a buried sun, remind Allen of Jodie. Where once flowers had just been pretty, now they served as a constant reminder of her, a new feeling stirred within him. He was about to thrust himself into the unfurling distance of a soft love. Without explanation and at any moment he would part; cracked open by her sunlight until blue shown through.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson, Jodie Copeland

From the back of his spotted brown Saddlebred, a weathered cattle farmer checks his heavy silver braced watch. Then he looks around the fields for his cattle. With rain maybe coming he knows most of the herd has already made its way back down towards the creek bed. He imagines the sense of unease that the animals must have with the weather like it is. In fact, he does not need to imagine it. Since where the ground is still wet it’s mashed with hoof prints he knows they began moving about two hours ago at 14:00. Frank Frederick still thought in military time since his days in the Army. He glances to his watch again. His vet will be out to meet him in thirty minutes or so. He clicks his tongue and pulls Leland back to the left to make their way down toward the creek bed. Dr. Turner will know where he and the herd went.

Then a noise turns Frank’s head. The sound’s beginning leaps out of the moist silence and rolls over the low hills in a tide. Frank’s mind begins to put the picture together. He can’t see anything—the highway is up and over the next hill about a half a mile away. As the sound rolls on like the sky, Frank squints his eyes like a man in pain, as if to deafen himself from what he may or may not hear next. A second short percussive smash follows the screams of the tires, and Frank lowers his head a touch in admission. Seconds pass and Frank is only left with the sound of the wind curling in the back of his large ears. Still he waits, listening for more though he knows it is over.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson, frank fredrick

Scratching his head, Travis drifts into the living room, feeling late morning on his head like a burro; hairy, warm, scratchy and possibly getting ready to kick him. He has awoken from a gelatin-thick dream of trying to put together the pieces of an invitation to the world’s greatest party of… but wondering the whole time if it was really worth the effort. His roommate’s stereo in the next room is blaring the sounds of a mariachi band, and Travis feels stuck in a movie with bad pacing. The sunbeams pour in through the blinds, thick and tangible, dust swirling and alighting on the fuzzy edges of everything. “I didn’t wanna go to a stupid party anyway,” he mumbles to the invisible mariachi players. In synch, the too-giddy Spanish guitars reach a climatic tremolo as a loud, persistent knocking at the door barges into Travis’s head and pushes his brain down. While gathering his wits, Travis eyes the door, knowing that if he stands very quiet and–and who the hell left the stereo on anyway? He was alone in the place, had been all week, roommates away doing things that roommates do when they’re away. He looks around suspiciously to make sure there’s no one there but him and his mess is all the evidence he needs.

Read the whole story so far: Showdown at the DQ Corral

A hundred yards or so east of a wide gray line that is highway 316 in Georgia, two crows occupy a small patch of ground in a grazing field. From a distance, it is difficult to make out what they are pecking at, heads stabbing at the ground and bobbing back. Above them and the fields and skeletal trees, a low-lying blanket of gray clouds has unfurled, tilled and furrowed like crop rows. In the low contrast light the birds seem as black as holes in the pasture. The dying grass around the scavengers is November brown that beneath the cold and tungsten sun seems only ashen—a hundred thousand strands of ash ready to be broken, crushed, and dispersed at the slightest weight. Nothing but two crows, in the whole of this landscape, is moving. This is the picture.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Smiling as he walks out across the gym parking lot, in a light wind beneath the looming gray, Allen muses that he actually enjoys his own stink. Then he smiles even more brightly when he remembers the time when Jamie had told him that she liked his stink too. Shit. What am I still doing in town? This is stupid. Why does she have to be like that? A warmth comes over him, as butterflies arrive in his stomach, turning to goose bumps in the cool air. He should drive down to see her. Right now. Right this second. She would be happy to see him; the argument would pass with his presence since that’s what it was really about. He nods slowly with a verbal, Mmm yeah when he remembers that Jamie will be working until five o’clock today.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson, Jamie Copeland

Rain For Most of the Early Week

Athens, GA—As a new warm front moves across Alabama and Georgia this weekend, expect mild temperatures with moderate to heavy rain beginning Saturday and continuing on through Tuesday.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson, Athens, weather

Allen makes his way up the sidewalk to the Five Star café. Ah hah!—and this one different from the last. The taste of an omelet has crept into his mind behind all his aimless thinking. He starts to salivate at the potential taste of salt and green peppers, butter-burned mushrooms and onions. Even the color of the food, bright flecks and sparks against the day’s backdrop—overdrop?—seem attractive. The door jingles open with a light tug and Allen makes his way to the counter. He glances over his shoulder to see if the bell that has rung is a real one. It was a small silver one just above the hinge side of the door.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson, Athens

“Gooooood morning.”

Enwrapped in the overcast sky, enwrapped in the eulogy of the low light of his room, Allen rubs his eyes. He isn’t speaking to anyone—just remarking on the lateness of his waking: 11:36am. Days like this one keep you in bed. An errant memory of Jodie laughing at his sarcasm comes to him and he still sighs shyly. He was never used to being the center of anyone’s attention but she shown spotlights of flirtation and joy at him, always leaving him overwhelmed. Producing an audible groan and then forced to laugh at his sloth, Allen rolls himself over to cooler parts of the sheets. His clock’s red digits buzz like guilt in his face and Allen looks to them for pity. Perhaps someone would be so kind as to blow a fuse or cut the power?

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: Allen Lawson

A warm front forms out in the plains states and begins to roll a transparent wave where the crest congeals into a foam of clouds boiling off from the difference in temperatures. Even air, empty air, has within it the potential for turbulence. As spirals, eddies, and the devils of empty cold and empty warm skies collide like invisible battalions, born is the froth of clouds. High, low, wispy and thick these fluffs and free floating textures billow out from the fronts and swirl and churn, curl and swell until they spill out to cover fifteen hundred thousand square miles.

East it drifts from its birthplace, over cold deposits of stillness too lazy to move but solid enough to shoulder the vapors and pass them at a high altitude across the land. The billion ton mass of crystallized water pours out towards us, cutting out the sun, turning gray and threatening rain.

Read the whole story so far: A Low Cloud Reflex

Characters and Places: weather

The passengers (the cargo) on the subway jiggle in unison: left then right, then left, then left again. Everyone leans but tries not to push on the person next to them—some, anyway. They stare in unison, though the rays of their eyelines are chaotic, like security vault lasers for heroes to acrobat through, like Da Vinci’s underlying canvas plans. She stares at shoes. He stares at the tops of breasts peeking out from a blouse between jacket lapels. She stares at the window but is thinking about her mother. She stares at her boy, asleep by her side, the undulations of the train pressing him into her. He stares at some nothing somewhere between him and the door, the interplay of blurry lit reflections in the dual-paned glass.

Fletcher Davis, he stares at an advertisement. He stares. His precise and calculating mind torn asunder by this ad’s garish lack of professionalism; totally devoid of style, proportion, measure, sensibility, schooling for God’s sake. It seems almost random with words crammed into the small four-foot-by-one-foot space that babbles—so much copy for such a small space!—on about Dr. Z’s miracle teeth whitening process; testimonials, benefits, details of the procedure and on and on. Dr. Z, an Indian or Pakistani man perhaps, balding and dressed in a white lab coat, is there as well, smiling a brilliant white hypnotic smile possessing a look that says, “The wisdom of the ages rests with me.” No! Fletcher thinks. Then he frowns and reads. “Studies have shown that people with brighter smiles are more successful and live more fulfilling lives.”—it’s elementary advertising! It’s the basics of a course in business writing: describe what the product does, what it will accomplish. But it just isn’t… cool.

Read the whole story so far: Brain->Wash

Characters and Places: 6 Train, Fletcher Davis