The early morning air is wet and cool, but still evidence, even at night, that it is June. There is no escaping the feeling of a Georgia summer night. The air drops in temperature from a ludicrous heat of hours passed, lingering absentmindedly around seventy-eight or so because the heat has nothing better to do—the boredom of humidity. At night the air isn’t sticky like it is during the day, just a soft and wet, damp blanket; protection from the fire too late. Travis stands watching all the silent parked cars in front of the apartments and thinks about all the people sleeping—tries to imagine his neighbors’ faces as they lay comfortably in their beds. They will be getting up to begin their days only as he goes to bed, too exhausted to dream anymore. The front door opens behind him and John steps out, turning to lock the bolt.

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: 3D, John Riffing, Travis Fleeting

When Travis has the dream he dies, only to awaken in his own bed, shocked not to have four feet and hooves. Television and a sleepless night in that soft, familiar armchair usually follow, the warmth of the corrugated velvet cradling him. The high-pitched chattering of channel ninety-nine is muted but its scrambled signal still graces him with enough randomness to meditate on nothing. Planet Earth? Planet Earth? Are you receiving our signal? Travis smiles lazily. “I am receiving you, Commander Gibson.” Fifteen minutes before, the channel had been clear enough to make out naked, heaving bodies through the static. Now the picture isn’t clear enough to make out anything. Travis, despite accusations from roommates, actually turns the scrambled channel on for the sake of the vegetating color bar—just something to ponder. Waves and tides of odd bands of resonance fight their way across the screen, and Travis enjoys lapsing into a hypnotized state in a vane attempt to comprehend the dream and the hole it leaves somewhere in the middle of his heart.

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: 3D, dreams, horses, Travis Fleeting

After the applause, his mind returns from vanishing, and this is the picture hours later:

He is Travis Fleeting in his lonesome, dreaming state, right there in front of you, cuddled up in front of the television in his dingy living room, roommates fast asleep. He does not exist because he is really his glorious friends. He is his listeners. He is love found along the way. He is a strange reminder, constant only for himself in his lonesome dreaming state, his dream now static on the television screen flickering dizzyingly with the word “MUTE” spelled out in green, blocky, digital letters in the lower left corner of the screen.

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: 3D, insomnia, static, television, Travis Fleeting

“You still up?” asks a tired voice from the kitchen door.

Travis rolls over onto his back, kicking his legs up over the arm rests. “Yeah.”

“Eh. I can’t sleep either.” The figure steps from out of the shadows of the darkened kitchen into the flickering bands of the satori machine, sitting himself on the couch wearily. It is John, and he wipes sleep from his eyes, and then wipes the optic goo off his hand on the arm of the couch. Smiling, he looks at Travis, his teeth a wonderland purple in the television’s light.

“I’m pissed off.”

Travis smiles knowingly, his grin half-buried beneath the seat cushion. “Sorry, lover, I just couldn’t get it up tonight—it wasn’t you—“

“Fuck you.”

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: cigarettes, John Riffing, pissed off, Travis Fleeting

The guitar slung over his shoulder is not a weapon, though he and other wielders of it will call it an axe in hopes that after midnight, in the thunder and lightning, battle with monsters arrives, and they will obtain heroic might from fire in the sky. This solo, that Travis is in the midst of, is deadly tense and screams of knockout punches and secret words that blast walls apart. It boils his blood and pushes sweat out every pore in his body. Hammering the frets, like concrete walls that he destroys with a glance, ahead of them somehow, some emergency is taking over the sound: wailing sirens, racing winds.

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy, The Gutar Solos

Characters and Places: Athens, Guitar Solo, Travis Fleeting

“11:20” appears before Travis like a poke in the eye. The midsummer sun is crawling toward the peak of its arc, pissed off once again that the little orb Earth has crept too close in elliptical drift. Rolling over to face the wall, Travis once again lingers over thoughts of beautiful horses trapped by bronze shafts, on a centrifugal cage of motion, before the visions begins to fade and the phone bill’s due date comes into focus, lying on the floor by the nightstand. Travis looks down toward the foot of his bed where his guitar leans, and shut his eyes.

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: 3D, Nick Vaughn, sleeping in, Travis Fleeting

At their usual Waffle House table, “How many times have you done it?” Nick asks.

“Just three,” Travis replies. “And honestly, I think this will be the last time… for a while anyway.”

The warmth from the grill, the sizzling of grease, and Johnny Cash singing low from the juke box, greet the boys easy, with a peppy southern waitress to boot. “Mornin’ boys!” She sets out silverware and napkins, but there’s plenty of time to take orders in a minute. Both Nick and Travis nod politely, fiddle with their silverware. The whole cherub yellow room smells like bacon. “Why’s that?”

Travis shakes his head. “I’m gettin’ too old for this.”

Nick rolls his eyes.

“Naw, seriously. I don’t know. I guess I don’t want to push my luck. I’ve had some really fun times.”

“Everything in moderation.”

Travis makes a little bow of recognition with his hand, “Thank you Mr. Aristotle.”

“Wasn’t that Plato who first said that?”

Travis thinks about it, catching his reflection in the glass, his own face surprising him. “Socrates,” he says nodding.

“Yeah. Socrates. That’s the dude.”

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: Athens, balogna sandwich, Nick Vaughn, Travis Fleeting, Waffle House

The heat rises up from off the concrete and asphalt like flamenco dancers moaning, moving and smoking. As his shaved head comes up over the black line of the horizon, the city behind him, it bobs with the gait of a disguise. He is every other person walking down every heated street, but it is his mission that is hidden from view. At the top of Baxter, Travis marches right through the rigid wall of translucent waves, undetermined. His guitar is draped over his shoulder with its neck pointing at the ground like an arrow, he, a troubadour. One step and he is anxious and frustrated—the next, he is smiling and laughing at private jokes and things his friends say, little melodies and chords in the noise of the world—the next moment, the theme from the Incredible Hulk plays, as David Banner, alone and lost, walks down a road. Travis is smiling in the gruesome heat, his black boots wrapped hot around his feet, the inside of his jeans damp from sweat. Wandering, wandering.

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: Athens, shoes, summer, Travis Fleeting

Damage. They call it experience. There you go. But listen cautiously to the meaning of the simple syllables in a word like damage. The way the ‘m’ rolls under the crest of the ‘d’, the way ‘age’ takes a part in the inevitability of it all. Damage: an even number of letters. The middle is the space where there is nothing. It is cruelly symmetric to the shape of being human—being only between moments—and being a matted, emaciated, old, dirty alley cat—one of those things that’s there just because it is, because no one wants it (and strangely, because no one has the heart to put it out of its misery). And yet if you do not handle that radioactive substance of regret and guilt with care, it leaves behind a dirty residue. “Oh, I am better,” says Life. “Oh, I have done worse.” But then there is Damage playing tricks in the back of Life’s mind. “I have done worse, haven’t I? Right?”

Read the whole story so far: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: dreams, the old man in gray, Travis Fleeting

“People keep saying that.” He takes a drink. “It’s what I do every day.” For a moment, Travis worries he is putting a damper on things. He doesn’t know why Melissa had come looking for him or why she seems to sympathize but he feels he is disappointing her somehow by not feeling better. “You wanna’ hear a joke?”

Read the whole story so far: Unthreaded

Characters and Places: Jokes, Melissa Keller, Travis Fleeting