Soda

His hand was sweating profusely as it gripped the worn hickory grip of the old .38 caliber Saturday Night Special. It wasn’t that there was a lot of heat in the pocket of the tattered old green army jacket; instead, the nervousness that comes along with making such a monumental decision, the kind of decision that will impact the rest of your life, caused the pores in the palms of his hands to pump out the moisture in overtime. If his nerves allowed for it, he could very shortly become eligible to be locked in a small room with bars on the door and window for the rest of his natural life. Of course, that would only happen if he were caught. The truth is that, even though he had only been convicted twice before of felony charges, hence the potential for garnering that dreadful third conviction, he had committed hundreds of crimes during his otherwise unproductive life.

Happenstance

The sound of gunfire rolled across the top of the tall grass on the open plain. Hours later, on the streets of a small town that lay nestled within the swaying stalks, one man stood propped against a display board in front of the undertaker’s store on Main Street while those who rode into town with him sweltered in a hot and cramped jail, waiting their turn.

“Where you think he come from?” a child asked his mother as they walked past the macabre figure.

The boy’s mother pulled him quicker along the dusty road, but his eyes would not be averted. “Same place as any of the rest of them that ride around to small towns trying to take what don’t belong to them. And it’s, ‘came from’, ‘where do you think he came from’.  Do I have to go talk to the school Master about your English?”