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  A Compilation

  Copyright 2016 Josh Thor

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  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Stewing Hot Car

  The Rescue

  Hero of the Wood

  About the Author

  Contact the Author

  Stewing Hot Car

  As he drove, the colors of signs flashed by Jack’s eyes, familiar signs he had seen all his life. Pete’s Automotive looked just as run down as ever, and Jack wondered how they even managed to stay above water. There couldn’t have been more than two dozen vehicles worth looking at in Terville, Alabama, anyway.

  Jack fiddled with the Dodge Stratus’s air conditioning controls for a few seconds, then gave up. The AC hadn’t worked in four years, and pressing the button again wouldn’t fix it. He lay back, resigned to the fact that he would sweat through his church clothes yet again.

  “Would you quit messing with that thing? You’re gonna make it worse,” Dianne said. She tugged at the collar of her puffy blue dress and lay back in the front seat, trying to keep her face away from those unforgiving rays of sunlight. Her silver chain and cross lay against her chest, moving up and down as she breathed.

  Jack turned to regard her. His anger momentarily subsided at the distracting image of his wife’s necklace upon her partially exposed breasts. “Can’t make something worse if it’s already broken,” Jack said. He turned back to the road, his face making an unconscious grimace.

  After an uncomfortable silence, Jack said, “Where do you want to eat?” He knew what the answer would be, what it always was.

  “It doesn’t matter, just wherever.” She always did this, every single week. Thinking about it made Jack even more angry.

  “It does matter, and you know it. Just tell me where you want to go,” Jack said. His thumb tapped against the wheel, keeping rhythm to his heart’s angry thumps.

  Dianne sat up a bit to look at Jack with narrow eyes. “What’re you getting at? I said I don’t care. So, I don’t care.” She lay back down as she said it and wiped sweat off of her forehead.

  Jack knew better than to respond. He pulled off the road into a Denny’s and parked. Dianne kept her eyes closed until Jack spoke.

  “What I am getting at..." He took a slow breath. "Every Sunday, you tell me you don’t care where we go, and then you tell me halfway through dinner that you wished we had gone somewhere else. And you hold it against me all day that I didn’t just know what you wanted. Just tell me what you want in the first place.”

  Jack took several quick, shallow breaths until he calmed back down. Looking to Dianne, his heart fell. Her face hadn’t changed at all, not phased in the slightest.

  “Denny’s,” Dianne said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I want to eat at Denny’s.”

  “Now, that’s just crap. We ate here last week, and you hated it, and you took it out on me. Plus, today’s service and member's meeting went longer than usual. It’s almost 2pm. I don’t want breakfast.” Jack tried to add a note of finality to his words, but instead they came out sounding whiney and childish.

  More awkward silence.

  Dianne said, “What do you want, Jack?”

  Jack put his face in his hands, which made him sweat even more. He stayed like that, in the stewing hot car, until an answer came to him. He thought it over for five more minutes, just to be sure.

  “I think we should try something new.”

  The Rescue

  -An excerpt from the autobiography of Jason Catty

  They all ask me: What was it like? How did you stay sane?

  Whoever said I was sane? Functional, sure, but I doubt very much that I am still sane. No one goes through that and comes out the same person.

  And they want me to explain to them, in excruciating detail, what it was like to be stuck in the dark for a year. How stupid. How full of useless thoughts their minds must be to not comprehend the idea of nothing, or to expect me to be able to describe it to them. How do you describe emptiness to an empty mind? If they do not understand it by now, they never will.

  But, for social etiquette, I appease them with another story, for describing my deliverance from such a fate is much more interesting and simple enough for their feeble brains to comprehend. I tell them this:

  I heard the footsteps of my rescuers first, but it wasn’t until I saw the light- that single beam of glorious, blinding, searing light- that I realized the truth of my rescue. And every time, my questioners fail to understand why I am angry at my saviors. They cannot grasp it. My hope is that you will understand the irony- and my rage-

  For, in the moment I was to be saved from the darkness and brought back into the light, I was doomed to live in darkness for eternity.

  Hero of the Wood

  Based off of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky