One of my favorite genres, when done well. I don’t write in it often, so this was a good exercise for me to get out of my comfort zone. And, let’s just say, it was one of the longest comfort zones I found myself in while doing these stories. Is that Raymond Chandler turning in his grave?
Thanks for reading.
Artwork by Jules Auger
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/q9zd9n
DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
The sun could’ve given Grant a closer shave than his razor. Sharp didn’t begin to describe it. A hot edge that broiled the empty street.
Grant scratched his chin around the nick. Swollen. Ready to split. Ruin his new shirt. Hah. Five years new. Stippled like one of those canvases the urbane bastards gawked at while sipping overpriced juice. Why he bought patterned shirts. Ones without didn’t go well in his line of work.
Grant toed the sun’s edge. Felt that anger through chewed leather and wool socks. That cut worked its way up to his cut. Son of a bitch made his eyes water and the rest of his face needle. A good shave was hard to come by. Fuck if that wasn’t a cliche. But the streets were full of them.
Long shadows clung the smell of piss and regrets sleeping off what they could. Shame no one respected the streets like he did. Floor to ceiling. The floor starting beneath the street, infested with rats and shit. He’d put some there himself. The ceiling ending at the stars where he’d seen many of those rats and shits bawl their last wishes, as if they were anything more than smoking bullet holes on a black wall.
He dragged a match over the part he always missed under his nose. Sulfur and wood burned. He supressed a cough, dug out the thing that had led him here. A crushed can. Reyno-Cola. Never heard of it. The last sips circled the lip as he swirled the can. He sniffed it. Smelled like it should, but not how he wanted. A whiff of tobacco, cologne, hell, even the grease smears of the steak from a last meal, because it would be. Nobody in the city got up this early. Breakfast was out of the question.
The name had led him here. Antique store. Tagged shutters, vomitting mail slot, window split into triangles leading to a center that just might have a clue. Grant crossed that moat of hellfire, stopping long enough to look straight into that fiery eye of a source to wink a “fuck you” in case it though he had been hiding from it.
He planted a foot on the bottom stair, only one more leading to the door that no on respected. Angled his toe up. Felt that stretch in his calf. Inhaled. Deeply. He blew a smoky kiss to his fragmented reflection. Didn’t let it all go, snorting the last of it, rolling it around his mouth, then swallowed. Exhaled nothing.
Mail told him nothing. Advertisements with CURRENT RESIDENT slathering barcoded labels. He dropped one, and it slid beneath the door. Halfway though. It was thick in the middle, like him.
He picked it up, turned it over. Something about the weight of it said more than the anonymity. He grinned around his cigarette at the thought of opening someone else’s mail being a federal crime. Pictured those old boys in too-short shorts trying to haul him away because the cops had better things to do.
He gutted the envelope, let his eyes fall on fresh entrails. He’d read something once about a religion reading entrails, so he honored them. Fucking Romans. A credit card glued to the center, teetering on something more than glue. Raised numbers, a raised name. M. Marshall. Fuck if he didn’t hate people who had double initials. Like their parents thought they were clever or something, as if a child was an avatar to fulfill some derivative dream they hadn’t been able to. Meanwhile the child would grow up to be a failure, get in too deep to nurse that failure, owe money, owe lives, owe things grander than the dreams of those two pathetic parents who probably thought the world of the sack of shit still, unaware that he was nothing more than what crawled and festered in the sewer, where he would soon be, once Grant found him. Which would be soon.
They liked to use his name when begging. “Grant, please this. Grant please that.” Maybe if they said it enough its literal meaning would manifest into reality and they’d live another day. Fuck if it would. He wasn’t one of those double-initial pricks who bent to tears or money. All had offered both.
Grant cocked his head, watching his reflection divide, shrink, grow. A shadow painted on the wall across the street with clean lines. He took a drag, which illuminated the hint of a nose, a lipless mouth, hollow face. Marred by that one spot he hadn’t taken care to prevent. His third eye apparently lived on the side of his cleft chin that was bigger than the other, blocky, pain in the ass to shave. Too many punches or too much of Pops’s biological signature.
The AC kicked on, rat-a-tatting the tin roof. Grant ducked as if gunshots. His already irregular heartbeat found more irregularity, cigarette tumbling to his feet sparking cinder pollen. Onto something he hadn’t noticed.
Ignition. He stomped out the fire, picked up the remains. A one-sheet menu. Benny’s. The only bar-owner who had ever, in all of history, mailed menus. Near-blackened on the kids’ menu–Grant laughed at that–just below Apple Juice was Reyno-Cola: NEW!
Shame no one respected the streets like Grant did. Floor to ceiling. Too bad he’d spent too much time staring at the wall. Could’ve been sooner, maybe give him enough time to grab a bite. Benny would be opening soon, for him anyway. Because old Benny’s mitts were all over this. Benny Benson. Magnitudes worse than a double initial. Son of himself. Son of a bitch.
Grant gagged the mailslot again with the thick envelope, kept the menu. It was a long walk to Benny’s from here. He patted his gut. That was all right with him. He tossed the can onto a dogpile of garbage bags, took another drag, rounding the Reyno Antique Store to pay a visit to a man who was the son of himself.
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