Contributor: Hannah Garrard

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Mrs. Barton-Hoff sashayed into the jeweler’s, slinging her clutch purse and her small son, Mungo, onto the chaise lounge. She flexed her fingers in preparation for a BIG PURCHASE. “Good afternoon Mrs. Barton-Hoff” oozed the jeweler, already counting his commission.

“I’m after the new season’s Dolce diamonds,” bellowed Mrs. Barton-Hoff, her thick calves striding towards the twinkling cabinet display. She placed her palms ceremoniously onto the cold glass, and made as if to inhale the light that spun off the diamond-encrusted contents.

“I need a wee,” said her son in a small voice from the chaise lounge.

“Mungo! Don’t be so disgusting!” Mrs. Barton-Hoff spat, her trance broken. She returned to the cabinet to admire the earrings on her reflection in the glass.

“I’ll try the studs first.”

“As you wish madam,” radiated the jeweler.

“Mummy I must have a wee,” whimpered Mungo- Mrs. Barton-Hoff’s only, and last, child.

“Shut up, Mungo! It’s mummy’s time now!”

Mungo got up and started to make those half automatic bucking motions with his hips that signaled a full bladder. He was old enough to know when he needed to go, but not yet old enough to hold it in for very long. He looked around for a potty, but he couldn’t see one in the big, boring shop with all the glass boxes and shiny things that he wasn’t allowed to touch.

Just then Mrs. Harrison-Ford swept in, accompanied by her three-year-old daughter, Melody. This isn’t a bloody crèche thought the jeweler, wondering where all the nannies were.

“I’m after the new line in Dolce,” barked Mrs. Harrison-Ford, nose first. She placed Melody along with her clutch purse neatly onto the chaise lounge where she sat, cherub like in her white frock and bows.

She spotted Mrs. Barton-Hoff with her fingers in the diamonds she was after, and marched right over to the cabinet at the far end of the shop. The two women stood like sows jostling for space at the dinner trough.

Meanwhile, Melody was watching Mungo dancing. That looks fun she thought to herself. Better than this boring shop with all the glass boxes and shiny things I’m not allowed to touch. She hopped off the chaise lounge and went to join Mungo in his fun dancing game.

“I was here first!” boomed Mrs. Barton-Hoff at Mrs. Harrison-Ford.

“I called ahead!” Mrs. Harrison-Ford spluttered back. The jeweler felt his Adam’s apple tighten.

“Perhaps madam would like to try the Chanel?” he proffered, sending appeasing glances. It was tough work being a jeweler sometimes, requiring diplomacy, tact, and flattery.

Mungo and Melody continued to buck and dance.

“Keep out the way it’s going to come out!”  Mungo warned Melody. If he weed himself his mummy would smack his bottom again; he didn’t want a repeat of the supermarket incident, that had left him sobbing by the sun dried tomatoes all by himself, his mother too disgusted by his wetness to claim him as her own. Mungo had an idea and bucked his way to the chaise lounge with Melody hot on his tail.

The squabbling at the counter was getting acerbic.

“MUTTON DRESSED AS LAMB!”

“LADY GAGA DRESSED AS LADY DIANA!”

Mungo snatched his mummy’s black clutch purse that was sitting on the chaise lounge and snapped it open, placing it on the floor in front of him. He pulled down his pants and pointed himself at it. Melody stopped dancing.

Mrs. Barton-Hoff was pulling at Mrs. Harrison-Fords hair.

A half-sob of relief left Mungo as he watched his fanfare of wee fill up his mother’s clutch purse. But it was almost full and he still had more. Melody (who was a smart girl and had figured out the rules to the new game), came to the rescue with her mummy’s clutch purse.

Mrs Harrison-Ford had snatched the pair of diamond Dolces from Ms. Barton-Hoff’s ears and was fumbling to place them in her own.

Just in time. Mungo redirected his aim and sent another fanfare of wee up into Mrs. Harrison-Ford’s clutch purse, finishing with an inch to spare. “Thanks for saving me!” Mungo said to his new friend as he shook the last spots. Mungo and Melody snapped the purses shut and replaced them on the chaise lounge.

“Now ladies,” interjected the Jeweler over the din his customers were making. “I will sell the diamonds to the fist credit card I see.”

Both women raced towards the chaise lounge, batting their small children out of the way and scrambled for their purses. They emptied their contents onto the counter, and all over the diamond Dolce display.

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Hannah is from the UK but now lives in South Korea amongst the neon signage. From her apartment she can see the ocean, and a rusty cruise ship that makes tired laps around the peninsular. You can follow her travels and her writing at:
www.lookingformyhat.blogspot.com

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Author: Hannah Garrard

Contributor: Neila Mezynski

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The space between two black chair to define chaos in white light, right angle for poetic sake. Not too far don’t blur, boundary. Move straight line, there. Little black dress soften nice, glare, shoulder strap, off. Impossible. Care.


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Dancer/choreographer turned abstract painter/writer turned installation artist.

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Author: Neila Mezynski

Contributor: Tyler Gates

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She holds you down as she tightens the knots around your wrists. You are being attached to the bed frame. There you lay naked and cold. She has a grin plastered across her face. She is happy, an emotion she rarely displays. Reaching past your head she grabs a large box cutter. Moonlight sneaks in past the blankets she has covering her windows and shines across the brand new blade. Fear explodes inside you and begins a frantic race through your veins. Your muscles twitch and you try to shake loose. She smiles as she begins violently slashing at your chest. You scream and struggle to throw her off. She counters by putting her weight into her knees and muffling your screams by forcing her tiny fist in your mouth.


She continues slashing until a gaping hole forms in the center of your chest. Once satisfied with the size she tosses the blade aside and forces her free arm into your chest. The cavity where your heart used to be fills with blood as she begins to pump her fist in and out of your chest. Suddenly she begins moaning and and arching her back; an obvious result of the pleasure she is having. This goes on and on until she climaxes in a torrent of screams; matching yours in volume and intensity. After several moments of heavy panting she rips her blood soaked arm out of your chest and shoves two fingers in your mouth. Forcing you to taste the pieces of your own soul; a taste all too similar to metal shavings. Wiping the rest of the blood on the bedsheets she rolls over and gets comfortable with her back facing you. “Tomorrow night you can do it to me.” she says quietly before falling asleep.


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Tyler Gates exists barely in small town rural Midwest. His life is dotted with violent encounters with hillbillies, night jobs, alcohol binges, gas station explosions, and the occasional cult abduction. Besides playing writer he occupies his time with illegal underground home made hot air balloon races.

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Author: Tyler Gates

Contributor: Ken Sparling

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The road came to an end. There was a small white sign. Beyond that, there was a dirt trail, and she set out to walk it. It wound between high ridges. There was a river. She had never seen a place like this.

I could never find the words to say the things I felt, and the situation today was no different. I removed my monocle from my left eye and looked away from the book I was reading. A window was open somewhere, although it seemed to me that it was not the time of year to be opening windows. Cold air touched my ankles and wrists and my chin and ears. The tip of my nose was very cold. I lifted the monocle back to my eye and looked again to the book. I read a sentence silently, to myself. It was as much as I could take in all at once, a single sentence (more than I could take in, in fact) so I looked up again and let the monocle fall on its chain and dangle before me like a prisoner in a noose. It dangled and caught the light and I saw white spots on the wall across from me where the light shot through the monocle and bent into strange blurry light beings scrambling over the wall like small creatures trying to escape.

My phone changed everything for me. It reformulated my entire life. It restructured the grammar of my existence. I slept on a piece of foam on the kitchen floor, waiting for the light of day to slither through the cracks in the wooden blinds.


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Ken Sparling has six published novels. His first, DAD SAYS HE SAW YOU AT THE MALL (Knopf, 1996) has just been reissued by Mudluscious.

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Author: Ken Sparling

Contributor: Gary Clifton

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Fire Department found a fat guy dead in the frame house and heavy gasoline residue. Homicide sent Red Harper and Chris Jonic, both old timers.
"Girls, 10 and 13 survived," the fire captain said grimly "Transported to Parkland...badly burned."
Bleary-eyed neighbors reported the dead guy was the girls' uncle and one sorry bastard. "Two arrests...indecent exposure...once for fondling," Harper flash-lighted his notebook.
"Guy told me uncle was sexually abusing both girls. Told a kid who told a kid type deal," Jonic said.
"Where the hell was CPS?" Harper growled.
At Parkland - Menthol bandages and oxygen - both girls burned beyond recognition. Felecia, 13, terrified, in pain, was lost in sobs. "Neighbors said you got out, then went back to get your sister," Harper said gently.
She dissolved into hysteria. "Maria?" .
"She'll be ok," Jonic considered the weight of such a lie in Hell. They'd both be dead tomorrow.
Harper caught his eye. Instantly, they both saw...she'd set the fire from outside to save her sister from him.
"We understand, Felicia, you thought you could get Maria out." More sobs.
Outside, Harper relit his cigar. "I'll write this...no suspects."
"That's the way I see it." Jonic said.


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Gary Clifton, forty years a cop, has over forty short fiction pieces published or pending with on line sites. He's been shot at, shot, stabbed, sued, lied to, and often misunderstood.

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Author: Gary Clifton

Contributor: Peter McMillan

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Ashen cloud banks pile one upon the other in the darkening western sky. The setting sun manages to filter only a few solitary amber rays through the layers of thick cloud. As if pierced by countless pinpricks, the cloud canvas lets through isolated beams of sunlight, refracting the light as the clouds mass and then expand to cover the twilight sky.

The glass of the shop windows catches the rays of sunlight that find their way through the clouds and bounces them back through the sultry air into the hurried eyes of the people passing from their labour to their leisure. The eyes of the crowd do not reflect these chance glints any further but absorb them as charcoal does.

A mantle of gray-black falls suddenly, draping itself across the shoulders of the earth, and instantly there is momentary pitch-black darkness all around. The lights of the village do not anticipate the abruptness of the transition to night. Street lamps begin to hum noisily as their globes gradually brighten, the heavy clicking sound of traffic light control boxes rises in intensity directing the play of colours above the street intersections, private windows begin to emit their light soundlessly, forming rectangular patterns of whiteness on the sidewalks and streets.

The stillness of the brief eclipse quickly gives way to tempestuous gusts of wind, rushing around corners, down the corridors of streets and lanes, whipping about, scattering bits and pieces of trash, and blowing dirt and sand into the emptiness of passers-by's eyes.

The relentless winds blow in a storm of rain, driving the rain like needles into the exposed flesh of the comfort-seeking mass of pedestrians. The faces of the crowd seek refuge behind their buttoned coats and upturned collars. Hats float off into the darkness, away and beyond the village's scattered umbrellas of light. Traffic signals, regulating the movement of human and machine, blink in complete obedience to the prescribed design of their makers, while the swell of the crowd overflows the ordered lines and right angles of the streets and sidewalks. The din of honking horns and screeching tires fills the intersections with a dissonant and unpleasant noise that is from time to time joined by the loud swearing and the banging of fists on metal of pedestrians violating intersections from all directions.

The disentanglement of flesh and metal proceeds quickly and chaotically. The wind and rain and blackness hasten a resolution to the confusion. A few stragglers pass by in obscurity to one another, brushing against one another, plashing through the rivers of rainwater overflowing the sidewalks, gutters and streets. The rain becomes so dense that the changing traffic lights resemble a kaleidoscope--colours flashing, changing, merging. Red, green, yellow, red, green, yellow, flashing faster red green yellow red green, merging redgreenyellowredgreenyellow...WHITE....

One man, indistinguishable from the numbers preceding him to this corner, steps out ... into the street from his curb corner and splashes into the choppy waves of the river coursing through the intersection and is swept away into the black void.

Next morning, the crowd, returning from its leisure on its way to its labour, stops and stares with bloodshot, vacuous eyes at a hat that has found its balance on the globe of a lamppost--but the traffic light clicks and whirs to green and the eyes turn away to face the dawning of a new day.


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The author is a freelance writer and ESL instructor who lives on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario with his wife and two flat-coated retrievers. In 2012, he published Flash! Fiction, a collection of 34 reprinted stories.

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Author: Peter McMillan

Contributor: John Laneri

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Nate Carver stepped to the front door of Aunt Jillie's Boarding House, the finest establishment along the cattle trail to Fort Worth.

Nate was a scruffy character from Oklahoma where a small town preacher wanted him for soiling his daughter's virtue. In fear of his life, he headed to Texas where he had been drifting from town to town looking for action.

At the moment, he wanted a girl.

Once inside her stately Victorian, he hesitated. He had never been to an establishment with fine furniture and window curtains. He ran his hand through his hair watching the grit fall to the floor while he considered the situation.

To his left, he saw several gentlemen eating fried chicken at a dining room table. In the opposite direction, he looked toward the parlor, a large room filled with red couches and comfortable chairs. For a instant, he experienced awe, the grandeur overwhelming him.

“Well I’ll be dang,” he said to no one in particular.

Jillie’s met him in the foyer. “Howdy, mister. You've come to the right place for eating, sparking and splashing.”

“I’m here to get me a woman,” he said, as he continued to look about – his eyes darting from room to room.

She looked him over. “Our girls go for fellows like you. Yes sir, they like the lanky, eye-catching types with a powerful presence.”

“Most ladies can’t resist my charms.”

“I bet you court the girls right smartly.”

“That I do,” he said, as he took a closer look at Jillie, his eyes lifting a bit. “You’re a mighty fine looking lady. I've always had a preference for red hair and green eyes.”

Smiling, Jillie fluffed the hair. “I’m proud you’re pleased.” Nudging his arm, she directed him toward the parlor and continued, “What kind of darling suits your taste?”

Nate's mouth stumbled a time or two then he replied, “I want the kind with two legs and real teeth. Of course, I take a likin’ to the ones with a little meat on their bones.”

Jillie smiled and pointed to one of her girls, “I’ve got Carole Marie from Abilene. She’s a lovely girl with a solid amount of heft. And best of all, her lips can get a fellow to screaming before he's had a chance to get his boots off.”

“Woo-e, she sounds right nice.”

Jillie waited while Nate turned in circles to look the other girls over, then she pointed across the room. “If, on the other hand, you have a hankerin’ for the extras, then Frances May is your little lady. She's the one wearing the spurs.”

Nate scratched at his whiskers. “I don’t know much about spurs.”

Jillie chuckled and said, “It takes a hearty person with powerful spunk to like spurs. We reserve 'em for real men like yourself, fellows with cast iron in their spirit.”

“My pappy always said my head was as solid as a block of wood. I guess that's close enough to cast iron.”

“I suspect it is,” Jillie replied, smiling. “What brings you to our little town?”

“I've been lookin' for a place where I can find work,” he replied, as he looked away to wink at Frances May.

“How about a splash in my tub... might get rid of some of that trail dust. The girls like to splash with smooth talking gents like you, and they're mighty good at playing around underwater.”

“A bath sounds mighty good... Now, hurry up. I'm about ready to explode in my pants.”

Directing him to the side, Jillie said, “As I’m sure you’re aware, my girls like to see real money before getting acquainted.”

“I got plenty of money,” he said quickly. “But, I ain't never paid for a woman.”

Jillie smiled softly. “Maybe so, but around here, fellows get the kind of experience only money can buy.”

Grumbling, Nate reached into his pocket to withdraw a crumpled wad of bills. “Right now, I got three dollars.”

Jillie indicated across the room. “Frances May, come meet this boy.”

Frances May scooted closer and took his hand. “I’m so good with spurs you'll be blindly in love by the time we're through.”

“I’ll try anything with you.”

Jillie snatched his money, saying, “Three dollars buys you Frances May with spurs and a splash.”

Sometime later, Frances May helped Nate back to the parlor, his hand covering his eye.

After sitting him in a chair, she said, “I didn't mean to poke you in the eye with my spur. You should be careful where you put your head.”

“But, we were only playin' around in the tub when you started running those spurs across my back.”

“Maybe so, but you''re not supposed to kiss my feet when I'm wearing spurs.”

“It just so happens your feet got in the way of my lips. But, I want my money back. I ain't gonna pay for getting poked in the eye.”

After listening to both sides of their argument, Jillie drifted their way and said to Nate, “We're here to please, so, here's what we'll do... First off, since you need work, I'll hire you paint my front porch starting tomorrow morning. And when you're done, Frances May will agree to pay you with a free poke – less the spurs, of course. How's that sound? Not many fellows get that kind of opportunity.”

Smiling brightly, Nate said, “Frances May for free! Why that sounds like the best job I ever heard of. I'll be here bright and early.”

As he walked out the door, Jillie turned to Frances May. “I'm starting to like that boy. He dumb enough to paint the rest of the house before he realizes that fellows always pay for women – one way or the other.


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John is a native born Texan living near Houston. His writing focuses on short stories and flash. Publications to his credit have appeared in several scientific journals as well as a number of internet sites and short story periodicals.

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Author: John Laneri

Contributor: Rachel Scott

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Shuffling, shifting, toiling…lift grate, insert hose, wait, reverse. The Man Who Cleans Street Drains places fists on hips and contemplates the filth inhaled by the plastic elephant’s nose attached to its mechanized body. There has been the usual cacophony of degradation.

“Again? It’s disrupting traffic.”

“That smells like death.”

“Why can’t the city send him in the middle of the night?”

Out of sight, they mean, because it’s hardly respectable to earn a living through the removal of decomposing coffee cups and the corpses of vermin.

“Didn’t you go to college?” a peer with two mobile phones jeers in passing.

The Man Who Cleans Street Drains feels pity for his accuser’s manic pace and need to destroy in order to survive. There is no defensiveness, because a former CEO down the block refills soda machines, and a woman at the department store was a journalist and is now a janitor. At night, of course.

The plastic nose sniffles, and The Man Who Cleans Street Drains packs up and moves to the next metal grate. Someone approaches…a scruffy junkie with a devastated look on his face.

“Take this,” he says, handing over a yellow ticket with numbers on it. “It’s a winner. Not much, like a thousand or something. But I’m quitting…definitely. I want to quit. Take it from me.”

The Man Who Cleans Street Drains receives the yellow handout from the giver and watches him fade into the atmosphere. He glances at the lottery lifeline briefly as he thinks of hard labor and self worth. He lets it fall down the drain to join the refuse claimed by the artificial feast of his own control.


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Rachel Scott is a high school English teacher who has a deeply eccentric love of all things British, and has also spent the last three summers studying Shakespeare at Oxford University.

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Author: Rachel Scott

Contributor: James Wolanyk

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It was just a matter of time until they got him. They were weak, scrawny little things, covered in sores and clambering over one another to get a look at the prey. They gnashed their teeth in mismatched rows and giggled with horrible, slurping fits of joy. It sounded like something was caught in their throats, like undigested meat festered between their jaws.
He had never seen them before, but he was certain they had seen him.
“Believe me, I know it sounds crazy,” he would tell his wife.
For the first few weeks it was funny. She almost thought it was a scare tactic to get the kids in bed. But they were five and six years old, hardly able to stomach the details that he recounted. He spoke of nauseating things.
“And they ate everything. They save the pancreas for last because they can taste the insulin.”
He wished that he could stop hearing their cackling, and the scratching of their paws on the carpet and between the walls, and especially the screeching and thumping when they cannibalized one of their own. They were hungry, and there were hundreds of them.
“They said that my corpse could feed them for years,” he trembled that night, burying his face in the blankets as his wife lay beside him. He couldn’t turn off the light. They were there.
Darkness was where they thrived. Their best chance to get him was when he stared at the pallid glow of a computer screen. They circled in the blackness of his peripheral vision like coyotes, disguised by the light, waiting until his bloodshot eyes snapped toward them before they retreated. They would skitter along the ceiling and in the fridge.
He had to shower with his eyes open.
“I can’t take my shirt off,” he whispered, his back pressed to the sink. He grabbed his wife’s shoulders. “Every time you close your eyes, they get closer. They never sleep.”
Standing outside with his gun didn’t do anything. They waited in the shadows just beyond the porch light’s watchful gaze, snickering, taunting him to wander into their domain. He swore that beady black eyes caught the glimmer of the moon every so often, like droplets of ink among the night. Squirrels and stray dogs screamed out when the creatures became hungry.
When he ran on the treadmill, they lurked in the nooks and crannies of the basement, listening to the wheezing of the machine and the exhausted gasps of their prey. They crawled behind boxes of antiques and discarded lamps. They rummaged through trash-bags full of old toys and tore apart dolls in hopes of finding one made out of flesh.
“I don’t know how much longer we can keep this up,” he sobbed that night.
She took the children and left for her sister’s house – it was a hundred miles off, and he hoped she could make it there.
Rain streaked down the window panes. He waited in the bathroom with his shaving razor and a towel, unable to do anything but hit his head against those tiles. Nothing could overpower their laughter. The vents and ducts rattled with their presence. They tapped on windows and sliced glass with their jagged nails. Crawling, biting, snapping creatures with a constant hunger. He was safe within his bleach-white fortress.
He wasn’t the first to fall, and he wouldn’t be the last.
Thunder rattled the house.
“Please don’t,” he said.
More laughter.
“I’m begging you, please. Just stop.”
All at once, it ended. The pitter-patter of their nails against metal and wood faded away. Their giggles and shrieks disappeared. Beady eyes gave way to the night once more.
He stepped out of the bathtub. For a moment he stood still, listening, praying that their fun had run its course. It was done.
Tap-tap-tap. He undid the door locks, all seven of them, and wandered into the hallway.
It was quiet once more.
Something fizzled. Something popped and whined, and blackness filled the house. Thunder shook the floorboards. It was the first time in years that the power had gone out.
It was also the last time.


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Author: James Wolanyk

Contributor: Gary Clifton

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Hillary Washington had been Mrs. Clarence Washington until two years earlier. Then cancer took Clarence.  In a neighborhood where ninety-eight percent of the population was terrified of the other two percent, she was unafraid - Clarences's.32 still lay in a kitchen drawer.  She opened the door to a young white man.  The pirate-like bandana atop his head was probably a costume - it was Halloween.  But no treat was involved.  Her trick reward was rape, murder, arson.
    Homicide sent out Detectives Harper and Garnet.  Red Harper, in Homicide since before electricity, with a thin rim of red hair surrounding plenty of bald head, was big, tough, and never without a nasty cigar polluting the atmosphere.  Margaret "Maggs" Garnet, new in Homicide, was leggy, black, beautiful.   A graduate of Texas Tech via a track scholarship, she could outrun and then kick the ass of most men they encountered.
    As they examined Mrs. Washington's crime scene, a patrolman caught Harper's eye.  "Neighbors report a white guy wearing a plaid doo-rag ran from the scene."
    "White boy on foot around Fair Park shouldn't be hard to find," Maggs said. "Sure a fine day to look," she gestured to the beautiful autumn day.
    So as cops should, they cruised the area.  Harper, driving missed the light at the Grand Avenue entrance to the Cotton Bowl.  Three U.S. Marines, splendid and ram-rod straight in their dress blue uniforms were manning a "Dollars for Wounded Warriors" booth on the sidewalk.  A clown, presumably another Marine, stood ringing a bell.  Maggs winked at an African American Marine who was movie star handsome and bigger than Harper.  The kid smiled back.  
    They hadn't driven two blocks when Maggs shouted: "There, Harper."  In half a heartbeat, Maggs had bailed out and was full bore after a greasy white kid with a plaid bandana tired around his head.
    With Harper following in the car, to Maggs's chagrin, the kid went over a fence on Grand avenue and disappeared into the vast housing project behind.  She'd lost him.  When Harper puffed up, Maggs waved a shoe.  "Tennis shoe?" Harper said.
    "Christ, Harper," It's a Michael Jordan...costs two hundred.  Somewhere back in there is a white guy wearing a damned rag on his head and one shoe," she gestured, "...who just might have Mrs. Washington's piggy bank in his pocket."  They radioed a description of the suspect to all units.  Another hour's search failed to find their man.

        They'd just dropped the Jordan at the crime lab behind Parkland Hospital when dispatch advised them to look into an assault victim wearing one Jordan who'd just been ambulanced into Parkland.  In the ER they found, Jim Bob Griffin, white male 20, with two convictions for assault and robbery.  He had sustained six broken ribs, two broken arms, a fractured jaw, and a concussion   But, he'd retained plenty of mouth.  "Damned clown jumped me, them some others tried to kill me.  Ain't did shit."

    Then, E.M.T.'s wheeled a clown down the hallway, closely followed by three uniformed Marines.  The clown lay face down, a gash to his left shoulder blade.  "That's the crew from Far Park," Maggs said.  Besides the patient on the cart, the kid she'd flirted with was bleeding from his right hand.
    Harper turned back to Jim Bob's gurney.  "Mean ol' clown beat up on you, huh.  Maybe we just found this bully.  Shoulda picked on the Easter Bunny.  Heard he's a real whoosh."
    "Kiss my ass, pig.  Ast the sumbitch for a little change and he done this to me.  Am I gonna die?"
    "Absolutely, dude, and with any luck at all that would be today."   
    A uniformed officer walked in, holding up a stubby switchblade in a plastic bag.  "This jerk-off thought he could take on the Marines with a Barlow knife," he grinned.  "He...uh finished second.  After they kicked the dog shit out of him he ran in front of a D.A.R.T. bus."  He leaned close to Harper and Maggs.  "But them kids did all the damage...the bus just glazed him."
    Harper stepped into the curtained cubicle where a physician was stitching up the clown's back.  The patient was lean and muscular with a tattoo:  Semper Fi  on his forearm.  "You guys have to report this?"
    "Yessir," all four snap-answered as one.
    Harper sat down and wrote out the following report:  "Suspect, Jim Bob Griffin,  suspect in a rape, murder, arson earlier in the day, attempted armed robbery of U.S. Marine Wonski who improvised, adapted, and took evasive action.  Suspect fled, ran into the path of a D.A.R.T.  bus and sustained injuries requiring hospitalization at Parkland.  If suspect survives, he will be charged with armed robbery, assault, and  damaging a city owned vehicle."
    As he finished, his cellular rang.  He spoke briefly and hung up.  "DNA on the Jordan matches Mrs. Washington and ol' Jim Bob both," he grinned at Maggs.  "Hey, Jim Bob," he called into the cubicle where Griffin lay on a cart.  "Your Halloween treat is a needle and a three-poison-juice cocktail."
    Maggs, who'd peered over Harper's shoulder as he wrote, said:  "Only just injuries, huh?  Gotta contingency plan if this dirt-bag dies."
    "Haul the carcass to the dog pound?" he rolled the cigar stub.  He tossed a carbon of the report on the injured clown's gurney, then followed Maggs out.  As they cleared the door, Harper fished a fresh cigar from his pocket.
    "Trick or treat officers," the clown called behind them.


- - -
Gary Clifton, forty years a cop, has over thirty short fiction pieces published or pending with online sites. He has an M.S. from Abilene Christian University.

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Author: Gary Clifton