'Yeah, what's left? I want a Black Butte or a Hefeweissen if ya still got some. So, ok, where was I, oh yeah, so I just turned ten and we're all going for this ride right? Danny, not moms boyfriend but the other guy she's fucking, is always jacking a different car, hoopdees cause they ain't got steering column locks, I think this one was a baby blue dart, smelled like cheese and ass, so we're going out to this --- thanks, love the black butte, thanks --- like trailer park back in the swamp, pretty sure it's like Florida up in the panhandle, and we're singing car songs n shit, this place is like way out there, I mean we must have been ten miles on this dirt track that's pretty much old growth ferns n shit, and setting on the porch like something out of Tobacco road is this great grandma black lady in a wife beater, she ain't got no teeth and she's smoking this pipe I swear to god made out of bones and she's got this idiot boy, must have seven foot by five foot and half of that forehead, and my mom is dragging me out to sell me ---'

'You mean try and sell you,'� John says quick and loud, he's been wanting to get in there since she was talking about being born at home without any prenatal, without doctor or midwife, without certificate of live birth or census report. He's been perched on the edge of his chair like he's constipated or sitting in confessional after an orgy.

'No, I don't,'� Candy says and takes a big breath for the next leg of her horrible accounting.

'Yes you do. This is America, nobody sells anyone anymore, it's like saying you hid in an attic in Koln while the Nazis rifled through the house, in the 1990's! It's not just against the law; it's an anathema to the entire moral makeup of every man woman and child!'� John likes using words like anathema and tires to work them into his regular speech, dying for someone to ask him what it means.

A lot of things could have happened then; a fight, one or the other getting up and walking away, some combination of spat and walk, someone else changing the subject, an act of god like an earthquake, something like that. But no, they both just sat there, glowering, like they had decided to carry on using telepathy. The thing is I was their ride, both of them. Both of them had been showing their asses all night long. Candy with her typical inappropriate disclosure, john with his pseudo-rational realer-than-thou and me, likely the worse of the lot, with my you-buy-I'll-fly. At the moment I couldn't think of a single time that showing our ass had ever worked out well for any of us or anyone ever is the history of man and beast.

Jimmy was fumbling around in the cooler, I slugged back a good quarter inch of foam and spit, shook the bottle to prove it was empty, moaned as I stood up like I was ninety and arthritic, and stumbled over to jimmy and the cooler.
'Hey, what's going on?'� I said. You do shit like that when you've been drinking. Jimmy and I had been at the same bonfire drinking beer, slapping and tickling for the past seven hours, yet, I ask him what's going on. There are people in the Pacific Ocean drowning for want of air and here I am just wasting it.

'Nothing much, 'sup chew?'� I mean what the hell else are you supposed to say. If the art of conversation wasn't already dead then between Candy, john, jimmy and me we would have killed it.

Want to comment on this Flash Fiction? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Flash Fiction and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...