NEW Fiction from Joe Miller: "One-Eyed Jack", a short story of luck and chance in a casino.
"Ace of clubs, King of clubs, Queen of clubs, the 3 of diamonds, and the 10 of clubs. Jack of clubs is all I need to win big. I hold my breath. Then, I hold all four of the clubs, delicately pressing the backlit “Hold” button under each card. This could be it."
A demon burst out of the house, screaming in a language that chilled our teeth to the roots. Its many wings beat the night air. We clambered out of the blue, skin tearing off our fingers and knuckles and knees. We leapt the fence as the demon leapt into the pool with a soul-wrenching crash as if it meant to open a portal to hell behind us. I ran without looking back. A fear overtook me so powerful I started laughing. I sprinted aimlessly in the dark, laughing from terror.
Although I was vice president of Kristen’s five-person “Metaphysics Club” in high school, I was neither a “crystal” nor an “indigo child of the millennium.” According to her, I just had a “puke green aura” and good penmanship, which earned me the job of recording the number of demons she saw each week. This was hard to keep track of, as they vanished and reappeared with “shifting faces.” Kristen despised quiet and cerebral “crystal children,” almost as much as she hated Latinos, not realizing that her best friend and second-in-command was the latter.
Reg got into the car. Meg climbed in beside him. He started to drive. He could still see the balloon. It was a bright red dot against the blush-grey sky. He imagined that it would quickly come down with the weight of the ring in it. He would have to buy her a new ring, if that was the case. Or maybe it was an omen?
"Why did you get a balloon?" Meg said. "It isn't my birthday."
"I need that one," Reg said.
"It's okay. I like flowers more than balloons anyway."
"I needed that balloon."
"What special about that balloon?" she said.
Upon arrival, sign your name on the sign-in sheet and grab your nametag. Place it on your forehead. While you are waiting for the rest of the ladies to arrive and sign in, please enjoy a complimentary cup of coffee. That is, please enjoy a single complimentary cup of coffee. Subsequent cups of coffee will not be complimentary.
She dialed 9-1-1 and frantically looked for the nearest mile marker while waiting for the operator.
"9-1-1 dispatch, what's your emergency?" came a voice neither friendly nor urgent. This dispatcher expected no emergency.
"There's a shoe in the middle of the interstate. A very nice shoe. Not like a ratty old shoe," Marie blabbered.
"Come again?" the voice even less urgent than before.
When I awoke alone in the chair, my mouth felt different. At first I couldn’t really feel anything, but then I began to wiggle my tongue around, searching for my teeth. As I was exploring, the dentist returned, sans mask.
“How’s it feel?” he asked with a smile, his curly mullet flowing freely.
“I fees weir,” I mumbled.
“Not surprising. That was the first time I’ve ever done anything that extreme. I’ll have to monitor how you react closely.” He approached as he spoke, flashlight in hand. “Now open up wide.”
She was cold. How long had she been in the bathroom? Her body felt like it belonged to someone else; she had no control over her limbs, her fingers, her neck. Her head floated. It took a moment of gazing, unfocused, into the toilet bowl before the image of him heaving her thin body against the shower door flickered in her head.
“And after that we drove out to the countryside to the star party to watch the lunar eclipse.” He drew a star and a moon on the railing with his finger. “The ancient Chinese and Scandinavians supposed it was a dragon devouring the moon, but the moon always returned. There we were, the two of us, newly met in a population of, at that time, six billion-plus. Remember when you pointed to the Andromeda galaxy and said you’d like the myth better if she saved herself instead of waiting for a prince to do it? I thought, this woman is my hero. I thought of all the pinpricks of light above us. I thought how we too sent off reflected light, traveling 186,000 miles per second to the edges of the universe."
I tapped back through the previous days’ photos. They were blank until the morning of her death three days before. Then, one by one, day by day, the small square photos went back through time, the last photo taken exactly one year prior to her death.
Scrolling through them, I recognized nothing. Some photos had trees not seen around here. One was from such height it made my skin crawl. I could feel my face grow clammy as I downloaded the phone’s photos onto her computer. Some were fuzzy, several were macro shots of details, others half obscured by over exposure or shadows. Checking the metadata on each photo, I sorted them by place. Some were local, taken around our Tennessee landscape. But when I was through, 366 photos were literally all over the U.S. map.
