Category Archives: 11. Afterlife
Exit
music: Beethoven, Symphony No. 6, V. Shepherds’ Song; Allegretto It was Sue, he realized. The realization nearly failed to stir him, but he replied, “it’s open.” Sue turned the knob. “No it’s not.” “Coming,” he groaned as he got up to let her in. “You’ve been evacuated. Haven’t you heard?” She paused and looked at [...]
A-ROCK
music: Beethoven, Symphony No. 6, IV. Gewitter, Sturm: Allegro Armen watched, and then he called out to Sam. Sam turned to him, his eyes glowing with excitement, and he turned back to the updrafts, and the cloud over the Sergeant broke with a cracking, pounding violence that could knock a man onto his heels. Armen [...]
Foresta Road
R.E.M., Country Feedback It was another hot August day in Merced Canyon. Armen had taken a day off his job at the wastewater treatment plant, and took a walk up Foresta Road. He leaned against the bridge railing under the falls and knocked out a cigarette. He lit up, took a couple drags, and continued [...]
A Walk Along The Rim
The job was good medicine, but Armen would feel even better with cash in his pocket. Inconveniently, his paycheck would be deposited directly to his bank account, so he’d need to take a bus up to the Valley to get his hands on it. When he got to the bank, he couldn’t remember his PIN, [...]
The Portal
“Grandma,” Armen started over the sandwich she had prepared him for lunch. “Yeasss?” “Do you still have m—do you still have those baseball cards?” “In the garage. Over the car.” After lunch he looked through his old Topps cards, some in sleeves and some in stacks. Coming upon his 1976 Brooks Robinson, seeing the glossy [...]
Homecoming
The southbound bus rolled into the Fresno Greyhound Depot at daybreak. Armen stretched as he stood up, picked up his paperback and notebook, and stepped up the bus aisle with his hands stepping from seat to seat. After claiming his pack, he picked up a Sunday Bee, sat down against the depot wall, and scanned [...]
One day, a position his the Federal job board that seemed a breath of fresh air. It was a job at what amounted to a sewer plant; a lab tech job, which would match his degree, and it was on the Range; not in the haunted lands of the golden trout, but at Yosemite. He [...]
Natural Neighbors
Maps generally depict the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles as hundreds of miles apart, and their residents would have you believe it were thousands, but the facts on the ground establish that the two cities are adjacent. They are nearly standing in the same space. There is a secret passage that will get [...]
When Armen graduated, he took his biochemistry degree and got an unrelated job at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park. Soon after he started there, he discovered tha the water there was pure mountain water from the Sierra. Just then he realized that the water he was drinking was from O’Shaugnessy Dam, that project [...]
Santa Cruz
He walked around town and into a diner. He found a newspaper amid the detritus of someone’s meal, and took it to the next booth. Not much there. He dug a pen out of his pack and circled a couple blocks. At the pay phone outside he found a couple addresses. He jotted them down [...]