Straws | Page 3

asleep when he finally came to bed. He'd played guitar for a
while after all, and nodded out on the loveseat. But when he woke up
he was still there, in a tiny house near a town called Pittsboro.
*
He was on Register 3 in the morning. A young guy kept staring at him
as he rang up three pairs of socks and two pairs of running shorts. "You
know who you look like?" the guy said. "You look like this singer
named Jeff McCoy."
"Yeah," he said. "That's me."
"You're kidding! I can't believe it. You're working at Wal-Mart? I saw
you at the Cradle last year. You were incredible. I thought you were,
like, big time."
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
*
Sometime after lunch he felt the numbness begin to wear off. He hadn't
realized how much it had been protecting him until it was gone. But
now every minute, every second, was agony. Scanning candy bars and
girdles and plastic leftover containers, feeding checks into the printer,
cracking a roll of quarters over the drawer. Staring at the clock, willing
the time to pass. What in God's name was he doing here?
How much longer could this go on?

(c) 2007 by Lewis Shiner. First published in Fiction Liberation Front,
June 2007. Some rights reserved.

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