The Spit Bottle
Flash Fiction
by Preston Brady III
Dwayne Cooley was tall, lanky but strong as an ox. He was a shipfitter in Pascagoula who after an apprenticeship program he entered at age 19, was 5 years later a level 3 fitter. He had what he called the good life: a good job, a good wife, a house and a 3 year old son named Cody. His bride Ellie loved him to the moon and back, but one thing nagged her to no end: Dwayne’s tobacco dipping habit that required he have a plastic bottle nearby almost at all times.
Now Ellie stared at the last bottle he ever used. One minute she was kissing him out the door, the next two policemen knocking on her door. When the 18-wheeler jackknifed it crushed Dwayne’s pick-up. That night before she had nagged him
about leaving his spit bottle on the kitchen counter. It ruined my appetite, she scolded him. He picked it up wordless, scooted out of the kitchen like a dog with tail between its legs.
He had left it in the bathroom, a half inch of brown spittle silently hollering out his presence now. Ellie ran her fingers along the side of the clear water bottle. Now she dared to pick it up and move it towards her face.
The scent of him was palpable. A tear trickled down her face.
It was a bright sunny morning a full three years after Dwayne’s death. Ellie finally succumbed to the persistence of another shipbuilder, Sean McGuffey. He was a dipper too. As he rushed off to work he left his spit bottle on the kitchen counter. It struck Ellie in the heart:almost the same spot Dwayne had left his. She left it there, hovered over it, caught a scent of Sean, remembered a scent of Dwayne. She cherished it now, the smell, the sweet aroma of her man’s saliva mixed with wet, minty tobacco. Shipbuilders. She could love no other.
The End
The Musk of You
Flash fiction
by Preston Brady III
Covered in red clay, sand, dirt, grease, Waylon walked through the door of their two bed one bath on Mill Street. Mutt greeted him first. Judy lay curled in a corner on the top shelf of a mostly empty bookcase. She extended her front paws, arched her gray back. There would be no greeting from the wifey. She didn’t care for the scent of a working man.
The dissolution was mutual. He took Mutt and she kept the cat.
He set up digs in Splendor Apartments near the job site. There was nothing splendid about them but the rent was cheap and occasional gunfire late nights was included at no additional charge.
One hot sweaty August day he stopped at the dollar store to pick up a tv dinner and a six pack. He looked like he had crawled out of a rusty cauldron and then rolled through a mountain of red clay dirt. And yet his working man presence stimulated the senses of the checkout clerk, a shy-looking dishwater brown number with large brown eyes.
Their city hall marriage was witnessed by her best friend Belinda. Waylon wore dungarees and his favorite cowboy boots. He splashed on too much Old Spice but she didn’t care. She loved the smell of him, clean or musty.
Belinda loved the presence of Waylon too. He noticed that look in her eyes, the longing, lingering, lonely ones that tugged at his heartstrings and a few other places. Her job transferred her to the next town over and soon she and his new wife lost touch. But he didn’t.
With newborns at two homes, Waylon started working overtime. But he felt he was a lucky man, having gone from a wife who couldn’t stand the smell of him, to two who loved their working man, even if they didn’t know they shared him.
And he still had Mutt who loved him no matter what.
The End
Dump Jockey
Flash Fiction
by Preston Brady III
Nobody could drop a load of dirt on a job site like Kylie McGowan. Other workerson job sites would gather, watch as the dirt flowed off the back of his truck like Niagara Falls on a spring morning. Observers shook their heads as every speck of dirt came out of the back of that dump truck and landed in a perfect pyramid style mountain. This remarkable talent earned him the exclusive nickname dump jockey. While other drivers' piles were lopsided cascading dirt off to all directions, he came off perfectly every time. Other drivers left dirt in the container, so it had to be lowered to the ground in a vertical position and then the rest of the dirt shoveled out by hand, causing more time and money costs on a job site. Some drivers believed it was Cody’s hand motion on the power control, and so sometimes when they had already emptied their dumps, they would sit next to him in the passenger seat and watch his hand and arm motion as he lowered the container.
He was like a pilot readying the plane for takeoff. Observers marveled at the dexterity he displayed, shifting the control lever up and down with incremental precision.
Then one day Kylie showed up on the job site and his first load at a construction site was such a pitiful performance it left jaws dropped and tongues wagging.
He left at least a wheelbarrow full in, said one foreman.
Kylie seems tense, said another. I see lines along his forehead. Something's up.
Not many knew that Kylie had an identical twin brother, Kip. It seemed innocent at first, when Kylie pulled in the driveway and saw Kip kissing his wife.
Oh my God, she exclaimed. I thought it was you baby, she told him.
He knew she could tell the difference between them. And Kip just shrugged and laughed, blaming it on sister-in-law. She was coming out the kitchen door through the garage. She saw me in the driveway and ran up, kissed me.
The divorce was nasty. In an attempt to stick the knife in deeper she told him outside the lawyer’s office. I wanted my cake and eat it too. I wanted both of you, one on each arm, double trouble. Why have just one of you when a carbon copy was also always around?
On one job site after the other, Kylie’s dumping skills fell to an all time low. It got so bad that one day he arrived at a VIP job and his container was empty. No one, not even the old-timers had seen a driver actually forget to load his truck. He received his walking papers later that day.
It had been over two years since Kylie’s dump jockey days. Now he stood at the entrance to a freeway onramp, his cardboard sign dog-eared, barely readable. “For Hire,” it read. “Champion Dump Jockey.”
The End