Jimmy Doom's Roulette Weal

  Ghosts and Obligations Short Fiction about Honor And Mayhem Photo by  James Fitzgerald  on  Unsplash T here are different levels of obligation. There’s the Hippocratic Oath, the pledge that all doctors make that holds them to the highest professional and moral standards. Sure, some of ’em fuck it up, but it’s there, and doctors gotta work too hard for too long at too great an expense to not take it seriously. Then there’s the obligation, with a throat full of phlegm while edging the lawn, to spit it on your own property and not on your neighbor’s prize rosebushes that get trimmed and pruned every fourteen minutes, six and a half days a week. You didn’t ever promise not to, but… Darren Elmore’s obligations floated somewhere in between those. Darren is rich. That inherently comes with a lot of obligations, many of which rich people spend a lot of time and money trying to waltz away from. But Darren wasn’t born rich. Darren didn’t wanna be rich. Or, more accurately, r...

  Potluck Excess is Just Around the Corner Photo by  Slim Emcee  on  Unsplash The last can of tuna he made last for three meals, basically just mayonnaise soup with pathetic little tendrils of fish. Barry walked to get out of the house, to not smell his disintegrating life anymore. He wore a dress shirt, which was clean because he had nowhere to wear a dress shirt, no jobs, no interviews. Everything else was filthy because laundry detergent was out of the budget. Down an alley, only blocks from home, he heard some music coming from a party and laughs from friends he didn’t have. The sounds made him smile when they could have easily made him sad. A guy stumbled into the alley, setting a plastic plate of food on top of a closed garbage can and jumping into a waiting ride. As Barry approached, he saw a heap of potato salad on the plate and an open gate. Everyone inside the gate looked drunk and happy. He took the plate, wiped the guy’s fork with his forearm, and took a ...

  The mildew crawled up the shower wall like a dead tree. To Billy Swann, it looked like Munchie was sitting against the tree, naked, in a park surrounded by dirty white tile. Billy had five weeks sober, some of the best and worst days of his thirty-eight years. But he wasn’t leaving  the life  without Munchie. “Know what’s sad?” Munchie asked, Billy knowing he didn’t have to speak or react because Munchie would certainly tell him, in two seconds or four minutes. “Somewhere,” Munchie continued after a pause to take a deep drag off a wet, unlit, poorly hand-rolled cigarette, “someone’s got the world record for most times puking blood, and he’ll never get recognized for it.” “People do stuff all the time they don’t get any reward for, Munch. The world is just like that. It ain’t a vending machine where you put money in and a spiral thing revolves you a candy bar.” “Puking blood a lot is a commitment.” Billy nodded. His oldest friend wasn’t wrong. “It feels pretty good to be...