It was August. The late summer. Hot as hell outside and getting hotter. I wasn’t prepared to skydive that night. But it seemed like I wasn’t gonna have much choice.
I walked up to the counter and popped the question: when’s the next flight going up? The pimply-faced kid who took reservations was dumbfounded.
“The next flight?” he crackled.
“That’s right, ass. When’s the next flight?” I snapped as I flipped my still lit cigarette into his matted hair.
“This is a hot dog stand,” he sniveled as he scrambled to put out the three alarm blaze atop his crusty, vacuous melon.
“Yeah, and I’m the Queen of England,” I crevassed.
“You’re the Queen of England?” he behooved.
I realized this was going nowhere fast, and I still had about thirty minutes before the bomb went off. Suddenly, I remembered Barbara and our time together. The sweaty nights. The cool, calculated goodbyes. She was my happily ever after, but we never seemed to get around to “Once upon a time.”
Christ. It seemed like Del Gado would win this round. In our forty years of rivalry, he had never once gotten the best of me. But the streak was over.
I leaned against an empty store window and lit another cigarette. Sometimes, when you’re an underdeveloped protagonist in a poorly written, fractured, cliched piece of short fiction, that’s all you can do. That and listen to the jukebox.
And I was all out of quarters.