Mama's Boy

ProetryPlace Blog 18

    With the change of seasons upon us, the gradual transmutation from summer’s green to the dappled hues of autumn, ProetryPlace will undergo a temporary transition into the fiction genre, call it transition fiction. This is the first fiction I have featured here, except for my very short “Hope’s Legacy” included in Blog 15 several weeks ago.

    Mama’s Boy will appear as a four-part series. The first line of the story is “Jim Masters felt good, really good.” The last line is “The monster . . . laughed with relief as hot tears fell from his eyes.”

MAMA’S BOY (part one)

    Jim Masters felt good, really good.

    “Hey, Rug Rats!” He grinned and waved through the cracked windshield of his aged and rusted pickup. Two little faces laughed and smiled at him from the rear window of a school bus. Children were not offended by the irregular stained teeth that filled his broad smile. They didn’t find anything menacing about him.

  Children liked Jim instinctively. They often smiled at him in passing, even instigated small conversations. Not so with adults. Although his deeply lined face appeared open and cheerful to a casual glance, up close and friendly he triggered a sense of coldness, even menace. Maybe it was the eyes, shaded under the frayed bill of his sweat-stained baseball cap. Maybe they found the pain they saw deep within too much to tolerate.

  The bus turned off, but Jim continued, smiling, flooded with a sense of relief and imbued with a peaceful solitude. He drove with no real destination in mind, somewhere in the suburbs of the city. He had not been aware of his exact location until the approaching intersection stirred some vague recognition—an Eastern Collateral Bank, a Sammy’s Pizza, a small strip mall and the red, white and blue badges warning that the interstate was near.

  Feeling a sudden compulsion to escape the scene, he jammed the wheel to the right, swerved in time to avoid the black sedan next to him and hit the on-ramp doing 50. His smile and his inner tranquility were gone—pushed suddenly and brutally aside.

To be continued

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - 0     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com