Category Archive Browsing Category: Friday Fictioneers

You heard in the valley us coal miners is hard people? You don’t know the half of it. Before the union come to Mingo, the company sent up a bunch of hooligans from Baldwin-Felts, rough men toting guns and blackjacks. They aimed to keep out the union. See, they wanted to leave the coal price…

Everything about the giant camp foreman said logger, from the flannel Pendleton buttoned tight around his tree-trunk neck to his sap-stained hands hard as rocks. “War’s on,” he said around the pipe in his teeth, “so we’re hiring. Either of you logged before?” “Not I,” said Hal, who was always more honest than smart. I…

You get used to living like this. Focus on the present, but keep one eye on the horizon. Mostly you need to be flexible. Like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. I was on my way to Las Cruces when the van started making noise. Just the…

She sets the steaming mug before me. “Soon set you to rights,” she says. “You’ll see.” My hands are shaking so badly I don’t trust them to lift the tea to my lips. Instead, I bend to sip, pursing my lips against the heat. “There’s a good girl,” she says. “Get some nice tea in…

The man pushed the piece of notebook paper across the desk. “Can she be built?” I studied it. A kid’s pencil drawing of a circle bisected by a rectangle. “You are best architect in Montreal, yes?” he said, his accent thick. I gave my most gallic shrug. “Perhaps.” “And yet you have no French?” “My…

The waitress sets a cup and saucer on the counter and pours it full of a watery brown liquid Enzo assumes is coffee. She wears a faded dress with a chipped name tag he reads as she pours. Dorothy.  He turns this in his mind, unsure how to pronounce it. He sips at his cup…

The whole room tilted at a steep angle. I’d noticed the corner of the double-wide was crushed like a beer can. I guess the office was a salvage job,  one that’d fallen off a flatbed. I stared across the slanting desk at last year’s calendar tacked to the warped paneling. “Eleven bucks an hour for forty…