Jimmy Carter’s Nuts

Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri

Jimmy Carter was on my trail. He wanted me dead. I wish I hadn’t told that joke about squirrels wanting his nuts. I should have listened to my sister. Now I was hiding out in an abandoned boxcar.

“Don’t worry,” Samantha said, her sea-blue eyes bloodshot. “Life flings rocks at us all.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. If she made it back here, I’d do everything for her. I thought of those days after Mother and that fucking bottled water salesman from Scranton, when she gave me a home.

Samantha smiled as she walked into dusk’s deepening shadows, a silhouette in lavender.

Mir-Yashar Seyedbagheri is a self-proclaimed romantic and graduate of Boise State University with a BA in Political Science. His short-stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Fat City Review, Postcard Shorts, The Bookends Review, Apocrypha and Abstractions, Microfiction Mondays, and The Turk’s Head Review. Mir-Yashar lives in Boise, Idaho.