Kenton K. Yee
It happened last Thursday. I took off early from work and found my brother Ebie’s boiler parked on my driveway. I was annoyed but not surprised. I had known about this for a while.
As usual when this happens, I kept driving, past Papa Partha’s Pizza, under the underpass, into the side of San Francisco where sin doesn’t show. I parked on the street. Unlike Ebie, I have the courtesy not to park in my brother’s driveway when I’m conjugating his missus. Her name is Myra.
Afterwards, I was sniffing hop on Ebie’s toilet seat when I heard Myra’s cell beep. I squinted and peeped through the bullet-size keyhole into their adulterated marital bed.
“Go-ay-hed,” Myra mumbled into the horn, stirring her curly mound with an index finger. She never could enunciate after coming.
That single utterance was the extent of her contribution to the call. So I didn’t obsess about it until the cops reported later that Ebie was dropped minutes later at a red light. Dropped by a Harley cowboy in pointy leather boots. Using a semi-automatic.
Fast forward to the night of Ebie’s closed casket funeral. Afterwards, I’m lying in bed with my own misses. Jolene’s eyes, round as a pair of synchronized sun-dried peppercorns, have been mice-tense since the night of Ebie’s murder.
“Life is too short,” I say.
Jolene’s pale nostrils tighten. “Life ull never be da same.”
“Myra’s selling their house and moving to Los Angeles.”
“She can’t afford El Lay.”
“Ebie had life insurance. A million bucks. She intends to go platinum and take acting classes at UC El Lay.”
“Da chippy! Just another wannabe.”
Victims both, we roll opposite and close our eyes, Jolene’s oeuvre weaving around our reproductive system, as if Ebie and Myra never happened.
Kenton K. Yee has placed fiction in The Los Angeles Review, PANK, Hobart, and Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, among others. A theoretical physicist working in finance, he is starting his second year in Stanford’s Online Novel Certificate program. Follow him at Fictionaut: http://fictionaut.com/users/kenton-k-yee
