Junkfood Noir
Chapter 8, “The Rise and Fall of Baby Frankenstein”
A small diner in a small town in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
She sat in the booth farthest from the door nursing a lukewarm coffee and a few pieces of overcooked bacon. The first meal she’d had in three days. The pen in her left hand scratched furiously into an worn moleskine.
Sketches. Notes. Poems. A diary of her life and her future.
Too soon before both plate and cup were empty and her waitress, a “Flo” stand-in if ever there was one, began doing laps around the table like a shark stalking its prey.
She stared at the freshly scrawled words on the page in front of her. A new poem.
A song, maybe, she thought to herself.
“Can I git ya anything else, sweetheart?”
Flo. Her big shark teeth twisted up into a bullshit smile.
She looked up, returned a bullshit smile of her own and shook her head. Flo shrugged her knobby shoulders and shuffled back to the counter.
Her gaze fell back to the open notebook and her fingers began tracing the words on the page. Absorbing. Memorizing.
Flo returned with the bill. And advice.
“Lost little girls like you shouldn’t be wandering around all alone so late at night.” Distaste disguised as concern.
She looked up at the waitress. Ambivalent.
Flo gave her the eye, looking her up and down twice before leaning over the table towards her. Wilting tits in thinning cotton threatened to dip themselves in her coffee cup.
“Out there, in the night. That’s where the sinners live,” Flo whispered loudly, as if repeating a secret she overheard. “That’s when the Devil gets in ya!”
She thanked the aging woman with a weak smile and stared blankly at her until the old bat shrugged and shuffled off again.
Pen in hand again, she paused for a moment then wrote at the top of the page
Indeed, she thought to herself.
The moleskine got stuffed into the bulging duffel bag that held all her worldly belongings. An entire life crammed into the confines of a filthy green sack.
She dumped the last of the loose coins in her pocket onto the table, hefted the heavy bag over her shoulder and made her way out to the crisp dark Autumn night.
She stood outside for a minute, not yet sure which direction to go.
Nearby, the sound of a horribly untuned guitar wailed plaintively through the air. She followed the sound for two block and, upon turning a corner, found him sitting on a milk crate in front of a bar.
Heroin-chic handsome. Skin painted with dozens of tattoos, scars and scabs. Big beautiful eyes nearly hidden under a head of long black hair. Burning cigarette clenched between his teeth while he strummed an old shitty acoustic guitar.
She bummed a smoke off him and offered to tune his guitar. The offer, she was quick to point out, was not a euphemism for anything pervy.
As she sat on his milk crate, tuning, she learned that he was a bouncer for the bar. A bar, he noted, that catered primarily to retired farmers and ancient veterans who mostly kept to themselves to drink away the final days of their miserable lives. This afforded him plenty of time to sit around doing absolutely nothing.
The guitar, he told her, had been a recent acquisition from a local pawn shop. A diversion to keep boredom at bay. He was, admittedly, not very good at playing.
She, on the other hand, could play very well and did so as soon as the strings had been tuned. She started strumming absent-mindedly, just random chords at first then a melody of random classic rock songs. She told him she was on her way to California.
Running away from some bullshit in some other shitty nothing town to find her fame and fortune in sunny and glamourous L.A.
He smiled at her, a big boyish grin that made his eyes light up like blue fire.
“I’m Amanda,” she smiled back at him. “My friends call me Mandy.”
Email me when Chad Michael Ward publishes or recommends stories