New Flash Fiction - It's Good To Be Back

So, yeah, this is like the first new flash fiction in months. I hope you like it. 

Making Ends Meet

She lives in the space between the here and there.

She floats along, grasps at false hopes and tempered dreams; she places small bets on the purchase of Glocks vs. the instincts of simple prayer. And in this space, there’s sometimes desolation and despair. The chafing between the haves and the have-nots.

Border town.

She sucks electricity illegally from the utility pole that’s next to an Airbnb Airstream, where faint whispers of conscience of what she’s doing to make ends meet are muddled with the windmill-attacking dedication to the truly downtrodden. She feeds her neighbor’s dog, which is chained to a nearly dead mesquite tree, illegally over the fence. The guy she shares the fence with is probation officer; he’s already called the sheriff on her three times. Yet she documents the animal’s cruelty on her cell phone.

The borrowed bold cutters and calls to a no-kill shelter the next county over means she’ll be moving soon. Again.

She makes $11.50 an hour waiting tables at a fancy stop on the foodie trail – a place where her own creeping morality could never afford. A novice in the ranks of the true guerrilla extremists in the food service industry, she mainly picks her nose and touches the pan-seared duck breast with fresh blueberry compote, or the date pudding with the caramelized rum sauce. She smiles as she does this, and again when she goes to ask how everything is tasting and the foodies oooohhhh and aaaaahhh and Instagram the event like it’s a baptism. Blissful ignorance, yes, but it’s the least she can do to help stick it to The Man – or at the very least, try and make some sense of the absurdities of life today.

It’s a living. She has a calling. Misdirected as it is some days. It is an ethos.

And that’s good enough for her. For the right now.

In the here and there.