Sample from my new short story, Bus Stop

The wind blows right through you late at night in the desert. It was especially bad when you had to sit on a cold metal bench at a bus stop with no barriers to block the damn breeze. I could always feel my bones chilled back then, on nights that I had no business being out. I’d go back to just being cold physically. You can do something about that. You can get warm again. I’ll never feel warmth ever again.
I was looking for revenge that night. Revenge over something that most sensible people would have let roll off their backs. But just like I had no buffer from the cold wind, I also had no sense.
He’d called my girl the C word. Yes, that one. This was after she’d denied Scott Harmony’s advances. The first offense got you beaten where I came from, and the second got you dead. In my neighborhood, you never disrespected someone’s lady unless you wanted beef with her man.
Scott was bigger than me, so a fist fight would have left me beaten or maybe worse. He had friends who liked to jump in and one of his buddies wore those boots with the steel built into the toe. I couldn’t fight them by their rules. So, I was off to purchase the inevitable object kids of my ilk eventually come into possession of. Yup, you guessed it. I was going to get a gun. And I was going to shoot that son of a bitch. I couldn’t get one legally, being that I was only seventeen at the time, but my friend Brownlie knew a guy.
“Man, somebody needs to teach that punk Harmony a lesson. I told you what he did to my sister, didn’t I?”

Read the rest HERE

Read the rest of, Bus Stop HERE