by Sean McGarragle

So much to say and the clock is ticking; it likes you succinct, precise. So does your audience at Our Town Café, 245 East Broadway on the second Wednesday every month for Word Whips and Story Slam. Contact Johnny Frem at 604-254-0355 or visit www.boltsoffiction.org Here’s the winner of the May Story Slam.

Is it the suffrage of the sunset or the twinkle gaze of the skyline that sets my mind in motion? I am a ghost on the window in a diner in northern Saskatoon. The year is 1982.
In the kitchen, Stephen Flint, a middle-aged former football player turned restaurateur, lures lint nestled underneath the stove to the alcove of a dustbin he purchased the day before from the local hardware store. He sweeps and hums, a canary in his own mind shaft, daft and dumb for the nightmare to come.
At the counter, the waitress Rita rolls knives and forks into napkins, beginning to hum the same sad song that’s brought Stephen – the ever present and aware owner of this diner – to a man with the presence of a miner on Mars, digging for water in his birthday suit, with a root of knowledge limited only to a sand box.
The first to arrive at the door is a young girl from town. Far from the class clown, Susan, a straight-A student with a penchant for writing poetry, pulls up two creamers and a coffee and after giving her please and thank-yous to Stephen and Rita, proceeds to even her disheveled head with two quarters and a song from the jukebox. She bobs and weaves to the ease of Aretha Franklin singing, “You’re all, I need to get by…”
The next guy who walks through the door is Stewart – a trucker due to retire at age 54, with a cottage in Banff and enough apathy to whore himself to the leisure gods and the fishing up there, trout fishing to be precise.
While all of his comrades and friends spent their ends meet on family and vice, he took solace and faith in the somewhat wraith-like nice notion, of the ocean of possibility that sits on the edge of the hook of retirement or the bait of the environment of those happily unemployed.
So the stage of the scene is set, and lest we forget, we have Stephen in the kitchen and Rita rolling napkins on the counter. We have Susan sipping poems and song at the long, dark and handsome booth at the back of the building. And Stewart now sitting at the counter flipping through the leisure section of the newspaper.
All this now gets a bit more complicated. Two young men named Butch and Duke with cut-off jean jacket sleeves and two items purchased without the luxury of governmental registration, chime through the front door marked: “Open for business” with three witnesses and one dead-body-to-be sipping coffee and subconsciously humming about true love and a protest piece.
The two men’s rhythm and movement is mechanical like two animals stalking their prey and you wouldn’t have needed x-ray vision or a crystal ball to see the trigger on their lips – not with a ball cap with a southern flag on it and the drag of a long look pointed at the girl with the mahogany skin, sitting at the back of diner, writing.
“Coffee boys?” Rita says greeting the two at the door, torn from the song about war that still echoes in her mind. “The special’s bangers and mash for three sixty four. Think that’ll do the trick?”
Butch, without missing the beat, gives Rita a lick from the butt of his gun, sending her crashing to the tile floor, mumbling something. Duke pulls out his magnum and with his left hand on Stewart’s shoulder puts the eye of his gun to the back of Stewart’s cranium screaming, “This is a hold up!”
Susan’s eyes dart up from her book and pen while Stephen, standing in the kitchen, freezes deer-like at the sight of these two young men doing their best impersonation of Bonnie and Clyde – without the sympathetic glide of the knowledge of their romantic tendencies.
“Yo, open the safe,” Butch yells at Stephen. “And if you think of calling the cops, I’ll put an even six rounds in your head!”
“And you, in the back, get your ass over here!” he yells to Susan, while Duke begins bruising the back of Stewart’s balding head.
Now I’d love to say that the headlines in the daily newspapers the day after read: Retiree Saves Young Poet With a Fishing Line Suture or Future Hall of Fame Linebacker Stops Two Thieves Trying to Rob His Diner, but that would be both a lie and cumbersome.
Truth be told, the scant 20 words that never made national headlines read something like this, “Young Candice Bearg, age 16, was found dead on the scene at Stephen Flint’s diner, just north of Saskatoon – the aftermath of an early morning robbery.”
And that little thought balloon or bubble-sized press clipping – that was supposed to address our poignant example of a national crisis – failed in its compression of the facts to mention that she’d be sorely missed after her lifeline was hijacked.

Originally from Toronto, Sean McGarragle currently resides in Vancouver, BC. He is founder/artistic director of the West Coast Poetry Festival and is on the board of the Vancouver Poetry House. This summer he will be touring Western Canada with the poetry/spoken word troupe Core Sample, sean@wcpf.ca

To contact Bolts of Fiction call Johnny Frem at 604-254-0355 or see www.boltsoffiction.org