Fiction

No Shit Sherlock

My mom loved detective novels, all of them, but especially Sherlock Holmes. As our last name was already Holmes, she named me Sherlock when I was born. Maybe it was always in my nature, or in part because I wanted to please her, but becoming a detective became an obsession to me. Harriet the Spy, The Hardy Boys, Encyclopedia Brown, I read them all, and I entered the academy right after community college. I learned at college and at the academy that the fictional Sherlock Holmes’ way of thinking or deducting was horribly flawed. He leapt to conclusions and spoke fast. In retrospect, he seems more like a carnival huckster than a real detective. You can’t just look at a corpse and tell its life story based on some calluses or old shoes — you actually have to work extremely hard to avoid whatever inherent biases you have. At thirty-seven years old, I’m…
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My Darling Detis

Few parents will admit this, but we often forget the names of our children, especially if we have more than one.  I woke up reeling with another head-splitting hangover and little Joey tugging at me.  “Christ kid, what time is it?” “Papa, come on, you must get up.” Isn’t that just like a kid? Can’t even answer a simple question. There’s something wrong with this generation. With every generation. I shake Joey off and start rubbing my temples. I had no job and nowhere to be.  “Whatever you have to tell me, you can tell me here.” Joey shook his head.  “No, Papa. The Spectrum man is here to restore our internet, so we can resume our schooling!” Schooling my ass. The kid probably just missed playing Minecraft. And a hell of a lot of good school had done me, even if I did have the money to pay Spectrum.…
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There Are Days I Will Remember

Or more accurately, days I partially remember. I can’t recall why, but I was stuck late at high school during a blizzard. By the time I left, all the busses were gone, and my usual route home, through a path across a patch of forest, was impossible. There was at least three feet of snow on the ground. My only choice was to take the driveway out of the school and use the roads, which were being plowed and salted hourly. It added about a mile to my trip, but I figured it was easier than trudging through the snow. It was a bad decision, but I’ll never know if it was the wrong or worse one. The road was covered in slush and cars kept splattering me. Within minutes, I was drenched from head to toe and freezing. About halfway home, I reached a Burger King and stopped to…
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Shopping List

I was 26 and had just finished my first novel, or technically, novella. It was a crazed, pointless story about a drunken airline pilot with no discernible plot or structure. My main point, or “meta” point, was that books are mostly filler. Was it vital to know that Gary’s shirt was wrinkled, or that there were always little white blotches of spittle at the corners of his mouth, when he does nothing of consequence and we never see him again?  A person’s size matters if they have to cram themselves into an airline seat. He or she had a name if they needed one. The smear of whitewash where some lazy painter had wiped off his roller was important if it helped you to recognize a building. Otherwise, it was just crap. Words to make a book heavy or large or long enough to justify its price. The more time…
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How I Met Your Mother Redux

I met this charming bird in a boutique just south of Oxford Street between Regent Street and Charing Cross Road. I asked her if she’d like to go out to dinner with me, maybe for some Chinese, since Chinatown was just a few blocks south. She said that it was lovely of me to offer, but if it was all the same to me, she’d rather just shag straight off in a little room she had in the back. I asked her why she had a little room in the back of a boutique and she just smiled and laughed at me like I was an idiot. Perhaps what they said about European women was true, “they” being American men who had been abroad, and “what they said” being that European women are the best women on earth. Of course they were flighty and crazy like all women everywhere, but…
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Lucy

Jim had been saving up for years, and he finally had enough for the sex robot of his dreams. Six feet tall, blond, Quad AI processing, the strength of three men. In the long run, the thing would pay for itself. It would do his laundry, install the air conditioner for him, clean behind the refrigerator, and fulfill all of his shameful, disgusting fantasies.  He went online to place the order and there was a problem. Out of stock? Basic models only? Every time he clicked, he got a different error message, so he finally decided to call. After three hours on hold, he chose the option to be called back.  Two days later, Jim awoke to his phone buzzing and scrambled out of bed. If he missed this call, they might never call him again, and where did he leave his phone? He saw movement on top of his…
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Crime

Whenever someone asks about crime I tell them it’s a lot more difficult nowadays because all of the phones, cameras and GPS, and all of the other new forms of technology. But looking at the way I actually live, this can’t possibly be true.  My life is basically a long string of crimes from ten or eleven to now. Perhaps it’s generational or locational, but the general consensus of just about everyone I know around my age is that you’d be stupid not to steal anything you could. Maybe I stopped thinking of most of these activities as crimes because they seemed so natural. Of course you should steal tapes or CDs or torrent movies and software if you could get away with it. I got caught shoplifting once or twice, and it cost me (actually my parents) maybe $500.00, compared with the thousands of dollars of cigarettes, video games,…
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Mother

I was coming out of the movies at Union Square and saw a mother dropping off her twin daughters, presumably to see a movie. The mom was youngish, or at least youngish looking, and her twin daughters were 14 or 15 and both undeniably sexy. The mom noticed me watching and was giving me the stink eye, but I hung around at the periphery anyway. There are a lot of people around Union Square but not as many creepy ones as there used to be, but I still didn’t really stand out. Once the twins were safely deposited in the theater I approached the mom.  “Excuse me. MIss?” She was ignoring me, which is to be expected. All strangers do is ask, for change or cigarettes or time, and who really wants to talk with anyone after a certain point? Especially some strange middle-aged guy who was just checking out…
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Murder Ring

Ramsey sat at his desk with a coffee and a copy of the NY Post. He got it for the sports section, the crime blotter, and the borderline satirical reporting. He had started reading it whenever he found a discarded copy on the subway, and it gave him a boost. The sports and news sections took him out of himself. They reminded him that there was a great big world out there, a world that would continue regardless of his personal successes or failures. A week into June and the Yankees were in first place. The Mets were in fourth. The Middle East still had problems.  The crime blotter was his Page 6. If there were enough details, he could sometimes figure out who had handled the call and whether or not he knew the cops who had likely been involved.  Ramsey never arrested anyone if he could help it.…
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Balloons

Sam had lived a cliched life from the moment he was born. He had grown up in the thick of it, at a time when the majority of Americans had learned how to live from watching television. Everyone acted like television characters–his parents, teachers, and friends when he was a kid, and his wife, bosses, and coworkers when he was older. In elementary school, his classmates would repeat the popular jokes and catchphrases of the season (life moved slower back then). Some of the kids had loved Pee Wee Herman and imitated him constantly, while others had repeated lines from Predator, Robocop, and other movies or television shows. It was as if they were rehearsing for adulthood. Crucial moments called for a certain gravity. Someone had once said that all of life is a stage. Maybe Shakespeare. Maybe no one. Who knows? No one knew anything anymore, except about television…
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