Free The Speed Chronicles by Joseph Mattson

might, just might, have a shot at getting rid of her for keeps. And for fucking his old friend’s girl it would serve Glen right to get stuck with the bitch for a few years.
    chuck
    So I went out to the store, and after pretending to make some revisions in that week’s work schedule (a job that strictly speaking should fall to Walt, my superior, who on the pretext of giving me valuable management experience via delegation has been weaning himself off just about all his own responsibilities over the last couple of years), I stepped onto the loading dock out back and removed from their hiding places five empty, flattened Choos-a-Fed cartons I’d been saving for a while. What kind of a man hides at his workplace empty cardboard cases of Choos-a-Fed, you may wonder? The answer lies in my abandonment some years ago of the drug life. I never, though I was so urged at the time, joined a twelve-step recovery program. Had I joined such a program I would not have encountered Glen in a bar, since participants are honor-bound, as I understand it, to shake off their other addictions as well. Had I joined such a program I would not have spent these last years stewing over Gretchen’s fate and plotting different kinds of revenge on Glen. I’ll bet I have twenty or thirty such scenarios, of varying degrees of complexity and practicality and lethality.
    And now an opportunity had arisen, and I filled each case with what I figured the weight of the Choos-a-Fed would have been, and then I sealed it up carefully enough that it looked brand new and unopened, a level of craft that was probably unnecessary, because he was tweaking like the very dickens when I saw him at the Brass Candle. I loaded the empty cases into the bed of my truck and sat and waited out back by the dumpster.
    torie
    So I’m thinking maybe it’s time to get out of the hospitality business altogether, once we’ve made this score up in Topeka, and cut way back on my crank habit before it turns into an addiction. Also thinking what beautiful babies Glen and I could make, and what a contribution I could make to society after getting my hygienist’s license back.
    glen
    We’re driving north on the turnpike and I am feeling pretty damned fine. This Crumdog will certainly, upon hearing who our mutual friends are, take the Choos-a-Fed off our hands for three, maybe four times what we would have paid poor old Chuck for it. As far as Chuck goes, the cops aren’t going to spend much time on the shooting of a well-known low-level pot dealer tossed into a dumpster behind a supermarket. Not the cops I used to know.
    As I listen to the female prattling on about our future of domestic bliss, I wonder about leaving her with the bikers. She needs more crank than I can afford to provide, and where I’m going I won’t want a woman attached to me at the hip. The turnpike snakes through the Flint Hills, and up around Matfield Green I swear I can feel Frank Sinatra’s penis start to vibrate in my pocket out of something not unlike joy.

    SCOTT PHILLIPS is the author of six novels, including The Ice Harvest and, most recently, The Adjustment (Counterpoint) and Nocturne (les Éditions la Branche). He lives in St. Louis, MO.

osito
    by kenji jasper
    M an, you know shit is fucked up when we comin’ way the fuck out here,” Gary said between puffs. He’d rolled the blunt with a Phillies, which meant it wouldn’t last long. I’d told him that there were better brands, but he insisted. “This what I started with. So I’ma stick with these shits till I ain’t have lungs no more.”
    I was never a fan of working high. Hell, I didn’t even touch weed or anything else. For me it was all about control, all about making mind and body one whenever needed. But Gary was the one who’d got us the job. So Gary was calling the shots. That’s how it was and how it is still, at least in theory. Execution, however, was