A sweat stain creeps down Teddy’s spine as he crosses the tarmac of the Leopard J’s Home Cafe parking lot. He moves past the large windows that frame diners in booths raising white mugs and silver forks and makes his way to a small metal door in the back. It leads to the annex the hostesses have turned into a club house of sorts. Silvia is there and Teddy can smell she’s been smoking.
“Where’s Maria?”
“In the walk-in,” Silvia says.
He strides through to the kitchen. Teddy opens the walk-in door and there she is. Maria’s drinking ShockTop out of a plastic quart jar she hides behind the mayo gallons. She’ll tell Monte the boys in the kitchen need a beer batter. Monte will know the boy’s made the batter before Maria clocked in but he’ll pour it anyway, angling the quart jar to give it a nice strong top. He likes the change that comes over her, eyes like TV static and a dewey smile. He imagines the foamy head caught on the peach fuzz above her lips.
Teddy grabs Maria’s bicep. She wrenches her arm away and then smooths out the ruched neckline of her sleeveless white blouse.
”Quit it, Teddy.”
“Sorry. Sorry.”
“What’s going on?”
Their breath hangs like a veil between them in the refrigerated air. Maria continues sipping on her beer. Teddy’s arms break out in goosebumps as his sweat dries. The front of his Pershing & Sons Landscaping tank becomes a salt flat pebbled with white deposits.
“I’m scared Maria. I had a dream.”
“Okay.”
“I dreamt that I got trapped on a forest road that got cut off by the blaze." Teddy’d signed on with a fire crew in the Lost Sierras for the summer. He hadn’t told Maria before doing it. Nor Greenie, his buddy since they were five-and-a-half and both got detention for releasing toads in Mrs. Kirtchner’s classroom. When he put his pen to the dotted line of the release form, he’d understood that the spiraling cone of summer possibilities had collapsed into a single certainty: he was departing. Greenie had flipped out. He’d never conceived of such a thing being possible. Maria’d understood it, when he told her. She’d been cold about it but Teddy had the reason why wrong. He thought she was heartbroken. She knew he’d leave Petersburg just as she was sure he’d come back. But she was gone, gone for real. There was no turning back once she got to Marshall. Huntington today, New York City next. Then the cities her grandfather told her about in a reverent voice as they picked through the snow-bones clinging to the shadows on spring hikes to the ridge line: Dar es Salaam, Valparaíso, Kuala Lumpur. Teddy’s departure simply meant the end of Jeeping with a boy after shifts at the Lep passed in quart jar dream. She might write about it later, she thought.
“What of it?” She asked.
“I dreamt I was going to die. I couldn’t see the sky. Embers like snowflakes were falling—”
“Embers like snowflakes, I like that”
“—were falling and they were burning through my jacket and it started getting hard to breath and I was in my Jeep with the top down and so I gunned it but there were some downed trees blocking the path and they were on fire too and soon the smoke started to black out the fire and that’s when I woke up.”
Teddy was panting now. The whites of his eyes shone in the dark of the walk-in.
“I’m scared of dying,” he said. “What the fuck, I’m scared of dying.”
“You’ve had a premonition,” Maria said.
“A premonition?”
“A premonition, a vision of what’s to come.”
“Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, about the premonition.”
“No! I’m going to die!”
“You’ve only dreamt it.”
“For a couple hours there, I lived it.”
“You lived out dying, huh.”
“Forget it.”
"Eyes like TV static" good one. Nice writing, now here's my premonition: You're going to tell me you don't want my advice but I'm going to give it to you anyway: forget putting a scene of flash fiction out there for the rest of us sharks to nibble on (or not) and instead keep it close until you've come up with a solid 5-10 pages with a pay off. Trust me, it'll make you want to actually keep working on something more (until you actually see it through) than just sharing dribs and drabs at a time. That way you'll keep at one idea until it's finished. And I mean like, KA BOOM finished. I'm not one to quote Hemingway, but the man did say something like: If you don't finish, nothing means a damn.