Flash #1 from the Novel

Here I am with my first sample. Word count after day one: 1,646.


Further up the block he can see the old guys hanging out on the corner in front of Barry’s. The sun is mellowing everything with a late summer twilight glow, so that even this cast of characters seems beautiful in their own way, and it makes him laugh to himself. He’s known most of these guys his whole life, having been bounced on more than one of their knees on this very corner as a little kid, so it’s not as if he doesn’t have a lot of affection for most of them - but beautiful? On any given day that would be damn near a miracle.

Lou looks up when he hears the basketball and tossing his chin says, “Here’s Mac, right on time.”

He had been called Curtis his whole life right up until the day of his father’s funeral, his dad the one they called Mac. It had been these guys, his father’s friends, who had pulled him aside, toasted his father the night after the burial, raised their shot glasses in honor, “To Mac, may he rest in peace,” and then immediately bestowed the name upon him, as if they could not bear it dying as well. It was his first shot of whiskey. He was fifteen.