Z.Z. Boone
STORIES (a few excerpts)
The Buddy System (from The Adroit
Journal)
It was that summer when the rain just wouldn’t stop. It had started as a drizzle sometime in May, continued almost nonstop through June, and now lingered into July. Together with the heat, it had helped create a mosquito problem that Staten Islanders, not content people by nature, swatted at and bitched about even more than politics.
We were teenagers, first generation suburbanites whose parents had fled Brooklyn and Hempstead and the Bronx to settle here. We lived with the acrid smell of the Jersey chemical plants at night, and the stink on the Fresh Kills landfill by day. We listened to Cousin Brucie on the radio, shot pool and played Nok-Hokey in each other’s finished basements, jogged behind the Mosquito Control trucks and tried to lose ourselves in clouds of white pesticide. We thought we were cool, simply because we avoided anyone who might tell us differently.
Strapless
ISBN: 978-0-9800704-9-1
I don’t know what happened, but last night I lost it.
It’s 11 PM, I’ve been doing inventory in my store all week, and this is when my fourteen-year old daughter decides it’s a good time for defiance.
“You don’t know what it’s like!” she screams.
I’m lying on my still-made bed, full dressed except for my shoes, and she’s standing with a hand on each side of the doorway as if to prevent my escape. I’m trying to hear the TV, trying to get the news about how screwed up the rest of the world is.
“Go to bed, Tess,” I tell her.
“Girls in seventh grade are wearing strapless dresses!” she says.
“Good for them.”
This infuriates her. “Mom would let me!”
This is meant to be the deal breaker. The fact that my wife, who killed herself two years ago, was more sane than I am.
Moving
ISSN: 1527-344X
I go with my mom since she’s afraid to go alone. It’s not the threat of anything physical happening; she’s more worried that what she calls “the verbal shit” will kick up again. She and my dad have been divorced seven months now, and so far so good. She and I moved into a two-bedroom apartment twenty-five minutes away, while he stayed at the house.
A couple of weeks ago the news came down that the house had sold. Yesterday my dad checked into the Ramada on Old State Road while movers came in and took almost everything to Sir Store-A-Lot, one of those complexes of metal sheds you see from the highway. The stuff will sit in there until my parents can agree—something they’re not known for—on what to do with it.
But other stuff was left behind—valuable, breakable, sentimental—as per my father’s instructions. He and my mom have agreed to meet here on a symbolically icy Saturday afternoon in January to divvy it up.
I'm Good
ISBN: 978-1466363649-58-2459886032524
Being as handsome as I am has its disadvantages.
Case in point: this guy I work with at Klingspor. His name is Kenny, and he works in Quality Control, and he’s not a particularly good-looking dude. He’s been pursuing Summer Pinkman over in Sales, and last Friday night, after months of trying, he finally bags her. This took god-knows how many dinners, probably about a million movies, and one Sugarland concert which I doubt he could afford.
I’m privy to this info because Summer, who I’ve been bagging myself on and off for the past three months, told me. Her way of making me jealous – good luck with that.