Last Call by Tom Walsh

Outside the trailer, the air glows the same hushed red-orange as my neighbor’s heirloom pumpkins. The landlord says fire’s comin’, evacuate, but he doesn’t say where to so I use the final gasp of gas and drive to my local, the Last Call. Big flecks of ash, some glowing, pepper the windshield. The wipers leave thick grey streaks across the cracked glass, so I turn them off, stick my head out the window, a small spark burns my cheek. At the saloon, I grab a warm beer, electricity’s been off for days. Carrie’s there, and refills her tumbler with gin, no water, no ice. She says no traffic’s gone by for two hours or more, not even a fire truck or the sheriff. Cliff, the bartender, tells us to run ourselves a tab, says don’t bother locking up, wishes us good luck, then speeds off, kicking up gravel that pings off my truck. I take a long swallow, tell Carrie how I played drums with Metallica in a friend’s garage once, before they knew they were Metallica. She says she was a groupie for a country band that raped her before she knew it was rape. The wind and the trees bang together, the only sounds until a window shatters out back. I tell Carrie about the time I hitchhiked from NY to San Francisco and fell in love with a lady who turned out to be a man; I turned her away and have regretted it ever since. She tells me that after her mother died, she poisoned a friend’s dog because she wanted someone to grieve with. It’s too hot inside. We step out but the heat is too much. Back inside, I pour another round. She says last call, and we laugh for the first time in years.

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TOM WALSH — Tom writes from Cambridge, MA. His stories can be found in Emerge, Hobart Pulp, Lost Balloon, JMWW, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. He is an assistant editor at Flash Fiction Online. Say hi @tom1walsh.bsky.social.

Art by OCH GONZALEZ — Och’s work has appeared in Brevity Journal, Panorama Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, Lunch Ticket, Complete Sentence Lit, and Santelmo Journal, among others. Her essays have also been included in the literary anthologies in The Practice of Creative Writing and Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. You can find her art at och_gonzalez.