Love In the Backmost Black Booth

[Robert Crisman]

Among the welter of buildings I saw being lashed into place was a theater brought down from Queen Anne, a retail complex ripped out of Ballard, some other and sundry old buildings and whatnot from hither and yon, and last, a restaurant sent up from 'Frisco in, say, 1950, replete with the yellow-smoked walls and black leather booths, and pulltab machines, a beehive-haired waitress named Sal who took shit from no one, and red-flannel-shirt-wearing union-type guys with big bellies and jowls and grease-raddled ducktails who all played the pulltabs and gave every stranger the stinkeye.

The place--it hadn't a name--had been floating around in the ozone unseen till this dream snatched it up.

The dream snatched it up and brought it on home, because it was home to all the raven-haired beauties I sighed, danced, and died, and occasionally killed for...

Forty-five years could pass in this place in a night and not one thing would move--talk about long-running freeze-frame ballets!--except for this tramp named Caprice who grabbed me and kissed me one night in the backmost black booth, and held it and held it and held it some more, with her tongue down my throat and her hand in my pants as I turned to liquid and gave up the ghost one more time.

Later, she made her way back to the bathroom to powder her nose, and when she came back Sal was there, and we decided on pancakes and coffee for breakfast, a pretty young couple in love--till the lights came back on and drove us away like undead.

But not before I saw what showed up on my plate: an old killer's heart and a bone flecked with flesh, and I looked at Caprice and her face turned to dust as she shrugged.

[Mike Handley]

Excellent. Everything about it.