Sheriff John Stone
just busted a guy for possession of the stuff earlier today, he knows, but can’t get to bed without taking a little hit nowadays, not a large hit, just a few puffs, and he gets out of bed, telling his wife Louisa that he just needs a little bit of fresh air, stepping out onto the balcony of his seaside apartment with the skunk, and he lights the joint with a match from the matchbook that he picked up at the St. Wilson Hotel, embossed with the hotel’s logo, a blue winged, “W” on a white backdrop, just up the coast off Highway 1, and as he smokes he dreams himself the captain of a grand ship, standing on the deck above his cabin, overlooking a vast and dynamic crew, buzzing as bees do to make the ship to his liking, and his alone, but instead he looks down at the cerulean water reflecting up in distorted shadows across his hairy forearms, and he wonders where he went wrong, why there’s a circular floatie with an inflated head like a rubber duck just floating in the middle of the pool, when Louisa will notice how he’s just shrugging on the railing out there, and he flicks ash off the end of the joint, careful not to let the weed itself fall out, and he just kind of leans forward a little more to inhale, and get a deeper smell of the briny air, and he tumbles end over end, his broadside cracking against the cool blue, when the splash wakes Louisa.
The Ballad of Brick Michaels
Today is Brick Michaels’s birthday, which he hates. Brick has lived his entire life born on Christmas Eve, and every year he hears the same, tired questions. Do you get half as many gifts because your birthday’s on Christmas? What’s your favorite thing about Christmas—I mean, your birthday? Does this make you, y’know? And Brick is sick of ‘em.
What Brick wants more than anything on his birthday, is just the chance to sit by a beach, reading a book, drinking heavily citrus flavored and boozy drinks, and ignoring anyone who dared speak to him. But instead, he is stuck working the late shift at the department store, along with the other straggling employees who have no reason to go home, or no one to go home to.
Brick leans on his register and asks one of his coworkers, a teenaged-looking girl he’s never seen before what the real meaning of Christmas is. Capitalism, she says. Brick chuckles, but she expands, “This whole holiday was cooked up by Dickens and Coca-Cola in order to sell things people don’t need to people who don’t need them. If we just spent that money funding things people actually needed all year, we wouldn’t need to rely on the concept of charity and the spirit of giving so hard.”
Bricks asks the girl her name, and she responds Jeannie. He asks Jeannie if she wants a piece of cake, since the two of them are stuck working the night shift together. She hesitates, looking at the much older Brick with distrust, until Brick pulls it out from behind his counter. He slices them each a piece, and the two share Christmas together.
