Devil's Hopper

       Jim Stallings

Devil's Hopper    3

“Oh God,” he moaned and stood wavering over the toilet to relieve his blad­der. “I need a vacation. Maybe a new job.”

A voice inside his head, he hoped was the case, said rather smartly: “How you doing, Lucky?”

The room seemed to brighten around him and the toilet. Lucky let his eyes move side to side and then out the open door into the stairwell. There seemed to be someone there. A shadow. His peripheral vision saw an old man, hump­backed, fragile, one step below the landing, bent forward as if to hike himself fur­ther up the stairs.

The hair on Lucky’s neck rose and he turned to confront the old man. In the process of whipping about, he peed his final jet around the bathroom floor in a golden arc.

The old man wasn’t there now. But he wasn’t really new. Jewel had picked up on him years before growing up in this house. Her family had an old Yankee great great uncle who spent his final Civil War veteran years in the house. Having survived the horrors of war, Jewel said he just never wanted to admit defeat to death, so he hovered in the stairwell where people came and went.

“Harmless really. Just another piss ant, like most old men,” Jewel had said, her eyebrows arching at Lucky.

“Gimme a break,” Lucky said. “You know too much.”

“You’re all the same,” Jewel said. “You do dangerous things we girls don’t wanna do. You make us laugh. It’s like having a dog…you gotta enjoy the trade-off of cleaning up the mess.”

Lucky wiped up the bathroom and washed up, keeping his eye on the stairs. The pirate ship night-light blurred as he bent over one time too many. I’m gonna stroke out wiping up piss, he thought, a ghost uncle, territorial and a gang of toxic dump babies. This way to Hell…

He stumbled back to bed and tried to ease down onto the Maui Zephyr, a large futon favored by Jewel and her New Age friends. Whatever. Just a good night’s sleep for a change. He unscrewed the cap on his spring water and sipped. The water caught in his throat and began to gag, but he quickly recovered.

“Good grief,” Jewel said from her side, deep in darkness. “You gotta cut back on the margaritas.”

“Oh please,” Lucky said and eased back onto his pillow. Please, Morpheus or whoever was in charge, just a few hours lazy sleep. He had to be at the plant on time for a management meeting…things were going to hell in a hand basket, whatever that meant.

Devil's Hopper

Copyright © 2004 Jim Stallings. All rights reserved.
Maintained by R M Stelting.
Updated: 04 February, 2008