Now I'm Sharing

I don't do it often, at least I haven't in the past, but once or twice a week I'd like to begin sharing my fiction. It won't be for everybody. Writing never is, fiction in particular, but for the curious out there I am letting loose, sort of. I will offer bits and pieces of my creative writing on this blog along with whatever details are necessary. It is generally first or second draft stuff and, though I hope if often will be, not guaranteed to be free of errors. You will never find entire pieces on this blog but, should you ever want to read the whole deal, email me at aminnick85@gmail.com and I just might oblige.


I want to let my work stand for itself but it should be noted that the piece below, the opening segment of larger story, came about from a writing exercise. It finds influence in the song Jack Blue by Chris Knight. Look below the story for a video performance by the artist.

Jack Blue

By Andrew Minnick

With thanks to Chris Knight

  

The bar seats five at this joint of mine and there are eight tables on the floor. Brass plaques on each one read “Leave Cue Ball in Side Pocket.” Anyone can play but I need a credit card before I surrender a triangle rack. A rack comes with fifteen balls, don’t lose one. If you haven’t got a credit card fifty dollars deposit is just as good. If you haven’t got either you’re not playing, but I might still sell you a beer. Convince me to play and the rules are simple – We play nine ball. We call our shots. We play ball-in-hand off a scratch. Hit a ball, hit three walls, or don’t bother. We play for kicks, not cash. – I’ve got one other rule: Pool cues come off the wall in one piece, they go back the same way. That last one is for jack blues. They come in here from time to time.

            Somewhere around three weeks ago a regular jack blue came in. It was early, and a Wednesday, but we were nearing in on the first frost of the year and every day the sun hid just a bit earlier behind the round hills of the Appalachian range behind us. He was big, the jack blues usually are. I think his intentions were mild. I imagine he had none to begin with. He ordered a beer, Miller Light in a bottle, and I thought he might be perching up at the bar watch football. So early in the week the game must have been small conference, a Boise State or a Bowling Green, Big East maybe but by halftime no one cared any more.  The TV was new then, still is. I had an old flat screen Magnavox and had replaced it with the latest HD, 3D, model of some other brand I once knew a whole lot about. Great picture, nothing to watch.

At some point I turned around, to wipe down a glass or grab myself a drink. I turned back and the jack blue had put his money down. Three others were waiting to play, all hovering around one table. Two of them looked like they’d already been beat. They didn’t seem to know each other. They were decent though, talking was easy enough among them.

That all stopped.

            One thing about a jack blue that’s always the same, maybe it is the one thing that makes them what they are, is that trouble collects silently around them and everyone knows it’s coming. You might describe it as a chill, the creeping knowledge that the atmosphere has changed, but it is more accurately just the quieting bred from realization. When jack blue enters stage right, and the scene is going to be a bloody one, the imposing force is the absolute silence, those who know will tell you the wind stops, but there’s no calm.

            The two boys who’d been at the table when that jack laid his money down were carted off thirty some miles, to the nearest emergency room. I went out there later and left the one his fifty dollars. I hope he got it back.

 No cues broke that night but the local boy who works the bar for me sometimes had to wipe blood from one. I closed up before ten to mop and found two and a half teeth, two scattered on the floorboards, one half stuck into the felt of the table amid the imprint of an overbite.

 It had been frightening. It had not been terrifying. It is somewhere in that difference, that gap between senseless violence and profound fear, where one finds the difference between jack blue and Jack Blue. The boy in this tussle was big and mysterious and mean, but when the argument had ended and the fist started flying he let loose a caterwaul that broke the ominous, portentous silence and it was the hook that ripped the ordeal from an unknowable and hellish confrontation with fright, back through time and space and atmosphere, into the chaos of a downright, corporeal, fist fight.

            What I know of Jack Blue comes mostly from the fringes, an incomplete look into a life not often discussed. I know Jack Blue mostly through stories and hearsay and that one time I met him, face to face.