On jobs, I drive because Demetrius, Sal, and Vinny say I’m too fat to run. I’d weigh them down. They gotta point, but it hurts. I wait in the Charger. Don’t go into the paymaster’s office. Sit behind the wheel. Miss out, and get Twinkie all over my balaclava, waiting. We score $200,000. 

At Vetri’s, we celebrate. They roast me. Call me a fat fuck. 

Demetrius says, “Ask for volume two,” after I order from the right side of the menu, the whole right side, and then the left.

That Demetrius. Hysterical, right? 

Leaving a container with 32,000 kilograms of Almas caviar at $25,000 per kilogram unguarded is careless and thus becomes my get-outta-jail-free from these animals who use me like a latex sex doll.

Russ, my neighbor, subcontracts for Allied Trucking. He has a Kenworth T280 ample enough for a three-person crew, although, in my case, a two-person crew.

Wheels, fence, and Ciudad de la Nada. Bada-bing! They’ll never find me. The sun always shines there.

Now, tooling down 95, freedom feels gossamer, like crème anglaise — a silken-sweet, numbing confidence in the future, from my left shoulder straight down to where my fist grips the wheel. 

Bio:

Retired English teacher Jon Gluckman writes in a small southern New Jersey town outside Philadelphia, PA, USA. He has published work in Micro-Fiction Monday Magazine, 101 Words Weekly (x6), Mystery Magazine, Grim & Gilded, Mobius Boulevard, Frontier Tales (x2), The Best of Frontier Tales Anthology Vol. 15, Punk Noir Magazine (x2), Flash Frontier, Black Sheep Magazine Issue 21, The Fifty & Up Writer Awards: The Table Issue #4 (2nd place finalist runner-up) and Dark Harbor Magazine.

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