Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

73

"I'll take care. You take care, umh—"

"Janice."

"Take care, Janice."

Never did see Janice again, but I added her to my long list of 'what ifs.'

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For a while, all-night talk radio rescued me from the repetitive strain of Top 40. I even got to where I didn't mind Larry King. After all, it was one of his interviews where I found out about this guy, Least Heat Moon, who wrote a book about his personal odyssey—Larry's words—across America's back roads, and the people he met, and the stories they told.

Thought I could do that—sure had my share of stories to tell. But I couldn't. Couldn't focus while I was driving—even talking into a tape recorder—and couldn't keep anything straight when I wasn't driving, I was so dog-tired. Stopped listening to talk radio and went back to musing through my 'what-ifs' and about the places I was speeding past and, of course, Top 40 radio, which still beat popping pills. The morning I caught myself singing "Karma Chameleon" in the shower, I switched to Mexican radio. Didn't speak much Spanish, but that was kinda the point. However, the beat was what stuck with me, and I couldn't shake it.

I won a bilingual parrot in a card game in El Paso and trained it to talk trucker talk on the CB radio. One day it died. Its last words were "Don't Worry, Be Happy."

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