Chubcheckers

Doug Ames tightened his grip on the wheel of his worn sedan, the engine’s steady drone offering a small comfort. At fifty-two, freshly divorced and two years into a job peddling mid-range outdoor kitchen gear, his work had lost all excitement. He glanced down: the GPS screen had gone completely dark. “Perfect,” he muttered, tapping the blank display. As he drove on, the highway signs turned strangely whimsical—names like Lick Hollow and Boys Town Junction flickered past. He even circled a gigantic fiberglass lumberjack, shirtless and smiling in a way that felt oddly both friendly and eerie. “Where the hell am I?” he muttered to the empty car. Finally, he pulled into a small roadside diner whose neon sign pulsed like a heartbeat. Inside, the aroma of sizzling bacon mingled with the clink of plates. He eased into a sticky vinyl booth. “Welcome to Knuckle Creek!” called a burly, mustachioed man named Hank. Well into his sixties, Hank’s checkered shirt strained over a round belly, and his ...

The Two Pints Tavern was hardly a refuge for the soft-spoken. On Friday nights it swelled into a cacophony of clinking glasses, stale smoke, and confessions hurled at half-volumes. In that raucous crowd, Henry Allyn was all but invisible. At sixty-three, he’d perfected unremarkability. His faded cardigans, neat gray slacks, and perpetually smudged wire-rimmed glasses made him look more benign fixture than person. His voice never climbed above a whisper, and he always carried a faint scent of old paper and glue. Though officially retired as librarian from the Ridgewood Branch, he still shelved books on weekends. Every Friday at exactly 6:15 he’d slide into the corner booth at Two Pints, order a half-pint of bitter, and open some dusty volume of long-forgotten verse. This particular Friday, though, he didn’t read. Three tables down, a red-faced drunk—bloated from too many pints—stood unsteadily and lurched toward the bar. He shoved aside a stool and, slurring, began to shout at the barte...

The ice in Frankie O’Grady’s glass had long surrendered to the lukewarm amber liquid, the remnants of its former self clinking softly as he shifted the glass on the sticky countertop. The hour was late, the usual boisterous energy of O’Grady’s fading into a hushed stillness punctuated only by the low murmur of a few remaining souls. Two construction men, their faces etched with the weariness of a day’s toil and their large hands still bearing the smudges of the docks, sat hunched over their beers, the silence between them thick with unspoken exhaustion. In the dimly lit corner booth, a cabbie, his cap askew, had succumbed to the lull, his head resting on the cradle of his folded arms, a soft snore escaping his lips. The flickering neon sign outside, a testament to a long-broken promise of Schlitz, cast an erratic glow on the scene, catching the plume of smoke as a drag queen with artfully applied but now slightly smeared lipstick exhaled slowly, the tendrils of gray dissipating in the ...