Superb Flash Fiction Piece by Catfish McDaris

 

Wooden Bullets and Steam Shovels

 

All his life Sniper heard bizarre rumours about his father. He remembered the tiny town in Oklahoma where his father was from. There were oil wells everywhere, even right in the middle of Main St. The wells resembled metal Pterodactyls sucking up black dinosaur blood. Johnny, Sniper’s dad was wounded nineteen times by Japanese machine gun fire in World War 2. Lucky for him they had run out of lead and had to use wood projectiles. Johnny’s legs and buttocks looked like chunks of raw hamburger. He caught malaria on the Bataan Death March in the Philippines. Every six months, he’d go into a bad spell trance. Sniper loved him and used to make up stories about him. He said, “Time stood still for the man that didn’t sleep. You could cheat death in a game of Texas Hold ‘Em and the gold will keep stacking up, until the table legs get weak. Sometimes after these lies I tell, my tongue grows so long I bite it bloody while trying to eat.” Then he’d take an afternoon siesta. Once Sniper woke up in a canyon valley full of extinct creatures. The earth tremble like it was in agony. A Tyrannosaurus Rex was eating a Brontosaurus like a steam shovel scooping bloody coal into its gigantic mouth. There were roars from all four directions. Two Triceratops were goring each other with entrails streaming red carnage on their hooked heads. Sniper had to escape this sleep induced madness. He leaped onto the back of a flying Quetzalcoatlus. They flew out of the ravine high into the snow covered mountains.

Catfish McDaris has been in many magazines, books, and broadsides. He’s a 30-year small press and 3-year Army artillery veteran, from Albuquerque and Milwaukee. He works in a wig store in a dangerous neighbourhood. Second day on the job, a lady dropped her purse and a loaded 357 not of safe rolled out on the floor.