All over the country Brads are repeatedly falling in love with themselves, in storefronts, in chrome bumpers of parked cars, chasing after chrome bumpers of speeding cars, in ladies' compact mirrors briefly flipped open for touch-ups, in wide mirrors of trailering dualies, in shiny new quarters whose reflections could not distort Brads' superbly chiseled corners, all thirty-two hundred teeth, kaleidoscope irises that dizzy and blind, yes, Brads had it all but are giving all up with each grip of themselves in something reflective that's really not reflective at all but absorbent, a thief in the light that does not, cannot, would not give back if it could.


Jethro is living the dream, just look at him there in his cowboy pajamas with his duel cap guns in their holsters, his getting tripped up in his own little lasso and is that real tobacco juice and what I'd give for a buckaroo hat like the one he keeps slapping dust out of on his leatherette chaps. The trick is he's sleepwalking and even when I tell him after he wakes up, he tells me I'm full of it, I've been swallowing my own tobacco juice I should have spit into my beer can and he's right, Jethro's a genius and I've always believed everything about him, even his kisses with his eyes closed.


Eddie's into empties. Glass ones. Green ones. He likes to look through them, make his day. A man in a desert built his house out of empties and cement. He likes to look through his walls and keeps dogs who like to look through walls too. Eddie sometimes shoots them, empties that is, off the picket. He's proudest of the ricochet embedded in his forehead. No one has one like it and he won't let the doc take it out though the doc said he'd do it for free. You see, when Eddie gets a little anxious, like when the recycle truck comes, he just reaches up there and pushes it. He calms down some. It makes everyone's day.


Charles Springer has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning painter. A Pushcart Prize, Sonder Press Best Small Fictions and Best of the Net nominee, he is widely published in print and online. His first collection of poems entitled JUICE was published by Regal House Publishing. Visit his website at www.charlesspringer.com. Charles writes from Pennsylvania.