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    No More Time
    No More Time
    No More Time
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    No More Time

    By Michael Sean Erickson

    ()

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    About this ebook

    There is a moment in every person's life (or maybe afterlife is the better word here) when he or she realizes that there is no more time to right the wrongs of the past. No matter how much we may struggle, or scheme, or even pray, every game of chess leads to that one moment when the king is in checkmate. Our hero may have reached that moment; and if that is the case, then must he sit back and watch as his king is taken off of the board, or can he wipe the board off the table? What is more horrifying when there is no more time: shrugging the shoulders and accepting the end, or going down in a violent fit of defiance? Is the rebel as stone cold dead as the submissive?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael Sean Erickson
    Release dateJul 14, 2013
    ISBN9780988599765
    No More Time
    Author

    Michael Sean Erickson

    Michael Sean Erickson wears many hats. Some of them are as trampled and lost as the Lost Sombrero. Others are being stored still in a tidy space at the rear of his closet. Among his finer adornments, he is or has been a political consultant, an essayist, an Anglican Catholic Priest, a stage actor, a husband, and a father of a Shih Tzu. He is from San Jose, California, but lives currently in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico with his beautiful wife, Sharon, and their Shih Tzu, Shansi.

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      Book preview

      No More Time - Michael Sean Erickson

      NoMoreTimeCover

      No More Time

      Michael Sean Erickson

      Hot Chili Press

      Copyright © 2013 Micheal Sean Erickson

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ISBN: 978-0-9885997-6-5

      First Edition (ebook, version 1.0): 2013

      Published by Hot Chili Press at Smashwords

      E-book and cover design: Patricia Garcia Arreola

      I am behind the wheel of a 1969 Oldsmobile Delta 88. I am on an endless road; no bend as far back as I can remember; no bend as far as the eye can see or the mind can imagine; just one lane, so nothing ever passes me from behind, or chugging down the opposite direction. Makes for the kind of mindless driving I associate mentally with I-5 between the Harris Ranch and the Grapevine; high desert wasteland driving; no speed seeming any different from any others; just a dim apprehension of forward motion; except I realize that I am not on the I-5 since there’s not even a turn-off or an occasional oil pump way out in the haze.

      I take a deep drag on a dead smoke; the cigarette fizzling like lukewarm soda pop that had been poured a week ago; not enough smoldering to generate a warm cloud of poison down my throat. I raise this dead smoke to my lips just about every minute or so, but at this rate I am not going to develop lung cancer for another three hundred years. I cannot remember the last time I had to open the glove compartment to retrieve a cigarette and a lighter. Perhaps this is my one and only smoke and will be still when finally everything just fades to black.

      Misplaced optimism, I correct myself, ‘cause the world is not going to be fading to black, not in the next few minutes, not in a million years. The sky has been that dark purple blue; just after sunset, when those old and tired sunrays have yet to slide down the horizon with the ball of fire, but do not have enough kinetic life in them to inspire any warmth out from the listless twilight; as long as I can remember; maybe forever; surely the duration of my time on this road.

      I may have rolled down my window, but I cannot really tell. The air is so still outside that, no matter my lead foot, I feel not the smallest breeze against my left cheek. There is no life in that air; nothing, really, to distinguish it from stale and heavy embalming fluid in a long dead corpse; not even a hint of dirty fog, when a pair of nostrils happens to press upon a blank mirror and to exhale.

      There is a whiskey flask beneath my seat; pretty brazen on my part, if in the back of my mind I thought that there was any possibility of a cop up yonder waiting to haul me in on a DUI; but it is as dead as my smoke. I just know that I could sip at it from now until the Second Coming and never feel so much as the light buzz that as an adolescent punk I used to get when downing a stale Coors.

      Way back then that light buzz had been something; a vulgar gesture just because my teetotaler father would have been aghast to know that I had snuck out from my Bible studies to share a can of piss fizz with a group of boys inside of an abandoned barn; a wild bronco skip in the heart from being naughty; a sly gleam in my eye later that same night while pretending to kneel beside my bed in soulful prayer; but now, well into my receding hairline and solid paunch, it is at best a flicker of disorientation in my graying mind, and then a dim haze that is no different from the twilight all around me. Even if I could acquire the light buzz, I am pretty sure that it would not matter out here on the endless stretch.

      At least the radio works on my cash-for-clunker; but it is just impossible to pick up a station this far from the beaten track, unless I want to listen to an eternal loop of reruns of Coast to Coast AM; not such a bad prospect, if indeed that loop included episodes from the Art Bell years; but as they’re all from the George Noory years, I suspect that a horned devil in a cramped editing room on his own decided what episodes to include in the loop. I practically can hear the Beelzebub radio tech snickering his scales off as George Noory forever asks the same half a dozen questions of each of his guests, no matter really the topic or the occasion. The devil can smell the brain cells fizzling out there in that Great American Desert, as lonely drivers like myself have no where else to turn for an escape from the asphalt crunch on their tires, and he realizes that it is simply a matter of time before this Noory Loop reduces every man to a drooling zombie, or an Obama voter, which of course is much the same thing in the devil’s mind.

      I decide not to bother. If I really want the Coast to Coast AM experience for a while, then I can just talk to myself; mimicking the tired, simian grunts of the host; and then responding in the voice of a sexless housewife, a trucker, or a hillbilly on speed. I have a knack for voices and can entertain myself just fine when the boredom creeps in and takes a hold of what little is left of my sanity.

      I see a sign up ahead. It is the same sign I see every million miles or so, I reckon; not much to read but at least a break from a flat desert landscape that is not even broken by an occasional weed patch; and so I drag my worn eyes to the white block script centered on a black background. No More Time, it reads.

      No more time, I mumble, as I swoosh passed the sign and watch it vanish altogether in my rearview mirror. What a crock. I have nothing but time on this road; an eternal sunset to think about the past; a road with no speed limits and detours; and a fuel gauge always marked full, no matter how far I may ride this bitch. So what kind of mental fuck game are they trying to play on me anyway?

      I am not sure who they are. Surely there are no speed traps on this road; no drones flying overhead to make sure that I am abiding by

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