Dana Blankenhorn

Thanksgiving

This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited. 

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When the first lockdown hit, we were scared but not careful.

When the second lockdown hit, we were careful but not scared.

When the third lockdown hit, we were neither.

After months of avoiding stores, of having Friday date nights delivered and becoming chummy with the Amazon driver, I finally went out to get Thanksgiving dinner ingredients on Sunday.

The store isn’t a chain. It’s a one-off. Half the floor is dedicated to fruits and vegetables. The signs not only tell you what you’re buying but where it comes from. The selection is fabulous. The prices are good.

I barely thought about how crowded it was inside. Outside, there was a sign insisting the store recycled its air every few minutes. Everyone seemed to be wearing a mask. But I wasn’t everywhere at once.

When I went to pay, I found the strangest thing. There was a line to reach the checkouts. It seemed all my neighbors felt like I did, they were desperate to get out, to do something that was normal. I got behind a cart, opened my phone, and waited. I figured, the line must be because they’re limiting traffic inside the checkouts, which is in a separate room, with a low ceiling.

The Story of Q

This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited. 

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Quintavious Johnson was a good kid. He came from a good home, in Ellenwood, Georgia. He lived in a big, two-story house, with a lawn. He felt privileged. 

His dad, Mason Johnson, was a retired cop, his mother Ellen a retired teacher. He was given his name because he was the fifth in his line to be born in freedom. On Sundays he went, with his parents and his sister, to the Piney Woods Baptist Church, where he was taught that a proud, strong black man was capable of anything. Afterwards they would repair to a Golden Corral for fried chicken, everyone in their Sunday best.

In high school Quintavious was known as Quint. His grades earned him a Hope Scholarship. The costs of college would be minimal if he kept up his grades. His older sister Melissa graduated from Spelman and had won a nursing scholarship at North Carolina State.

Behind the Catafalque

This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited. 

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The Catafalque rolled slowly down Pennsylvania Avenue, pulled by two black horses.

It was followed by the Great Man’s family, by the country’s new leader, and by hundreds of men and women who had known him in life.

The “Man from Montgomery” was almost anonymous in this last group.

John Lewis had started the great man on his way. A lifetime ago. Now the long-time director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, and rainmaker for the “lynching memorial” going up southwest of downtown, wondered what might have been.

His mind went all the way back, back to the beginning of the end of his political career.

It was 1986. Wyche Fowler had decided to run for Senate. His House seat was open.

There were only two candidates, John Lewis, and the already-great man. Lewis tried to make his opponent’s marriage the issue. The Great Man had built a cross-racial coalition, the Buckhead crowd, the east side’s gentrifiers, and City Hall’s grifters were all behind him.

Lewis had the preachers of the south side and the west side. It wasn’t going to be enough.

Rip

This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited. 

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For the first lockdown, Rip Hamilton masked up and went to Costco.

For the second lockdown, Rip Hamilton ordered in from Amazon.

When the third lockdown came, that fall, Rip Hamilton had had enough. He ordered non-perishable food online, with enough hand sanitizer and soap to get through a couple of years. He retreated to his basement, turned off the TV, and lost himself reading the classics.

Even before the pandemic, Rip didn’t fit in. People kept asking if his name had anything to do with the basketball player, whose given name was Richard, Rip would explain calmly that his folks were old Dutch, supposedly descended from Peter Stuyvesant himself. His name came from the Washington Irving character, Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep a British subject and woke up 20 years later an American.

The Heiress

This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited. 

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Andy McPhail grew up poor.

But she wasn’t.

Her family owned a ranch, up near Dime Box, in central Texas. It ran to a full section, 640 acres. They ran cattle on it, had for five generations. Everything was on the agriculture exemption, except for a tiny house near one corner with a miniature garden, worth hardly enough to knock down.

Life was never easy. When her father wasn’t grading for hay, checking the perimeter fence for rustlers, or driving the herd between seasons, he was snipping off the balls of the young bulls and selling the year-olds to a processor he said was in “Wyoming.” He also fought a running battle against feral hogs that tore everything up. There were no roads in the section, just trails, as it had been since the 19^th century when “Big Jim” McPhail, son of Irish immigrants, bought it out of some Mexican family’s bankruptcy.

Typhoid Murray

This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited. 

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The deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, in Las Vegas, Nevada, killed 58 people.

Larry Murray, known as Murray the Spreader among the regulars at Biloxi’s Beau Rivage casino, where he was a dealer, felt certain he could beat that.

He also thought he could get away with it.

When the Beau Rivage re-opened in early June, he was ready. The company had protocols in place to check temperatures and separate gamblers, but Larry Murray was confident these were garbage. Besides, they couldn't police his off hours.

He knew it was only a matter of time before he got the virus.

Zombies

This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited. 

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Clean, bright Florida beaches aren’t where you go for horror.

For that, you need a place like the Maine woods. Deep, dark, filled with the noise of animals and the crackling of branches. The hoot of an owl, the rustle of an eagle’s wings as snatches its prey.

That’s where the scare is.

Madison “Mads” Fitzpatrick, a 20-year old University of Florida sophomore, loved a good Stephen King story. She had read them all. She had also read his imitators, and much of his fan fiction. She even wrote some of it. She wanted to be an English major. Her dream was to become the 21^st century’s Stephen King, to meet him at a book launch, and to win his praise.

She was starting to write a horror story when the virus sent her home from the dorm, back to Homosassa, where she lived with her grandparents. Mom and dad had perished on 9-11. They were traders at Cantor Fitzgerald. She was a baby then, staying with Dot and Bill Lawson at their home on Long Island.

The Coward

This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited. 

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Jake Frederickson idolized his grandfather.

Buck Frederickson was approaching 70 as the year 2020 opened, but he still went to the shop every day. Buck’s Appliances in St. Cloud helped Buck’s son, Chuck, become the first Frederickson to graduate college, in 1990. Chuck became a State Farm agent and earned enough, in turn, to pay all Jake’s bills when he went to the U in 2018.

Jake wanted out. He had a vague major in the sciences. He wanted to do something relevant.

The Chef

This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited. 

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He was born Frank White in Newnan, Georgia. But he became known around the state, and wanted to be known around the world, as Lem LeBlanc.

Lem grew up in the “Age of Emeril,” the golden days of the 1990s when he would sit at home with his mother and watch FoodTV. His father had left before he was born, so he never took the man’s last name. The home belonged to his mother’s parents.

Lem wanted desperately to follow his hero’s path. That’s why, when he got into Johnson & Wales (the Charlotte campus, not the one in Providence Emeril had gone to, but he didn’t know that) he changed his name. LeBlanc sounded like Lagasse, but he couldn’t be Emeril (that would be silly), so he was Lemuel.

By the time he finished in 2005, chefs around the country were becoming established stars. But there was a new style coming along. It was a search for “the good stuff,” for authentic foreign flavors, pioneered by an ordinary sous chef named Anthony Bourdain.

The good stuff held local or regional provenance. The good stuff took poor, local ingredients and made magic with them. The good stuff wasn’t American cooking. So instead of seeking a four-star restaurant or resort gig, Lem LeBlanc sought to travel the world.

The Survivor

This is one in a series of short stories I've been writing during my own coronavirus quarantine. You can find the complete collection of fiction written especially for this blog here. My books are available on the Amazon Kindle, for sale or for reading via Kindle Unlimited. 

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In early 2020 Ann Jefferson was the golden girl of Tulane University.

It wasn’t her looks. It wasn’t her athleticism. It was her grades and her study habits. She was going to spend the next few months choosing among Harvard, Baylor, and Stanford Medical School. Her grades, MCATs and references were immaculate.

Then came COVID-19.

Ann had grown up in what became one of the early hotspots, Albany, GA. Her parents had been at one of the funerals which fueled it. Her mother, Anita, died from it. Her father, Albert, was crippled by it.

Ann went home the moment Tulane closed. She volunteered at a local hospital, the world’s most overqualified candy striper. Soon she was doing a nurse’s duties.

During that whole sad spring and summer, Ann Jefferson nursed strangers all day and her father all night. She lived in a gown, a mask and face shield, without complaint. She washed her hands and face so often her skin blistered.

Albert Jefferson had the full range of post-COVID symptomology. He couldn’t eat. He suffered a stroke. His lungs were permanently scarred. His right foot was amputated. His kidneys were damaged.