Flash fiction by Hayley Barnes

There’s a Snake in My Boot

Goose, at the time, was living in the back of his Subaru, parked way at the back of the parking lot of the Traverse City Wal-Mart. We’d sit out the back some nights playing cards on old milk crates and take turns crossing the lot to get provisions or cross in the other direction to get smokes and beers. He kept it ok clean on the inside and a little less so on the outside and it looked like a regular old Subaru, not new exactly but not old enough to vote, either, one of those station wagon-y types, maybe a Legacy or something. Nothing like a truck, anyway, but for some reason people kept thinking it was a truck, and not just any old truck but a taco truck, if you can believe that. 

 He’d be sleeping in the middle of the day on account of his working nights most days and so it’d be three in the afternoon or something and somebody would come looking for a taco or a quesadilla or somesuch. No sign or nothing on the car, maybe a few bumper stickers on the bumper and even a few on the back window, but they were mostly of the places Goose’d been, like Big Sur and Everglades National Park and the Alamo (he was a real traveler back then and had actually even been most of the places in that very Subaru), but I guess at least one of the stickers on the bumper was for a Mexican place, someplace in Oklahoma I think. So anyway somebody’d come knocking on the back window, waving some cash and asking loudly if he was open. ‘Open’! Like he was a restaurant. And if he had his earplugs in they’d go away eventually, but I asked why he didn’t just move his vehicular abode somewhere else: the car ran alright still, definitely alright enough to get to one of the several other Wal-Marts within not so many miles, but he said, and rightly so, that this was the best one for how safe it was and how well-stocked the deli inside the Wal-Mart was and how close the gas station was and all. 

 Well one night Shayna and I were hanging out at his place, playing a little basketball with empties and shooting the shit and some guy comes up on a skateboard and asks if Goose’s serving and I’m ready to give him what-for and turn his ass away, but no. Goose just shrugs and reaches into his Igloo cooler he’s got there in the back and pulls out a foil-wrapped burrito and tosses it to the guy. The guy gives him a five and he skateboards off and Goose just shrugs again, sinks a can in the can, and winks.