Rory D. Smith

What’s the price of aluminum, dear? She likes to swill cheap beer by the glass and hide the empty cans under the sink until after I'm gone.  It's easier to chain drink that way when no one is counting the cans or how often the blue, thirty-two-ounce cup gets filled up during an afternoon. We exchange cigarettes and talk about the price of tobacco over Sunday afternoons.  It's how I end my week and how she keeps track of the year, seven days at a time.  She reminds me six days is a long time in between visits. "It's supposed to stop raining this week."  I repeat myself when it's apparent she hasn't heard me.  We play this game every now and again, the hearing game that requires repeated conversations and quick answers to unimportant questions. "What do they know? Bastards." Mom dislikes the guys on television, the weather channel and the newspaper reporters, where wealthy people get paid to make up things about the weather. "They're never right," she adds, sipping her beer and adjusting her lawn chair; Mom prefers company on the patio of her apartment, where she's tacked down like fake green carpet.  “The no-mow lawn,” she advertises.  If I spill my beer or something she reminds me the lawn will soak it up. "Like throwing darts for an answer, eh?" "I could do a better job," she says.  Sometimes she’s right.  She'll call me up and leave messages on my answering machine.  Rain today, she'll say. Chance of rain one hundred percent. It's like life, she tells me, slurping her beer and rocking back and forth in the stained white resin chair.  From our view we can see the rest of the apartment complex and an occasional neighbor she knows. “How much they paying,” she asks, ducking from an insect I can’t see. “Dollar and a penny,” I say. She makes a motion to get up but I know she’s only asking in her own way for another cigarette.  I watch her mottled hands, twisted with jaundice, pick apart the remnants of a butt left in the ashtray and stick the thing in her mouth like a crooked finger pointing up at the sky.

Copyright © 1999 Rory D. Smith All Rights Reserved

Rory D. Smith is a fiction writer working primarily with the short story, vignette, and prose poem.  The contemporary landscape is his portrait and the eclectic composition of people within it the medium from which he draws. Rory's work has appeared in Mediphors, the Parnassus Literary Journal, The Rough Draft, Razor Magazine, Whispers & Shouts,The Black Swan Review, The Rain Dog Review, and American Literary Press’s short story collection, Ten Top Short Stories of 1993, among others.