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Jamie Marchant


Jamie Marchant is a published author and professor at Auburn University in the great state of Alabama. Her work can be found at www.Short-Story.Me and her forthcoming novel, The Goddess’s Choice, can be found at Reliquary Press.

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worldofmyth


By: Jamie Marchant
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Martin raised his eyebrows. “How could you miss seeing the hole?”

“Well . . er . . . I was kind of being chased at the time.” I explained all about the cat, the street urchin, the ladder, and the constable who wanted to see me hang.

“What were you thinking?” said the tallest of Martin’s friends. “Everybody knows black cats and ladders are the worst kind of luck.”

Martin laughed. “Very bad luck for scrawny here.” He gave me a light push in the chest.

I looked around frantically for a prison guard, the only time in my life I’ve desired to see a representative of the law. But the guards were on the far side of the yard and had not noticed my arrival.

Tall pulled out a sharp piece of glass, and I realized it was a piece of a broken mirror. “I say we carve up his face.”

Now, as I have said, I’m not a superstitious man, but even a non-superstitious man will find his beauty marred by a broken mirror. “You said break every bone in my body. Nothing was said about carving up my face.” I objected, trying to back away.

As luck would have it, the broken mirror caught the sunlight and reflected it into the eyes of another group of prisoners—a gang of the Aryan Brotherhood. I should perhaps explain that my skin is none too light. Besides, I recognized the head Brother from my prior stint in the Long Beach city jail. His name was Justin, and we too had had a misunderstanding, my having made some remark about his parentage involving a dog and a baboon.

He signaled to the other members of the Brotherhood, and they too converged on me. I counted quickly and discovered there were also thirteen of them. I racked my brain for something clever to say to avoid getting every bone in my body broken and my face carved like a pumpkin. The best I could think of was a joke about why the Nazi crossed the road that I didn’t think either group would appreciate.

They stopped advancing about two feet from me. “Here’s ours,” said Martin, staring at the head Brother.

“You can have what’s left of him when we’re through with him,” Justin said.

I put up a hand toward each of them. “Now, ladies, no need to fight over me.” This may not have been the smartest thing to say because both men stopped glaring at each other and turned their full attention to me. But at that moment, I saw a penny lying face up at my feet. Now, I’m not normally a suspicious man, and I have left many a penny lie, but today I reached for it. At that exact moment, both men swung for me, but because of the penny, I was no longer there, and they hit each other instead.

An all-out brawl erupted, and I was able to crawl free of the fray with scarcely a bruise to show for it. While I was congratulating myself on my escape, I looked down and saw the crack in the concrete directly under my feet. Not knowing who my mother was, I was not much concerned with breaking my momma’s back, but I noticed the crack start to widen and realized it was not an ordinary crack, but another rift in the space-time continuum. What are the odds of encountering two on the same day?

Before I could decide whether to jump aside or allow myself to fall through it, I was sucked into the fathomless void to have my atoms thrown about again. I nearly laughed in relief when I found myself on my back on the streets of my beloved Longston Beachidea.

Then I glanced to the side and saw a pair of boots. I looked up to find that they belonged to—you guessed it—Constable Rawlings.
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