Fool of the Catch
a short story feat. ‘Thom Pope’
In Hotel Marmot, I stay while on a detour in Fox and Cat Hollow, Delaware. Word must’ve got around that I’m below the Mason-Dixon, probably spread from Haydn; a well-intended gesture of promotion, more like a prank of labor; or perhaps the trafficker up north collected the right information and sent it along to D.C. in an unassuming box truck. This is their territory I’m treading on. In dangerous proximity to the national capital, perilously teetering on the north line, less than a mile from Queen Mary’s land. Never the matter of my paranoiac meanderings, there’s a job to do and I don’t have the details. I was supposed to meet a man in this beatific old building, but as the day went on and no one showed up to ask for my services, I felt condemned to loaf about. After paying for a room on the second floor facing away from the road, and smoking a pack of cigarettes out the window, I slept off my worries and was this morning, a man about town; in reverie towards the persistence of the working people who mend the street, grind down fillings, officiate the law, and sell their wares. Not exactly their wares, and I wonder why they put up with it. At least those who do it for the money, who have to do it for the money.
In recent memory, there’s been a great rest, an understanding that the compensation for your efforts falls short. So, people didn’t return to…