Yellow Mama E zine

CONTROL-ALT-DELETE FOR AUGIE BENNETT

by Tom Fillion
 

          "It's official. Augie Bennett got banned from the Internet forever."
          It didn't surprise anyone who knew him. He'd been kicked out of most everything else in the neighborhood, so why not the Internet . . . and forever. And for good reason, the neighbors assumed. He raked oak leaves in his yard so hard there was only dirt left under them, but where did he rake them? Right into the street alongside his turd-brown Dodge van that nobody knew what went on inside except for the Confederate flag decal that covered whatever was going on back there.
         Augie lived around the corner with his brother and mother. The old man must have died or run off before anyone paid much attention to any of them. Augie graduated from the local high school and then did some time in the service to hear him talk real loud after his fifth or sixth beer, but he probably got kicked out of that too, knowing him, and came back home for the last thirty or forty years. Hard to tell how old he was, really, unless you measured his beer gut like you counted the rings on a tree to tell how old it was. 
         His brother, Pete, wasn't much better, with one and a half arms. Two arms really, but one just hung there like an elephant's trunk or a dangling participle off his shoulder. He wasn't much help raking the leaves into the road, so they could blow in everyone else's yard, but he did go to a job most every day. Not sure what it was, though. Pete had that old Corvair that was parked in their driveway most of the time covered with a thick cloth to keep the leaves off it. It was an antique like their mother who stood behind the front screen door looking out there at Augie in the corner of the yard hiding his empty beer cans and talking so loud you could hear him all the way down the block to the Red Dog Saloon that first banned him for being so obnoxious.
        "Augie got banned from the Internet forever? How they gonna do that?"
       “They sent his name out to every ISP in the world, every portal under the sun, every server and proxy server imaginable, internet cafes with banks of computers stared at by anonymous travelers from Hong Kong to Dublin. All of them got his name on it so when he logs in, it tells him straight away: AUGIE BENNETT, YOU'RE BANNED FROM THE INTERNET. No more Google, MapQuest, Facebook, Instagram, email, games, misinformation, or porn. He's marooned on planet Earth, ampersanded to hexadecimal hell, teabagged by the Man, and digit pickled on every boot record and silicon wafer on the information superhighway."
         “So what did Augie do to become so immortalized?"
         "It was his dog. Batman. Batman heaped a memory stack on the president of the neighborhood association's yard, and Augie left it. The neighborhood watch got it on camera. Homeland Security left him with keyboard caplock and a boot on his van." 
          "I guess that's it, then. It's control-alt-delete for Augie Bennett."
          “Yep. He’s SOL, MIA, DOA, and hasta la vista of la dolce vita, baby! Good thing his Mama still has the landline!”


      Thomas Fillion is the author of 5 novels and 2 books of poetry. A new novel, The Year of Broken Glass, is in the works. A number of his short stories and poems reside online. He graduated from the University of South Florida in Tampa and is the third generation of his family to work at Mt. Washington Cog Railroad in New Hampshire. His experience as a waterbed set-up man inspired The Dream Mechanic, a colorful look at 1970s Me Generation. His teaching career began at Hillsborough County Adult High School as an English and math instructor. In 1991, Desert Storm, he was an English language trainer for the Royal Saudi Air Force in Taif, Saudi Arabia. He has also taught Ringling circus children and was a private tutor for Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys. For twenty years he taught math and coached track, tennis, and golf at Robinson High School. He is now gainfully unemployed, i.e., retired, and spends his time writing, riding a bicycle along Tampa’s Bayshore Boulevard and Riverwalk, picking a guitar, grilling some dinner, and traveling to New Mexico and Vermont. @dream_mechanic, facebook.com/dreammechanic, https://thomasmfillion.substack.com/

Tom’s latest book of poems, Everyone Gets a Trophy, is available on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/Everyone-Gets-Trophy-Thomas-Fillion/dp/B0FM82RMG6/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0

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     KJ Hannah Greenberg is eclectic. She’s played oboe, participated in martial arts, learned basket weaving, and studied Middle Eastern dancing. What’s more, she’s a certified herbalist, and an AP College Board-authorized teacher of calculus. 

Her creative efforts have been nominated once for The Best of the Net in poetry, once for The Best of the Net in art, three times for the Pushcart Prize in Literature for poetry, once for the Pushcart Prize in Literature for fiction, once for the Million Writers Award for fiction, and once for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. To boot, Hannah’s had more than forty-five books published and has served as an editor for several literary journals.

Check out her latest short fiction collection, An Orbit of Chairs:

https://www.amazon.com/Orbit-Chairs-KJ-Hannah-Greenberg/dp/B0CWMMM73T

 Within its pages are two tales originally published at Yellow Mama: "Alive Another Day" and "Light Notes."

Channie's new art book, Life's Colors, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FGCTHJ6Z, just launched (hit "read sample" button). It contains images originally published by Yellow Mama.