Yellow Mama E zine

The Grill Thief

by Jeffrey Greene
 

         Barbecue grills have cheap wheels, and with the added weight of a large, naked man straddling the domed lid of the one rolling precariously down the middle of our hilly street, one could only marvel at how well those wheels were holding up. The stranger was shouting in a voice as big as the rest of him the direst prophecies imaginable concerning our world's imminent future and what a vengeful God has in store for us sinners.             

        I would've had more pity for the nude prophet if I hadn't recognized the grill as my own. It's a stalwart, heavy-gauged, charcoal model from a company that had built its products too well to stay long in business, and I resented its appropriation as a conveyance, remembering that Jesus had entered Jerusalem on a borrowed, not stolen, donkey.  
        Many of my neighbors had come out in the cold to witness the prodigy. I had something to lose here, however unimportant a grill is in comparison to a man's life and was the first to try intercepting him. The movement caught his eye, and without pausing in his shrieking denunciations he made a curious motion with his pallid, spreading hips that was poignantly akin to a cowboy urging on his tired horse. Occurring just as he was be-ginning to swerve sideways, it undid the delicate balance of man and grill, and it toppled. He met the street face first, but with a resolute silence that seemed to admonish the screams of his audience.  
          Fortunately, the man's injuries were not serious. His car was found parked down the street containing boxes of religious tracts and piles of trash.  No fixed address, the police said.
          Whenever I use my grill—though badly dented, it still functions—I see the man's bloody, broken-toothed grin as we wrapped him in a blanket and waited for the ambulance. It's his happiness, more than his injuries or his nakedness, that I can't forget, complicating my pleasure in the sound and smell of searing meat.   
    


      Jeffrey Greene is on the editorial staff at Bewildering Stories. He’s pub-lished quite a few stories over the years, 43 at Bewildering Stories, and 11 at Altered Reality, as well as The North American Review, Zahir, Po-tomac Review, Oasis, and decomP Journal, among others.  

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      Luke Lester is an artist and writer from Victoria, Canada. He has recently been published in Absolute Underground, Black Petals, Flash Fiction North, Paragraph Planet, Ultramarine Literary Review, and Yellow Mama. More of his art and writing can be found on his blog: The Other Place.