Gentility

The walls of our shanty were of the standard corrugated rusty metal typical of communities like ours.

We did our cooking over a Bunsen burner purloined from the Catholic Boys' School - beans mostly.  We did our drinking from bottles of Thunderbird or Old Crow (when times were good); when times were not good it was straight from the tap.

We slept and loved on a scrummy mattress, twin-sized, also taken from the Catholic Boys' School.  At night and in the morning we lay wrapped up in each other and a thin blue blanket, smoking cigarettes, exhaling clouds of indolence.

Decadence was ours to claim.


















Seth Gall has had work published in China, Canada, and the U.S.  His work has appeared in Word Riot, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Nanoism.  He is S.H. Gall in decomP Magazine, Nanoism, issues one and 27 of SmokeLong Quarterly, Five Star Literary Stories, and Fictionaut.