Broken Doors

By Greg Jackson

Marty Webber is a man who has lost everything but refuses to let himself be beaten. Living on the streets, working manual labor when he can, he spends his twilight years living day to day to make ends meet. Until he revisits the shelter he's known off and on for over a year, where Marty Webber meets Riley, a young girl who's struggling to make sense of her own life. Broken Doors is a short story about two lost people whose paths intersect in the dreariest of circumstances. Will these two lost souls find hope within the darkness?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greg Jackson
• Release date: Aug 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311681751

Greg Jackson

Greg Jackson is author of Prodigals: Stories, for which he received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award and the Bard Fiction Prize. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, Tin House, Vice, Conjunctions, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Guardian, among other places.

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Broken Doors

by Greg Jackson

Copyright 2014 - Greg Jackson

Smashwords Edition

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. Chapter One

2. Chapter Two

3. Chapter Three

4. Chapter Four

5. Chapter Five

6. Chapter Six

7. Chapter Seven

8. Chapter Eight

9. Chapter Nine

10. Chapter Ten

ONE

In the summer in Florida, this was one of the best times of the morning to do anything. It wasn't yet into the full-blown misery that the Florida heat brought...but on the setting of pre-heat, a small window between the bearable and the unbearable that you needed to work like a meteorological magician. It just passed eight in the morning and just like every morning, the world seemed to slow down just enough for Marty Webber to catch up. The Florida sun was up but it wasn't yet the deadly orb that brought with it the suffocating humidity. No, the sun was nice at eight in the morning, where you could enjoy it before you needed to shed your second skin, which melted into oblivion within moments of exposure.

The traffic was nearly gone. The rush-hour freaks going off to God-knows where are where they need to be, pulling their overpriced hunks of metal into their assigned spots with the fervor of bulletproof narcissists. And with the narcissists gone and their incessant weaving and bobbing through traffic to get where they needed to be ten seconds before the slow people who irritated them, they took their damned horns with them. Now all Marty had to do was enjoy what was left of nature, the parts that were left to him in the trails of the more important.

He could smell the gasoline on the highway and he could hear the chatter amongst a family of ducks trying to vie for position in the small reservoir off the highway. He always stopped to watch the little creatures...the ones in the back...the tiny ones always ran twice as hard to waddle with their dutiful mother. The whole process was uniform and elemental...it was an instinctual thing that was embedded in their DNA, and even though they were merely ducklings, they had more going for them for half the people walking around who didn't even realize they were alive.

As he walked his normal route, Marty looked down to make a precursory inventory of himself. His jeans looked dirty but were well before any scent made itself known. His shirt was worn and sweat-stained but there wasn't anything he could do about that until later tonight. His shoes? They were a different story. Duct tape was Marty Webber's best friend, as it had been with over forty years of working manual labor.

Damn nice mornin'. He mumbled to himself as he walked over the blacktop to the outside ashtrays lining the outer walls of the bar he visited between eight and eight thirty. He went straight to work, rifling his calloused, worn fingers through the scattering of pebbles rising up from the bottom of the utility bucket that stood in as an ashtray. And with a few wipes of pebbles under his fingers, Marty soon found what he usually stumbled on...a few cigarettes extinguished well before their time. There ya go, Marty.

He lit the cigarette and let it dangle between his lips, pulling a large drag from it before his face crunched into the breeze.

Goddamned menthol. He grimaced.

Marty didn't need to check his pockets to know what else he had on him. Besides the lighter crammed into his front pocket he carried along a wallet that never opened, eight dollars...a crumpled five, two singles (one of them Scotch taped over Washington's face) and a shitload of change that's been saved from abandonment over the last few days.

The door in the convenience store dinged as Marty walked through and he followed his routine to the letter. Head down to avoid the cautious stares, deflect the looks from the normal people who couldn't stop looking at the human mess walking into their establishment, mucking up the works with his apparent lack of self worth. He learned not to care but it was impossible not to notice the contempt on their faces...and the upturned noses aimed in his direction.

Same ol' thing Marty? Dennis said from behind his little mountain of scratchers that flowed into his only visual space between the glass. He had the slightest hint of an Inidan accent which, by