The phone is ringing,” Margaret called.

It was another sleepy, dusty Delta day. Billie Jean had just set the plates for lunch and was turning the okra over in the skillet.

“I can’t get it,” she said. “I’m cooking.”

“Well shoot fire, it could be important.”

“Then get it.”

“Can’t. I’m changing the baby.”

Billie Jean swore and turned the burner off. She made it to the phone in time to hear a voice say softly, “Billie . . . ,” and he was gone. She stood there—the phone a few inches from her head—trying to tell her self it wasn’t Johnny.

Her brother was dead.

Lynne Webster

I was on a boating vacation on the Mississippi River going down stream, having pulled the boat all the way from Coeur d’Alene ID to the #1 lock and dam on the big river. I had plans to go all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, then cruise the intercoastal waterway east and finally reach my friend’s dock in Palmetto FL. Somewhere above St. Louis MO my wife called up to the bridge that the phone was ringing…bad news. Somehow the Coast Guard had gotten my cell number and was informing me they had been contacted by the Idaho State Patrol that one of my trucks had been hijacked. The driver was okay and had been tied up and left behind a truckstop in Butte MT. The truck and its load of Jack Daniels had disappeared without a trace.

Jerry Stapleton

She stared at it, mesmerized by the lovely green bottle so like Christmas with its lovely red emblem in the center. It called to her from across the room.

Could she resist? Tough when she could imagine the scent of pine needles drifting up from a frosty glass.

“Not tonight,” she mumbled to no one. She had promised herself not tonight she’d not be tempted by the tang of that remembrance. Still her mouth watered with the memory.

However, the last time she’d imbibed she woke up the next morning not knowing where she was or how she got there. You put yourself at great risk when you drank too much in the big city. Every day it seemed she read about some woman’s body being found in an alley or under an overpass their bodies mutilated nothing but a vacant stare in their eyes.

She glared at the bottle again. What was it about a bottle of Tanqueray that so enticed her. Many people couldn’t abide the taste of gin, even good gin with lots of lime. It had to have lots of lime.

Christine Howard