Mitchell Tanner, an ex-convict struggling to get his life back on track hasn't faced his family in year. Not since his conviction, not since his move to Indiana, not since moving in with his half-sister. When he attends an uncles' funeral in Tampa, old hurts come back to slap him in the face. Take a journey to a tropical paradise ... where sometimes paradise is just an illusion.
This story was a finalist for the 2010 Florida Review's Editor Choice Award and an Honorable Mention at the 2007 Writers in Paradise competition.
Out of Joint By T. Keeney Mitchell Tanner steered his twelve-year-old into the funeral home parking lot, found a spot beneath a dying magnolia tree, and lit a joint. His frayed shirt sleeves pulled back to reveal barbed wire tattoos curled around each wrist. He left the lugging engine on and ran the AC against a Tampa October that pressed down solid as a slab. Florida. f**k. In his rearview mirror, groups of people quick-stepped over steaming asphalt. The rain had made his final miles down from Indiana a maddening octopus of slow traffic, back-tracking, three fender-benders, and one street closed because of a sinkhole. Tampa’s northern outskirts had mutated into , shiny suburbia of -Marts and Starbucks and McDonald’s. But the city’s inner core along Florida Avenue was the same. Peel
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