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
