Category: James Finn Garner

Fiction by James Finn Garner

A stranger approaches a Cub fan in a bar, carrying a strange relic….

I was sitting at the bar at Yak-zie’s on Clark. The season hadn’t started yet, so the place was nice and peaceful, full of locals. The expectations, the intensity, the slobbery emotions of the regular season were still off in the distance, so I was soaking in the serenity of things that currently were and the things that could in the future be. In short, I enjoyed being near my favorite ballpark with a cold one in my hand, without having to share the place with hordes of drunk account managers from River North and Schaumburg.

I was just about to ask for my tab when a certain smell stung the air, a smell like the floor of the Grand Avenue Red Line station. I turned to my left and was confronted with a haunted face staring intently at me. The man wasn’t a bum, but he wasn’t quite normal either. His scraggly beard was dusted with gray, and his full head of hair was slicked back. His eyes were brown and lit from the inside, surrounded by cracked circles of skin like pale dried mud.

Hey, I said.

You need to do me a favor, he said.

Sure I do.

You do.

Well, you have such a sweet way of asking someone, I said, how could anyone refuse?

Don’t laugh. This isn’t a joke.

Continue reading “The Wrigleyville Monkey’s Paw”