Mile Marker Zero

This week’s new flash fiction is Florida noir.

Mile Marker Zero

Jeff left South Beach just after morning rush. Even with no traffic it was a Ionger drive than he remembered.

To the end of the world. The end of his world.

He stopped in Islamorada. At Robbie’s Dock, the famous outpost where overweight tourists force feed the captive tarpons like they do their shiftless kids.

Jeff was in no mood for the show. He pulled over to stretch his legs on the service road outside.

It was the only real attraction between Largo and the end of the line. Key West.

He was aware that stopping there left him nothing of interest for the return ride.

That was OK.

He wouldn’t be coming back.

Finally, he made it to the Conch Republic, around happy hour. The first one of the day. Checked in and wandered Duval Street, the main artery.

Treated himself to the local delicacy. The conch fritter. What a triumph of marketing. It was nothing but a crab cake meatball.

He sat, chewed the rubbery seafood sphere, and congratulated himself. This seemed to Jeff the perfect spot to wrap things up.

Hemingway disagreed, apparently. The author had a place here, famously overrun with palmetto and six-toed cats. But chose to blow his brains out in Idaho instead.

Then on to Sloppy Joe’s. Papa’s old day-drinking haunt. The joint had fallen to serving flavored seltzers along with its flat beer. But still retained some hint of rebel swagger to the end; they would not accept his Amex.

Jeff strolled south to the buoy recognizing the city’s latitudinal exceptionalism.

“So, this is the lowest point in the U.S.?” he said, making conversation with the gal behind him on the line for selfies with the monument.

“Not lowest, southernmost,” she corrected sweetly, pointing at the inscription.

Jeff smiled. “Maybe for you.”

Finally, Jeff hustled back up Duval for his curtain call. The star of the show. The sunset.

There was nothing like a Key West sunset.

Harry Truman too made a winter home on the island. Facing west. No doubt he spent countless hours, at the end of his government day, staring out at the open water, the reflection of the blazing, descending sun. The explosion of colors. The sky on fire. You know what it kind of looks like, I bet he would think to himself sometimes after a snort or two of Old Grand-Dad.

Hiroshima.

Jeff realized immediately when he emptied Tino’s safe he had made a mistake. Like a crashing wave of post-coital clarity, he knew at that moment he was a dead man. Tried to put the cash back. But the combo reset when he closed the box. Couldn’t really leave a mountain of hundos with a sticky note of explanation, could he.

He started to make plans to run. But knew they would find him.

The thought of fleeing made him tired. So rather than heading out into the broad expanses of the US of A, or the wider world, he took the turnpike south. A one-way trip.

Nobody who really wants to evade capture escapes to a floating dead-end that offers only two lanes of egress.

The crowd gathered at Mallory Square as they do every dusk.

For this serious moment, this reckoning, Jeff’s witnesses would be tourists. Barflies. Jugglers.

He thought that apt.

The famous Key West sunset.

His last. Anywhere.

It was symbolic for him. A sundown. A waning.

He got there at 8. In time for the money shot. Just in time.

But too late, as it turned out.

As usual, he blew it. One last time. One last foul-up. One last disappointment.

As he stared west with the rest of the throng, he noticed the sun did not sit atop the gleaming Gulf like a burning yolk, before slipping under. Instead, it slid slowly behind a block of condos on a small island that obstructed the million-dollar view, completely.

The sun was still proudly above the horizon. Ten minutes from scheduled retreat. But invisible. Blocked by the handiwork of humankind. Commerce. Development.

Man having the last word. Over nature. Over Jeff.

Jeff had not remembered those buildings being there. In the way. Must have been built since his last visit years ago. Or maybe they always had been there, and he ignored them in his romanticized personal history of the place. Either way, it didn’t matter.

He wasn’t ready for the sun’s final exit. Soon, but not just yet.

He stood on the teeming open pavilion. Sunlight abounding but the source now gone. Hidden.

A sunset appropriately imperfect. Half cooked. Like all of his endeavors.

Jeff had driven all this way to see, what, exactly? A backlit housing complex?

He stared off at the nondescript Tommy Bahama architecture. Rimmed in a corona of flame.

Then he began to elbow through the densely packed crowd, walking, with purpose, toward the sea wall.

He had been preparing for a dramatic moment.

Majesty. Closure.

Instead, he got parody.

The sun, his sun, not yet extinguished.

But already gone.