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Run All Day, Run All Night

November 28, 2013/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Winter-Spring 2014 / by Katie Cortese

[flash fiction]

At Gaffney’s, we feed the jukebox and dance with pool cues like they’re bolted to the ceiling until the men in town for the races buy us drinks we’d never order for ourselves. Rum Punches. Tom Collinses. Whiskeys with unpronounceable names. Theater majors, we thank them in thick accents—Russian, Spanish, German—trading some touchless flirting before melting into the crowd.

“Sure and begorah,” I say, rolling r’s like marbles as Mr. Striped Shirt hands me a dishwater-dirty martini.

He pulls out a chair, pats the seat. My best friend Tina stands behind him Frenching her hand, but I don’t crack. Stripes has two fluffs of hair—pale blond—arranged over the tunnels of bare skin at his temples.

“What stunning eyes,” he says, leaning close enough to ripple my drink. They’re colored contacts. I tell him all the women in my family have them, violet at night, blue in the morning.

“Stunning,” he says, again. “I bet your boyfriend loves them.”

Sipping from the funnel of my glass, I wink and he grins, rubbing knuckles down the creases of his khakis.

“So, what do you do?” I ask, looking past him to Tina in the corner where she flirts with the guy from Econ that I invited out tonight. He’s got curly hair I want to wrap around my fingers like an old-fashioned phone cord. In the shadows, Tina half-turns and points at me, then leans against Econ-boy and laughs.

“Gamble,” Stripes says, listing his tips for tomorrow as if I’m planning to bet my student loans. The horses’ names are bad puns: Life Foal of Joy, Pony Up, Unbridled Danger. I nod until he falls quiet. “Well, cheers,” I say, lifting my glass. “Lots of luck.” It’s his cue to give up gracefully, but he holds up a hand plump as a rubber glove full of water. His hotel is close, he says. He thinks I’d love the view.

“Thanks, but no,” I say, dropping the “h,” and stretching the “a” like the Lucky Charms leprechaun.

Stripes pouts like a child, fat lower lip punched out, but when I stand, embarrassed for him, he grabs my hand. “At least point me in the right direction.” I don’t know why I follow him to the door and push into the night, steamy like it can get upstate. Outside, I point up Caroline to Broadway.

He nods, then pins me against brick, bites at my lips, says, “Violet eyes, be sweet to me.”

“They’re really just brown,” I say, turning side-to-side, forgetting my brogue.

“Fine,” he says, pulling back enough to produce his fist of a wallet. “What’ll it cost?”

Under the streetlight, I see the bar’s dimness was kind. His hair is white, fine, spare.

When he starts extracting bills meant for trifectas and places and wins, I shake my head. No, I think, stop. Not for any amount you can name.

But then why do I say nothing, do nothing, except watch the bills mount between us?

Headshot - CorteseKatie Cortese holds an MFA from Arizona State University and a PhD from Florida State. Her work has recently appeared in Carve, Gulf Coast, Third Coast, Crab Orchard Review, Cimarron Review, and The Tusculum Review, among other journals. She teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University, where she also serves as the fiction editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.

https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png 0 0 David Bumpus https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png David Bumpus2013-11-28 10:30:292019-05-19 12:19:56Run All Day, Run All Night

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Genre Archive

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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Gale Naylor
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Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Mitko Grigorov
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Mother-to-Mother: An Open Letter about White Privilege and Fragility

November 22, 2024/in Blog / Dr. Valerie Nyberg
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Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Dig Into Genre

May 23, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Lauren Howard
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The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

April 25, 2025/in Midnight Snack / paparouna
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On The Map

March 28, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Ariadne Will
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Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

Tale of the resistant apple tree

June 6, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/TaharBekri.jpg 512 340 Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson2025-06-06 11:00:072025-06-02 19:06:30Tale of the resistant apple tree

Talyshi Wall Graffiti and other poems

May 30, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Ghazal
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we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

May 16, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/headshot-translator-Gabriella-Bedetti.jpg 400 400 translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes2025-05-16 11:00:362025-05-14 17:05:21we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
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Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
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Word From the Editor

The managers of Lunch Ticket all agreed that issue 26 needed to have a theme, and that theme had a responsibility to call for work relating to what we are seeing in society. We wanted a theme that resonated with Antioch University MFA’s mission of advancing “racial, social, economic, disability, gender, and environmental justice,” and we felt it was time to take a stand…

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