Fiction: The Colonel’s Disappointment

- Niles Reddick

The Colonel wouldn't have liked what happened in the drive-thru at the Kentucky Fried Chicken at lunch. He probably would have been so disappointed, he would have messed up his white breeches. Sometimes, the customer wasn’t always right, especially if she'd been cheating with the cashier’s man and came through the drive-thru window, placed her order, screamed and shouted obscenities at the cashier who had screamed and shouted back, took her order and threw it, drink and all, back at the window.

The finger licking good special sauce mixed with Pepsi splattered on the sliding window and popcorn chicken and fries dropped to the asphalt below, where birds flew between cars and picked at fries. The cheater sped away in her Altima, and I crept forward, thankful there hadn't been a shooting and thankful I didn’t have to be a witness in a domestic dispute for a police report. I said, “Yes, mam, and thank you,” got my order without checking to see if it was accurate like I normally do, and drove away. For the next several weeks, I brought a sandwich to work and didn’t venture out of my office.

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BIO: Niles Reddick is author of the novel Drifting too far from the Shore, a collection Road Kill Art and Other Oddities, and a novella Lead Me Home. His work has been featured in eleven anthologies/collections and in over two hundred literary magazines all over the world including PIF,Forth Magazine, Spelk, Cheap Pop, Slice of Life, Faircloth Review, With Painted Words, among many others. His new collection Reading the Coffee Grounds was recently released. Reddick works at The University of Memphis, Lambuth, in Jackson, TN.

Website: http://nilesreddick.com/

Twitter: @niles_reddick

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/niles.reddick.9

Setu, April 2019