Making Spares: a short story

by Jeff Posey

Mr. Meyers lost his two sons in American wars and his wife to her own cells that went wild with disease. He coped by bowling. Every afternoon. For a decade.

Then he saw a boy one afternoon in the custody of police going into the Juvenile Detention Facility. Mr. Meyers stopped his car, seeing the place for the first time, imaging the people inside. The next day he went in and offered to take a kid bowling once a week.

They gave him Reuben. A wild-eyed, wild-haired ball of surly anger.

Mr. Meyers took him to the bowling alley.

“I ain’t bowling,” said Reuben.

Mr. Meyers played without him. But the boy began to watch. Creep closer.

“I can beat you, old man,” Reuben said.

“I don’t think you can,” Mr. Meyers said softly.

Then Reuben picked up a ball and surprised both of them.

20 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 13, 2012

About the author

Jeff Posey has a geology degree and worked as a petroleum geologist before he discovered the world of words.

Since then, he's been city editor of a metropolitan magazine, fiction editor for a national magazine, and then stumbled on his own ignorance: about business. So he earned an MBA, thinking that would solve everything. Ha! But it did give him the ability to see things that had been invisible before, such as how business and money truly work.

Now he writes short stories and novels, most of them inspired by his nearly two decades of research and fascination with ancient Southwest cultures (mainly the good ol’ Anasazi) and tied to his favorite area in and around Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

You’ll see allusions to the ancient ones in all of his work, which he describes as rather like a huge ongoing meta-novel.

To learn more, see http://JeffPosey.net/.