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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Issue 12: March 2022
Micro Fiction: 108 words
By Todd Mercer

December D.I.Y

 

Jane banned me from fixing car engines after costly re-repairs undercut my budget-sparing effort. Fine. It surprised me when Jane asked me to take apart the furnace, find the problem, put it together. I’m finished. It’s in one piece, except a nut, two wires, and this metal...thing. The pilot light lights, but no ignition. We’re almost young, there aren’t extra funds to tap. Long before How-to videos. Prehistoric. We freeze three days before trial and error smiles on us with heat. Jane under heaps of blankets wonders aloud if she could have loved a mechanic as easily. My brutal humorist.


—From the author’s in-progress manuscript, In the Location Business, a collection primarily of microfictions.

Todd Mercer’s
Issue 12, March 2022

short collection Ingenue was a winner of the Celery City contest. His digital chapbook, Life-wish Maintenance, is available free at Right Hand Pointing. Recent work appears in Beatnick Cowboy, Flash Frontier, and Literary Yard.

 
 
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