2 Pieces by Tim Stiles

Postscript

I submitted a memoir piece about the evil inflicted upon my friend’s

kidnapped/tortured/murdered six-year-old sister, and it got accepted.

They sent me the galley proof.

They classified it as fiction.

I emailed the editor my concerns.

He answered back: My bad, I’ll change it back to cnf. It was so brutal, I wanted it to be fiction.

I turned to my homie James:

Now that is some white-people shit right there. Whatever happened was so bad, they don’t want

that shit to be true.

James: You ain’t nevah lie, Stiles. You ain’t nevah lie.

The Other-Man Rules

Me, in the back seat of the cop car while the Sheriffs opened my trunk: Stiles, you are screwed.

There was a sledgehammer and a machete in there.

But here’s what they did: the Sheriffs took a peek at my junk pile, and shut the trunk.

I was lucky, I thought.

I told Meechie this in the holding cell where they put me to sober up (Meechie was already in there on some other charge).

Naw, you wasn’t lucky, bro. You got the other-man rules. Me? I’da caught me a case, it ain’t even a question.

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Tim Stiles lives in the San Francisco-Bay Area. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. His poems, stories and lyrics have been published/recorded throughout the USA and Great Britain. His poetry-photography collaboration with photographer Jay Tyrrell, entitled Botmerica: Repeat After Me, was published in 2016. He won the Seven Hills Review 2020 Creative Nonfiction Award for his story, "Bizzy Bone's Cousin," is the recipient of LitFest Pasadena's 2021 Jonathan Gold Award, and won the 2021 Thirty West Publishing Broadside Pt. 2 competition.