By Scott Ragland
That morning at the office after his doctor’s appointment Morton ran the numbers to see if he’d sell himself life insurance. The numbers said no.
At lunch he had extra fries and a beer rather than water like usual. He ate there most days and knew the waitress a bit. He asked her about her hopes for the future. She said she planned to go to community college and learn landscape design.
“Green buildings, native plants, that sort of thing,” she said.
“Good for you,” Morton said. “The world needs people who want to save it.”
He ordered another beer and texted his daughter.
I love you.
When she didn’t reply Morton blamed the vagaries of technology like he always did.
Back at the office he put his computer to sleep and raised the window blind. He looked down at the street and saw a young man standing at the corner with a little girl, holding her hand, waiting for the crosswalk light to change. Morton smiled and waved and imagined the little girl waved back.
Scott Ragland has an MFA in Creative Writing (fiction) from UNC Greensboro. Before taking a writing hiatus, he had several stories published, most notably in Writers’ Forum, Beloit Fiction Journal, and The Quarterly. More recently, his flashes have appeared in Ambit, The Common (online), Fiction International, Cherry Tree, CutBank (online), the minnesota review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Cutthroat, Fictive Dream, The MacGuffin, and Allium, among others. He is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee and has served as a flash reader/editorial assistant for CRAFT. He lives in Carrboro, N.C., with his wife Ann, two dogs, and a cat.
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