Honko got shanked for his Redbox return. Honko was an inflatable life preserver. The EMTs rushed him to emergency care to patch him up and reinflate him. “He’s lost a lot of air,” one of them said. Honko never stood a chance.
At Honko’s funeral, his nephew, who was a human named Bobby Boxer, swore revenge on the unknown shanker who’d shanked Honko outside Walgreens. “There. Will. Be. Justice,” he said at the end of his speech. Every eye there had at least one tear.
Bobby dragged his feet on the way back to his cul-de-sac home after the funeral. The birds were chirping and someone was smoking oysters in the evening light. On his front lawn, no grass blade differed more than an eighth of an inch in height. He’d just gotten married. His wife kissed him as he entered.
“How was the funeral?”
“It was beautiful, really. A real special tribute.”
They had grilled steaks and mashed potatoes for dinner, and prayed that God would have mercy on Honko, and on everything under the sun.
John Gabriel Adkins is a Pushcart-nominated writer of antistories, microfiction and other oddities. A member of the Still Eating Oranges arts collective, he has been published in The Escapist, Gone Lawn, Squawk Back, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine and Apocrypha & Abstractions.
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