Hair Trigger 2.0 Issue One

excerpt from Poison and Antidote, “TROUBLED RECOGNITIONS”
Lee Foust
Lee puts the round key into the bike lock, unhooks it, draws the lock out of its resting place—
hanging from the back of the moped by the short sissy bar—and slides it through the spokes of
the front wheel and around a pole of the painter’s scaffolding. The moped belongs to his
girlfriend Betty; he should have returned it to her a while back. After locking the bike to the steel
pole, he reaches over the seat and turns off the gas flow. Betty never remembers to do that, and
he remembers only sometimes.
Finished with the chore, Lee raises his head, his face splashed a spectral white from the
streetlights along Geary Street, and looks up at the scaffolding; the metal poles are humming
softly in the cold wind that’s blowing in from the ocean, down through the avenues of the Sunset
and Richmond districts, up over Cathedral Hill, and swirls around down here in the Polk Street
gulch. The metal frames of the scaffolding are crosshatched with wooden planks and the dusty
framework stands up against the façade of the building next door to the bar where Lee’s meeting
the rest of the band. The boards are worn, splintered, spotted with drippings of white paint. It
reminds him of the scaffolding that had stood in front of the house where he and Betty had lived
together. All that fall their landlord—who’d moved into the basement flat of the building,
nullifying the rent control—had been repairing their building out in the Western Addition. When
he’d finished he raised their rent and they’d had to move.
Walking toward the bar now, the Edinburgh Castle, Lee looks up the street for his friends.
They’re all coming in Adrian’s car and it’ll take ‘em a while to find a parking space. Lee has come
on ahead to get the fish and chips ordered before the place stops serving food, at ten. There’s no
sign of them yet.
He pushes the swinging doors and goes in, turns the corner skirting the tiny Scottish
souvenir shop, and walks into the bar proper. The space is bigger inside than you’d imagine from
looking at the door on the street, and dark—thick wooden booths line the wall opposite the bar,
" 26 | Hair Trigger 2.0