Cellar Shifts (IX) by Chris Bronsk

I’m down in the stock room counting cordials when the barback bundles in. He can’t change the gas for the soda gun, so I show him, joking, no quick hits. He says he’s not a red balloon. A month before he leaves he’ll tell me, at send-off drinks for the waiter he calls chupacabra, that his grandfather was the backup goalkeeper for his national side. That his mother’s mother, with civil war again all over the papers, jumped down the village well. No one heard a splash, he said, but when they hauled her body up, you could pour it in a jar.

Chris Bronsk writes and takes pictures. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gravel, Yellow Chair Review, Mojave River Review, The Corvus Review, Creative Thresholds, and elsewhere. He lives in Boston with his wife and son.