The Fire and the Rose: Part 3

Jeff Suwak
The Fire and the Rose
4 min readOct 29, 2022

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Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Part 2 is HERE
The story starts HERE

Jeff got a room in slumland hotel inexplicably named the Blue Bird Troupe and slept the sleep of the outrageously intoxicated until sunlight and a screaming prostitute roused him awake. He was close to rested and closer to sober, both of which were better than being dead cold in the Puget Sound, he supposed.

Images of the preceding night flashed through his memory. Drinking Muldoon’s booze, fleeing into the night, nearly leaping into the Sound, finding his own corpse, and then the strange man in the suit.

Crumbled cash lay scattered on the bed around him like dead bats. He gathered it all up, remembering the instructions as he did so. Go the Hob Knob diner on Sixth, the mystery man had said.

None of this made sense, but neither did clinging to the old patterns of life that had brought him within inches of suicide, so Jeff gathered up the cash and went to the bus station. Twenty minutes later he was stepping onto the sidewalk in front of the Hob Knob, a place he’d eaten at before and never thought much about one way or the other.

Pasted on the bottom front wall were two promotions. One read: “Look for signs!” The other, “Trust your instinct!”

One was for auto insurance, the other for a casino, yet he must have been a little drunk still because he felt something downright mystical in their proximity to each other.

After the words of the weird old man the night before, it all seemed meaningful in some way.

He shrugged off the impulses of his hungover mysticism and went inside. He ordered polish sausage with over-medium eggs. Potato-bread toast. Sugar-free energy drink.

He consumed all these and waited for his next instructions. Nothing came. No one there was waiting for him.

It occurred to him that the old man’s directions had been so vague as to be basically useless. There had been no specific time mentioned. No description of a person to…

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