Main Dishes

— Don’t ask. The man beside me didn’t look at me when he said it. He stared straight ahead at the biker on the curb, the one nobody would go near. Leather vest. Heavy boots. Arms covered in ink. But the eyes weren’t dangerous. They were empty. Hollowed out like a house after a fire….

“You could’ve killed him!” The man’s voice cut through the thick afternoon heat like a blade. Eli didn’t flinch. He just stood there, gripping that rusted key so tight his knuckles were bone-white. The biker lay crumpled on the asphalt, his leather vest dark with sweat, his chest barely moving. The stone—a jagged piece of…

— “Don’t go near him.” The woman’s voice cut through the dusty wind like a blade. I pulled my jacket tighter. I was just passing through that desolate patch of dirt off the highway—Daniel Reeves, nobody special—but the small crowd had me braking hard. There, in the center, a massive biker tied to a rusted…

“You’ve got a death wish, kid?!” The biker’s voice ripped across the highway, sharp as the screech of brakes that still echoed in my ears. I sprinted around the last curve, lungs burning, to see Ethan—small, trembling, his wheelchair stopped dead in the center of the road. A wall of leather and chrome towered over…

The shed door wasn’t supposed to be open. But it was. Just a crack. Just enough for the smell to slip through—rust, damp wood, and something metallic that my twelve-year-old brain couldn’t name yet. I should have walked away. “You been in the shed, Ethan?” My father’s voice cut through the kitchen like a blade….

“Let him go! Please, you don’t understand!” The little girl’s scream cut through the street like glass breaking. Her tiny fingers dug into the leather of his vest, knuckles white, her whole body trembling. The biker—a mountain of a man with scarred hands and a patch-covered jacket—stood frozen in the middle of the road, ringed…

— You shouldn’t be riding that. The man’s boot was still planted on my rusted Harley. I’d bought it the day before for ninety-eight dollars, cash. Every cent I had. Now a stranger in a leather vest was telling me to walk away, and behind him, the low rumble of engines was getting closer. —…

I’m Travis, and I still feel the cold bite of that November wind whipping across the gas station lot the moment everything I thought I knew about guilt and innocence shattered. The OPEN 24 HOURS sign flickered, a dirty yellow strobe over two pumps and a cracked concrete pad. I was just a guy with…

The light was still red when I threw open my car door and ran. — Hey! someone yelled. — What are you doing?! I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. All I saw was the biker’s head, slumped forward, his chest barely moving under the leather vest. Too still. The kind of still that doesn’t belong on…

The shelf was moaning. Nobody else heard it. That soft, grinding whimper of metal bending under too much weight. I did. I’d been staring at it for three whole minutes while my mom argued about cereal prices two aisles over. The top shelf in aisle seven leaned a little to the left. A month ago,…