Twenty Dollar Tongue In Cheek by Nicole Yurcaba

on the march afternoon of my twenty-second birthday, The Fireman stood next to me in the space between Dad's Dodge Dakota's open passenger-side door and the truck's cab:
         leaned in
and slipped twenty dollars--a ten and two fives-- into the waist of my blue-denim LEI jeans.  Dad, sitting in the driver's seat, unaware of where The Fireman's sneaky hand rested,
        had once warned:
"never accept money from a man; he'll always expect something in return".  And I casually wondered if Dad, in any one of his seventy years, had ever expected something in return?


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Nicole Yurcaba hails from a long line of coal miners, Ukrainian immigrants and West Virginian mountain folk. She is an adjunct instructor of English and Developmental Reading, substitute teacher and farm hand hailing from West Virginia currently pursuing her Master of Humanities in English at Tiffin University. Her work has appeared in print and online journals such as VoxPoetica, Referential Magazine, Rolling Thunder Quarterly, Decompression, Hobo Camp Review, The Camel Saloon, Jellyfish Whispers, Napalm and Novocaine, Floyd County Moonshine and many others. In life, she enjoys taking the unbeaten path, and usually exits the scene pursued by bear.

Bay Laurel  /  Volume 2, Issue 1  /  Spring 2013