Let's All Be Happy Today
A collection of short fiction that reveals an assortment of influences, including 1950s crime fiction, Ray Bradbury, The Twilight Zone and even American foreign policy ("The Very Special Birthday Dinner"). After guiding the reader through such locales as the Jersey Shore in the 1970s ("New Jersey Gothic") and the porn-drenched Eighth Avenue of 1980s New York ("Daily Life"), Allegretti concludes the book with "In the Aftermath of the Nuclear Annihilation," which runs a total of 17 words.
THE INTRUDERS
A cigarette and an ashtray appeared on my coffee table alongside the wine carafe from Paris, the twig of coral from a beach in Puerto Rico and the New Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible.
The cigarette was unfiltered; it made no pretense about itself. It was half-smoked. The burnt end projected a gray-white curl of ash the length of a baby's pinky. Filaments of tobacco were in a diaspora around the ashtray. If lint were brown, I think it would be tobacco.
The ashtray was a lime-green dollar-store plastic dish. It didn't have the decency to be ceramic or a decorative Japanese plate gone utilitarian. It belonged back in the store aisle with the rest of its kind, not on a glass table sharing square feet with bibelots from France and Puerto Rico in a room with crammed bookshelves and my grandfather's mandolin.
*
A week has gone by. The cigarette and the ashtray haven't moved. The carafe, coral and Bible resent their presence, but like 1980s squatters in an East Village tenement, the duo holds its ground. Because the one who smoked half the cigarette is certain to come back for the other half.
I'm waiting, for no other reason than to see who it was.