fin

Summer is upon us and our lives have taken on new endeavors. Therefore, 50 x100 will cease to exist. Call it an indefinite hiatus. If it starts again you can be sure to get emails and posts informing you. However, as of now, there are no definite plans for this.
You may be happy to hear [...]

fifty

I stood out front of her second story apartment building staring at the parking lot and the overcast sky. I wanted to go to the desert, towards Arizona or Las Vegas, quit everything and just go. Why not, you know? So I drove my car onto the freeway with the intention of going somewhere but [...]

forty-nine

After three days of unanswered phone calls he arrived to inspected sheets, the desk, and the refrigerator for signs of life to no avail. In the late afternoon he collapses in her bedroom amidst a pile of clothes that occupy the floor more than racks or drawers. Around midnight he puts away enough depression to [...]

forty-eight

An email from an old friend said something about finding old photos before slyly included a “did you happen to hear…”
She hadn’t. Searching across computer screens and small print, he finally appeared with bleached teeth and forehead wrinkles. It was still the young man she had watched feverishly stuff cigarettes in his mouth as words [...]

forty-seven

The first time he heard “fuck” was a Saturday, outside an empty office. Two men were throwing buckets of mud at the windows of the building. Their faces looked stuck in the rain or of someone discovering their milk had turned sour on them overnight.
His nose was runny from the overcast day. The pacific coast [...]

forty-six

The man handed him his I.D. as protocol for a withdrawal.
“This doesn’t look like you…”
“Moustache.” The man responded calmly.
Morgan scrutinized the photo then noticed the peculiar name.
“L? What kind of name is L? It sounds like a character or something.”
L. slowly placed both hands on the counter then said,
“If I wanted people to know, [...]

forty-five

“How is that kid of yours,Warren?” asks the morning waitress with a forgettable name.
Amongst Keno screens and antique décor he stares at a painting called, “Brussels et Aux Sportifs”, and thinks about two identical others he painted while smoking hash with this European girl for a week straight in 1959 and the day his career [...]

forty-four

She appeared naked in the window like a middle-aged woman in France he saw one summer in a hot alley, two stories up, smoking a cigarette, looking over the jagged rooftops of her arrondissement. It was subtle, beautiful, cliché. The door was cracked as a welcome invitation. He stood in the vestibule decorated by a [...]

forty-three

Before gravity did its dirty work he had been with a few. When combs weren’t enemies and cheap beer didn’t do anything but get you drunk. Now he reconsidered bars as a viable option for companionship. It was a mess being single.
So he went to the pet store and picked out a carpet rug for [...]

forty-two

Tired of pumping gas, stupid customer jokes, staring at the same four-lane road, St. Jeffery’s Southern Shack, Bar 85 and Walmart, he threw his uniform on the counter and said “Fuck this.”
He called a girl who made him feel ambitious and they spent the night mixing laughs with Jim Beam. The next morning to muted [...]

forty-one

Morgan arrives home late after another mildly exciting night with co-workers at some downtown bars. Before his key hits the lock, he stops to the sound of a frail voice. Across the street, an old lady with wild hair and a red dress stands in the door frame of an unremarkable house, slightly silhouetted by [...]

forty

Cold Berliners breaking down a wall with kitchen utensils and overgrown fingernails while a Russian man with an ink blotch forehead watched on from a large carpeted room in Moscow led to a New Mexico Uranium mine to close its doors in late 1991. No more yellow cake meant no more job. He worked HR [...]

thirty-nine

Some chicas were eating outside of Don Pedro’s with crispy Aqua Net hair and hoop earrings talking fast Spanglish. No doubt it was about quiet boys with slicked back hair who looked unaffected and hung out in groups of ten-plus with girls in their arms, saying nothing, just watching the lady-less ones talk too much. [...]

thirty-eight

“Yeah… traffic is so bad people actually read in their cars while stuck in rush hour.”
Never having been to Los Angeles, Kamile closes her eyes and imagines a middle-aged white man in a freshly washed, black Mercedes with the windows up and the AC on so the hot wind doesn’t mess up his hair. He’s [...]