Five Fingers Review

Jim Finley
Excerpt from Infinite Possibilities

I’d rather a double fist down the throat and my lungs ripped out than have Poopsy Vickers leave me the way she did; all cream and sweetness, sliding her smiling self under the wheel of her sleek new soft top, hitting the starter and slipping off down the road. And me? Left standing in her dust, wiggling like bait in a minnow bucket. The entire ordeal made me feel as if I’d been handcuffed and taken to Cleveland.
Heartbroken, I scream after Poopsy, “My grief shall be noble and uplifting!” Since I’d read that in a book someplace and thought it sounded really deep, I scream it again, louder, “My grief shall be noble and uplifting!” When I come across a saying like that I try to save it for just such an occasion. I don’t remember what I expected that day, perhaps for Poopsy to stomp her brakes, leap from her car, drop to her knees and proclaim to the entire world something like, “I love you more than life, DW Boatwright, and you know I could never leave you!” And there I’d be, outside Lenny’s Bar with the sun on my back, feeling like the stud duck on the pond. But truth is Poopsy didn’t as much as look back and when I called her cell phone, the sound was like shuffling marbles in a coffee can.

Most fiction Jim Finley writes is grounded in the place and spirit of his youth; in the shadows of the Brazos Salt Fork, near 4-Sixes Ranch, somewhere south of sorrow and north of nothingness. Youth for him was the 1950s, but even today, this single slice of Texas and the people it marks remain sacred.

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