Showing posts with label Rouleau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rouleau. Show all posts

Sunday, January 18, 2015

The Ice Cream Snatcher, by Bryan Paul Rouleau

"The Ice Cream Snatcher," by Bryan Paul Rouleau, in Thuglit, issue 13, 2014.

Thuglit has upped its game since the last time I looked in at it.  Lot of good stories here.

But lets talk about Mr. Rouleau's contribution.  I have said I am a sucker for stories in which a character is offered a chance at redemption, whether or not he takes it.  And that's what this tale is all about.

Sunrise thinks he's beyond such things.  All though he doesn't have the vocabulary to say it, he feels he's doomed, predestined to crime.  You see, someone told him you never recover from bad things that happened to you before you turn three, and really bad stuff happened to him.  And that, he figures, is why he keeps ending up in jail.

On this particular occasion he had his friend Pedro steal a Maserati.  They get away clean but they don't notice that there's somebody in the back seat.

A three-year-old boy. 

What I love about this story is that Sunrise interprets what happens so differently than the reader is likely to.  If there is doom here, I suppose that his attitude is it.