The Jadedvisalian

Welcome to the 2nd season of Stan Prolongo. Story written by Justin Lowmaster from The Space Turtle Blog. Voice of Stan Prolongo provided by DAVe Avila from The Jen and DAVe Show. If you have a podcast and would like to use Stan Prolongo for content in your show. Please do 2 things for us. Cut of only the ending credits and link back to this site. Thank you!

Before I did any serious research, I wanted to replace my shoes. At the I walked into the store to get a new pair. The girl behind the counter didn’t acknowledge me when I entered. Normally this bothers me, but her face looked like it was peeled right from the picture in the dictionary entry for dejected. Hoping the trail of flour on the floor wouldn’t increase her plight, I walked right up to her.

“Why the unhappy face?” I asked.

Startled, she looked at me. She said she was sorry, and that something was on her mind. I asked if I could help remove it from her brain. She looked at me all queer like for a second, then shrugged. She pulled up her left sleeve. Another sleeve lay underneath, covering her arm, but not a cloth sleeve, it was a tattoo.

“You don’t like your tattoo?” I asked.

“Don’t like it?” she said. “I didn’t even want one. I just woke up with it today!”

I asked her how much she drank last night. She glared at me, then told me she didn’t drink, even if all her other high school friends did. “Look!” she said, then pulled up her other sleeve, revealing her other arm. “I only got vandalized on one side, so now I’m …” she looked at her blank arm. “… Lopsided.”

I asked if she knew who did it. She didn’t. I told her I was a private eye, and I’d investigate for her. She said she didn’t have the money. I said she could just give me her employee discount on the shoes. She took a moment to consider, then agreed.

New shoes on my feet, I broke them in following the clues she had given me. I went to her apartment and looked for evidence outside. She didn’t want me going inside, since she really didn’t know who me, but I did what I could. I found some footprints outside a window that had been forced open. I took a digital photo of the print and went back to my office. The print looked familiar. My case notes might tell me why.

I sat in my chair and chewed on a pen as I stared at the photo. When I started tasting ink, I decided I was thinking too hard and threw away the ruined pen. It took a while, but eventually it pulled a memory out of the depths of my mind. A kid stabbed a gentleman and ran from the law. The movie Dead End. I’d watched it at Visalia Theater. Many people have scoffed at my filing system of envelopes, boxes, and old movie ticket stubs. I always remember the past by what movies I was watching on the silver screen. I found the right box and there it was, a photo of a shoe print made of paint. Taking the old photo with me, I walked out into the streets to find the villain of this tale of ink and home invasion.

As I pulled Tommy Allen by his arm to the shoe store, I explained to him than when I told him to stop graffiting the buildings, that I didn’t mean he should graffiti something else. He told me he had seen Miami Ink and It Takes a Thief on the television box and couldn’t help himself. When we got in the store, I made him apologize. He looked pretty pitiful apologizing on his knees and explaining how to better secure her apartment against intruders. She looked at her arm and decided she actually kind of liked it, but wanted the other arm done too to make up for it. Tommy obliged and promised never to break into a home or tattoo people while they slept again.

Stan Prolongo by David Avila is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

 

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