It’s just after 11 and already over a hundred degrees and this lady is kneeling by the iguana on this hotass parking lot, trying to get the scaly bastard to drink from a goddamn water bottle and dude throws one globulous eye my direction, as I stand there like a dumbfounded assbackward idiot, nevertheless catching my dude’s gist 110% clear on all radio frequencies: we do not belong here, it on this manmade asphalt horror splattered all over dude’s ecological paradise, and me, with my fanny pack, my D+ Spanish, my plastic bravado, my chest caving in with each breath.
Dean Hel's work has appeared in Assignment Literary Magazine, Five on the Fifth, and Porcupine Literary. They are currently at work on a novel.