Farrago – Miles Carnegie

“How did it feel?” Canter asked. “When you used the hammer.” Pine frowned. “Heavy. My wrist has been bothering me. Carpal tunnel from the data entry job. Swinging it hurt. I remember thinking I should switch hands. But I’m not ambidextrous.” Canter stopped writing. The air conditioner hummed. A fly buzzed against the fluorescent light. Canter loosened his tie. The knot was a tight Windsor that pinched the skin of his throat.

“Arthur. You aren’t taking this seriously.” “I am,” Pine said. He picked at a hangnail. “It’s just procedural. You want poetry. You want me to say she looked like an angel or that the blood was a sacrament. It wasn’t. It was messy. Sticky. Like spilling syrup on the floor and knowing you have to clean it up before it hardens.” Canter gritted his teeth. His thumb found the pen. Click. Click. “You stripped the skin from her back.” “The fabric was snagging,” Pine said. “It was cheap polyester.

I couldn’t get a clean cut through it.” Canter slammed his hand on the table. The pen rattled. “This isn’t filing taxes. You ended a life. You have to feel something. Guilt. Power.” Pine looked up. His eyes were dull, watery blue under the glass. “Do you feel power when you squash a spider?

Or do you just want it off your shoe?” “I am not the one on trial here.” “Aren’t you?” Canter adjusted his tie. It felt tighter. He reached for his pen. His thumb pressed the top of the pen. There was no resistance. No spring. No click. The barrel felt soft. Waxy. He looked at his fingers. They weren’t holding a Parker Jotter. They held a blue crayon. The paper wrapper was peeled back in strips. A crescent of blue wax was jammed under his thumbnail. He looked at the table.

The cool, brushed steel was gone. His palms rested on grain. It was oak. Scratched. A name was carved near the edge: KEVIN. The wood felt damp. Canter reached for his throat to loosen the knot. His fingers met a rough, circular collar. There was no silk. No tie. Just a thick grey seam that rubbed his neck raw. He looked at his arms. The charcoal Italian wool had dissolved into pilled fleece. The gold cufflinks were gone.

Copyright © Miles & Miles 2025-2026 Design & Layout: Miles Carnegie All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. First printing, 2026 ISBNs: Book: 978-1-972266-05-2 Digital: 978-1-972266-04-5 Published by: Miles & Miles OceanofPDF.com CONTENTS Preface Fresh for Everyone Eaters Your Murder is 3 Stops Away No Substitutions Spoiling Meat 3:47 Don’t Wake Your Father White Hell The Scissor Runners The Shield Cincinnati Wants Me Dead The Study of Evil HDI Eye for an Eye We Were Never Real Schlorp Jerry Owes Me Five Hundred Bucks Pretense Again Glory Loaf™ Reverse How Big is God’s Dick?

Also by Miles Carnegie About the Author OceanofPDF.com PREFACE I call this collection Farrago. A heap of exhaustion sleep cannot fix. They share the grit between their teeth. Some crawled out on Substack, others stayed in the drawer. They didn’t fit anywhere else. Time keeps moving.

These didn’t. OceanofPDF.com E FRESH FOR EVERYONE Love means waiting. lena left for the office at eight. Sarah waved from the living room window, a coffee mug in her hand and her laptop open for a day of back-to- back calls. The bottle of Guinness was in the laundry room, tucked behind an ironing board Sarah hadn’t unfolded in years. Elena needed vanilla. She’d stop at the supermarket on the way home, bake the cake after Sarah went to bed.

Salted Caramel Stout. Sarah closed her laptop. Elena’s brake lights disappeared around the corner. She had eight hours. She’d stashed a Guinness behind a tub of Elena’s untouched protein powder. Sarah pulled up the recipe on her phone. Salted Caramel Stout Cake. She’d been thinking about it since August.

The market was ten minutes away. Elena pushed through the market doors at 5:32 PM. She held her phone in her left hand, the screen brightness at maximum. The recipe for Easy Salted Caramel Stout Cake looked like a threat. Underfoot, the tile was a blinding, antiseptic white. She grabbed a banana and a green tea from the aisle cap. A decent snack for the drive home.

She turned the corner at Aisle 4: Baking Needs. She walked past the flour. She needed Madagascar vanilla. Not the imitation stuff in the plastic brown bottle. “Excuse me,” Elena said. She squeezed past a woman, eyes on the shelf. The woman stood by the yeast, methodically checking the expiration dates on every packet. Her hands were spotted with age, the skin translucent like wet parchment. Her hair was the color of unbleached flour. “The yeast won’t rise,” the woman mumbled. Her voice was a dry rattle. “Must be bad.”

“Sure,” Elena said. She grabbed a glass bottle of vanilla.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: f640a5d3d1fe5018
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,855,438 bytes (1.769 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781972266052, 9781972266045
• Pages: 169
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 127.74 minutes
• Total Words: 25,548
• Total Characters: 147,513
• Average Words per Page: 151.17
• Average Characters per Page: 872.86

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