Gallup, New Mexico is a project I worked on with my two friends Mark Hermoso (Part 1) and Jon Boulier (Part 2). We decided to put together a completely fictional story based on a single photo that I gave to both Mark and Jon.

From the photo they collaborated on a story told from two different characters point of view and from their stories I was able to provide more photos to create a kind of look book for the project.

We are planning on making this an ongoing project where we will create something out of very little.

Enjoy!

My brother Isaac was always smarter than me. Even now, as he leaned over the un-dusted counter space that housed the hand blown glass bowls, and showed me how to open the new CD player he got in Corpus Christi, I knew that there was a reason he was out there exploring God’s country, and I was here, selling stale tobacco and desert dry skoal. “Now don’t tilt it like that Pino, or you’ll make the damn thing skip” said Isaac. He turned from the counter and sized the rest of Pa’s smoke shop up slowly. He hasn’t been back in a year and a half and I thought that maybe he was trying to remember the times we both used to work here. Like when we were fourteen and he helped some lady from Missouri with directions to Reno. He helped her so good that she fucked him in the back of the store. Isaac even let me watch from the day shadows of the bathroom. But that was a long time ago. That was before Pa died and before we hated New Mexico.

He left three days before the funeral. The deal was that Isaac was gonna write the eulogy and I would read it. I wasn’t too keen on writing but I was a damn good reader. Hell, still am. But Isaac used to write some great stories when we was young. Stories bout all different sorts of stuff, but mostly bout this black haired girl named Bernadette who we hung around with as kids. He wrote about her a lot actually. Especially towards the end.

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When he saw her in the bus terminal, he knew she was right.  His girl pressed her head into his neck and purred, traced the back of her fingers along his cheek.  “Who was she?” she asked.  He shook his head and pulled her tighter, walking on.  When he looked back over his shoulder, to the crowd, with their suitcases and thin jackets balled up in their hands, the prophet of his childhood was gone.

They walked together to the luggage station and picked up their bags.  Soon they were outside and they caught a cab to a nearby motel.  Along the way, he asked the driver to make a stop.

“I’ve got to pick up some smokes, do you mind? he asked.

The driver shook his head without speaking and pulled off the road beneath the awning of a gas station.

“I’ll only be a minute,” Isaac said.

He opened the door and went inside.  The counter of the place was littered with trash.  Empty potato chip bags, candy wrappers, a crushed coffee cup, lay on their side on the counter.  The shelves were nearly bare.

“Cigarettes,” he said.  “Reds.”

The man behind the counter turned and reached toward the ceiling, pulling a pack of cigarettes from a higher shelf before turning around.

“Five fifty,” the man said.  Isaac patted a bill down on the counter.

“Keep it.  Know where I could hold up for the night?”

“Of course,” the man said.  And he smiled.

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