Cover for Drabblecast episode 249, Jimmy's Roadside Cafe, by Roo VandegriftThis episode of the Drabblecast presents Jimmy’s Roadside Cafe by Ramsey Shehadeh. It’s a tale about running a shanty café off I-95, in a post-apocalyptic, plague-ridden America. Jimmy cobbles together the shanty between the guardrails of the highway, where he assists passersby. Scavenged goods, hard truths, or a place to rest, Jimmy’s kindness becomes an uplifting oasis in a ravaged world.

After the world ended, Jimmy set up a roadside cafe in the median of I-95, just north of the Fallston exit, in the grassy depression between the guardrails. His first cafe, nothing more than a plywood shanty, fell to the first thunderstorm that blew through. The second was better: he dug a sort of foundation and built the walls out of heavy plywood he’d harvested from an overturned Home Depot truck, reinforced the corners with steel joints, laid down a sheet of tin for the roof. He used a Hummer’s windshield for the front window, a thick yellow shower curtain for the door. And then he nailed an Open/Closed sign beside the doorway, flipped it to Open, settled down in his lawn chair, and waited…

Our Drabble is “Aftermath,” by Steve Lidster. In it, the “Nice” put Santa’s list to an unusually ominous use one Christmas in Portland.

And our Twabble comes from Algernon Sydney is Dead:

I saw myself buying new eyeglasses.
For weeks, it’s all my crystal ball showed me, every single time.
It was a re-vision.

So please enjoy:

Drabblecast #249 – Jimmy’s Roadside Cafe