Go Out Like Sunday

stories by

Barbara P. Greenbaum

~132 pages, $16.95 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: July/August 2025

An Advance Sale Discount price of $9.50 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $14/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

Barbara P. Greenbaum is a poet, fiction writer, and teacher. A New Jersey Native, she spent most of her adult like in New England where she taught creative writing. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast. Her work has appeared in many publications. She is the author of The Last Thing, book of poetry published by Main Street Rag. She currently lives in Winston Salem, North Carolina with her dog, Bean.

Such a rich and unforgettable collection of short stories, each sparked by the inescapable fact of death, painted powerfully by such a writer to follow forever. You’ll be rapt watching Greenbaum’s 3-D characters wrangle with all that can and does swirl around the end of a life, and you shouldn’t be surprised to find some version of yourself on these pages. ~Suzanne Strempek Shea, author of Make a Wish But Not for Money

“Hope is a curse,” one of Barbara P. Greenbaum’s characters warns another, faced, like so many of her people, with a life-changing decision. As dire as their situations may be, the cast of Go Out Like Sunday find a way forward. As one says of her leap, “There’s more future here than there ever was there.” ~Stewart O’Nan, author of Last Night at the Lobster House and Emily, Alone

In these stories, Barbara P. Greenbaum has an uncanny ability to inhabit characters and their voices with pitch perfect accuracy. She moves from a high school student to a teacher to a murderous wife and more with equal grace and ease. Greenbaum is a natural born storyteller and this collection shows that off beautifully. ~Ann Hood

DUMB ASS

Jake Skilling is dead. Nobody’s supposed to die when they’re seventeen but he did. Dumb ass. Know how he died? He’s late for school, so he’s doing sixty-five down route 26 and he loses it. Drives his truck right into a tree. In about three seconds he’s dead. He had his little brother with him, and now the kid’s got brain damage. How dumb ass is that?

And you know what all the assholes in school do? Cry and cry and cry. I mean, there are fucking signs all over the halls. We love you, Jake, we miss you, Jake, RIP, and “Git Er Done!” because that was his favorite saying. All the senior cars show up with “Git Er Done!” in white letters across the back of the windshields. Yep—he was that original. And then they have this assembly so we can all get “closure,” as if his whole life is just like a suitcase you can shut and latch up and put away somewhere. Coach Nelson comes out and says he was just one of the finest young men he’d ever known, like he was a saint. He could kick a soccer ball, but that didn’t make him a saint. Not even close, and now it looks like I’m the only one who knows that.

I said something at the cafe this morning. Okay, I said he was a dumb ass, and they all looked at me like I was crazy. Amy Fincher started crying, like everybody doesn’t know she cries at everything and she always had the hots for Jake, but he never even looked at her. She screams at me—You didn’t know him. And I just shook my head and left because I did. I walked down that hallway, over all that new linoleum, past all those pretty blue lockers, and I walked right out because I knew him better than any of them. And I wish I never had. In fact, I wish the dumb ass had died years ago.

It started with all the faggot jokes, in fifth grade. He’d throw soccer balls at me on the playground. He’d bonk me on the head whenever he had a chance, and he’d laugh his ass off, he and his three little buddies who were all bigger than I was at the time. He called me faggot so many times, I thought it was my name. Franklin Faggot. Nice alliteration, you think? And the funny thing was, I wasn’t sure what it meant. Did he know something I didn’t?

I don’t know why adults never see this shit, but they all liked him. Everybody did. School isn’t a safe place to be on your own where everyone likes the hell out of the guy whose mission in life is to beat the crap out of you at every opportunity. Even when you tell, nobody wants to believe you. They look at you sympathetically, like you’ve got a cantaloupe-sized tumor coming from your forehead, nod, say things like, Oh, that’s too bad, Franklin, have you tried just talking to him? And then do nothing. Once, I heard Mr. Evans say to Madam Gray, Oh, you know how histrionic Franklin is. He’s just that way. As if somehow, this was my fault. If I’d been a different kind of kid, this incredibly likeable guy would be my friend too. But no, I was that way.

In some ways I guess you could say Jake “liked” me, all right. Did you know? There are all kinds of places in a school to hide. The bathrooms, the back of the gym behind the equipment pile, the music room. I know because he’d find me every time. For a while it was every week, at least freshman year. That was the first time he actually hit me. And I thought the soccer balls were bad. Nothing that would show. Mostly he’d just slap me on the arms, in the face. And the bruises wouldn’t show up until later.

Then he’d pretend he didn’t even know who I was walking around in the halls. That was the worst part. I got used to it after a while, him smacking the shit out of me. But in the halls, he’d walk right by me like I was bad air. I felt like a ghost only a few people could see, and most of them were just like me.

At least I had summers off. My mom could never figure out why I didn’t want to go to school. So stupid about things they don’t want to see. I grew four inches that year and four more the year after that, and the little sessions with Jake did get to be fewer over time, but fewer wasn’t never. In some ways it was easier when it was more regular. You’d get it over with and then you could depend on a few days off. When there’d be a long stretch, you’d anticipate it, and that made it harder.

I don’t know what made me find a spine. To this day I don’t know. But it was sometime around the end of junior year. Must have been around April because the cherry trees were blooming, and I could see them from that high window in the back of the gym just past the edge of the folded bleachers. It was lunchtime and I’d gone there to hide, do my homework, as usual. I didn’t like lunch and I figured out pretty quick that if I lagged behind, Mr. Barnard, the PE teacher, would just leave and assume everyone was out of there.

So, I sat on the floor, my trigonometry book open in front of me, when Jake swaggered in. Swaggered was the word made for the way he moved. He had a cowboy hat on and a western-style shirt because it was “country day” and he was big into that school spirit shit.

“Hey, Franklin Faggot, what you doing? Jerking off again?” he said, and laughed, as he kicked my book so it slid across the floor and clunked against the wall. He had this long, narrow face, a ferret face with a kind of rangy flexibility to it. He had very round gray eyes that seemed to get darker the more he hurt people. It was mainly me, but there were a few others. A kid named Sam moved away the middle of our sophomore year. I heard he’d tried to kill himself over Jake’s little antics.

Around that time, I had a dream Jake came after me again, but this time I stopped him. After that, he crashed a lot of my dreams. Sometimes I’d tackle him, once I hit him with a rock, once I pushed him into a pool. He’d get up and come after me, but more and more it felt like I’d gotten faster. In one dream, I just started hitting him again and again, but it was like his face was made of rubber, and it just bounced back, smiling.

And now here he was again in real life, that same smirk.

“Get a life, Jake,” I said, and started to stand up. He kicked me in the thigh. Hurt like hell and as usual my heart started racing. In the past he’d put up his fists and start to move back and forth on his toes, all energy, but today he just looked tired, almost as if he were as tired as I was of all this crap. I’m such a fucking optimist.

“Sessions with Jake! Are you ready?” he asked because he always asked me that. “Time to Git Er Done!”

I didn’t move. Ever have one of those moments when pain makes something clear? Like it’s telling you something? I realized it didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. Or maybe as much as it used to. Maybe the two of us had been doing this for so long we couldn’t figure out how to not do it anymore, but the effect was wearing off. At least for me.

Slowly, I stood up. I bent down and picked up my book, closed it, and set it aside on the floor. As I straightened back up, I felt heady because I realized, looking up at the lights of the gym and the white ceilings, that I wasn’t afraid anymore. Or maybe I just didn’t care. I looked down at him, and he looked small.

When he came at me, I grabbed him by the shoulders, turned him in a half circle, and slammed him hard up against the back wall. His hat flew off. It surprised me that I could just do that, and I felt strong, even though my hands were shaking like crazy. Then, I kissed him. Weird, eh? He tasted like shit—cigarettes and coffee to be exact—and I don’t care for either, but here’s the strange thing. For a second, maybe even a nano of a second, he kissed me back. And when I pushed off of him and took a few steps back, his face was all twisted like he was going to cry. He stepped away from the wall and pushed me, two hands on my chest, and I let him. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I always knew you were a faggot,” he said, spitting on the floor.

“What’s that make you?” I asked him.

“You tell anybody about this, I’ll kill you,” he said.

“You call me faggot again and I’ll tell everybody we’ve been doing this for years.”

He looked so surprised when I said that. For a minute I thought he was going to try to hit me. His face went red, and he grabbed his hat off the floor, and he took off across the gym. He never touched me again.

Now he’s dead, he’s a fucking saint. I can’t stand that, so I’m not going back in for a while. Let them all be delusional. He wasn’t a saint, he was a sick fuck. A dumb ass. And for a long time, I let him make me one too.

Get this, two weeks ago he even said hello to me in the hall. Nobody was around of course, but he said hi and kept on walking. I heard later he was picking on some freshman kid, Cody Lacy’s brother, but nope, I didn’t play the hero. I figured if I could figure this out, maybe this kid could too. That’s what high school is for, right? Figuring out who’s going to survive?

If you’ve enjoyed this story, order Go Out Like Sunday and have it delivered to your door so you can read the rest of it once the book has been published in spring 2025.