The
Broken
by
J.J. Hernandez
Genre:
Crime Fiction
Just
released from prison, Julian Serrano is determined to get his life
back by reconnecting with his son, maintaining a legit job, and
steering clear of the life of crime that led him to prison in the
first place. All while under the watchful eye of his parole officer,
Diana Rivera. But while Julian fights to stay out of the life that
cost him everything he loved, Diana struggles with her own heartache
and loss.
Thrust
back in the life when things don’t go as planned, Julian must
decide who to trust and what plays to make. All while trying to keep
Diana believing he’s staying on the straight and narrow. In an
untangling web of betrayal, lies, and old debts come due, Julian and
Diana must come together to save each other from the ghosts of their
pasts.
Excerpt 1:
Diana thought about the day he’d left. She remembered lying face up in their bedroom and being
exhausted after two hours of crying and yelling. She had gone home early after Chloe, their
neighbor from two houses down, had called to ask her about the moving truck that was parked in
their driveway. Diana had made the mistake of confiding in her about her rocky marriage, so
Chloe had turned the dial on the nosey neighbor routine up to ten and was always on the lookout.
Diana remembered arriving just in time to watch him load the last few boxes. Although
she had been expecting something like this—things had been different between them after they’d
lost Isabel—she’d asked questions anyway. She’d thought if she forced Derek to stand and
speak, they could somehow work through the heartache together. She slowly realized there
would be no conversation, at least not the one she envisioned.
Diana realized Derek was inherently a coward. He took some exhaustive measures to
avoid speaking with her and to avoid any confrontation. He took a sick day from work and used
a credit card she hadn’t known about to hire the movers. Like the antagonist in a crime film, he’d
been planning this heist for months.
She remembered following him around their house. Diana watched as he double-checked
for things he didn’t want to leave behind. She didn’t yell at him, and even though she was dying
inside, Diana did not cry. She did not want to give him the satisfaction.
He eventually spoke to her. Derek stopped, faced her, and laid it all out. He told her he
wasn’t happy anymore, that something had died inside him after Isabel died.
Derek reminded her, as if she had somehow forgotten, that it had been almost a year since
their baby died and she wasn’t getting any better. He’d told her he’d only stayed after Isabel died
because he thought she was weak and incapable, but he couldn’t waste his life taking care of her.
And she must have been standing too straight because he added the final gut-punch of telling her
he just didn’t love her anymore, at least not in the way a husband is supposed to love their wife
Excerpt 2:
Angel Guerra’s bodega was on Jefferson Avenue, between Throop Avenue and Marcus Garvey
Boulevard in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It made up the bottom floor of a four-story building, the top
three floors consisting of six walk-up apartments.
From the outside, the bottom half of the store’s windows were covered with pictures of
deli sandwiches and various grocery items they had for sale inside the store. Maria’s Deli
Grocery, named after his mother and the store’s official owner, was printed in light-blue lettering
on the dark red awning that covered the top of the store’s windows.
Angel used the store as a front for his real business. He cleaned his money through the
store, and since he unofficially owned the entire building, he used the apartments to clean some
of his cash too. Paid himself rent for six unoccupied apartments. He even kept them furnished
and the names on the leases were legit in case someone came asking. Angel didn’t do any
business inside the building and the only people he let in were some members of his crew.
He liked where his store was located. A few years back, Brooklyn started to change. The
Nets moved into town, the Barclays Center opened, and everywhere west of Clinton Hill saw an
influx of million-dollar real estate properties, billion-dollar companies, and hipsters.
Rich people liked to see that their investments are being looked after, so the NYPD
always made a point of having a lot of cops patrolling that area. An area that in the past wouldn’t
see a cop unless they were called. Angel’s bodega was smack dab in the middle—between the
flourishing and the forgotten. Just close enough to where his shop got a taste of the new money,
but not so close that he had to worry about more cops in the neighborhood.
His spot was across the street from a Popeyes and T-Mobile Store. There used to be an
Associated Supermarket where those stores now stood. He remembered when Carlos Paz and
Artie Weisman tried to rob the supermarket before it went out of business and the building’s
owner converted one space to two spaces.
Artie and Carlos got themselves gunned down for their trouble. It was just one of the
many memories Angel had of the old neighborhood, and he liked to tell it. Especially when he
had younger members of his crew around as he did now.
Movie Theaters are Dead and COVID isn’t to Blame
J.J. Hernandez
I can’t lie, I was excited. The last time I had been to a movie theater was February 26,
2020 when I went with my family to watch Elizabeth Moss battle her ex in The Invisible
Man. Now, after having spent a week getting sunburned on the beaches of Miami, I was
ready to spend the last few hours of my vacation watching Vin Diesel go ktoe to toe with
John Cena.
Like most people in the world, I stayed away from extended and unnecessary visits to
enclosed places during the pandemic. Which, unfortunately, included movie theaters.
So, now with the CDC, WHO, USDA, ASPCA and every other agency with a cool acronym
and thinly veiled agenda saying it’s okay to return to theaters, I was like “Why the hell
not?”
I love movies. And when I say I love movies, I mean I loooove movies. Old movies, new
movies, black and white or color, I love em all. So, naturally I love movie theaters. Or at
least I loved movie theaters.
It breaks my heart to write those words, believe me it does. Once upon a time, movie
theaters were my sanctuary. No matter how bad I felt, I knew I could go sit in a theater
for a few hours and come out feeling just a little bit better. But now? Now, I feel
comfortable using the word “love” in its past tense, cause man oh man do movie
theaters suck now.
It’s not so much the theaters, as it is the people that frequent them. Boorish, rude,
entitled, selfish - pick whichever pejorative term you like best, they all work. I’m not an
idiot, I know the “Tale of the Obnoxious Movie Theater Jerk” is as old and frequently told
as Don Quixote. And this most recent experience was not my first encounter with The
OMTJ (Yes, like a child naming their monsters I have named mine, and it is called The
OMTJ).
What’s that? You want an example of The OMTJ’s dastardly deeds? Ok, how about this:
one half of the couple that sat directly behind me spent the entire movie providing their
partner with a complete oral history of the Fast and Furious franchise. Let me say that
another way, they spent the entire two hours and twenty-five minute running time
speaking about the trials and tribulations of Dom, Letty, and Brian at a volume well
above a whisper. Not enough you say? Ok, how about this: Three seats down from the
folks from Mystery Science Theater, a not so polite gentleman decided to use the top of
our friends’ seat as a footrest. What’s that? That’s not quite bad enough for you? How
about if I told you he was barefoot? Is that something that might interest you?
Well before COVID shut everything down, the movie theater going experience had
devolved into a ninth season episode of The Office, a painfully sad reminder of a once
great franchise. According to Statista.com, a survey conducted in June 2019 (about
nine months before the world shutdown) found that just 14 percent of U.S. adults visited
a movie theater one or more times per month, but 46 percent stated that they went to
the movies once a year or less. Not very promising numbers if you ask me.
There are thousands of articles on this subject. A lot of them do a really good job of
litigating the issues threatening movie theaters. Some reasons often cited: the rise of
streaming services, advanced and affordable home theater technology, and studios’
pushing for shorter exhibition windows to take advantage of home viewing habits. The
truth is, stakeholders can debate the issues all they want. The bottom line is this, until
we find a way to trap and kill The OMTJ, it ain’t looking too good for your favorite
multiplex. Somebody get Peter Vincent on the line.
J.J.
Hernandez was born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Brooklyn and
Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of Sam Houston State University and
has been a law enforcement officer in Central Texas for twenty years.
He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two daughters.
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Hell everyone, this is J.J. Hernandez author of The Broken. I'll be checking in on the comments section throughout the day if anyone wants to leave a question for me to answer.
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