The Thermo Room by Don Robishaw

There’s a club on the grounds of a nuclear power plant, built on a fault line. When you walk in, adjacent to the dining room -- a narrow corridor -- adjacent to that passageway -- a bar --
and behind the bar --  five feet long, two-and-a-half feet wide, black and white glossy of none other than Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. You’ll meet a bartender. Sparky will have a glow about him, emanating from his fire engine red curly hair, matching beard, and a slight smirk. When you’re ready to order he’ll slap his crimson-vested belly and say, “We list our specialty drinks in the Tru-man’s Refreshment Menu, cocktail recipes included.” He’ll slap his belly again, make a hearty laugh, and hand you a menu, while reeling off their names one by one:

“1. Manhattan
2. Death in the Afternoon
3. Adios Mf’er
4. Nuclear Fallout
5. After Burner
6. B-52
7. H-Bomb
8. Zombie
9. Invisible Man”

Raising an invisible glass he’ll say, “Cheers, to a nuclear free world!”

“I wish!”

Before Don Robishaw stopped working to write, he ran educational programs for homeless shelters for thirteen years. 

Don's also well-traveled, using various ways and means: Sailor, Peace Corps Volunteer, bartender, hitchhiker, world traveler, college professor, and circus roustabout.

His work has recently appeared in, The Rye Whiskey Review, Drunk Monkeys,O’ Dark Thirty, Literary Orphans, Crack-the-Spine, The Remembered Arts, Open: Journal of Arts and Letters, Flash Fiction Magazine, and others. His chapbook, ‘Willie’s Bad Paper Odyssey’ was a semi-finalist in Digging Press 2018 Summer Chapbook Contest.

He like to write poetry, satire, tragedies, and gritty fictional tales — of men and women from various backgrounds — that may have sprouted from a seed, from his past.

Many of the characters he developed have been homeless, served for periods of time in the military, or are based upon archetypes or sterotypes he's met while on the road.