It’s Not My Fault She Wasn’t Dead ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

 

It's Not My Fault She Wasn't Dead

It’s Not My Fault She Wasn’t Dead
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This is a repost. It has been published in The Literary Hatchet.)

It was eleven o’clock Saturday night. I had spent a strenuous day doing next to nothing, laying around my apartment reading Dostoevsky, and was ready to go to sleep, when the telephone rang. I was going to let it ring, but I figured it had to be Mr. Ludwig. Nobody else would call at that hour.

 “Got a little job for you,” the voice on the telephone said.

“Mr. Ludwig!” I said. “How happy I am to hear from you!”

 “You alone?”

 “Yes, I am. I was about to go to bed, though.”

“I can always get somebody else if you’re indisposed.”

“Just kidding! I would never pass up the chance to do you a service!”

“A doctor had somebody die in his office. A woman. He wants her removed before morning.”

“What did he do to her?”

“Never mind. The doctor has a problem and is paying us plenty to remove it for him.”

“I’ll wear my Boris Karloff disguise.”

“I don’t care what you wear. Just get the job done.”

He gave me the address and I wrote it down on the inside of a match book.

“There’s a dead-end alley that runs behind the doctor’s building,” he said. “Pull in there. The doctor will be waiting for you.”

“Sounds like a cakewalk.”

“Put the deceased in your car and bring her to me.”

“I won’t exactly be taking her out for a night on the town.”

“And make sure nobody sees you!”

I found the address easily enough. As expected, the doctor was waiting. Dressed all in white, he looked like a ghost.

“You the man Ludwig sent?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Turn off those headlights!”

“No need to be so jittery,” I said.

“Did anybody see you?”

“There’s nobody around this time of night.”

“Nobody but the police,” he said.

He pulled the door back and pointed down. He had the woman in a body bag right inside the door.

“You sure she’s dead?” I asked.

“I strangled her.”

“Charming.”

She was so light I thought she must only be a child. I was glad I didn’t have to see her face. I put her in the trunk and turned to bid the doctor farewell.

“You have a wonderful evening, now,” I said.

“You were never here!” he said, slamming the door.

Mr. Ludwig lived twelve miles outside of town in a hundred-year-old house. He probably built it himself, he was so old. He was a doctor but I didn’t know what kind. I didn’t ask questions.

The road to Mr. Ludwig’s house was hilly, curvy, and dark with that special kind of lonely darkness that exists only in the country. I hardly ever met any other cars out there and if I did I figured they were driven by lost souls who couldn’t find their way.

I made sure I didn’t exceed the speed limit—I couldn’t afford to be stopped with a corpse in my trunk—and I got to Mr. Ludwig’s place a little before one o’clock. The big iron gate opened for me as if by magic and I drove through, up to the big house and around to the back.

I stopped the car and got out. I stood there beside the car, looking up at the silent hulk of the house and listening to the crickets. In a couple of minutes Mr. Ludwig came out the door with one of his goons, a muscle boy named Kurt.

“Any problems?” Mr. Ludwig asked.

“No,” I said.

“Nobody saw you turn in here?”

“Only a couple of owls.”

“Well, bring her on inside then.”

I opened the trunk and Kurt lifted the bundle like a sack of feathers and carried it inside. Mr. Ludwig motioned for me to follow him so we could sit down in his study and complete the transaction and, I hoped, call it a night.

 “Would you like a drink?” he asked as I sat down on his expensive leather sofa.

“No, thanks,” I said. “It’s late and I just want my money.”

“Stay and have a drink with me,” he said. “I hardly ever have a chance for intelligent conversation.”

“What makes you think you’ll get it from me?”

“I know you. How long have you been working for me now?”

“About a year, I guess.”

“Just have one little drink to be friendly,” he said.

“All right. Just one.”

He poured some scotch, which I hated, into a glass and handed it to me. He was a tall man, slightly stooped in the shoulders, wearing an expensive-looking robe of some soft material like cashmere. It made him look like an enormous brown bear.

“How has the world been treating you?” he asked.

I sighed, in no mood for small talk. “I can’t complain,” I said.

“You like working for me, don’t you?”

“Sure.”

“You like working at night.”

“I guess so.”

“Everything is more interesting at night, don’t you agree?”

I would have agreed to anything that would bring the conversation to an end. “Yes, sir,” I said.

“There are infinite possibilities lurking in the dark.”

“If you say so.”

“Of course, the kind of work we do has to be done at night.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought I’d give you a little extra this time for your trouble, since it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Say six-fifty instead of the usual five hundred.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate that.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank Dr. Broyles. He’ll be picking up the tab.”

“I don’t want to know his name.”

“You met him when you picked up the girl?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He was a very charming fellow.”

“Did he say she bled to death, or what?”

“He said he strangled her.”

Mr. Ludwig laughed so that his jowls quivered like jelly. “That’s a good one!” he said. “An odd choice of words but, then, he’s an odd character.”

“He a friend of yours?” I asked.

“I’ve known him all of thirty years.”

I looked over at the clock and cleared my throat. I was tired and had a headache. “Well, Mr. Ludwig,” I said. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’d like to get my money and go home now.”

Kurt came into the room and Mr. Ludwig and I both turned and looked at him.

“What is it now?” Mr. Ludwig asked.

“I think you need to see this,” Kurt said.

“What is it?”

“It’s the girl in the bag.”

Mr. Ludwig left with Kurt and in a couple of minutes he came back into the room. His jovial manner had vanished. The corners of his mouth turned down as if his face was made of dough.

“Anything the matter?” I asked.

“She’s not dead,” Mr. Ludwig said.

“What?”

“I said she isn’t dead.”

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“You’ll have to kill her.”

“What? I’ll have to kill her?”

“Do you want her identifying you to the police?”

“She hasn’t seen me.”

He took a gun out of his desk and pushed it toward me.

“I’m not going to kill her,” I said. “Get Kurt to do it. I think he’d enjoy killing a woman.”

“Kurt’s no killer.”

“Neither am I.”

“I thought you were courageous.”

“Up to a point I am, but nobody said anything about killing a dame.”

“You were hired to bring a dead body to me,” he said. “You brought me a live one. It’s not quite the same thing, is it? Your job isn’t finished until you give me what I’m paying you for.”

“Why should I do it? You’re a doctor. Can’t you just chloroform her or something?”

He smiled as if we were talking about pulling a kite out of a tree. “All you have to do is take the gun, point it at her head and pull the trigger. It’s all so simple.”

“I’ve never killed anybody before!” I said, and I hoped the logic of that statement would carry me through.

“Once you’ve done it, you’ll see how easy it is.”

“How about if I take her back to town and drop her off at the nearest hospital? An anonymous drop-off. No questions asked and none answered. She hasn’t seen you or Kurt. She hasn’t seen me. She hasn’t seen any of us. She doesn’t know where she is. She was in my trunk inside a bag all the way out here.”

“When they see the state she’s in, they’ll call the police and the first thing she’ll do is put the finger on Dr. Broyles. I must do what I can to protect my old friend.”

“Maybe I can talk to her and make her promise not to say a word to anybody.”

“My goodness, you are naïve, aren’t you?” he laughed.

“Killing is not in my line,” I said. “I’ll bet you have half a dozen others on your payroll who specialize in that sort of thing.”

“None of them are here, though. You are.”

He stood up, walked around the desk and placed the gun in my hand.

“I don’t want to shoot her,” I said. “Maybe I’ll hold a pillow over face until she stops breathing.”

He took a three-foot length of rope out of his desk and tossed it to me. “Use whatever method you prefer. Just do it.”

“And what will you do with her after I kill her?” I asked.

“You don’t have to worry about that. I know how to make dead bodies disappear.”

“Sounds delightful.”

“You’re a doer, not a thinker. Just do it and don’t think so much about it.”

“Yeah, I’m a doer,” I said.

He held the door for me to go into the room where the girl was who was supposed to be dead but wasn’t and closed the door behind me. There was just enough light in the room for me to see the light switch. I couldn’t kill anybody that I couldn’t see, so I turned on the light.

The empty body bag was on the table but the girl was gone.

I opened the door again and said to Mr. Ludwig, sitting at his desk, “What’s the gag? There’s nobody here.”

Mr. Ludwig came rushing into the room and when he saw the girl wasn’t there he yelled for Kurt, who immediately appeared from another part of the house.

“She’s gone, you idiot!” Mr. Ludwig said. “Why didn’t you watch her?”

“She was here just a minute ago!” Kurt said.

“Find her!”

The two of them seemed to forget about me while they looked behind the curtains, in the closet, in the bathroom—any place a person might hide.

“Maybe she went upstairs,” I said, pointing up the dark staircase with the gun.

“Go check and see if she’s upstairs!” Mr. Ludwig said to Kurt.

Mr. Ludwig was red in the face. I thought he might pop a blood vessel right before my eyes.

While Mr. Ludwig and Kurt were searching frantically for the girl, upstairs and down, I thought of the simple expedient of checking the back door.

The door was partly open and a rug in front of the door was kicked up, so I figured the girl had run out into the night. There was no place for her to run to out there, but at least she could get away.

I sat down on the sofa and took a deep breath, listening to the sounds of Mr. Ludwig and Kurt scrambling around upstairs. When Mr. Ludwig came down again, I smiled.

“She flew the coop!” I said.

“She what?”

“She ran out the back door.”

“Don’t just sit there, you idiot! Go find her!”

“It’s not my job to find her,” I said, “and I’d be careful who you’re calling an idiot, if I were you.”

He went straight to the phone and called “some people” to come out from town and comb the woods and the grounds surrounding the house to try to find her.

When he hung up the phone, he rubbed his forehead as if he was kneading bread. “They’ll be here as quick as they can,” he said, “but in the meantime, I want you and Kurt to go outside and see if you can find her.”

I was on the point of refusing when he handed me a flashlight and another one to Kurt and hustled us out of the house.

“You’d better not let her get away again!” he said threateningly as he slammed the door.

Kurt and I stood there in the dark at the back of the house, listening to the crickets. He was smoking a cigarette and didn’t seem in any hurry.

“He’s crazy, you know,” he said.

“I suspected it,” I said. “Why do you work for him?”

“He likes to have a well-built young man around.”

“Are you saying Mr. Ludwig is queer?”

He shrugged. “Call it whatever you want.”

“What do you get out of it?”

“He pays me plenty.”

I looked up at the moonless sky. “It’s too dark tonight to see anything.”

“Yeah, I know, but we can go through the motions, can’t we?”

“You look on that side of the house and I’ll look on this side,” I said.

There were twelve acres surrounding the house. The carefully tended lawn ended where the woods began. I figured the girl, if she had any sense at all, would hide herself in the woods until morning and then try to find somebody to help her.

I spent an hour or more going over the lawn with the flashlight. I saw a possum and a couple raccoons but that’s all. I was about to go back inside and tell Mr. Ludwig it was hopeless, when I heard a snap over to my left beyond the boundary of the lawn.

I shone my light where the sound came from. All I saw were trees and brush, but then a person materialized out of the dark.

“Don’t shoot me!” a female voice said.

“Who’s there?” I said.

She stood up then out of the brush, her hands in the air. She wasn’t more than twenty years old. “Please don’t shoot me!” she said.

“I’m not going to shoot you!” I said.

“What is this place?” she asked.

“It’s the home of a mad scientist, twelve miles from town on a very lonely road.”

“How did I get here?”

“Never mind that now. If you value your life, you’d better get away from this place as quick as you can. There are people coming out to look for you and they mean business.”

“Can you help me?”

“No. I’m supposed to find you and take you to him.”

“Take me to who?”

“It wouldn’t help you if I told you his name.”

“I’m so scared!” she said, starting to cry. “I don’t remember anything that happened.”

“Do you remember a doctor? Being in his office?”

“Oh, yeah. Him.”

“He thought he strangled you. He thought you were dead.”

“Oh, yeah.” She touched her throat and winced.

“Parked behind the house is a black car,” I said. “That’s my car. After Kurt and I go back inside the house, go around to the side of the car away from the house and get in on the floor in the back seat. Close the door as quietly as you can. There’s an old army blanket on the floor in the back that you can use to cover up with. I’ll be going back to town as soon as I can get away from here and I’ll drop you off and then I’m finished with this whole thing.”

“Who’s Kurt?”

“You don’t want to know. If you want to go on living, just do as I say. And if they find you in my car, I had nothing to do with it.”

“Okay.”

I circled around the front and met up with Kurt on the other side of the house.

“Any luck?” I asked.

“No. I didn’t see anything.”

“Me either.”

“The boss is not going to like it,” he said.

“Maybe his people will find her.”

When we went back inside, Mr. Ludwig had settled himself down with a bottle of whiskey. He smiled when he saw us.

“Did you find her?” he asked.

“No,” Kurt said. “She’s nowhere around the house.”

“Did you look everywhere?”

“As well as we could in the dark.”

“She probably went out to the road and flagged down a car,” I said. “Somebody to give her a ride to town.”

“She’d better keep her big trap shut,” Mr. Ludwig said, “or she won’t live long.”

“If she has any sense at all, she’ll know that,” I said.

“With people like that, you can never be sure of anything.”

“People like what?” I asked.

“She’s a doper. A heroin addict. So is the doctor. He was giving her what she needed. Something went wrong, I imagine, and then he had to strangle her.”

“Maybe she refused to pay him,” Kurt said helpfully. “Drug dealers get awfully touchy about that.”

“Shut up, Kurt!” Mr. Ludwig said. “Go on and go to bed now!”

After Kurt was gone and I was left alone with Mr. Ludwig, I asked him again for the money he owed me.

He looked at me sadly and shook his head. “I don’t pay for sloppy work,” he said.

I couldn’t keep from laughing. “It’s not my fault she wasn’t dead. If there’s any blame to be allocated, I think it belongs to the doctor.”

“He won’t see it that way. When he finds out she wasn’t dead, he won’t pay me and I can’t pay you. That’s the way the world of business works.”

“I have no appreciation for the world of business,” I said.

“You can go now,” Mr. Ludwig said. “You’ll be hearing from me soon. Good night.”

“It’s almost four o’clock. It’s good morning now instead of good night.”

When I went out to get into my car to go home, Mr. Ludwig’s people were out in full force looking for the girl. I was sure some of them weren’t happy at being yanked out of bed in the middle of the night, but I knew they were being well paid for their efforts.

 The girl didn’t make a sound all the way back to town. I dropped her off at the hospital but wouldn’t let her get out of the car until I gave her some advice.

“You don’t know anything,” I said. “You don’t know how you got here. You don’t know where you’ve been. You’ve been with some bad people, that’s all. If you’re thinking of getting revenge on that doctor, he’ll kill you. If he doesn’t, somebody else will.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“I’m not fooling, now. This is serious business. Do not say a word about anything that happened if you want to go on living.”

“I got it.”

She got out of the car and began walking across the parking lot toward the emergency-room door. Before going inside, she turned and gave me a little wave.

The sun was just starting to come up when I got home, but for me the day was ending instead of beginning. I had a hot shower, closed the curtains and fell into bed. Before I went to sleep, though, I took the phone off the hook. I figured I deserved that, at least.

Copyright © 2026 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Somebody Somewhere ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Somebody Waits for Me image 3

Somebody Somewhere
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This is a repost. It has been published in The Literary Hatchet.)

I was standing at the window. Inside it was still winter but outside it was spring. The sky was blue, trees and flowers were budding, the sun was shining and birds were singing. Miss Deloite, the woman with the delightful hanging mole on her upper lip, came up behind me. I heard her shoes squeaking on the floor and then smelled her particular sharp smell.

“You shouldn’t be wandering the halls,” she said.

I ignored her but as she walked away I turned and stuck out the tip of my tongue at her and she turned into a puff of blue smoke. You can’t know how satisfying it is to turn an annoying woman into a puff of blue smoke.

I went back to the room that I had come to identify as my own and lay on my back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. I knew there was something wrong with me but I couldn’t remember what it was. I couldn’t even remember what place I was in. Oh, well. If it mattered at one time, it didn’t matter much any more.

I heard somebody coming and picked up a magazine and opened it and pretended to be reading. I wanted to look busy so nobody would ask me questions or try to engage me in conversation.

It was Theo, all dressed in white as usual. If I saw him in any other color, I wouldn’t recognize him.

“Where’s Miss Deloite?” he asked. “She said she was coming in here to help you with your bath.”

“I’m perfectly capable of taking a bath on my own without any female assistance,” I said, not looking up from the page.

I should probably have told him I just turned her into a puff of smoke but I would have to let him figure it out on his own. He should feel lucky that I didn’t do the same to him.

I crossed my ankles and wished I had a cigarette, and in came Louie from next door. He was wearing a lady’s red kimono with colorful dragons. I didn’t like Louie and I let him know it.

“What makes you think you can just barge into my room any time you feel like it, Louie? I’m supposed to be taking a bath.”

“I already took mine.”

“I’m so happy for you.”

“Do you have any candy?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Shouldn’t you be having your nails done or something?”

“I’m going to tell Miss Deloite you were snotty to me,” Louie said.

“You’ll be telling it to a puff of blue smoke.”

“What?”

Before Louie could annoy me any further, I raised my eyebrows and turned him into a little spider. I laughed as I watched him run on his touchingly small legs across the floor to the wall. He crawled up the wall to the ceiling and looked at me.

“You’re a medical phenomenon,” I said.

I was thinking about taking a nap, for lack of anything better to do, when Theo came back, bearing clean towels.

“Since Miss Deloite is temporarily not to be found,” he said, “I’m going to help you with your bath.”

“I already told you I don’t need help with a bath,” I said.

“Stand up now and take off your clothes, or I’ll do it for you.”

“I don’t want to take off my clothes for you any more than I do for Miss Deloite.”

“Do you want me to go get Stan and Sylvia?”

“Oh, please! Not Stan and Sylvia! I can’t tell them apart. Oh, I remember now. Sylvia’s the one with the mustache, isn’t she?”

“Cut the comedy now. Stand up.”

“Theo, I don’t like your tone of voice!” I said. “It’s not a polite way to speak to a man who isn’t well.”

He came at me with the intention of pulling me off the bed by my arm, but before he knew what was happening I raised my index finger at him and turned him into a blue jay.

Now, I had always thought the blue jay a most attractive bird, even though people said he was mean and liked to eat carrion.

Theo flapped his blue wings a couple of times and flew up to the ceiling and ate the tiny spider Louie in one gulp. Louie didn’t even have time to try to get away.

“Good bird!” I said.

He flew around the room a couple of times, bumping painfully into the walls until I stood up and opened the window for him. He didn’t have to be coaxed to fly out and then away over the treetops.

“Be well!” I called to him.

I lay down again. I did not want to take a bath and would be just as obstinate about it as I needed to be. I still believed the decision to take a bath should be mine alone. Crazy though I may be, I must have some rights left!

Before I had time to draw another breath, Nurse LaPeezy was upon me with my meds. I eyed the pills suspiciously.

“What if I don’t want to take that stuff?” I said.

“Doctor’s orders,” she said.

“So you’re saying I don’t have a choice?”

“I could call Stan and Sylvia if you like.”

“Oh, no! Not that!”

She handed me a cup of water and I pretended to take the pills. I put them in my mouth and swallowed but I held them under my tongue. When she bent over to pick something up off the floor, I spit them into my fist. The hand is quicker than the eye.

As Nurse LaPeezy was leaving I felt a strong dislike for her. I flicked the little finger on my right hand at her and she turned into a mouse. Realizing she was a mouse, she scurried across the floor the way mice do and disappeared into a conveniently placed mouse hole in the corner. I envied her because I knew she’d find her way to the kitchen where she’d have plenty to eat and find lots of other mice to keep her company. How sweet the life of a mouse must be! Much better than that of a nurse.

The next time somebody came in to help me take a bath, I was going to tell them I had already taken it while everybody was occupied elsewhere. I wanted them to know I had been taking a bath on my own since I was three years old and didn’t need help from anybody.

I was almost asleep when a slight change in the air currents around the bed made me open my eyes. Dr. Felix had come in silently and was standing at the foot of the bed looking at me.

“Sorry to wake you,” he said.

Dr. Felix wore glasses and looked like the movie actor Franchot Tone. His hands were folded in front of him. I looked at his hairy wrists and his expensive wrist watch so I wouldn’t have to look at his face.

“If you don’t mind, doctor,” I said. “I don’t really feel like talking to you today.”

“Anything wrong in particular?” he asked.

“No. It’s just that I’m here and I don’t know where here is.”

“Here is where you need to be at the moment.”

“I must have a home somewhere, even if I can’t remember it. I want to go home.”

“Everybody feels that way sometimes.”

“That’s comforting.”

“I’m going to increase your antidepressant medication again.”

“You doctors think drugs are the answer to everything, don’t you?”

“You’re spending far too much time alone. That’s not good. I’m going to assign you to some group activities.”

I groaned and closed my eyes. “Don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “I won’t be here that long.”

“Are you planning on going someplace?”

“Well, you never know,” I said.

He chuckled in his knowing way and turned to go. As he started to put his hand on the door to open it, I blew out a little puff of air in his direction and turned him into a cockroach. He ran under the door and out into the hallway. One of the nurses would see him and scream and step on him and then take a Kleenex out of the pocket of her uniform and pick him up and throw him in the trash can. How fitting is that for Dr. Felix?

Before anybody else had a chance to come in and annoy me further, I dressed in some clothes I had been hiding in the bottom of the closet. It was a uniform the maintenance men wore that I had stolen one day when I was exploring in the basement. In the uniform and with the brown cap pulled low over my eyes, nobody would recognize me. Also hidden away in the closet I had some ninety dollars and a pack of cigarettes, which I stuffed into the pants of the uniform.

I took a good look at myself in the mirror over the sink. I looked as much like a maintenance man as the real one did. Cautiously I went out into the hallway. Everything was quiet and nothing out of the ordinary. I made my way down the stairs to the main entrance.

The receptionist at the front desk looked up from the magazine she was reading and then looked away. I knew she didn’t know who I was. If she had known, she would have been screaming for help.

I walked out the door into the bright cool air and down the steps, wanting to run but not running because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I followed the concrete walk to the driveway and along the edge of the driveway a quarter-mile or so to the main gate. I saw nobody and nobody saw me.

I turned right at the gate out of the place, which seemed to me a better choice than going left, and began walking briskly. I walked for many blocks and saw nothing that looked familiar. I might have been in a foreign country or on another planet, for all I knew. Still, it felt good to be free and on my own.

Checking my pocket to make sure the ninety dollars was still there, I remembered the cigarettes and how long it had been since I had one. I lit one up and as I walked I puffed out a cloud of smoke behind me.

I stopped at a bar that looked inviting and had a beer and a hamburger and after that I kept walking deep into the city. It was a big city but I didn’t know what the name of it was and I didn’t know if I had ever been there before. I saw many people but they seemed to not see me, which altogether suited me.

After what seemed like hours of walking, I felt tired but pleasantly so, and I felt good about the distance I had put between myself and the place I had left behind. When I came to a faded old hotel with a sign that said Clean Rooms and Cheap, I decided that getting a room was the most logical thing I could do.

The desk clerk signed me in without asking for identification or money in advance. He gave me a key to a room on the tenth floor and I went up in a smelly elevator that must have been a hundred years old.

The room was clean, as advertised, and pleasant. There were two windows, a bed, desk, dresser with a large mirror, chair, closet and tiny bathroom. I liked the feeling of being up high. I opened the window a couple of inches to feel the air and to hear the traffic noises from the street, which at that distance I found soothing. After checking the door to make sure it was locked, I lay down on the bed and fell into a deep and restful sleep.

I spent two days and nights in the room, sleeping a lot during the day and walking around the city at night. Nobody ever approached me or bothered me or seemed to find my behavior in any way out of the ordinary. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so free and unencumbered.

More than anything I wanted to go home, but I didn’t know how that was ever going to be possible. I knew very little about myself, except for insignificant details like enjoying smoking and preferring tea instead of coffee. I could remember nothing of my past life. Where had I come from? Where was I going?

Did I come from a small town or a city like this one? Did I grow up in an apartment in the city or in a house in the wide-open spaces with a big yard and a view of the mountains? Wasn’t it likely that somebody was waiting for me somewhere, wondering if I was alive or dead or if I would ever come home again? A mother? A wife? A lover? A son or daughter? Whoever he or she was, I could feel them and I knew they could feel me.

When the people from the hospital I had just left realized I was gone, I knew they would come looking for me. I had done some very bad things, including turning my doctor into a bug and a nurse into a mouse, which I have already told you about. They would lock me up now and I would never go free again.

On my third day in my little hotel room high up, I had the window open as high as it would go to let in the warm breezes. At any one time, there were as many as five pigeons on the ledge outside the window. They cooed and danced and seemed happy. When I got close to them, they weren’t at all afraid of me. If I had had something to feed them, they would have eaten right out of my hand.

I sat on the bed, looking at myself in the round mirror on the dresser. Wait a minute, I thought. I don’t have to go back to that place or any other place like it. I can do to myself what I did to the others.

I pointed at my reflection in the mirror and turned myself into a pigeon. I flapped my wings on the bed to try them out. From the bed I jumped to the floor and then to the window ledge. There were three pigeons already there to greet me. They knew I was somebody they had never seen before, so they were curious about where I had come from. After introductions were made, they were all eager to show me around the city. They were extraordinarily accepting of me, even though I was a stranger. How happy I was to be welcomed by them. How fortunate to have made such delightful friends so fast.

Copyright © 2026 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

For Sentimental Reasons ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

For Sentimental Reasons
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~ 

(This is a repost. It has been published in The Literary Hatchet.)

Hearing Russell’s footsteps on the stairs, Vee set a glass of orange juice on the table and cracked two eggs into the skillet. When he came into the sunny kitchen, she smiled and wished him a good morning and asked him if he’d like bacon with his eggs. Not waiting for an answer, she took four slices out of the refrigerator and laid them carefully in the skillet beside the eggs.

He helped himself to some coffee and sat down at the table. He looked across the table at Vee’s husband, Milt, but Milt didn’t look back. He was absorbed in the morning newspaper. He loved reading about crime in the city. It seemed to somehow make him happy.

“You’re such a sharp dresser!” Vee said to Russell from her place at the stove, pointing to his natty black pants and red-plaid shirt. “A lot of college students go around looking like bums all the time.”

Russell smiled modestly and downed his orange juice.

“Did you say something?” Milt asked, looking around the edge of the newspaper.

“I was just saying to Russell here how he always looks so dapper, even early in the morning.”

“Oh, Russell!” Milt said, putting down the paper. “I almost forgot about Russell!  He is a quiet boy!”

“He’s hardly a boy!” Vee said, setting Russell’s plate down in front of him. “He’s a fully grown man! Just look at those arms!”

“I work out when I have the time,” Russell said.

“Whatever makes you happy,” Milt said. “Say, I was just reading in the paper where a family of six was murdered in their own beds. No sign of forced entry. Police don’t have a clue who did it. Can you beat it? What is the world coming to? And over on Polk Avenue, in those old apartment buildings near the post office, a woman stabbed her common-law husband in the neck and went off to work and left him on the floor to bleed to death.”

“Can’t we talk about something more cheerful?” Vee asked. “It’s a beautiful morning!”

“I heard yesterday about an old woman who lived alone. Somebody broke into her house and after they stole her money and jewels, they killed her. Slit her throat. She had two big dogs. They didn’t have any food for a long time so they ate her body, right down to the bones! Did you ever hear of anything so awful?”

“Russell doesn’t want to hear that gruesome talk!” Vee said. “He’s young and full of life!”

“It’s all right,” Russell said. “I don’t want you to do anything different on my account.”

“How do you like your room?” Milt asked.

“I like it fine, sir.”

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir’. This isn’t the army.”

“No, sir. I know it’s not the army.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four in October, sir.”

“It’s probably hard for you to believe right now,” Milt said, “but I was twenty-four not so long ago.”

“Russell’s a graduate student,” Vee said. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

“A what?”

“He’s earned his undergraduate degree. Now he’s in graduate school.”

“Oh, right! I guess you can’t have too many degrees.”

“I should be able to get my master’s degree in two more semesters,” Russell said.

“So you’ll only need the room for two semesters,” Vee said.

“As far as I know.”

“Oh, I hope you’ll stay longer than that! You’re the best boarder we’ve ever had!”

“I don’t think you’ll have any trouble renting the room to somebody else,” Russell said. “It’s a comfortable room, conveniently located, and you are an exceptional cook.”

Vee smiled with pleasure and set down her cup. “It’s sweet of you to say so,” she said. “Most people don’t usually have anything good to say.”

“We don’t want any beatnik types with their bongo drums,” Milt said.

Vee laughed. “You’re behind the times, dear!”  she said. “There aren’t any beatniks anymore!”

“You know what I mean!” Milt said. “We only want the decent-living, clean-cut types. The ones who don’t make a sound at night because they’ve got their noses buried in books all the time.”

“I think he’s saying he approves of you, Russell!” Vee said.

“We don’t need to overdo it,” Milt said.

Russell finished his breakfast and stood up. He offered to carry his plate to the sink, but Vee told him she’d take care of it.

“I won’t be here for dinner,” he said, as he left. “I’m going to be working late at the library.”

“It’s all right, darling!” Vee called. “Have a wonderful day!”

“Darling?” Milt said.

Milt left to go to work. The day was long and dull for Vee. She washed the breakfast dishes and when she was finished she lay down on her unmade bed and read an article in a magazine about a woman who was spontaneously turning into a man, and when she was finished reading she dozed for a while until a big truck passing on the street in front of the house woke her up.

She carried her broom and dustpan up the stairs and let herself into Russell’s room with her spare key. It was her duty as landlady to tidy up, empty the trash, sweep the floor, put clean towels in the bathroom and clean sheets on the bed.

Not only was Russell neat in his dress, but also in the way he lived. The covers on his bed were pulled up over the pillows. There were stacks of books and papers on the desk, but, other than that, no clutter anywhere; no dirt and no piles of dirty clothes. In the bathroom, the towels hung neatly; there were no splashes on the mirror; the bathtub gleamed, as if it had just been scrubbed.

Before going back downstairs, she lingered for a while over Russell’s belongings. She ran her fingertips over his alarm clock and his jade elephant that she admired every time she was in his room. She picked up a couple of the books and opened them, read a few words, and set them back down exactly where they had been. She opened the closet door and marveled at the perfect order: coats, jackets, shirts, pants. On the floor were four pairs of shoes aligned with precision. On the inside of the closet door was a rack of belts and ties, the ties arranged according to color.

One thing she expected to see in Russell’s room but didn’t: a picture of a lovely young woman. Of course such a handsome, intelligent, smartly turned-out young man would have a girlfriend, a real homecoming queen type, who would be waiting for him to come home and marry her when the time was right. Beauty is always rewarded with beauty, isn’t it? Isn’t that the way the world works?

In the afternoon she took a long bubble bath and washed her hair and set it. When she was finished, she dressed in fresh clothes. There was no reason for her to look slouchy all the time. She wasn’t an old woman, not yet, and she didn’t want to get old before her time. Of course, it didn’t help being married to an old stick like Milt, but she wasn’t going to let him drag her down even more than he already had.

At dinnertime she set three places at the table, even though she knew Russell wouldn’t be there. Milt didn’t notice the extra plate or that she had fixed herself up and looked better than usual. He came into the kitchen and sat down at the table at six-thirty, the time they always ate. She served up the food and they sat in silence; she stared absently out the window into the back yard or at the empty plate and unused silverware across from her. Milt didn’t talk about his day; they were all the same and had been for twenty-five years or more.

When dinner was over she washed the dishes and Milt, bone-tired as usual, retired to his spot on the couch in front of the TV. He would watch one mindless show after the other, all evening long, until it was time for the ten o’clock news and then he’d turn off the TV and get into bed, literally asleep before his head hit the pillow.

Vee went to her room at eleven o’clock and closed the door. She lay for a long time without sleeping, listening to the sounds outside: the wind in the trees, distant traffic on the highway, the faraway barking of a lonely dog.

At one o’clock, she had been dozing lightly but awoke when she heard the floor creak upstairs over her head. It meant Russell was home. She imagined him taking off his clothes and getting into bed. He’d be tired out from his long day, a day well-spent, and would go to sleep quickly.

An hour later she was still awake. She got out of bed and, without turning on a light, put on her bathrobe and stepped into her slippers. She crept slowly out of her room, careful not to make a sound, feeling her way along the wall, and up the stairs to the door of Russell’s room.

The door wasn’t locked. She turned the knob and stepped into the room. There was just enough light coming in at the window that she could see him sleeping in the bed, lying on his back. The blanket was pulled up to his waist. He wore an undershirt.

She stood for a minute beside the bed, watching him sleep. He had his right arm over his head with his left arm resting at his side. She was reaching out her hand to touch him when he opened his eyes.

He reached over and turned on the lamp beside the bed and looked at her with alarm. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Is anything wrong?”

“No, nothing’s wrong. I…”

“There’s not a fire, is there?”

“No, there’s no fire.”

“Why are you coming into my room late at night without knocking?”

“Please don’t be mad at me! I missed you at dinner and I just wanted to make sure you made it in all right.”

“Of course I made it all right!” he said. “Why wouldn’t I? You don’t have to watch out for me.”

“I know. I wouldn’t blame you for being terribly angry, but…I just couldn’t seem to help myself.”

“Why not?”

“You’re special to me.”

“What are you talking about? You woke me up to tell me that?”

“I can’t stop thinking about you. I like looking into your beautiful dark eyes and talking to you and being in the same room with you.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I just like being near you.”

“Oh, I think I get it now! I’m not going to have sexual intercourse with you. Now or at any other time.”

“No, it’s not that!” she said. “That’s not what I want!”

“What do you want?”

 “I want you to turn off the light. I want you to close your eyes and pretend I’m somebody else. I want to touch your face and your hair. I want to feel your arms and your chest, your legs and your feet. I want to feel you all over.”

“That’s a very odd request. Do you always do that with your boarders?”

“Oh, no! This is the first time!”

“Does Milt know about it?”

“Milt doesn’t know a thing.”

He threw back the blanket that covered his lower body and stood up from the bed. He pulled his undershirt off over his head and stepped out his pajama bottoms and turned off the light.

“All right,” he said in a whisper, lying back on the bed as though waiting for a medical examination. “Please make it quick, though. I’m cold and I feel kind of funny about this.”

“I promise you, nobody will ever know,” Vee said.

In the morning Vee was in the kitchen cooking breakfast when Milt came in, yawning, and took his place at the table.

“Did you hear anything unusual last night?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“I heard a dog barking but it didn’t keep me awake,” she said.

“With all the crime in the city, you have to be constantly aware of what’s going on in the neighborhood. You can’t be too careful these days.”

She handed him the morning paper to get him to stop talking it and he opened it and began reading a story on the front page about a triple homicide.

“One of the people killed was a niece of the mayor’s wife! Can you beat it?”

“Eat your eggs while they’re hot,” she said.

He was halfway finished with breakfast when he noticed someone was missing from the breakfast table.

“Hey, where’s what’s-his-name?”

“Who?”

“Our little boarder.”

“Do you mean Russell?”

“Yeah, Russell. Where is he?”

“He’s gone.”

“He had an early class or something?”

“No, he left. He moved out.”

“Moved out? What are you talking about? He just said yesterday he liked it here and wanted to stay. Did something happen?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“Did he skip out on the rent?”

“He was paid up until the first of the month.”

“What is wrong with these people? He’s the third boarder we’ve lost in less than a year! They’re here and everything is fine, and then the next day they’re just gone without so much as a wave goodbye! It must have something to do with all this crime!”

“I’ll place the ad in the paper again,” she said, “but I don’t think we’ll get anybody as sweet as Russell ever again. Not in a million years.”

She turned her head away and went out of the room so Milt wouldn’t see her tears. She stayed in her bedroom until he left for work and then she went into the kitchen and began gathering up the dirty dishes to wash them. She hoped that Russell might come by later in the morning so they could have a private talk, just the two of them, without Milt, and she could apologize for what happened and set things right. Oh, how she hoped!

Copyright © 2026 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997