Author: allen0997
Seven Eight Nine ~ A Short Story
Seven Eight Nine
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~
(This is a re-post.)
Milly Pogue was the guidance counselor. She walked with a limp because she had an artificial leg. She came into fifth-hour study hall where Penny Costello was looking at a magazine and told her she wanted to see her in her office. Without questioning the command (there would be time for that later), Penny stood up and followed Miss Pogue down the hallway to her office. Clunk, clunk, clunk went her artificial leg.
They went into the little windowless office and Miss Pogue closed the door.
“What did you want to see me about?” Penny asked. “I was busy.”
“You were looking at a magazine,” Miss Pogue said. “Sit down.”
Penny sat in the metal chair facing the metal desk and already she looked bored.
“You’re not living up to your potential, Penny,” Miss Pogue said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your math and reading scores are the lowest in your class.”
“I can’t help that! I’ve been sick!”
“You’ve missed too many days of school.”
“When you’re sick, aren’t you supposed to stay at home so you don’t spread your germs around?”
“The school nurse says there’s nothing wrong with you.”
“What does she know? She’s a crackpot. She’s not even a real nurse. She flunked out of nurses’ school.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“My mother heard it in the beauty shop.”
“It’s not true. She’s a fully accredited nurse.”
“Okay. That’s what you wanted to see me about?”
“I met with Mr. Bumpus this morning.”
“Was it good for both of you?”
“He asked me to have a private talk with you.”
“What about?”
“You won’t be passed on to the ninth grade.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’ll be repeating eighth grade next year.”
“What?”
“In view of your low scholastic ranking, you’ll be required to repeat eighth grade again when the new school term begins.”
“Could you put that in plain English?”
“You flunked eighth grade. You’ll have to do it all over again.”
“Bullshit!”
“In these cases, we find it’s better to inform the student privately beforehand. That gives you time to adjust to the idea of repeating a grade. You’ll have time to talk it over with your mother and father before anybody else has to know about it.”
“Are you saying that when school starts up again I’ll still be in eighth grade, while everybody else in my class is in the ninth?”
“It can be a difficult adjustment, I know, but I’ll be here as your guidance counselor to help you in any way I can.”
Penny began to cry as the truth of what she was being told took root in her brain.
“I can’t repeat the eighth grade!” she said.
“What not?”
“It makes me look so stupid! Everybody will laugh at me.”
“No, they won’t!”
“Am I the only one?”
Miss Pogue looked down at her paper. “There’s one other person.”
“Are you going to tell me who it is, or do I have to ask?”
“It’s really none of your business, but if you think it’ll help, I’ll tell you. It’s Hermie Malchick.”
“Hermie Malchick! Why, he’s retarded! He can’t even write his own name!”
“I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
“Do you think I’m retarded?”
“No, Penny, I know you’re not retarded. You have the ability. You just don’t use it.”
“Everybody will laugh at me for being such a loser. Me and the retarded boy are the only two that didn’t pass the eighth grade! That must mean I’m retarded, too!”
“No, Penny. It doesn’t mean you’re retarded. It means you have to try a little harder in the future.”
“I can’t repeat eighth grade! I won’t!”
“Penny, I don’t think you have much choice in the matter.”
“We’ll get a lawyer! They’ll make you pass me on to ninth grade!”
“Can your family afford a lawyer?”
“No, but we’ll get one, anyway!”
“It wouldn’t do you any good.”
“As of this moment, I’m quitting school! I won’t ever be back! Not to this school or any school!”
“You’re too young to quit school, Penny, and you know it. You have to be sixteen, and even then you have to have your parents’ permission.”
“There’s a very good reason I won’t be coming back and it’s not only because I’m flunking eighth grade.”
“What is it?”
“I’m going to have a baby.”
“Oh, Penny! Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Who’s the boy?”
“You mean the father of the baby? He goes to a different school. He’s a senior.”
“Oh, Penny, that can’t be! You’re just a child yourself.”
“I know, but it sometimes happens.”
“Whoever he is, he could be facing legal issues. You’re a minor.”
“He knows all about that and he doesn’t care. You see, he’s in love with me and I’m in love with him.”
“What could you know about love at your age?”
“I know plenty. I’m not stupid.”
“Have you told your mother and father?”
“Sure. They know all about it.”
“And they approve?”
“They know there’s nothing they can do about it.”
“Oh, Penny! This is tragic. There’s no other word for it.”
“I’ll get over it. In about seven and a half months.”
“You can go on back to study hall now.”
“Hell, no! I’m not going back to study hall! I’m going home! I’m done with this place once and for all! No more school for me! Ever!”
When Penny was leaving Miss Pogue’s office, she almost ran into Hermie Malchick coming out of the boys’ restroom. She and Hermie were a matching pair. Two of a kind. Two cards from the same defective deck. If she had had a knife in her hand, she might have stabbed him in the throat with it.
Before she left school for the last time, she went up to the third floor and emptied the contents of her locker out onto the floor. One last act of defiance.
Walking home, she had to laugh at how readily Miss Pogue believed the lie about the baby. The only person she knew of who was going to have a baby was her own mother. She was an expert at it. She had had seven.
She was all smiles that evening, that school was finally out for the summer and she had three long months of vacation before she had to go back. If she had told her parents that she was never going back, it would not have gone well. There would have been a big scene, and either her mother or her father would have ended up slapping her. They would find out the truth when school took up again and she stayed at home in bed.
Her mother had her baby in the middle of June. It was a boy and they named him Skippy. Her mother had a difficult time with lasting effects. The doctor told her she’d better not think about having any more babies. Seven were enough. Any more would be excessive.
Throughout the summer, Penny began thinking of Skippy as her own child. She fed him, bathed him, got up with him in the night, and took him all over town in his perambulator, while her mother lay in bed and complained.
Old ladies looked at her with Skippy and turned up their noses, as old ladies do. It’s such a shame, they said, that a girl of such a tender age is already a mother. What is the world coming to? If she was my daughter, I’d keep her busy scrubbing the floors and cooking the meals. She wouldn’t have any time for nonsense with boys.
Copyright 2025 by Allen Kopp
Gluteus Maximus ~ A Short Story
Gluteus Maximus
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~
School let out at three-fifteen. It took me fifteen minutes to walk home, about five blocks. I was always told to come straight home. Don’t dawdle. Don’t fool around. I was seven years old.
My mother had started working as a receptionist in a doctor’s office, so I knew she wouldn’t be home until later in the afternoon. I didn’t mind being on my own. I always liked it. I liked to get some cookies or potato chips or something and then not have anybody around while I watched cartoons on TV.
On a day in the middle of October, my father was sleeping when I came home, though, so I couldn’t turn on the TV. Even with the sound turned all the way down, he said, it kept him awake. Anything I did might keep him awake. If I opened a drawer, he would hear it and get mad. I could be quiet if I had to, but it was always so boring, like being in jail.
He was working night shift; he would get up about five-thirty and get ready for work. Can you imagine working all night and sleeping all day? It suited him somehow.
I went in my room and laid on my bed for a while. I tried reading a comic book but I was too restless after being in school all day. Then I went into the kitchen and played with the phone. I called time and temperature and then I called the bowling alley and hung up when they answered.
While I was in the kitchen, I had a snack. I ate a cold hot dog right out of the package. I liked the taste. Then I ate a couple of marshmallows and a couple of chocolate cookies. My mother always told me not to eat anything when I got home from school because it would spoil my appetite and I wouldn’t want any dinner. I wouldn’t want any dinner anyway unless we had noodles or macaroni and cheese.
I was bored and starting to get sleepy. I could have gone to sleep until my mother got home from work, but I didn’t want to be too much like my father. My mother would think I was sick if she came home and I was asleep.
I was looking around for something to help me pass the time, when I heard voices out in front of the house. I went to the front door and opened it a couple of inches and looked out. There were a couple of police cars and an ambulance at the house across the street. People were standing out on the sidewalk to watch.
I had to know what was going on. I ventured out into the front yard. I couldn’t see much from there, so I went out to the street. I had to look around all the tall people.
At the house across the street, a couple of uniformed police officers stood sentinel on either side of the door. The door was open. I was just standing there, trying to see what was happening, when Miss Katz from up the street approached me.
“You’d better get back inside!” she said. “There might be more shooting!”
“I just wanted to see,” I said.
“Where’s your mother?”
“She hasn’t come home from work yet.”
“What about your pa?”
“He’s taking a nap.”
“Better go back in.”
“What happened?”
“Miss Burford shot her old man.”
“Her father?”
“No! She shot her husband, Harry Burford.”
“Did she kill him?”
“I don’t know. That’s what we’re all waiting to find out.”
Two police officers brought Miss Burford out of the house with her hands cuffed behind her back. She was bawling but not saying anything. They put her in the back of a police car and drove away, not too fast but with the red lights spinning. Then a little while later they brought Harry Burford out of the house on a stretcher. He clearly wasn’t dead but didn’t look too happy. His face was pale and his eyes were closed. They loaded him into the back of the ambulance, slammed the doors shut, and drove off with the siren going.
“I think he looks like he might die,” Miss Katz said.
“Why’d she shoot him?” I asked.
“She probably found him fooling around with another woman. She shot him in both cheeks!”
“She shot him in the face?”
“No, she shot him in the ass cheeks. The butt!”
“Oh!”
“He probably won’t be sitting comfortably for the rest of the year.”
“What will they do to her?”
“I think they should lock her up for a good long time, don’t you? If old Harry dies, they’ll probably put her in the penitentiary for life. She always was crazy if you ask me. She just has a funny look about her. She’s the kind of woman that when you see her coming you feel like turning around and running.”
“She always seemed okay to me,” I said.
“That’s because you’re a child. She wouldn’t dare do anything crazy to a child.”
“Well, I’d better get back inside.”
“What time does your mama come home?”
“Not for a while yet.”
“Are you hungry? I can fix you a baloney sandwich if you want to come home with me. You can sit with me, if you want, until your mama comes home.”
“Okay.”
She didn’t exactly hold me by the hand, but she kept her hand on my shoulder as we walked the short distance to her house. We went into her kitchen and she set me down at the kitchen table.
“Your house is pretty,” I said.
Her kitchen didn’t look anything like ours. Everything was shiny and clean-looking. Everything was in its place. I didn’t know much about Miss Katz. I think she used to have a husband, but I don’t know what happened to him. He must have died. I know she had a son who died in a war.
Do you like baloney?” she asked me.
“Sure.”
“Do you like mayonnaise?”
“I love mayonnaise!”
She fixed the sandwich and set it on a plate in front of me. It was two slices of baloney, with one slice of cheese in between, on fresh bread, with lots of mayonnaise. It was delicious.
“I used to know your mother a long time ago when she was a little girl,” Miss Katz said. “I worked in the cafeteria at school when she was just a little thing. She had the prettiest blond curls.”
“She works in a doctor’s office now,” I said.
“Life plays some dirty tricks sometimes, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does.”
“What about that father of yours?”
“He’s working nightshift tonight. When I got home from school, he was sleeping so I wasn’t supposed to make any noise. He didn’t even know when I came outside. He gets up to go to work about the time my mother comes home. Sometimes I wish he would stay gone all the time.”
She made some sympathetic noises in her throat and then put a bowl of fruit in front of me.
“Do you have any Pepsi?” I asked.
When I got home, my father had already left for work. My mother was in the kitchen.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
“I was talking to Miss Katz. Did you hear what happened?”
“No.”
“Miss Burford shot Mr. Burford.”
“Shot him where?”
“In both ass cheeks! That’s got to hurt!”
“Who told you that?”
“Miss Katz. I was standing there when the police brought Miss Burford out of the house in handcuffs! Then they brought Mr. Burford out on a stretcher and took him away in the ambulance! If he dies, Miss Burford will go to the penitentiary.”
“I want you to stay away from those people! I always suspected something funny was going on with them.”
“I don’t ever go near them,” I said.
She fixed chow mien with rice for dinner. I wasn’t hungry by then, but I picked at it with my fork and tried to eat a little of it. I didn’t want to hurt my mother’s feelings.
Copyright © 2025 by Allen Kopp
A Mother and Her Cigarettes
A Mother and Her Cigarettes
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~
When Ruffin awoke early on Monday morning, he immediately began calculating how he might miss school that day. He could say he was sick, but if he wasn’t vomiting or didn’t have a fever, his suspicious mother wouldn’t believe him. He had to be visibly sick. Not always easy.
He realized, after a couple minutes of deep thought, that he was going to have to go to school no matter what. There was no way around it. He already had more than enough absences for the semester; any more would result in disciplinary action, which meant tedious lectures about the tragic consequences of not taking school seriously enough.
He splashed some water on his face, made a feeble effort at brushing his teeth and dressed in the same clothes he wore to school on Friday. Taking a quick look at himself in the mirror, he went downstairs to the kitchen, where his mother was sitting at the table smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. She hadn’t yet put on her wig and makeup and looked like a derelict old man.
After pouring himself a cup of coffee and adding milk, he sat down at the table, squinting in his mother’s cigarette smoke.
“Boy, I feel lousy this morning!” he said. “I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I have a splitting head. I think I probably have the flu.”
“You’re not missing school again today,” she said.
“When you were young, I bet your mother didn’t make you go to school when you were sick.”
“I don’t believe you’re sick.”
“Can’t you tell just by looking at me? My color is terrible!”
“If you miss any more school, you know what’s going to happen, don’t you? They’re going to come after me for being a lousy parent.”
“You are a lousy parent!”
“The whole world doesn’t have to know it!”
“Just feel my forehead,” he said. “I’m burning up!”
She stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and finished her coffee. “You’re not sick!” she said.
When she stood up to put water on her geranium in the window over the sink, he reached across the table and stole three cigarettes out of her pack and put them in his shirt pocket.
“I saw that,” she said, slowly turning around.
“Saw what?”
“Put ‘em back.”
“Put what back?”
“I’m not as stupid as you seem to think I am. I saw you steal cigarettes out of my pack.”
“I didn’t!”
She started slapping him with both hands. He put his arms up in feeble defense.
“I’ve told you I don’t want you smoking!”
“I haven’t been smoking!” he said. “I would never smoke! It’s bad for your health!”
“You stole them!”
“All right, I’ll admit I took them. I didn’t really steal them. I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“So, are you telling me you’re stealing my cigarettes but not smoking them? If you’re not smoking them, what are you doing with them?”
“I took them for a sick friend.”
“What friend?”
“You don’t know him!”
“I want to know his name!” she said, slapping him again.
“Harry Burgess! His name is Harry Burgess!”
“Tell Harry Burgess to steal his own cigarettes!”
“He can’t! He doesn’t have any hands!”
“How does he smoke, then, if he doesn’t have any hands?”
“I have to light the cigarette for him and hold it up to his lips.”
“You’re a liar!”
“No, really, mother. That is the Lord’s honest truth!”
“I want you to bring Harry Burgess to meet me. I’d like to meet a boy with no hands.”
“Well, he’s shy. He doesn’t like meeting people. People laugh at him and call him ‘meat hooks’.”
“He sounds like your type of friend.”
“I’m going to the school nurse today and tell her you beat me! I’ll have the bruises to prove it! She’ll call the police and they’ll come and take you away in handcuffs.”
“Put the cigarettes back in the pack and get your ass to school!”
On his way to school, he stopped at Finklehoff’s Sweet Shoppe and bought his own pack of cigarettes. Hungry from not eating breakfast, he also bought a donut, which he ate in a few quick bites.
Being within sight of the school building always made him feel despondent and a little suicidal. He loitered out in front for a while before going in. Soon he was joined by his friend Harry Burgess.
“Did you study for the American history test?” Harry asked him.
“Hell, no!
“Me either. All that stuff just goes right out of my head as soon as I read it. Why should I care about history stuff?”
“My old lady beat the crap out of me at the breakfast table this morning,” Ruffin said.
“You mean your mother?”
“Yeah, I mean my mother.”
“Why did she beat the crap out of you?”
“Because she’s evil.”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.”
“I have cigarettes, though.”
“Yeah? Where’d you get ‘em?”
“I stopped at Finklehoff’s on my way to school this morning.”
“Did you steal ‘em?”
“No, I didn’t steal them! What do you think I am? I bought them!”
Together they went into the school building. It was still a few minutes to first bell, so they made their way to the boys’ restroom on the first floor. All the way in back was the traditional smoking space between the last stall and the wall. It was fairly private and there was a window there that might be raised to let out any excess smoke.
Ruffin took the pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and opened it. He gave one to Harry and took one himself. They lit up and puffed greedily.
“Boy, that tastes good!” Harry said. “I’ve been having a nicotine fit all night long!”
“I know what you mean,” Ruffin said. “Smoking is one of life’s greatest pleasures!”
“Does your mother know you smoke?”
“I think she knows but she doesn’t want to admit it. She smokes like a fiend all the time, but she tells me if she ever sees me smoking she’s going to knock it down my throat.”
“That might cause you to get choked!”
“Yeah, if she caused me to choke to death, she’d go to jail, but she’d swear I had it coming. How about you? Does your mother know you smoke?”
“She doesn’t pay any attention. If she saw me smoking, she’d scream at me and lecture me, but five minutes later she’d forget about it.”
They heard the door open and close and then quiet footsteps.
“Who do you think that is?” Harry whispered.
“Probably nobody.”
Harry opened the window a little higher and began fanning the smoke with his hands.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ruffin said. “So, we’re smoking! What of it? Who cares?”
They heard the water running and relaxed. Whoever had come in didn’t care what they were doing. They kept smoking, generating an unusually large amount of smoke.
“What’s going on here?” a loud voice said behind them.
Startled, they both turned and looked into the face of Mr. Emmett Terry, school principal.
“Are you smoking?” Mr. Terry said. “Hiding in the bathroom and smoking?”
“No, we were just taking a little break before going to class.”
“You’re not smoking?”
“No, we’re not smoking,” Harry said, grinding his cigarette out under the heel of his shoe.
“There’s enough smoke in here for a forest fire!”
“Oh, that! We were wondering about that too!”
“My office! Right now!”
“Yes, sir!” Harry said.
The penalty for smoking on school grounds was a three-day suspension. Mr. Terry, in this case, was not inclined to be lenient.
“The three days of your suspension will go on your permanent record as unauthorized absences,” Mr. Terry said gravely. “This could severely limit your ability to get into a good college.”
“This is going to kill my mother!” Harry said.
“Now, I’m sending a letter home with each of you for you to give to your parent or guardian. At the end of your suspension, you will not be readmitted to school until your parent or guardian comes to the school for a sit-down meeting with me, the superintendent, and the guidance counselor.”
Harry groaned.
“When you boys sneak cigarettes in the boy’s restroom, it’s a serious breach of discipline. School administration seeks the help and intervention of the parent or guardian in a situation this serious.”
“You make it sound like we killed somebody!” Harry said.
When Ruffin got home in the middle of the day, his mother was dozing on the couch.
“What are you doing home from school so early?” she asked.
“I’ve been suspended from school.”
“What?”
“I said I’ve been suspended from school for three days.”
“You’ve what?”
His hand shook as he handed her the letter from Mr. Terry. She looked at the letter, front and back, but before she opened it she lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of blue smoke upward into his face. He was sure he was going to vomit. He was more afraid of her than he was of Mr. Terry.
Copyright © 2025 by Allen Kopp
Literary Fictions 