If You Don’t Tell Santa What You Want, You Won’t Get Anything ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

We lived in a small town with small stores, where there was no sit-down Santa to talk to. The nearest big stores were in the city two hours away. Every year my mother and grandma took my sister and me to see Santa and do some Christmas shopping.

I was little and didn’t know any better, so I liked the city, which was so unlike the town we lived in. I liked the cars and the crowds of people standing on the street corners waiting for the light to change so they could walk across; the tall buildings and the roaring buses that had a particular smell of their own. I liked the whistle of the policeman directing traffic and the clang of the bell-ringing Santa on the sidewalk (not the real Santa, I knew) who was trying to get people to drop money into his pot. Of course, it had to be cold weather (the colder the better) and not raining, or none of this would have held any appeal for me. Cold weather was absolutely essential to get the feel of Christmas.

I was seven and still firmly believed in the myth of Santa Claus. I also believed that if you weren’t able to talk to Santa and tell him what you wanted in the run-up to Christmas, you would be out of luck and would get nothing. No presents, no Santa, no nothing. I already knew the world was a hard place.

Mother had lived in the city before she was married so she knew her way around downtown. As she maneuvered the car through the traffic to get to where she wanted to park, I was still sleepy from the Dramamine I had been given before we left home but I didn’t feel like vomiting, so that was the important thing. She parked in a pay parking lot a few blocks from where we were going and we all got out of the car.

“They charge a dollar now for parking,” mother said. “I don’t know what the world is coming to. Just last year it was fifty cents.”

Grandma helped my sister and me on with our hats and gloves and we began the several-blocks walk down to the department store where Santa was.

This store was famous for its animated Christmas windows. We stopped to take a look at them but there were so many people crowded around that we couldn’t see them very well, so we went on inside the store. I was starting to feel little-kid anxiety about seeing Santa. I might freeze up when I sat on his lap and not be able to tell him what I wanted. I felt my throat constrict at the thought.

To get in to where Santa was, you had to walk through the “Winter Wonderland” that was supposed to be the North Pole. There was a wooden walkway to get through it and there were plenty of elves around to make sure nobody left the walkway and tried to walk on the fake snow, pull on the fake trees (trees at the North Pole?) or try to get a closer look at the reindeer. It was all very pretty, with Christmas music blasting over the sound system, but I couldn’t wait to get through it and in to see Santa.

After we passed through “Winter Wonderland,” There were ropes on poles to keep all the people in a neat line. It was about half adults and half kids. Some of the women held tiny babies or pushed them in strollers. You knew they were too young and would only waste Santa’s time. Most of the kids, you could tell, were trying to hold still and not squirm too much. A few of them looked as nervous as I felt.

In about fifteen minutes, we finally came to the place where we could see Santa on his throne. I breathed a sigh of relief when I was actually able to see him and know he was there. There were still about twenty more little kids in front of me, though, before it would be my turn.

Santa was flanked by yet more elves to keep the line moving and keep any one child from taking up too much of his time. Each child was placed on Santa’s lap, Santa leaned over to let the child speak into his ear for about twenty seconds and then the child was removed in an elfin movement of robotic efficiency.

My heart was beating too fast as I got nearer to Santa. I tried to keep in my mind what I was going to say, but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to remember it. I knew my mother, sister and grandma were somewhere behind me, watching me, but I wasn’t thinking about them. I only wanted to get this over with.

Finally it was my turn. A burly elf with acne put his hands on either side of my rib cage and hoisted me up; I swung my legs over and found myself face to face with Santa. He smiled at me and I could see his thick lips through his whiskers. He breathed on the side of my head.

“What would you like for Santa to bring you?” he asked.

“Uh, I want a sled and a pair of cowboy boots and…”

“What else?”

“A Howdy-Doody puppet and a racing car set and some books and…”

“Yes?”

“That’s all I can think of right now.”

“Have you been a good boy this year?” he asked.

“Oh, yes!”

He gave me a candy cane, and the same elf who had lifted me up then lifted me down. I realized then how silly all this was.

After my sister had her turn with Santa, I rejoined mother and grandma. “Did you tell him everything you wanted?” mother asked me.

“Everything I could think of,” I said.

“Now, that doesn’t mean you’ll get everything just because you told him you wanted it.”

“How does he remember what people tell him without writing it down?” I asked.

“I guess he has a photographic memory.”

“He’s really something, isn’t he?”

We had lunch on the mezzanine level where you could look down and see hundreds of people moving around like ants. There was nothing like that back home. Then, after lunch, we had the rest of the day to concentrate exclusively on the serious shopping.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Pneumonia
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This short story has been published in The Literary Hatchet.)

In third grade I wore a navy pea coat. Some of the kids in school made fun of me for wearing a kind of coat that nobody else had, but I didn’t care. I liked my pea coat. It made me look like a little navy man, like a junior-league Robert Taylor.

Any time I think about that pea coat I think about my mother lying sick in a hospital bed.

In November of that year, she slipped on gravel down the street from where she worked and hit her head on the sidewalk. She had a brain concussion and it made her plenty sick. Her doctor thought three or four days (a week at the most) in the hospital would fix her up, but she just kept getting sicker and the three or four days became weeks. (He eventually admitted she wasn’t getting any better and sent her to a hospital in the city, but that’s another story.)

Since I was only nine, I missed my mother while she was in the hospital. I wasn’t a baby and I could manage without her for a few days, but I was afraid she wouldn’t be out of the hospital in time for Christmas. My biggest fear, though, was that she would die in the hospital while I was in school and I’d be left alone with my father. He and I didn’t like each other very much. I don’t know why. It’s just the way it was.

We went to the hospital every evening to see my mother after eating our quick and meagre dinner (a tuna salad sandwich or Campbell’s chicken noodle soup). These visits were disheartening because she wasn’t like herself. She just lay there, hardly moving, and didn’t say much. She was pale, her hair looked terrible, and her eyes were hollow. When I asked her when they were going to let her come home, she just shrugged and didn’t seem to care one way or the other. I wasn’t the only one thinking she might die; she was thinking it herself.

Since it was November and the weather was turning cold, somebody at school was always sick, spreading germs all over the place. It was impossible to be in a closed, heated classroom and not breathe in some nasty germs. A couple of my friends came down with the flu or whatever was catching, and then, before I knew it, I was the sick one.

My mother noticed at the hospital during visiting hours that evening that I didn’t look quite right. She tried to get me to take my pea coat off, but I felt chilled and wanted to leave it on. My throat was raw and my chest hurt. I had developed a cough, which was impossible to hide.

“Aren’t you taking care of your son, Roy?” my mother asked my father.

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” my father said.

“Make sure he takes a hot bath and goes right to bed.”

“He thinks if he can convince you he’s sick, he won’t have to go to school.”

“I’m all right,” I said. “I’m not sick.”

The next morning I felt terrible and my cough was worse. My throat felt like I had been snacking on razor blades. I went to school and I sat in my seat all day long without telling anybody how bad I felt, but I was glad when the bell rang and it was time to go home at the end of the day. When I got home, I put on my pajamas and got into bed. I only wanted to shut everything out.

I hoped I would feel better in the morning, but I only felt worse. I got up at the usual time and went into the kitchen. My father was sitting at the table drinking coffee and smoking his Marlboro cigarettes. He barely looked at me.

“You’d better get a move on,” he said in his absent way, “or you’re going to be late for school.”

“I don’t feel like going to school today,” I said.

“What?”

“I said I’m sick and I don’t feel like going to school today.”

“You don’t look sick to me.”

“My throat really hurts and my chest hurts and I have a lump in my throat.”

“You’ll feel better after you get there.”

I sat down and poured some corn flakes into a bowl and got the milk out of the refrigerator, but I wasn’t able to eat anything.

“I’m running a fever,” I said. “I’m sure of it.”

“You’re just being a baby. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“If mother was here, she’d take my temperature and know I’m too sick to go to school.”

“Well, she’s not here, so go brush your teeth and get dressed and get your little ass to school before I kick it up between your shoulder blades for you. I have to get to work. I don’t have time to mess with you.”

The wind and the cold air didn’t help my cough. By the time I got to school, I was wheezing and gasping for breath. I took my seat in the third row, as usual, and hoped I’d drop dead before too long.

I coughed and I coughed and I coughed some more. No matter how much I cleared my throat, that old frog seemed to have taken up permanent residence. Every time I coughed, somebody turned and looked at me with distaste. I couldn’t blame them. They were wondering what I had and if they were likely to catch it from me.

I hadn’t been sitting in my seat for long when Miss Goldschmidt came and stood over me and put her hand on my forehead.

“You don’t feel very well, do you?” she asked.

“I’m all right.”

She motioned for me to stand up and go along with her. She took me out into the hallway and down the stairs to the nurse’s office on the second floor.

“He’s too sick to be in school today,” Miss Goldschmidt said to Miss Bouchard, the school nurse.

Miss Bouchard looked at me and told me to sit in the chair beside her desk.

“Let’s see your throat, honey,” she said.

She took a tongue depressor and a flashlight and looked at my throat so long I thought I was going to choke.

“How long have you had this throat?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Three days, I guess.”

When she took my temperature, she found I had a fever of slightly over a hundred and two.

“I’m going to call your mother and tell her to come and get you.”

“She’s not home. She’s in the hospital.”

“Oh. What about daddy?”

“He’s at work.”

“Well, I guess we’re stuck with you, then, aren’t we?”

There was a cot made up like a bed against the wall. She told me to take off my shoes and get into the cot and cover up like a little baby. She would be in and out of the office all day long and if I felt worse to let her know.

She gave me two aspirin tablets and a cup of water and after I swallowed the tablets I covered up in the warm little bed and coughed my head off for a while but then my cough lessened and I went to sleep. I slept right through lunch and most of the rest of the day. When the bell rang to go home, I was surprised at how much time had gone by.

“Time to go home, little man,” Miss Bouchard said.

I sat up on the cot and put on my shoes and tied them.

“Do you feel like walking home?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“I can get the janitor to take you in the truck if you don’t feel like walking.”

“I can make it okay.”

“And don’t come back to school until you’ve seen a doctor.”

“What?”

“I’ve written a letter for you to give to your daddy. You need to see your doctor. We don’t want you in school if you’re sick. You might be contagious.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Being told I could stay home from school the next day, and maybe the day after that, cheered me considerably. It was the best news I had heard in a long time.

When I got home, he was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette. He gave me a sour look and blew smoke out his nostrils like a deranged bull. I put the envelope from Miss Bouchard on the table in front of him.

“What’s this?” he said.

“A letter,” I said.

“From one of my many admirers?”

I wanted to tell him he didn’t have any admirers, but all I said was, “No, it’s from the school nurse.”

He read the letter and crushed out his cigarette angrily.

“So, you’ve been complaining at school about how sick you are?”

“I didn’t say anything. They knew I was sick. Some people pay attention to those things.”

“I don’t have time for this crap!” he said. “You’re a lot more trouble than you’re worth, you know that?”

“Yeah, I know.”

In the morning he took me to see Dr. Froberger. He was an old man with cold hands and I was a little afraid of him, but I liked him well enough. His office girl complimented me on my navy pea coat.

Dr. Froberger set me up on a high table and looked at my throat and into my ears and felt my neck. He took my temperature and listened to my heart and lungs.

“This boy’s got pneumonia,” Dr. Froberger said. “His lungs are filled with fluid.”

“I didn’t think he was that sick,” my father said. “He’s always been quite a pretender.”

“Well, he’s not pretending now! I want him to go to the hospital. We need to start treatment right away, or he’s going to be very seriously ill.”

“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” I said.

“It’ll be all right,” Dr. Froberger said. “We’ll take good care of you and you’ll be back to normal in a few days.”

They took me to a different hospital than the one my mother was in. I was worried that she wouldn’t know where I was, but my father said he’d tell her and he’d bring her to see me as soon as she was able.

They took my clothes and put me in a high bed in a room by myself and stuck needles in both arms and gave me oxygen. For a couple of days I felt like I was dreaming or floating through the air, but it didn’t matter to me if I was. Nothing felt real. My father came a couple of times to see how I was doing, but he didn’t stay long; he always had something more important to do.

After I had been in the hospital for a while, a nurse arranged for me to talk to my mother on the phone. She sounded better than she had in a long time. They were giving her a different kind of medicine, she said, and her doctor had decided to send her to a better, smarter doctor at a hospital in the city.

“How long before they’ll let you come home?” I asked.

“I’ll be home before you know it.” she said.

She wasn’t going to die after all.

When the doctor finally released me from the hospital after a week (that’s how long it took for my lungs to clear up), he said I couldn’t go back to school for a while (two weeks or so), which was altogether fine with me. I had to have somebody, a “sitter,” stay with me during the day when my father was at work, so that’s where Barbara Legaspi entered the picture.

Barbara was recommended by Dr. Froberger’s office. She had experience as a nurse’s aide and was used to dealing with sick people. I could tell my father didn’t like her because she was fat and had big arms and a dark mustache, but he hired her because it was the easiest thing for him to do.

I liked Barbara right away. She bought me candy and comic books. She lived with her parents and had never been married and had lots of funny stories about men she had dated. The men she liked didn’t like her or were married, and the men who liked her were unacceptable and undesirable for one reason or another (one had rotten teeth and another one was a midget).

When we got to talking about my father, she told me she had an “instinctive” feeling about him. He was a “negative” individual from whom “nothing good” would ever come.

“How do you know these things?” I asked.

She told me she was psychic and “an old soul” who lived “many times” before. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I thought it sounded good.

I told her how when I became sick with pneumonia and my mother was in the hospital, my father didn’t want to be bothered with me and made me go to school because he thought I wasn’t really sick at all but only pretending.

“He never wanted to be your father,” she said. “People who have children they don’t want make me sick.”

“Me too,” I said.

“He doesn’t treat your mother well, either, does he?”

“No. I don’t know how she stands being married to him.”

“I can take care of him for you if you want me to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can put a spell on him.”

“You mean, like, kill him?”

“No, that would be a curse. I’m talking about a spell.”

“You can put spells on people?”

“If I can’t, I know somebody who can.”

“What kind of a spell would it be?” I asked, fascinated.

“A kind of spell where he gets what he deserves.”

“That sounds good. I don’t want you to kill him, though, or burn him up in a car crash or anything like that.”

“No, I know what you mean. Moderation is the key.”

“Yeah. Fix it so he has stay in the hospital for about a week.”

“I think it might be arranged.”

My mother came home from the hospital in the city a week before Christmas. She wasn’t over her brain concussion yet, but she was getting better every day. She and Barbara Legaspi had a long talk at the kitchen table. When Barbara left for the last time, she said I was her favorite sick person and she and I would be seeing each other again. She winked at me when mother wasn’t looking and I knew it meant that she and I had a secret together.

My mother gave my father the silent treatment for not taking care of me the way he should have and for not keeping me home from school when I was obviously sick. She cooked his meals at mealtime and then she went out of the kitchen while he sat at the table and ate alone. She slept in the spare bedroom and didn’t speak to him unless she had to.

We had a happy Christmas that year. I was over my pneumonia and had returned to school. My mother was still taking lots of medicine and it seemed to be helping her. She was going to return to her job after New Year’s. She wasn’t a stay-at-home; she liked being around other people, she said.

In the middle of January, my father passed out at work. They came and got him in an ambulance and took him to the hospital. After the doctor examined him, he said he had “smoker’s heart” and was going to have to cut back on his Marlboros and go on a diet.

When my mother and I visited him in the hospital, I stood at the foot of his bed and smiled. He barely looked at me, but I knew he knew I was there. If he had known what I was thinking and why I was smiling, he would have had to light up another Marlboro and blow an angry stream of smoke out his nose.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Nothing But the Night
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~

The time is 1924. The place, Chicago USA. Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb are both eighteen years old. They live in a Jewish enclave in Chicago called Kenwood with their wealthy families. They are both smart and well educated. The have everything in life that anybody could want. Yet, still, inexplicably, they kidnap and murder a fourteen-year-old boy named Bobby Franks, also from a wealthy Jewish family, also from the Kenwood neighborhood. They beat Bobby in the head with a chisel, force ether-soaked rags down his throat, and then pour hydrochloric acid all over his body. After they have killed him, they dump his body in a culvert in a wooded area outside the city.

There is no apparent reason for Leopold and Loeb to commit such a horrendous murder. It seems to be a crime without a motive. Leopold and Loeb both know Bobby Franks from the neighborhood and have no real reason to want to harm him.

The murder of Bobby Franks comes to be known as the “crime of the century.” Public interest in the murder is unprecedented, fed by the Chicago newspapers, which print any information on the murder they can come across, regardless of its journalistic merit. Soon the story spreads outside Chicago, and the entire country becomes fascinated by the crime.

Despite the supposed mental superiority of both Leopold and Loeb, and despite their wealth, they are soon suspects in the murder. Under police interrogation, Richard Loeb breaks down and confesses that he and Nathan Leopold, Jr. did, in fact, kill Bobby Franks. The murder is, ironically, solved within a week.

Since Leopold and Loeb confess to the crime, there will be no trial to determine guilt or innocence. There is a trial, without a jury, to present evidence and allow both sides to argue in favor of the death penalty or a life sentence in prison. After both sides argue their case, the final decision rests with the judge. It will be either the death penalty or life behind bars.

The Leopold and Loeb families procure the services of famed defense attorney Clarence Darrow, who is vehemently opposed to the death penalty, to defend “Dickie” and “Babe” in the trial.

Nothing But the Night by Greg King and Penny Wilson is a riveting, historical, true-life crime story, where truth is stranger than fiction. It comes in at a tidy 300 pages. The story is detailed and well-documented, but it never bogs down in details of police or court procedure. If you are a fan of true-life crime, as I am, you will find Nothing But the Night a very powerful reading experience.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Seascape
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This short story has been published in Black Lantern Publishing.)

Blanca Longworth and her husband checked in on a brilliant, sun-infused day in early May. They had a delightful room on the fourth floor with a little balcony overlooking the ocean that from that distance was like a mirror reflecting the sunlight. Feeling tired from the long journey, Blanca lay down on the enormous bed to rest her eyes and soon she was asleep.

When she awoke, she knew from the way the sun slanted into the room that it was very much later than it had been. She arose and went into the bathroom and fixed herself up and then changed her clothes and waited for her husband to come back—back from wherever it was he had gone—to take her downstairs to dinner.

She waited for twenty or thirty minutes and, when her husband still hadn’t returned, she made up her mind to go and have dinner alone. She hadn’t eaten all day and was feeling faint from hunger. She was sure he would understand and would be able to get something for himself later from room service.

When she swept into the crowded hotel dining room, she noticed a few heads turn in her direction. She enjoyed being the woman alone, the woman with a slight air of mystery. For all anybody knew, she might be an heiress or a movie star or an important novelist. She seated herself at a pleasant table-for-two beside a window and a young waiter appeared at her elbow with a menu and an appropriately servile attitude.

After eating her spicy and too-heavy dinner, she left the dining room and, not feeling like returning to her room just yet, went into the cocktail lounge. She was irresistibly drawn by the sound of the music and chiming laughter and the clink of glassware.

Feeling slightly awkward and out of place, she sat at the bar and ordered a martini. She drank the martini quickly, finding it good for her digestion, and ordered another one. By the time she had taken a sip from her second drink, a young man seated himself beside her at the bar. She turned and looked at him with curiosity and when he smiled at her she smiled back at him.

He was perhaps ten or so years younger than she was, making him twenty-eight or thirty. Speaking with a slight foreign accent, he told her his name was Tibor. He had a charming smile and brown-blond hair combed straight back from his forehead that revealed the superb shape of his head and perfect small ears. They exchanged small talk for a few minutes and then he asked her if she would care to dance. She shrugged charmingly and consented.

While she was dancing with Tibor, she thought she had never felt more natural and more at ease with a stranger. As they moved around the dance floor, she felt the strength in his arms and shoulders. She tightened her hold on him and moved in a little closer.

When the dance floor came to be too crowded, they sat down at a small table in the shadows and ordered fresh drinks. After a while, he reached his hand across the table and placed it on her hand and asked if she would care to go someplace else with him. His soft eyes glistened in the romantic light.

She smiled sadly and, in answer to his question, held her left hand in front of his face and waggled her fingers so that he would see her wedding ring. Seeing it, his smile faded and his face clouded. He stood up and, bowing formally from the waist, apologized for his presumption and excused himself. Then he was gone.

After Tibor left, she was just another lonely middle-aged woman sitting pathetically by herself in a barroom. She continued to sit at the small table for a while longer, feeling the kind of sweet sadness she hadn’t felt since she was sixteen, and then she stood up and went back to her room.

Her husband still hadn’t returned yet, but she was glad in a way to be alone with her thoughts. She wouldn’t like having to explain that she had been dancing and drinking—however innocent—with a handsome young stranger. She went out on the balcony and breathed in the scent of the ocean and listened to the soothing sounds of the surf.

When she awoke at seven o’clock the next morning, the first thing she was aware of was that she was alone in the bed. Her husband still had not come back. She got out of bed and called down to the front desk to see if anybody had left any messages for her, but there were none.

She had a light breakfast and then took a long walk down the beach. She walked to an isolated spot and spread her blanket on a pleasant incline and lay down. She read her novel for a while and then, growing weary of reading, stared out at the ocean, the enormity of which had always frightened her in a way. Soon she became sleepy and fell into a light doze.

When she awoke it was to the sound of voices. A man and three children had come upon her but they hadn’t seen her yet, although she could see them. Her pleasant feeling of being isolated from the rest of the world was gone. She stood up and walked to the water’s edge, thinking to speak to the man and the three children, and that’s when she saw a sailboat gliding by about fifty yards out.

One lone man was on the sailboat. She could see him clearly until the sail shifted around in the wind and obscured him. In the couple of seconds she could see his face, she was sure it was her husband. He had the same gray hair and goatee, but he was too far away and moving too fast for her to be sure. She waved her arms, thinking to get the man’s attention, but he was occupied with navigating the boat and didn’t see her. Then he was gone.

Clouds were now obscuring the sun and a chill had come into the air, so she went back to the hotel. Before going to her room, she stopped at the front desk and asked the clerk if anybody had seen her husband, but he assured her nobody had. She told him that if he saw her husband to please be sure and tell him she was looking for him. The clerk nodded his head solemnly and scribbled on a pad, pretending to make a note, but after she left he tore the sheet off the pad and threw it away.

She had a prolonged, leisurely dinner, sitting at the same table as on the previous evening, and when she was finished she once again went into the cocktail lounge. She sat at the bar and ordered a scotch and soda, her husband’s favorite drink; she drank it down and ordered another.

She hadn’t dared to hope that she would see Tibor again but when she turned partway around and looked over her shoulder, there he was. He was sitting at a table toward the back with a blond-haired woman in a red dress. They were both sitting on the same side of the table and he had his arm draped over her shoulders and was nuzzling her neck and laughing. He was obviously quite drunk.

She left quickly, before Tibor could see her, but it was mostly her disappointment that she didn’t want him to see. On the way up to her room in the elevator, she laughed at her own foolishness.

In this way she passed an entire week at the hotel. Telling herself she didn’t care about Tibor but catching a glimpse of him every chance she got and seeing him with a different woman every night, all of them prettier and younger than herself. (Tibor never looked directly at her, so she couldn’t be sure if he knew she was there.) Taking walks on the beach, occasionally sunbathing (she never went into the water, as she was deathly afraid of drowning). Eating large, lavish, expensive meals (her loneliness seemed to increase her appetite). Alternately reading her book and dozing on the bed in her room. Shopping for things she didn’t need and spending all her ready money. Smoking cigarettes on the balcony of her room while watching people come and go on the beach a hundred yards away through binoculars she had purchased on an impulse. Most of all, though, she waited for her husband to return, wondering all the time where he had gone and why she didn’t hear from him. She took to asking every chambermaid, desk clerk, or bellboy if they had seen him, thereby earning a reputation for herself as a crazy woman.

On the morning of her seventh day in the hotel, just as she had dressed to go out, there was a knock at the door. She opened the door, seeing a small man, slightly cock-eyed, wearing a dark suit. He told her he was the assistant manager and he needed to speak to her. She had no other choice but to allow him to come into the room.

“Since you didn’t have a reservation for this room,” he began nervously, “we were wondering if you intended on staying past today.”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “You’ll have to ask my husband.”

“Is he here?”

“Not at the moment.”

“The thing is,” he said, clearing his throat loudly, “this room is reserved after today. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to vacate this morning.”

“I couldn’t do that until my husband comes back.”

“The room is no longer available to you after today.”

“Might I move to a different room?”

“I’m sorry. The hotel is all booked up for the coming week. There’s a convention in town, you see.”

“So, you’re telling me I have to leave today?”

“I apologize for the inconvenience, but I’m sure you understand.”

“My husband isn’t going to like this.”

“If you’ll call down to the desk when you’re ready to check out, they’ll have your bill ready for you.”

After the little man left, she checked to see how much money she had left and discovered only a few dollars remaining in her purse. It was clear she wasn’t going to be able to pay the bill, which she was sure was sizeable by now.

She went down in the elevator to the lobby and walked past the front desk and out the hotel to the street that led away from the city. She began walking away from the hotel and didn’t look back.

After she had walked for more than an hour, looking straight ahead and never once stopping, an enormous black car pulled up alongside her and stopped at the curb. She could feel someone in the car looking at her, but she didn’t turn her head and kept walking. As she continued to walk, the car inched forward to keep pace with her. Finally she stopped and turned toward the car. A man inside had rolled down the window.

“You need a lift,” he said, a statement rather than a question.

He swung the door open and she got in beside him without hesitation and closed the door. As he sped off and for several minutes after, he was looking straight ahead and seemed to forget she was there. She studied him, though—the way the stubble grew on his cheek and the pout of his lips—and she was sure she knew who he was, even though he was pretending to be somebody else.

“Where you headed?” he asked.

“Nowhere,” she answered, taking her eyes off him and looking at the unreeling scenery.

“You just left everything behind, didn’t you? Everything you owned?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“My name is Alvin.”

“No, it isn’t. Or at least that isn’t what you said before.”

“All right. If you say so.” He smiled and ran his fingers through his hair.

“I see you’ve dyed your hair and are not as suave and polished as before and have dropped the accent, but you’re not fooling me. I know who you are.”

“Is that so?”

“You’ve been watching me all week while pretending not to.”

“What?”

“I saw you with a different girl every night. You knew all the time I was there.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I was sure the name and the foreign accent weren’t real. You were like a made-up character in a story. Nothing about you was real.”

“Have it your own way. Everybody in this town is crazy in one way or another. You’re no exception.”

“Some people are not so easily fooled. Keep that in mind.”

“I will.”

She was silent for several miles and then, as if it just occurred to her that she was in a speeding car, she asked him, “Where are we going?”

“Someplace a long way off,” he answered. “Do you want me to let you out of the car?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Do you have any money?”

“Not even the price of a pack of cigarettes.”

“Would you be surprised if I told you I have a dead body in my trunk?”

“Not very.”

“Just remember. I warned you.”

She moved over closer to him and put her hand on his arm and her head on his shoulder and let out a long sigh. “I knew you would come for me,” she said. “I never stopped believing.”

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp