Hazel McCreary
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This short story has been published in Dew on the Kudzu: A Journal of Southern Writing.)

We were lost again. We had a map but didn’t know how to use it. I had been driving earlier but now Drusus was driving. His wife, Alma, sat between us, and I sat next to the window. Mama and Chickie were in the back.

The seat wasn’t long enough for mama to stretch out all the way so when she needed to lie down she used Chickie’s lap as a pillow. We were all a little worried about mama. She was so thin and now a little stoop-shouldered as if she didn’t have the strength to stand up straight anymore. We had to stop every now and then for her to get out of the car and walk around. She was car sick and sometimes she vomited. I couldn’t help but notice one time that there was some blood coming up.

“Sing to me, honey,” mama said.

“Oh, mama, I don’t want to sing now,” Chickie said. “I’m supposed to be resting my voice anyhow.”

“Are you nervous about the radio contest?” Alma asked.

“A little jittery,” Chickie said. “I’m trying not to think too much about it.”

“I just know you’re going to win with your lovely voice.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Drusus said. “There’s thirty or forty other people think they’re going to win, too.”

“I’ll do my best,” Chickie said. “That’s all I can do.”

The old woman giving Chickie singing lessons had taught her some opera from a piece called Madame Butterfly, but she was best at singing popular tunes like “Pennies from Heaven” and “Ten Cents a Dance.” She could sing anything, though, even church music; that’s the kind of voice she had.

“And I just know that doctor at the clinic is going to make you well again, Mrs. McCreary,” Alma said.

“I’m not sure he’ll even see me,” mama said. “We leave it in the hands of the Lord.”

“We’re praying for you and Chickie both.”

“He’ll see you, mama!” Drusus said. “We’ll make him see you.”

“How you gonna do that, son?”

“I don’t know. We’ll think of something. Rough him up a little bit, if we have to.”

We all laughed but mama groaned. “He’ll think you’re a bunch of ruffians,” she said.

“We are a bunch of ruffians.”

We came to a tiny town with a cutoff to a different highway. Drusus took the cutoff a little too fast. Mama almost fell to the floor and gave a little yelp. Alma fell over against me and pulled herself away as if I was poison to the touch.

“We’re not in no race, honey!” she said to Drusus.

“Well, this is it!” Drusus said. “This is the right way now. I just know it. We are officially not lost anymore. We are found!”

“Happy days are here again,” sang Chickie. “The skies above are clear again. So let us sing a song of cheer again. Happy days are here again!”

We passed a sign then that told how far it was to the city. “Only two hundred and thirty-seven more miles,” I said.

“I don’t know if I can last that long,” Chickie said. “Seems like we’ve already gone about a thousand miles.

“We’re doing it all for you,” Drusus said.

“I know,” Chickie said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“How about you, Wynn?” Drusus asked me. “Do you want to drive for a while?”

“No thanks,” I said. “You’re doing fine.”

I went to sleep with my head against the door and woke up when we had a blowout and Drusus pulled off the highway to change the tire.

We all got out of the car, including mama. She took a few steps and smoked a cigarette and said she was feeling a little better. She wanted to know what state we were in. When I told her I wasn’t sure, she laughed.

We took advantage of the unscheduled stop to have a drink of water and a bite to eat. We still had some bread left over, Vienna sausages, fruit, cookies and other stuff. Mama didn’t want anything to eat but she drank a little water. Alma spread a blanket on the ground for her and Chickie to sit on. Mama sat for a while and then lay down and looked up into the trees.

“This is nice,” she said, “laying on the ground and not having no tires turning underneath me.”

“I think mama’s sicker than she lets on,” I said to Drusus when we were changing the tire.

“The doctor in the city will fix her up,” he said.

“She’s trying to put a good face on it for Chickie’s sake. She doesn’t want to spoil her chance of singing on the radio.”

“Everything will be all right,” he said. “Don’t worry so much.”

Mama went to sleep on the blanket and we had to wake her up to get her back in the car. I took over driving from there, even though I liked it better when Drusus drove and I could just sit and watch the scenery and think.

We were all tired and we knew we were going to have to stop someplace for the night. We hadn’t made very good time, what with our getting lost and mama being sick and all.

At dusk we stopped at an auto court where, according to the sign, the cabins were clean and cheap. I went into the little office in the front and engaged our room and then we drove around to our cabin, number twelve in the back. With the shade trees, the two rows of trim white cabins, and the azalea bushes everywhere, it was a pretty place and plenty inviting.

We tried to get mama to eat some supper, but she just wanted to go to bed. Alma and Chickie helped to get her out of her clothes and into bed while Drusus and I sat on the front step and smoked.

“If Chickie wins the prize money,” Drusus said, “we can pay back Uncle Beezer the money he advanced us for this trip.”

“We can’t expect her to give up the prize money for that,” I said. “If she wins, I hope she’ll use it to advance her singin’.”

“Advance her singin’ how?”

“Go to the city and live there and meet the right people in the music business, agents and promoters and people like that. She could get a real singing career going for herself.”

“Do you really think she has a chance?”

“You’ve heard her sing,” I said. “Isn’t she as good as anybody you’ve ever heard?”

“Yeah, she’s good,” he said.

“If she wins the money, it’s hers. We can’t touch it.”

“Okay, but maybe she’ll offer part of it to help pay for this little trip.”

“We wouldn’t take it,” I said.

After a couple of minutes in which neither of us spoke, Drusus said, “Alma thinks she’s going to have a baby.”

“A baby!” I said. “You’ve only been married a month!”

“The curse of the married man,” he said.

“What do you mean? Don’t you want it?”

“We’re poor,” he said. “We don’t have anything. Even the car I’m driving belongs to somebody else. If we start off married life havin’ babies left and right, we’ll always be poor. Just like mama and papa.”

“There’s things even poor people can do, I guess, to keep from havin’ so many.”

“I’m not ready to be anybody’s daddy yet. I’m still young.”

I laughed at that line of reasoning. “People are gonna have babies, I guess, no matter what.”

“That’s a lot of comfort.”

“You’re not sorry you married Alma, are you?” I asked.

“Well, no. Not exactly. I probably wouldn’t do it again, though, if I had it to do over.”

“I’ll be sure and tell Alma you said that.”

“Don’t tell anybody about this,” he said. “She doesn’t want anybody to know about the baby just yet, because it makes it look like we had a shotgun wedding. I swear the baby wasn’t on the way yet when we got married.”

“You don’t have to convince me of anything,” I said.

“Not a word to mama or Chickie yet. Alma wants to make sure about the baby before she tells anybody.”

“I won’t breathe a word of it,” I said.

The women took the beds, so Drusus and I had to sleep on the floor of the cabin but I didn’t mind. I was just glad to be able to stretch out and rest my weary bones. I laid down near the screen door where I could feel a cool breeze and hear the trees rustling. After being on the dusty road all day, it felt like heaven.

As I drifted off to sleep, I could hear Chickie softly singing to mama her favorite song: “Deep night, stars in the sky above. Moonlight, lighting our place of love. Night winds seem to have gone to rest. Two eyes, brightly with love are gleaming. Come to my arms, my darling, my sweetheart, my own. Vow that you’ll love me always, be mine alone. Deep night, whispering trees above. Kind night, bringing you nearer, dearer and dearer. Deep night, deep in the arms of love...”

I slept all night long without waking up a single time and woke up at seven in the morning to the sound of the birds singing. I stood up from my makeshift bed on the floor to slip into my shirt and pants and that’s when I saw Chickie and Alma sitting quietly at the foot of the bed where mama lay. Alma was smoking a cigarette and I could tell Chickie had been crying, I knew her so well.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“We can’t wake mama,” Chickie said.

“Is she breathing?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We’d better get a doctor,” I said.

Alma looked at me and shook her head and that’s when I knew mama was dead.

I shook Drusus by the shoulder to wake him up. When I told him what had happened, he had to see for himself. He went over to the bed and put his ear to mama’s chest and then he took Alma’s makeup mirror and held it to mama’s nose. He looked at the mirror and threw it down on the bed like a child with a toy that no longer works.

“What should we do?” I asked.

“I don’t want to go another mile from home,” Chickie said.

“We’d better call somebody and tell them what happened,” Alma said.

“No!” Drusus said. “We’re not calling nobody! They’ll ask us a lot of nosy questions. They won’t believe the truth about what really happened, that mama was sick a long time and we were on our way to the city to take her to a clinic. They’ll keep us here and make Chickie miss her chance to sing on the radio.”

“I think he’s right,” I said.

“We can’t go off and leave mama here,” Chickie said.

“Of course not,” Drusus said. “We’re taking her with us.”

After Chickie and Alma got mama dressed, Drusus carried her out to the car across his arms. I opened the door for him and he slid mama into the corner of the back seat with her head resting against the seat back. He then took a length of rope and tied it around mama’s chest so she would stay upright and not fall over from the movement of the car. Chickie gave mama’s dark glasses to Drusus to put on her and we found a straw hat that belonged to Uncle Beezer in the trunk and put it on her head. With the hat and the glasses and in her regular clothes, she didn’t look like a dead person.

We all got into the car and Drusus started her up. As we were pulling out of the place, the manager stopped us and leaned in at the window and said he was glad to have had us stay in his establishment and he hoped we had a pleasant journey, wherever we were going. He never noticed or suspected anything unusual about mama.

“I’m glad she died in a pretty place like this instead of on the road,” I said.

“She went quick and peaceful,” Drusus said. “That’s about as much as anybody can expect.

“We have a lot to be thankful for,” Alma said.

Drusus turned around in the seat and said to Chickie, “You’ve got to win the radio contest now. Not for fame or fortune, but for mama’s sake.

When we were on the highway again, going at full speed, Chickie began singing mama’s favorite hymn: “O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder, consider all the works Thy hand hath made, I see the stars, I hear the mighty thunder, Thy power throughout the universe displayed. When through the woods and forest glades I wander I hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees. When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur and hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze, then sings my soul, my savior God, to Thee, how great Thou art! How great Thou art! Then sings my soul, my savior God, to Thee, how great Thou art! How great Thou art!”

“I felt the baby stir in my womb just then,” Alma said.

Drusus groaned. “I could sure use some ham and eggs,” he said, turning and looking at some cows standing alongside the road.

Nobody said anything after that. Nobody needed to. We all felt good, though, even though everything didn’t work out as planned. We had the feeling, or at least I did, that nothing was going to stop us now. That old car of ours was sure burning up the miles.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

A Clown First and a Doctor Second
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

I was born in a hospital. My parents didn’t want me. They told the hospital people to drop me off at the nearest orphanage—or smother me with a pillow, whichever was most convenient. I was a healthy, sturdy, good-looking boy, but unwanted. I didn’t even have a name. With my profusion of white-blond hair and prominent baby nose, somebody on the hospital staff suggested I looked like the schoolroom pictures of George Washington, so my first name became George. A nurse who was eating her lunch was given thirty seconds to come up with a last name for me, so she said Pickles. From that moment on my name became George Pickles.

The question for the hospital people was what should be done with me since I didn’t have a home or a family. The nurses in the baby ward took care of me the same as they took care of the other newborns, but that couldn’t go on forever. I would grow and soon it would become apparent that I was a reject left behind.

The hospital people thought I might make an excellent janitor when I was old enough to use a mop or a broom, or, failing that, my organs might be used for a dying patient who needed a new liver, lung, kidney or heart right away. Of course, if my organs were used in this way, my own life would come to any end. This is undoubtedly one of the hazards of being unwanted.

At the age of three, I remained at the hospital and still nobody had decided what was to be done with me. Some of the doctors and nurses took a real liking to me; I became a sort of mascot. I was good-natured, easy to please, and not temperamental or fussy. Why somebody hadn’t taken me home and adopted me, I cannot imagine.

I could no longer stay in the baby ward for obvious reasons, so some of the doctors cleared out an unused room in the basement for me to stay in. They put me in a sort of baby bed on wheels that I liked because it was high and, out the tiny window over my head, I could see the sky. When I saw a bird fly past, I cooed in excitement. The nurses took turns taking care of me, feeding me and doing what else needed to be done, throughout the day and night. Some of the doctors would stop by just to pick me up and tickle me in the ribs so they could hear me laugh. Even though I didn’t have a real home or a mother and father, I lacked for nothing.

When I became a little older, the baby bed on wheels was swapped out for a regular bed. The nurses dressed me up in clothes from the charity box and fed me food from the hospital kitchen. They fixed up my room the way a little boy’s room would be in a real home, with stuffed animals, building blocks, tiny cars to roll around on the floor, and pictures on the wall of clowns and horses.

At five years old, I began to learn to read. At first one of the doctors would sit with me and patiently teach me the letters of the alphabet, but in no time I was reading on my own with little effort. Soon everybody started bringing me books because books were the things I liked best: colorful books with pictures of animals and simple texts and, later, young adult fiction. A couple years after that I was reading at an eighth or ninth grade level and, from there, I graduated to Mark Twain and the less-tedious classics of American literature.

As I was reading so well, somebody suggested that I should be in school with other children my own age. “It’s no need,” I told them. “I can learn everything I need to know right here on my own and learn it much more efficiently than I would in a public school.” The hospital psychiatrist was asked to give me an intelligence and reading comprehension test, whereupon he decided that my education was in no way lacking and was, in fact, far superior to what I would have received in the real world.

Besides the books people brought me, I had access to all the books in the hospital library, as well as the doctors’ closed-to-the-public medical library. I was reading novels and short stories, books on history, paleontology, archeology, ornithology, clowns, anatomy, physics, sociology…whatever the subject, I was reading it.

You’ll notice that in the preceding paragraph, I stated that one of my interests was clowns. I first became fascinated by clowns from the pictures on the wall in my room in the basement of the hospital. When I evinced an interest in knowing more about them, a particular friend of mine, Dr. Moorehead, brought me a book called The Big Book of Clowns, which contained many fascinating, colorful pictures and stories about real-life and fictional clowns.

After I read Dr. Moorehead’s book from cover to cover, I told him I wanted to be a clown; the next day he brought me a clown suit with clown shoes, clown makeup and a large red clown nose. The next time I saw Dr. Moorehead I was a clown. After that, I wanted to be a clown all the time, but the head nurse, a woman named Vera Ralston, told me it just wasn’t practical in the real world unless I joined a circus and she didn’t think I would ever want to do that.

Wearing my very own clown clothes, nose and makeup, I taught myself such clown tricks as juggling oranges, pie throwing and seltzer-water squirting; also some “physical” tricks like crumpling up when I got hit on top of the head with a rubber chicken, tightrope walking. and sliding on the floor without getting floor burns.

When people asked me why I was so interested in clowndom and in everything having to do with clowns, I told them I didn’t know, but that I believed somehow clowning was my destiny, that it played some role in who and what I was. One boy is interested in dinosaurs, one in racing cars and another in being the best at throwing a ball. My interest was clowns. How can we know where these things come from?

Somebody who felt sorry for me gave me some professional clowning attire with floppy shoes, wig, and a one-piece suit with plenty of padding, ruffled collar and cuffs. In this get-up I entertained at hospital staff parties. Sometimes I would go to the children’s ward and, despite my innate shyness, entertain the small patients there until I was exhausted. They especially liked me because they knew I was a child just like them.

As I got older, I knew I couldn’t be a clown forever. I needed to cultivate some additional interests. Dr. Moorehead, Nurse Ralston, and other people on the hospital staff asked me if I had any interest in becoming a doctor. When I told them I thought I might make as good a doctor as anybody else, they began bringing me books they thought might interest me—books on simple anatomy, the circulatory, respiratory and reproductive systems, and a book just about blood.

I had what’s known as a photographic memory. I could read one page and then put the book down and recite the page verbatim without any trouble at all. I absorbed medical knowledge like a sponge. I began working with some of the doctors as they went on their rounds. (I wasn’t allowed to see patients as a clown, though. I was instructed to wear a white coat so I looked like all the other doctors, which meant no rubber chickens, no red wig and no pies in the face.) In a couple of years I was ready to take my exams to qualify as a fully certified doctor.

Something was still bothering me, though. I wanted to know about my real parents: what they were like, where they lived, and why they didn’t want me when I was born. It’s natural for a person to want to know these things.

When I learned that the name and identify of my parents were in a confidential file in the hospital, I began trying to figure out how I might see this file, which, of course, was supposed to be strictly off limits. Nurse Ralston, Dr. Moorehead, and everybody else told me I was better off not knowing what was in the file. Still, they provided me with information that allowed me to find the file and read it at two in the morning when the hospital was sleeping.

There wasn’t much information in it other than the names of my real parents—Otto and Minnie Gruenwald—and their address, which I knew to be in a dreaded neighborhood downtown, a place people referred to as Skid Row. Telling Nurse Ralston I was going to an afternoon movie, I took a cab to the address and discovered it was a stricken residential hotel, midway along a boulevard of broken dreams.

The handful of people didn’t look at me as I entered the lobby. It occurred to me for the first time that a lot of years had gone by and my parents probably no longer lived there. Living in this place had probably killed them.

A desk clerk sitting behind a grubby pain of glass looked at me disinterestedly and expelled smoke from his nostrils. I told him who I was looking for and the corners of his mouth turned down into a reverse smile.

“What do you want to see them for?” he asked.

“It’s private,” I said.

“Are you a process server?”

“No.”

“Bill collector?”

“No.”

“A police officer sworn to uphold and protect the law?”

“No. I think I might be related to them.”

“You have my sympathy. The elevator don’t work. Take the stairs up to the fourth floor, if you’ve got the wind. They’re in room four thirty-one.”

As I knocked on the door of room four thirty-one, my mouth was dry. I realized I hadn’t thought beforehand what I was going to say.

A tiny woman, a midget, opened the door and looked up at me. Her face was covered with wrinkles and she had a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. Her reddish hair looked burned, bitten off.

“Are you Mrs. Minnie Gruenwald?” I asked.

“Whatever you’re selling I don’t want it!” she said.

“I’m not selling anything. I’d like to have a word with you and your husband if it’s convenient.”

“If this is about his gambling debts,” she said, “you’re out of luck. He died a month ago.”

“He’s dead?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

“Is it all right if I come in?”

“If you’re selling insurance or cemetery plots, I can tell you right now I don’t want any.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

“You’re not going to knock me in the head and take all my money, are you?”

“No.”

“All right, then,” she said with a sigh, “but make it quick.”

She let me into her tiny suite of three rooms. I looked around quickly, seeing piles of clutter, clothes, papers, and magazines on every surface. She pushed a stack of newspapers off a wooden chair and gestured I might sit down if I was so inclined.

I sat down and I knew she was looking at my clothes and shoes, my haircut. “You don’t belong here,” she said. “I hope you make it out of the neighborhood alive.”

I thought she was making a joke, but when I looked at her and smiled I knew she was in earnest.

“This is an interesting old hotel,” I said, trying to find an opening to what I wanted to say.

“No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s a rat hole. The city is about to condemn it.”

“I’m sorry. I suppose that means you’ll have to move.”

“Cut the palaver and tell me why you’re here.”

“You said your husband died?”

“Yeah, what of it?”

“His name was Otto Gruenwald?”

“It was, unless he had some other name that I didn’t know about.”

“Do you mind telling me how he died?”

“He had alcoholics’ disease, his liver was shot, he had diabetes, emphysema from too many cigarettes and he was insane. Are those good enough reasons to die?”

“Did you and your husband have any children?” I asked, trying to keep from sounding nervous.

“I’m not answering any more of your questions until you tell me who you are and what you want!”

“My name is George Pickles,” I said. “I’m a doctor or soon will be.”

“Did county welfare send you?”

“Nobody sent me.”

“If you don’t tell me what you’re doing here, I’m going to call that little punk at the desk downstairs and have him send up a couple of goons to eject you!”

“You were in the circus?” I asked, pointing at a faded poster on the wall.

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Were you and your husband by any chance clowns?”

“My husband was a clown. People loved midget clowns. He was like me, only a couple of inches shorter. I was a bareback rider and acrobat. I could do all kinds of shit while standing on the back of a moving horse. But why am I telling you all this? It’s none of your business. You still haven’t told me what your business is.”

“Was he always a clown?”

“He was a clown until he broke his back and had to quit. He was a clown, his father was a clown and his grandfather, going all the way back to the beginning of time.”

“So that’s where it comes from!” I said, excitedly.

“Where what comes from?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just thinking out loud.”

“I’m going to have to cut this little tête-à-tête short,” she said. “I’m a very busy woman and I’ve got things to do.”

 “Do you mind telling me if you and your husband had any children?” I asked.

“What do you want to know that for? I don’t think it’s any of your business.”

“I want to know for my own information. I’m interested in knowing about clown life.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m writing a book.”

“About clowns?”

“Yes.”

“You won’t use my name, will you?”

“Of course not.”

She was silent while she got a cigarette going. “Well, it’s like this,” she said, letting a stream of smoke escape from her mouth. “I did have a baby once, but I had to give it up for adoption.”

“Why?”

“I’ve never talked about this before with anybody.”

“Strictly entre-nous, I promise.”

“The circus was no place for a baby. The life was hard.”

“I’m sure other people managed it.”

“They did, but they weren’t freaks like us. I only saw the baby one time but I knew he wasn’t a freak and that he wouldn’t have any kind of a life with us. My husband was always a heavy drinker and unreliable. No kind of a father. He even went around with other women, if you can believe that. He didn’t want the kid from the very beginning.”

“But you wanted him?”

“I knew I made the right decision for all of us, but especially for the baby.”

“Don’t you ever wonder about him? How he fared in the world?”

“Sure, I wonder about it all the time. I always hoped he was adopted into a nice family and grew up into a happy, successful, good-looking man.”

“If you knew how to find him, would you ever like to meet him?”

“Oh, no! I wouldn’t want him to see the trash he came from! He’s better off not knowing.”

“Maybe he’d like meeting you.”

“No, I want to keep things the way they are, with him not knowing anything about me and his father. And, anyway, I’m going away and I don’t know yet where I’ll end up. I don’t have any family or friends anymore. I might just get on a plane and fly around the world and choose a spot where freaks are welcome.”

“You shouldn’t think of yourself as a freak,” I said, standing up.

“It’s what I am,” she said. “Like it or not.”

After I took my exams and passed them to become a full-fledged doctor, I packed my bags and left the hospital. The people there were my family and, of course, they wanted to know where I was going. I told them I’d be back one day, but first I had something I had to do. I was a clown first and a doctor second.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

My Father’s Pajamas
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

Susan pulled into the driveway of a two-story house and turned off the engine. The man sitting beside her, whose name was Knox, rubbed his hands along his thighs and looked nervously over at the house.

“I’ll just leave,” he said. “I’m not going in there with you.”

“Don’t be silly,” Susan said. “My mother is probably watching us out the window this very minute. She’ll wonder who you are.”

When she saw he was still hesitating, she said, “It’s all right. You can leave whenever you want.”

She got out and motioned him to follow. She led him across the yard and up the front steps to the porch. Before she inserted her key into the lock, she turned to look at him to make sure he was still there.

“As you can see,” she said. “It’s a big house. There are four bedrooms upstairs and another bedroom off the kitchen. We have plenty of room for houseguests.”

“I don’t think I should…”

She plucked at his coat sleeve and pulled him inside behind her.

The house was overheated and had an old smell about it, as if to announce to anybody entering: Old people live here.

Knox stood inside the doorway awkwardly, his hands in the pockets of his coat. A very old woman entered from another room and stopped in midmotion when she saw Susan and Knox.

“It’s me, mother!” Susan said. “I’m back! And I’ve brought somebody with me this time.”

“Who is this?” the old woman asked. She had a great shock of white hair sticking out all over her head. The thick glasses she wore magnified her eyes many times, giving her a rather freakish look.

“His name is Knox,” Susan said. “I met him in the park. I invited him to come home with me and he very graciously accepted.”

“Who?” the old woman asked.

“Knox!” Susan said loudly. “His name is Knox! Don’t you think he’s nice-looking? That wasn’t why I chose him, of course, but I suppose it had something to do with it. He has blue eyes, mother. Same as you.”

“What?” the old woman said.

“And he’s just the right age. I don’t mean I know how old he is, but he looks the right age.”

“Hello,” Knox said to the old woman. “I’ll only stay a minute.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”

“I’ll show Knox upstairs to the guest bedroom,” Susan said. “He can take a shower or do whatever he wants while I fix dinner. I’ll get some of father’s clothes out of his closet for him to wear.”

“What?” the old woman said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“I know you heard every word I said, mother! There’s nothing wrong with your hearing!”

“You’ll have to excuse my mother,” Susan said to Knox when they were upstairs. “She’s a bit eccentric and she is old.”

The guest bedroom was commodious in every way, with its own bathroom, a huge walk-in closet and lots of natural light.

“I think you’ll like this room,” she said. “It’s always been my favorite room in the whole house.”

“I can’t stay here,” Knox said.

“Why not?”

“Does this look like the kind of room I belong in?”

Susan laughed. “You’re going to have to forget all that,” she said. “It might help to keep an open mind and be open to new experiences.”

“Your mother doesn’t like having me in her house and I can’t say I blame her,” Knox said.

“Don’t worry so much. I know how to get around her.”

She went to the closet and brought out a pair of pants, a shirt, a belt and a pullover cashmere sweater. She laid the things on the bed and then took some things out of the dresser drawer, which turned out to be a man’s underpants, an undershirt and a pair of black socks.

“These things belonged to my father,” Susan said. “He’s been dead for years. Wear them in good health.”

“I can’t wear your father’s clothes,” Knox said.

“Why not?”

“I shouldn’t even be here.”

“I’m going downstairs now to cook dinner. You can take a bath, a shower, or do whatever you want. I know you’re thinking you only want to leave, but I hope you’ll at least stay for dinner. I’m thawing out some trout that I bought and there’s a lot more than my mother and I can eat.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “None of this seems right.”

“Maybe you need to think of it as your lucky day. The day I found you in the park.”

“My lucky day.”

“In the bathroom beside the sink is a brand-new razor that’s never been used. There’s also a toothbrush, a washcloth, a towel and lots of soap and shampoo. I think that’s everything you need. I’m going back downstairs now. I’ll close the door so you can have your privacy. I know men like their privacy. You can lock the door from the inside if it makes you feel better.”

“I don’t think I should do this,” he said.

“Put these clothes on that I laid out for you. I’ll wash your old clothes, or we can put them in the trash if you want. I won’t insult you by telling you how awful they are. Now, if there’s anything else you need, just let me know. I’ll be in the kitchen. Oh, and tomorrow I’ll trim your hair if you’ll let me. But please wash it first.”

“Trim my hair.”

“Yes. I’ll let you know when dinner is ready.”

While she was in the kitchen, slicing potatoes, her mother came charging in with the crazed look in her eye.

“Who is that man?” she demanded.

“I told you, mother. His name is Knox.”

“What is he doing in my house?”

“I invited him.”

“How long is he going to stay?”

“As long as he wants. We haven’t discussed any long-term arrangement yet.”

“I’m going to call the sheriff.”

“Why?”

“There’s an intruder in my house and I want him removed!”

“He’s not an intruder if I invited him, now, is he?”

“What do you know about him?”

“Nothing.”

“Where does he come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who are his people? What does he do for a living?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going to wait for him to slit our throats?”

“He’s not going to do that!”

“We don’t know anything about him, so we have to assume the worst.”

“All you have to do is look at him to know he’s not that sort.”

“I’m going to call the sheriff.”

“You’re not calling anybody!” Susan said, turning to her mother with the knife in her hand. “I might slit your throat if you don’t stop being so silly!”

“As long as that man is here, I’m not staying in this house another minute! I’m going to go stay with my sister Edith.”

“Your sister Edith is dead.”

The old woman starting crying. “So, I guess that means I don’t have any place I can go!”

“You don’t need a place to go!”

“I don’t know how you can treat your mother this way!”

“This is not about you, mother!”

“What is it about, then? Are you starting to go through the change?”

“I want a friend, that’s all.”

“What about your Sunday school class?”

“They’re just a bunch of gossipy old women. I don’t have anything in common with them.”

“Maybe you should try harder.”

“Look, mother! I spend all my time in this house with you. You’re the only person I ever see or talk to.”

“That’s not true!”

“I cook your food and wash your clothes. I keep your house clean. Life is passing me by. Maybe I want more from life than being your nursemaid.”

“Well, what do you want?”

“I don’t know! I’m going to find out.”

“Are you going to marry that man?”

“I might. It’s too soon to know.”

“He might be a rapist!”

“He might be a lot of things. He might have a wife and eight children. You can’t go through life being afraid of everything and everybody.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing. Everything.”

“What kind of an answer is that? Are you sick? Do you need to see a doctor?”

“When I need to see a doctor, mother, I’ll let you know.”

“Is that man going to spend the night in this house?”

“I don’t know what he plans on doing. I want him to stay but I can’t force him.”

“Are you going to let him make love to you?”

“Of course not, mother! I don’t think you need to worry about that.”

“Well, I’m going to a hotel! Will you please call me a cab?”

“You know how to call a cab, mother. You’re just being melodramatic.”

“No, on second thought, I’m not going to a hotel and leave you alone in the house with that man! When there’s an unsavory character in my house, I want to know what he’s doing every minute.”

Dinner was uneventful. Knox ate the food that Susan put in front of him with his head down. She was gratified to see that he had put the clothes on that she laid out for him. He had taken a bath and washed his hair and he did look much improved. He still needed a haircut, though, and a manicure.

Susan’s mother sat with her arms close to her sides, feigning fear. She cried the entire time she ate and sniffled into her hanky for effect.

“How do you like the fried potatoes, mother?” Susan asked.

“Greasy. I can’t eat them. They give me heartburn.”

“Do you like the fish? It’s just the way you like it.”

“No, it tastes funny. I think it’s going to make me sick.”

“Would you like some salad?”

“No, I’ll just eat some of my candy before I retire for the night.”

“Too much candy isn’t good for you.”

“What do you care?”

She stood up then, nearly falling, and made her way out of the room.

“Your mother doesn’t like me,” Knox said.

“No matter,” Susan said. “She doesn’t like me, either. I’ve always been a disappointment to her.”

“I should go,” Knox said.

“Where?”

Once again he gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “I don’t belong here.”

“It’s dark now and raining. Spend the night. You’ll have the guest room all to yourself. You won’t be bothered. There’s a lock on the door. You can lock yourself in.”

“I can’t pay you for any of this.”

“Tomorrow we’ll have a little talk while I’m trimming your hair. You can tell me about yourself, as much or as little as you want.”

“Maybe there’s nothing to tell.”

“Everybody has something to tell.”

“Maybe there’s nothing worth telling. I’m less than nothing. I’m nobody. I’m not worth mentioning. I’m not worth a second of your time.”

They sat for a while longer without saying anything. The house was quiet. Knox went to sleep sitting at the table. While he was sleeping, Susan looked at his hands and fingers, his face, his hair, his nose and mouth. If he knew she was scrutinizing him that way, he would have spoken sharply to her and walked out the door.

A crash of thunder woke him and he stood up from the table. Now is the moment of truth, Susan thought. Instead of leaving, though, he crept up the stairs and went into the guest room and locked the door. She hoped he would find the pajamas and dressing gown she left out for him. She wanted him to have all the good things she might give him.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Entre Nous
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

She spotted him in the park. He was a man of indeterminate age, dressed in a tattered green overcoat, badly in need of a haircut and shave. When he knew she was following him, he stopped and looked at her. She smiled. She had so many things she wanted to say to him.

“How are you?” she asked.

He shook his head and started to walk away.

“I saw you and I wanted to speak to you.”

“If you’re from the mission…”

“No. I’m not,” she said. “I was wondering if we might sit and talk a while.”

“No!”

She took hold of his arm, gently. He let her pull him to a bench. She sat on the bench and he had no other choice but to sit beside her. He looked at her apprehensively.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not the police or anything, and I’m not from the mission.”

Now that she saw him up close, she saw he was younger than she at first thought. His eyes were a startling blue. He had tiny lines around them, but except for that his face was unlined. His hair was prematurely gray, in need of a trim. He smelled of tobacco and alcohol.

“Just on my way,” he said.

“Where?”

He gestured with his thumb over his shoulder.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. “I only want to talk to you.”

“Why?”

She laughed and put her hands between her knees and looked up into the trees. “I guess you could say I’m a student of human nature.”

He shook his head and looked at his hands.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Knox.”

“Is that your first name or your last name?”

“Just Knox.”

“All right. My name is Susan Morehouse. I believe in laying all my cards on the table. I’m forty-seven years old and not the least bit sensitive about my age. I live with my mother on Independence Avenue. My mother was over forty years old when she had me, so you can imagine how old she is now. It’s just my mother and me. My father died at age sixty of cirrhosis of the liver.”

He started to stand. She put her hand on his arm. He remained.

“Do you have family?” she asked.

He shook his head, which she took to mean no.

“Are you a mental patient?”

He smiled, for the first time, and shook his head.

Are you a drug addict?”

A shake of the head.

“Alcoholic?”

Another shake of the head.

“I won’t ask how you come to be an aimless bum in the park. We’ll save that one for another time.”

“I have to go,” he said, gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder.

“Go where?”

He shrugged, meaning anywhere or nowhere.

“The truth is, I don’t think you have any place to go.”

“I don’t see it’s any of your business,” he said.

“Would you like to come home with me?”

“No!”

“I know it sounds terribly forward, but I don’t have a lot of time to waste on amenities.”

“No!”

“I wouldn’t expect anything of you. You wouldn’t have to do anything. You wouldn’t be bothered. Only my mother is there. She’s a very old lady, nearly ninety years old. You can stay as long as you want and leave whenever you say.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I’m not well.”

“Do you have anything contagious?”

He shrugged and looked up at the sound of a dog thrashing through the leaves, chasing another dog.

“I’ve never done this before, you know,” she said. “You’re the first man I’ve ever approached like this.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, but she could see he was softening.

“Nobody has to ever know about it. It’s just between you and me. Entre nous, as the saying goes.”

“No, I don’t want to go with you.”

“My car is just over the hill.”

He looked up the hill as if imagining the car on the other side.

“All you have to do is get in the car. I’ll drive. It’s just a few miles.”

“I’m not going with you,” he said.

He stood up when she did, though, and walked over the hill with her. She touched him on the arm and looked at him every few feet to encourage him. When they came to her car, she motioned for him to get into the passenger-side seat, reassuring him, once again, that she meant him no harm.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Since Anybody Lived Here
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

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

The Heaton house was down the street from the school, on a corner lot, high above the street. It was a big house, three stories, but the most interesting aspect of the house was that it was unoccupied; nobody had lived there for a long time.

The yard of the Heaton house was a mass of dead tangled weeds. A dead tree lay diagonally across the front yard, having pulled part of the front porch down with it. The house had once been painted white, but most of the paint had peeled off, revealing underneath the ugly gray of decaying wood. Windows on the first floor were boarded up, to discourage anybody from climbing through, but most of the higher-up windows still had glass in them, through which remnants of curtains, like ghostly apparitions, were visible from the street.

My friends and I passed the Heaton house going to and from school every day. We had heard the stories about the dead bodies in the house—some in coffins and some not—and about the old woman with the ax who would cut your head off if she got the chance; about the sounds of moans and clanking chains coming from the house late at night that nobody had actually heard but only claimed to have heard.

We longed to see the inside of the house, to see firsthand the dead bodies and whatever other horrors it held. It would be difficult to get inside, but not impossible. There’d be a certain amount of risk involved. We’d have to be careful and not get caught. If I got caught, I might go to jail but, worse than that, I’d be in all for all kinds of trouble at home, not the least of which would be months and maybe years of bitching and yelling.

On a gusty Saturday night in the middle of October, I told my mother that I was going to walk to the show downtown with my friend Alonzo Ficket. I had already seen the picture that was playing and knew all about it, so I was covered in case I was questioned about it later.

“Be home by eleven,” she said.

I met Alonzo on the corner by the church and we walked over to Carl Duffel’s house. Carl’s parents were gone for the weekend and he was left alone with Gwen, his older sister. She was a teenager, so she didn’t care what Carl did or how late he stayed out. Reggie Tolland was already at Carl’s house when we got there. Reggie didn’t have a father and his mother was always drunk, so he could stay out all night if he wanted to and nobody would even know it. We had all the bases covered.

After Carl showed us his small flashlight that fit into the palm of the hand and his pack of cigarettes and box of kitchen matches, the four of us set out for the Heaton house, about six blocks away.

Near the Heaton house, a dog started barking but, except for that, the neighborhood was quiet. The nearest streetlight was pretty far away, so it was dark enough where we were that any nosy neighbors wouldn’t see us from a distance and alert the police.

We walked all the way around the Heaton house two times, crunching leaves under our feet but trying to be as quiet as possible. There was only one small window on the ground floor that wasn’t boarded up. It was higher than our heads, but we figured that would be the best way to get inside.

We didn’t have anything as practical as a crowbar, but Reggie had a screwdriver in his coat pocket. Alonzo gave him a boost so that he could stick the screwdriver under the bottom of the window and try to pry it open.

He got the window up high enough with the screwdriver to be able to replace the screwdriver with his fingers and push up. It took a lot of effort and he was showered with old paint fragments, but he raised the window high enough to crawl through, which he did without hesitation. In two minutes we were all inside, standing in what had once been the kitchen.

Carl shone his flashlight around the large room. Against the wall were places where a refrigerator and a cook stove had been. The kitchen sink was pulled away from the wall and dangled at an inhuman angle a couple feet off the floor.

“I don’t like it in here,” Alonzo said. “It smells funny.”

“Go wait outside, then!” Reggie said.

“I think it’s interesting!” Carl said. “Let’s go this way!”

Carl had the light, so we all followed him into the next room, which would have been the dining room. The windows were boarded up from the outside, but there were still remnants of curtains hanging over the windows. From the middle of the ceiling hung part of a shattered chandelier suspended from a single wire.

“This must be where they had parties,” Carl said.

“I think I heard something!” Alonzo said, turning around quickly.

“It’s probably that old woman with the ax,” Reggie said. “She’ll come up behind you and cut your head off before you even see her!”

“Shut up! You’re not scaring me!”

“This way!” Carl said.

The next room was the front room, what would have been the living room. It was a long, rectangular room, with three large windows boarded over.

“Look!” Carl said. “There’s the stairs that go up!”

“Are we going up there?” Alonzo asked.

“Of course we are! Isn’t that what we broke in for? You can wait down here if you want to.”

Carl led the way with the light, fearlessly, and the rest of us followed.

Halfway up the stairs was a landing and then a turn to the left to go up the rest of the way.

“Don’t lean on the banister,” I said. “It’s coming loose in places.”

“The stairs are strong enough!” Carl said. “I like it here! I could live here!”

“That’s because you’re really a ghoul!” Alonzo said.

“Thanks! I like ghouls! I’d rather be a ghoul than a baby!”

“I’m not a baby. I’m not even all that scared.”

He may not have been scared, but he was holding on to the back of my jacket as if he was.

At the top of the stairs was a hallway with four doors leading to other rooms. Two of the doors were closed and the other two partly open. Carl shone his light on the walls in all the rooms, but there was nothing to see. One of the rooms was a bathroom from which the fixtures had been removed. In one of the rooms was a dusty pile of boards and a barrel with a rat’s skeleton in it. If we had been hoping to see skeletons hanging from their necks or ghosts or dead bodies, we were disappointed.

“This is so great!” Carl said. “I’ll bet there were lots of murders that happened here!”

We proceeded down the hallway cautiously, our footsteps resounding on the bare floor. We would have had to take our shoes off to be really quiet and I don’t think any of us wanted to do that.

At the other end of the hallway was another smaller stairway going up to the third floor.

“Are we going up there?” Alonzo said. “There’s no telling what might be up there!”

“If there’s anything good to see,” Reggie said, “we’ll see it.”

On the third floor were three small rooms without doors. In one of the rooms were dusty bookshelves, empty except for a beer bottle with a cigarette butt in it.

“Somebody’s been here!” Carl said.

“Yeah, that’s real scary!” I said.

“No dead bodies and no old woman with an ax,” Alonzo said. “It all turned out to be a hoax!”

“Hey, if we had some beer we could have a little party!” Carl said. “We’ve already got the cigarettes!”

He took his cigarettes and matches out of his pocket and, sitting down on the floor and leaning against the wall, lit up. The rest of us sat down, too. After Carl had his cigarette going, he generously passed around the pack and the matches and we all lit up. Soon we were all huffing in a cloud of smoke.

“Isn’t this great?” Carl said.

“This is the best thing we’ve done since summer,” Reggie said.

“If my mother knew I was smoking, she’d just die,” Alonzo said.

“You’d better not to go home tonight, then,” Carl said. “She’ll be able to smell it.”

“I don’t think so. She smokes herself, so she’s used to the smell.”

“If the police came in now, we’d all go to jail,” I said.

“That’s not going to happen,” Reggie said. “Nobody knows we’re here. If we died here, it would be a long time before they found our bodies. They’d have to call in the FBI.”

“How long has it been since the Heatons lived here?” I asked.

“A hundred years,” Reggie said.

“I don’t think it’s been that long,” I said.

“How do you know so much about it?” Carl asked.

“My grandma remembered the family. She said they were odd. One of them committed suicide.”

“In this house?” Carl said. “I’ll bet it was in this very room!”

“Another one went insane.”

“That one probably murdered the whole family.”

“You know,” I said, sucking on my cigarette like a grown man, “we can’t ever tell anybody about this, no matter how much we want to brag about.”

“Why not?”

“If we tell one person at school, before you know it everybody will know. You know what people are like.”

“I think he’s right,” Alonzo said.

“I won’t ever tell,” Carl said. “On my word of honor.”

“I won’t ever tell anybody,” Reggie said.

“You know I won’t ever tell anybody about it,” Alonzo said. “I don’t want to go to jail. It would just about kill my mother.”

We smoked three or four cigarettes each. While we smoked we sat around talking and laughing about some of the ridiculous people at school, forgetting for the moment that we were in an unlawfully breached house.

It was after ten-thirty, so we decided it was time to go home. We each of us slithered out the same small kitchen window by which we had entered.

“We’ll have to do this again sometime soon!” Carl said.

Walking home, we all felt smart and resourceful, that we were able to see the inside of the fabled Heaton house without anything bad happening to us. My mother asked me how the movie was. I said it was a good movie and I had a wonderful time.

The next day was Sunday. My mother asked me to go to church with her in the morning, but I said I was sick at my stomach and needed to work on a book report for English class, so she relented.

I spent most of the day in my room, listening to the radio, reading the book I was supposed to write the report on, and doing plenty of nothing. I took a nap in the afternoon and woke up right before dinner.

That evening we were sitting in front of the TV watching the usual Sunday night fare, when we heard sirens. Not just one, but many.

“What in the world is going on?” my mother said.

We went out on the front porch. There was the unmistakable smell of smoke in the air.

We went back into the house and mother went into the kitchen, where I could hear her babbling on the phone. I knew she’d call one of her gossipy old friends and get the scoop without too much difficulty.

When she came back into the front room, I asked her what was burning.

“It’s the old Heaton house,” she said. “It’s been empty for years. Just a matter of time.”

“Do they know what caused it?” I asked. “It must have been lightning.”

“It’s probably some old drunken bum that went in there and started a fire to get warm.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

That night I had trouble sleeping. All night long I could hear sirens and smell smoke. Every time I went to sleep, I woke up with a start, thinking I had to get up and put out the fire before anybody knew I was the cause of it.

In the morning I walked the long way around so I wouldn’t have to walk past the Heaton house. When I got to school, I saw Alonzo first thing. He had a worried look on his face.

“Did you hear the news?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think they’ll know we did it?”

“Did what?”

“Caused the fire.”

“You have to stop thinking that way!” I said. “Maybe we didn’t cause it!”

“Of course we caused it! It was the smoking!”

“Don’t say that where anybody can hear you!” I said. “Do you want to go to jail?”

“No, I really don’t want to go to jail! It would absolutely kill my mother!”

“Then you don’t know anything! You didn’t see anything! You were nowhere near that house! Don’t even think about it! Got it?”

“I got it!

After lunch we saw Carl and Reggie and were able to have a private conversation with them outside the school building where nobody would hear us.

“I’m not worried,” Carl said. “Nobody saw us unless it was a ghost.”

“Nobody can prove anything,” Reggie said. “We didn’t do anything. The fire was caused by faulty wiring. It was just a coincidence that the fire started the day after we were in the house. We all know what a coincidence is, don’t we?”

“Sure, that’s a fourth grade word,” I said.

We all turned and looked at Alonzo, who looked not only doubtful but sick.

“Well, what are you looking at me for?” he said. “Do you think I’m going to tell?”

“No, you won’t tell,” I said. “Not if you know what’s good for you!”

“What are you going to do to me if I tell, huh? Kill me?”

“No, I won’t kill you, but if we go down, you go down, too.”

“Don’t worry so much! I’ve been stealing my mother’s tranquilizers. They make me forget things, but, more than that, they make it easier for me to lie.”

“Good boy!” I said.

“Can you steal some of those tranquilizers for the rest of us?” Carl asked.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Little More Than Bones
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

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

On the edge of town an empty house known to the locals as the Archer house (so named because of its original owner) was being torn down. At one time the Archer house was a perfectly fine house but had fallen into disrepair through neglect. Nobody wanted the house, but somebody wanted the lot, which stood at the top of a secluded hill, reached by a winding road.

Workmen first removed the doors and windows, the bathroom fixtures and the kitchen sink. Anything that might be used was salvaged. Most of the wood in the house was rotten and wasn’t of any use, so the workmen threw it into a large dumpster in the front yard. When the dumpster was full, the workmen had it emptied and then began to fill it again.

One of the main features of the Archer house was a large fireplace in the front room. A fireplace, of course, meant a chimney. The chimney was made of a light-colored stone and was largely intact. When the workmen began to dismantle the chimney, they expected to find old birds’ nests and other bird effluvia inside, but what they found instead was a dead body of indeterminate gender.

The workmen stopped what they were doing and called the police, believing they had unwittingly stumbled upon a crime scene.

To know whose body was in the chimney and how it came to be there, we must go back six years to a snowy Sunday in February.

Three miles from the Archer house, a young man named Perrin Borger lived with his mother and father. He had a job working in an office, but he despised his job and was generally unhappy with his life. He knew he should be living on his own away from his parents, but he somehow couldn’t make the move. He lacked motivation and ambition, and he believed he didn’t make enough money for a place of his own.

On this Sunday in February, Perrin Borger and his mother got into a fight—a small fight as fights go, but still a fight—and she threw him out of the house. When he told her he didn’t have any place to go, she told him she didn’t care; he could rot in hell as far as she was concerned. He threw a few things into a suitcase and got out of the house as fast as he could, hating her and not caring if he ever saw her again.

He drove around for a while, not knowing what to do with himself. The heater in his car didn’t work very well and the temperature was hovering around twelve degrees, so he wanted to get inside someplace where he could sit and think. He contemplated calling his mother and apologizing for the fight, but she was in the one in the wrong; she had started the fight and she ought to be the one apologizing to him. It would serve her right if he froze to death. He could see her standing over his casket at Foley brothers’ funeral home, putting on a good show of emotion as if she cared.

Feeling hungry—it was long past lunch time—he stopped at a pancake house and ate, voraciously, a plate of sausages and strawberry pancakes. After he paid for his lunch, he counted out his money to see if he had enough for a hotel room.

Wait a minute! Why should he spend all his money on a hotel room? Didn’t he have friends? He thought immediately of his friend Earl Declan. They had known each other since eighth grade and went all the way through high school together. They had a lot in common and had always been good friends. He knew Earl was renting the old house that people in the know called the Archer house. He figured that Earl would be happy to have a roommate, at least for a little while. They could share expenses; it sounded like a perfect arrangement. Nobody could say he wasn’t one to land on his feet when his mother or somebody else laid him low.

With a full stomach and a definite plan, he felt relieved and almost happy. He drove to Earl’s house and pulled into the leaf-strewn driveway and cut the engine. He leaned over the steering wheel and looked closely at the house but saw no signs of life. Could it be that Earl no longer lived there?

He climbed the steps to the front door and knocked several times until the knocking became pounding. When no answer was forthcoming, he called Earl’s name as loud as he dared without attracting unwanted attention, but still there was no response.

He walked around the house and knocked on the rough wood of the back door until his knuckles were raw, calling Earl’s name with each knock. He peered in the windows but wasn’t able to see much of anything except the leg of a table of a picture on the wall. It was obvious Earl wasn’t home.

On the verge of tears, he went back to his car and slumped down in the seat, trying to cocoon himself in his winter coat the best he could. He would wait until Earl came back from wherever he was. Maybe he only went to a movie or to do some grocery shopping. He would be home soon.

While sitting in his car facing the house, he began to look closely at the chimney. The chimney was big because the fireplace was big. Dropping down the chimney should be fairly easy for a person with narrow hips and shoulders. He would gain entry to the house that way and be waiting inside where it was warm when Earl came home. Earl wouldn’t mind. He’d be glad to see him. They’d have a lot of old times to talk over.

He walked all the way around the house to see how he might gain access to the roof without a ladder. He was able to shimmy onto the lowest point of the roof by the back porch, standing on a garbage can, and from there he climbed easily to the pinnacle where the chimney was.

Perched like a bird, he swung his feet into the dark hole of the chimney and lowered himself a few feet. It was smooth going at first, but the chimney narrowed unexpectedly, and he wasn’t able to go any farther. He couldn’t go down, and when he tried to go back up, he couldn’t do that, either. It was as if the chimney was gripping the lower part of his body. He struggled valiantly and said a prayer but wasn’t able to move. He rested for a few minutes and then tried again, but still wasn’t able to move an inch, up or down.

After struggling for what seemed like hours, he realized it was no use; he was not going to be able to free himself. His only hope was to yell until somebody heard him. When Earl came home, he’d hear him and get some help. The police and fire department would come and they’d lower a rope and extract him from the chimney like a cork from a wine bottle. He’d feel so stupid but also so glad to be free.

At about three in the morning, a drifter who was also a car thief happened along. He heard Perrin screaming inside the chimney, but he didn’t know where it was coming from, and if he had known he wouldn’t have cared. Since he was a thief, he easily opened the door of Perrin’s car and drove away stealthily in the night.

On Thursday after the Sunday that Perrin’s mother threw him out of the house, she began to have an uneasy feeling about him. She had expected him to come home, contrite, on Monday or Tuesday at the latest. She called the office where he worked and was told he wasn’t there. He hadn’t shown up for work all week and hadn’t bothered to call.

She immediately put in a call to the police and filed a missing persons report. A couple of officers came out to interview her, get a picture of Perrin and a physical description, and an account of the argument that prompted him to leave. The police began looking for him and his car.

Two weeks later his car was found in St. Joseph, Missouri, abandoned on a residential street. His suitcase was found inside the car with his pajamas, toothbrush, underwear and a change of clothes in it. There was no sign of violence or physical struggle.

Perrin survived in the chimney for thirty-six hours and then froze to death. No help was forthcoming. Right before he died, he saw his mother’s face and heard her voice; he hoped she wasn’t too mad at him.

She always believed he would someday come home. And, then, six years after he left, she received the unexpected phone call that revealed the truth at last.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp