Author: allen0997
A Short Life and a Merry One ~ A Short Story
A Short Life and a Merry One
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~
I had my friend Calvin Pears. He was in my class at school. We were both twelve years old and had known each other since we were five. We spent a lot of time together. We were good friends because we were both shy and not popular in school.
Calvin and I always had a lot of things to talk about. We laughed a lot. We laughed about things that nobody else would have thought funny. We made fun of people behind their backs. Calvin was a good imitator. He imitated our teachers, whether they were male or female. He imitated the way they walked or talked or smoked. He wanted to have a show business career after he finished school.
It was a Friday evening in October. After being in school all week, it was time to get out of the house and have some fun. Calvin and I decided we’d rather go roller skating than see the western movie at the Bijou. I liked roller skating and could skate circles around Calvin. He usually said he was tired or his legs hurt and he wanted to call it a night.
We were a couple blocks from the roller rink when we saw two boys from high school standing on the street corner. I had seen them but didn’t know their names.
“Well, here’s a couple of little kids!” the taller of the two boys said when he saw us. “Does your mommy let you out after dark?”
“Hi, Lonnie!” Calvin said enthusiastically.
“How’s it going, little man?”
“I’m doing spectacularly well!” Calvin said.
“Well, glad to hear it! What’s your sister, Bimbo, up to these days?”
“Bimbo’s fine. She was rolling her hair up at the kitchen table when I left home.”
“She wasn’t going out on a date, was she?”
“No, I think she was just going to pop some popcorn and watch TV.”
“Well, you be sure and tell her old Lonnie said ‘hi’!”
“I will.”
Lonnie’s friend’s name was Brent. He had red hair and a sly look about him like a fox. When Calvin introduced me to Lonnie and Brent, they both shook my hand without irony. I was used to high school boys calling me names or making fun of me.
“Where you little hoodlums headed?” Lonnie asked.
“We’re going roller skating,” Calvin said.
“Well, that’s a kids’ thing, isn’t it?”
“I guess it is,” Calvin said. “It’s fun, though.”
“Yeah, I guess you would think it’s fun!”
“They are kids,” Brent said.
“Yeah, and we’re grown men, ain’t we?” Lonnie said. “Hah-hah-hah!”
“Let’s go!” Brent said. “I’m tired of just standin’ here!”
“Now, look here, you two little kids!” Lonnie said. “I’ve got my brother’s car parked over there. I don’t have my own car yet, but I will soon. We were just about to go for a little hell-raising adventure, if you two would care to join us.”
“What do we need them for?” Brent said.
“It’s just for a little while,” Lonnie said. “I need to find out some stuff about Bimbo.”
“Oh, you and your girls! You make me sick!”
“So, how about it?” Lonnie said. “Do you two little sixth graders want to go with us for a little ride?”
“Sure!” Calvin said.
“We’re not sixth graders,” I said. “We’re in the seventh.”
“Do you want to go?” Calvin asked me.
“I guess so. If you do.”
“Well, let’s get crackin’, then!” Lonnie said.
On the way to the car, Lonnie put his hand on Calvin’s shoulder and leaned down and talked in his ear. So, that’s what this is all about, I thought. Lonnie only pays any attention to Calvin and me at all because he’s interested in Calvin’s sister, Bimbo. I’d rather go roller skating.
Lonnie opened the door for Calvin and me to climb into the back seat. He and Brent got into the front seat and Lonnie started the engine and pulled away from the curb with a jerk.
“Where do you kids want to go?” Lonnie asked over his shoulder.
“Any place is fine with us,” Calvin said.
“Isn’t this fun?”
“I’ve never had so much fun in all my life!”
“Does Bimbo ever talk about me?” Lonnie asked. “I mean, like at the dinner table or anything?”
“I never pay any attention to anything Bimbo says,” Calvin said.
“Do you know if she’s seeing anybody right now?”
“Seeing anybody? I don’t know what that means.”
“Is she dating anybody regularly?”
“I don’t know. I don’t pay any attention.”
“Well, are there any guys that hang around?”
“I haven’t seen any. Except for the man who reads the gas meter.”
“If you see any, you be sure and let me know.”
“I will.”
We went through town, past the chemical plant, over the railroad tracks and the bridge, and in ten minutes we were out in the country. The road was dark, now, and hilly, with abrupt dips in the road and signs about watching for high water. There were sharp curves that couldn’t be seen until we were right up on them.
Lonnie angled around in the front seat so he could see Calvin’s face. “Does Bimbo go around much? With other girls, I mean?”
“Yeah, they have stupid slumber parties and they go to shows and things like that. They’re all hoping a talent scout from Hollywood will discover them and want to put them in the movies.”
“Yeah, I know what they’re like,” Lonnie said. “Completely unrealistic. I mean, how many people get discovered by talent scouts?”
“I never heard of anybody.”
“Watch this!” Lonnie said.
He got the speed up to sixty miles an hour (the limit was twenty-five) and then he turned off the headlights, and we found ourselves speeding blindly through absolute darkness. I held on to the door beside me and closed my eyes.
“Oh, my god!” Calvin gasped.
“Isn’t that the wildest thing you’ve ever seen!” Lonnie said.
“That’s a stupid trick, man!” Brent said. “What are you trying to do? Get us all killed?”
“If you don’t like it, man, I can always let you out here!”
“No thanks, man! It’s a long walk back to town! Just slow down a little.”
“Now it’s time for the roller coaster!” Lonnie said. “Don’t you kids in the back seat just love roller coasters?”
“Sure!” Calvin said.
He took a series of small hills at a high rate of speed, engine roaring. At times we were flying, all four tires off the road at the same time. We could hear the bottom of the car scraping the road in the low places.
“I’m glad this is not my car!” Brent said.
“Oh, my brother does this all the time!” Lonnie said. “He’s the one that told me about it!”
There was a sharp curve in the road and then another one. Lonnie had to fight the wheel to keep the car on the road.
“This is so much fun!” Lonnie said. “I’m going to turn the headlights off again!”
“Don’t be a jerk, man!” Brent said.
He didn’t turn the headlights off, but he went faster. There was a curve on a hill and then another curve going down the hill. There was a straightaway, then another hill.
“Isn’t this living!” Lonnie said. “It feels just like flying!”
He didn’t see the next sharp curve until it was too late and the car left the road. He struggled to regain control, but it was too late. The car glanced off a tree and kept going to the next tree—down a gulley, up the other side, taking out fence posts and small trees as it went. Finally it came to rest on a huge flat rock ten feet below the level of the road, smashed flat like a stepped-on bug.
I was thrown from the car. I didn’t know where the others were. I knew I was dead, but I also knew that I was aware of what was happening and that the same thing had happened to me before at an earlier time. All this went through my head in the briefest of flashes.
I was present at my funeral, and I don’t mean just as a dead body in a closed-up box at the front of the church. I saw the whole thing from up near the ceiling. My mother sat on the front row, a stunned look on her face. My father, divorced from my mother since I was four, sat on the other side of the room. Everybody from my seventh-grade class was there, even the ones who didn’t like me.
My mother, sparing no expense, had me buried in the Methodist cemetery beside my great-grandfather, who died long before I was born. I was dead, now, and buried and the people who had known me would soon forget about me.
The one person who remembered me years later was my father, though I had hardly known him in my short life. Since I was the only child he ever had, he became sentimental about me in his old age. When he was over ninety and aware that he was nearing the end, he had my body (what was left of it) disinterred from the grave where it had lain in for fifty years, flown halfway across the country, and cremated.
When he died a short time later, he had my ashes, along with his own, interred in a niche in a columbaria. Both our names were inscribed on the niche, along with the dates we were born and the dates we died. He had a long life and I had a short one. Father and Son. Together Forever.
Copyright © 2025 by Allen Kopp
You May Know Him as a Ghoul ~ A Short Story
You May Know Him as a Ghoul
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~
(This story has been published in The Literary Hatchet.)
Blaise DeBeulah awoke to the rising of the sun and switched on the radio beside his bed. Dark Eyes by the Vincent Lopez Orchestra was playing. The beautiful melody brought a smile to his face, making him forget for the moment that had to get out of bed, get dressed, and face another distasteful day. He was just drifting off to a warm, intoxicating dreamland awash in saxophones and violins, when Bertha DeBeulah came bursting into the room.
“Get out of that bed, you lazy slug!” she commanded. “Do you think the world owes you a life of comfort and ease?”
“No, mother. The world doesn’t owe me anything. I’m getting up now.”
“Your brothers and sisters are hungry! They want fresh meat! Now!”
“I’m doing the best I can, mother. I’m not feeling very well.”
“Well, isn’t that just too bad?
“I was out last night until dawn. Fresh meat isn’t so easy to come by anymore.”
“I don’t want to hear any of your feeble excuses! And when I say fresh meat, I mean fresh! The longer a body has been buried, the worse it tastes! After a body has been dead three or four days, the embalming fluid ruins the taste! The ones you’ve been dragging home have been anything but fresh!”
“I know mother. I’m doing the best I can. I hang around the cemetery all day long, waiting for a funeral, but they have been few and far between.”
“I told you I don’t want to hear any lame excuses! If there haven’t been any funerals, you have to do the killing yourself! How about some nice, juicy, muscular gravediggers?”
“Would those be for you to eat, or for the brothers and sisters, mother?”
“Don’t you get fresh with me! I’ll tell your papa, Benedictus DeBeulah, you smarted out to me and he’ll knock your block off!”
“Yes, I know, mother. I know. He has knocked my block off so many times that my head no longer sits straight on my shoulders.”
“Well, it serves you right! And if you don’t bring home some fresh meat—and I mean fresh—I’ll let the brothers and sisters eat you!”
“I’m not exactly fresh, mother. I’m two hundred and thirty-seven years old.”
“You don’t have to tell me how old you are, Mr. Smarty Britches! I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it any time I choose!”
“Yes, mother, I know. You’d be doing me a blessing.”
“What was that?”
“I said I’ll be on my way as soon as I find my shoes.”
Though he was two hundred and thirty-seven years old, Blaise DeBeulah could pass for nineteen whenever he wanted to. He wrapped himself in a long trench coat and a scarf that, thanks to the icy wind, allowed him to cover the lower part of his face. He topped off the invisible man look with a broad-brimmed hat worn low over the eyes. Dressed in this way, he could pass for anybody, anywhere, without attracting any particular kind of attention.
To get to the cemetery, he had to pass through downtown. Since it was a college town, there were always lots of interesting people around his own age (not two hundred and thirty-seven, but nineteen), and he enjoyed seeing them and walking among them. He might even pass for one of them: a tall, well-dressed, rather stately young man, dignified and poised, aloof and intriguing.
He liked to linger outside a malt shop where people his age gathered. It had a red-and-white awning and exuded attractive smells such as cinnamon, chocolate and peppermint. The thing that attracted him most, though, was the music that was piped out to the sidewalk: the romantic dance bands and orchestras, the velvet-voiced crooners, the bouncy girl singers, the snappy dance numbers. It was like nothing he had heard before in his two hundred and thirty-seven years of a ghoul’s life.
He longed to go inside the malt shop, to sit at the counter and order a drink, maybe strike up a conversation with someone and end up slow-dancing on the dance floor with everyone watching. It was not going to happen, though. He had a ghoul’s hands and a ghoul’s legs. When people saw his face, they would know it was a ghoul’s face and they would run screaming from the place in terror. He would be more embarrassed than he could possibly imagine. Somebody would call the police and they would come and take him away and lock him up. He couldn’t let that happen.
With a lump of regret in his throat, he passed on to the cemetery, the music sounding in his head long after he could still hear it.
One small, poor-looking funeral was in progress on a hillside. A dozen or so black-garbed mourners gathered around an open grave. A priest said a prayer and when he was finished the mourners dispersed and a man standing by with a shovel began filling in the grave.
Blaise moved on. He wasn’t going to dig in the dirt with his hands just to get a freshly buried body. It would taste like embalming fluid, anyway, he was sure, and the brothers and sisters would gag. They could always tell a body that had been embalmed from one that hadn’t. He’d have to look elsewhere.
He knew that if he didn’t find a really fresh corpse he’d have to kill a man or a woman, or maybe a child, on his own. He hated the killing; he didn’t even like killing animals. He’d almost rather die himself.
He came to another funeral, a much larger one this time. A prominent man, a person of some fame, had died. There were maybe two hundred mourners on their feet around a dark-wood casket that gleamed in the sun. Some of the mourners cried and some smiled and laughed as if they were at a cocktail party. A holy man gestured over the casket with his arms and when the service was finished the people let out a gasp of relief like children released from school. They moved away quickly, some of them lighting cigarettes, toward cars dispersed along a scenic hillside.
Blaise stood behind a tree and watched. After a few minutes, all the mourners were gone and the casket was left unattended in the sun. The gravediggers hadn’t appeared yet to finish their job. The funeral director was nowhere to be seen; he was off someplace, probably having a cigarette or a nip from a bottle.
Without thinking what he was doing, Blaise approached the casket and lifted the lid. The deceased was an old man with a mottled face and a bald head. He appeared to have been ninety years old or older.
He scooped the old man up in his arms and, balancing the body against his right shoulder, managed to reclose the lid with his left hand. If all went well, the gravediggers would come and bury the empty casket, never suspecting that the body inside had been purloined.
He couldn’t exactly walk back through the streets of the town carrying a dead body, so he took it to the designated hiding place, a scooped-out trench along the north wall, hidden behind some bushes. He covered the body with dead leaves as an extra precaution and when he was finished he left the cemetery.
From a payphone downtown he called Daedalus, Bertha DeBeulah’s factotum, with his usual message in code: Some lovely peaches are to be had at the north wall. Daedalus would go and collect the body as soon as it was safe, take it back to the house and drop it down the meat chute in the kitchen wall, to the brothers and sisters who dwelt below.
Blaise walked the rest of the way home, then, relieved that he had delivered a body without having to kill it on his own and relieved, also, that he wouldn’t have another confrontation with Bertha DeBeulah at least for a day or two. Maybe something cataclysmic would happen in the meantime, such as a meteor colliding with earth.
He spent the rest of the day locked in his room, catching up on his sleep and dreaming about what his life might have been like if he had been born into a real family instead of a family of ghouls. He might have been one of those sleek college boys popping up soda pop rickeys to his heart’s delight. He might have driven a car and carried books under his arm.
About nine o’clock that night, he was listening to music on the radio when he heard a terrible commotion downstairs. He went to the top of the banister and looked down. Bertha DeBeulah and Benedictus DeBeulah were fighting, yelling at each other, throwing objects across the room. It was nothing new. He went back to his room and shut the door.
The fighting was not to be ignored, though. Bertha DeBeulah and Benedictus DeBeulah were engaged in all-out war, causing the old house to quake on its foundations. Blaise went downstairs, thinking to separate them and get them to stop fighting, but he could see it was no use. They were mad with rage. When he tried to get between them to pull them apart, Benedictus DeBeulah pushed him so hard against the wall that he went through to the next room.
“Stop it!” Blaise cried. “If you don’t stop it, I’m going to call the people from the insane asylum to come and get you and lock you up, where you belong! Then where would the brothers and sisters be?”
“I’m sick and tired of her!” Benedictus DeBeulah roared. “I’m going to kill the evil old bitch once and for all! Satan will be happy when she finally arrives in hell!”
“Kill me?” Bertha DeBeulah screeched. “I don’t think so! Not if I kill you first!”
Blaise could see they meant to do each other seriously bodily harm. He was going to run to the neighbors for help, but then he remembered they lived in a swamp and there weren’t any neighbors for miles.
Bertha DeBeulah and Benedictus DeBeulah had each other around the neck. There is nothing on earth like two old ghouls fighting to the death. They may destroy the earth, but one of them will live and the other one die.
Benedictus DeBeulah’s strength proved superior in the end, however. He pried Bertha DeBeulah’s fingers from around his neck and reared back and knocked her block off with so much force that her head flew off her shoulders and hit the wall like a bloody cabbage.
Bertha DeBeulah wasn’t finished yet, though. Her headless body rose up from the floor and produced from the air a ball of flame, a gift from her beloved Satan. She directed the ball squarely at the midsection of Benedictus DeBeulah and he became the ball of flame. He ran through the house, arms flailing, but he wasn’t able to extinguish the flames that engulfed him. He grabbed the dining room curtains and pulled them down on top of him. The curtains helped to extinguish the flames and keep the rest of the house from catching on fire, but they were of no use to Benedictus DeBeulah. He was not only clearly dead, but really most sincerely dead.
When it was all over, Blaise gathered up the charred remains of Benedictus DeBeulah and the headless remains of Bertha DeBeulah and dragged them into the kitchen and threw them down the meat chute. The brothers and sisters wouldn’t know that they were eating their own mother and father, but if they did know they wouldn’t care. Fresh meat is fresh meat.
After Blaise rested and had a cooling drink of water and some onions and herbs (he was trying to take up a vegetarian diet), he became fully aware of his good fortune. For the first time in his life, he was free of family exigencies, free to do as he pleased rather than as he was told.
He would buy a phonograph and all the latest recordings. He would buy a car and learn to drive and find the best tailor in town and have some stylish suits made to order. He would get to know some of those young college students and invite them to parties. He would tell them of his experiences in some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. They would love him. They would find him fascinating.
Just as he was contemplating his life to be, he heard the brothers and sisters howling below-stairs like the wild animals they were. They were well-fed, so what was wrong with them now? He would just ignore them and tomorrow, or maybe the next day, he would have a special treat for them.
Copyright © 2025 by Allen Kopp
Literary Fictions 