Literary Fictions

Birth of the Dodo
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

I was ill but I recovered. When I awoke, I was in a place I had never been before and found myself purchasing a house. A large house it was, many-windowed, a hundred yards or so up the hill from a river. The river, with its protruding rocks and swift current, provided a scenic background to the setting.

I didn’t remember choosing the house out of other houses but, here I was, turning over a fat envelope full of cash to the owner and seller of the house, a woman named Mrs. Goldoni. She had platinum blond hair like a Hollywood starlet and a thin, lipless mouth. Her face was shriveled like a Mayan mummy and, due to an arthritic condition (she said), she didn’t always walk upright, but parallel to the floor like an insect, which is to say a cockroach or cricket. I’m not sure how many legs she had, but I’d say at least six.

As soon as the house was transferred over to me, I thought Mrs. Goldoni, the bug woman, would clear out and leave me to it, but she seemed reluctant to leave. Her husband was dead, she said, and her many children scattered to the four winds.

“I don’t have any place else to go,” she said pitifully.

“Why did you sell your house then?” I asked.

I agreed to keep her on as housekeeper, at least until one of her innumerable daughters could arrange to take her in. I pictured her children and I wondered what form they had taken, if they were insects like their mother or something else entirely. I was probably better off not knowing.

The day after I moved in, I was in one of the upstairs rooms putting things away, when I stopped what I was doing and looked out the window at the river. I heard Mrs. Goldoni’s rapid, tapping little footsteps come up behind me and I turned and spoke to her.

“What is the name of that river?” I asked.

“What river, sir?”

“There’s only one river out there, Mrs. Goldoni!”

“It’s the River Ishcabob, sir.”

“Ishcabob? I haven’t ever seen it on a map. Does it ever flood?”

“Oh, no, sir!” she said. “I’ve never heard of it flooding. Why ever would it flood?”

“Where I come from, rivers sometimes flood and cause a lot of trouble and damage.”

“Well, rivers may flood, but I’ve never known the River Ishcabob to flood.”

While I was watching the river, I saw a person, a man, floating along on the current. I could distinctly see his face and head and his struggling, flailing arms. In a few seconds there was  another man and then another one.

“Oh, I my Lord!” I said. “Somebody has fallen into the river and is being swept away on the current! Not just one but three! I saw three different men! They were naked and they were struggling to keep their heads above the water. We should try to get them some help for them before they drown!”

“Oh, bless my soul, sir!” Mrs. Goldoni said. “It’s nothing to be alarmed about. It happens all the time.”

“What does?”

“People in the river. Those are the Transgressors.”

“The what?”

 “You have to understand. Some poor souls are brought to the river.”

“What do you mean, brought to the river?”

“Is that the telephone phone ringing?” she asked.

“We don’t have a phone,” I said.

Mrs. Goldoni dropped to her tiny feet and skittered out of the room. I was left with the distinct impression she was evading my question.

“What kind of arthritis makes you grow extra legs and walk like a bug?” I asked, but of course she was gone and didn’t hear me.

While I was eating lunch, I noticed a small crowd of people standing in the doorway looking at me.

“Who are those people?” I asked Mrs. Goldoni, who was serving.

“Oh, they’re always here,” she said. “They won’t bother you.”

“Now, look here!” I said. “My privacy is important to me. I don’t want lots of strange people hanging around.”

“You usually have to be here a lot longer before you see them.”

“Who are they?”

“Don’t worry yourself about them, sir. After a while you’ll forget they’re here.”

“I still want to know who they are and why they’re here!”

“They’re always here,” she said. “We just don’t always see them!”

“Tell them to leave!”

After lunch I took a walk down the hill. It was the first time I had seen the river up close. I stood for a while close to the edge and looked down at its churning, blue-green depths. It was beautiful and mesmerizing but also frightening in a way because I had the feeling it (the river) had a will of its own and would suck me under if it could. I didn’t relish the thought of drowning—which I certainly would do if I ever fell in—or of being in uncontrollable water over my head. I suppose I had always had a fear of water. I would stay as far back from the river as I could.

While I was walking back up the hill, I noticed movement over to my left and turned and looked in that direction. What I saw was a clown dressed in a billowing red suit with a tremendous ruffled collar and enormous shoes. I was going to say something to the clown or at least wish him a good morning, but he was juggling a series of balls so fast while walking that they (the balls) were only a blur. He was the best juggler I had ever seen.

When I got back home, Mrs. Goldoni met me at the door. She was entertaining her good friend in the kitchen, Baby Estelle. Baby Estelle was not a baby but was instead a tiny, doll-like woman with flaming red hair and a twinkling smile. She curtsied and smiled demurely.

“Would you like to see me dance?” Baby Estelle asked.

“Um, I guess so,” I said.

She stood up and in the space between the table and the kitchen sink twisted and turned, jumped and dived, sashayed and pirouetted with absolute abandon. In five minutes she was out of breath and so completed her performance with an elaborate bow to the floor.

Mrs. Goldoni applauded enthusiastically. “Isn’t she a wonderful dancer?” she said. “I just don’t know how she does it!”

“I haven’t ever seen anything like that before,” I said.

“I was trained at the Sore Bone Academy,” Baby Estelle said.

“Isn’t that in Paris, France?” I asked.

“Of course not, silly!” Baby Estelle said. “It’s right here!”

“Right where?”

“Right under your nose,  Mr. Smarty Pants.”

I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I didn’t care to pursue it any further.

“And that’s not all!” Mrs. Goldoni gushed. “Baby Estelle’s husband is a clown!”

“I think I just saw him!” I said.

“Where?” Baby Estelle asked.

“I walked down to the river and as I was walking back up the hill I saw a clown dressed in red off in the distance. I was going to speak to him, but he was juggling balls and he didn’t even know I was there.”

“That’s him!” Baby Estelle said. “The very one! That’s the clown in question! That’s Mr. Winklebottom!”

“Mr. Winklebottom is so handsome!” Mrs. Goldoni said. “So distinguished!”

“You must come and see us perform some night!” Baby Estelle said.

“I look forward to it,” I said.

Baby Estelle curtsied again and danced her way out the door.

“Baby Estelle is such a doll!” Mrs. Goldoni said. “I just love her to pieces!”

“I’m going to take a little nap,” I said. “Call me when dinner is ready.”

A couple of nights later I was sleeping soundly when Mrs. Goldoni knocked on my door and woke me up.

“Sir!” she called. “Sir! Wake up! I thought you would want to know!”

“Know what?” I asked. “There’s not a fire, is there?”

“No, sir, there’s no fire. Your wife is giving birth!”

I jumped out of the bed and opened the door. I didn’t mind her seeing me only partially dressed after such an absurd statement.

“What did you say?”

“I said your wife is giving birth!”

“Very funny!” I said. “You know I don’t have a wife.”

“Come with me!”

I followed her into a part of the house I hadn’t seen before, down some stairs and into a dark corridor to a doorway. Standing around the doorway were several women I didn’t recognize. As Mrs. Goldoni and I approached the doorway, the women stood aside to let me enter.

The room was dark with only a couple of candles burning. There was a large, high bed, and in the middle of the bed was a human-sized female doll. The doll’s face was turned toward the candle. She had painted circles on each cheek. Her eyes were large and expressive and her eyelashes long and curved like spider’s legs.

“What is all this?” I asked. I still wasn’t happy about being woke up at such an hour.

“Why, don’t you recognize her, sir!” Mrs. Goldoni asked. “It’s your wife, Curlicue. She’s about to give birth.”

“How many times do I have to tell you I don’t have a wife? And even if I had a wife, I wouldn’t have a doll for a wife!”

“You don’t have to worry, sir. She’s in a good hands. All will be well.”

“I’ll wake up in a minute and discover I’m having a nightmare.”

“Why don’t you go back to bed, sir? I’ll call you as soon as the baby is safely delivered.”

“Call me for when breakfast is ready and, other than that, don’t call me at all!”

“Just as you wish, sir, but what shall we do about the baby?”

“Give it to Baby Estelle and Mr. Winklebottom! I’m sure they can make it part of their act!”

“Yes, sir, but I think you’ll change your mind when see you the little darling little thing!”

Despite my instructions to the contrary, Mrs. Goldoni came to my bedroom again at eight o’clock to tell me the news that Curlicue had been safely delivered of a baby at four o’clock in the morning.

“A baby what?” I asked.

“You’re going to want to see it, sir!”

I wasn’t dressed yet, but I pulled on my robe and followed Mrs. Goldoni again, down the same stairs and the same dark corridor to the same doorway to the same room where I had seen Curlicue lying in the middle of the big bed the night before.

Curlicue looked no different. She had the same half smile on her lips and the same dreamy, expressionless eyes of a doll.

“Very funny!” I said. “I don’t see a baby at all.”

With a pleased smiled, Mrs. Goldoni pulled out from under the covers a fully formed dodo bird. She held it up so I could get a good look at it. It gave out with a couple of pitiful peeps and flapped its flightless wings. I heard people behind me gasp in wonder.

“That can’t be a dodo bird!” I said. “They lived on the island of Madagascar and they’ve been extinct for hundreds of years!”

“It’s your very own son. Wouldn’t you like to hold him?”

Not waiting for an answer, Mrs. Goldoni thrust the dodo bird into my arms and I had no other choice but to hold him. He looked into my eyes and made little cooing sounds.

“Oh, he knows his daddy!” Mrs. Goldoni said. “Isn’t he the smartest boy? And already just as cute as a bug!”

While I was still holding the dodo bird, Mrs. Goldoni leaned over the bed and put her ear to Curlicue’s mouth.

“She’s wants to name him Sheridan and she wants to know if the name meets with your approval, sir.”

“I can’t think of a better name for a dodo bird,” I said. “Now, can I get some breakfast, please?”

By the time I was finished with breakfast, I was already thinking of the dodo bird as Sheridan, as a unique individual. Of course, I wasn’t his father—and I didn’t want anybody to entertain the notion that I was—but I felt a certain amount of pride and proprietary interest in him. I recognized the significance of having the rarest of rare birds in my possession: a bird that had been extinct for hundreds of years, a bird that no living person had ever laid eyes on, and it was in my very own house!

It occurred to me that nobody was going to believe that I had a real, living, extinct-no-longer dodo bird in my possession. People would think I was a dangerous lunatic if I tried to tell them. I had to have photographic proof! I wasn’t in possession of a workable camera at the moment, but I was a mile or so from the good-sized town of New Garland and was sure there would be a store there where I could buy one, no matter the cost.

I changed clothes and put on my walking shoes and told Mrs. Goldoni I was going to be gone for a while and not to await luncheon on my account. Then I set out walking. Still within sight of the house, I was passing the River Ischabob over to my left, intent on the long walk ahead of me, when I saw a sight in the middle of the river that stopped me in my tracks.

On one of the large rocks protruding from the water, Sheridan the dodo bird was perched at a perilous angle, struggling to keep from sliding into the raging water. How did he get out of the house and down to the river? Wasn’t anybody watching him? I couldn’t let him be swept away on the current!

I couldn’t swim a stroke but, without concern for my own safety, I started trying to make my way from one rock to another over to the rock where Sheridan was sitting. He looked at me pitifully and squawked and I knew he recognized and remembered me. He would come to me if only he wasn’t paralyzed by fear.

I was within five feet of Sheridan when he gave a couple of surprising hops away from me, until he was all the way across the river to the other side. He was safe, but I couldn’t say the same for myself.

It became impossible for me to hang onto my rock any longer and I found myself in the river, being carried away on the current like an insignificant piece of flotsam. I flailed my arms and legs, but I knew it was no use. As I was swept away, I clearly saw Mrs. Goldoni standing on the bank of the river looking at me, along with Baby Estelle and the juggling Mr. Winklebottom. Sitting in a wheelchair in front of Mrs. Goldoni was Curlicue the human-sized doll, her alarming eyes with their spiderly lashes turned in my direction. None of them did anything to help me.

The current carried me away and away. I had the sensation of drowning over and over until I could drown no more. All went dark and I was lost.

But I would wake again.

When next I came to myself, I was in a large cage and hundreds people, it seemed, were looking at me. I knew, somehow, that hundreds more were lined up outside waiting to look at me. To express my indignation, I squawked at a large woman in a disgusting hat and flapped my flightless wings. When I didn’t get the response I hoped for, I turned around backwards and tucked my head under my barely adequate wing and hid my face  the best I could.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Maroon and Yellow
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

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

Everybody knew Miss Penny. She was the elderly widow who lived in the trim white house on the corner with green window shutters and a pear tree in the front yard. She was frequently seen tending her lawn, walking along the street carrying groceries, or soliciting donations in the neighborhood for a charitable cause or to buy flowers for someone who had died. When she saw any of her neighbors, she always called out to them cheerily and waved and smiled. Everybody loved Miss Penny.

Suffer the little children to come unto me. Miss Penny’s home was something of a haven for the better-behaved, calmer children of the neighborhood. On warm summer evenings, they liked to sit in the glider on Miss Penny’s screened-in porch, sipping Kool-Aid and eating cookies, while she sat in her old-fashioned rocking chair beside her huge fern and listened to them prattle on about school or their families. She smiled and laughed, encouraged them to be themselves, not be sullen and withdrawn. She was like the indulgent grandmother they wished they had. Sometimes she gave them small amounts of money to do little jobs for her, such as sweeping the front walk, putting birdseed out for the birds, or lifting down a box from the top shelf in the closet.

Tippy Kepke lived on the other side of the street, down the block from Miss Penny. She was fourteen years old and lived with her parents and her two manly older brothers. She thought all her teachers in school were bitches or assholes. Her parents were assholes, and she wanted, more than anything, to see her two brothers eat shit and die. She regarded Miss Penny warily and pondered why a woman that old was still allowed to live.

Tippy was unpopular in school, but she knew a way to change all that. She would try out for cheerleader, and if she was lucky enough to be chosen over the other nitwits who tried out, she would be welcomed into the world to which she so fervently aspired: the world of handsome, sleek, well-dressed boys, and pretty girls with perfect hair and skin; the world in which boys would pick her up in their very own cars for Saturday night dates; the world in which she, even she, might be homecoming queen and get her picture in the society column.

She stole a book from the library that told all about cheerleading, with cheerleader routines and yells; pictures of how cheerleaders dressed, how they deported themselves. There were drawings at the back of the book that demonstrated exercises that cheerleaders ought to undertake, because—don’t you know?—a cheerleader needs to be in tiptop physical condition and have winning muscle tone. A cheerleader is a winner and not a whiner. A cheerleader sets an example for the other students in the school, girls and boys alike. A cheerleader excels in all things, at all times. Yes, being a cheerleader is not something to be taken lightly. The cheerleader of today might be the movie star of tomorrow. Anything is possible in the world of the cheerleader.

She began to think of herself as the “cheerleader type.” She tried to do the exercises in the book but she hated any kind of physical exertion and soon became bored and achy. What she was able to do, though, was to pay closer attention to her grooming and appearance. She began washing her hair and face more often and making sure she didn’t have dirt under her fingernails.

The biggest obstacle to not becoming a cheerleader, she believed, was not having the cheerleader outfit with the school colors, maroon and yellow. The outfit consisted of short skirt, long-sleeved blouse, jumper, knee socks, and optional sweater for colder weather. The entire outfit might be purchased at Delaney’s department store for thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents: not a lot of money when one considered what it might mean to her future. If she had the outfit, she’d wear it to the tryouts and, surely—if there was a God in heaven—that would give her an edge over the others, even if her cheerleader moves were not all they should be.

She knew it was useless to ask her mother for the money. It would only get her started on one of her boring lectures about how hard money is to earn and to keep after it’s earned. She might steal the money if she knew who she might steal it from.

Then she thought of Miss Penny. She knew that Miss Penny sometimes paid children in the neighborhood money for doing little things for her. She would go to Miss Penny and offer her services for the paltry sum of thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents, plus tax. She could work the money out somehow: cleaning house, washing dishes, doing laundry, yard work, or whatever the silly old cow needed.

It was a good plan and she congratulated herself for thinking of it.

The next morning after her mother left for work and her brothers were away doing whatever brothers do, she went to Miss Penny’s front door and knocked timidly. Not getting any answer, she walked all the way around the house a couple of times. Then she tried the back door, found it unlocked, and entered the kitchen without making a sound.

Standing for a moment just inside the door, listening, she heard nothing. Miss Penny must be gone, probably to the store or the beauty parlor, or maybe visiting a neighbor. Maybe she would only be gone for a minute or two. Whatever Tippy was going to do, she had to do it fast before Miss Penny came back and found her. If she could find some money and take it and then leave, that would be perfect. Miss Penny would never know who took it. But where would an old woman keep money in her house? That was the question.

She crept soundlessly through the kitchen and then the dining room into the front room, and there was Miss Penny, asleep on her back on the couch, her chest moving up and down with her breathing. Her right arm was up over her head and her left arm by her side. The television set, to the right of the couch, was on, but with the sound turned so low it could barely be heard.

 If Miss Penny woke up at that moment and saw her in her house, she’d scream and jump up and call the police and have a great squawking fit. Tippy couldn’t let that happen. They’d come and take her away in handcuffs and lock her up and she’d never, ever, be cheerleader after a thing like that happened.

She had to act fast. A sound outside scared her. Someone was coming! She felt genuine panic rising inside her, the panic of being found out doing something horrible. She felt faint with confusion and fear. Not knowing what else to do, she ran into the kitchen and grabbed a knife from a knife rack on the counter beside the sink. Gripping the knife so hard it hurt her hand, she ran back into the front room where Miss Penny lay.

A sudden solution occurred to her, as though whispered into her ear. Stab the old bitch to death and take the money out of her purse and get out of the house as quickly as she could! Nobody would ever know she did it. She had hardly known Miss Penny and had never been in her house before. The police would think a burglar or a drifter had done it.

With the first thrust of the knife into her flesh, the old woman woke up, gasped for air, tried to sit up. She opened her eyes and when she saw Tippy and knew what was happening to her, she closed them again quickly, as if on a horrible vision. The life went out of her so fast and so easily!

The deed done, Tippy took the knife back into the kitchen, washed it off with hot water—including the handle—and put it back into its rack along with the other knives.

Miss Penny’s purse was easy to find. It sat on top of the dresser in the bedroom, plain as day. Tippy didn’t even have to look for it. She opened the purse, took out the wallet and inside found two twenties, a ten, and two ones. Fifty-two dollars! Enough to buy the cheerleader outfit and have some left over to buy something else. It had all been easier than she thought it would be.

That evening she was especially kind to her family. She smiled at her brothers and helped her mother with dinner and then, when the meal was over, cleared the table and washed the dishes while the rest of the family watched television.

The next morning she slept late, after a night of untroubled sleep. After a light breakfast, she got dressed and walked downtown to Delaney’s. The day was sunny and fresh and much cooler than it had been. There was a hint of autumn in the breeze.

Delaney’s had the cheerleader outfit in stock, in exactly the right size. Tippy’s heart sang! Finally, good things were going to happen for her. Doors would open that had previously been closed. It was the turning point she had been hoping for.

With the bulky Delaney’s bag containing its treasure gripped tightly in her fingers, she went straight home, without any dawdling. She couldn’t wait to take the bag up to her room, lock herself in, take the things out of the bag, admire them one by one and try them on in front of the mirror.

When she got home, she went into the house by the back door, as she usually did. She couldn’t have seen the police cars parked at the curb.

Her mother was standing in the living room. When she heard Tippy entering from the kitchen, she turned and looked in her direction, her face pale and stricken. She took the Delaney’s bag from Tippy’s hands as if not really seeing it and gestured to the two police officers standing a few feet away. Tippy hadn’t seen them at first. She showed by the look on her face that she knew why they were there and what it was going to mean to her future.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Not a Cough in a Carload
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~  

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

Berna Taffin worked at Peek-a-Boo Laundry. All day long she put dirty sheets, towels and diapers into one machine to wash, and took them out again and into another machine to dry. Endless stretching, lifting and bending to make the world clean for democracy. The white overalls she wore, like a man’s, were stained and dirty at the end of her nine-hour shift.

She moved through her daily duties like an automaton, without thought and without feeling. To her co-workers, she was sexless and devoid of personality. If spoken to, she answered curtly and briefly. Nobody tried to make her their friend. People avoided being near her.

Did she have a husband? Children? She had to have a family somewhere. People don’t spring from rocks. Possibly she came from outer space. The people at the laundry wondered about her, as people will, and, when the answers were not forthcoming, they forgot about her.

The truth was Berna Taffin did have a home and a family. Her family consisted of an elderly father and mother, Roman and Arletta. They were superannuated and confined to their reclining easy chairs in the long, darkened living room of their sixteen-room house in the oldest part of the city that nobody cared about any more. Children in the neighborhood said the house was haunted. They hooted and moaned and ran past in the dark.

At the end of her shift, Berna put on her long man’s coat and man’s hat and left Peak-a-Boo for the day without a word to anybody. She walked down the street and caught the bus. In fifteen minutes she got off the bus and walked the rest of the way home, often stopping in at the neighborhood market to buy cigarettes and whatever else was needed.

She bought four cartons of cigarettes a couple times a week. The manager of the store was always happy to see her and greeted her with a smile. None of his other customers bought so many cigarettes. If they did, he’d be the Cigarette King.

Besides the cigarettes, she bought four cans of Campbell’s vegetable soup, a bar of Palmolive soap, a four-pack of toilet paper, four cans of sardines, six cans of Vienna sausages, four cans of peaches in heavy syrup, and a large box of vanilla wafers. At the cash register, she stood down while the manager tallied her purchases. He would have made small talk if she had seemed less forbidding.

He put all her purchases into a heavy-duty bag and folded down the top to make it easier for her to carry. As she turned to go, he went around in front of her quickly and opened the door.

“It’s pretty heavy!” he said. “Are you sure you don’t need no help?”

She ignored him and breezed past out the door into the chilly darkness.

She let herself in at the back door with her key. Right away she heard the yammer of the TV and smelled the ever-present cigarette smoke. She took the four cartons of cigarettes out of the bag and took them into the cloud of smoke that was the living room. She put two cartons on the chair-side table by Roman’s chair and the other two cartons on Arletta’s table. They didn’t look away from the TV, didn’t acknowledge Berna’s presence unless she got between their eyes and the TV screen. She knew they knew she was there. Nothing made them as happy as their cigarettes. Cigarettes were their gold.

They each smoked a carton a day, sometimes more. Each time they opened a new pack, they threw the empty pack on the floor. They had lighters for lighting up, but most of the time they chain-smoked, meaning they lit a new cigarette from the old one they were about to finish. When they had a butt to dispose of, they threw it into a large glass bowl for that purpose kept within easy reach. The glass bowl smoked continuously like a dormant volcano.

The TV played around the clock, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was never silent. Whether it was a western, a comedy, a drama, singing and dancing, news, sports, movies, puppet shows for the under-five set, or just talking for the sake of talking, it was all the same. Every show, commercial break, or burst of artificial laughter was the cue to take another one out of the pack and light up.

They watched twenty hours a day. What little sleeping they did, they did in their chairs a few feet in front of the never-silent TV. Walking was difficult for them. They could make it to the toilet and back two or three times a day, but these excursions into another part of the house usually elicited cries of pain and distress.

Berna returned to the kitchen and took her purchases out of the bag. She opened one of the cans of Vienna sausages and emptied it onto a plate. She did the same with a can of the sardines, emptying it onto another plate. She carried the plates into the living room and presented the plate of sardines to Roman and the plate with the Vienna sausages to Arletta. Neither of them required a fork; they always ate with their fingers. After Berna went back into the kitchen, she could hear them smacking as they ate and sucking on their fingers.

One Friday at Peek-a-Boo when Berna was near the end of her shift and getting ready to go home, the boss came out and broke the news to the workers. Peek-a-Boo was going out of business. The land Peek-a-Boo sat on, and indeed the entire block, had been sold to make way for an apartment building.

Berna had worked at Peek-a-Boo for twenty-seven years. Some of the other people had been there longer than that. They wailed and worried about what they would do. Berna left quietly without a word to anyone and caught her bus home.

The next week Berna received her final paycheck from Peek-a-Boo in the mail. She took it to the bank to cash it, and withdrew, in cash, all the money she had in her account, a little in excess of two-hundred thousand dollars. She had worked all those years and never spent as much as she earned.

The bank teller, after trying to talk Berna out of withdrawing all her money, put the money into a canvas bag and handed the bag over the counter, with a warning that carrying that much money on her person, on the street, might be dangerous.

Berna carried the canvas bag under her coat and when she got home she took it upstairs to her bedroom and threw it on the floor of her closet.

She planned on putting Roman and Arletta into an old-folks’ home and taking her money and going away somewhere by herself, maybe to Peru or Iceland.

But when she asked herself the hard questions, she didn’t have any satisfactory answers. What would she do when she got to Peru or Iceland? Look for a job in a laundry? What if there were no jobs in laundries? What then? And how would she manage, alone in a foreign country, if she didn’t know the language? What language did they speak in Peru or Iceland, anyway?

And when it came to Roman and Arletta, wouldn’t she miss them quite a lot if she never saw them again, even though she got awfully sick of them sometimes?

She would defer the questions to a later date. She didn’t have to be in any hurry. She had the money to be independent. She could do whatever she wanted to do, at the time of her own choosing.

But the truth was she didn’t go anywhere or do anything. She installed herself on the sofa in the long, low-ceilinged living room along with Roman and Arletta. She began sleeping on the sofa instead of going upstairs to her bed. The sound of the TV became so incessant, so familiar to her, that she couldn’t do without it. It became as necessary to her as her own heartbeat.

And she didn’t even have to leave the house anymore if she didn’t want to. When the cartons of cigarettes needed to be replenished, or when there was no more toilet paper or not enough Vienna sausages, sardines, Campbell’s vegetable soup or vanilla wafers, she put in a call to the neighborhood market. They delivered whatever was wanted and sent a bill at the first of the month.

Months went by and then years. Berna put Peek-a-Boo out of her mind and stopped thinking, when she woke up in the morning, that it was time to go to work. Those days were over. She had been released from her jail.

Roman was the first to succumb to lung disease. Berna noticed at the end of an episode of I Love Lucy that no smoke was coming from his quarter; he hadn’t lit up for at least a couple of hours. When she got up from the couch and looked closely at his face, she knew he was dead.

She covered him over with a sheet of heavy plastic and sprinkled him with fragrant bath salts. They would go on the same as always. Arletta was unaware that he was dead and Berna thought it best that way.

After three days, Berna realized the cigarette smoke in the room was one-half what it had been. She began smoking herself, for the first time in her life. In a short time she was chain smoking up to a carton or more a day. She began buying the large quantities of cigarettes for herself that used to be for Roman.

She and Arletta kept the room filled with smoke, exactly as it had been when Roman was alive. The TV played on. Bonanza was followed by Hazel; Petticoat Junction by Please Don’t Eat the Daisies; The Beverly Hillbillies by Hollywood Palace; Lassie by Laramie; The Munsters by… On and on without end.

During an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Arletta made a choking sound in her throat and, not surprisingly, she too was dead from lung disease. Berna covered her over with a large sheet of plastic and sprinkled her with fragrant bath salts, after which she went into the kitchen and emptied a can of Vienna sausages onto a plate and carried the plate back into the living room and ate the little sausages with her fingers, making smacking sounds and licking her fingers. Between bites, she lit a cigarette and blew as much smoke out into the room as she could manage in one breath. And the TV played on. The Red Skelton Show was just beginning. If ever she needed a good laugh.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

 

Blanche Barrow
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

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

They had two side-by-side rooms around in back at the Arimosa Auto Court, away from the road, underneath the tall trees. The rooms were small but clean and the walls like paper. Everything that went on in one room could be heard through the wall. Blanche resisted when her husband, Buck, reached for her after lights-out because she knew the others in the next room would be able to hear the slightest intake of breath and she didn’t like the thought of putting on a show for them. She didn’t mind rebuffing Buck from time to time, whenever his appetite needed curbing. We’re not animals, she would say, slapping at his hand. Besides, it’s my time of the month.

Buck and Blanche hadn’t been married long and were still on their honeymoon. They were both well past the first bloom of youth but still felt young and amorous. Buck had been married twice before and Blanche once. Now that they had found each other, they wanted to forget their previous marriages and not ever talk about them—start out afresh, as the saying goes.

They met at a bingo game in the basement of a church in Kansas City. When he flirted with her, she thought he was crude and low-class, but he persisted and eventually she succumbed to his charms. Two weeks after they met, they were married in a civil ceremony at the courthouse. As Buck liked to say, it was the face powder that caught him and the baking powder that would keep him at home.

They set out on a grand honeymoon. They drove around from place to place in Buck’s sturdy old Ford, seeing the sights, laughing a lot, reveling in their freedom. They spent a few days in a fancy hotel in St. Louis where they saw some shows, ate in fine restaurants and shopped in the big stores.

From St. Louis they drove down to the Missouri-Arkansas border, where they stayed nearly a week in a kozy kabin with a kitchenette at a lakeside resort. It was at the resort that Buck heard through a family friend that his brother Clyde was staying nearby. Clyde wanted Buck and his new wife to come and meet him. He had plans for a moneymaking venture that he believed Buck would be interested in.

Blanche was peeved with Buck for making her leave the lakeside resort before she was ready. She didn’t especially want to meet brother Clyde and wondered why it was such an urgent matter. She was carsick on the way and Buck asked her if she might be going to have a little baby in a few months. He laughed then and tried to pinch her, but she slapped his hand away and moved over as far away from him as she could get.

Clyde had summoned them to an out-of-the-way country town (Far Corner, population 113) where he was staying at a rundown motel, and it ended up taking half a day to get there. Buck got lost on unfamiliar roads and had to stop and get a map at a gas station. Blanche fumed the whole time and refused to help him read the map.

Finally Buck found the place. It was a place so far off the main road it was almost impossible to find, but find it he did, and the brothers were reunited. They whooped and hollered and acted like a couple of backwoods boys in their pleasure at seeing each other again. They embraced and jumped up and down and took affectionate punches at each other.

When they settled down enough, Buck said, “Hey, brother! I want you to meet my missus!”

Blanche was still in the car, forgotten for the moment. Buck motioned her to come out and even took hold of her hand to pull her if need be. She decided she wasn’t going to be mad at him anymore. She dredged up a polite smile.

“This is my wife Blanche!” Buck said.

“Hello,” Blanche said to Clyde, shyly shaking him by the hand.

“Congratulations, Mrs. Barrow!” Clyde said, showing his prodigious teeth.

She wondered why he was congratulating her and then realized it was because she and Buck were newly married.

“Hey!” Clyde said. “I got somebody I want you to meet!”

A blond-haired woman came out from behind Clyde’s back. Clyde took hold of her shoulders as if she was an animal he had caught that might get away.

“Well, who is this little lady?” Buck gushed. She was as thin as a pencil and sallow as if she didn’t get outdoors very much.

“Bonnie, honey, I want you to meet my older brother, Buck Barrow. And this here is his wife, Mrs. Blanche Barrow.”

“H’lo,” Blanche said with her same polite smile.

“Pleased to meet you,” Bonnie said.

“Wife?” Buck asked Clyde.

“No.”

“Sweetheart?”

“Yeah.”

“You old dog, you! You always did have an eye for the prettiest gals!”

“And rounding out our little entourage,” Clyde said, “is Mr. C.W. Moss. He’s my driver and all-round factotum.”

C.W. shook their hands profusely. “I sure am glad to meet all of you!” he said. “Clyde’s told me all about his family! It sure is a pleasure! How do, ma’am!”

Buck and Clyde laughed because C.W. was wearing only his union suit and seemed to not know he wasn’t wearing any pants. Blanche had seen men in their union suits before but was embarrassed anyway. She blushed like a schoolgirl and turned her head away.

C.W. spied a movie magazine on the seat of Buck’s car with a picture of Myrna Loy on the cover.

“I see you got the latest issue of Motion Picture World!” he said. “Would it be all right if I borrow it from you, Miz Barrow? Myrna Loy is my favorite movin’ picture actress!”

Without waiting for an answer, C.W. snatched the magazine off the car seat and held it to his bosom. He couldn’t wait to get off by himself and read the latest news from filmdom.

With introductions out of the way, they had a picnic lunch in Clyde’s motel room. Spirits were high. Buck was the life of the party. He told jokes he heard on the radio and did impressions of Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby. Blanche laughed so hard she wet her pants.

“She’s got a weak bladder! “Buck said, setting the men off on another outburst of laughing while the women looked bewildered.

After lunch, Buck and Clyde went off by themselves to talk business. Blanche still wasn’t feeling well, so she lay down on the broken-down sofa in Clyde’s room, turned her face away and went to sleep. C.W. looked at all the pictures and read all the gossip about his favorite motion picture stars in Motion Picture World and then went to sleep in a hammock under the shade trees. Bonnie sat on the front steps smoking cigarettes and after a while went inside and washed her hair.

Buck and Clyde didn’t come back for three hours. Blanche was anxious to leave and wasn’t happy when Buck told her they were staying.

“Stayin’ here with them?” she said. “What for?”

“We can manage for one night. Tomorrow we’ll move on to a bigger place.”

“You mean all of us?”

“Yeah.”

“Move on where?”

“We haven’t decided yet.”

“What were you and Clyde talkin’ about so long?”

“A little job he’s got planned.”

“What kind of a job?”

“I’ll tell you about it after we’ve worked out all the details.”

“It’s nothin’ illegal, is it?”

“Now, honey! You don’t have a thing in this world to worry about!”

The little job Clyde had planned—and worked out to the smallest detail—was robbing the bank in the town of  Morganville. He needed help, though. He needed his older brother, Buck. The two of them together would be unstoppable.

At first Buck didn’t think that robbing a bank anywhere on God’s green earth was a good idea. He was a newly married man, he said, with a wife to think of, and he didn’t want to get mixed up in any old bank robbery.

“It’ll be so easy,” Clyde said, “you won’t believe your eyes.”

“How do you figure?”

“Shit! A bunch of farm hicks and small-town rubes! They’ll be so scared when you flash a gun in their face they’ll piss their pants.”

“I don’t know,” Buck said. “It seems kind of mean to me.”

“We don’t have to actually kill anybody, if that’s what you’re worried about! We’ll just pretend we’re going to kill them if they don’t do what we want!”

“And what is it we want?”

“To put all the cash in a bag and not try to keep us from leaving!”

“Well, that sounds easy enough.”

“See, you’re talking about the element of surprise! They’ll be so surprised when we burst in on them that they won’t be able to think until after it’s all over.”

“When do we do this little thing?” Buck said.

A week after talking it over, the Barrow brothers, along with Bonnie and C.W. Moss, robbed their first bank in the town of Morganville. They took a little over three hundred dollars without a shot being fired. Even Blanche was impressed. She had never seen that much cash before. She was able to bury her religious scruples for  the time being.

Other banks followed. Clyde and Buck saw it as a sure-fire way to get large sums of money without having to work for it. The only trouble was they became wanted across five states and people were on the alert for them. Banks hired extra guards and armed them well. Small-town police departments took on extra deputies.

And then the expected happened. One bank put up more resistance than the robbers were accustomed to. Bank guards fired their weapons and Clyde had no other choice but to fire back. A zealous fellow who was determined to stop the robbers from getting away with the bank’s money jumped on the running board of the car. Clyde shot him in the face and killed him. Now they were something more than robbers. They were desperate killers to be feared by the public at large.

At first it was fun: robbing banks, outsmarting the laws, being always on the move. Then, when Clyde had to kill a man and the laws began to take them seriously, it wasn’t quite so much fun anymore. Their pictures were everywhere: in newspapers, post offices and government offices. Their story blasted on the airwaves. They could no longer go into a restaurant and order a meal, for fear of being recognized.

They found the Arimosa Auto Court by accident. It was so far removed from the known world that they felt safe there. They could rest for a few days and plan their next move. They got two rooms around in back, away from the road, underneath the tall trees. It was a peaceful place, where the birds sang and the soft breezes blew. The place was run by two old men and they didn’t ask any questions.

They got on each other’s nerves, though, being cooped up in two small rooms, especially Blanche and Bonnie. More than once, they had been about to come to blows over little things, until Clyde and Buck had to separate them. The sound of Blanche’s whining voice made Bonnie want to tear her hair out by the roots. Blanche complained of Bonnie’s “rotten disposition.” Buck and Clyde didn’t know how much longer they could keep them from killing each other.

It was a Sunday afternoon. The men were hungry. Blanche was the only one whose face wasn’t known to the public, so they sent her into town to get some food. C.W. drove her in Buck’s car.

As soon as Blanche and C.W. were alone in the car, Blanche began crying.

“What’s the matter, Miz Barrow?” C.W. asked.

“I’m just a nervous wreck!” she said. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

“Of what?”

“Just waitin’ around. Just waitin’ for the laws to come and shoot us to ribbons, one by one.”

“They won’t find us way out here,” C.W. said. “Clyde made sure of that.”

“Oh, Clyde! May the devil take Clyde! He doesn’t know anything! He’s the reason we’re in all this mess!”

“What do you mean?”

“My papa would just die if he knew the kind of life I’m livin’. With a bunch of thieves and bank robbers! It just don’t make sense!”

“What don’t make sense, ma’am?”

“Even if they do get away with lots of money, you know people are not going to stand for that! It don’t take a genius to figure it out!”

“Figure what out, ma’am?”

“When you’re livin’ this kind of a life, it’s only a matter of time before they catch up with you. And when they do, they’ll either shoot you on the spot or lock you up in jail for the rest of your natural life. Those who live by the gun die by the gun. It says so in the Bible.”

“You just have to take it as it comes, I guess,” C.W. said.

“You’re not afraid of dyin’ or goin’ to jail?”

“I don’t think about it much.”

At the restaurant in town, C.W. waited in the car while Blanche went inside and ordered the food. Five chicken dinners to go and twelve bottles of beer. While she waited for the food, she sat at the counter drinking a Coca-Cola and smoking a cigarette. She didn’t look directly at anybody for fear they’d know who she was.

Most of the other people in the place didn’t even look at her, but a couple of older men over to the left were giving her the eye, whispering back and forth. When she realized they might be a couple of lawmen and they might know who she was, she felt a chill go up her spine.

When the food was ready, she lugged it out to the car, along with the twelve bottles of beer. C.W. got out and helped her put the stuff in the back.

“Did you see a couple of men go in that place who might have been laws?” she asked C.W.

“I didn’t see nobody,” he said.

“They were givin’ me the eye while I was waitin’.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I think they know who I am.”

“How could they know that?”

“I don’t know how they know. They just know.”

A couple miles down the road, she asked C.W. if they were being followed.

“I don’t see nobody,” he said. “Just relax.”

Blanche couldn’t eat her chicken at the thought that those two men were laws. If they knew who she was, they couldn’t just let it go. They would follow her and she would lead them to the Clyde and Bonnie and Buck and that would be the end of that. Shoot now and ask questions later.

Blanche had never participated with them in any of the robberies, had never fired a shot, but she’d be just as guilty as they were, just by being with them. She’d be just as guilty of shooting that man in the face as Clyde was. It’s called guilt by association.

She loved Buck, or believed she did, but she wasn’t going to die for him or go to jail for him. If he and the others were too stupid to see the writing on the wall, she saw it plainly. The laws weren’t stupid. The laws would find them and make them pay the price for their crimes and it was going to be sooner than any of them imagined.

She hardly slept at all that night. She got out of bed before daylight and dressed quietly in the dark, making sure not to wake Buck. Carrying her suitcase, she left the Arimosa Auto Count for the last time and went out and started Buck’s car as quietly as she could. She drove the seven miles to the nearest town, the same town where they had bought the chicken dinners, and stopped at the bus station. She left the car in a place where Buck would be sure to find it when he came looking for her.

Everybody would expect her to go back home, where she came from, but she wasn’t going there; it was the first place Buck would look. She bought a ticket to Chicago. She had only seen Chicago once before in her life, and she knew it was big.

A day and a half later her bus rolled into Chicago. She spent the night in a cheap hotel beside some railroad tracks and the next day she fixed herself up, had her hair bleached and went out looking for a job, using the name Ruby Weems.

She was just one of thousands of dames in the big city, scratching out a living. She didn’t expect to have an easy time of it, but in three days she landed a job as a hostess in a nightclub.

“Go home and put on your best dress and some face powder and lip rouge,” the nightclub manager told her. “You’ll work from eight o’clock in the evening until closing time at three a.m., five nights a week. You’ll dance with the customers, flirt with them, make them feel good and get them to spend money on drinks. If you encounter any ruffians or cavemen, all you have to do is call the bouncer and the guy will be bounced. If you think you’re not up to the job, let me know now. We’ve got plenty of girls that want to work here.”

“No, it’ll be all right,” she said. “I can do it.”

At first she hated the job and wanted to quit, but after a couple of weeks she learned to handle the customers. Most of them were shy and lonely and wanted only to talk. The more motherly she was toward them and the more she patted them and smiled, the bigger the tips they left her. She danced with some of them, but they were mostly bad dancers and stepped on her toes. She liked the ones best who just wanted to sit with her in a booth and drink and talk. If any of them became overly aggressive, help was always at hand.

One night the expected happened. She was sitting at the bar smoking a cigarette, talking to one of the other hostesses, when she saw Buck come into the place. She went to him and took him to a booth.

“How did you find me, Buck?”

“Does it matter?”

“How did you find me?”

“The old gal you bought the bus ticket from told me it was for Chicago. After I got here, I showed your picture around. You’d be surprised how a sawbuck loosens people’s tongues.”

“I figured you’d be glad I was gone.”

“You’re my wife. Did you think I’d let you go that easy?”

“I’ll bet your brother Clyde and Miss Bonnie Parker are glad I’m gone. Even Mr. C.W. Moss.”

“Nobody’s glad you’re gone.”

“Oh, Buck! I’m just no good at robbin’ banks and keepin’ one step ahead of the laws!”

“I’m takin’ you home with me, honey,” he said, reaching across the table and taking her hand in his.

“And where is home, Buck? Another auto court?”

“They’re waitin’ for us down in Joplin, Missouri.”

“I’ll bet Clyde’s got the next big job all planned, don’t he?”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, honey. All I want you to do is be my wife and be sweet to me.”

“When they come after us, they’ll kill me same as you, even if I haven’t done anything.”

“You don’t belong in a place like this, honey. This place ain’t you.”

“A person can used to just about anything, Buck.”

“Go get your things packed, Blanche. We’re goin’ home tonight.”

“I’m not goin’ anywhere with you, Buck.”

“Why not?”

“Livin’ the life of a bank robber ain’t for me.”

“Nobody said it is.”

“I don’t want to go to jail. I don’t want to die. And when I die, I don’t want to go to hell.”

He laughed. “That’s just silly, honey. Nobody’s goin’ to hell.”

“It’s the way I was brought up. You’re forgettin’ I’m a preacher’s daughter.”

“No, I ain’t forgettin’ that.”

“I’m not goin’ back with you, Buck.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna stay here for now. I’m makin’ my own livin’ and makin’ my own way. I don’t depend on any man for my dinner.”

“You’re still my wife, Blanche. I can make you go back if I want to.”

“I don’t think so, Buck.”

“So it’s goodbye then?”

“I guess so, Buck.”

“I got six hundred dollars in my pocket, Blanche.”

“That don’t make any difference. I’m not goin’ back.”

“I want to give you half of it.”

“I don’t want any of your stolen money, Buck. You can gain the whole world, Buck, but what does it profit you if you lose your immortal soul?”

“I guess I’ll just leave then. Go on back down to Missouri and get out of this stinkin’ city.”

“I think that’d be the for the best, Buck.”

He stood up and put on his hat and looked down at her. “Could I have just one final kiss before I go?” he asked.

“No, I don’t think we should kiss goodbye, Buck. The big boss is over there givin’ me the evil eye. I’m supposed to be workin’.”

He gave her one last look and turned around and left the place. At the door, he didn’t hesitate, but seemed in a hurry to get away.

“Who was that fella you were talking to for so long?” the boss asked her.

“It was nobody,” she said. “Just an old boy I used to know back home.”

“I ain’t paying you to sit and visit with home folks, dear.”

“He won’t ever be back. You can be sure of that.”

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Never Mix, Never Worry (I Was Dancing and I Was Ridiculous)
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~  

They were out all night and didn’t get home until after dawn. Honey was sick from too much to drink and went right to bed. Nick slept on the couch in the living room, slept the morning away, and didn’t wake up until the middle of the afternoon. When he awoke, he had a terrible headache that he hadn’t been aware of while he slept. He wasn’t sure if his body was going to allow him to get up, but after a while he pulled himself to a standing position, head reeling, and went into the kitchen.

Honey was sitting at the table reading a book. She had a cup of tea beside her; she always said tea with lemon settled her stomach. When Nick came into the room, she didn’t look at him but concentrated on her book.

“Hello, Honey,” Nick said, going up behind her and affectionately putting his hands on her shoulders close to her neck. She flinched and leaned forward; he took his hands away as from a hot stove.

“What a night!” he said with a little laugh. “Whew! I feel like eating something but when I think about what I might eat I think I’m going to puke.”

She marked her place in the book, closed it, and laid it aside. “Want me to fix you scrambled eggs?” she asked.

Nick groaned. “I can’t stand the thought of eggs.” He went to the refrigerator and opened the door. “Don’t we have any bacon?”

“I haven’t been to the market yet. I was planning on going today but I don’t think I’m up to it.”

He poured himself a glass of orange juice and sat down at the table across from her. “Can somebody please tell me what happened last night?” he said.

“You haven’t asked me how I feel,” she said.

“How do you feel?”

“Lousy. I feel lousy.”

“Were you able to stop the vomiting?” he asked, pulling downward on his face with both hands as if trying to pull it into shape.

“Yes, a person can only vomit so much. I’ve stopped for now, but I don’t dare eat anything. I think it’s going to take several days for me to feel right again.”

“Do you want me to fix you some toast? Do we even have any bread?”

“No, if I eat anything, I’ll vomit again.”

“All right.”

“We need to talk about last night,” she said.

“Not now, Honey,” he said. “I don’t really feel like a serious discussion at the moment. And, really, I think it’s better if we don’t talk about last night at all. Don’t you agree?”

“Better for you, you mean,” she said.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he said, standing up. “If you feel better later, we’ll go out and get some chicken or something.”

“Maybe I need to talk now!” she said in an insistent voice that made him stop in his tracks.

“Talk about what, Honey?”

“I humiliated myself last night.”

“You didn’t! You didn’t do anything the rest of us didn’t do.”

“I was dancing and I was ridiculous.”

“We were all dancing. It was all in good fun.”

“Then why do I feel so humiliated today?”

“You’re tired and you’re overly sensitive.”

“Don’t talk down to me!”

“I don’t mean to…”

“I’m humiliated. I drank bourbon and scotch. Not together, but one after the other.”

“That isn’t anything to be humiliated about. We were all drinking. It was a drinking party. We’re all grownups. Grownups get to drink as much as they want. That’s what it means to be a grownup.”

“Yes, but you know my one steadfast rule: Never mix, never worry. Well, I mixed and I’m paying the price.”

“Honey, nobody’s perfect,” he said. “We all have little lapses.”

“Stop treating me as if I were a child!”

“Why don’t you go back to bed? You can stay there all day and I’ll wait on you. How will that be? If there’s anything you’d like to have to eat, I’ll go and buy it.”

“The faculty party was bad enough, but after that was over we couldn’t just go home and go to bed and quit while we were ahead the way any two normal people would. No, we had to go to an after-party party.”

“Yeah, I admit it was a mistake,” he said. “I wish we had never gone.”

“Then why did we?”

“She’s the daughter of the president of the college and he’s a senior professor in the English department.”

“The history department.”

“It never hurts to cozy up to the entrenched people. They’ve both been around a long time. They’re part of the landscape. She’s daughter of the president of the college, for Christ’s sake!”

“You’re thinking of your career, of course.”

“Well, one does what one can to get ahead.”

“Just once I wish you would give the same consideration to me that you give your career.”

“Honey, that’s absurd,” he said. “There’s no comparison.”

“Well, I’m glad you admit it!”

“That isn’t what I meant!”

“A night like last night causes me to question my entire existence.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are we going to spend our lives hobnobbing with disgusting people just so you can get ahead in your career?”

“No!”

“Because I’m telling you, Nick, I don’t want to live that way.”

“It was just one party.”

“You can find out a lot from one party.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“If those people, that George and his wife Martha, are representative of the life in this college, then I don’t want any part of it. The way they tear each other apart is indecent. And when they’re finished attacking each other they go after whoever happens to be present at the moment. Just being in their presence makes you feel degraded.”

“You’ve been reading too many books.”

“Did you know he called me ‘angel boobs’?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I think I heard that,” he said.

“And ‘monkey nipples’.”

“He really called you ‘monkey nipples’? I didn’t hear that. When did he call you that?”

“When you were doing your provocative dance with that horrible woman.”

 “He was making a joke! You ought to be able to take a joke! You’re not a child!”

 “How can you stand by and do nothing when a strange man calls your wife filthy names?”

 She began to cry. He sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulder. “You take things too seriously, Honey.”

 “How would you like it if he called you those names?”

 “I think I might have punched him in the nose!”

 “But it’s all right when it’s me?”

 “That’s not what I meant!”

 “I can never face those two again,” she said. “I vomited all over their bathroom. It was as if they saw me without my clothes.”

 “You were just being human, Honey. It happens to the best of us.”

 “How can we live here and you teach here when I feel so uncomfortable?”

 “It’s just something you’re going to have to get over.”

 “I don’t think I can. I want you to start looking for another position right away. If not today, then tomorrow.”

“But, Honey, we just got here! Do you know how hard it was for me to get this job?”

“I don’t care! If you have as much regard for me as you do for your career, we’ll leave right away!”

“Honey, that’s so unreasonable! You can’t be serious!”

“I have never been more serious in my life.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” he said. “We’re here and we’re going to stay.” He picked her book up off the table and threw it hard against the far wall, not because he was so angry but because he wanted to make a point.

“I can always leave on my own,” she said. “I don’t necessarily need you.”

“Fine. Go home to your mother. Tell her what a mistake it was to marry me.”

“I want to know what happened between you and that woman, that Martha, while I was passed out.”

“Nothing happened! What do you mean?”

“I’m not as stupid as you obviously think I am. I heard them talking about it afterwards.”

“Heard who talking?”

“George and Martha. They thought I was still passed out, but I was just lying there, fully awake, with my eyes closed. I heard the words stud and houseboy. They were talking about you! Were you a stud or were you a houseboy?”

“I didn’t hear any such thing, so I don’t know what you mean.”

“How are you going to face them again?”

“I don’t think I’ll see them again until the next faculty party and that probably won’t be for several months. Everything that happened last night will be forgotten by then.”

“Well, I can tell you right now I’m not going to any more faculty parties.”

“What do I say when people ask me where my wife is? She’s too squeamish for university life? She throws up a lot and can’t stand to be teased a little bit?”

“I don’t care what you tell people. It’s your career, not mine.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m going away tonight.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll think of something.”

She stood up from the table and went upstairs.

“I’m hungry,” he said to the empty chair where Honey had sat. “I’m going to see what I can find to eat.”

A little bit of humoring would bring Honey around. She would never leave him. She was too dependent on him. He’d finesse her, just the way he finessed everybody. He’d cajole her, buy her a new coat or a piece of jewelry and everything would be fine. She needed to get out more and meet more people. If she happened to meet a young fellow, a handsome athletic type, who wouldn’t mind romancing her, so much the better. Nick would encourage it. Casual infidelity was all part of the game. The sooner she realized it, the better off she’d be.

And as for Martha, she wasn’t half-bad. A little bit gone to seed, but obviously with a few good years left in her. If she really liked Nick—and he would give her every reason to like him—she could help him in ways he hadn’t yet imagined. Of all the pertinent wives he might plow to further his career, the daughter of the university president had to be the most pertinent. And what could he do for her? He could make her feel good, make her feel young again. Remind her, if she had been inclined to forget, what it’s like to be with a real man.

He started to make himself a sandwich but then stopped what he was doing and went to the phone and picked up the receiver. He looked over his shoulder to make sure Honey wasn’t in earshot and then he dialed Martha’s number, which he had committed to memory. He let it ring twelve times and was about to hang up when she answered.

“Hello,” she said.

“Martha?” he said.

“Yeah, who is this?”

“It’s Nick.”

“Nick? I don’t know any Nick.”

“Nick from last night?

“Oh, yeah! You woke me up, you bastard!”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you are! Tell that little slim-hipped wife of yours she vomited all over my downstairs bathroom last night. Nobody can stand to go in there today. I ought to make the little twit get her ass over here and get down on her hands and knees and clean it all up.”

“She’s not feeling very well today.”

“Got a hangover, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, what can I do for you, lover boy? It’s Sunday, you know.”

“Is your husband at home?”

“No, he’s at school. Even on Sunday the old bastard goes to the old salt mines, just to get away from little old me.”

“I was wondering if we might get together today. You know, just the two of us.”

“My goodness! You are an eager beaver, aren’t you?”

“I had a really nice time last night.”

“So did I, lover boy. What did you say your name is again?”

“Nick. The stud. Remember.”

“Sure, baby, I remember! Who could forget?”

“So what time can I come over?”

“Make it about an hour.”

“Perfect!”

“And when you get here, you can clean up the vomit in the downstairs bathroom.”

“What about my wife?”

“You can drop her down a well as far as I’m concerned.”

After he hung up the phone, he had the distinct impression that Honey had been listening in on the upstairs extension. He was sure she took down every word in her secretarial shorthand. She would use it in a court of law during the divorce proceeding.

He crept to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. Not a sound came from Honey’s bedroom. He went halfway up the stairs and stopped, as if afraid to go the rest of the way.

“Honey!” he called. “I just remembered some work I have to get done today in my office at school! I’m going to be gone for a couple of hours. When I come home, I’ll bring you a cheeseburger and a milkshake. How does that sound? Okay, then, dear! Bye-bye!”

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Mein Fuehrer is Sleeping
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

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

Albrecht Fennerman was, in every literal and figurative sense, a ghoul. He was over a hundred-and-thirty years old and should have been dead long ago, by any reasonable reckoning. If you were to meet him, the first thing you would note about him was that his skin was the color of ivory. Instead of blood coursing through his veins, he had a secret, powerful, life-giving, milkfish fluid invented by the brilliant Dr. Mengele.

Herr Fennerman’s eyes were as yellow agates, his teeth and fingernails honed and at the ready for tearing flesh. Although his body was elongated and his leather-like skin stretched almost to the breaking point over his skeletal frame, he was always elegantly dressed in the finest evening attire made (decades earlier) by the best tailors in Berlin, completed and complemented by top hat, monocle, elegant walking stick and distinguished service cross presented to him by the Fuehrer.

He resided with what remained of his family in his remote castle on an undisclosed mountaintop. He had been, at one time, married to a bloodless witch named Rafaela who was torn to shreds by a rival witch in a violent disagreement. From Herr Fennerman’s unholy union with Rafaela had been born two daughters, Regina and Theodosia.

These daughters were, of course, half-witch and half-ghoul, but neither camp claimed them, so they were always at odds with the world, never fitting in, filled with rancor, bitterness and jealousy. Through their many decades of childhood, they resided with their papa in his castle and looked upon him to protect them from harm and to lock them away in the dungeon belowstairs when such an action was warranted, as when Theodosia got it into her head that she was fervently in love with God and wanted to join a religious order or when Regina wanted to become a tango dancer and brought in an Italian gigolo with patent-leather hair to teach her the steps. (The gigolo unwisely laughed at her clumsiness on the ballroom floor and she ripped his head off and drank his blood in front of dozens of guests.)

In appearance, Regina and Theodosia were quite different. Regina possessed hulking enormity. She kept her face whitened with bone dust and her lips and talon-like fingernails painted a blood-red. She always wore black to accentuate the whiteness of her skin. She was easily frightened, though she herself was frightening to look upon; whenever she felt particularly vulnerable and felt like retreating, she spoke French if she spoke at all and covered her face with a heavy black veil, which gave her the feeling of being in the room but not in the room at the same time. She was, by all accounts, an odd person. When people met her, they were rarely able to forget the singular experience. That which has been seen cannot be unseen.

Her younger sister Theodosia was diminutive but none the less deadly. She walked hunched over, indicating fragility and old age, but this was a ruse to trick anyone foolish enough to challenge her into believing she was weak and vulnerable and could be easily foiled. When an adversary least expected it, she would rise up and strike with deadly force that was all the more effective because it was unexpected.

Regina and Theodosia were both known for their unabashed cruelty and love of spiteful tricks. If an itinerate wanderer happened to stumble on the grounds of the castle, they would lock him in the dungeon and then spend several days torturing him with the mediaeval torture devices at their disposal. They would feed him a pig’s-knuckle sandwich and give him a drink of water and revive him to the point of consciousness and then begin the torture all over again when his only crime was to be where he should not have been.

On a lovely spring day Theodosia blindfolded her lady’s maid and booted her off a cliff for the sole pleasure of seeing her dashed on the rocks below. Afterwards she told her papa the lady’s maid had run off with the baker and every time she said it her sister Regina screamed with laughter. (Afterward the phrase “run off with the baker” became code for “booted off the cliff.”) When a crow deposited a finger bone on the windowsill, Theodosia claimed it belonged to the lady’s maid and believed it was a sign of great things to come, particularly a great love.

Both Theodosia and Regina had been disappointed in love many times. In the game of romance, they didn’t seem to be able to get a decent hand. Men generally fled from them in fright. And then there were the misguided men who were only interested in them for their money. These they dealt with in their own special way, that is, to play with them the way a cat would play with a mouse. They had spells at their disposal and might, depending on the whim of the moment, turn a man into a statue, an ugly woman or a permanent carrier of the plague. Others they just killed outright in one way or another, as we have already seen with Theodosia and her Italian gigolo.

When one of the sisters became interested in a man, the other sister usually set her sights on the same man. When this happened, the two of them became deadly rivals. They would fight each other to the death for the sake of the man they believed they loved; exhaust themselves with fighting until the man in question would escape (if they hadn’t thought to lock him up in the dungeon), and when they came to a cessation in the warfare and looked around them, they’d forget about him and why they loved him in the first place.

One summer Herr Fennerman went away and was gone for months. He was gone so long, in fact, that Theodosia and Regina began to think he had been killed by one of his rivals and might never come back. Then, in the midst of a blinding mountain snowstorm, he pulled up in what appeared to be an absolutely new touring car.

Theodosia and Regina were watching from an upstairs window as Herr Fennerman stepped out of the stunning car and went around to the other side and opened the door for another person, who turned out to be a regal lady. Laughing, Herr Fennerman and the regal lady entered the castle, and Theodosia and Regina turned to each other in bafflement.

Herr Fennerman was showing the regal lady around the castle when Theodosia and Regina went timidly down the stairs.

“Who is this?” Theodosia asked, forcing Herr Fennerman to turn and look at her.

“Ah, my darling girls!” he said, kissing both on the cheek. “I want to you to come and meet someone very special!”

The regal lady he introduced as Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna.

“Enchanté,” she said, lifting the veil of her plumed hat.

“Enchanté,” Regina said with a simper, bending a knee to give a small curtsey.

“How long are you planning on staying with us?” Theodosia asked with a smile that was more a grimace.

At this question, Herr Fennerman and the regal lady looked at each other and laughed.

“This is going to be her home from now on,” Herr Fennerman said. “We were married in Switzerland five days ago. She is to be your new mama.”

“I hope we shall all be great friends,” the regal lady said as if holding court.

“You might call her mama if you wish,” Herr Fennerman said.

“Or just call me Maria,” the regal lady said. “We don’t need to choke ourselves with formality here. Hah!”

With the introductions out of the way, Maria went upstairs to freshen up and rest for a while before dinner, while Theodosia and Regina descended on Herr Fennerman.

“What’s the idea of bringing her here?” Theodosia asked.

Herr Fennerman smiled his wry smile as he placed a cigarette in a holder and lit it. “I didn’t think it necessary to ask your permission,” he said.

“I don’t like her!” Theodosia said.

“Nonsense!” Herr Fennerman said. “You don’t even know her.”

“Oh, dear!” Regina whimpered. “Mon Dieu!”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve marrying her without consulting us first,” Theodosia said.

“I don’t have to consult with you about anything,” Herr Fennerman said. “You are to me as nothing.”

“Well, that’s a fine thing to say, I must say!”

“And I want to warn both of you. If you think you’re going to indulge in any of your nasty tricks to try to get rid of her, I will dispense with you so fast you won’t even see it coming. And please believe me when I tell you I can do it with one wave of my little finger.”

“Oh, you are despicable!”

“Why, thank you, my dear!”

The dinner gong was rung and the four of them seated themselves around the large table in the dining room. Herr Fennerman and Maria laughed and made eyes at each other, as they partook of the pigs’ brains smothered in blood sauce and dinosaur eggs, a rare and enormously expensive delicacy. Regina was feeling vulnerable and so covered her face with her black veil and lifted little bits of food up underneath the veil and fed them into her mouth. Theodosia glared at Herr Fennerman and stabbed with a knife and fork at her food as though she were murdering it.

“I wish you girls could have seen our bridal suite at the hotel in Switzerland,” Herr Fennerman said. “It was quite the loveliest of love nests. There were little cupids everywhere. The bed was heart-shaped with a red canopy over it.”

“It was so sweet!” Maria gushed. “A little slice of heaven!”

“Why didn’t you stay longer?” Theodosia asked archly.

“I told darling Maria about our glorious secret waiting back here at the castle and we couldn’t wait to get back.”

“You told her about the Fuehrer?” Theodosia asked, aghast.

“Why, yes, why wouldn’t I? She’s my wife now, my consort. Every possession I have in the world also belongs to her.”

“I thought it was to be our secret, always!”

“It is our secret!” Herr Fennerman said emphatically. “The only difference now is that the our includes Maria.”

“I was so excited to hear of your plans regarding the Fuehrer,” Maria said, “And I pray that they come to fruition!”

“Who do you pray to, Maria! King Satan? Isn’t he the one you would bow down to?”

“That’s enough, Theodosia!” Herr Fennerman said. “How do you dare to speak to your step-mama in that fashion on her first day home!”

“It’s all right, dearest,” Maria said. “I understand that she is feeling a little jealous now. A little threatened.”

“Oh, oh, oh, oh!” Regina said from underneath her veil.

“Let me ask you one question, Maria,” Theodosia said. “Why do you wear that ruff around your neck?”

“I have a painful scar that I try to keep hidden. You can forgive a woman her vanity, I’m sure.”

“I think it’s more than vanity,” Theodosia said. “I think at one time in your glorious past your head was severed from your body.”

“Theodosia, that’s quite enough!” Herr Fennerman. “I’m just on the point of banishing you from the castle!”

“Weren’t you at one time married to a man named Louie?” Theodosia asked.

“Why, yes!” Maria said. “How did you know? Dear Louie died in a rather grisly fashion.”

“Your husband was King Louie the Sixteenth of France, wasn’t he? And you were his infamous and despised Queen, the one they called Marie Antoinette?”

Herr Fennerman stood up and threw his napkin down on the table. He was just on the point of striking Theodosia in the face if his arm had been long enough to reach across the table.

“That will do!” Herr Fennerman shrieked. “One more word out of you and I shall call down all the fires of heaven upon your head!”

Maria took hold of his arm and pulled him back to a sitting position. “It’s all right, dearest!” she said. “Your little daughter has guessed my secret. There is no point in denying the truth now that the secret is out.”

“How did you know?” Herr Fennerman asked Theodosia, all his fire dissipated.

“I recognized her picture from the picture books.”

“It’s not something I want everybody to know,” Maria said, “so I do hope you will respect my right to keep the matter quite private.”

“Tell us how it happened,” Theodosia said with a satisfied smile.

“My husband, the king, had already been executed and his body thrown to the wolves. My children had been taken from me and I didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. I was kept prisoner in a filthy cell, awaiting my fate. Finally the day arrived when I was thrown into the back of a horse cart and taken, before tens of thousands of screaming Parisians, to a public square to be executed. I was so frightened I could hardly stand on my feet, but they made me get out of the cart I was riding in and mount the steps to the guillotine. I don’t remember anything after that until I was waking up, not knowing where I was.”

“Oh, oh, oh!” Regina whimpered from underneath her veil. “Quelle horreur!”

“There has to be more to it than that,” Theodosia said.

“As much as people hated me,” Maria continued, “there were those few loyal friends who wanted me to live to wreak vengeance on those who had wronged me and my family. Those dear souls collected my body and my head when nobody was looking and took me to the secluded mountain laboratory of a pair of doctors—mad scientists, really—who were known for their unlawful work in restoring the dead to life.”

“And the rest, as they say, is history,” Herr Fennerman said.

“When your dear papa told me of his secret, your secret, here at the castle, I saw it as my chance to vindicate myself, redeem my reputation, and restore myself to the queendom that was so cruelly taken from me.”

“What are you saying?” Theodosia asked.

Herr Fennerman giggled like a schoolboy and covered his mouth with his napkin.

“I don’t follow your line of reasoning,” Theodosia said.

Herr Fennerman reached over and took Maria’s hand in his own. “Maria is to be Queen of the Fourth Reich, the royal consort of the resurrected Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler. Think of the amazement around the world as, not only the Fuehrer is resurrected and returned to his rightful place of power, but at his side will be one of the most infamous women in history, the lovely Marie Antoinette, Queen of the French.”

“Except that now I’ll be Queen of the Germans,” Maria said.

“And eventually Queen of the Entire World if our plans for the Fuehrer come about the way we expect them to!” Herr Fennerman said.

“I can hardly believe what I’m hearing!” Theodosia said.

“Maybe you need a hearing aid,” Herr Fennerman said.

“Do you think I’m going to stand by and do nothing while you make this interloper, this usurper, this whore, the Fuehrer’s Queen?”

“What are you raving about now?” Herr Fennerman asked.

“I thought we agreed that I would be first in line to be the Fuehrer’s Queen and that Regina would be second.”

“Qui!” Regina said. “Je devais être le deuxième!”

“You aren’t a Queen!” Maria said. “I am a true Queen! You are a nothing! You are half-ghoul and half-witch, which makes you half-nothing!”

“Now, now!” Herr Fennerman. “We can’t accomplish anything as long as we are each other’s throats. We must all take a deep breath and calm ourselves and try to be friends.”

“He’s right!” Maria said. “We will not engage in petty quarrels. We are as nothing to the destiny that awaits us!”

“Hear, hear!” Herr Fennerman said. “Long live the Fuehrer!”

“He lies in a peaceful slumber within these very walls,” Maria said. “All we have to do is return him to life and he will rise up and become Emperor of all the World!”

“Comme c’est excitant!” Regina said.

“Have you decided on a date yet to bring the old boy back to life?” Theodosia asked.

“The glorious day will be October thirty-first, All Hallow’s Eve. It will come as the finale to our annual Ghouls’ Ball.”

“We thought that most appropriate!” Maria said. “It will be the date that will forever be remembered and celebrated!”

Theodosia could stand no more. She picked up a sharp knife used for cutting meat and hurled it at Maria’s head. When the knife missed and clattered harmlessly to the floor, Theodosia catapulted her body across the table and grabbed Maria by the throat with both hands.

“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” Herr Fennerman shouted.

“I will kill her!” Theodosia said.

Theodosia wasn’t able to get a good hold on Maria’s throat. She fell to the floor as one being struck out of the air by an invisible enemy. Maria had done it with only a small movement of her index finger.

“I still remember a little trick or two!” she said with a laugh to show she wasn’t hurt.

“Oh, my dear, my dear!” Herr Fennerman said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you should be treated in this way on your first day home.”

“Don’t be sorry for me,” Maria said. “Be sorry for this daughter of yours, the one who cannot control herself and who must act out her jealousy and frustration in the ugliest of ways.”

Theodosia stood up from the floor, as though coming out of a daze. When she saw everyone looking at her, she sprang again for Maria, talon-like fingers extended like the claws of a vengeful bird.

Maria stood back, raised both arms over her head, made a motion with her arms and turned Theodosia into a blackbird.

“Mon Dieu!” Regina said. “Qu’avez-vous fait?”

Theodosia hopped around among the dishes on the table and looked in amazement at the others.

“How appropriate!” Maria said. “The half-witch is now all crow!

“No less than she deserves!” Herr Fennerman said.

“I’m not sure if I remember how to change her back, though.”

“Not to worry. Let her remain a crow for a while and see how she likes it. Maybe she will learn a lesson in humility.”

“What do we do with her in the meantime?” Maria asked. “We can’t just let her fly around from room to room. She’ll need to be fed.”

“Quite right,” Herr Fennerman said. “We’ll let Regina take care of her until we change her back or until she dies of a crow disease.”

“I don’t want to take care of her!” Regina said, managing a simple declarative sentence in English for once.

“You can make yourself useful for a change. In the cellar is a large birdcage. Go down there and get it and bring it upstairs and keep her in that for the time being.”

“I can’t go to the cellar by myself,” Regina whimpered. “J’ai peur!”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Herr Fennerman raged. “Be a grownup person for once and take care of your sister!”

“I don’t want to, and you can’t make me!”

“Do you want me to turn you into a toad or something even worse? How about a spider? You know that crows eat spiders, don’t you?”

“She would do it for you, darling,” Maria said with a sympathetic smile.

“And feed her some corn or dead bugs or whatever crows eat,” Herr Fennerman said. “We can’t just let her starve inside that cage. She might be useful later.”

“I have nothing to feed a bird!” Regina whimpered. “Que devrais-je faire?”

“You’ll think of something, I’m sure,” Herr Fennerman said.

“I think she would enjoy some dead flesh,” Maria said as she sat back down at the table and resumed her interrupted dinner.

The evening of the Ghouls’ Ball on the last day of October arrived with much fanfare and anticipation. Herr Fennerman invited over a hundred of his best friends and confidantes, some of the most ghoulish fiends the world has ever known.

As official hostess, the lovely Marie Antoinette made everyone feel welcome. Herr Fennerman, as host, never left her side. Regina lurked somewhere in the shadows, afraid for anyone to see her. Her constant companion now was a large birdcage with a lonely black bird inside. She guarded the birdcage with her life.

Champagne flowed freely. The guests danced, ate and drank. Talking and laughter were loud and raucous, the air abuzz with excitement. The Fuehrer’s name was on everyone’s lips. It was no less than a miracle, after so many  believed him lost to them forever, that he would soon be in the room with them again, that the world would once again belong to him and his devoted followers who always knew in their hearts that National Socialism was not dead but would flourish on every continent, in every country, and every corner of the globe. The mistakes of the past would not be repeated. It was the time of new beginnings.

The dancing ended. The musicians finished playing and put away their instruments. Food and drink were cleared away. Everyone held their breath with anticipation.

At the end of a ballroom was a stage with a black curtain, illuminated by dim lights rising up from the floor. Everybody in the room knew what was going on behind that curtain. The actual Fuehrer himself was being readied to step forth and re-assume the mantle of leadership that had been torn asunder by the enemy.

Everyone stood looking at the curtain. Talking and laughter had subsided. People were attentive to the point of reverence.

The curtain opened. A small man stepped forward, but the stage was very dark, so no one knew yet if it was really the Fuehrer or some other man. He came to the middle of the stage and stopped, an attendant on either side of him. A spotlight came on above his head, illuminating him for all to see.

Everybody in the room gasped. It was a revelation to once again look upon the mustachioed face of the Fuehrer. There were tears of joy. Many held their breath with delight and astonishment.

The Fuehrer looked out over the heads of the assembled, as though seeing something that nobody else could see. He raised his right hand in the Nazi salute and let it fall. When he opened his mouth to speak, everybody was ready for a rousing, roaring speech, given as only he could give it.

But these were the disappointing words that came out of his mouth: “Where is my Bondi?”

There was a slight murmur. People looked around to see if anybody else had understood the words and knew what they meant.

When nobody answered his question, the Fuehrer took a couple of hesitant steps forward, cast his blank eyes left and right and then up and down, and when he didn’t see what he was looking for he turned and exited stage right.

After a few moments of stunned silence, the ghouls and their ladies, the musicians, the servants and waiters, Herr Fennerman, Marie Antoinette, and everybody else in the place, erupted into the most enthusiastic applause and cheers of adulation that might have brought down the house if it hadn’t been so firmly in place.

Lurking in the shadows where she couldn’t be seen—that is, performing her trick of being in the room while at the same time being not in the room—was Regina. She let the veil fall from her face and looked down at the blackbird in the cage and stuck the tip of her finger in between the bars and stroked the bird’s  head. The bird looked at her knowingly and spit out a bloody gob of the Fuehrer’s brain matter that had been lodged in its throat.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

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 © 2023 by Allen Kopp