Literary Fictions

 

The Picture is About to Begin
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

Mama came home from her job at Woolworth’s, flung off her saleslady smock and fluffed up her hair in the mirror.

“What a day!” she said. “I caught a couple of shoplifters. They were hiding makeup inside their coats. I didn’t waste any time. I told Mr. Gottschalk and he called security. They were just high school girls. I felt kind of sorry for them. You should have seen their faces when security nabbed them. One of them cried as if her heart would break. Serves her right, is what I say! You can’t go around taking what doesn’t belong to you!”

“What’s for supper?” Franklin asked. He was tired out from his day and was lying on the couch reading a magazine.

“You’ll have to make do with a sandwich or with whatever you can lay your hands on. I’ve got lodge tonight.”

“Can’t you tell those lodge ladies to stuff it?”

“You know I’d never do that. They’re my friends.”

“I’d like some fried chicken.”

“Well, cook it up yourself, then.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Maybe it’s time you learned.”

“I’ll just open up a can of beans or something.”

“Where’s Peachy?”

“She’s upstairs getting dolled up. She’s going out on a date.”

“Who with?”

“I don’t know. I hope it’s Jack the Ripper.”

“What time is this date supposed to arrive?”

“I don’t know. If he knows what’s good for him, he won’t arrive at all.”

Mama went upstairs and when she came back down, Franklin was pretending to be asleep so he wouldn’t have to talk to her anymore. She left a few minutes later and Franklin got up and went into the kitchen to find something to eat for supper. He opened a can of beets and began eating them out of the can with a fork.

He took the can back into the living room and set it on the coffee table and began thumbing through the newspaper to see all the latest happenings when someone knocked on the front door. That would be Peachy’s date for the evening.

At the second knock, he pulled himself up off the couch with a groan, and when he crossed the room and flung open the front door, he was amused by the startled look on the fellow’s face.

“Yes?” Franklin said. “We’re not buying any magazine subscriptions at this time.”

“I, uh, I’m here to pick up Peachy.”

“Pick up who?”

“Peachy. She and I are going out tonight.”

“Are you sure you have the right address?”

The fellow took a step back and peered at the house number to the left of the door. “Yes, I believe I do,” he said.

“Well, I’m not sure I know anybody by the name of Peachy,” Franklin said, “but you can come in as long as you’re not planning on murdering anybody.”

“Oh, no! I…”

The fellow stepped inside the door and Franklin slammed it shut.

“Just messing with you,” Franklin said. “I’m Peachy’s brother. My name is Franklin Terry. You can call me Franklin Terry.”

“I’m Curtis Wadlow,” the fellow said, offering his hand.

“The duchess is upstairs getting dressed. You can throw all caution to the wind and sit down and wait for her or, if you know what’s good for you, you can leave now.”

“I’ll wait, if you don’t mind,” Curtis Wadlow said. He sat in the big upholstered chair that matched the couch.

Franklin resumed his place on the couch, and the two young men regarded each other warily.

“I don’t think Peachy ever mentioned she had a brother,” Curtis Wadlow said.

“No, she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t want anybody to know I exist.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, I guess you could say she and I don’t like each other very much.”

“You can’t mean that. She’s a lovely person.”

“You don’t know her very well, do you?”

“This is our third date.”

“In how long?”

“Oh, a couple of months, I guess.”

“You don’t work very fast, do you?”

“No.”

“Where did you two meet?”

“At a young adults’ mixer in the church basement.”

“Oh, a church affair?”

“Yeah, I don’t usually go to those things, but if you’re shy, like me, it’s a good way to meet people.”

“I’ve never been to a church mixer,” Franklin said.

“You can meet some awfully nice people there. Generally speaking.”

“Where are you taking Peachy tonight?”

“We’re going to see a movie.”

“Yeah? Which one?”

“Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein at the Odeon Theatre downtown.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Peachy doesn’t like horror movies. They keep her awake at night.”

“She said she wanted to go.”

“Well, you can never tell about her.”

“Maybe she’d rather go someplace else.”

“You don’t always have to do what she wants, do you? Women can be very selfish that way. Do what you want.”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make much difference to me. I just like being with her, no matter where we are.”

“Are we both talking about the same person?” Franklin asked.

“She takes her time getting dressed, doesn’t she?” Curtis Wadlow said.

“Now you’re discovering the real Peachy.”

“I told her what time I’d pick her up. It seems rather inconsiderate of her not be ready at the time I specified.”

“Sometimes she takes hours getting ready to go out, and when she comes out she looks worse than before.”

“I think she could have a little more consideration for me. I want to see a picture from the beginning, the ‘directed by’ stuff and all that. I hate going in after a picture has already started.”

“You’d be better off waiting for a glacier than for Peachy.”

“If we don’t leave about right now, we won’t make it in time. Could you go and hurry her along? Tell her the picture is about to start?”

“It wouldn’t do any good. She doesn’t like to be hurried. Once she sees her own reflection in the mirror, she’s transfixed.”

“Are you saying she’s vain?”

“Vain doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

“Well, I’ll wait a couple more minutes and if she’s not down by then, I’m going to go on alone.”

“I like horror movies,” Franklin said. “I’m not doing anything tonight.”

“What? Are you saying you’d go to the Odeon Theatre with me?”

“Mister, I’d go to the moon with you!”

“I’ve never been to the movies with another fellow before.”

“I don’t mind if you don’t.”

“I think it’s good to keep yourself open to new experiences, don’t you?”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“I can pay for your ticket if you want me to.”

“You get this one and I’ll get the next one.”

“I always pay for Peachy’ s ticket,” Curtis Wadlow said.

“Does she ever pay for anything?”

“She hasn’t so far.”

“She won’t, either. That’s just the way she is. She’s a ‘taker’ instead of a ‘giver’. Are we walking or riding?”

“I’ve got my car out front.”

“You have your own car?’

“Sure thing!”

“Well, let’s get going, then! If we leave now, we can just about make the ‘directed by’ stuff.”

“What will Peachy think when she comes down and finds out I didn’t wait for her?” Curtis Wadlow said. “I wouldn’t want her to think I stood her up.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Franklin Terry said. “She stood you up first.”

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Cherry Hill
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

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

My hometown doesn’t have much to recommend it. When I finally got away, I stayed away. I managed to return for a visit every three or four years and stay for three or four days. My father was dead, but my mother, nearly eighty, was remarkably the same. She was still the same mother she was when I was in second grade, only with more lines on her face and gray in her hair.

Mother liked to talk, but she lived alone, so she didn’t always have anybody to talk to. Talking to a person on the phone is not the same, she said, as talking to them in person. Whenever I saw her, she had always saved up a lot of things she wanted to tell me: Her great-niece in Calabasas had to have all her female parts removed; a woman in a nearby town shot her husband while he was sleeping and then shot herself in the heart; the one daily newspaper in town was shutting down after more than a hundred years; her hairdresser, a Portuguese woman named Vivian, was in a multi-car pileup on the highway in a rainstorm and broke her nose.

Mother’s idea of a good time was to bring down all the family pictures from the attic and sit at the dining room table and look at them one by one. She told me who was in each picture, even if I already knew. A lot of the pictures had stories to go along with them, stories I had heard many times before about long-dead aunts and uncles, weddings, deaths, births and fortunes gained and lost.  The picture-viewing session could easily take all day and far into the night. It was a tedious and sometimes nauseating journey down memory lane.

When my visit was nearly half-over, mother realized we didn’t have much time, so she went into the kitchen and prepared what she remembered were my “favorite dishes” when I was in high school: fried chicken and mashed potatoes, ham and scalloped potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs. She never bothered to ask me if those were the things I still liked or, if now, all those years later, I might have preferred something else. To her I would  always be sixteen.

When she needed things from the store, she asked me if I would drive her. I needed some time alone, so I generously offered to take the list and get the things on my own while she stayed home and relaxed. She gave me the list and hurried into the kitchen to make some chocolate cupcakes.

After I had the groceries safely stowed in the back of the car, I wasn’t in any hurry to get back. I drove around for a while in the town where I grew up, taking in the sights, such as they were.

The downtown business district was like a ghost town now. Most of the businesses were closed up and the buildings remained empty, some with boards covering the windows. A long time ago, when I was still in school, the town had a movie theatre, a couple of drugstores, some restaurants, a doctor’s office or two, two banks, clothing stores, a hardware, a Chevrolet dealer, a Woolworth’s and even a book store that sold magazines and newspapers. All of them long-gone.

I drove by the high school. The street was still familiar to me, but the building where I went to school has been replaced long ago by a sprawling, low, brick building that looked like a shoe factory. The old building at least had character; the new building had none. Not far past the school was the only hospital in town, the sight of which still scared me. Then there was the little park where we used to ride our bicycles and have Boy Scout wiener roasts.

Past the old train station, over the railroad tracks, across the river and on out the old highway into farm country, I kept going for a couple of miles until I came to Cherry Hill cemetery. I turned on my left turn signal and waited until it was safe to turn.

Cherry Hill was as old as the town. The oldest graves were from the 1870s. My grandparents and great-grandparents were buried there, along with various aunts, uncles, cousins, a few teachers I had in school and a couple of classmates who didn’t make it very far into adulthood. My own father, to spite my mother, was cremated and had his ashes dumped into the smelly river where he fished for bass as a child. I hope the fish enjoyed his ashes.

The cemetery was deserted and peaceful. I drove around for a while and parked under a majestic maple tree at the top of a hill and rolled down my window to breathe in the pure air. I heard a mourning dove cooing off in the distance and then another one answering the first one. The perfect sound effect for a country cemetery.

I got out of the car and walked down the hill among the gravestones, small ones and big ones, some ostentatious and some modest. I had always found cemeteries fascinating, just reading the names and dates off the stones: children, old people and all those in between. There was the grave of Siamese twin boys, born and died before World War I. Not far from there was the mass grave of children who died in an orphanage fire in town in 1911. Then there were  influenza victims from 1918 and a few soldiers killed in France in World War I. (The graves from World War II and Korea were in a different part of the cemetery.)

In the last row of graves before the fence, I found the lonely grave of Leta Bluet, a girl in my class in high school who died in eleventh grade. The granite stone, about eighteen inches high, had weeds growing around it. I pulled some of the weeds up by the roots and tossed them aside, disturbing a myriad of tiny insects living in the grass.

High school girls don’t usually die, but when they do there’s a good reason, such as illness or accident. In the case of Leta Bluet, her death was caused by another person, a man who worked as a janitor at the school named Curley Heinrich. I suppose Curley was a nickname. Somebody said his real name was Alphonse.

Curley didn’t fit the image of a school janitor. He was only about thirty, with dark hair and dark eyes. He hardly spoke at all but when he did speak he had a slight foreign accent. He walked with a pronounced limp, always wore a uniform, and was on the small side, no more than five feet, seven inches tall and a hundred and forty pounds. He was always sweeping the floors, cleaning up where somebody had vomited, or fielding complaints about the room being too hot or too cold.

When Curley wasn’t working at the school, we would see him driving around town in his blue pickup truck, smoking a cigarette. Most of the time he’d be alone but sometimes there’d be another person with him in the truck, a man or a woman. A lot of people found Curley interesting and mysterious, but I never paid much attention; I found him easy to ignore.

There were all kinds of rumors going around about Curley: He was a spy and was wanted by the FBI; he was serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary and had escaped; he had a wife and several children but he didn’t live with them.

I had a couple of classes with Leta Bluet. I knew her well enough to know she lived with her mother, who was some kind of a nurse, and didn’t have a father. One day she came to school with a black eye and when I asked her what happened she said she and her mother had a fight and her mother hit her. She wore dark glasses until the eye cleared up.

Leta was moderately attractive but not what you would call pretty. If she had had enough money for good clothes and a stylish hairdo, she would have been among the more popular girls in school, but she claimed not to care about those things. Several of the less savory boys in school went out with her and she didn’t mind being seen with them, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. She was the kind of girl my mother told me to not be seen with. I didn’t care, though; if somebody was my friend, I didn’t care what other people thought of them. In a small town, there are always lots of ignorant people.

One afternoon when I was walking downtown, I saw Curley drive by in his pickup truck. He had somebody in the truck with him and when I took a second look I knew it was Leta Bluet. He might have just been giving her a ride home, but I was sure there was more to it than that. I hoped she’d tell me about it the next day at school, but she didn’t mention it and I didn’t want to ask.

A few days later Leta asked me if I could keep a secret and when I said I could, she told she and Curley had been going out together on dates. Curley didn’t want anybody to know about it, though, because he was afraid he’d get fired for dating a student. I was a little surprised because he was about twelve years older than she was, but after I thought about it I saw that it made perfect sense. It was only natural she would want what everybody thought she shouldn’t have.

It was October and we were well into November when something happened to Leta Bluet. She didn’t show up for school and didn’t call in to say she was sick. It wasn’t like her to miss without a good reason. According to her mother, Leta hadn’t been home for two nights; she (the mother) was starting to get a little worried.

After Leta had been missing for a week, everybody assumed the worst. The police came and talked to us at school, first to the whole class and then to each of us individually. Whenever I saw Curley, changing fluorescent tubes or cleaning up a mess in the cafeteria, I thought he was the one person the police should be questioning; he probably knew more about what happened to Leta than anybody.

In the second week of Leta’s disappearance, her mother found her (Leta’s) diary, hidden in the closet. In the diary, Leta confessed that she and Curley had been intimate on several occasions and that she wanted to marry him, even if he was already married. (Was he?) When Leta’s mother turned the diary over to the police, Curley became the main suspect in Leta’s disappearance. (I imagined that the police subjected Curley to the kind of intense interrogation I had seen in the movies—the kind of grilling that makes you feel sorry for the suspect, even if he is a terrible rat.)

It was as if a bomb had hit the school. As awful as it was, it was the biggest thing ever to happen, in the school or in the town. If anything can spice up your life, it’s the murder of a person you know. It was all anybody could talk about. The principal closed the school and told everybody to go home and get it all talked out before returning to school the next day.

On the day of Leta’s funeral, we received the final piece of the puzzle: the police examination of Leta’s body showed she was in the early stages of pregnancy. The newspaper headlines and the TV coverage were lurid. The town ate it up.

So, everybody in our class went to Leta’s funeral; we were all officially in mourning, even those who would have nothing to do with her when she was alive. Curley didn’t go to the funeral; he was in police custody.

After a trial lasting about three months, he was found guilty in a jury trial of second-degree murder and sentenced to twenty-five years in a federal penitentiary. A lot of people thought it wasn’t enough. If he didn’t die in prison, he’d be out by the time he was sixty.

The furor died down after almost a year and eventually everybody moved on and stopped talking about what happened to Leta. Nobody would ever entirely forget it, though.

That evening while we were having dinner, I asked mother if she remembered Leta Bluet.

“Of course I remember her,” she said. “What an awful thing!”

“After I got the groceries today, I drove out to Cherry Hill.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Just looking around. I wasn’t looking for Leta’s grave, but I found it anyway. It’s in a lonely part of the cemetery. I pulled up some weeds that were growing around her gravestone.”

 “Her mother died a few years ago. Leta didn’t have any other family. They said her parents were never married.”

“It’s been almost thirty years since it happened,” I said.

“In a way it seems like no time at all. Did you know that man is out of jail now?”

“What man?”

“That foreigner that killed Leta.”

“How do you know?”

“Everybody knows about it and everything thinks it’s terrible,” she said. “He should have been given the electric chair.”

“Does anybody know where he lives?”

“He lives right here in town just as bold as you please. He’s got a young wife and children. They go around town as if nothing ever happened. It seems he would have wanted to live someplace else, where people didn’t know him.”

“He can live wherever he wants, I suppose.”

“It just doesn’t seem right.”

“I’d like to see him,” I said.

“Why?”

“Just to see him. See how much he’s changed.”

“That’s morbid,” she said. “You’d better not go anywhere near him.”

We moved on to other topics, but that evening I looked his name up in the phone directory. I didn’t expect him to have a telephone and if he did have one I didn’t think his name would to be in the book, but there it was, as plain as four fingers and a thumb: Alphonse “Curley” Heinrich.

Also his address, in a part of town I knew well.

The next morning I told my mother I had to go to the bank but instead went to the address given in the phone book for Alphonse “Curley” Heinrich. It was a two-story house with a white fence and big trees in the yard. I parked the car and went up and knocked on the door.

A plain-faced woman came to the door and looked at me.

“Mrs. Heinrich?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“Is your husband at home?”

“He’s in the basement. I’ll go get him. Would you like to come in?”

“No, thanks. I’ll wait here.”

I stood there on the front porch, peering into the dark house through the screen door. I heard voices, footsteps, closing doors. I must have stood there at least five minutes before I heard somebody coming toward me from the back of the house.

And then I saw the outline of a man and I knew it was him: the thirty-year-old man had become the sixty-year-old man. He still had the same dark hair, only now with a lot of  gray. There were lines around his eyes and wrinkles on his forehead.

“Yes?” he said.

“You haven’t changed much,” I said.

“What?”

“I said you haven’t changed much.”

“Who are you?”

“You don’t know my name and it doesn’t matter anyway.”

“All right,” he said. “What is it you want?”

“I don’t want anything. I was a friend of Leta Bluet’s. I wanted to see what you look like after all these years.”

He came out the door and took a couple of steps toward me until his face was inches from mine.

“Are you some kind of a ghoul?” he asked.

“No, I’m not a ghoul.”

“Well, there’s nothing here for you to see, so you might as well move on.”

“Doesn’t it bother you? I mean, about Leta?”

“Look,” he said. “That was all a long time ago. The past is dead and buried. I’ve moved on. We’ve all moved on.”

“All right,” I said. “The next time you don’t have anything to do, you might take a drive out to Cherry Hill cemetery and visit her grave, since you’re the reason she’s there.”

Then I turned around and started to walk away, but he extended his arm and blocked me.

“Just a minute!” he said. “How well did you know that girl?”

“We were friends.”

“Did you know she was crazy?”

“I don’t have to stand here and listen to…”

Again I started to leave and again he blocked me, this time with his body instead of just his arm.

“She threatened me. She was only sixteen. She was going to have a baby. She said it was my baby, but I knew it had to be somebody else’s. If she went around telling people it was my baby, she could cause me plenty of trouble since she was a minor.”

“You had a lot of time in prison to work up this story.”

“It’s the truth!”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Why should I care whether you believe me or not? Somebody needs to hear the truth! The cops wouldn’t believe me. Even my own lawyer thought I was lying!”

“It sounds like a lie to me, too!”

“You’re full of shit! You don’t know anything about it!”

He grabbed hold of the front of my shirt and I thought for a minute he was going to hit me.

“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “I’m sorry I came here. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

“She wanted me to marry her. I told her I didn’t want to be married to her, or to anybody else. She continued to threaten me. She said she was going to the school board and tell them I impregnated her and that when she confronted me with it, I threatened to kill her.”

“Quite a story!” I said.

“It’s not a story. It’s true.”

“Well, thank you for sharing it with me. I really ought to be going now.”

“She told me she was going to kill herself if I didn’t marry her, but I didn’t believe her. While I was at work, she broke into my place, took off all her clothes and got into my bed and shot herself in the head with my gun. She set me up to get back at me for refusing to marry her. She killed herself, knowing that everybody would think I did it!”

“How did she know you had a gun? Had you threatened her with it before?”

“All I did was show it to her. I wanted to impress her. You know: Big Man with a Gun!”

“So, then, you did the stupidest thing imaginable. You took her body out to the woods outside of town and buried it to try to hide it.”

“I was scared! I knew nobody would ever believe what really happened.”

“So, you went to prison for thirty years for something you didn’t do!”

“She ruined my life. She set me up. She stole thirty years from me. So, if I don’t feel much in the mood to mourn her loss, that’s why.”

“I don’t really believe any of this,” I said. “She was an innocent young girl. She wasn’t capable of hatching such a devious plot against another person.”

“It doesn’t matter to me whether you believe me or not. I don’t know you. You don’t know me. Let’s keep it that way.”

“If what you told me is true,” I said, “you should try to get your name cleared so people in this town will stop thinking you’re such a demon.”

“I don’t care what people in this town think of me. They can go to hell. You can go to hell.”

I apologized once again for bothering him and got in my car and drove away.

Mother was talkative during dinner and all evening long. She wanted me to move back home and take care of her in her old age. I told her she’d probably live longer than me, so it was a moot point. We had standing rib roast for dinner. It was the last thing she would ever cook for me.

Copyright 2023 by Allen Kopp

 

The Drinking Song
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This short story was published in The Literary Hatchet.)

Lloyd Stott had a lead on a three-day job in a cemetery. When he called to inquire about the job, he was told to take the bus to a certain address to speak to the man doing the hiring. He took the bus, all right, but he got lost and became so confused he ended up in a place that couldn’t have been the right place. It was a neighborhood of beautiful houses with attached garages; spacious, well-kept lawns and overarching shade trees. It was a neighborhood that might have made a confused hobo believe for a moment he was in heaven.

He walked around for a while, garnering hostile stares. Anybody who saw him would know he was in the wrong place. And what would he do if someone called the police? He’d have to explain what he was doing there, and anything he said would not be believed.

He was going to knock at the back door of one of the houses and ask for directions when he saw a police car a block away coming toward him. When he turned in the other direction, he saw another police car. Somebody must have already called the police and reported a stray hobo in the neighborhood, ready to wreak unspeakable carnage! Even though he wasn’t doing anything wrong, they could nab  him for vagrancy and trespassing, just when he was only trying to get a job and get himself straightened out.

Across the way was a huge brick house with a spacious, park-like lawn—lots of trees and bushes. All he had to do was hide himself in the bushes for a half-hour or so, by which time the police would be gone, and then he could go back to where he came from and resume his career of racking balls at the pool hall.

Certain he hadn’t been seen, he ran into the yard and was looking for a good place to hide when a medium-sized dog, a black cocker spaniel, spied him and ran toward him barking. He was afraid of barking dogs, especially the ones that might possibly rip off a leg. He had heard that cocker spaniels were particularly vicious.

Heart pounding, he ran around the house away from the dog, hoping the dog would become distracted and not follow. Good boy! Good dog!

On the other side of the house were stairs to the basement. Down the stairs were a door and some trash barrels. Taking the steps two at a time, he crouched behind the barrels, hoping the dog would become bored with his attack-the-hobo game and go home.

The door beside which he was crouching had a window with a curtain. There were no sounds coming from beyond the door and the window was dark. Did that mean nobody was home? No, it probably meant that nobody was in the basement. The people who lived in the house were all upstairs.

Not thinking any particular thought, he stood up from his crouching position behind the trash barrels and put his hand on the door knob and turned it. The door wasn’t locked. He inserted his head as far as he dared. He saw a large, comfortable room with a television, a couch and some overstuffed chairs, a table for playing cards, some weight-lifting equipment, a bookcase with some books, a couple of lamps, a record player and some vinyl records. What a setup! Whoever lived here must be a movie star or a prince or something like that, he thought.

What caught his attention more than anything else, though, was a bar on the far wall. He never knew anybody before who had a full-sized bar in their basement. He approached the bar as quiet as a mouse, as grandma used to say, listening all the time for sounds from above.

Behind the bar on glass shelves were all shapes, sizes, and colors of bottles, as beautiful as any work of art. There were wines, liqueurs, vodka, tequila, rye whiskey, scotch, bourbon and other bottles with labels he couldn’t read because they were in foreign languages. He picked up a bottle of vodka, unscrewed the cap and took a generous swallow. He couldn’t resist. Then he had another drink of vodka and one of scotch. It was all of the best quality. No rot-gut stuff like they sell in his neighborhood.

He sat on the big couch, the bottle of vodka in one hand and the bottle of scotch in the other, and took a few more drinks, alternating between bottles. He thought: Man, this is living! I could get used to this shit!

Soon he was asleep. That’s the effect liquor had on him.

He awoke with a start, not knowing where he was. Neither did he know how long he had been asleep, but it had probably been too long. He remembered then that he was in the house of a stranger and he hadn’t been invited in, either. Technically he broke in, but he didn’t really have to break anything to get inside. It was so easy.

He should leave, but he hadn’t heard a sound from upstairs the whole time he had been in the house. What could it mean? It might mean that nobody was home. Might he go into the kitchen and grab something to eat before milord and milady came home? He hadn’t had anything to eat all day, and it was never a good idea to consume large amounts of alcohol on an empty stomach.

Realizing he was still holding liquor bottles in both hands, he set them on the bar and went quietly up the stairs, holding on to the wall. If there was anybody at home and they confronted him, he should be able to run out the way he came in before they called the police. Always a good idea to have an escape plan in mind.

At the top of the stairs was a hallway and then the kitchen. The kitchen was dark and quiet, orderly and neat. The refrigerator hummed quietly. He took a few steps and stood still, listening for any sounds coming from any of the other rooms. Hearing nothing, he proceeded.

Beyond the kitchen was the dining room and then a living room. Blinds were closed and curtains drawn. The air felt stale and uncirculated. Nobody was home, plain and simple. He could take as much time as he wanted and explore the entire house, but there was always a chance that whoever lived there would be coming back at any moment. He had to be constantly on guard for footsteps or voices.

And then he saw the note on the kitchen counter that liberated him:

Dear Geta, We’ll be back on the twenty-fifth. On the twenty-fourth, come in early to vacuum and dust, collect the mail, newspapers, etc. Make the house presentable. You know how I like everything perfect! Ha-ha! I do hope everything has been all right while we’ve been away and that nobody has broken in and made off with all our valuables! See you on the twenty-fifth. I hope you’ve made good use of your free time, as we discussed. Yours sincerely, Mrs. Penelope Poindexter.

So, he had the house to himself until the twenty-fourth! That gave him four days. He could have a good rest, get himself clean, eat whatever food was there, drink the liquor, sleep in a comfortable bed. When the people who lived in the house returned and saw that somebody had been staying there, they’d call the police, of course, but by then he’d be long gone. They’d agonize over it, have a locksmith come and change the locks, upbraid the maid for not securing the basement door, and then, in time, forget it ever happened. No real harm done.

First things first, though: the bathroom. What a luxury to sit on the toilet and do one’s business with nobody else around and then just flush the effluvia away as if it never existed. Surely one of life’s greatest pleasures!

Later he would have a bath, but first some food. He went to the refrigerator and opened the door. The shelves were mostly bare: a jar of pickles, some mustard, a couple of shriveled onions, a part bottle of wine. He reached for the pickles and the wine and sat down at the kitchen table and drank wine and ate pickles, digging them out of the jar with his filthy fingers, until he believed he would be sick. Then he put the pickles and the wine back in the refrigerator where he found them and opened the freezer, in which he found, among other things, a full carton of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Finding a spoon easily enough, he began eating the ice cream greedily right out of the carton. Nothing in his life ever tasted so good.

He was sick then, but he made it into the bathroom before he made a mess on the floor. What a pleasure just to be sick in such a spacious, clean bathroom! The lucky ones don’t know how lucky they are, he thought, as he rinsed out his mouth afterwards, regarding his frightening face in the mirror above the sink.

Standing in front of the mirror, he stripped off his clothes, not failing to notice the awful smell emanating from his body. After he had taken everything off, he didn’t want to see himself. He got into the tub and filled it with scalding water.

The hot bath was the closest he had ever come to bliss on earth. After scrubbing every inch of himself, he let out the dirty water and started over, but this time he reclined in the tub and took a long, luxurious soak, making it last as long as he dared.

Emerging from the tub, he dried himself all over with a beautiful pink towel and when he was finished, he felt like a different person in a different skin. He regarded his old clothes in a pile on the floor with distaste. He’d rather go unclothed than to put them on again. He didn’t know what to do with them so he kicked them out of the way where he wouldn’t have to look at them.

With the pink towel around his middle, he went into the bedroom at the end of the hallway to find something to wear. The men’s clothes he found in the closet weren’t right for him, too big and boxy; they swallowed him up. Since he was a small man, only five feet and four inches, he found the lady’s attire more to his liking.

Ever since he was a little tyke, he liked to dress in women’s clothes. His mother indulged him in this peculiarity, while his father beat him with a belt to discourage any feminizing ways. When his father went to prison for a twenty-year stretch, he was free to be either male or female, according to his mood.

Now he was getting on in years (over forty) and his indulgent mother was dead. He had found precious little opportunity in the last ten years or so to dress as a woman. Now, though, God had landed him in this rich person’s house for a few days where no one could see him and he could do as he pleased. Thank you, God!

The note he found in the kitchen told him that the lady who lived in the house was one Mrs. Penelope Poindexter. As he dressed himself in her clothes, (including frilly undergarments), he began to think of himself as the one, the only, Mrs. Penelope Poindexter.

What could be more comfortable after a bath than slipping into a silk Japanese lounging kimono with a  motif of red poppies, topped with a cascading, curly wig from the shelf in the closet? A prolonged examination of his mirrored image reminded him that his previous state of drunkenness had worn off in the act of bathing, and he knew that no good would come from being sober.

He had never considered himself an alcoholic, but he had known other alcoholics, including his father and two of his brothers, and what he had in common with all of them was that he couldn’t leave the stuff alone. Remaining drunk all the time was the only way he could live. When he was sober, he had to face the hard reality of his life: despicable, distasteful, insupportable. My life has become insupportable, he remembered hearing someone say. It might have been a line from a movie.

He drank a bottle of Jamaican rum and a bottle of tequila (small bottles) and then he tried on a cocktail dress of madame’s from the closet. He didn’t think the cocktail dress was quite right for him somehow, so he took it off and threw it on the floor and replaced it with a tea-length dress in a floral print. An auburn wig from madame’s wig collection set off the dress perfectly, calling for more ice cream. He ate the rest of the carton of mint chocolate chip and then he threw up again, barely making it into the bathroom.

As he finished each bottle, he lined all up all the empties on the table in the kitchen like a row of toy soldiers. It made a pretty picture and served as a visual reminder of just how much liquor he had consumed and how much more he had to go: there were still lots of bottles left in the basement.

He tried on some more of madame’s lovely clothes and then, realizing it was two in the morning—where does time go?—he carried the bottle of gin into the master bedroom and passed out on the king-sized bed.

When he awoke in the morning to the sound of birds singing, he didn’t know where he was, but he knew it was someplace good. He had a terrible headache but was able to stumble into the bathroom, where he found a bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet. After taking two aspirin without water, he fainted on the tile floor, where he lay unconscious for several hours.

So, in this way, Lloyd Stott passed his four days in the home of an unwittingly generous benefactor: modeling all of madame’s clothes from the closet (discarding them in a heap on the floor in the bedroom when he took them off), drinking all the liquor from the bar in the basement, eating all the food in the kitchen. How lucky he was that the liquor and the food lasted just as long as he wanted them to! And madame had just enough clothes that he didn’t have to model any of them more than once.

For his last night in the house—and he felt a little sad that he couldn’t stay longer—he wore madame’s shimmering, white, floor-length evening gown. And not only that, he saved one last bottle of his favorite rye whiskey. He would have a little going-away party. A party for one.

The maid would be in early the next morning, so he planned on being out well in advance of that time. He would doze until five or so and then get up and vamoose like a scared little rabbit while the world still slept.

He had a wonderful time his last night, drinking straight from the bottle, dancing with an imaginary partner to music from the radio, remembering some good times he had when he was younger before he gave up his life to drinking. When he was twenty-three he was married for a time and became a father. He had traveled and seen the world. He had seen New York City and the Gulf of Mexico and Niagara Falls.

At midnight he retired to the master bedroom, taking the bottle of rye whiskey with him. There was still a little left in the bottle and he wanted to finish it off before he left in the morning. Before going to sleep, he thanked God, again, for the four happy days in the wonderful house.

It was to be his last night on earth. He would not live to see another day. His heart, his stomach and his intestinal tract were overburdened by the huge amounts of liquor he had consumed. His heart stopped pumping and he died in his sleep; he didn’t know or feel anything.

When the maid, Geta, came in at nine o’clock in the morning, she saw the bottles lined up on the table in the kitchen and she knew something was wrong. Then she went into the master bedroom and saw the contents of the closet turned out on the floor and the strange figure in the bed wearing Mrs. Poindexter’s evening gown. It gave Geta quite a fright because she thought it was Mrs. Poindexter herself. Her hands shook as she went to the phone and called the police.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

 

Fallen Angel
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

In 1948, Alonzo Goldsmith and Isabelle Bird were married in a modest service in a small country church. He was twenty and she was nineteen. Neither of them knew anything of the world.

In less than a year, they brought forth a baby, a boy they named Timothy. The next year, they had a girl, named Peggy. Alonzo knew that, with two babies in less than two years of marriage, life was always going to be a struggle for him. Ten months after Peggy was born came Jesse, a stolid, dark-haired boy. When Jesse was barely walking, there came another girl; this one they named Storm. With two boys and two girls in less than five years or marriage, Alonzo declared there would be no more. One more would upset the balance.

Alonzo was never blessed with intellectual curiosity or an abundance of learning. He had to make a living for himself and his brood of children the best way he knew how. He got a job on an assembly line in a shoe factory. He stayed for thirteen years until, one day, he was told he didn’t need to come back; the factory was closing its doors.

After his time in the factory, he painted houses, worked in a lead mine, drove a school bus, worked as a janitor in a church, clerked in a hardware store, did cleanup work in a cemetery, and even for a while worked as a trash collector. No work was beneath him as long as it paid the honest dollar.

The growing-up years of his quartet of children passed in a kind of blur. They were starting kindergarten and then, before Alonzo knew it, he was putting on his blue suit and going to their high school graduations. Peggy and Storm were both out of the house and married by the time they were twenty and started having babies of their own.

Timothy, never much interested in the girls, moved to Alaska with a couple of his friends and got a job there. He sent greeting cards to Alonzo and Isabelle on Christmas and birthdays, but he would never come back home, he said, not even for a visit. He was happy in Alaska and didn’t want to be reminded of his growing-up years.

As a child growing up, Jesse was unlike any other. He was stubborn and uncooperative. He refused to sit still in school. He was a bully with his classmates. He defaced the walls. He pulled fire extinguishers down from the wall to watch them spray. Several times he ran away from school and was found wandering the streets. His name came to by synonymous with misdeeds.

At home, if anybody ever crossed him, he picked up the nearest object and threw it. He broke windows, dishes and mirrors, not to mention all his toys. He played cruel tricks on his sisters, putting a dead skunk in their closet or taking their clothes and books out into the back yard and setting fire to them. He called his mother vile names and painted obscenities on the wall of his room in his own blood.

His high school years were tumultuous. He cheated on tests, stole money, engaged in fistfights, threatened to kill a teacher for correcting him in class, slashed the tires on a school bus. At night, he went out drinking, sometimes not getting home in time to go to school the next morning. He shoplifted cigarettes and small food items. He had been barred from every drug store in town because he roamed their aisles and pilfered drugs.

Finally, he graduated from high school. He had the lowest scholastic record in his class and the highest number of days missed, but still he was allowed to graduate. The entire family attended his graduation and were happy for him. The next day he attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. He spent four months in the state mental hospital, after which he was said to be cured of whatever had been wrong with him and sent home.

His mother knew he was an aberration. Something that happens in the world. For every good in the world, there is a bad something or other. He was no more responsible for his actions than a wild animal in the forest. She loved him as much as she loved her other children, if not more. He was her fallen angel. He would come to a bad end, she knew. She could only hope for a merciful one.

After his stay in the mental hospital, he got a job as an apprentice meat cutter for minimum wage. In the evenings, he would come home wearing his white apron covered with blood, in which he seemed to take pride. Sometimes he brandished a meat cleaver in his mother’s or his father’s face, but they could ignore these things as long as he was going to work every day and staying at home in the evenings and watching television and napping in the recliner.

He began dating a checker named Maureen in the supermarket where he worked. In a few weeks, they announced they were going to be married. Maureen was going to have a baby, but she hoped nobody would notice until after the wedding. They rented a small house a few blocks from the supermarket where they both worked and, seven months after they were married, Maureen gave birth to a son, Matthew.

In the year after Matthew’s birth, Jesse began going around with other women, sometimes women he picked up on the street. He stole money from Maureen’s purse and began staying out all night, sometimes being gone for two or three days at a time. When Maureen confronted him over the loss of the rent money, he hit her in the head with a bottle and tried to strangle her. As he held her down on the floor, she slashed him across the face with a piece of glass and got away. After that, she filed for divorce, quit her job and took Matthew and went back to her childhood home to live with her widowed mother.

Alonzo was now in his mid-sixties and, after forty-five years, he had to give up working. He had a heart murmur, a fatty liver, arthritis, asthma, and deteriorating disks in his spine. Every movement for him was painful. He and Isabelle, sitting at the kitchen table, figured they could get by on what little money they had, since they only had themselves to take care of and didn’t need anything in the way of luxuries.

Just when Alonzo was looking forward to a serene old age, fatherhood was once again thrust upon him. Jesse lost his job, his home and his wife, and had no place to lay his head. Alonzo and Isabelle had to give him one more chance. They allowed him to move into his old room, but only if he could be the kind of responsible adult they expected him to be. If he engaged in any more of his destructive behavior, he would have to find another place to stay.

Jesse found a job as counter man in an auto parts store. He went to work every day and straight home afterwards and didn’t go out again at night. After a month of this good behavior he was stretched to the limit of his endurance and reverted to his old ways. He stole Alonzo’s pain medication and took grocery money from his mother’s purse. He stayed out all night and slept all day, forfeiting his new job. He was dirty and sloppy and his mother had to pick up after him the same way she did when he was a child. When she tried to speak to him, he called her a meddling old bitch and threatened to kill her.

When he broke a glass in the kitchen and sliced Isabelle’s arm with it, Alonzo told him he had to get out before the end of the day. His mother and father could no longer be responsible for him and he was going to have to make his own way in the world.

He got his things together, but before he left he had a few choice words to impart. They had always been against him, he said; they had hurt him and held him back by not loving him enough. They hadn’t seen the last of him, though. He’d be back and when they saw him coming they’d better say their prayers.

The next day they changed the locks on the doors and Alonzo bought two handguns, one for him and one for Isabelle. They took lessons on gun safety and made sure they kept plenty of ammunition in the house.

Two weeks after Jesse left, Isabelle was alone in the house when she heard a car out front. When she looked out the window, she saw Jesse getting out of the car with a shotgun. She heard him try to open the door and, when he found that his old key wouldn’t work, he began shouting and swearing.

“Go on now, son!” she called to him. “We don’t want any more trouble with you!”

“Let me in!” he yelled.

“No! If you don’t go away and leave us alone, I’ll call the sheriff! I swear I will!”

He banged and kicked at the door and when she still didn’t open it, he broke the glass out with the butt of his shotgun and reached through and undid the lock.

When he came through the door, she was ready for him. She believed that when he saw her pointing a gun at him, he would desist, but still he advanced on her, pointing his gun at her middle. She would never forget the look of hatred on his face.

She believed in that moment without a doubt that he would kill her and then kill Alonzo when he came into the house. Without thinking about what she was doing, almost by reflex, she leveled her gun at him and, from eight feet away, pulled the trigger. One bullet was all it took. He fell dead at her feet.

She called the police and told them calmly what happened. Ten minutes later, Alonzo came home. The story was in the newspapers and on television: Rural Woman Kills Mentally Ill Son in Self-Defense. No Charges Filed.

Alonzo and Isabelle had Jesse’s body cremated. There was no religious service. People heard about it and were disappointed there would be no funeral for them to go to. How could a mother kill her own son, they asked. Well, he was going to kill her. It was one or the other. What do you know about that? It takes all kinds.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

The New Ricky Ricardo
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

Ethel let herself in at the kitchen door and helped herself to a cup of coffee. She sat down at the table and began nibbling at the bacon that was left over from breakfast. When Lucy came in from the other room, she took one look at Ethel and began crying.

“What’s wrong, honey?” Ethel asked.

“Oh, Ethel, it’s just awful!” Lucy sobbed.

“What happened?”

“I’ve just been frantic since two this morning! I don’t know what to do!”

“You and Ricky have another fight?”

“I don’t know what’s got into him lately.”  

“Well, pour yourself some coffee and sit down and tell me all about it.”

“Oh, Ethel, I hate to tell you what I’ve done!”

“It can’t be all that bad!”

“This time it is!”

“I’ll help you get it straightened out, whatever it is. What are best friends for?”

“Oh, Ethel, I don’t know how to tell you this!”

“Just say it. You’ll feel better.”

“I’ve killed Ricky!”

“What?”

“I said I’ve killed Ricky Ricardo. My husband. The famous bug-eyed Cuban bandleader known and loved by millions.”

“Oh, Lucy! You didn’t! I’m speechless!”

“I know! It’s terrible!”

“Are you sure he’s dead?”

“He’s dead, all right. He’s been dead since two this morning.”

“Well, get yourself calmed down and tell me all about it.”

“Well, he came home from the club about one-thirty and I noticed right away that he was acting sort of funny. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.”

“Oh, honey, that’s a very bad sign!” Ethel said, spraying crumbs out between her teeth.  

“He took off his clothes and laid them on the chair next to the bed and went into the bathroom. I heard the water running, so I figured he was taking a bath. I gathered up his clothes for the laundry and you’ll never guess what I found!”

“What?”

“There was lipstick on the front of his shirt and, not only that, it reeked of perfume!”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, honey! How do you know he didn’t just brush up against one of the chorus girls from the club?”

“Oh, he brushed up against her all right, and did a lot more than that, too!”

“Oh, honey! Now don’t start jumping to conclusions!”

“That isn’t all. When he came out of the bathroom in his bathrobe, I asked him if he had a pleasant evening at the club and he yelled at me.”

“Yelled at you? That doesn’t sound like Ricky!”

“He called me a meddling old bitch and said he was sick and tired of my nagging at him all the time.”

“Oh, Lucy! What did you do then?”

“I asked him if he had been seeing another woman and he broke down and began crying. He said he had been seeing a chorus girl named Delores for about two years and he couldn’t go on any longer with the deception. He and Delores are in love, he said, and he wanted me to divorce him so he could marry her!”

“Oh, Lucy! I can hardly believe it! I never would have suspected it in a million years!”

“I know! He’s been very good at concealing it, hasn’t he? The louse!”

“What did you do then?”

“Well, we began arguing, saying nasty things to each other. I called him a two-timing pig and he called me a henna-haired harridan. We became more and more angry. When he twisted my arm and tried to slap me in the face, I took a knife and stabbed him in the neck. It was a clear-cut case of self-defense.”

“Oh, Lucy! The neck?”

“I severed the jugular vein in one stroke!”

“Oh, honey! Wasn’t there an awful lot of blood?”

“There was, but I got it all cleaned up.”

“And where is he now?”

“He’s on the floor next to the bed. I have him wrapped up in two leak-proof sheets. There’s not a trace of blood left.”

“Oh, Lucy! I’m afraid you’re in for a lot of trouble!”

“I know! I’ve just been frantic trying to figure out what to do!”

“I think you should call the police and turn yourself in. Tell them Ricky came at you and you were only defending yourself. With a good lawyer, you might get off with a light sentence or maybe no sentence at all.”

“Oh, Ethel! I’ve thought about it from every angle! I want to call the police but I’m afraid they’ll be mean to me. They’re all men, aren’t they? Of course, they’ll take Ricky’s side and make me out to be the villain!”

“Oh, Lucy! What will people think when Ricky doesn’t show up at the club? You’ll have to tell them something!”

“I have a plan all worked out. I think it’ll work, but I’m going to need you and Fred to help me.”

“Oh, no! You’re not getting me mixed up in this!”

“Ethel, I thought you were my best friend!”

“I am, but I’m certainly not going to spend the next thirty years of my life in Sing-Sing in the name of friendship!”

“Oh, don’t be silly! Nobody’s going to jail!”

“But it’s murder, honey! It’s serious!”

“If you and Fred will just do what I say, everything will be all right.”

“Just how far do you think Fred and I are willing to go to help you after you’ve killed your husband?”

Ethel called Fred to come up to Ricky and Lucy’s apartment and, when they had him comfortably seated on the couch with a bottle of soda in his hand, he looked suspiciously from one to the other.

“What have you two dizzy dames got cooked up?” he asked.

“Are you going to tell him, or shall I?” Ethel asked.

“There’s no easy way to say it,” Lucy said. 

“For heaven’s sake, just say it!” he said.

“Ricky and I had a terrible fight last night.”

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Well, I…”

“She severed Ricky’s jugular vein with a knife and killed him!” Ethel blurted.

“She what?”

“In the heat of the moment, I killed Ricky, Fred,” Lucy said. “That wasn’t really my intention, but it just happened.”

“Have you called the police?”

“Well, no, Fred. You see, I don’t think that’s necessary as long as you and Ethel help me.”

“Help you do what?”

“The furnace in the basement is really hot this time of year. I mean, there’s a big door and a big fire burning inside.”

“Oh, no! I’m not going to put Ricky’s body in the furnace!”

“With all three of us, it’ll be so easy!”

“No, I’m not getting mixed up in a crazy scheme like that! Do you think I want to spend my golden years behind bars?”

“If we do it right, Fred, nobody will ever know.”

“What do you say when people come looking for Ricky?”

“Well, I’ve thought of that, too. I’ll wait twenty-four hours and then I’ll file a missing persons report. After that it’ll be easy to make it seem that he’s run off.”

“He was cheating on her, Fred!” Ethel said.

“What?”

“Yeah, he had a girlfriend named Delores.”

“If we’re lucky,” Lucy said, “we can get the police to believe that tramp Delores had something to do with his disappearance.”

“No less than she deserves!” Ethel said.

“So Ricky was stepping out!” Fred said. “The old dog!”

“I just might kill him myself if Lucy hadn’t already done it,” Ethel said.

“Well, that sort of puts things in a different light, doesn’t it?” Fred said.

“Now are you willing to help me?” Lucy asked.

“On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You give me one-third interest in the club.”

“Fred! I can’t give you one-third interest in the club! I don’t own the club!”

“Freddy, for once in your life do something to help somebody else without calculating what you can get out of it,” Ethel said.

“Well, it was just a thought,” he said. “You can’t blame me for trying.”

“So, you’ll help me, then?” Lucy asked.

“Looks like I don’t have much choice.”

In the middle of the night, with everybody in the building asleep, the three of them loaded Ricky’s stiff body into a large trashcan on wheels and took it down to the basement on the elevator. Fred wheeled the trashcan up to the door of the furnace; he and Ethel hefted Ricky’s body out of the can and into the furnace while Lucy stood by and chewed her nails.

“How long do you think it’ll take to burn the bones and teeth and everything?” Lucy asked.

“We’ll give it until this time tomorrow,” Fred said. “I’ll come down every couple of hours and stoke the fire.”

Lucy called the police at the appropriate time and told them Ricky had disappeared, apparently run off. He had been despondent lately over money, she said, had even mentioned suicide, and there was another woman involved. The next day, all the newspapers ran the story: Bug-Eyed Cuban Bandleader Disappears—Foul Play Not Ruled Out.

Lucy began receiving condolences from friends and business associates of Ricky’s. The phone rang day and night and Ethel stayed with Lucy to keep newspaper reporters from bothering her with silly questions. Lucy’s mother saw the news on television and called Lucy long-distance from Jamestown, New York, imploring her to “come home.”

After weeks, the case was unresolved. Police could offer no clues. They concluded that Ricky had indeed run off. There were reports of witnesses seeing him board a plane for South America on the night he disappeared. At least two people claimed to have seen him on an ocean liner bound for Greece. Others claimed to have spotted him in other locations, including a racetrack in Kansas City and a brothel in Augusta, Georgia.

The club held auditions to find a replacement band leader for Ricky. One in particular, a man named Mickey Richards, stood out because he was so much like Ricky, not only in the way he looked, but in the way he sang, talked, and walked.

Mickey Richards was hired and took over as bandleader at the Copacabana. Lucy watched him with interest and was amazed at how much like Ricky he was. The management of the club even persuaded him to change his name to Ricky Ricardo. Out in front, the theatre-type marquee proclaimed: He’s Back! He Was Never Really Gone in the First Place!”

The club was more successful than ever before, with patrons being turned away every night. People soon forgot that the real Ricky had ever left because there was a new Ricky in their midst, and this one was even better than the original.  

For her part, Lucy missed Ricky terribly and was sorry she had killed him. She cried herself to sleep at night, wishing she might undo what she had done. She began making little overtures to the new Ricky, inviting him to the apartment for dinner or to a Broadway opening. A couple of times she left anonymous love notes in his dressing room at the club. She imagined that the new Ricky would fill the void left by the departure of the old Ricky and that everything would be as it was before, in the old days before he grew tired of her and fell in love with that floozy Delores.  

Alas, it was not to be. The new Ricky differed from the old Ricky in one very important respect: He didn’t like bottle redheads and in fact didn’t like women at all. Lucy toyed with the idea of killing him, too, but she was afraid she wouldn’t get away with it a second time. She would talk to Fred and Ethel and ask them what they thought about it.  

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

Somebody Somewhere
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

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

I was standing at the window. Inside it was still winter but outside it was spring. The sky was blue, trees and flowers were budding, the sun was shining and birds were singing. Miss Deloite, the woman with the delightful hanging mole on her upper lip, came up behind me. I heard her shoes squeaking on the floor and then smelled her particular sharp smell.

“You shouldn’t be wandering the halls,” she said.

I ignored her but as she walked away I turned and stuck out the tip of my tongue at her and she turned into a puff of blue smoke. You can’t know how satisfying it is to turn an annoying woman into a puff of blue smoke.

I went back to the room that I had come to identify as my own and lay on my back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. I knew there was something wrong with me but I couldn’t remember what it was. I couldn’t even remember what place I was in. Oh, well. If it mattered at one time, it didn’t matter much any more.

I heard somebody coming and picked up a magazine and opened it and pretended to be reading. I wanted to look busy so nobody would ask me questions or try to engage me in conversation.

It was Theo, all dressed in white as usual. If I saw him in any other color, I wouldn’t recognize him.

“Where’s Miss Deloite?” he asked. “She said she was coming in here to help you with your bath.”

“I’m perfectly capable of taking a bath on my own without any female assistance,” I said, not looking up from the page.

I should probably have told him I just turned her into a puff of smoke but I would have to let him figure it out on his own. He should feel lucky that I didn’t do the same to him.

I crossed my ankles and wished I had a cigarette, and in came Louie from next door. He was wearing a lady’s red kimono with colorful dragons. I didn’t like Louie and I let him know it.

“What makes you think you can just barge into my room any time you feel like it, Louie? I’m supposed to be taking a bath.”

“I already took mine.”

“I’m so happy for you.”

“Do you have any candy?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Shouldn’t you be having your nails done or something?”

“I’m going to tell Miss Deloite you were snotty to me,” Louie said.

“You’ll be telling it to a puff of blue smoke.”

“What?”

Before Louie could annoy me any further, I raised my eyebrows and turned him into a little spider. I laughed as I watched him run on his touchingly small legs across the floor to the wall. He crawled up the wall to the ceiling and looked at me.

“You’re a medical phenomenon,” I said.

I was thinking about taking a nap, for lack of anything better to do, when Theo came back, bearing clean towels.

“Since Miss Deloite is temporarily not to be found,” he said, “I’m going to help you with your bath.”

“I already told you I don’t need help with a bath,” I said.

“Stand up now and take off your clothes, or I’ll do it for you.”

“I don’t want to take off my clothes for you any more than I do for Miss Deloite.”

“Do you want me to go get Stan and Sylvia?”

“Oh, please! Not Stan and Sylvia! I can’t tell them apart. Oh, I remember now. Sylvia’s the one with the mustache, isn’t she?”

“Cut the comedy now. Stand up.”

“Theo, I don’t like your tone of voice!” I said. “It’s not a polite way to speak to a man who isn’t well.”

He came at me with the intention of pulling me off the bed by my arm, but before he knew what was happening I raised my index finger at him and turned him into a blue jay.

Now, I had always thought the blue jay a most attractive bird, even though people said he was mean and liked to eat carrion.

Theo flapped his blue wings a couple of times and flew up to the ceiling and ate the tiny spider Louie in one gulp. Louie didn’t even have time to try to get away.

“Good bird!” I said.

He flew around the room a couple of times, bumping painfully into the walls until I stood up and opened the window for him. He didn’t have to be coaxed to fly out and then away over the treetops.

“Be well!” I called to him.

I lay down again. I did not want to take a bath and would be just as obstinate about it as I needed to be. I still believed the decision to take a bath should be mine alone. Crazy though I may be, I must have some rights left!

Before I had time to draw another breath, Nurse LaPeezy was upon me with my meds. I eyed the pills suspiciously.

“What if I don’t want to take that stuff?” I said.

“Doctor’s orders,” she said.

“So you’re saying I don’t have a choice?”

“I could call Stan and Sylvia if you like.”

“Oh, no! Not that!”

She handed me a cup of water and I pretended to take the pills. I put them in my mouth and swallowed but I held them under my tongue. When she bent over to pick something up off the floor, I spit them into my fist. The hand is quicker than the eye.

As Nurse LaPeezy was leaving I felt a strong dislike for her. I flicked the little finger on my right hand at her and she turned into a mouse. Realizing she was a mouse, she scurried across the floor the way mice do and disappeared into a conveniently placed mouse hole in the corner. I envied her because I knew she’d find her way to the kitchen where she’d have plenty to eat and find lots of other mice to keep her company. How sweet the life of a mouse must be! Much better than that of a nurse.

The next time somebody came in to help me take a bath, I was going to tell them I had already taken it while everybody was occupied elsewhere. I wanted them to know I had been taking a bath on my own since I was three years old and didn’t need help from anybody.

I was almost asleep when a slight change in the air currents around the bed made me open my eyes. Dr. Felix had come in silently and was standing at the foot of the bed looking at me.

“Sorry to wake you,” he said.

Dr. Felix wore glasses and looked like the movie actor Franchot Tone. His hands were folded in front of him. I looked at his hairy wrists and his expensive wrist watch so I wouldn’t have to look at his face.

“If you don’t mind, doctor,” I said. “I don’t really feel like talking to you today.”

“Anything wrong in particular?” he asked.

“No. It’s just that I’m here and I don’t know where here is.”

“Here is where you need to be at the moment.”

“I must have a home somewhere, even if I can’t remember it. I want to go home.”

“Everybody feels that way sometimes.”

“That’s comforting.”

“I’m going to increase your antidepressant medication again.”

“You doctors think drugs are the answer to everything, don’t you?”

“You’re spending far too much time alone. That’s not good. I’m going to assign you to some group activities.”

I groaned and closed my eyes. “Don’t trouble yourself,” I said. “I won’t be here that long.”

“Are you planning on going someplace?”

“Well, you never know,” I said.

He chuckled in his knowing way and turned to go. As he started to put his hand on the door to open it, I blew out a little puff of air in his direction and turned him into a cockroach. He ran under the door and out into the hallway. One of the nurses would see him and scream and step on him and then take a Kleenex out of the pocket of her uniform and pick him up and throw him in the trash can. How fitting is that for Dr. Felix?

Before anybody else had a chance to come in and annoy me further, I dressed in some clothes I had been hiding in the bottom of the closet. It was a uniform the maintenance men wore that I had stolen one day when I was exploring in the basement. In the uniform and with the brown cap pulled low over my eyes, nobody would recognize me. Also hidden away in the closet I had some ninety dollars and a pack of cigarettes, which I stuffed into the pants of the uniform.

I took a good look at myself in the mirror over the sink. I looked as much like a maintenance man as the real one did. Cautiously I went out into the hallway. Everything was quiet and nothing out of the ordinary. I made my way down the stairs to the main entrance.

The receptionist at the front desk looked up from the magazine she was reading and then looked away. I knew she didn’t know who I was. If she had known, she would have been screaming for help.

I walked out the door into the bright cool air and down the steps, wanting to run but not running because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I followed the concrete walk to the driveway and along the edge of the driveway a quarter-mile or so to the main gate. I saw nobody and nobody saw me.

I turned right at the gate out of the place, which seemed to me a better choice than going left, and began walking briskly. I walked for many blocks and saw nothing that looked familiar. I might have been in a foreign country or on another planet, for all I knew. Still, it felt good to be free and on my own.

Checking my pocket to make sure the ninety dollars was still there, I remembered the cigarettes and how long it had been since I had one. I lit one up and as I walked I puffed out a cloud of smoke behind me.

I stopped at a bar that looked inviting and had a beer and a hamburger and after that I kept walking deep into the city. It was a big city but I didn’t know what the name of it was and I didn’t know if I had ever been there before. I saw many people but they seemed to not see me, which altogether suited me.

After what seemed like hours of walking, I felt tired but pleasantly so, and I felt good about the distance I had put between myself and the place I had left behind. When I came to a faded old hotel with a sign that said Clean Rooms and Cheap, I decided that getting a room was the most logical thing I could do.

The desk clerk signed me in without asking for identification or money in advance. He gave me a key to a room on the tenth floor and I went up in a smelly elevator that must have been a hundred years old.

The room was clean, as advertised, and pleasant. There were two windows, a bed, desk, dresser with a large mirror, chair, closet and tiny bathroom. I liked the feeling of being up high. I opened the window a couple of inches to feel the air and to hear the traffic noises from the street, which at that distance I found soothing. After checking the door to make sure it was locked, I lay down on the bed and fell into a deep and restful sleep.

I spent two days and nights in the room, sleeping a lot during the day and walking around the city at night. Nobody ever approached me or bothered me or seemed to find my behavior in any way out of the ordinary. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so free and unencumbered.

More than anything I wanted to go home, but I didn’t know how that was ever going to be possible. I knew very little about myself, except for insignificant details like enjoying smoking and preferring tea instead of coffee. I could remember nothing of my past life. Where had I come from? Where was I going?

Did I come from a small town or a city like this one? Did I grow up in an apartment in the city or in a house in the wide-open spaces with a big yard and a view of the mountains? Wasn’t it likely that somebody was waiting for me somewhere, wondering if I was alive or dead or if I would ever come home again? A mother? A wife? A lover? A son or daughter? Whoever he or she was, I could feel them and I knew they could feel me.

When the people from the hospital I had just left realized I was gone, I knew they would come looking for me. I had done some very bad things, including turning my doctor into a bug and a nurse into a mouse, which I have already told you about. They would lock me up now and I would never go free again.

On my third day in my little hotel room high up, I had the window open as high as it would go to let in the warm breezes. At any one time, there were as many as five pigeons on the ledge outside the window. They cooed and danced and seemed happy. When I got close to them, they weren’t at all afraid of me. If I had had something to feed them, they would have eaten right out of my hand.

I sat on the bed, looking at myself in the round mirror on the dresser. Wait a minute, I thought. I don’t have to go back to that place or any other place like it. I can do to myself what I did to the others.

I pointed at my reflection in the mirror and turned myself into a pigeon. I flapped my wings on the bed to try them out. From the bed I jumped to the floor and then to the window ledge. There were three pigeons already there to greet me. They knew I was somebody they had never seen before, so they were curious about where I had come from. After introductions were made, they were all eager to show me around the city. They were extraordinarily accepting of me, even though I was a stranger. How happy I was to be welcomed by them. How fortunate to have made such delightful friends so fast.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp

 

Twenty-Minute Rest Stop
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

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

Paul Penlow waited two hours for the bus and when it came he was the first to board. He took a seat in the back next to the window and watched the other passengers as they boarded and took their seats. When about half the seats were taken, the big-bellied driver got on, took a quick look behind him, and roared off the narrow parking lot onto the highway.

In the next small town, the bus stopped to take on more passengers. Three nearly identical old ladies with white hair boarded, moved slowly down the aisle, and surrounded Paul Penlow where he sat. Two sat in the seat in front of him and the other one took the aisle seat to his left.

He could have stood the intrusion of the trio into “his” space, but what he could not tolerate was the smell of their perfume. He would become ill if had to breathe it all the way to where he was going. He considered standing up and moving to another seat (there were plenty) but instead he opened the window a couple of inches and let the wind blow in his face.

“Do you mind, kiddo?” the old woman beside him said. “This is not a good day to be blown away.”

“I could move to another seat,” he said.

“Oh, please don’t do that! I want you to stay right where you are!”

“You could move to another seat.”

“Yes, but why would I do that? I just sat down and this is where I want to be.”

“I have asthma,” he said. “I need the window open to help me breathe.”

“Well, in that case let’s compromise. You keep the window open one inch instead of two and I’ll put on my headscarf.”

She took a lavender headscarf out of her purse, put in on her head and tied it under her chin.

“That’s better,” she said.

“Are you three sisters?” Paul asked.

They all three laughed the same musical laugh.

“Not only are we sisters but we’re triplets! It’s quite rare. I’ll bet you’ve never met any triplets before, have you?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“We were all born within one hour of each other on October the tenth. I won’t tell you what year because then you’d know how old we are! I’m Peg and these are my sisters Dot and Lou.”

“I’m Paul,” he said.

Dot and Lou turned around in their seats so they could shake his hand.

“We travel a lot, the three of us,” Peg said. “You meet some interesting people when you travel. Any time we take a bus trip, we always try to find a nice young person to sit with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a he or a she. If you strike up an interesting conversation with your seatmate, it makes the trip that much more enjoyable.”

Dot and Lou stayed turned around so they could join in the conversation.

“Everybody has a story,” Dot said, “and most of the stories are more interesting than you could ever imagine.”

“I have a story,” Paul said. “I’m going home. I haven’t been home for three years. I’ll bet you’d never guess where I’ve been.”

“At sea?” Lou asked.

“No. Guess again.”

“In jail?”

“No, but you’re getting warm.”

“I know where you’ve been,” Peg said. “You’ve been in a mental hospital.”

“That’s right! How did you know?”

“Oh, I know things about people.”

“She’s been doing it all her life,” Dot said. “She looks at people and knows things about them that nobody else knows.”

“What else do you know about me?” he asked.

“Well, let’s see,” Peg said. “You killed somebody but you didn’t mean to.”

“Why, that’s uncanny!” he said.

“Who did you kill?” Lou asked. “Was it your wife?”

“No, I never had a wife. It was my father.”

“Why did you kill him?” Peg asked.

“I had a mental disorder. I thought he was somebody other than who he was. I was afraid of him. I thought he was going to kill my mother and me, so I killed him first.”

“Who did you think he was?” Dot asked.

“I thought he was a demon like you see in a horror movie. The demon had killed the man who was really my father and taken over his body. He was just waiting until the time was right to kill me too.”

“Did the demon have horns?” Peg asked.

“Yes, horns, and eyes that glowed like coals.”

“How did you kill him? Did you shoot him?”

“No, I strangled him with a length of rope. It was so easy! I was so strong!”

“So what happened after that?” Lou asked.

“My mother found him dead in his bed the next morning with the rope still around his neck. She called the police. When they came, they knew right away I had done it, but of course I denied it.”

“Oh, that’s a sad story!” Peg said.

“Those are the best kind!” Dot said.

“They were going to lock me up in the penitentiary for the rest of my life, but psychiatrists examined me and said I had a textbook mental illness. I didn’t kill my father because I hated him or because he was mean to me or anything like that. I killed him, I believed, to save myself. They put me in a hospital for the dangerously insane. Now, after three years, they’re letting me go home. They say I’m cured. If you want to know the truth, I think they wanted my room to give to somebody else.”

“Are you cured?” Lou asked.

“No, I don’t think so. Not entirely, anyway. Do you know what I’m going to do when I get home?”

“No. What?”

“We live on a farm. Out back is an old barn. When I was little I liked to play in the barn to get away from my family and be alone. The barn has a hayloft and strong rafters. I’m going to climb up into the hayloft, tie a rope to one of the rafters with the other end around my neck, and jump off.”

“You’re going to kill yourself?”

“That’s right. I’ve been thinking about it for three years. It’s the only reason I’m going back home. There’s no other reason, really.”

“I won’t tell you you shouldn’t do it,” Peg said. “I’m sure you already know that.”

“I made up my mind a long time ago.”

“Well, if that’s what you want,” Peg said, “you’re a grown-up person.”

“C’est la vie!” Lou said.

“The world will go on without you,” Dot said.

“I sure would like to see my mother’s face when she finds me hanging there.”

“Won’t it be awfully upsetting for her?” Peg asked.

“I think she’ll be glad. She never really liked me.”

At the next twenty-minute rest stop, he got off the bus, while the triplet sisters stayed in their seats. He had to stand in line outside the door to the men’s room and when he was finished there, he had to stand in line to buy a Coke out of a vending machine.

He bought four Cokes. He thought the triplet sisters would appreciate a cold drink on a warm day. He had always been thoughtful that way; generous, you might say.

He had a little trouble carrying four Cokes in two hands, but he couldn’t keep from smiling as he re-boarded the bus. He stopped in the aisle, though, Cokes in hands, when he saw the triplet sisters were no longer there. He thought for a minute he was on the wrong bus, but, no, it was the same driver and the same passengers. It was the same bus, all right.

He drank all four Cokes and when he was finished he stowed the empty bottles under the seat. When he got home, he wouldn’t be hungry and wouldn’t need to eat before going to bed. His stomach was full of Coca-Cola.

His mother sure would be surprised he was home after all this time. He had been going to call her and tell her he was coming, but he somehow forgot.

Copyright © 2023 by Allen Kopp