Go and Sin No More ~ A Short Story
Go and Sin No More
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~
They were acquaintances, though not quite friends. They lived the same kind of life, but they were a study in contrasts. Zelda Zane (a name she chose for herself) was in her late fifties but looked much older. She was an indiscriminate alcoholic, known to drink turpentine or paint thinner if it was all she had. A frequent user of drugs, she was always on the lookout for any new sensation, any kind of substance to ingest or pills to take. She would take anything, even pills intended for dogs. Sometimes pills she took made her feel good and other times they nearly killed her.
Her companion sitting beside her on the park bench in the mellow, late-October light was one Vicki-Vicki Vale. She was twenty-three and still wore the bloom of youth. Her hair was and clothes were not quite clean, but she made the effort every day to tidy herself up, the way a cat might do. She was a shoplifter, a sneak thief, a sometime prostitute (when she had no other choice), a dope fiend, a social drinker, a check forger, a con artist, a liar, a fourth for bridge, and just about anything else she needed to be when the occasion called for it. You name it and she had done it.
“Where did you sleep last night, princess?” Zelda asked.
“In the cemetery,” Vicki-Vicki replied.
“Anybody try to mess with you?”
“There was nobody around, except for a few ghosts. I went over to the oldest part, where the moss hangs down from the trees.”
“That’s where the cholera victims are. Their ghosts, I mean.”
“Yeah, but ghosts don’t bother me nearly as much as living men do.”
“The grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace,” Zelda said.
“Isn’t that the truth?”
“It got pretty cold last night,” Zelda Zane said.
“I would have been all right if I had just had a warm blanket to roll up in.”
“No blankets for bums.”
“I had to settle for leaves. I covered myself over with leaves, the way my brother and I used to do when we were little. I shivered my ass off for a while, but then I went to sleep. If anybody had come along, they wouldn’t have even known I was there unless they stepped on me.”
“Last night was a mild autumn night,” Zelda Zane said. “It’s nothing compared to what’s coming.”
“I know. Winter. I try not to think about it too much.”
“Winters are rough when you don’t have a roof over your head.”
“Winters are rough when you do have a roof over your head.”
“Why don’t you go back home before winter comes?” Zelda Zane said.
“I don’t have a home to go to.”
“You have family.”
“My mother said she’d kill me when she sees me again. She means it, too.”
“She couldn’t be that mad at you.”
“She is, though.”
“What did you do to her?”
“We got into a fight. A fist fight. We drew blood. It wasn’t pretty. She hit me, so I punched her in the face. Broke her nose.”
“Why don’t you give her a call? I bet she’d be glad to hear from you.”
“No, she wouldn’t. She’d tell me to go to hell.”
“She’s still your mother.”
“She’d like to kill me, honest and true.” Vicki-Vicki said. “I hope I never lay eyes on her again in my life.”
“More’s the pity. My own mother died when I was eight. I lived with my grandparents until I was married the first time.”
“How did that work out?”
“The results you see before you.”
“What about you? Where did you spend the mild autumn night last night?”
“I’ve stayed the last two nights at the mission shelter. I don’t like staying there, but sometimes you just have to get inside where there are four walls and a roof.”
“I stayed in the mission shelter one night,” Vicki-Vicki said. “I swore I’d never stay there again. I’d rather die. Some of the people there have diseases, coughing their lungs out. And some of them have got bugs crawling on them.”
“I know it’s not the best company, darling, but if you live on the streets long enough, you’ll have bugs crawling on you, too.”
“I haven’t quite reached that point yet.”
“Do you have a place to stay tonight?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Well, weep no more, my lady, because I hit the jackpot this morning!” Zelda Zane said.
“What do you mean?”
“When I left the shelter at eight o’clock this morning, I was cutting across the parking lot when I happened to notice, in a big black Cadillac sitting there, a lady’s purse inside the car, on the front seat, clearly visible through the window.”
“A lady’s purse? No kidding?”
“If there is a God, I thought, the door won’t be locked. And do you know what? It wasn’t!”
“So, that means there’s a God?”
“Isn’t it obvious? I opened the door of the big black Cadillac and, as slick as a pig sliding down a chute, I grabbed the purse by its handle and ran away with it.”
“The dish ran away with the spoon! Did you remember to shut the door of the big black Cadillac?”
“Well, of course I shut the door! That just comes natural. You open a door and then you shut it.”
“Well, all right. Then what?”
“I went to the library across the street and went into the ladies’ room and closed myself up in one of the stalls and I opened the son of a bitch to see what was inside.”
“Well, what was inside?”
“A lot of junk that didn’t interest me, but what did interest me was a wallet with some money in it!”
“How much money?”
“A hundred and seven dollars and sixty-three cents! I left the sixty-three cents and I took the rest and put it in my pocket.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I dumped the purse and the rest of the stuff in the trash and then I came over here to the park and I’ve been here ever since.”
“A hundred and seven dollars! What are you thinking of doing with all that money? Go on an epic toot?”
“No. I was thinking I might give it to somebody in need.”
“Yeah? Who’s that?”
“Well, I was thinking I might give it to you.”
“Me! Why?”
“It’s enough for a bus ticket.”
“Bus ticket? I don’t need a bus ticket. I’m not going anywhere!”
“I’d be happy to give you the whole kaboodle!”
“Why would you do that?”
“You need to get the hell out of the city and go home while you still can.”
“Haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been telling you? I don’t have a home to go to!”
“You don’t want to be stuck here when winter comes.”
“You don’t need to worry about me. I can worry about myself.”
“Just tryin’ to help a friend in need.”
“I could never take your money! It’s your money!”
“Not really my money. I stole it.”
“It is your money. You found it. You seized the opportunity and you took it.”
“It belongs to the woman I stole it from.”
“Then take it back to her!”
“You know I can’t do that! The only way for this money to do any good in the world is for you to take it and get yourself home with it!”
“I’d rather die first!”
“All right, then. I won’t say anything else about it.”
“Please don’t!”
“But if you should happen to change your mind, you know where I can be found.”
“I won’t.”
They parted then. Vicki-Vicki said she had an important appointment, but it was only an excuse to end the conversation with Zelda Zane.
After Vicki-Vicki left, Zelda Zane continued to sit on the bench in the park until the sun went down behind the trees and the air turned colder. She tried to cheer herself with the thought of the hundred and seven dollars she had in her pocket, but there wasn’t much pleasure in it for her.
She went directly to the liquor store and bought an ample supply of whiskey and wine. Carrying her bulky treasure to the Chichester Motel a few blocks away, she engaged a room for two nights and possibly three. Locked away from the world in her motel room, she began the epic drinking binge that would result in her stuporous death two nights later.
The winter to come was a harsh and cruel one. People were found frozen to death all over the city: in alleyways, in the park, in the cemetery. In December, Vicki-Vicki disappeared and was never heard from again. Nobody ever knew what really happened to her.
Copyright 2022 by Allen Kopp
The Road ~ A Capsule Book Review
The Road
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~
A cataclysmic event has occurred. Planet Earth is dying and can no longer support life. Plant life is dying. Trees are toppling over, no longer able to hold themselves upright by their roots. Cities are burned to the ground. There is perpetual ash in the air. The landscape is littered with dead bodies in various stages of decay. Earth has become a living vision of hell.
This didn’t just happen yesterday or last week; it has been going on for years. Most of the people in the world have already died. The people remaining have a horrible life, trying to find enough to eat to keep themselves alive. The “good guys” have to work awfully hard to keep from being killed and eaten by the “bad guys.” The good guys refuse to stoop to eating other people. They have maintained a semblance of humanity; they “carry the fire within them.”
There are two principal characters in The Road, both unnamed: a man and a young boy, his son, about nine years old. They are referred throughout the novel as “the man” and “the boy.” They have left their home and are headed for some unnamed destination south of them. They are seeking more than safety, shelter, or food. As important as those things are, they seek something more profound. The man is driven by the desire to save the boy, his son. He believes God has given him the special task of delivering the boy to another place.
The Road is not a “doomsday thriller,” nor is it another diatribe about saving the environment. It is a simple human story about survival and the hope that there might be something on the other side of death. It is eerie, haunting, profound and memorable. Some readers might see a “God-Christ” metaphor in the “man-boy.”
I’ve read The Road by Cormac McCarthy twice, years apart, and was tremendously impressed both times. It is one the rare novels you will read in your lifetime that advances the art of fiction, that takes the reader to a place he has never been before. It makes you happy that a book can be that good.
Copyright © 2022 by Allen Kopp
The Only Adult in the Room
The Only Adult in the Room
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~
Prentiss Fitch stood and watched as her mother stuffed a black dress and a pair of pointy black shoes into an already-full suitcase. She was happy that her mother was going away for the weekend but not happy that she wasn’t going to have the house all to herself.
“Please, mother! I’m old enough!”
“No, you’re not! Fourteen is too young!”
“I’m almost fifteen.”
“You still act like a child. When I see you acting like an adult, I’ll start treating you like one.”
“Squeak is as much a child as I am!”
“She’s eighteen and a senior in high school. I trust her. I’m paying her to be the adult while I’m away.”
“She’s not eighteen! She’s seventeen! I’d rather go to the funeral than to stay here with Squeak for three days!”
“I thought you liked Squeak.”
“I like her well enough, but I don’t want to be with her every minute for three days.”
“As you get older, you’ll find yourself having to do many things that you don’t especially like doing.”
“Oh, mother, I think I’ll just kill myself!”
“All right. Just don’t make a mess.”
“A fat lot you’d care if I did kill myself!”
“Whenever you say things like that, I’m aware of what a child you still are.”
“Just give me the money that you’d pay to Squeak, and when you get back you’ll never know she wasn’t here.”
“I’m not sure I follow that line of reasoning.”
“What I’m saying is, you don’t have to pay Squeak. Just call her and tell her not to come. Then you can give me the money that you would have paid her.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I don’t need a sitter, that’s why!”
“Would you rather stay at the county jail?”
“What?”
“I can drop you off at the county jail and you can spend the weekend there, safely locked in a cell.”
“They wouldn’t let you do that!”
“Oh, yes, they would! The sheriff is my third cousin. He’d do anything I asked. So, what’s it going to be? Squeak or the county jail?”
“That is such bullshit!”
“I’ve asked you not to use that kind of language. I’m your mother, not one of your school friends.”
“Nobody ever does what I want!”
“That’s not true.”
“I’m hungry! What am I supposed to eat while you’re gone?”
“Stop your whining! You sound like you’re three years old. I just spent my entire paycheck on food. If you can’t find anything to eat, I guess you’ll just have to starve.”
“I want fish sticks and Tater Tots.”
“Squeak will be here soon. She’ll fix them for you.”
“Squeak can’t cook.”
“There’s nothing to fixing fish sticks and Tater Tots. All you have to do is preheat the oven and then put them in when the oven is hot enough. The only hard part is remembering to take them out before they burn.”
“I don’t want her to fix them. I want you to do it.”
After her mother left, Prentiss tripled-locked the front and back doors and turned on all the lights in the house. She didn’t want to admit it to her mother, of course, but she was afraid alone in the house after dark. Until Squeak arrived, she would be listening for any little sound outside that might indicate somebody was trying to break in.
She went into the kitchen to find something to eat. She would leave the fish sticks and Tater Tots for another time. It would take too long to preheat the oven, anyway. She fixed herself a baloney sandwich with lots of mayonnaise, put the sandwich on a plate and carried it into the living room. Her mother didn’t like her eating in the living room, but what did it matter? When one was alone, one might do as one pleased.
She turned on the TV and sat in her favorite spot on the couch, balancing the plate on her knee. On TV was a show with singing and dancing. She saw the dancers leaping in the air and heard the singing but she didn’t care for that kind of entertainment at the moment, so she didn’t pay much attention. Her attention was focused on the front door and to any sounds that might mean Squeak had arrived.
The singing-and-dancing show ended, and a comedy show with lots of laughter came on. She tried to focus her attention on what the actors were saying, but she was too nervous. It was after eight o’clock. It had been dark out for more than two hours and Squeak hadn’t come yet. She was going to kill Squeak when she saw her!
The comedy show ended and another one started. When the second comedy show was nearly over, she decided to call Squeak’s home and find out what happened. She let the phone ring and ring, at least twenty or thirty rings, but nobody answered. Squeak’s mother, at least, should have answered.
She began to scare herself with thoughts that Squeak and her mother had been murdered by a madman lunatic prison escapee, like in a horror movie. He would rape both of them, of course, and then slit their throats. He probably knew that Prentiss was waiting at her house for Squeak to arrive. He had her address and would be coming for her next.
At night o’clock, a police drama began. There were car chases, sirens and gunshots, but Prentiss paid only the scantest attention. She heard voices outside, people passing on the street. As long as people were out there, she was probably safe from anybody breaking in. If somebody wanted to kill her, they would probably wait until two or three in the morning.
She needed to go to the bathroom, not having gone since she came home from school, but she didn’t want to leave the relative safety of the couch and the voices on the TV. Finally, when the need became dire, she armed herself with a huge flashlight and a sharp pair of scissors and went down the dark hallway to the bathroom, turning on every light as she went.
When she returned to the couch, she felt a little better and was able to breathe a little easier. After all, she wasn’t a baby. She could do whatever she had to do. It was like standing up in English class and giving a speech with her knees knocking together. Just the thought of it made her ill, but when it was all over she realized it wasn’t so bad and she had been foolish to be so scared.
As long as the police drama was on, she felt it was still early enough that Squeak might show up before bedtime. The voices of the actors, even if she couldn’t make out all the words, were comforting.
The police drama ended at ten o’clock, though, and that’s when she began to be really scared. The ten o’clock news started. She hated the ten o’clock news. She wanted to turn to another channel, but she was afraid that somebody might be watching. If they knew she didn’t like the ten o’clock news, it might make them mad enough to kill her. She was better off, she decided, to just leave the TV where it was.
She stood up and went to the front door, pulling back the curtain just an inch or so and looking out into the darkness of the front yard. She saw movement out there, close to the house, as if somebody was sneaking around, trying not to be seen. No, on second thought, it was probably only the shrubberies blowing in the breeze.
The ten o’clock news ended with a cavalcade of commercials, and the ten-thirty movie began. It was a riding-and-shooting western, but at least there was nothing horrifying about it. She wanted to concentrate on the movie, to help her forget that she was alone, but she began to feel sleepy and longed to go to bed. She wished her mother was there and she didn’t need to be scared. She wished Squeak was there, silly and annoying, the way only Squeak knew how to be.
At eleven o’clock, she decided to call Squeak’s home again. If Squeak’s mother was in bed, the phone would wake her up, but that didn’t matter. She was an old crab anyway, and if she wasn’t on her high horse about one thing, she would be about a dozen things.
She let the phone ring and ring, as before, but still Squeak didn’t answer and neither did her mother. She seriously considered calling the police then, but she couldn’t think she would say if she did. No matter what she said, she’d sound like a fool. When you call the police, they expect you have some kind of crime to report, at the very least.
She returned to the western movie and was on the point of getting herself calmed down preparatory to going to bed when the phone rang. It was the most welcome sound she had ever heard! If it wasn’t Squeak, it had to be her own mother calling to check on her. She would let the words pour out of her, trying to keep from crying.
It wasn’t Squeak calling, though, and it wasn’t her mother. It was nobody. Or, rather, it was nobody who chose to speak. There was a brief intake of air from the other end of the line and then the connection was severed.
It could only mean one thing. Somebody was calling to make sure she was at home before they broke into the house to kill her.
Now she was scared beyond all reason. She clamped her hands over her mouth to keep from screaming. She went from the front door to the back door and back again. She turned on all the lights in the house that she hadn’t turned on already. She turned the radio on in the kitchen to dance music, loud enough so that anybody outside could hear it. She increased the volume of the TV, so that it sounded like there were many people in the house having a party.
Another hour went by. It was now after midnight. The phone didn’t ring again. She was less scared now and more sleepy. She ate a whole bag of marshmallows and some hot dogs, cold right out of the refrigerator. She wanted to go to bed, but she didn’t dare go into her bedroom and lock herself in, the way she did every other night. She thought about making a bed on the couch, but that was too out in the open and would make her too vulnerable. If anybody broke in, they’d find her without even having to look for her.
When she walked into the dining room, an idea came to her. Why couldn’t she sleep on the floor underneath the dining room table, where she would be hidden from view but would still know if anybody came into the house?
She went into her bedroom and pulled all the covers off the bed and covered the dining room table with them, making a sort of cave. Nobody would ever know she was under the table. It was dark under there, with the covers hanging down to the floor, and was probably the only place in the house where she would feel safe enough to go to sleep. Believing she was hearing voices that very moment outside in the yard, she scrambled under the table with the flashlight, wrapped herself in the blankets the best she could and soon she went to sleep.
She woke at three in the morning and didn’t know where she was. She thought she had died and was in her grave. She crawled out from under the dining room table, went to the bathroom, and walked sleepily all through the house, checking the doors and windows to make sure they will still secure. The TV was still going strong in the living room with talking and laughing, and the radio in the kitchen was broadcasting a sermon for the insomniac worshiper. She was still scared, but not like before. She went back to her bed under the table and went right back to sleep.
In the morning she didn’t wake up until after nine o’clock. She heard the blat of the TV and didn’t know at first where it was coming from. Her first waking thought was that it was Saturday and her mother wouldn’t be home until Sunday night. That meant she had to get through Saturday night the same way she got through Friday night. Damn everybody to hell for going off and leaving her alone! She couldn’t kill her own mother, of course, but she would definitely kill Squeak when she got the chance.
After a breakfast of cereal and toast, she got dressed and sat on the couch and watched some Porky Pig cartoons. She would just sit there all day long if she had to, waiting for somebody to remember that she was alone. Eventually her mother would call long-distance to check on her. She would enjoy telling her that Squeak never showed up and she was scared out of her wits in the house all night by herself, but she made it through on her own and was all the better for it.
While she was contemplating the long, lonely day ahead of her, she remembered that her mother kept a sizeable amount of cash in her jewelry box in her dresser drawer. Money for emergencies that never seemed to happen.
She went into her mother’s bedroom and rifled through the dresser until she found the jewelry box that she remembered but hadn’t seen in quite a while. She undid the little latch and opened the lid. There was the lovely money, just as she envisioned it: a fifty-dollar bill, some twenties, a few tens and some ones. Leaving the one-dollar bills behind, she took all the rest.
She went into her bedroom and packed her overnight bag, just the things she would need for one night: pajamas, house slippers, bathrobe, clean underwear, socks, toothbrush, toothpaste, and a clean change of clothes for Sunday.
When she was ready to go, she called a taxi and went out on the front porch to wait, holding her overnight bag in front of her with both hands. The yard and the outside of the house, she was happy to note, were not as frightening in the daylight. The taxi came after ten minutes.
She told the driver to take her to the Sir Francis Drake Hotel downtown. She and her mother had stayed there for two days in the middle of winter one year when the furnace broke and couldn’t be fixed right away.
She asked for a room for one night and when the man behind the desk looked at her, he asked her if she was alone.
“Shouldn’t I be?” she asked.
“Children are usually accompanied by an adult.”
“Well, I’m not! My mother is gone until Sunday night and I don’t have any place else to go.”
“I don’t think…”
“I have the money to pay for the room, if that’s what’s bothering you.”
After a little wrangling with the manager, they decided to let her stay for the night as long as she paid for the room in advance and as long as she wrote down the name and address of her mother and father as “responsible parties.”
“I don’t have a father,” she said. “My mother will have to do.”
After she checked into her room, she took the elevator down to the lobby and enjoyed a lavish meal in the hotel dining room of fried chicken, french fried potatoes, and lemon meringue pie, sparing not a penny of her mother’s money. Then she locked herself in her room (three locks on the door), where she watched movies all evening long, until she became sleepy.
In the morning, after a restful night of untroubled sleep, she again tried to get Squeak on the phone. Still Squeak didn’t answer, and neither did her mother. Something terrible must have happened there, she thought. It better be good.
She returned home by taxi in the evening. Her mother had been back from her trip for three hours and was “frantic” that Prentiss was nowhere to be found. She was getting ready to call the police.
Nothing bad had happened to Squeak. She wasn’t dead. Her mother was in the hospital for an emergency gall bladder operation. Squeak took advantage of her mother’s unexpected absence to go joyriding across three states with her twenty-year-old boyfriend in his new car. When she came back, she told everybody she had been abducted by aliens in a flying saucer in her back yard, but nobody believed her, and after a while she was forced to divulge what really happened.
Copyright © 2022 by Allen Kopp
Literary Fictions 