Allen Kopp – Page 40 – Literary Fictions

The Beautiful and Damned ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Beautiful and Damned ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

In college literature classes, we learned that there are about seven basic themes in all of literature and that nearly all great novels incorporate all seven of them. One of these themes is “the fall” or “fall of man.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (published in 1922), is an example of the theme of “the fall.” It concerns the young and doomed (by his own hand, by his own frailty) fictional character known as Anthony Patch. Anthony is young in the early years of the twentieth century. He is of the privileged class. He attends Harvard University and is the heir to a considerable fortune, being the only living relative of his grandfather, Adam Patch. We don’t learn how Adam Patch made all his millions, only that he is a “reformer.” From that word, we can deduce that he’s moralistic and Puritanical.

Anthony meets a debutante named Gloria Gilbert and falls in love with her. Gloria’s beauty is the wellspring of her shallowness and self-centeredness. Her beauty and desire for social status are all she has going for her. Men are, of course, drawn to her, but that’s because they’re shallow. We know that when she gets older and her looks begin to fade, she will be finished. Anthony persuades Gloria to marry her; she is easily persuaded because one day he will be very rich. The two of them are happy for a while, at least a few years, but Anthony discovers that marrying Gloria was the worst thing he ever did.

It seems that old Adam Patch will never die. Anthony could get a job, but all he does is wait around for years for the big day when the old man dies and leaves him all his money. Anthony and Gloria are a socialite couple. They throw parties (or attend parties that other people give) every night. Drinking all the time, Anthony becomes an alcoholic, if he wasn’t already one. Gloria and Anthony have only limited money that they get from their investments but—not to worry—when Anthony gets his millions all will be well. The longer they wait for the money, the more they get on each other’s nerves. They begin to hate each other and their marriage deteriorates.

One night in summer old Adam Patch decides to pay an impromptu call on his grandson and his wife at the house they’re renting. On that night, Anthony and Gloria happen to be “entertaining” guests with drinking, dancing and raucous fun. Adam Patch is appalled at what he sees (people drunk out of their senses, dancing in their underwear). He dies soon enough, but when he does Anthony discovers that he has disinherited him, leaving all his money to servants. Anthony contests the will, being forced to retain an expensive lawyer, but he isn’t given much hope that the case will go his way in court.

So, Anthony and Gloria wait out a lengthy court case, with no reason to believe they will win it in the end. Anthony continues his drinking, his money problems get worse, and he and Gloria become more alienated from each other. While World War I rages, Anthony is drafted into the army. He ends up in a miserable training camp in Mississippi and it’s while he’s there that he begins an affair with a local girl named Dot. For Anthony it’s just a little fling while he’s away from home, but for Dot it’s all or nothing. She proclaims her love for him, suggesting that she might kill herself if for any reason he should happen to leave her. She knows that Anthony has a wife back in New York, but she doesn’t care very much, believing that he will choose her (Dot) over his wife. It’s while Anthony and his unit are waiting to be shipped to France that Germany surrenders and the war ends. Dot isn’t giving Anthony up without a fight, though.

After Anthony’s stint in the army, he returns to Gloria and things only continue to get worse between them. The suit he filed to contest his grandfather’s will isn’t going anywhere and Anthony and Gloria are down on their heels. They don’t know what they are going to do for money. Neither one of them will consider going to work and earning any honest dough. They drink and quarrel, as their friends and their hopes abandon them. Anthony becomes completely unraveled and degrades and humiliates himself. But, wait a minute! The court case is still pending! Is there any chance, even a slim one, that it might still go Anthony’s way, since public sentiment has turned against “reformers” because of Prohibition?

Almost more than any other American writer of the twentieth century, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a chronicler of his age, the World War I era, the years leading up to the war, the 1920s, Prohibition, and the “Jazz Age.” We get a vivid impression, though his books and stories, of what it was like to be alive in those days that were so different from our own. Of course, a hundred years’ passage of time has romanticized the era. Maybe in 2116, people will have a romanticized view of 2016 because they didn’t live it and couldn’t possibly know what it’s like with its leaf blowers (I hear one now), cell phones, microwave ovens, computers and political lunacy.

The Beautiful and Damned, if not a great a novel, is certainly a very good one, with a strong story, vivid characters and a strong sense of time and place. Where else could we learn about New York “café society” in the years before, during and after World War I? (Through Fitzgerald’s descriptions, we see the New York streets, the park, the buildings and the trees around Anthony Patch’s apartment.) The story of Anthony Patch and his lovely bride Gloria, we are told in background material, parallels the real-life story of Fitzgerald’s tumultuous relationship with his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald. Plenty of heartache to go around.

December 10, 2016December 10, 2016 by allen0997

Visitors’ Day

Visitors’ Day ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

It was a Sunday morning in December. Freda and Julian were in the back seat of Daddy Earl’s car. Daddy Earl careened through traffic with ease, no obstacle too much for him to overcome. He had the radio tuned to some cheerful Christmas music because he knew Freda liked it. Julian held onto his teddy bear, although he insisted he didn’t need it, watching the passing scenery with absorption.

“Are you going to take that stupid bear inside with you?” Freda asked.

“Shut up!” Julian said. “I’ll do whatever I want.”

“Will they have her in handcuffs?” Freda asked the back of Daddy Earl’s head.

“I don’t think so,” Daddy Earl said. “Not on visitors’ day.”

The parking lot was full and Daddy Earl had to drive around for a long time before he found a place to park and, once he did, they had to walk a long way to the visitors’ entrance.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Freda said, as they waited to be searched and admitted.

Daddy Earl put his finger to his lips to tell her she should stop talking.

A man in a uniform took Daddy Earl, Julian and Freda into a large visiting room filled with people and showed them where to sit. He left and came back in a couple of minutes with mother.

Mother gave Daddy Earl a peck on the cheek and hugged first Julian and then Freda before sitting down.

“How’s my big boy?” she smiled at Julian.

“Mother, I don’t like for you to be in jail,” Freda said, on the point of tears.

“I know you don’t like it, dear. I don’t like it, either.”

“Why don’t you tell them to let you come home?” Julian asked.

“It doesn’t quite work that way, honey,” mother said. “I wish it did.”

“How are you doing, old girl?” Daddy Earl asked. It was one of the many names he had for her.

“I’m just peachy, darling!” she said.

“How are they treating you?”

“Like a queen.”

“How’s the cuisine?”

“Every meal like dining at the Ritz.”

“Do you need some money?”

“It would only be stolen.”

“Do you need anything?”

“Just one thing. To get out of this place and go home.”

“It feels funny having a criminal for a mother,” Freda said.

“I know, baby,” mother said. “And I apologize for it in every possible way.”

“Why don’t you just promise to stop shoplifting so they’ll let you out.”

“I’ll do that and see if it works.”

“Do you have a court date set?” Daddy Earl asked.

“No. You know what the courts are like.”

“Any chance you’ll be out by Christmas?”

“I don’t think so. No bail for me since it’s my third conviction. I’m a flight risk.”

“What does that mean?” Julian asked.

“Nothing for you to worry about, dear,” mother said.

“Is this place a hospital? Are you going to die here?”

“You don’t have a worry in the world, sweetheart. Mother will be home with you soon. If not before Christmas, then pretty soon after.”

“Are you sick?”

“No, I’m not sick. Everything is going to be fine.”

“I don’t know why you have to stay here if you’re not sick.”

“Shut up, Julian!” Freda said. “You’re only making things worse.”

“How am I making things worse?”

Mother took Julian on her lap, even though he was almost too big for it. “I don’t want you to be unhappy,” she whispered in his ear.

“I’m not,” he said.

“I’m so glad you came to see me today. This is the only good thing that’s happened me to since I’ve been here.” She hugged Julian and he hugged back. “The two of you are going to have a wonderful Christmas, with Santa and a tree and everything.”

“Maybe we don’t want those things while you’re in jail,” Freda said.

“Of course you want those things! And you’ll have them, too. Won’t they, Daddy Earl?”

“Santa already knows they’ll be at my house,” Daddy Earl said. “He’s not going to let us down.”

“I knew we could count on old Santa,” mother said.

“I’ve been thinking,” Daddy Earl said.

“About what?”

“Maybe they’d go easier on you if you were married.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I think we should get married.”

“Last I heard, you had a wife somewhere.”

“A minor technicality,” Daddy Earl said.

Mother laughed. “I hear they have a special place for bigamists over in the men’s prison.”

“What does that mean?” Julian asked.

“I know what it means,” Freda said.

“Never mind what it means,” mother said. “I was just making a joke with Daddy Earl.”

“I have the feeling they’re going to let you out in time for Christmas,” Daddy Earl said.

“Oh, baby, I wouldn’t count on that if I were you!” mother said.

“You’ll be calling me to come and get you, and I’ll get here so fast you won’t believe it!”

Mother began crying, no matter how hard she wanted to avoid it. “We have to be realistic,” she said. “I might be here for a long time. I might never go home again. I did such stupid things. I didn’t know what I was doing and I swear I’m done with all that!”

“Of course you are!” Daddy Earl said. He put his beefy arm across her shoulders. “You have to look on the bright side and keep your spirits up.”

“Yes, I’ll try,” mother said. She wiped her eyes with his monogrammed handkerchief.

A guard was watching them carefully and then he came over and told them it was time for them to leave; the visit was over.

Mother gave Daddy Earl a passionless kiss. When she hugged Julian and Freda, she started crying again, which made all of them cry.

“We’ll come again just as soon as we can,” Daddy Earl said.

“I want all of you to have a good Christmas,” mother said, “and don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’ll be thinking of all of you.”

“We’ll be thinking of you, too, mother,” Freda said.

On the way to the car, Freda said, “I don’t think we’ll ever see her alive again.”

Julian began wailing, so Daddy Earl picked him up and carried him the rest of the way.

Freda turned to look at the windows of the prison, expecting mother to be there waving at them, but she saw only a gray blankness that told her that nothing good ever came out of there.

On the way home, they stopped and ate a chicken dinner with cherry pie for dessert and then Daddy Earl went to a place where he knew they could get a good, real-live Christmas tree. When they got home, he set the tree up in the living home, strung the lights expertly, and then let Freda and Julian do the rest of the decorating.

In their twin beds in Daddy Earl’s guest room at ten o’clock, they could hear sleet and rain hitting the windows.

“Maybe they’ll call school off tomorrow,” Julian said.

“Did you hear mother say that Daddy Earl already has a wife?” Freda asked.

“What of it?” Julian asked.

“His wife might come back from wherever she is and tell us we have to get out.”

“Why would she do that?” Julian asked.

“She’d be jealous, that’s why.”

“Daddy Earl could always punch her in the nose.”

“Maybe we could sneak mother out of prison and sneak Daddy Earl’s wife in there in her place.”

“How you gonna do that?” Julian asked.

“Didn’t you ever hear of chloroform?”

“No!”

He groaned and rolled over so that his face was inches from the wall. He didn’t want to think about school tomorrow, about mother being in jail, or about anything else. He pictured snow piling up outside, so much snow that school would be called off for the whole week. With that comforting thought, he was able to make himself go to sleep.

December 7, 2016December 7, 2016 by allen0997

Manchester by the Sea ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Manchester by the Sea ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Manchester by the Sea is a somber study in loss and tragedy, set in bleak New England winter with gray skies and a gray heart. Lee Chandler (played by Casey Affleck) is a working-class man with a foul-mouthed wife and three small children. He drinks more than is good for him and it’s while he’s under the influence of alcohol that he makes the terrible error in judgment from which he will never recover.

As the story moves back and forth in time, it takes us a while to know who is who and what is what. Lee Chandler’s brother, Joe (played, coincidentally, by an actor named Kyle Chandler, who was the unhappy husband of a lesbian in the movie Carol last year), develops a heart condition in early middle age and dies. He has one child, a sixteen-year-old son named Patrick. Joe’s wife, Patrick’s mother, is an unreliable, drunken shrew, so Joe leaves guardianship of Patrick to his brother Lee. Lee, now divorced, works as a janitor/handyman, living in one room, and he has plenty of problems of his own (including alcoholism), so he probably isn’t the best choice in the world to take care of a confused, sexually precocious sixteen-year-old boy. Patrick probably isn’t going to be happy in any circumstances, with his father dead and his mother “away.”

The Manchester of Manchester by the Sea is Manchester, Massachusetts, and not Manchester, England, as the title would seem to suggest. It’s a contemporary story, so that means there’s lots of foul language and naturalistic acting, with parts of the dialogue mumbled and unintelligible. The outdoor scenes are wintry scenes, with piles of dirty snow everywhere and cloud-covered vistas, so there’s nothing pretty to look at, even the sea. There’s nothing happy about this movie, including the way it looks, but it’s an engrossing, immersive movie; its two hours and sixteen minutes race by with barely a thought of how much longer it’s going to take, and when the end comes we were probably wishing for a little more.

December 3, 2016December 4, 2016 by allen0997

The Medici Boy ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Medici Boy ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (better known as Donatello) was one of the most gifted sculptors and artisans of Renaissance Italy. He lived from 1386 to 1466 in the politically volatile city state of Florence. His bronze statue of David is among his greatest works and one of the most famous works of the Italian Renaissance. He shows David as a beautiful, delicately nude youth, a shepherd boy who has just slain the giant Goliath. We see David’s foot resting on Goliath’s head, a sword in his right hand, his left hand on his left hip and his left knee canted out. He is an almost androgynous figure with long, curling hair and a slight frame. He looks like anything other than a slayer of giants.

In The Medici Boy, John L’Heureux has written a purely fictional account of Donatello’s creation of his bronze statue of David and his obsessive and destructive love for the model, one Agnolo Mattei. Agnolo is a male whore, a bardassa. He prowls the streets at night, looking for men who will pay him to perform sex acts. (Donatello is, of course, a real person, while Agnolo is a fictional construct.) For all his physical appeal (some people don’t see it at all), Agnolo is a trouble-maker. He exerts a kind of spell over Donatello, a physical attraction that develops (for Donatello) into an all-consuming passion. Sodomy is, of course, a terrible sin and a crime in Florence, referred to as the “Florentine vice.” Men who engage in the forbidden practice are subject to severe punishment, including imprisonment, fines, or even death. (The penalty for each conviction is more severe than the one before.)

The Medici Boy is told in the first-person voice of one Luka Matteo, a worker in Donatello’s workshop (bottega). He is himself an artisan, but he also keeps the account books for the enterprise and handles other details that Donatello is too busy to handle himself. He has a wife, a former prostitute, and four children, two of whom are “carried off” by the Black Pest, a terrible disease that seems always to be lurking in the background in fifteenth century Italy.

Luka is a sort of step-brother to Agnolo, the male whore who has stolen Donatello’s heart, but he hates Agnolo for all the trouble he causes. (He is also a little bit jealous of Agnolo because he ingratiates himself with both men and woman.) When a political conflict erupts between the different factions in Florence, the opposing side hopes to use Agnolo to inform on Donatello, in an attempt to bring down the powerful Cosimo di Medici, a long-time associate and patron of Donatello.

For a speculative story about a real person (Donatello) in a real place (Florence, Italy), The Medici Boy is convincing and believable. We can easily believe that this is what “might have happened.” It’s obvious that the author has done a lot of research to render the time and place just right, although he has filled in the details of the lives of the characters with fictional details. It’s an easy and fascinating book to read, especially if you like historical fiction that removes you from your distasteful surroundings and transports you to another time and place. The sexual content is never graphic or offensive (after all, it was not written by Jacqueline Susann) and is handled in good taste and never sensationalized. Now that we have that out of the way, go and get the book and read it.

November 26, 2016November 26, 2016 by allen0997

Arrival ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Arrival ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

A huge pod-like object, obviously an alien spacecraft, has landed in the farm fields of Montana. We soon learn that there are eleven other pods in different locations around the world. Have aliens come to destroy human life on earth? If not, what are they (the aliens) here for? They seem to be trying to communicate in a non-human language but, of course, humans don’t know what they’re saying. The military engages the services of a renowned teacher and language expert named Louise Banks (Amy Adams, superb in any movie she’s in). She is taken to the alien pod in Montana where, it is hoped, she will be able to figure out what they are saying.

Louise Banks is a recent divorcee with plenty of heartbreak in her life, having lost her young daughter to disease. This, of course, means that she is provided with fellow language researcher and love interest in the person of Dr. Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner). Louise and Ian ascend into the alien spacecraft to confront the aliens and try to discover what they hope to accomplish by coming to earth.

Right away we see the aliens as Louise and Ian see them. They aren’t acid-slobbering killing machines as in the classic sci-fi movie Alien, but they are not pleasing to the eye. They resemble octopuses at the bottom of the sea, except that they have no eyes or mouths that we can see. The researchers right away dub them “heptapods” because they are about seven feet tall and seem to have seven legs or tentacle-like appendages. Louise discovers that they have names and they communicate in a strange language that, unlike human languages, is not based on sound or symbols but on thought. Inside the alien spaceship, she removes her bulky hood and breathing apparatus so the aliens can get a clearer picture of what humans are like. Ian does the same. This helps to establish a connection with the aliens.

The aliens communicate by extending their tentacles and writing before them, in an ink-like substance, in large, semi-circles with feathery extensions. After studying these “writings,” Louise begins to get a clearer picture of what the aliens are trying to communicate. She learns, for one thing, that time for the aliens is not “linear,” as it is for us. (This is a difficult concept for humans to grasp.) The aliens want to help humans because they will need help in the far-distant future (this is very vague.) Louise also learns that her own life has taken, or will take, a non-linear course and that this will allow her to know what will happen in the future. Her past, her life, and her future are somehow bound up with these strange creatures from an alien place.

Arrival is dark, in the way it looks and in its tone. There’s a sense of foreboding throughout much of the movie, a feeling that we don’t know what the aliens are going to do—or what might be done to them while they’re on earth (some countries are calling for aggressive military action). If the ending is unsatisfying because we don’t learn as much as we’d like to know about the aliens, we forgive it because the rest of the movie is so much more interesting than the rest of the stuff that’s playing at the multiplex.

November 19, 2016November 21, 2016 by allen0997

Hacksaw Ridge ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Hacksaw Ridge ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

I’d rather have Mel Gibson behind the camera where I don’t have to see him. His latest directorial effort is Hacksaw Ridge, a gripping World War II story with a conscientious objector from Virginia as its central character. When Desmond Doss sees that his country is in trouble, he can’t sit out the war and do nothing. He wants to enlist, but there’s just one thing: he’s a Seventh Day Adventist with very strong principles against carrying a weapon. He enlists, anyway, though, and soon finds himself in unexpected trouble in the military. His officers and fellow soldiers can’t and won’t understand his religious principles. How can he be such a fool as to believe he can go to war without killing the enemy or at least defending himself with a gun? He is harassed, beaten, called a coward, and yelled at (I would crumple under the yelling and name-calling) and finally given an easy way out, but he is not to be deterred. He wants to serve and he believes the best way for him to do it is as a combat medic. He will be the one to put people back together, he says, while everybody else is taking people apart.

He is about to be court-martialed for his refusal to pick up a weapon, but his drunken father, a World War I veteran, produces proof from somebody he knew back in the day that shows his son’s religious convictions are protected by the good old Constitution of the United States. (We can’t let politicians shred it!) He goes to war with his division and soon finds himself fighting the battle of Okinawa. Okinawa is of strategic importance to the U.S. war effort. If it can be breached, the next step is Japan.

The fighting on Okinawa is as close to hell as anybody has ever seen. (Bloody and graphic battle sequences, showing mutilations and head wounds.) Casualties are heavy on both sides. As a medic, Desmond Doss displays bravery beyond what anybody might have ever imagined. He selflessly rescues about seventy-five of his fellow soldiers from the battlefield under heavy fire from the Japanese. He manages to get each injured man down a cliff, using a butterfly knot that he learned in basic training. The man who was labeled a coward for his refusal to pick up a gun becomes an unexpected hero.

Actor Andrew Garfield (memorable in The Social Network and Never Let Me Go) plays real-life Desmond Doss with sweetness and sincerity. He goes to war armed only with a small Bible his girlfriend (later his wife) gives him with her picture in it. As modest and quiet-spoken as he is, he is never willing to compromise his principles under pressure that would make most of us buckle. We need more people like him.

November 4, 2016November 4, 2016 by allen0997

This House is Haunted ~ A Capsule Book Review

This House is Haunted ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

This House is Haunted by John Boyne is a gothic ghost story set in Norfolk, England, in 1867. Eliza Caine is a plain, twenty-one-year-old teacher at a girls’ school in London. When she and her father, her only living relative, go to hear Charles Dickens do a reading from his work on a cold, rainy night, her father, already ill, catches a chill and dies. Now alone in the world, Eliza applies for, and gets, the position of governess to the Westerley family at Gaudlin Hall in Norfolk, England. (She doesn’t know the family’s name until later.) From the beginning, she knows almost nothing about the job; how many children there are or what the family is like. Her feeling of mystery only intensifies when she arrives at the crumbling old family mansion to begin her duties anew and finds nobody there except the two children, Isabella and Eustace. Isabella is older and seems to know things that nobody else knows; Eustace, at eight, is sweet and innocent.

Miss Caine discovers, to her horror, that she is just the most recent in a string of governesses. Only the governess right before her got away. All the others died mysterious deaths. Is she going to be next? As if several dead governesses before her isn’t bad enough, she soon feels a mysteriously malevolent and unseen force in the house that wants to get rid of her, to kill her if necessary. Slowly and bit by bit she learns the secret of Gaudlin Hall and the mysterious Westerley family for whom she works. Why doesn’t she just leave and go back to her old teaching job in London? She has grown attached to Isabella and Eustace, especially Eustace, and doesn’t want to leave them alone in the house. And she isn’t thinking only of the children, but also of herself; she is beginning to feel a growing romantic attachment to Mr. Raisin, the Westerley family lawyer, even though he is in his late thirties and already has a wife.

This House is Haunted seeks to emulate the Victorian writing style of Charles Dickens, but in its tone is more like Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. A young, plain woman, educated and alone in the world, strikes out on her own to take a job in an unknown place far away from what she knows and there encounters mystery and unexpected romance. Unlike the works of Charles Dickens, though, or Charlotte Bronte, This House is Haunted is quick, breezy, light-weight reading. There’s nothing too surprising here. The horror is very mild, unlike the recent trend in movies and books of horrific, shocking, grisly horror. The story is so familiar that it almost seems clichéd but is still thoughtful, entertaining, and well worth the time and effort to read it.

October 26, 2016October 26, 2016 by allen0997

Verisimilitude

Verisimilitude ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Irene Gribble hit her mother in the head with an iron and sent the old lady sprawling. She hit the far wall of the room, head first, and fell to the floor like a hundred-pound sack of flour. Irene, observing from the ironing board that she wasn’t moving, figured she was pretending, as she had always been a great one for self-dramatization.

“You can get up now, mother,” Irene said. “I know you’re not hurt.”

No sound issued from the recumbent old woman.

“If you don’t get up now and stop pretending, I’m going to pour a pitcher of water in your face. That’s what they always do in the movies.”

She went and stood over her mother, hands on hips, and nudged her with her foot. “Well, at least I got you to shut up for a while,” she said.

She finished her ironing, washed some dishes, threw away some rotten vegetables in the refrigerator, and in another few minutes she checked on her mother again. This time she knelt down beside her and put her ear to the old woman’s chest. She heard no sound of a beating heart but, then, she had always been certain there was no heart there, anyway. When she saw that her mother wasn’t breathing, though, she knew she was dead.

“Well, what do you know about that?” she said.

She stood up and took a deep breath. She felt surprisingly calm, considering that she had just killed her own mother. She sat down at the kitchen table, lit a Lucky Strike and thought about the phone call she needed to make.

“A song came on the radio that she liked and she was dancing,” Irene would tell the police. “She always loved to dance. Her eyes were closed and she had her arms around her imaginary partner. She didn’t see the rip in the carpet, caught her foot in it, and fell backward against the wall.”

No, that didn’t sound quite right. Whoever heard of anybody getting killed while they were dancing?

“I was outside in the back yard,” the story might go. “I found her like this when I came in from outside. She must have taken a terrific fall.”

Or this: “I don’t really know what happened. I was upstairs and I heard a crash. When I came running down, I saw that she had climbed on a chair to change a bulb in the ceiling fan. She must have fallen over backwards off the chair and hit the wall. She was taking a new medication that caused her to black out when least expected.”

A little better. I have to make it sound convincing. Give it verisimilitude. I always liked that word. That will be my word.

As she stubbed out her cigarette, she realized her hands were shaking and she erupted into a torrent of pitying tears, not for her mother but for herself. What if they don’t believe me? What if they suspect I killed her? I can’t let them think that. My own mother. It makes me sick just to think about it.

She felt more alone that she had ever felt before in her life. She had only one living relative, her brother Ernest, and, although the two of them had never been on the best of terms, he might help her to figure out the best way to handle the situation.

She called his number and was relieved that he was available; he answered his phone on the second ring.

“Ernest!” she said. “Something terrible has happened!”

“What?”

“It’s mother! I need you to come over right away!”

“Are you two fighting again? I told you I refuse to get involved.”

“No, it’s not that! It’s more than that! She’s down on the floor and I don’t think she’s breathing.”

“Call an ambulance.”

“I think it’s too late for that. I need some help.”

“With what?”

“Just come over and see for yourself.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

An hour later he walked calmly into the house, removing his sunglasses. Irene was sitting on the couch in her bathrobe.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“In the kitchen.”

He went into the kitchen and a couple of minutes later came back into the living room. “She’s dead,” he said.

“I know she’s dead,” Irene said. She had taken tranquilizers, twice the recommended dosage, and felt calm, at least for the moment.

“Are you going to tell me what happened? The two of you were fighting, weren’t you? You think you might have killed her and you want me to help you cover it up.”

“That’s not quite true!” she said defensively. “You’re right about one thing, though. We were fighting.”

“I always said it would come to this. The two of you would end up killing each other.”

“Well, now she’s dead and I’m alive,” Irene said.

“You need to call somebody,” he said. “Call an ambulance, even if she is already dead.”

“How’s Malcolm?” she asked.

“Who?”

“Malcolm. Isn’t that his name?”

“His name is Martin and this is no time for small talk.”

“Are you two of you still living together?”

“Yes! And it’s not a crime!”

“Well, you don’t need to yell at me! I’ve had enough of that from her!”

“I knew it was a mistake for you to move in with her after your divorce.”

“She said she wanted me to. She said she was lonely.”

“The two of you have been fighting your entire lives.”

“I know, but it’s all over now. I feel a deep sense of relief, don’t you?”

“Well, at this moment, I can’t say relief is what I feel,” he said. “I’ve just seen my mother dead on the kitchen floor. That’s rather a shock in the middle of an uneventful day.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“Call somebody and tell them what happened. Call the police.”

“I’m scared!”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid they’ll think I was somehow responsible for what happened.”

“Weren’t you?”

“Well, in a way I suppose I was.”

“You’d better tell me exactly what happened.”

“She was a horrible person!”

“Yes, we’ve been through all that many times.”

“She always had to have somebody to fight with. Daddy or Aunt Jo, grandma when she was still alive, you, or me. Of course, now it’s me because I’m the one living with her.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“Well, a person can only take so much. She found fault with everything I did. I stay up too late at night and sleep too late in the morning. I smoke too much and I make slurping sounds when I eat soup. I’m not clean enough. I leave grease spots on the stove. I’m lazy. I don’t do my share of the housework. I’m a terrible daughter and a terrible person. I let my marriage fail. I take dope and I’m a shoplifter. I’m not a real woman because I never had any children. It goes on and on.”

“Same story, different day,” he said.

“I can take just about anything she heaps on, but when she accuses me of stealing money from her purse, that’s beyond the pale!”

“She said you stole money from her?”

“Two hundred dollars. Out of her purse when she while she was taking a nap.”

“Did you?”

“Of course not!”

“All right. The two of you came to blows over two hundred dollars that she said was missing from her purse.”

“I was ironing a blouse. She started screaming at me about the money. She called me a thief and whore and she said if I didn’t give it back she was going to call the police. When I told her I didn’t take the money and that she probably spent it and didn’t remember, she pulled a steak knife out of the drawer and threatened me with it. She held it to my stomach and said she was going to gut me like a fish and that it’s what she should have done the day I was born because I had always been a terrible curse to her. She kept on and on in that way and I hit her in the head with the iron to get her to shut up.”

“A hot iron?”

“It was on medium.”

“Then what happened?”

“I guess I hit her harder than I thought. I was so mad. It stunned her and she started falling backwards. It was really kind of funny, like the witch in The Wizard of Oz.”

“I don’t remember any witch falling over backwards in that movie.”

“For a few seconds it was like she was running backwards and then she slammed head first into the wall.”

He groaned and put his hands over his eyes. “What did you do then?”

“She didn’t move for a while. I figured she was all right and only pretending to be hurt to scare me. I finished my ironing and washed the dishes and then I went over to her and nudged her with my foot.”

“And nothing happened?” he asked. “She was already dead?”

“Well, I didn’t believe at first that she could really be dead. You know how melodramatic she’s always been and always making a play for sympathy.”

“When you realized she was dead, why didn’t you call an ambulance?”

“I was going to call, but then I thought how odd the whole thing must look to people who didn’t know what really happened. I was afraid they would come in and take a look around and just naturally assume that I killed her.”

“And you didn’t kill her?”

“No, it was an accident.”

“You have to call the police and let them decide if it was an accident or not. If she was threatening you with a knife, that’s self-defense, isn’t it? Weren’t you defending yourself?”

“It depends on what you choose to believe,” she said.

“I’d like to believe the truth,” he said.

“You know mother was always disappointed in you.”

“I know and I don’t care.”

“She wanted grandchildren,” she said.

“Tough,” he said.

“She called you all kinds of names. Not to your face, of course, but behind your back. To anybody that would listen.”

“Are you going to call the police or do you want me to do it?” he asked.

“She was a terrible person. Aren’t you at least a little bit glad she’s dead?”

“Right now the only thing I’m glad of is that I got away from home before it was too late.”

“You hate me for what happened, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t hate you. I’m worried about what’s going to happen to you.”

“I won’t go to jail,” she said. “I’ll kill myself first.”

“I’m going to call the police and tell them what you told me.”

“I have a better idea.”

“What is it?”

“We can wait until the middle of the night and drive down to the river and dump her in. Of course, we’d have to figure out a way to weight her down first.”

“Are you crazy? Do you think I want to be involved in covering up a murder?”

“I’d do it for you.”

He laughed. “Somehow I don’t think you would,” he said.

“There’s a space below the basement floor that has a metal covering over it,” she said. “Big enough to hide a body in. Nobody would ever find her there until long after we’re gone.”

“You should hear yourself! I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. You’re talking about hiding your mother’s body? What do you tell people when they come looking for her? That she just ‘stepped out’ and you don’t know when she’ll be back? I don’t think people are going to accept that.”

“Always such a pessimist!” she said.

“I’m going to call the police and try to explain what happened without sounding like a lunatic,” he said.

“No, you go on about your business,” she said. “I want to be alone for a while, to sit and think. To grieve for the lady who gave me life. I’ll call the police when I’m ready.”

“So you’re going to handle it on your own?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll do what’s right?”

“Don’t I always?”

“I’m going to leave now. I’ll come back tonight around dark. I hope you’ll have called the police by then and tell them the truth about what happened.”

“Of course. You don’t have a thing to worry about. You’re the guiltless one, as ever.”

“Tomorrow I have a funeral to arrange,” he said, and then he was gone.

She drank a couple of vodka martinis and took a bath, her first in four days. When she was dressed again and her hair clean, she backed her car into the driveway, as close to the back door as she could get.

Taking the two spare tires out of the trunk—new and old—along with a jack and other tire-changing tools, some assorted rags, a flashlight, and other junk, she set them on the ground beside the car.

In the bottom of her trunk was a compartment underneath a panel held in place with thumb screws. She removed the screws and lifted out the panel and after she had done this she went back into the house.

She had thrown a blanket over her mother’s body, but it wasn’t enough. Thinking fast, she went upstairs to the walk-in closet and pulled down a large garment bag containing coats and dresses that hadn’t been worn in twenty years. She emptied the stuff out onto the floor and took the bag back downstairs.

Getting her mother’s body inside the bag and the bag zipped was easier than she anticipated. She dragged the bag to the back door and then, checking to make sure the woman next door was not snooping around in the back yard, she dragged it out the door and the few feet to the car. With one great heave and a shooting pain in her back, she lifted the bag off the ground and into the compartment, quickly replacing the panel with the thumbscrews and putting the spare tires and other stuff back into the trunk. She felt much better now, having removed the body from view.

Going back into the house, she sat down at the kitchen table and, cigarette in hand, wrote a note to Ernest, which he would see when he came by later. The note read, in part: Mother and I are going away for a while. I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll be back. The deed to the house, in your name, is in the safety deposit. Do what you think is right.

She packed a bag containing enough clothes for a few days, locked the doors, turned off the lights, and got into the car and drove away.

She drove all night and all day the next day, into the next state and then the next one after that. At dusk on the second day, she stopped in a small city that seemed like another world and spent the night in a beautiful old hotel on the bank of a river. In the morning, after a restful night’s sleep and a wonderful breakfast, she drove around for a while until she found a place where used cars were sold.

The car didn’t bring as much money as she thought it was worth, but she didn’t care to argue about price and accepted the first offer. She drove away in a newer model, only two years old, in almost perfect condition as if it had hardly been driven at all.

In her not-quite-new car, she continued driving in a westerly direction. She had always wanted to see the Grand Canyon, so she spent a couple of days there, enjoying the solitude and the wide-open spaces.

From the Grand Canyon, she drove to Las Vegas, a place she had heard about and dreamed about but never visited. She had a feeling of excitement to be there, just as she felt as a child when the whole family used to go to the beach or the amusement park.

In Las Vegas she checked into a hotel room with a magnificent view and locked herself in, ordering lavish meals from room service, charging all to a credit card. At night she would lie on the bed in her room, turn off the lights and open the curtains, drinking from a bottle of chianti. Looking out at the millions of other-worldly lights, she couldn’t remember ever feeling so contented and free from care in her life.

When she went out among the crowds, in the casinos or on the streets, she felt safe and anonymous. Nobody paid any attention to her. Everybody was there to enjoy themselves, just as she was.

On her fourth day in Las Vegas, she was walking on a crowded street when she saw an old woman up ahead in a bright yellow dress. It was the same stiff-jointed limp, the left shoulder lower than the right one, as her mother; the same hair tinted the color of apricot jam. She didn’t know how it could be, but she was sure it was her mother. She wasn’t dead after all! She had somehow got herself out of the trunk of Irene’s car and here she was, same as always! Just like a miracle!

In her happiness at seeing her mother alive, Irene started at an almost-run to catch up with her, but still she was two blocks away. With all the people milling about on the street, she lost sight of her for seconds at a time, but the yellow dress was like a beacon that she could not lose sight of.

Abandoning all caution, she stepped off a curb into traffic. She didn’t see the taxi cab that knocked her down and ran over her. The driver screeched his brakes and jumped out. A crowd gathered. Traffic became snarled. An ambulance came to take her away, but there was nothing to be done. She didn’t have any identification on her, so it took a while to piece together who she was and why she was running. Nobody had seen a thing out of the ordinary.

October 19, 2016October 19, 2016 by allen0997

20th Century Ghosts ~ A Capsule Book Review

20^th Century Ghosts ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

20^th Century Ghosts is a collection of contemporary short stories by American writer Joe Hill. Not all the stories in the collection are about ghosts; some are about other things, but nearly all the stories have some element about them of mystery or the unexplainable. As with any collection, there were some stories I liked and some not so much. Whether you like them or not, they are all quirky and unconventional, written in an engaging and compelling style that keeps you turning the pages to see what’s coming up on the next page.

The short story “20^th Century Ghost,” from which the title of the collection is derived, is about the ghost of a nineteen-year-old girl who haunts an old movie theatre. In twenty years or so, there are around two dozen people who have had encounters with the ghost girl in the theatre, and those who do never forget the experience. The girl died violently in some way that involved the letting of blood. She was so in love with the movies and loved talking about them so much that her ghost just naturally has to haunt a movie theatre.

Many of the stories in this collection are about the loneliness and alienation of youth. “Pop Art” is about a lonely boy who has, not exactly an imaginary friend, but an inflatable one. When he loses the friend through an odd quirk of fate, he goes on to an inflatable girlfriend. Inflatable friends are so much more agreeable than real ones.

With a nod to Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” “You Will Hear the Locust Sing” is about a boy named Francis who lives in the desert and who, through exposure to radiation, turns into a giant locust. (Years ago I wrote a similar story called “Happy Trails” about a woman in the desert who turned into a giant bug that, I’m happy to say, was published in a literary magazine called Churn Thy Butter.)

“The Black Phone” is about a thirteen-year-old boy who is kidnapped by a crazed child killer. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the boy and not by the police or by the boy’s parents. The boy is locked in a windowless room that has a mysterious phone on the wall. If the phone is disconnected, why does it sometimes ring?

In “The Widow’s Breakfast,” a hobo in the 1930s travels around from place to place by snatching illegal rides on freight trains. He is rattled because his best friend and traveling companion has just died. When he comes upon a farm where a lonely widow lives, he rediscovers what it feels like to be treated with kindness. There’s something odd about her children, though.

At about fifty pages, the short story “Voluntary Committal” is the longest one in the collection and comes at the end. It’s about a teenage boy name Nolan with an idiot savant younger brother named Morris. Morris builds elaborate “forts” in the basement out of boxes and then paints and decorates them. When Nolan and a friend named Eddie do a stupid thing on a highway overpass that might have involved somebody getting killed, they are scared they will get caught. When Morris hears them talking about it, they are convinced he is too retarded to understand or to know what they are saying. Or does he know a lot more than they think? When Eddie becomes an annoyance to Nolan over his fear that Nolan will tell what happened on the overpass, Morris has an unconventional way of getting rid of Eddie in a way that nobody will ever be able to figure out.

October 16, 2016October 17, 2016 by allen0997

Hollow City ~ A Capsule Book Review

Hollow City ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Hollow City by Ransom Riggs is the second novel in a fantasy trilogy, the first novel being Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children and the third being Library of Souls. I’ve read the first two novels in the trilogy and will read the third one, well, someday. It is about a group of “peculiars,” children who have special talents or abilities; for instance, Millard is invisible; Bronwyn has superhuman strength; Horace is a boy-sized gentleman in monocle and top hat who has the gift of prophesy; Hugh has an army of bees at his command living inside him; Emma can produce fire at her fingertips; Olive floats because she is lighter than air; Enoch can animate the dead for brief periods of time.

Into this mix of peculiars comes Jacob Portman, an odd, sixteen-year-old American boy who ends up in Wales trying to find out what happened to his grandfather, Abraham Portman, who was peculiar in the same way that Jacob is. These peculiars live in a “loop,” meaning a time and place that are outside the real world. (Their particular loop is in 1940, during World War II.) Peculiars the world over live in loops and each loop is presided over by an “ymbryne.” Miss Peregrine is the ymbryne of the particular loop this particular set of peculiars occupy. Jacob believes there is nothing special about him, but as he becomes drawn into the group of peculiars, he discovers that he does in fact have a special talent. He can feel “wights” when they are near. Wights are the deadly enemies of the peculiars because they want to extract their souls and eat them. That’s how they become “hollowgast.”

At the end of the first novel in the trilogy, the peculiars’ home in Cairnholm, Wales, is attacked and destroyed by Wights. Their ymbryne, Miss Peregrine, has been turned into a falcon and has a good chance of not being able to switch back. The peculiars must flee their home, with Miss Peregrine (who is now a falcon), with them. They have only a short time to save Miss Peregrine or she will be a falcon forever. Hollow City is a kind of picaresque novel, as the peculiars have all kinds of quirky adventures and experience all sort sorts of dangers as they travel to London. Wait a minute! Don’t they know it’s 1940 and there’s a war on, with London under almost constant attack by German planes? It turns out that Germans are the least of their worries.

Hollow City is light, almost effortless reading. To make it even more interesting and fun to read, the text is liberally punctuated with “peculiar” vintage photographs that fit in with what’s going on in the story. In an interview at the end of the book, author Ransom Riggs says that in the first book, he wrote the story to match the pictures and in the second novel he wrote the text and then looked for pictures that were appropriate to what was going on in the story. Either way, it works, if you, the reader, are willing to suspend disbelief and be drawn into a fantasy world somewhere in the vicinity of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, or Gregory Maguire, but not quite as far as the nightmare world of H. P. Lovecraft.

October 6, 2016October 6, 2016 by allen0997