Tag: Allen Kopp

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places ~ A Capsule Book Review

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places by Colin Dickey is not about ghosts or ghost stories but is instead about the places (houses, prisons, brothels, mental hospitals, parks, cemeteries, etc.) that have, for one reason or another, come to be thought of as haunted. This book doesn’t espouse a belief in ghosts or hauntings or a disbelief in them. When you read the book, you decide for yourself.

Most ghost stories are folklore, “urban legend,” or tall tales. They start with a grain of truth and go on from there to fantastic make-believe. But, no matter how implausible the stories are, people are willing to believe them without question because they affirm a belief that there is, indeed, life after death. When you hear a ghost story that begins with a tragedy, an unresolved and unavenged murder, it’s satisfying on a psychological level because it makes you feel good that such a terrible thing has happened to somebody else and not to you and, more importantly, it makes you glad you’re alive.

Ghost hunting has grown into an industry, popularized in part by “reality” shows on TV. People believe what they want to believe. If a person on TV is telling you convincingly that a house, a commercial building, park, or cemetery is haunted, you believe it because it’s so easy to believe. Why shouldn’t you believe? When somebody takes the time and effort to dig deeper into a ghost story, however, the truth is often uncovered, and the truth is not nearly as interesting or as much fun as the tall tale.

Sometimes a house or its owner need only be eccentric or unusual. Sarah Winchester (1840-1922) is a perfect example. As heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, she was fabulously wealthy. The Winchester repeating rifle was the gun that “won the West.” Sarah bought a house in San Jose, California, and began adding on to it and, once she got started, she added and added and added. The house was never finished but, by the time she died in 1922, she had 160 rooms, staircases that went nowhere, and other features that, over time, marked the house as “haunted”—haunted supposedly by all the people who were killed by the Winchester rifle. When people think of American haunted houses, the Winchester house in San Jose tops the list. Serious scientific investigation, however, has yet to uncover credible evidence of a single ghost at the Winchester house. People believe what they want to believe.

The house that inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne to write his 1851 gothic novel, The House of the Seven Gables, is in Salem, Massachusetts. The house still stands and is a tourist attraction. There’s no absolute proof that the house is haunted, although it very well could be if you go entirely on the way it looks. Inside the house is a “secret staircase” on which people claim to have experienced ghostly emanations. Nobody has ever seen an actual ghost in the house, though. Hawthorne didn’t think the staircase was important enough to include in his novel.

The Lemp family of St. Louis became wealthy from the manufacture of Falstaff beer in the 1890s. They had their brewing plant, and their residence, in South St. Louis. Underneath their property were vast natural caves in which they stored the beer before electronic refrigeration became common. As wealthy and successful as the Lemps were, they were also plagued with mental illness, which today might be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. Several of the Lemps committed suicide. People believe the ghosts of the Lemps haunt the house, which is now a restaurant and a bed-and-breakfast. Employees at the restaurant claim to have seen spirits, or at least felt them. Teams of “ghost hunters” regularly inhabit the premises, looking for evidence of spirits that nobody else has been able to find. The vast brewery is also still standing but is mostly unused, except as a haunted Halloween attraction in October.

So, in addition to the Winchester house in San Jose, the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, and the Lemp house in St. Louis, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places takes us to a brothel in Nevada, an abandoned mental hospital in Maine, a plantation in Louisiana, a park in Portland, Oregon, that’s haunted by the ghost of a murdered fifteen-year-old girl, a house in New Orleans where slaves were mistreated, a prison in West Virginia where prisoners were starved and neglected, and from there to creepy Los Angeles hotels, where deceased stars still cavort, Civil War battlefields where many thousands of men died and on to Detroit, the once-thriving industrial hub of the U.S. that has its share of tragic ghost stories, most of them fabricated but still believed by people who are willing to believe what they choose to believe.

If you believe in ghosts, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places won’t get you to not believe in them, but the one thing the book does is to show that most ghost stories can be easily explained and debunked. The thing is, though, the truth is not nearly as compelling as the legend or the tall tale that, over time, has come to be accepted as the truth.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp  

by allen0997

Between Two Fires ~ A Capsule Book Review

Between Two Fires book cover
Between Two Fires
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~ 

Between Two Fires is a 2012 speculative-fiction novel by Chrisopher Buehlman. The year is 1348. The place is France. The country is ravaged by war with England (the Hundred Years War) and by a horrible disease known as the Black Plague. (The world is such a mess, we are told, because Lucifer and the other fallen angels are waging war in heaven.)

Thomas de Givras, a former knight of the Crusades, has fallen on hard times. His armor is tarnished. He has been excommunicated from the church and he has been stripped of his property. He is not old but not young, either. He has joined a band of brigands. They accost people on the road and rob them.

When he encounters a young girl named Delphine, a recent plague orphan, he sees that there is something special about her. She claims she can see angels and she asks him to accompany her to Paris and then Avignon. Although he is not known for his generous nature, he decides it is in his best interest to do as she asks. Along the way, they meet Father Matthieu, a homosexual priest who drinks too much wine. He confides that he was caught in a compromising situation with another man right before the plague struck. As a result, he lost his church and his congregation. Delphine takes pity on him. The three of them (Thomas, Delphine, and Father Matthieu) make quite a trio.

In Paris, Delphine acquires the Spear of Longinus from a seller of relics. Before the trio leaves the city, they are attacked by possessed statues of the Virgin Mary and other saints. They have several other encounters with fallen angels before they reach Avignon. Father Matthieu is killed by a demon in the River Rhone. Thomas, by chance, meets the man who ruined him, D’Évreux, and challenges him to a duel. Thomas is victorious and D’Évreux is killed.

In Avignon, Thomas and Delphine uncover a plot to kill Pope Clement and replace him with a demon look-alike. In the fight that ensues, Delphine is killed, but Archangel Michael and the heavenly host emerge from her body to defeat the false pope and his army of demons. Thomas’s soul is dragged into Hell by the fleeing demons, where he is tortured. Delphine descends into Hell to look for him, at which time she reveals that she is both Jesus Christ and the girl Delphine. Thomas awakens in his own body. Everyone except Thomas forgets the supernatural aspects of that night, believing the damage was from an earthquake. Thomas returns to Normandy and lives in the castle he lived in before it was taken away. Delphine becomes a nun; Thomas considers her his adopted daughter.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Demon of Unrest ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Demon of Unrest book cover
~ The Demon of Unrest ~
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~

In the lead-up to the Civil War, the long-simmering animosity between the North and the South was centered around Fort Sumter, in Charleston Bay. Fort Sumter was a federal fort, held by Union forces, surrounded by Southern troops and Southern sympathizers. South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union, so it was “all-in” for the South. The newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, seemed ill-at-ease in the role of commander-in-chief. He was afraid he was going to ignite an all-out civil war, so he didn’t know how to handle Fort Sumter. Should he evacuate the Union forces there to a safer location? Should he instruct the commander to surrender the fort? Should he resupply the fort with food and ammunition? (He couldn’t exactly let the people there starve to death, could he?) For a long time he did nothing because he didn’t know what to do.

Finally, in April 1861, after several months of suspense, the stalemate was broken when Southern forces attacked Fort Sumter. Federal forces fought back, but weakly at first. (They had used most of their ammunition in practice firing.) The “siege” of Fort Sumter lasted about a day and a half. The people of Charlotte, South Carolina, gathered on the beach to watch (and hear) the fighting, as if it was a sporting event or a celebration. When it was all over, it was a victory for the South, but the Federal commander in charge of Fort Sumter, Robert Anderson, was hailed as something of a hero by both sides for his perseverance and professionalism.

Fort Sumter was, of course, the beginning of the American Civil War. There was a belief in the beginning that it would be a short war and that both sides would quickly settle their differences. The South, especially, was overly confident. The truth was that it was a bitter, bloody, brutal war that lasted four years and resulted in the deaths of some 750,000 Americans.

The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson is the true story of Fort Sumter in the long march to the American Civil War. It’s a long book, minutely detailed, but it never seems ponderous, as you might expect of a historical subject. It remains gripping and engaging throughout, even if we know what happens in the end.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Last of Reginald ~ A Short Story

The Last of Reginald image 2
The Last of Reginald
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

Wexler Deal had been dead a long time. He died when he was a child, so his spirit-self would always be a child. Despite his apparent youth, he had experienced all the spirit world had to offer. Now he was lonely. Now he wanted a home.

He went back to the city of his birth, thinking that was as good a place as any to look for a home, but nothing looked the same. The hospital where he was born had been torn down and an office building stood in its place. The cemetery where he was buried was overgrown and unkempt, with a new highway built uncomfortably close. In the neighborhood where he had lived before he died, all the houses had been torn down and a shopping center built in their place.

Nothing was the same. There were no streetcars anymore. The little shops along Main Street were all gone. He didn’t see any horses anywhere, but there were lots of trucks. There were also lots of annoying people and much noise. He didn’t like the modern world.

“Just how long have you been dead, anyway?” he asked himself.

He sat in the park on a bench, watching living people go by and thinking how he didn’t belong and how he should find someplace else to go. If he was looking for happiness, he wouldn’t find it here.

He was watching a swan glide toward an island in the center of the lake when two people crossed his field of vision, a woman and a boy. The woman, smartly dressed, had soft-looking hair the color of straw. She was leading the boy by the hand. They stopped at the water fountain. The boy felt the fountain with both hands. She turned it on for him while he drank.

Wexler watched them as long as they were in the park and when they left he followed them.

They went home to a two-story brick house with a spacious yard. Wexler was fascinated by the boy who had to feel the water fountain with hands before he took a drink. He was a smart-looking boy just about Wexler’s age. He would make a good brother. The woman would make a good mother. He was sure of it.

The next day, he went back just as the boy and the woman were emerging from the house. He let them go ahead of him and then followed them.

This time they went to the library. The woman sat at a table and pulled a chair close to her for the boy to sit on. She began looking at newspapers. Whenever she went to the rack to get another newspaper, the boy sat quietly with his hands folded across his stomach and lowered his head. He closed his eyes as though he were asleep.

Wexler sat on the other side of the boy. Of course, the boy didn’t see him and didn’t know he was there. This gave Wexler a chance to look closely at the boy. Wexler saw how far the boy’s eyelashes extended from his eyes. His hair was exactly the same color as Wexler’s and, in fact, they looked enough alike to be brothers. The only difference was that Wexler had been dead for decades, but when he died he was about the same age that the boy was now, so, for all intents and purposes, they were the same age.

When they left the library, they stopped on the way home at a restaurant to eat lunch. They sat at a red-upholstered booth and ate tuna-salad sandwiches and drank malteds. Wexler sat beside the boy and watched him eat, mimicking him and imagining what it would be like to take food into his mouth and swallow it. He hadn’t eaten in decades, but he remembered what it was like.

Soon they were back home again. Instead of turning ar0und and walking away when the woman and the boy went inside, Wexler slipped inside with them. The woman closed the door, blissfully unaware that Wexler was there. Being a spirit certainly has its advantages.

The boy went upstairs, while the woman went into the kitchen. Wexler was going to go along with the boy to get better acquainted with him, but instead he wanted to spend some time exploring the house.

It was a big house. The rooms were splendidly furnished and there were a lot of them. These people must certainly have a lot of money, thought Wexler. I wouldn’t mind living in a place like this.

In a little while the woman went into the front room and laid down on the couch. Wexler watched her as she took off her shoes and made herself comfortable. She didn’t have to fix dinner or do any other work, Wexler was soon to discover, because she had a black maid named Ethel to do everything.

When dinner was ready, Ethel brought the food in from the kitchen and put it on the dining room table. The woman rose from the couch, and the boy came down from upstairs. They sat across from each other at the table. The woman put the food on the boy’s plate, and then on her own, and they began eating. Wexler hovered over the table and watched them as they ate. Finally he sat down beside the boy and listened to their conversation.

“Did you straighten your room?” the woman asked.

“Yes.”

“Did you hang up your clothes and put your underwear in the wash?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You’re not helpless, you know.”

“I never said I was.”

“Do you like the roast beef?

“Sure.”

After dinner, the boy went to his room and read a book that was little dots on a page. The woman watched TV while Wexler continued to explore the house, including the basement and attic.

At bedtime, the woman and the boy said their good nights, and the boy went into his room and changed into his pajamas. After he got into bed and was settling down to sleep, Wexler sat in a chair beside the bed and whistled an old tune.

“Who’s there?” the boy asked.

Wexler continued to whistle.

“I know there’s somebody there.”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“How long have you been following me?”

“Just for a couple of days.”

“I knew it! I could feel it!”

“Just between you and me.”

“What?”

“Is that woman your mother?”

“Of course not. She’s my guardian.”

“What happened to your mother?”

“She abandoned me when I was a baby.”

“Why did she do that?”

“Because I was born blind.”

“That’s terrible!”

“As you can see, I get along all right. Now, you’d better tell me who you are and what you want.”

“If I told you my name, it wouldn’t mean anything.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“My name is Wexler Deal.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“What’s yours?”

“Reginald Flinders.”

“I’d shake your hand, but I don’t have a hand.”

“Why not? Have you been in a terrible accident?”

“No, I…That’s a story for another time.”

“Why ‘for another time’?”

“I don’t think you’re ready for the truth about me right now.”

“Why not?”

“Just take my word for it.”

“All right. Now, tell me what you’re doing in my house.”

“I’ve been looking for a brother. When I saw you in the park, I thought you might be him.”

“That sounds suspicious. I think I should tell Grace the whole thing.”

“Who’s Grace?”

“She’s my guardian. She’ll want to know what you’re doing here. She’ll call the police.”

“No need for that.”

“I want to know how you got in without Grace or the maid seeing you.”

“Nobody sees me.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m not really there. Or here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve been dead for a long time. I’m a spirit.”

“Yeah, that’s a good one!”

“It’s the absolute truth. The reason Grace and the maid didn’t see me is because I’m not really there. Nobody sees me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you believe me?”

“Of course I believe you.”

They talked for hours. They both realized how good it was to have somebody to talk to. Before the night was over, they both ended up asleep, side by side, in Reginald’s bed. In the morning they woke up and began talking again.

Reginald went to a school for the blind. In the morning some people came and picked him up and kept him at school all day, and in the afternoon they brought him back home again. When he wasn’t at school, he spent almost all his time with Wexler. They spoke on every subject imaginable. Reginald told him how he wondered about colors and what a cow looked like, or a chicken.

“One day you’ll see everything,” Wexler said.

“I don’t think so. I’ve always been this way.”

“I’d help you to see if I knew how.”

Another time, Reginald said, “Tell me what you look like. Describe yourself to me.”

“I don’t look like anything,” Wexler said. “I’m not here.”

“If you were here and I could see you, what would you look like?”

“When I had a body and a face, I looked just the way you look now.”

“I’ve never seen myself.”

“My hair is halfway between brown and blond. My nose is large but not too large.  My eyes are blue and very handsome. My mouth is in the usual place.”

Despite Wexler’s discomfort, he let Reginald “see” him with his hands: head, ears, eyes, forehead, nose, mouth, chin, neck. When he was finished, he put his arms down and said, “So, that’s what I look like!”

“We’re just like twins,” Wexler said with a laugh.

Time went by quickly. The weeks became months, and it was winter again. Still Wexler stayed by Reginald’s side, with Grace, the guardian, and Ethel, the maid, never knowing there was another person in the house.

Wexler began to think that helping Reginald see was the best thing he could do in the world. He wanted Reginald to see everything he himself had seen all over the world. Unforgettable things like an octopus, a tall mountain, a full moon, a tropical rain forest, a desert, a waterfall, a polar ice cap. The list goes on and on.

He knew a doctor, a man named Gottschalk, currently living in New York. Dr. Gottschalk was a ghoul, hundreds of years old. He wasn’t really alive but was kept alive by artificial means. Wexler had met him socially on several occasions and had sat in on some of his lectures at the University of Vienna.

Wexler flew to New York and called Dr. Gottschalk and made an appointment to see him later in the day. Dr. Gottschalk remembered Wexler fondly.

Dr. Gottschalk hadn’t changed a bit. He was still frightening-looking with his white skin, long face and big teeth, but he was receptive and, as always, willing to help.

“Reginald is my best friend,” Wexler said to Dr. Gottschalk. “He’s alive, not a spirit like me. The problem is he can’t see. He was born that way. I want him to see all the wonders in the world that I’ve seen. I want to show him these things, as a friend.”

“I think I have just the thing,” Dr. Gottschalk said.

He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a little bottle and handed it to Wexler.

“This should do the trick,” he said.

“What is it?” Wexler asked.

“If I told you, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

“Okay.”

“Mix this in with a glass of water and have your little friend drink it before bedtime. Right before.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“In the morning, there’ll be a drastic change for the better.”

“Are you certain?”

“It’s never failed yet.”

Wexler tried to pay Dr. Gottschalk, but he wouldn’t accept any payment.

“I already have all the money in the world,” Dr. Gottschalk said. “I like helping my friends!”

“I can’t thank you enough!” Wexler said.

Wexler held onto the bottle for a few days. He didn’t want to administer it before the time was right. He waited until late Friday night. It was snowing out.

He waited until Reginald was snugly in bed. “I have something for you,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It’s something that will make you see.”

“What is it?”

“I have a doctor friend. His name is Dr. Gottschalk. He’s a ghoul, but that doesn’t matter.”

“A ghoul? I like it already!”

“It’s a little bottle of liquid. I’ll mix it in some water and then you’ll drink it.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“It’ll make you see everything, but there’s just one bad thing.”

“What could be bad about seeing everything?”

“Your life as Reginald will end.”

“What are you saying?”

“You’ll die and you’ll be a spirit like me.”

“Oh.”

“No more guardians and no more school for the blind.”

“Will you stay with me? I mean, while I die?”

“Sure, I will.”

“Will it hurt?”

“I don’t think so, but if it does, it will only be for a minute.”

Wexler gave Reginald the chance to postpone the drinking of the liquid for a few days—or indefinitely—but Reginald wanted to go ahead with it. More than anything in the world, he wanted to see with his own eyes.

Wexler went into the bathroom and drew a glass of cold water from the faucet. He set the glass on the sink and watched as he poured the bottle of amber liquid into the water. Then he held it up to his eyes to get a better look at it.

When he took the bottle back into the bedroom, Reginald had propped himself up in bed and was ready to drink. When he took the glass from Wexler, his hands were steady and in his eyes were tears of unalloyed joy.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

At the Time of His Disappearance ~ A Short Story

At the Time of His Disappearance image 7
At the Time of His Disappearance
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

Trent arrived home from school at the usual time. He threw down his school books and went into the kitchen. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette. Without a word of greeting, he ate some cookies and drank a glass of water, standing between the table and the back door. When he was finished, he set the glass on the table and went out the door.

“Dinner in an hour!” she called, but he gave no indication of having heard her.

It was October and the yard was full of golden sunlight and the smell of leaves. The yard was a refuge for squirrels and birds and other small animals. It was, by far, the best place to be on an autumn afternoon. And it was private. Nobody ever came snooping around. The nearest neighbor was over a mile away. The boy had it all to himself.

Abutting the yard at the south side was an old cemetery. The boy spent a lot of time in the cemetery. He loved the old gravestones and the elaborate growth of trees, bushes, vines and weeds. It was a private world unto itself. The newest grave that he had found so far was fifty years old. If there were any graves more recent than that, he had yet to find them. It was a lost world with all those long-ago dead people. He imagined some of them in their graves, exactly as they were when they were when they were alive. He could hear them laughing and whispering. Sometimes they reached out and touched him on the shoulder or the back.

From the bay window in the dining room, his mother watched him go into the cemetery. She told him to stay out of there, but since he turned twelve he had a mind of his own and he did exactly as he pleased. That was the problem with children getting older, she thought.

She believed he was developing a morbid interest in the dead because of all the time he spent in the cemetery. Any time she didn’t know where he was, it only took one guess to figure it out. One night she heard him talking long after he should have been asleep, and when she opened his door and asked him who he was talking to, he said he was talking to a sixteen-year-old boy who died in a flood in 1893.

It was time for the evening meal, and still the boy hadn’t come back. She was going to have to have a very serious talk with him. He might at least show some respect for her after all the trouble she went to to cook the dinner.

She put on a sweater and went out the back door to try to find him. She went all the way around the house, calling his name, but she knew he wasn’t there; he was in the cemetery.

She went to the entrance to the cemetery and stopped. She called his name, but she knew he wouldn’t answer, even if he could hear her. He loved playing tricks on her. It would be just like him to jump out at her from behind a gravestone and make her jump and scream. And of course he’d laugh at her and call her a panty waist.

It was almost dark now. She went back to the house and sat down at the table and began eating the food she had fixed. She could only manage a few bites. She was nearly in tears. She was a little worried about him, but she assured herself he was all right and had just lost track of time, as children do.

By ten o’clock, his customary bedtime, he still hadn’t returned. She got her flashlight out of the drawer and went outside. She walked all the way around the house, calling his name, shining the light into the darkest places. She didn’t see any sign of him. She knew the cemetery was the place to look.

She had been in cemeteries before, but never at night and never alone. She assured herself that the cemetery was full of people long dead. There were no ghosts, nothing  to bother her or cause her worry. She had to find her son, and she couldn’t be a big baby about it. Maybe he was in trouble. He might have fallen and broken his leg or something.

She gathered her courage and, walking slowly, shone her light all around, at the tops of the trees and all over the ground. Some of the gravestones were huge slabs, and others were so small you might easily trip over them if you weren’t paying attention. She called his name every few feet, but her voice was drowned out by the wind and the rustling leaves.

There was nothing out of the ordinary in the cemetery. Just the graves of those long forgotten. There were no signs of the boy having been there. All she could think to do was go back to the house and wait for him to return.

Rather than go to sleep in her bedroom upstairs, she took a comforter out of a closet and made a bed for herself on the couch in the living room. If he came in the back door, left unlocked for him, she would hear him. He would come back, she believed, with a wild story about having been abducted by a spaceship. He had quite an imagination. She would be torn between laughing at him and wanting to slap his face for scaring her so.

She spent a nearly sleepless night. Any time she almost went to sleep, she would be awakened by what she thought was the back door opening and closing, or by his calling out to her across a vast distance.

At seven in the morning she called the police and told them her twelve-year-old son never came home yesterday. Within a few minutes, two uniformed officers appeared at her door. One of them was old and the other one young.

Sobbing intermittently, she told them what happened: Her twelve-year-old son disappeared in the yard and/or cemetery the day before and didn’t come home all night. She went looking for him with a flashlight and even called his name repeatedly, but it was all to no avail.

The older officer said, “In about fifty percent of these cases, the adolescent runs off on his own and comes back on his own when he gets hungry enough. Do you think he might be one of these?”

“Oh, no! I don’t think so.”

“Has he ever run off before?”

“He hasn’t run off now.”

“Might he have been abducted by strangers?”

“I don’t have any reason to think that.”

“Was he having trouble at school?

“No!”

“Was he being bullied?”

“No, I don’t think so. No.”

“Did he ever use drugs or alcohol?”

“Of course not! He’s twelve years old!”

“What about the boy’s father?”

“My husband and I are divorced.”

“Was the boy upset when you got your divorce?”

“No. He was four years old at the time.”

“Do you ever see or hear from your ex-husband?”

“No.”

“Might your ex-husband have had anything to do with the boy’s disappearance?”

“Certainly not!”

The older officer had been writing her responses on a yellow legal pad. He stopped writing and, with his pencil poised above the paper, turned and looked at the younger officer. “Can you think of anything else?” he asked.

“Was the boy, um, I mean, is the boy sexually active?” the younger officer asked.

“Of course not! He’s a child!”

“Do you have a recent picture of him?”

She stood up, walked a few feet, opened the drawer of a desk, took out a picture and handed it over to the older officer.

“We’ll need to keep this picture.”

“Of course.”

“What was he wearing at the time of his disappearance?”

“A shirt and pants. A jacket. A cap.”

“Does he have any distinguishing features?”

“A small mole on his right cheek.”

“Height?”

“What?”

“How tall is the boy?”

“I couldn’t say for sure. He’s rather small for his age. I’d say about four feet, six inches.”

“Can you tell us anything else about him?”

“He loves to spend time in the cemetery.”

The older officer shifted his big legs and coughed. “And why is that?”

“We have an old cemetery adjoining our property. My son has been fascinated by it for years.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m not sure. I always told him he should stay out of there.”

“And what did he say when you told him to stay out?”

“He said he felt close to some of the dead people. Don’t ask me why. He’s a lot like  his father, I suppose.”

“Would you say he is obsessed with death?”

“No, I wouldn’t say he’s obsessed with death. He’s going through a phase.”

They’d keep a close watch out for him, the officer assured her. They’d send the boy’s picture and his description to every law enforcement agency in the state. They’d talk to every person in a ten-mile radius. If anybody saw anything, they’d say so.

“We’ll find him,” the older officer said.

She wanted to believe the boy would be found, but something about the way he disappeared defied logical explanation. It was going to take somebody smarter than the local police to figure it out.

They sent a team of men and boys to search the cemetery, the woods and the fields. After five days of finding nothing, they called off the search. The search would resume at a later date.

The story appeared in newspapers and on television. There was an outpouring of interest and sympathy. The mother’s phone rang all the time. Most of the calls were from well-meaning people, but a few of them were crank calls. One person claimed to know where the boy was and would divulge his location for five thousand dollars.

After the boy had been missing for a week, the mother received a phone call from a woman named Hortense Rathbone. She said she was a psychic who had been helping locate missing children for sixty years. She would do a “reading” for a hundred and fifteen dollars.

“I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” the mother said.

“I can tell things about the boy just by looking at his picture.”

“What things?”

“You’re not his real mother. You adopted him.”

“Nobody knows that. Not even he knows that.”

“Also, he’s a very old soul.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means his soul is prized.”

“Prized by whom? What are you talking about?”

“I can come to your house and do a reading. You have nothing to lose. I won’t charge you a penny if you get no results.”

“What results? Do you mean you can find him?”

“I don’t know, but I can try. No charge. This is an interesting case.”

“All right. This is Thursday. You can come on Saturday morning. And if  you’re another crackpot, I’ll throw you out and I won’t be nice about it.”

“I’ve been called a lot of things,” Hortense Rathbone said.

She was a very old woman, dressed in a man’s suit and wearing combat boots. She drove a fifty-year-old Cadillac, once white but now many other colors. When she walked into the house, she wanted to walk from room to room, but she especially wanted to spend time in the boy’s room, absorbing his “essence,” as she said. She wanted a shirt of his that he had recently worn. She wadded up the shirt into a ball and held it over her mouth. She lay down on the bed where he slept and closed her eyes.

“I’ll leave you alone,” the mother said. “Come back downstairs when you’re finished.”

The psychic wanted to know every detail about the boy’s disappearance: time of day, what he said before he left the house, what he was wearing. Did he mention any other person by name? What was his mental state at the time of his disappearance?  When the mother told the old woman about the cemetery, she said she needed to see it right away. It might contain an important clue that nobody else was able to see.

She spent four hours crisscrossing the cemetery, and when she came out she looked happy.

“I’ve had a breakthrough in the case,” she said. “I know what happened to the boy.”

“You know where he is?” the mother said.

“I don’t know where he is, but I know what happened to him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s lots of psychic activity in that old cemetery.”

“Yeah? What about my son?”

“You said he spent a lot of time there?”

“Yes.”

“He’s passed through a portal. I can hear his voice. He’s calling for you to help him. He wants out.”

“What are you talking about? What portal?”

“It’s not something in the ground, but in the air. Think of it as being a door into another dimension.”

“Another dimension? That sounds too fantastic!”

“Well, believe it or not, portals are everywhere. People, especially children, will fall into them. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.”

“But how do we get him back here?”

“I wish I knew, honey.”

The mother half-believed, half-disbelieved, the old woman’s version of what happened to her son. It made sense in a way, but it strained credulity. Another dimension? Is such a thing possible?

She began going to the cemetery every day. She wanted to find the portal that her son had fallen into. She wanted to hear his voice, pleading with her to get him out. If she just heard his voice, she’d do anything in the world to get him back home. She didn’t know how to look for a portal, but if it was there she’d find it. Being in the cemetery made her feel  close to him. She’d sit for hours, listening to the wind and hoping to hear his voice.

The police investigation was going nowhere. An officer called her occasionally to report nothing at all, but also to reassure her the case would remain open.

Sometimes she caught a fleeting glance of the boy out the window, turning a corner of the house. Other times, she heard him moving around in his room late it night. He was there. She was sure of it.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Goyhood ~ A Capsule Book Review

Goyhood cover
Goyhood
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~

The main characters in Goyhood are twin brothers Marty (later Mayer) and David Belkin. They live with their eccentric mother, Ida Mae, in the small town of New Moab, Georgia. When they are ten years old, Ida Mae informs them they are Jewish. Devil-may-care David doesn’t really care if he is Jewish or not. Marty, however, is shaken to the core by this revelation. He changes his name to Mayer and becomes an Orthodox Jew, making a profession of studying the Torah. When he becomes a man, he marries a Jewish woman named Sarah, whose father is a famous rabbi.

Years later, when Mayer and David are in their forties, they receive word that their (by-now) enormously obese mother has committed suicide. (Mayer lives in Brooklyn and David in Atlanta.) They both converge on their hometown of New Moab, Georgia, to attend the funeral. However, they learn there will be no funeral because their mother has been cremated. They are presented with an urn containing her ashes, which they, quite sensibly, refer to as Ida Mae. That’s not all, though. She has left Mayer and David a suicide not in which she reveals that they aren’t really Jewish after all.

Mayer is shattered. He has been living a lie, albeit an unwitting lie. He isn’t a Jew; he’s a gentile. He’s a fake; he’s a liar, he’s a sham. He only wants to get back to Brooklyn to convert to Judaism and make thing right with Sarah. His brother David, though, has other ideas. How about a road trip through the South? They can have some adventures, and it will give them some time to reconnect as brothers. Mayer reluctantly agrees against his better judgment. They rent a jazzed-up, red, retro car that David names Daisy.

Right away on their travels, Mayer and David encounter a lovable stray dog alongside the highway. David wants to keep the dog, but Mayer is against it. David wins, and they take the dog wherever they go, even into restaurants. David names the dog Popeye because he has been mauled in a fight and only has one eye. Despite his rough appearance, Popeye is very sweet, and both brothers fall in love with him.

The brothers spend several days in New Orleans, where David encounters an old friend named Charlayne Valentine. She is black and is on her way to hike the Appalachian Trail, which is over 2,000 miles long. She becomes a significant addition to the duo and a major character.

During the trip, Mayer unwinds a little and has some startling self-revelations: For one thing, he realizes he has been married to the wrong woman for eighteen years. And the question about his Jewishness is an obvious one. Even though he isn’t really a Jew, he can become one. We are what we think we are, even when we are (unwittingly) something else.

Goyhood is a first novel by New York Post writer Reuven Fenton, who writes some very smart dialogue. I had a little trouble with some of the Hebrew words and phrases, but that’s a minor quibble. It’s an entertaining novel, filled with droll humor, some surprising twists and turns, and a minimum of heart-rending tragedy. Highly recommended for summer reading or reading at any other season.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

You Were Kind to Me ~ A Short Story

You Were Kind to Me image 1
You Were Kind to Me
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

The once-every-two years carnival was in town. Anybody who was anybody would go at least one night. Vicki-Vicki LaGrasse went on Saturday night, accompanied by two friends from high school, Pansy Dowd and Mary Lee Kaiser. When they arrived at the fairgrounds, it wasn’t quite dark yet and the crowds were thin.

“I want to go on the Ferris wheel first thing,” Pansy said.

“Before it’s even dark?” Mary Lee said.

Mary Lee was afraid of heights and, so she sat in the middle and kept her eyes closed the whole time.

“What good does it do you to ride the Ferris wheel if you don’t look down?” Pansy said.

“With my eyes closed it feels like I’m flying. I don’t have to have my eyes open to appreciate it.”

“When we get all the way to the top, I’ll push you out, and then you can really get the sensation of flying!”

After the Ferris wheel, they went to the House of Mirrors and howled with laughter at their ridiculous, distorted images. The three of them together looked three times sillier than one.

“We look like freaks!” Pansy laughed.

“Well, isn’t that what we are?” Mary Lee said.

“Say, I’m starting to get hungry. Let’s go get something to eat.”

They went to the food pavilion and ordered hot dogs and Cokes. While they were waiting for their food, they saw a tall boy across the way who seemed to be looking at them.

“Hey! Do you know him?” Pansy said. “He’s kind of cute.”

“I don’t know him,” Vicki-Vicki said without looking up.

“He’s been following us since the mirrors,” Mary Lee said.

“He’s not looking at me,” Pansy said.

“He’s not looking at me, either,” Mary Lee said. “I think he’s looking at Vicki-Vicki.”

“He’s not looking at me,” Vicki-Vicki said.

“He’s an older boy,” Pansy said. “He’s got whiskers.”

“Are you sure you don’t know him, Vicki-Vicki?”

“No, I said I don’t know him.”

“I never saw him before in my life,” Pansy said.

“He is definitely looking at Vicki-Vicki,” Mary Lee said.

“Well, I don’t want to be looked at,” Vicki-Vicki said. “So why don’t we just forget about it and go ride the Tilt-a-Whirl?”

They rode twice until Mary Lee began vomiting and the attendant had to stop the thing and let her off.

“I always get sick when I ride the Tilt-a-Whirl,” Mary Lee said.

“Then why do you ride it?” Vicki-Vicki asked.

“I’ll be all right once my head stops spinning.”

They found a place to sit quietly for a while until Mary Lee felt better. While they were sitting doing nothing, the tall boy walked past, eating from a box or popcorn.

“There he is again,” Pansy said. “It’s no coincidence that he keeps popping up.”

“Just ignore him,” Vicki-Vicki said. “He obviously just wants attention.

“He is so cute!”

“I don’t see anything about him that’s appealing.”

“Maybe you’re not looking at him in the right way.”

“I don’t want to look at him at all.”

“I’m feeling better now,” Mary Lee said. “Let’s do the Haunted House.”

“Are you sure?” Vicki-Vicki said. “I don’t want you vomiting on me again.”

“I only vomited on your shoes,” Mary Lee said. “I said I was sorry.”

They stood in a long line at the Haunted House. When they finally got in, they were surrounded by screaming younger kids.

“I didn’t know this was such a kiddie attraction,” Pansy said. “They need to be at home in bed.”

The Haunted House was screaming ghouls, severed heads, clanking chains, puffs of air, moaning corpses, flashing lights, and lots of screaming. Mary Lee admitted that she wet her pants when a monster jumped out at her but that it would dry on its own as soon as she got out into the air.

After the Haunted House, they were on their way to get some cotton candy when they stopped to watch the “Dunk the Clown” booth. A clown with an enormous nose and a painted-on mouth sat on a swing over a pool of water. For twenty-five cents, anybody could try to hit the target with a baseball that would dump the clown into the water. While the clown was in the water, he gestured to the crowd and made faces, eliciting screams and jeers. After a while he climbed out of the water and got back on the swing again for somebody else to try.

“Can you imagine being the clown?” Pansy said. “So degrading!”

“It’s his job,” Vicki-Vicki said. “Like any other job.”

“Wait a minute,” Mary Lee said. “There’s that guy again.”

“What guy?”

They all turned their heads toward the person trying to knock the clown into the water. There were lots of people standing in the way, so they had to wait for somebody to move before they could get a good look.

“Yes, it’s him,” Pansy said. “He’s there and then he’s here. He’s everywhere.”

He hit the target effortlessly with the baseball and the crowd roared. A carnival worker man handed him his prize of a stuffed animal, and the next person in line took his place.

“Now we’ve seen everything,” Pansy said.

“Let’s get some cotton candy,” Mary Lee said.

“No, he’s coming this way,” Pansy said. “He’s looking right at us.”

“Just ignore him,” Vicki-Vicki said. “He might be looking for somebody to knife.”

“I don’t think so,” Pansy said. “He looks very sweet.”

Ignoring Pansy and Mary Lee, he walked up to Vicki-Vicki and smiled at her. He towered over her.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” he said.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” she said with a tight smile.

“I remember you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Here. I want to give you this stuffed toy.”

“Thanks, but I don’t accept stuffed animals from strangers.”

“You really don’t remember me, do you?”

“I’m with a couple of my friends from school. We were just leaving.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “Don’t let me intrude.”

She looked at the stuffed animal in her hand and gave it back to him.

When she turned to go, he said, “It was in sixth grade.”

“What was in sixth grade?”

“When we knew each other.”

“That was years ago.”

“I know,” he said, “but I always remembered you.”

“I think you have me mixed up with somebody else.”

“It was Miss Spengler’s class. She had white hair and she looked just like the picture of George Washington hanging on the wall.”

“It wasn’t me. It was somebody else.”

“No, it was you, all right.”

Pansy and Mary Lee were standing behind Vicki-Vicki, taking in every word. Mary Lee giggled and Pansy pinched her on the arm.

“Maybe if you told me your name, I might remember.”

“It’s Harry.”

“Harry what?”

“Just Harry.”

“You don’t have a last name?”

“I was living in a foster home. I moved around a lot. I left school after a few months to go someplace else.”

“You sat in the back of the room?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You were taller than anybody else in the class.”

“I think you remember me now.”

“You were the only one in the class who could spell the hardest words.”

“That was me.”

“You had fried chicken for lunch. Everybody else had junk food.”

“What a memory you have!” he said.

She blushed, in spite of herself, and turned to Mary Lee and Pansy for support.

“Since you remember me now, I wonder if you’d let me give you a ride home.”

“What? Oh, no! As I said, I’m with some friends.”

“I can give them a ride, too.”

“I don’t think so. My friend’s mother is going to pick us up.”

“How about if you go with me, and your two friends can go with your friend’s mother.”

“I don’t think I should go off and leave them.”

“Surely they wouldn’t mind. Just this once. It’s a beautiful evening. There’s a full moon. We can go for a ride in the country. Tell me that doesn’t sound good.

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t think I should leave my friends.”

“Ask them.”

She turned away and consulted with Mary Lee and Pansy. They shook their heads and shrugged, showing how indifferent they were to Vicki-Vicki’s comings and goings.

In a minute she returned to him. “It’s all right,” she said. “My friends think I should go with you.”

She knew that if she didn’t accept his offer, there might never be another one. Never as in not ever. She’d die a dried-up old spinster, playing bingo in the church basement on Friday nights while smoking Marlboro cigarettes. She would be forced to remember that she had once been asked but had foolishly declined.

He drove far out into the country, twenty miles or more. She didn’t ask where they were going. She didn’t tell him she had to be home by a certain time. She didn’t care about any of that.

Finally he stopped on a bluff overlooking a river.

“I didn’t even know this was here,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking.

“People don’t know about it,” he said. “It’s private. That’s why I like it.”

“It’s kind of scary in the dark. You don’t know what’s lurking in those trees over there.”

“Maybe an owl or two.”

After a while she asked him about his life since sixth grade. He lived in foster homes until he was sixteen and then he struck out on his own. After he got his high school diploma, he said, he no longer needed to live with strangers.

“You’re self-sufficient. Most boys your age are still such adolescents.”

He reached her for and began kissing her. He smelled of soap and peppermint. She resisted a little bit, but not much.

“I like you,” he said. “I’ve liked you since sixth grade.”

“It’s funny how people meet again after years. When somebody appears unexpectedly in your life, I always think there’s a reason.”

“I know you didn’t think about me after the sixth grade, but I thought about you a lot. You made a very favorable impression on me.”

“Why me out of all the others?”

“You were kind to me. Nobody else bothered.”

“I’ve never done this before with a boy.”

“It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”

Soon she was on her back and he was on top of her.

When he drove her back to town, it was almost three in the morning. She was relieved to see that her house was all dark, meaning that her mother had gone to bed. She opened the door of the truck. Before she got out, he said, “I want to marry you.”

It was the last time she ever saw him.

In a few weeks she knew that something was happening with her body. She missed one cycle and then another. She was pretty sure what was wrong, but she hoped it was something else. When she told the school nurse the symptoms she was having, the nurse gave her a test to do on herself when she got home. When she saw the results of the test, she felt a stab of panic. She was going to have to tell her parents about the carnival, the boy from sixth grade, and all the rest of it. She couldn’t keep it a secret forever.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Map of the World ~ A Short Story

Map of the World image 3

Map of the World
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~ 

On the first day of the new school term, Joanne Torrance was sullen and unhappy. She wasn’t ready for summer vacation to be over; she wanted to be able to stay at home and do as she pleased all the time. It wouldn’t have mattered to her if school had never taken up again for as long as she lived. She was sure she could learn all she needed to know from reading books and magazines and seeing lots of movies and watching the really important shows on TV like Superman and Lassie and The Three Stooges.

As soon as she met her new teacher for the first time—one Ruby Chinn—she hated her on sight. She had long yellow teeth that showed even when her mouth was closed. She had dyed hair the color of beets that she wore pulled into a severe bun on top of her head that resembled a cake made out of hair and that showed the fleshy folds on the sides of her face and neck. Joanne could have told her how she might adopt a more flattering hairdo to complement her round face, but she didn’t care how ridiculous a person’s hair looked when she despised that person as much as she despised Miss Chinn.

Since it was the first day of the new term and people didn’t know each other very well, Miss Chinn had each person write his (or her, as the case may be) name on the blackboard in colored chalk. After writing his or her name, the person was to turn around and face the class and introduce himself (or herself) in a loud clear voice. The boys were then supposed to bow from the waist and the girls to curtsey. This was a chance for everybody to get to know what face went with what name. Miss Chinn referred to this exercise as an ice breaker.

When Joanne’s turn came, she went to the blackboard and picked up the pink chalk and wrote her name in a neat cursive script underneath the babyish scrawl of the person who went before her. Then she turned around and bowed from the waist instead of curtseying. A howl went up from the class and she flushed with embarrassment.

“No, no, no!” Miss Chinn said impatiently with her forefingers extended, two feet apart, as though measuring the length of a fish she had caught. “What do girls do?”

“Curtsey!” the class said in unison.

“And what do boys do?”

“Bow from the waist!”

“That’s right! Now, Joanne, I have a simple question for you and it isn’t that difficult. Are you a girl or a boy?”

Again a howl of laughter erupted from the class. They were enjoying her discomfort, which went a long way toward relieving the tedium of the first day of class.

“I’m a girl,” she said in a small voice.

“What was that?” Miss Chinn said. “I can’t hear you!”

“I said I’m a girl!”

“Well, you certainly look like a girl, but we all just saw you do the thing that boys do. Now, can you prove that you’re a girl and do what girls do?”

“No.”

“What do you mean ‘no’?”

“I mean I would rather not.”

“And why would you rather not?”

“It’s silly.”

“Not as silly as you are in refusing to do it.”

“I don’t think I have to do it just because you tell me to do it.”

Miss Chinn rolled her eyes and the class laughed again. “If there is one thing I will not tolerate in the classroom,” she bellowed, “it is insolence!”

“You and me both,” Joanne said, but not loud enough for Miss Chinn to hear it.

“You are wasting precious time! Sit down this instant! We’ll deal with this matter later.” She opened her grade book. “I could send you to the principal’s office, but I know he’s busy on the first day and would rather not be bothered, so I’m giving you a failing grade for the day. You may be the only student in the history of this school to get a failing grade for the first day of the new term.”

“Whoo-whoo-whoo!” went the class.

Joanne returned to her seat, wishing she had a pirate dagger to plunge far into the heart of Miss Chinn and everybody else in the class.

The next person to the blackboard to write her name was Veronica Kennedy. She had blonde hair and dimples and a beauty mark on her right cheek. People said she looked like a movie star and would go far in life. She already had breasts and was wearing a brassiere, the outline of which could be clearly seen through her lovely yellow blouse. She wrote her name beautifully with yellow chalk (yellow seemed to be her color) underneath Joanne’s name, and then she turned and faced the class and executed a perfect curtsey, holding her skirt out just far enough so that the edge of her underpants showed. The class erupted in cheers and applause.

“You see?” Miss Chinn said triumphantly. “That is what girls do!”

“Yaw-yaw-yaw!” went the class as Veronica Kennedy smirked with superiority and resumed her seat.

Later in the day, during the social studies lesson, Miss Chinn pulled down a map of the world like a window shade and stood before it with her pointer.

“Now,” she said, “who can tell me where Peru is?”

Joanne was the only person in the class who raised a hand.

“Come now,” Miss Chinn said. “Doesn’t anybody know where Peru is?”

Joanne raised her hand even higher. She was all the way at the back of the room, so maybe Miss Chinn hadn’t noticed her.

“Nobody?” Miss Chinn asked. “Can’t anybody tell me where Peru is? No? It’s in South America. Can anybody tell me where South America is?”

“I can!” Joanne said, waving her hand.

“Who said that?” Miss Chinn asked.

“I did!” Joanne said.

“I believe I’m had quite enough of you for one day,” Miss Chinn said. “You should know by now that we don’t speak in class until we’ve been called on. You haven’t been called on.”

“Hoo-hoooooo!” went the class.

“Now, can anybody tell me where South America is?”

Joanne lowered her hand and slumped down in her chair.

“Nobody? Shame on you! It’s right there!” She pointed to South America, outlining it with the pointer. “And there is Peru!”

During lunch in the school cafeteria, Joanne sat by herself facing the wall. She heard sniggers behind her back and knew they were coming from the next table where Veronica Kennedy and her coterie of followers were sitting. Somebody threw a wet bread ball and hit her in the side of the head, followed by a volley of snorting laughter. She was only half-finished with her lunch, but she didn’t feel like eating the rest of it and so stood up and emptied her tray and went outside.

Rosalie Dunphy was leaning against the side of the building with her head tilted back against the brick and her eyes closed, like a cat sunning itself. She was a large, silent girl with wild unkempt hair who was a couple of years older than anybody else because she had been held back two grades. Joanne knew her slightly from the year before. When she walked up to her, Rosalie opened her eyes and looked at her but didn’t move her head.

“I’d like to poison Miss Chinn,” Joanne said.

Rosalie reached in her pocket and took out a folded-up piece of paper and handed it to Joanne. “I drew this,” she said.

Joanne unfolded the paper and saw there a picture of a witch flying on a broomstick with her heels up in the air and a leer on her face. She was wearing a pointed hat and had a hump on her back and a wart on her chin with hairs coming out of it. It was a perfect likeness of Miss Chinn.

“That’s pretty good,” she said, handing the drawing back to Rosalie.

“I like to draw.”

She stood next to Rosalie against the wall and she somehow felt better and not so alone. “I hate everybody in this school,” Joanne said after a while.

“Come with me,” Rosalie said. “I have something I want to show you.”

She led the way around the building to the long flight of concrete steps that went down from the school grounds to Main Street. The steps were strictly off-limits during school hours, but that didn’t make any difference to Rosalie. She went down near the bottom of the steps and sat down. Joanne followed her and sat next to her.

“You have to promise not to tell anybody about this,” Rosalie said.

“I won’t,” Joanne said.

She reached into her pocket again and took out a package of Lucky Strike cigarettes and a little box of kitchen matches.

Joanne wanted to say is that all, but she said nothing because Rosalie surprised her by taking a cigarette out of the pack and putting it in her mouth and lighting it as expertly as if she had been smoking her whole life.

Rosalie took a deep drag on the cigarette and inhaled the smoke into her lungs. “Ah, that is so good,” she said.

After another drag, she held the cigarette out to Joanne. “Try it,” she said.

“I haven’t ever smoked before,” Joanne said.

“Try it.”

She took the cigarette from her and drew a little of the smoke into her mouth and breathed it out. “That tastes awful,” she said.

“It takes some practice before you’re any good at it,” Rosalie said.

They smoked the cigarette, handing it back and forth, until it was smoked down to the filter. Joanne didn’t like the taste of it at all, but she smiled every time she handed the cigarette back as if she approved and was enjoying it. When they heard the bell ring to go back inside, Rosalie flipped the cigarette butt away out to the street and they went back up the steps unnoticed.

That evening when Joanne was having dinner with her mother, she had been going to tell her that she had smoked her first cigarette at school that day, but she decided it wouldn’t be a good idea. She had already had enough disapproval for one day. Instead she asked her mother if she knew where Peru is.

“Isn’t that in South America?” her mother asked. “They have those strange animals with the long necks.”

“Llamas,” Joanne said.

“That’s it!”

“I’m going to murder Old Cakehead.”

“Who’s that?”

“Miss Chinn, my new teacher.”

“Well, all right,” her mother said. “Just don’t get caught. The trick is to try to make it look like an accident or to make it look like somebody else did it. Somebody you don’t like.”

At ten o’clock Joanne got into bed, but before she turned off the light she looked at the map on the wall of her room that had been there for as long as she could remember. It was somehow reassuring to look at it every night before she went to sleep. She loved the colors—the pinks, oranges, browns, greens, yellows—surrounded by a dazzling expanse of blue that was the ocean. And, yes, from looking at the map every night of her life, she knew where Peru was and just about every other country in the world. She knew a lot more than some people were willing to give her credit for.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

At the River ~ A Short Story

Floating,In,San,Marcos

At the River
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~ 

(This short story has been published in The Sim Review.)

All day long he had nothing to do. His legs didn’t work so well anymore; neither did his eyes or his ears. He slept at night and got up in the morning and there was somebody always there, sometimes a stranger he had never seen before, to help him get himself into the bathroom and dressed and downstairs to breakfast, where he sat with thirty or forty others just like him, making a mess of his oatmeal and eggs and not saying anything. After breakfast somebody always sat him down in a comfortable spot in the solarium or the TV room and he just sat there, usually all day, until they came and got him for the next meal. After that it was time to get into bed and sleep again and wake up again and get dressed and go down for breakfast and do the same thing all over again; again and again as if that was what he was put on the earth for: a lot of nothing that seemed to have no end. Whoever said life was short?

He wondered what happened to the people he used to know. Didn’t he have a wife and a couple of children? Didn’t he have at one time some grandparents, uncles and aunts, a mother and father, a sister and a couple of brothers? What happened to all of them? Did he just dream them up? Oh, yes, that’s right: one after the other they all died. He came to see life as a kind of lottery: the winners went on ahead and the losers had no other choice but to stay behind. In the end there would be one loser left, and he was it. When they were children and they played tag or kick-the-can or hide-and-seek, somebody always had to be “it.” He didn’t like being “it” then, and he didn’t like it now.

Since he had no current life to speak of, he dwelt mostly in the past. Once, when he was eight years old, he and his whole family—including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins—went on a camping trip to a river. The men went fishing while the women went in swimming. He had never fished and wasn’t interested in learning, so he stayed with the women. His mother told him he didn’t need to be embarrassed about staying with the women, but somebody always teased him about it and it hurt him enough that he thought he should probably learn to fish so it wouldn’t happen again. His mother took his swimming trunks out of her suitcase and gave them to him and told him to go into the tent and take everything off and put on the trunks and come back out as soon as he could because they were all waiting to go in swimming.

After he put on the trunks, he was ashamed of the way he looked. His arms and legs were a pale yellow color and as thin as sticks. His chest was ugly and not at all manly. His stomach stuck out farther than he would have liked. He imagined that he looked like a monkey without any hair, a shaved monkey. He couldn’t let anybody see him almost naked with just a strip of red cloth around his middle. He stayed in the tent until his mother came and pulled him out, looking plenty silly herself in her green swimsuit and matching bathing cap that wrinkled the skin on her forehead. When he insisted that he had to stay in the tent because he felt sick, she slapped at him and told him she was in no mood for any of his nonsense. He slapped her back on the arm, which later he regretted. He could tell that she wasn’t quite herself; her tongue seemed thick in her mouth and her movements were jerky; she had been drinking. She dragged him out into the sunlight and held him to her hip as if she thought he might get away if she let him go.

Nobody looked at him in his silly red swimming trunks so he started to relax. He went into the water up to his elbows and then got back out and sat on a towel in the shade on the bank. The women were splashing around in the middle of the river, talking and laughing. The older kids were playing in a spot farther off, screaming and trying to hold each other under. He wanted no part of any of them.

He realized after a while that he couldn’t just sit there all day while everybody else was having fun, so he went back to the water. He waded in slowly until he was up to his chest and then, taking a quick look over his shoulder, began walking downriver. He walked until he was out of sight and hearing of the others.

He went farther and farther, staying in the middle of the river. The farther he went the deeper the water became. It was up to his breastbone and then past his shoulders to his neck. When he looked down all he saw was green-black murkiness; he could no longer see his feet, but still he kept going.

Every couple of feet he advanced, the water came closer to swallowing him up. It was up to his chin and then to just beneath his mouth. If he stepped off a drop-off that he couldn’t see, he would go under. He knew the drop-off was there, up ahead, waiting for him; he could see it without seeing it. All he had to do was keep going and he would find it. He would drown because he had never learned to swim. And even if he had had a chance to yell before he drowned, nobody would hear him because they were all too far away. He knew, even at his young age, that he was flirting with death.

As he stood in the water up to his mouth—unable to swim if he should go under—he looked over at the river bank; at the sky and the wild foliage that began on the other side of the trees. He was watching some birds doing acrobatic loops in the air when he noticed a smell in the air, a smell that he realized had been hanging over him all day. It seemed to him to be the smell of death. He thought for a moment that it was his own death he had been smelling, but as he turned around and began walking back upriver he knew it was somebody else’s.

When he got back to camp, everybody who had been in the water earlier was now out. His mother, as he was soon to find out, had had an argument with her younger sister and swam off by herself to another part of the river. Everybody expected her to come back in a few minutes, after she cooled off, but more than an hour had gone by and nobody had seen her. They were starting to get a little worried.

After another hour or two, they were certain something bad had happened, or she would have come back on her own. Somebody drove to the nearest phone and called for help. The police came in due time and, after they had asked their myriads of questions, conducted a search of the river. They found her body near some bluffs where it had been swept by the current and become lodged against some rocks. The green bathing cap was what they saw that led them to her.

His mother’s drowning was the terrible event of his life, the one event by which all other events were measured; the event that changed everything. It was his primer in death—the death that prepared him for all the others, including his own.

Not a day—and barely a waking hour—had gone by in his life that he didn’t think of her. She was and always would be the unknowable thirty-three-year-old wife and mother of four and he, the frightened eight-year-old boy clinging to her memory. He had—and always would have—unanswered questions that only she could answer.

After dinner he had a sinking spell; he blacked out on the way to his room and fell in the hallway. The nurses got him to his room and into bed and called his doctor.

He had been dozing in the darkened room when he opened his eyes and saw a nurse he had never seen before standing beside his bed. He smiled at her and she smiled back.

“I knew you would come,” he said.

“Of course I came.”

“Where’s the green bathing cap?”

“This is my day not to wear it.”

“You don’t look a day older.”

“That’s the way it is. You look much older.”

“Isn’t it awful?”

“Don’t talk now. The doctor is on his way.”

She straightened the blanket around his shoulders and went to the window and pulled back the curtain and looked out. “It’s starting to rain,” she said.

“You won’t leave again?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I’ll be right here.”

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Find Out Where the Train is Going ~ A Short Story

Find Out Where the Train is Going image 1
Find Out Where the Train is Going
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~ 

(This short story has been published in Selected Places: An Anthology of Short Stories.)

We’re in a long room that was once used for something else. There are thirty beds in two rows. These are accommodations for guests of the state: check bouncers, bigamists, shoplifters, pickpockets, prostitutes. You could go on and on calling out their misdeeds, but why bother? They are the morally bankrupt repeat offenders who are not beyond being redeemed or reformed. Give them two years, or four or five, and they’ll be out if they’re lucky. Redeemed? Not very likely. The really bad ones, the hardened criminals, the murderers, the ones that would throw acid in your face and enjoy doing it, are in another part.

Juniper Tarrant has only been in residence for a few days. She didn’t do anything. She is innocent. She was left with some hash or blow or something—she wasn’t even sure what it was called—that belonged to her boyfriend, a man named Ed King. He disappeared and she went to jail, no matter how many times she told them it wasn’t her fault. Her one hope is that he comes back and tells them what really happened. Of course, she’s going to stick a knife in his ribs if she ever gets the chance, but that’s something that is going to have to wait.

On her fifth or sixth day (she has lost count already), her lawyer, an elderly man named Arthur Lux, comes to see her. She meets with him in a tiny room with a table and two chairs. A blank-faced guard stands against the wall, a silent observer. As she tells the lawyer again everything that happened, he writes it all down.

“When I woke up,” she says, “he was gone.”

“Who was gone?” the lawyer asks. “You have to be specific in your answers.”

“Ed King.”

“Was that his real name?”

“It’s the name he gave me.”

“Did he use any other names?”

“I don’t know. Why would he do that?”

“How long had you known him?”

“I don’t know. A few months.”

“How many months?”

“About six.”

“You didn’t know he was involved in the selling and distribution of drugs?”

“No! And if he was, I wasn’t!”

“Do you have any reason to believe he deliberately framed you?”

“No! Why would he do that?”

“So, the two of you were living in this hotel together. What was it called?”

“The Excelsior. And I wouldn’t say we were living there. We were staying there for a few days.”

“For what purpose?”

“Why does anybody stay in a hotel?”

“Hotel records show the room was registered in your name alone.”

“Ed always took the room in my name.”

“Why is that?”

“He always had the feeling that somebody was following him. Watching him.”

“And you suspected nothing?”

“No. I stayed out of his business.”

“After the Excelsior Hotel, where were you planning on going?”

“I don’t know. If Ed knew what our next move was, he hadn’t told me.”

“So, you traveled around with him from place to place and you didn’t know what kind of activities he was involved in?”

“He told me he was a salesman.”

“What did he tell you he sold?”

“In his day he sold cars, washing machines, life insurance policies and other things, too. He didn’t like to talk about it.”

“And you didn’t question him?”

“Why should I?”

“And you thought he was a perfectly legitimate salesman?”

“I had no reason to believe otherwise.”

Arthur Lux closes his notebook, puts his pen away and places one hand on top of the other. “Would you be able to identify him if you saw him again?” he asks.

“Of course!” she says.

“Were you in love with him?”

“I thought I was but right now I hate him so much I could kill him.”

“Did you give him money?”

 She shrugs and pushes her hair back out of her face. “All I had,” she says.

“How much?”

“Five thousand dollars and some change.”

“It seems he did you a dirty deed.”

“If he would only come back and square me with the police,” she says. “Tell them the truth about what really happened. That’s all I ask. I would never bother him again.”

“Maybe you should be more prudent in your associations in the future,” Arthur Lux says with a sad smile.

“Thanks for the advice. It’s a little late.”

“We’re doing all we can but, in spite of our best efforts, we haven’t been able to locate him.”

“You’ve got to find him!”

“There’s no indication that he even exists.”

“What are you saying? Do you think I made him up?”

“I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that he probably gave you a false name and that he planned on running out on you from the very beginning.”

“I fell for his line. I was such a fool.”

“We’re all fools.”

“Can’t you pull some strings to get me out of here? Some writ of habeas corpus or something? I don’t belong in prison.”

Arthur Lux reaches across the table and pats her arm. “Don’t despair, my dear. Something is bound to turn up.”

Now, every night at nine-ten, just before lights out, a passenger train goes by the prison. For fifteen or twenty seconds the long room with the thirty beds is filled with the clatter and excitement of a train on its way to some undisclosed location. Some of the prisoners cover their heads with their pillows to try to drown it out, while others wait to catch a glimpse of it and, if the light is just right, to catch a glimpse of some of the people riding on it. The train goes by so fast that it is just a blur, but some of the prisoners claim to have seen passengers on the train that they recognized. One woman said she saw her husband who was supposed to be in a mental institution but was obviously out having a good time. Another claimed to see the daughter and son, twins, that she gave up for adoption at the time of their birth twenty-seven years earlier.

Juniper Tarrant falls into the habit of watching the train every night. She is one of those who, for a few seconds at least, feels a curious sense of release and possibility as the train goes by in the night. As long as trains carry happy people from city to city, the world cannot be all terrible and bad. Some day I’ll be free and I’ll be the one on the train.

After a week or so of watching the train, she sees Ed King, looking out at her from one of the sleek passenger cars that glides through the night like a bullet. She sees his face so clearly she cannot be mistaken: the dark hair with a little gray mixed in, the brown-green eyes, the little scar above the right eyebrow, the commanding chin. He is wearing a gray suit with a light-blue shirt and a red tie. She remembers the tie. It was the one tie of his that he liked the best.

She turns away from the window, lets out a little cry and is sick. Lying on the floor, she has a kind of seizure. The prisoner in the bed next to her calls for help and she is taken to the infirmary. When the doctor examines her, he tells her she is going to be a mother in about seven months time.

She is given a sedative and kept in the infirmary overnight for observation. In the morning she is desperate to talk to Arthur Lux, her lawyer. When she asks to call him, she is denied. (“What do you think this is, a finishing school?”) One of the matrons will try to get a message to him if she can. The message is simple: I saw Ed King on the train. Find out where the train is going and there you will find Ed King.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997