Tag: fiction

And That Includes Cab Fare

And That Includes Cab Fare ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Mrs. Deal was eighty-five and had more cobwebs in her head than the basement and attic combined. She could no longer be trusted to stay at home by herself. She had been known to leave the front door open all night in the winter or turn the burners on in the kitchen and let dangerous amounts of gas escape into the room before she noticed the blue flame hadn’t come on the way it was supposed to. Her daughter, Patsy Ruth, age sixty-three, left her latest husband in the city and went to live with Mrs. Deal in her old-fashioned house on a corner lot in a small provincial town a good five-hour drive away.

Patsy Ruth had smothering emphysema from a lifetime of smoking Camel cigarettes, but her more immediate problem was her fragile nerves. She took little yellow pills her doctor had prescribed, sometimes twice the number she was supposed to, but still, no matter how many pills she took, Mrs. Deal tried her nerves almost beyond endurance. Mother and daughter had never been on the best of terms anyway, going all the way back to the beginning, and it was an almost impossible situation with them both living under the same roof. Mrs. Deal was stubborn on principle; it if was mealtime, she wasn’t hungry and refused to eat. At bedtime she refused to have the light off. Patsy Ruth thought at times about taking the whole bottle of yellow pills at once and getting into her big four-poster bed and going to sleep and never waking up, or going down to the railroad trestle and jumping into the shallow, muddy water a hundred feet below.

“I’m not a well woman,” she was fond of saying to anybody that would listen. “I still have my own life to live.”

To have an occasional “day off,” Patsy Ruth had to engage the services of a “woman” who was willing to spend a day, or at least part of an afternoon, sitting with an impossible old woman and keeping her from doing any harm to herself or to the house. When Mrs. Ida Stroud answered Patsy Ruth’s newspaper ad the first day it appeared, she seemed ideal; she had sat with old people before, she said, had some nursing experience, and lived only a short distance away. Patsy Ruth would have to pay for her to take a cab, though; Mrs. Stroud was fat, had painful varicose veins, and wasn’t able to walk very far.

“I guess we can manage the cab fare,” Patsy Ruth blatted into the phone, delighted that she had found the right person so easily and on the first day.

On Saturday, Patsy Ruth was going to visit the dentist, meet a friend for lunch and see a two o’clock matinee movie. She arranged with Ida Stroud to come on that day.

Patsy Ruth was gratified that Ida Stroud arrived on time on Saturday morning but was a little dismayed to see that she had brought her thirteen-year-old daughter, Stella, along with her.

“Stella don’t cause no trouble,” Ida said. “I can’t leave her at home by herself. She gets into too much mischief.”

Stella Stroud was a pale, skeletal girl with a permanent scowl on her face and dark circles around her eyes. Refusing to say hello to Patsy Ruth or to Mrs. Deal, she slumped down on the couch, folded her arms and yawned.

“We’ll all get along just fine!” Ida gushed. “We’re going to have a fine time, aren’t we? Everything will be just fine.”

“I’ll be back around six,” Patsy Ruth said.

“Don’t give us a thought!” Ida said. “We’ll all be just fine!”

“Do you mean I have to stay in this hell hole all day until six o’clock?” Stella asked after Patsy Ruth was gone.

“Find something to do,” Ida said. “Go outside and commune with nature.”

“I don’t want to go outside!” Stella said. “I didn’t want to come here in the first place!”

“Sit there and be miserable, then! I don’t care!”

“You’re just a horrible old woman, you know that?” Stella said.

Of Ida’s eight children, Stella at thirteen was the youngest. Mr. Stroud had been dead for many years, the victim of a bad heart passed down to him through father, grandfather and great-grandfather.

Ida beamed at Mrs. Deal. “You certainly are a lucky woman,” she said. “You have your daughter to look after you and you live in this fine, big house. That’s as much as any Christian woman might expect.”

“I’m a Methodist,” Mrs. Deal said.

“Where’s your husband?” Stella asked.

“He died.”

“What did he die of?”

“Shut up!” Ida said. “You’re not supposed to ask questions like that!”

“Well, I just wondered!”

 “Would you like a piece of butterscotch?” Mrs. Deal asked. “My daughter buys this butterscotch candy for me when she goes to the store.”

“No, thank you, dear,” Ida said.

“Haven’t you got any peppermint?” Stella asked. “I hate butterscotch.”

Ida gave Stella a warning look. “If you can’t be nice,” she said. “I’m going to slap you silly.”

“Well, let’s talk about something interesting,” Stella said. “I have sleep apnea. I could die in my sleep any night.”

 “Nobody wants to hear about that,” Ida said.

“Well, I don’t know why the hell not! I think it’s very interesting!”

“You think it’s interesting because it’s about you! You need to learn that the world doesn’t revolve around you! And I told you not to use words like that!”

“Words like what?”

“You know perfectly well what I’m talking about!”

“Well, pardon the hell out of me! I have to go to the bathroom! Where is it?”

“Ask Mrs. Deal,” Ida said. “It’s her house.”

“All right. What’s her first name?”

“You’re not supposed to use her first name, silly! Call her ‘Mrs. Deal’.”

“All right. Mrs. Deal, honey, I need to use your bathroom. Is that okay?”

“What?” Mrs. Deal said.

“She wants to know where the bathroom is,” Ida said.

“Oh. Go through the dining room into the back part of the house.”

Stella leapt to her feet. “It’s always so interesting to see other people’s bathrooms!”

“And don’t break nothing, either,” Ida said.

When Stella had gone out of the room, Ida gave Mrs. Deal a sad smile. “Kids!” she said. “This girl has given me more trouble than all my others put together. From the time she was born, she was trouble with a capital T, morning, noon and night. She would lie in her crib and scream all day long and all night. I told my husband I wasn’t having any more children because I was afraid they’d turn out like her. He didn’t care if we had another dozen because I did all the work of takin’ care of them. He made the living for the family, but that was all he ever did. At home he never lifted a finger.”

“I had three children,” Mrs. Deal said, “but only one of them is still alive.”

“All of mine are still alive!” Ida said. “I rue the day! Now, let me tell you, that Stella has had a rough time of it her whole life. When she was just a baby, she had yellow jaundice, whooping cough and I don’t know what all. You name it, she had it. And from the time she started to kindergarten, it’s been one problem right after another. She wet her pants just to defy the teacher and she refused to sit still and pay attention. Finally the school gave her a test and they said she wasn’t right in the head and they put her out! Can you imagine putting a child out of school? Then we had to send her to a special school in another town and, believe me, it cost a lot!”

“Maybe it’s just better not to have any children,” Mrs. Deal said. “I had three and both my boys are dead. One died two days after he was born.”

“Oh, isn’t that a shame! But it’s such a blessing to you that you still have your daughter. She lives with you and takes care of you.”

“She wants to put me in a nursing home so she can get married again. She’s been making a lot of calls, asking questions. She thinks I don’t know what she’s up to, but I’m not as stupid as she thinks I am.”

“I’d have you come and live with me,” Ida said, “but we live in such a small house. Not big like this one.”

“She’s still married to that last husband of hers, but here she is scouting around for the next one. She’s had I don’t know many husbands.”

“No!” Ida said. “And she seems like such a nice woman!”

“One of them she was married to twice.”

“Some people is like that. Can’t seem to find what they’re looking for.”

“My son was married two different times,” Mrs. Deal said. “He was an alcoholic and died at age thirty-five. Even younger than his father.”

“Isn’t that sad! Well, I guess we learn tribulation through our children if nothing else.”

“That’s what I mean,” Mrs. Deal said. “It’s probably better not to have any children at all.”

“Then we’d be alone, I guess, and that might be even worse.”

Stella came back from the bathroom smiling and wiping her hands on the seat of her pants.

“What were you doing in there so long?” Ida asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“You weren’t smoking, were you?”

“Don’t be re-dick! I don’t have any cigarettes!”

“Mrs. Deal and I were just swapping stories about our children.”

“I bet you told her how awful I am, didn’t you?” Stella said.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I’m not ever having any kids. I don’t want the little son-of-a-bitches.”

“You shouldn’t say that,” Ida said. “You don’t know what the future holds for you. You’ll meet a wonderful man.”

“Hah-hah! Where?”

“You’ll get married and live in lovely little house and you’ll realize after a while that something is missing and that something is little ones. After you’ve had one, you’ll want another and then another and then another.”

“You are so full of shit!” Stella said.

“Hey! I warned you about using that kind of language! One more word like that, and you’re going to have to wait outside on the front porch until six o’clock. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“Oh, you know what you can do, don’t you?”

“I don’t want to hear another word out of you!”

“I just remembered,” Stella said. “Today is my birthday.”

“No, it ain’t, either,” Ida said. “Your birthday is in April. This is October.”

“I can make today my birthday if I want, can’t I? It’s such a boring, terrible day, I can say it’s my birthday just to help make it a little bit special, even if it’s not really my birthday.”

“No, you can’t, or if you do, just do it silently and don’t say anything!”

“I wonder if I’ll get any presents?”

“No, you won’t, so just forget about it!”

“When I get a little older, I’m going to run away from home!”

“Why wait?” Ida said. “Go now! Go anytime! You have my blessing!

“I’m not going to hang around this stupid, dead town and have a bunch of ugly babies and be just like everybody else. I’m going to Hollywood and I’m going to be a big movie star and when that happens, you’ll be sorry you were ever mean to me!”

“Send me a postcard!”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to be rid of me!”

“You try the patience of a saint!”

Stella said to Mrs. Deal, “You see what a crazy old bitch my mother is, don’t you? And she never stops being crazy! She’s crazy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week! It’s a wonder I just don’t shoot myself!”

Ida stood up, took three elephantine steps, and in one deft motion, slapped Stella across the mouth. “I don’t want to hear another peep out of you for the rest of the day!”

Stella sobbed and rubbed her cheek and was sullen for the rest of the morning.

At noontime, Ida went into the kitchen to fix lunch, leaving Stella and Mrs. Deal alone together.

“My mother says you’re a tiresome old woman,” Stella said.

“She can leave any time,” Mrs. Deal said.

“Did you ever see anybody talk as much and not say anything at all? She’s like a big gas balloon with a leak. And did you ever see anybody so fat in all your life? Lord God! I’m embarrassed to be seen walking down the street with her.”

“Stick a pin in her,” Mrs. Deal said.

“Did you know I have a boyfriend? I’ll bet you’re kind of surprised to hear that about me, aren’t you? He’s sixteen and he has his driver’s license. He hasn’t got his own car yet, but he can borrow his brother’s car any time he wants. He’s coming to pick me up tonight. My mother doesn’t want me to go out with him, so I’ll tell her I’m going to a girlfriend’s house. She’ll never know the difference. And me and my boyfriend? We’ll drive out someplace to a secluded, romantic spot, and when we’re sure there’s nobody around we’ll get into the back seat and make love. Doesn’t that sound romantic? I’m a very romantic person, but I guess you can tell that just by looking at me.”

When lunch was ready, Ida took one of Mrs. Deal’s arms and Stella took the other arm and helped her into the kitchen.

“I’m not helpless, you know!” Mrs. Deal said.

Lunch was canned tomato soup and dainty little baloney sandwiches with the crust cut off. Ida was of the opinion that bread crust made old people choke.

“I don’t like tomato soup,” Stella said.

They ate in silence. Stella discovered she could eat the tomato soup as long as she soaked bread in it first. When Mrs. Deal was finished eating (hardly anything at all), she said she was sleepy and wanted to take her nap. Ida helped her into her bedroom, covered her up with an afghan and went back into the kitchen.

Stella was still sitting at the kitchen table, looking at something she held in the palm of her hand.

“What is that you’ve got there?” Ida asked her.

“Nothing,” Stella said.

Ida grabbed Stella by the wrist and made her drop what she was holding. It was a pair of little gold earrings.

“Where did you get those?” Ida asked.

“I found them in the bathroom.”

“Stole them in the bathroom is more like it.”

“It doesn’t concern you.”

“It concerns me if that daughter knows that you’ve been stealing from them and fires me. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s all I have coming in right now.

“She’ll never know I took them.”

“Put them back right now or I’m going to shake your head so hard it’ll fall off your shoulders.”

“Not on your life! You get paid for sitting around this dump all day, while I get nothing! Isn’t my time worth something? I’ll be lucky to get five dollars for these. I’m not even sure if they’re real gold.”

“It breaks my heart to know I have an unrepentant thief for a daughter.”

“There’s worse things.”

“If Mrs. Deal and her daughter find out you do such things, they’ll think you’re just terrible!”

“They won’t find out.”

“When that daughter comes back, I want you to tell her you found those earrings on the floor and then give them back to her. Then she’ll know you’re acting in good faith.”

“Screw good faith! I’m not gonna tell her anything!”

“If you won’t tell her, I will! Do you want her to know you’re a thief?”

When Patsy Ruth returned home, she was in a happy frame of mind, with smiles all around. “I’ve had the most relaxing day,” she said. “Sometimes all a person needs is to get away from home for a few hours.”

“I know just what you mean,” Ida said. “We had a lovely visit with your dear mother and the time just flew by.”

Patsy Ruth paid Ida, plus cab fare, plus an extra five dollars since everything went so well.

“Now I can pay the light bill,” Ida said.

Ida and Stella put on their coats and made ready to leave.

“Stella has something she wants to tell you before we go,” Ida said to Patsy Ruth.

“What is it, dear?”

“Go ahead and tell her while I call the cab,” Ida said.

Stella hesitated until Ida was in the kitchen, where the phone was. “I just wanted to say…”

“Yes?” Patsy Ruth said.

“I just wanted to tell you there’s a bad smell in your bathroom. I think it might be coming from underneath the floor.”

“Oh, really? I haven’t noticed any smell.”

“Some people can smell things that other people can’t.”

In just a minute, Ida came back into the room. “The cab will be here in two shakes,” she said.

“Finally, I can go home!” Stella said.

Patsy Ruth opened the front door and gave Ida a friendly pat on the shoulder as she passed through. Stella refused to look at her or return her smile.

Patsy Ruth sat down on the couch facing Mrs. Deal and lit a cigarette. Her smile had turned into a scowl, the scowl that Stella wore as she went out the door. The happiness she felt when she came home had left her. The good day was at an end and now it was time to return to the ugly reality of living in the same house with her mother.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

A New Ricky in Their Midst

 

A New Ricky in Their Midst ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

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

“What’s wrong, honey?” Ethel asked.

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

“What happened?”

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

“You and Ricky have another fight?”

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

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

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

“It can’t be all that bad!”

“This time it is!”

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

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

“Just say it. You’ll feel better.”

“I’ve killed Ricky!”

“What?”

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

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

“I know! It’s terrible!”

“Are you sure he’s dead?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, Lucy! What did you do then?”

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

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

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

“What did you do then?”

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

“Oh, Lucy! The neck?”

“I severed the jugular vein in one stroke!”

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

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

“And where is he now?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Well, I…”

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

“She what?”

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

“Have you called the police?”

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

“Help you do what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

“Yeah, he had a girlfriend named Delores.”

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

“No less than she deserves!” Ethel said.

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

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

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

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

“On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

What Better Night Than Christmas Eve?

What Better Night than Christmas Eve? ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in Ethereal Tales. This is a repost.)

Agnes Victoriana Wellington was, by all accounts, an incorrigible—some might even say an evil—child. As a baby, she would lie in her crib and scream hour after hour for no apparent reason until the neighbors would believe her mama was sticking pins into her flesh for amusement. At ten years old she was expelled from school because she was a perpetually disruptive influence in the classroom. Her mama and papa took her to a succession of doctors, all of whom assured them she was sound in mind and body, without any discernible physical or mental ailment that would cause her to behave in so frightful a manner. The only explanation that any of them could offer was that she might be possessed of a demon that wouldn’t desist until he had taken her back to hell with him.

Released from the imperative of attending school, Agnes was made to stay at home all the time, where she pushed her mama and papa to the limits of their endurance. She screamed and raged and fussed and threw any object that wasn’t too heavy for her to pick up. She tormented her younger brother and sister, Wallingford and Floretta, without mercy. She tied Wallingford to a tree and attempted to burn him at the stake. When Floretta was asleep in her bed, recovering from the scarlet fever, she glued her toes together and painted her lips with red ink. When her mother refused to buy her a new pair of boots, she took a kitchen knife and cut up her old ones. She called her papa an ignorant old fool. Her most hideous act of all, though, was taking all her clothes out of her closet and piling them in the middle of the floor and setting fire to them, putting herself and her family and all they possessed in grave danger.

After the fire, papa and mama were at the end of their tether. They could tolerate Agnes no longer. If they were to allow her to continue on the same path of destruction, they might very well all end up in a row of graves in the cemetery. They had little Wallingford and Floretta to think of, both of whom were blameless and deserving of a happy and peaceful life. As a final alternative and the only remaining hope, they agreed to place Agnes in the Mountainview Sanatorium for the Criminally Insane, where a certain doctor, a Doctor Pretorius, was known to have helped such patients with his progressive methods of treatment, about which nothing was known to the outside world.

Doctor Pretorius took Agnes in hand. He had her confined to a solitary room on the top floor of the Sanatorium and gave her anything she asked for and lots of good food to eat. After a lengthy period of carefully studying her and analyzing her and filling a notebook with his notes and consulting with a dozen other of his colleagues, he arrived at the conclusion that she was indeed possessed of a demon; a very unusual and rare type of demon that he had never seen before; a demon thousands of years old that was from a very deep and isolated station in hell. And, yes, it was true, as an earlier physician had suggested, the demon, for reasons known only to him, had claimed little Agnes as his own while she was still in the womb, his intention being to take her back to hell with him and make her his consort in evil. Evil was as much a part of her as her leg or her heart or her skin, which was as good an explanation as any that had ever been offered for why she was the way she was.

The question confronting Doctor Pretorius was how he was going to make Agnes the good and docile girl she should have always been and so return her to the bosom of her family to live a normal life. He tried many failed experiments with different anodynes, but nothing seemed to change Agnes for the better. One night, after a long and difficult day, he fell asleep in his study and, while asleep, he dreamed a vivid dream. In the dream, as he was walking along a lonely and deserted country road, he met a being surrounded by a kind of a glow, who told him that the only thing that was going to help poor Agnes was to eat human flesh and lots of it. Human flesh consumed daily was the only remedy that was going to keep the demon at bay and allow Agnes to live the kind of life that a child her age should be living.

Doctor Pretorius wasted no time in serving Agnes large portions of human flesh. In no time at all she began to show marked improvement. She began reading books, playing card games, working puzzles, and doing needlework like other little girls. She stopped having temper tantrums and throwing things and playing mean tricks on people. Doctor Pretorius and his staff were delighted with her progress.

Since the year was getting on to its close and the Christmas season was approaching, Agnes’s mama and papa asked Doctor Pretorius if Agnes might be allowed to return to her home and family for the blessed holiday. Doctor Pretorius harbored serious doubts about returning Agnes to the world and society just yet, but, after careful deliberation and prayer, he decided to allow her to go home for the last two weeks in December if, at the end of that time, she would return to the Sanatorium for continued rest and treatment.

Agnes’s papa, mama, brother and sister were surprised at how much she had changed in the Sanatorium (she had put on a lot of weight from her rich diet), but they were happy nonetheless to have her home again and happier still that she was docile, sweet and kind. The frightening, horrible little person that she had been was, for the moment at least, a thing of the past.

The next few days after Agnes’s return home were happy ones. She discovered she liked helping out in the kitchen and doing housework. She became reacquainted with Wallingford and Floretta, spending many happy hours talking, playing games, romping with the dogs and taking long walks around the countryside. She was never once tempted to eat them. At mealtime, she would decline the slices of roast beef or wedges of pork, saying she had become a vegetarian. She ate very modestly of vegetables and fruits, longing for the chance to leave the house to obtain the kind of sustenance she really needed.

It was after everybody had gone to their rooms and gone to sleep at night that Agnes slipped out of the house as quietly as she could to feed. On Doctor Pretorius’s advice, she walked miles away from home out into the countryside. People in the country weren’t as easy to find as in town, but the ones she found were choice, and she had the advantage of not being seen. She ate a twelve-year-old boy who was walking along the road at midnight (sweet and tender) and the next night a farmer’s wife who had insomnia (stringy but with lots of meat). There were a boy and a girl parked on lover’s lane (a rare double event), a young doctor out on a night call (muscular with a chemical taste), and a young married woman out to meet her lover in the middle of the night (a wild, gamy taste). Always she would get herself cleaned up and return home to her room before the sun came up. Nobody in her family ever knew of her nightly peregrinations.

As Christmas was fast approaching, Agnes and the other children were making excited preparations. They put up a beautiful tall tree that they cut down in the woods near their home and decorated it with as many baubles and decorations as it would hold. Their mama had instructed them to each make a list to present to Santa Claus. Whether or not Santa Claus would comply with their lists was another matter. Agnes wrote on her list that she wanted a family of dolls and a perambulator to push them around in, a miniature tea set and a wooden circus set. In her earlier life, before she went to the Sanatorium, she would have asked for a set of knives, poison darts and a blowgun to shoot them, and a prosthetic leg.

On Christmas Eve, all the presents were wrapped and under the tree. The house was gaily decorated from top to bottom; snow was whirling past the windows, adding to the feeling of Christmas. Agnes went into her room to go to bed at the same time that Wallingford and Floretta and mama and papa went into their rooms, but she was too excited to sleep, and at about a quarter to twelve she went back downstairs. She somehow had the feeling that Santa Claus would arrive at midnight and she wanted to meet him face to face and have a few words with him; it might be the only chance she would ever have to see him up close.

She sat down in papa’s big chair facing the low-burning fire and covered up with a lap robe and went fast asleep without meaning to. The clock chiming midnight woke her up. She opened her eyes and saw a man standing in the middle of the room looking at her. She knew without being told that he was the demon. He looked like an ordinary man except that he had yellow eyes. If he had horns or a tail, she couldn’t see them because he was wearing a Derby hat and a long black topcoat.

“May I extend to you all the felicitations of the season,” the demon said cordially as she pulled herself up in the chair.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “You can’t bother me as long as I’m eating human flesh. Doctor Pretorius said so.”

“Ah, yes, Doctor Pretorius. I have to commend him for discovering my one weakness. Eating flesh is the one thing I cannot abide. It’s something I would never do.”

“Well, that’s why I doing it,” she said. “To keep you away from me. I’m not doing it because I’m a ghoul. I don’t really enjoy doing it.”

“Why aren’t you out feeding your voracious appetite? You haven’t fed since last night and you’re nearly famished.”

“If it’s any of your business, I’m waiting to meet Santa Claus and after I’ve met him I’m going out to feed.”

“Ah, yes, the Jolly Old Elf himself. I know him well.”

“So why don’t you just leave now before papa wakes up and comes after you with his shotgun? You’re not wanted here.”

“I’ve come to take you with me. What better night than Christmas Eve?”

“I’m not going anywhere!”

“Do you think you can go on killing people forever just to keep up appearances? Think how it will affect your family when they find out you kill people and eat them.”

“That isn’t any of your business!”

“When they find out what you are and what you do, it will be the end of them. Do you want that on your conscience? It’s better that you come with me now to spare them the degradation.”

“I can scream and wake everybody up if you don’t leave!”

“How foolish you are! What good do you think that will do? You would just put everyone in danger.”

Just then Floretta came down the stairs on padded feet. “I heard a noise,” she said, “and I thought maybe it was Santa Claus.” When she saw the man standing in the middle of the room talking to Agnes, she stopped in her tracks.

“Who’s he?” she asked. “If that’s Santa Claus, where’s his bag of toys?”

“It’s no one,” Agnes said. “He was just leaving.”

“This doesn’t concern you, little girl,” the demon said. “Why don’t you just run along and mind your own business?”

“Go back to bed,” Agnes said. “Santa Claus won’t come until you’re asleep. He doesn’t want you to see him.”

“I’m going to get papa,” Floretta said.

“I can take two as easily as one,” the demon said.

“What’s he talking about?” Floretta asked. “Take two where?”

“He’s just talking nonsense,” Agnes said. “He’s not right in the head. And he’s just leaving.”

“All right,” the demon said, “I’ll go.”

“Good!”

“If you won’t go with me, though, I’ll take her.” He pointed his long finger at Floretta.

“You’re not taking her or anybody!”

“All right, then. You win. But before I go I want you to show me how it’s done. With her.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know it’s past time for you to feed, and you are ravenous with hunger. You have this delicious little creature standing right before you. Show me how you do it and I’ll go away and leave you alone. Forever.”

“What does he mean?” Floretta asked.

“He’s just making a little joke,” Agnes said.

“You have two choices,” the demon said, “and you know what they are.”

“If I go with you, you won’t hurt her?”

“On my word of honor.”

“And if I were to eat her, as you want me to do, you would go away and not bother me again?”

“Do you have any reason to doubt?”

“It’s not a difficult decision. I’ll go with you, but on one condition.”

“And what is that, dear child?”

“That you never bother her or any of my family.”

“You have my solemn oath.”

“All right, then. I’ll go with you.”

“A wise decision. Come.” He held out his hand and Agnes stood up.

“Tell mama and papa I’ll be all right where I’m going and not to worry,” Agnes said to Floretta.

Floretta opened her mouth to ask Agnes exactly where it was she was going, but a commotion coming from the direction of the fireplace silenced her. She ran and stood in the corner, where she could duck down behind the sofa if she needed to.

With a great clatter, accompanied by a huffing and groaning, Santa Claus came into the room by way of the fireplace, careful not to let the flames touch his boots. When he was all the way in the room, pulling his huge bag of toys, he stood upright and straightened his cap and brushed the soot off his sleeves. That’s when he saw the demon standing across the room looking at him with his yellow eyes.

“What are you doing here?” Santa asked, recognizing the demon on sight.

“If it’s any of your business,” the demon said, “I came to keep a rendezvous with little Agnes here.”

“Is this true?” Santa asked Agnes.

“Well, in a way I suppose it is true, but that doesn’t mean I want to go with him! I just struck a bargain that I would go live with him in hell and be his consort in exchange for his promise to leave Floretta and the rest of my family alone.”

“My, my, my!” Santa said. “You should never strike a bargain with a demon!”

“I know it was stupid but I had no other choice.”

“My dear, you always have a choice,” Santa said and laughed his characteristic laugh.

“It’s been lovely chatting like this,” the demon said, “but it’s time we were going.”

“Whatever possesses you to transact this kind of business on Christmas Eve?” Santa asked the demon. “Have you no delicacy? Have you no respect for tradition?”

“Is there any way you can help me, Santa?” Agnes asked.

“Don’t worry, child! I have a plan.”

“You should just stay out of this,” the demon said. “It’s none of your affair. Why don’t you just drop off your toys or whatever it is you do and then be on your way? I’m sure your reindeer are getting impatient.”

Santa smiled broadly at the mention of his reindeer and opened his black bag and pulled out the corpse of a recently deceased girl-child. He laid her out on the rug in front of the fireplace and gestured dramatically with both hands.

“She got in the way of my sleigh,” he said, “and my reindeer trampled her to death not ten minutes ago. I hated to leave her lying in the snow for the wolves to tear apart, so I stuffed her into my bag. I planned to take her back to the North Pole and instruct my elves to give her a decent burial.”

With a gesture from Santa, Agnes approached the tiny corpse lying on the rug and devoured it whole in the blink of an eye. She had become expert at feeding with no mess and no spilled blood.

The demon bent over double as if he had received a blow to the back of the head. He held his stomach with both hands and retched violently. When he was able to speak again, he said, through clenched teeth, “I’ll get you for this!”

“Hah!” Santa said with a hearty laugh. “You’re no match for me and you never were! Go on back to hell where you belong and don’t bother these children again!”

“All right, I’m going,” the demon said, and to Agnes he said, “You may have won this battle, but you haven’t won the war. I’ll be back. On that you may depend.” Then he disappeared as if he had been a mirage all along.

“What just happened here?” Floretta asked, speaking for the first time since Santa came into the room.

“You really are a saint,” Agnes said to Santa with tears in her eyes.

“I help wherever I can,” Santa said modestly.

“I’m afraid the demon is right, though. He will be back. Maybe not today or tomorrow but when I least expect it. He’ll have his way with me in the end.”

“Wait a minute,” Santa said. “I have something else for you.”

He reached into his bag and pulled out an old-fashioned locket on a chain and handed it to Agnes.

“It’s lovely,” Agnes said, “but what is it?”

“It’s a Holy Relic. It contains a sliver of the shin bone of St. Peter. Wear it around your neck always and I guarantee the demon won’t be able to stand to come near you again.”

“How can I ever thank you enough?” Agnes asked, putting the locket around her neck.

“Make amends with the world,” Santa said. “Make yourself worthy.”

With those words, he went about his business of placing the presents under the tree and when he was finished he climbed up the chimney as nimbly as a squirrel and was gone.

“Imagine that!” Floretta said, not being able for the moment to think of anything else to say.

Agnes wore the Holy Relic locket around her neck throughout her long life and was never bothered by the demon again. To atone for the people she had killed and eaten (never-to-be-explained disappearances), she dedicated her life to helping others. Through her charitable works and her countless good deeds, she saved many more lives than she had ever taken. Floretta, for her part, woke up in her bed on Christmas morning believing the scene she had witnessed involving Agnes, the demon, and Santa had been nothing but a dream.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

He’s Going to Kill Me

He’s Going to Kill Me ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

“You’ve just got to let me stay here for a few days, honey!” Madge Rapf said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Irene Jansen said.

“Why not? The place is plenty big enough for both of us.”

“It’s not that. It’s…”

“I’m scared to go home! Vincent Parry has escaped from jail. He’s going to kill me for testifying against him in his murder trial!”

“If he has escaped…”

“Oh, he has!”

“Well, if he has escaped, I don’t think he’ll stay around here. He’ll get as far away as he can.”

“Oh, no, honey! He’s out for revenge!” Madge said. “He’s already killed George Fellsinger!”

“Why would he kill George?”

“I don’t know, but George’s head was smashed in with his trumpet, and the only two sets of fingerprints on the trumpet were George’s and Vincent’s.”

“That probably isn’t true,” Irene said.

“Do you think I’d make up something like that?”

“I don’t know, dear. Would you?”

“Oh, Irene! You’ve got to listen to reason! I can’t go home! I’m scared half out of my wits! I’m so scared I don’t know what to do!”

“Why don’t you call the police?”

“And what would they do?”

“I don’t know. Assign somebody to guard you, I guess.”

“They don’t care about me!”

“Well, I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re going to do, but you can’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“Because Bob is coming over. He’ll be here any minute. We have a date.”

“Oh, Bob! What do I care about Bob? I’ll just hide myself away upstairs in your bedroom and Bob will never know I’m here!”

She started for the stairs, but Irene stopped her. “You can’t do that, Madge!”

“Why not? Have you got somebody up there?”

“Just try to calm yourself down, dear. I’m sure you’re all worked up over nothing. Help yourself to a scotch and soda. Take a few deep breaths and I’ll call you a taxi.”

The doorbell rang and it was Bob. Irene let him in. He was smiling until he saw Madge.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Oh, Bob!” Madge said. “You’re the last person I wanted to see!”

“What’s going on?” Bob asked Irene.

“She’s heard that Vincent Parry’s escaped from prison and she’s convinced he’s going to kill her.”

“He has escaped and he is going to kill me!” Madge said.

“It’s highly unlikely,” Bob said.

“I’m afraid we’ll have to postpone our date tonight, Bob,” Irene said.

“All right,” Bob said, “but I don’t like it.”

“Oh, who cares whether you like it or not?” Madge said. “You make me sick!”

“No, I’ll tell you about sick,” Bob said. “When I think that I almost married you, I want to jump out the window and kill myself!”

“Oh, why don’t you go ahead and do it? I’ll stand by and enjoy every second of it!”

“Will you take her home, Bob, and try to calm her down?”

“Only for you,” he said.

“I don’t want him to take me home,” Madge said. “I think I’d rather have Vincent Parry get me.”

“Madge, that isn’t very nice,” Irene said.

“Well, I’m just not a in a very nice mood right now,” Madge said.

“If I have to take her home, I will,” Bob said, “but I don’t guarantee that I won’t kill her myself.”

“Oh, you just go ahead and try it!” Madge said.

“Well, let’s get going,” Bob said. “The quicker I can get her home, the quicker I’ll be rid of her!”

“And don’t expect me to ask you in, either!” Madge said.

“Oh, boo-hoo!” he said.

“Well, how about if I call you tomorrow, then, hon?” Madge asked Irene with a bright smile.

“I think I’m going to be busy tomorrow,” Irene said.

“How about the next day, then? We can have lunch.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, maybe next week,” Madge said.

“You’re going to have to hit her with the sofa to get her to take a hint,” Bob said.

With Bob and Madge gone and the door triple-locked, Irene breathed easier. She went up the stairs and knocked lightly on the door to the bedroom.

“Yeah!” came the voice from inside.

She pushed open the door and there was none other than prison escapee Vincent Parry sitting on the side of the bed.

“They’re gone,” she said.

“Who’s Bob?” Vincent asked.

“Just a guy. He used to be engaged to Madge.”

“Until you cut in?”

“No, nothing like that. I really don’t know him very well. We’ve been out together a few times. Nothing serious.”

“It’s none of my business,” he said with a shrug.

“Did you kill George Fellsinger?” she asked.

“No, but I was there right after it happened and I saw George on the floor. It’s true my fingerprints were on the trumpet, but I didn’t kill him. I was there earlier and he wanted me to see the semi-precious stones inlaid in the keys. If my fingerprints and his were the only ones on the trumpet, then that means that whoever used it as a murder weapon wore gloves.”

“I knew there had to be an explanation.”

“I would never have killed George. He was going to hide me out at his place for a few days. He was my best friend.”

“Did you kill your wife?”

“No, but it was Madge’s testimony that got me convicted. She lied.”

“I followed your trial all the way through. I was there every day.”

“I know,” he said. “I saw you.”

“I wrote letters to the editor of the newspaper about how unfairly you were being treated in court.”

“Why did you even care?”

“Because the same thing happened to my father. He was convicted with lies and false testimony. He was innocent.”

“You know that for certain?”

“Yes. He died in prison after only six months. He had a bad heart to begin with. I knew that being in prison would break him, and it did. It was a blessing, really, when he died. His troubles were over.”

“I’m going to kill Madge,” he said. “Every day and every night when I was in prison I dreamed of squeezing the miserable life out of her, watching the fear in her eyes when she knows she’s going to die and there’s no taking it back.”

“Revenge will avail you nothing,” Irene said. “Read your Bible.”

“I’m not good like you.”

“You don’t want to kill Madge just yet. I have a feeling she holds the key.”

“Key to what?”

“I think she’s the one person in the world who knows who killed your wife and George Fellsinger.”

“Do you know something I don’t know?”

“No, it’s just that I know Madge. I know her type. There isn’t anything she wouldn’t do.”

“Madge was there on the day Gertrude was killed. She left behind one of her gloves but, not only that, I could smell her awful perfume all through the house.”

“Your wife and Madge were friends?”

“I think it’s safe to say they hated each other. Gertrude saw Madge as a rival.”

“You were once in love with Madge?”

“No, but she had it in her head that I’d marry her.”

“The plot thickens.”

“But where does that leave George?” Vincent asked. “Who killed him?”

“I think she knew that you and George were friends and that you probably would go to him after you escaped from prison. She killed him so people would think you did it.”

“Poor George. I was the only friend he had in the world.”

“His funeral is tomorrow. I think I’ll go and take some flowers.”

“I’d go myself if I wasn’t the leading suspect.”

“Just rest for a while and I’ll fix us some dinner.”

“You’re too good, Irene. I don’t deserve you.”

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Hair of Her Head

The Hair of Her Head ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

The queen was at the forefront of every fashion trend. If she painted her face the color of chalk, every lady of the court with any fashion sense ended up with a face the color of chalk. If she wore a ruff collar to a court function, ruff collars became the rage before the sun rose again. If she wore platform shoes under her gowns to make herself a few inches taller (taller than the king), shoemakers were working round the clock by the end of the week to satisfy the sudden desire for platform shoes.

When the queen decided she wanted a new coiffure, she summoned Alphonse, the court hairdresser, and his retinue of lackeys and assistants. She was getting tired, she said, of the same old curls, fluffs and puffs. She wanted a new style of dressing her hair that nobody had ever seen or imagined before. She wanted to hear people gasp with surprise and envy when she entered a room.

The court hairdresser propped the queen up in an elaborate swiveling chair, stuffing pillows all around her to make her as comfortable as she could be. He knew he was going to have to create something different, and fast, if he was going to keep his job. He was under a considerable amount of strain but he had been in the same situation before and he knew he would get through it. To keep the queen calm and to soothe his own frazzled nerves, he called a small ensemble of court musicians into the room to play softly the music that was known to put the queen to sleep. In no time at all, she was snoring.

She slept for three hours. She woke up only because her little pet monkey Marcel was blowing bubbles with his pipe and one of his bubbles, a very large one indeed, landed on her nose and popped. It couldn’t have happened at a better time because Alphonse was just then putting the finishing touches on the royal coiffure.

The queen was impatient to be handed a mirror, but Alphonse wanted an unveiling of sorts. When he pulled her to her feet, he had one of the ladies-in-waiting tie a scarf over her eyes. Then he walked her to an enormous mirror that went from floor to ceiling with two side mirrors tilted out at angles. He took the scarf away and stood back, heart pounding. If the queen didn’t like the royal coiffure, he might be sent packing with only the clothes on his back.

She blinked her eyes several times and regarded her reflection without expression for what seemed a very long time but couldn’t have been more than two or three minutes. She turned this way and that to see herself from the back and from both sides and from every oblique angle.

The royal coiffure was, indeed, unlike any coiffure her majesty had ever seen before. Instead of the customary white, it was a slightly pinkish color, like a cloud at sunset. The color was not the most salient feature, however; the one thing that made this coiffure so much different from others was its size. It was at least a foot high of gorgeousness—elaborate rolls and twists adorned with shimmering precious stones and ostrich feathers. On the sides and in the back, hanging about the royal neck and ears, was a profusion of sausage-like curls that seemed to have been spawned by the puff of pink rising above. It was truly a coiffure befitting the queen of the land.

However restrained her majesty might have been in showing approval, she was most pleased with the royal coiffure. She touched the court hairdresser lightly on the shoulder and passed from the room with a tiny smile on her lips. The court hairdresser collapsed into a chair and ordered a bottle of wine and a plate of sausages be brought to him.

That evening the queen wore a magenta gown and her ruby jewels to complement her pink hair. On the arm of the king, who always managed to look like an unhappy frog in a powdered wig, she entered the dining salon where her court was assembled. As she and the king passed in their stately procession from one side of the enormous room to the other to take their places at table, all eyes were upon her. She heard gasps, whispers, exclamations, but the looks of envy and jealousy were the most gratifying to her. All the other ladies present looked like laundresses and milk maids beside their queen.

They, the ladies of the court (and this included some of the men), were all delighted by the queen’s new coiffure. While they couldn’t run the risk of being seen as trying to better the queen, they were free to emulate her as much as was fitting. They could copy her coiffure if they so desired, but they had to be careful not to have hair higher than the queen; this could incur not only the disfavor of the queen but also of the king and the royal offspring. The queen was above all considerations of competitiveness. She was without peer. She was the queen.

So there followed a frenzy of high hair at the court. When all the ladies had hair as high as—but no higher—than the queen, the queen herself went a couple of inches higher each time they saw her. And if the queen appeared with blue hair, all the ladies the next day had hair the same shade of blue, but no bluer; the same for green, lilac, yellow, orange and every other color imaginable.

When the queen and all the ladies of the court had hair higher than about three feet, special accommodations had to be made. They had to sit on the floor in carriages because ceilings were just not high enough. A special section at the opera had to be designated for them because nobody ever wanted to sit behind them. Many of them had to sleep sitting up in a chair or flat on their backs on the floor, as they could no longer sleep in a bed with three-foot-high hair. These were all minor inconveniences, however, in light of what was to come.

The pomade the ladies used to keep their hair malleable was made of apples and other organic materials. At all times of the year, but especially in hot weather, the pomade was likely to turn sour and create a smell. This situation resulted in the ladies using overpowering scents to mask the smell of the pomade. Some of the gentlemen of the court, including the king, became sickened by the strong, unnatural smells. The king was forced to require the women to sit downwind from him and to have lackeys fan the air. The queen complained to the king that his behavior toward the ladies was insulting but he paid her no mind.

As if the smell wasn’t bad enough, some of the ladies began to be infected with all kinds of vermin. It seemed the very high, elaborate coiffures attracted unwelcome visitors. One lady died while eating a dinner of roasted squab. When her body was examined, it was discovered she had a family of poisonous spiders nesting in her hair that were feasting on her scalp as they saw fit. Another lady had a couple of enterprising bats take up residence in the upper reaches of her coiffure; the bats decided to vacate the premises at a very inopportune moment. Still another was infested with a rare kind of beetle that heretofore had been found only in the Orient. Other of the ladies complained of lice and fleas.

Outside the walls of the palace, more serious events were taking place, of which the king, the queen, and their court of aristocratic sycophants and hangers-on were largely unaware. The common people, many of whom were starving and dressed in tatters, were disenchanted with the king and queen and with royalty in general. There was a movement afoot to revolt, to bring down the government and put in place a fairer, more equitable system of running the country. Who needed a king and queen anyway? They were bleeding the country dry and enjoying themselves while they were doing it.

When the revolt finally came, the king and queen were preparing to decamp to their summer palace in the mountains with their enormous retinue of servants. The king immediately had the palace secured, but he knew that he and the queen and everybody else in the palace were not altogether safe from an angry mob.

Some members of the court assumed false identities and fled for their lives. The ladies with high hair dismantled their coiffures and washed out the dyes, as it happened that their coiffures had become hated symbols of excess and indifference to the plight of the common people. Some went so far as to shave their heads to disavow who they were. A few of the ladies were found to have been men all along.

The king and queen decided to stay in the palace, an act of defiance if there ever was one. When the mob came for them, they were standing at the top of the staircase of the grand salon as though posing for a picture. The king was dressed in his sumptuous robes of state, powdered wig and crown. The queen wore her loveliest gown and most elaborate jewels. Her coiffure was a grand, four-foot-high creation of defiant flaming orange, adorned with her many-jeweled crown proclaiming to the world that she was queen and none other.

The monarchy was abolished and a provisional government established in its place. The king and queen never saw each other again after the day they were taken and they never saw their children again. The king’s head was severed from his body and placed on a spike in front of the palace that had been his home.

When the queen a few weeks later met the same fate as the king, it was a grand event for the common people. Everybody crowded into the city to see the old girl get what she had coming. And when her head was finally severed from her body a great cheer went up, but there was something else, too: all the bugs, mice, vermin, spiders and small birds living in her hair scattered throughout the land to tell their tale of life and death at the court.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Happy Starfish

Happy Starfish ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Did I tell you how I hate school? This morning in zoology I had to dissect a starfish. The inside of the starfish is green. That’s disgusting enough, but the thing that got to me is the fishy smell. It’s a smell that lingers in my head and my nose. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat any kind of fish or seafood again for as long as I live without being reminded of the green insides of a starfish.

The world is very cruel. That little starfish was probably just minding its own business on a beach somewhere when somebody picked it up and put it in pickling solution where it instantly died. One minute a happy starfish and the next minute a laboratory specimen to be cut open and have its insides probed. If I was a starfish, I would want to live on a faraway island where there were no people and I could die of old age.

After zoology was American history, but I skipped. I thought I was going to vomit and I didn’t want anybody to see me. I went to the boys’ toilet on the third floor where it was quiet and went into a stall and latched the door. I put my hands on my knees, leaned forward and closed my eyes, trying not to think about that starfish.

In a minute somebody came into the toilet whistling. I hate to hear people whistle. It spoiled my concentration, so I just spit into the toilet and flushed without vomiting. I opened the stall door and went to the sink and started to wash my hands.

“What do you think you’re doing?” somebody to my left said.

I turned and saw it was Claude Qualls. If there’s anybody in school I hate, it’s Claude. He’s the class president and a snitch. Mr. Do-Gooder. Mr. Over-Achiever. Mr. Perfect. He has somehow taken it upon himself to keep the rest of us in line. Probably someday he’ll be a congressman or a senator or something if somebody doesn’t kill him first.

“Washing my hands,” I said. “What does it look like?”

“That’s not what I meant, smartass! What are you doing out of class?”

“I’m sick.”

“You don’t look sick.”

He took his eyes off himself in the mirror and leaned in close to me, sniffing.

“Get away from me!” I said. “What I have is probably contagious.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in American history?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“As class president, I’m supposed to report anybody skipping class.”

“Go to hell!” I said.

He grabbed me by the collar and pulled me toward him, holding his right arm back like he was going to hit me in the face. “What did you just say to me?” he said.

“You heard me. I said: Go to hell, bitch!”

He roughed me up a little bit but didn’t hit me. He finished by pushing me into the sink. The fingers on my left hand bent back painfully.

“You stupid little baby!” he said. “You can be sure that this little episode will be reported.”

“You’re the big man, aren’t you?” I said. “The big man will always be there to tell the rest of us what to do, won’t he?”

“Shut up, you little freak!”

“No, you’re the freak, Claude! Not me! Everybody hates your guts!”

“I’m going down to Mr. Ludlow’s office right now and write up a report stating that you’re loitering in the bathroom when you’re supposed to be in class.”

“I hope you break your leg going down the steps,” I said.

I went to the library to hide out for the rest of the period. I knew that if I sat at one of the tables out front, anybody coming in would spot me right away, so I wandered around in the dusty stacks for a while and then went all the way to the back where nobody ever ventured and sat down on the floor in the corner. I opened a book on my knees so if I heard anybody coming I’d pretend to be reading.

I was starting to feel a little less like vomiting. The quiet and the smell of old books made me sleepy, so I leaned my head against the wall and dozed off like a bum sleeping it off in an alley.

“Here he is!” I heard somebody say in a loud voice.

I jerked awake and saw Claude Qualls looking down at me. Behind him was Mr. Ludlow, the principal.

“I was sure he’d be hiding out somewhere!” Claude said.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Mr. Ludlow scolded. “Sleeping on the floor in the library!”

“I was feeling sick,” I said, standing up.

“You haven’t been drinking, have you?”

“Of course not!”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”

“American history class,” Claude said.

“I was going to vomit,” I said. “I didn’t want to be in class when it happened.”

Mr. Ludlow took hold of my arm above the elbow and squeezed. I was sure I would have a bruise there and I was sorry that Claude was the only one present to witness this rough treatment.

“Skipping class will not be tolerated in this school,” Mr. Ludlow snarled in his best warden-of-the-big-house voice. I could smell his cologne and it was worse than the starfish. “Do you want a suspension?”

“No,” I said. “I just want my high school years to be over.”

“Do you need me to help you with him?” Claude asked.

“No, thanks, Claude,” Mr. Ludlow said. “I can take it from here.”

“Before you tell somebody else to go to hell,” Claude said to me with his demonic smile, “think about who you’re talking to.”

“That’s fine, Claude,” Mr. Ludlow said. “You may go now.” To me Mr. Ludlow said, “Proper disciplinary action will be taken at the appropriate time but, for now, you may go to your next class, and if you even think about skipping class again you’ll be faced with a three-day suspension. Think what that will do to your scholastic record and to your chances of getting into a good college.”

My next class was gym class, which I hated more than all my other classes put together. I went to the locker room and changed out of my “street clothes” into the ridiculous gym togs: baggy red shorts that hung down to my knees, a stretched-out tee shirt and grass-stained high-top tennis shoes that were too small for me and made my toes hurt.

While we were all standing around waiting for the teacher to arrive so the class could begin, I spotted Claude Qualls about twenty feet away, bouncing a basketball. When he saw me, he gave me a look of bemused hatred and I mouthed the words go to hell. There wasn’t any way he could not know what I was saying.

The physical education teacher was Mr. Upjohn, or “coach,” as he liked to be called. He was four feet, eleven inches tall and he looked like a troll in a fairy story who hides under a bridge.

“All right now, everybody!” he yelled and blew his whistle. “Time for warm-up!”

As bad as the warm-up was, it wasn’t as bad as the game of volleyball or basketball that followed. We stood in rows as Mr. Upjohn faced us and directed us in the knee bends, sit-ups, pushups, and jumping jacks.

It was during the jumping jacks that I vomited on the floor, a thick green mass that looked exactly like the insides of the starfish. Everybody stopped jumping up and down and looked at me. I bent forward to vomit again and fainted face down in what I had just deposited on the floor. It was only the second time in my life that I had ever fainted. The first time was when I was eight and had the flu.

When I regained consciousness, they were all standing around in a circle watching me. I had really spiced up their boring old gym class. Mr. Upjohn was kneeling beside me, waving a bottle of smelling salts under my nose.

“He’s coming around,” he said.

“I want to go home,” I said.

“Can you make it to the nurse’s office?”

“She doesn’t like me. I pushed her down the stairs once.”

As I stood up, Mr. Upjohn took hold of my arm. “Go get dressed,” he said, “and go see the nurse.”

“I don’t know,” I said, wobbling for effect. “I feel like I’m going to faint again.”

“Claude!” he barked. “Go with him and help him get dressed!”

Claude stepped forward, ready once again to fulfill his role as student leader.

“I don’t need any help from him!” I said. “Just give me time!”

I went down to the deserted locker room, cleaned the vomit off my face and out of my hair and put my clothes back on. As I was leaving the locker room, I noticed the door to Claude’s locker was partway open. I approached the locker, pulled the door open all the way and looked inside. There, on the top shelf, was Claude’s expensive gold wrist watch. I slipped the watch into my pocket and deposited it in a trashcan on my way to the nurse’s office.

I walked into her office and vomited again, all over the floor. Now, I have to tell you, there’s nothing like vomiting to get people’s attention. You can say you’re sick, but dramatic vomiting leaves no room for doubt.

The nurse dropped what she was doing and came running with a kidney-shaped metal pan. She told me to lie back on the cot and she put a wet cloth on my head. When she took my temperature and saw I had a fever, she called my mother and told her to come and get me.

When I got home, I kicked off my shoes and got into bed. My mother stood in the doorway and harangued me, as usual.

“Why did you choose today of all days to be sick?” she asked.

“I figured it was time,” I said.

“Algebra test today?”

“No, I failed that last week.”

“Well, I have to tell you,” she said, “sometimes when you say you’re sick I don’t believe you, but today you look sick.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She called the doctor and described my symptoms. From my bed, I could hear her yapping into the phone in the other room for a good ten minutes. After she hung up, she came back into my room. I pretended to be asleep until I heard her breathing and opened my eyes.

“He said it sounds like you have a virus that’s making the rounds,” she said. “It’s contagious and he said to keep you at home in bed for a few days.”

“I always liked Dr. Fain,” I said.

“He said that after the nausea passes I’m to give you anything you want to eat or drink.”

“I want a champagne cocktail,” I said, “and a steak medium rare.”

“But the main thing,” my mother said, “is to keep you quiet and in bed.”

I groaned for good effect and my mother went out of the room and closed the door.

I remembered my conversation earlier in the day with Claude Qualls in the boys’ toilet. He had stuck his snoot in my face and I hope he caught what I had, only ten times worse. He would be distraught at the thought of missing any school, while I, on the other hand, loved it better than anything.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Until We Meet Again

Until We Meet Again ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in The Corvus Review.) 

During the years that Hulga Van Sipes took care of Isadore, her invalid husband, he wasn’t able to speak or barely to blink his eyes. She did everything for him: got him up in the morning and put him to bed at night, bathed him, dressed and undressed him, lifted him in and out of his wheelchair (he had always been a small man), cooked his food and fed it to him (all he had to do was swallow), and talked to him as if he might answer. She read to him, sang to him in her wheezing soprano, and sometimes she put a little rouge and lipstick on him to make him seem more alive.

When Isadore finally died in his sleep, Hulga had his body cremated without fanfare. She put his ashes in a large-sized Hellman’s mayonnaise jar and kept the jar on a shelf of the curio cabinet next to the TV where she could always see it.

Hulga thought she could go on with her life (what was left of it), but she found it was just too bleak and lonely—empty, so empty—without Isadore. She had been married to him for fifty-two years and most of them were good, fine years. She wasn’t able to erase all those years and go on her merry way as if nothing had happened.

At a store called Under the Sun on Skid Row Boulevard that sold just about anything, she bought a full-sized male mannequin (also known as a doll) with fully articulated arms and legs. She took the mannequin home with her in a taxi.

Of course the mannequin looked nothing at all like Isadore. Everything about him was shiny. He had shiny black hair (complete with pompadour) painted on his head, shiny black eyes (sparkling, like the glass eyes of a stuffed mountain lion), and a shiny skin with red spots on both cheeks. His shiny lips were slightly parted, showing tiny, perfect teeth which, of course, were shiny.

At first Hulga was put off by the difference between the mannequin and Isadore, but after a few days she came to accept the difference and appreciate it. The mannequin was a young man and at times she was able to think of herself as a young woman worthy of him (even if the mirror told her otherwise). And, even though he was inanimate, he was for the most part no more inanimate than Isadore had been.

Hulga Van Sipes was happy again or, if not happy, she felt useful and not quite so lonely. At mealtimes, she propped the mannequin up at the table and put little dabs of food on his plate which, of course, she ended up eating herself or putting down the garbage disposal. She was delighted that her grocery bills were smaller because the mannequin really didn’t eat all that much.

As she chewed her food, with the radio playing lively dance music in the background, she looked over at the mannequin and smiled and he always smiled back. He was never grumpy or out of sorts. He never dribbled food out of his mouth down his front. He was the perfect dining-table companion. How fortunate she was to have found him!

She left him in his place at the table while she washed the dishes, and when she was finished she wheeled him into the living room and lifted him onto the couch, propped his feet up and covered his legs with an afghan. (He had always been susceptible to chill, especially in the lower extremities.)

They both liked the same programs on TV. If she laughed while watching, she looked at him to see if he was also laughing. If she cried, he also cried, and if she became bored with a program and wanted to change the channels, he was always compliant.

After the weather report, she switched off the TV, took the mannequin into the bedroom and got him into his pajamas and into bed. She pulled the covers up under his chin, kissed him on the forehead and turned off the light. She always left his door open a little bit so she would hear him if he stirred.

After several months of unchanging days, the line between Isadore and the mannequin became blurred for Hulga and then disappeared altogether. The mannequin became no longer a substitute for Isadore but Isadore himself. Hulga forgot that Isadore had died (she put his ashes in the basement where she wouldn’t have to look at them). He had been with her all the time. It was a leap that she made in her mind as easily as breathing.

In October the days were warm and the sky as blue as it had been all year. Hulga wanted Isadore to have some time outdoors before winter set in again. She dressed him warmly and took him for a stroll in the park where he might observe the beauty of nature. The little outing went so well, and they both enjoyed being out of the house so much, that she took him again the next day and then the day after that.

On the third day of Hulga pushing Isadore through the park, a woman came and stood in front of the wheelchair and Hulga was forced to stop. She thought the woman was going to ask her for change because she was that kind of woman, a bum or a homeless person.

“What’s the matter with you?” the woman asked.

“What?” Hulga asked.

“What are you, deaf? I said: What. Is. Wrong. With. You?”

“Why, nothing’s wrong with me,” Hulga said, thinking she was being indulged in a joke of some kind.

“Are you an escapee?”

“Am I a what?”

“You are such an asshole!” the woman said. She was very short and fat, wore a filthy knit cap on her head and a man’s wool overcoat, even though the day was warm. She brandished a lighted cigarette like a knife.

“What was that you called me?” Hulga said.

“Every day for the last three days I’ve seen you pushing that dummy around in that chair.”

“Dummy?” Hulga asked.

“Yeah! Him!” the woman said, pointing at Isadore.

Looking down at Isadore to see if the woman was upsetting him, Hulga said, “He’s my husband.”

“Your husband!” the woman said with a hoot of laughter. “One of us is nuts and I don’t think it’s me!”

“If you’ll just let me pass, miss.”

“It’s time you woke up and smelled the roses, dearie!” the woman said. “That dummy ain’t nobody’s husband!”

A small group of people, sensing that something interesting was happening, had gathered around to listen.

“We’ve been married for fifty-two years,” Hulga said. “Not that I think it’s any of your business.”

“Well, I hope you’re married for another fifty-two and I hope he don’t give you a bit of trouble, neither.”

“That’s silly,” Hulga said.

The people who had gathered around laughed and the woman with the cigarette bowed like a courtier and went away as quickly as she had appeared.

Hulga felt the people looking at her, laughing at her the way they would laugh at a freak. She wanted to get herself and Isadore away as quickly as she could, back to the safety and security of their own home. How ugly the world was! How cruel people could be!

Feeling shaken, she stopped the chair and sat down on a bench to rest before going home. The air had suddenly grown colder and the sun, shining so brightly just a little while ago, had receded behind gray clouds.

“It was a mistake to bring Isadore out into the world,” she said. “He doesn’t need this any more than I do.”

She pushed her fingers lightly into Isadore’s upper arm and he tilted crazily against the arm of the wheelchair in such a way that only a crazy person would think he was a real man.

“You aren’t real, are you?” she said. “I’ve only been fooling myself all along.”

She began to be afraid somebody might report her and they—the bureau of crazy people, maybe—would come and take her out of her home and make her stay in a mental home against her will. They might even shoot volts of electricity into her head, as she had witnessed on TV. The thought made her feel frightened and helpless.

She dumped the mannequin (not really her Isadore, after all) out of the wheelchair under a tree and hurried away before she changed her mind.

On her way out of the park, an old man shuffled toward her.

“Can you spare a dollar?” he asked.

She looked at him and smiled. “Isadore?” she said.

“Name’s Boo-Boo,” he said. “At least that’s what my friends call me.”

“Would you like to come home with me?”

She touched the sleeve of the jacket, slick with dirt. He pulled back as if uncertain what she was might do.

“Gunsmoke is on tonight,” she said. “It’s your favorite show.”

“What time is it?” he asked.

“It starts at eight o’clock,” she said.

“You really want me to come home with you?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch.”

“Could you fix me some bacon and eggs?”

“Sure.”

“Got any beer?”

“You never drank before.”

“Could I have a bath and some clean socks?”

“Anything you want.”

She pointed to the wheelchair. He sat in it and twisted his head around and smiled up at her.

“This is all right!” he said. “Very kind of you, I’m sure. It’s only fair to warn you, though: I ain’t much of a lover.”

She patted him reassuringly on the shoulder and began pushing toward home. She thought how light he was, how easy to push, and how much she had missed him the whole time he had been away.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Mother Witch, Father Ghoul

Mother Witch, Father Ghoul ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Jock and Lena had been married for eighteen years when their first child came along, a boy they named Finley. They had resigned themselves to being childless, so Finley was something of a surprise. Lena was sick the whole time she was carrying Finley and she wondered secretly if childbirth was worth all the trouble and fuss. She had been happy without children and wondered if she would ever be happy again.

Always a reader, she read book after book on child-rearing and parenting, hoping that the words on the printed page would make her feel inspired, but they had no effect in that direction. She woke up every morning during her pregnancy hoping that the little thing growing inside her would—if not exactly die—just not be there at all.

When Lena told Jock she was going to have a baby that neither of them expected, he was so dismayed he couldn’t speak. He shook and felt weak and had to sit down. When he recovered his senses, he demanded a scotch and soda and a steak medium-rare and accused Lena of having a secret affair with the obese man who cleaned the carpets.

The birth was a difficult one and Lena thought she would die. When the nurse at the hospital placed Finley in Lena’s arms for the first time, Lena fainted and fell out of bed; the nurse caught Finley just in time before he hit the floor. When Lena woke up from her faint, she had temporarily lost her senses.

Jock and Lena readied an upstairs room in their spacious house for the baby. They bought all the requisite furniture and all the little things they thought a baby would like. They had the room painted a cheerful yellow color and bought new curtains with elephants and giraffes on them; they spared no expense.

On the day Lena brought Finley home from the hospital, a few curious neighbors dropped in to see him. Lena wore a tight smile and welcomed the visitors graciously. Jock locked himself in his study and drank whiskey and wrote atrocious poetry.

Finley was a beautiful, perfect child with abundant light-brown hair and a full set of teeth. It was his strange, green-and-amber eyes, though, that people noticed first. He looked searchingly at any visitor who came into the room, as if he were studying them and knew things about them that nobody else knew. When people talked, he moved his lips and smiled, pretending he too was talking. Frequently he pointed at something across the room and when people turned to look at what he was pointing at, there was nothing there except the blank wall. He was seeing things that nobody else saw.

At about three weeks old, Finley began moving objects around the room by pointing at them with his tiny index finger and pursing his lips. If a floppy yellow bunny was sitting on the chest of drawers, he could make it fall to the floor or float across the room and fall into his bed, at which time he would grab it and stick it in his mouth. When a wasp came into this room, he pointed at it and flicked his tongue and the wasp fell dead in mid-flight.

“I don’t see anything of myself in him,” Jock said. “Nobody in my family ever had eyes that color.”

Lena was hurt anytime Jock suggested that somebody else was Finley’s father. The marriage, which before had been tolerable, was strained to the breaking point. Jock went out of the room when Lena entered and spoke to her only when it couldn’t be avoided. He blamed her for Finley’s existence and came to see their marriage as a mistake. He tried to warm up to Finley but believed that the two of them would only ever be strangers. He couldn’t visualize Finley living in his house for twenty or so years until reaching adulthood.

Despite Lena’s misgivings about parenthood, she tried to be a good mother to Finley. She fed him, bathed him and spent most of her waking hours looking out for him. There was always something about him, though, that to her didn’t seem right. It seemed he didn’t need her. He was attuned to something or someone else besides her. At times he would look longingly outside the window and point his finger and warble at something that only he could see.

At six months, Finley was walking and at nine months talking in complete sentences. He asked for pencil and paper and began drawing pictures of birds, castles, airplanes and elephants.

“How could you know about such things?” Lena asked.

When Finley was less than a year old, a relative gave him a picture book with farm animals and jungle animals. He looked appreciatively at all the pictures and then asked for a book with words.

“What kind of a book would you like?” Lena asked, stunned that a baby would make such a request.

“It doesn’t matter,” Finley said. “Just something I can hold in my tiny hands and turn the pages.”

She didn’t want to give him anything too “adult,” so she gave him a juvenile book about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. He read the book in one afternoon and asked for another one.

“Where did you learn to read?” Lena asked. “You haven’t been to school yet.”

“Some people are just born knowing things, I guess,” he said.

At one year, Finley was dressing and bathing himself and getting his own food. Lena kept a little stepstool within easy reach of the refrigerator. He never dropped any crumbs or spilled anything on the floor, and when he was finished eating he washed his own dishes, standing on a chair at the sink.

He learned to turn on the TV when nobody was around and watch on his own. He wasn’t interested in anything where people were talking. He wanted to hear music and see movement: pictures of animals, cars, airplanes, trains—anything but people.

One day, when Finley was one year and two months old, someone knocked on the door in the middle of the afternoon. Opening the door, Lena saw a strange-looking man and woman standing on the porch peering in at her. The man was very thin and pale and dressed in formal attire. (He seemed like a holdover from the Third Reich.) The woman was taller and broader than the man and wore a very old-fashioned kind of lady’s hat with a red feather and a veil. The chimpanzee she held by the hand wore an aviator cap with goggles and a little leather coat.

“You have the wrong house,” Lena said.

“I’m Mrs. Miggles and this is my husband, Julian.”

“Charmed,” Julian said.

“Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested.”

“We’re not selling anything, but we would like to speak to you.”

“I’m very busy right now.”

“You’re going to want to hear this,” the woman said. “It concerns your son.”

When Mrs. Miggles said the words your son, she inclined her head toward the chimpanzee.

Lena allowed them into the living room and asked them to sit down. The woman began by saying, “The boy’s name is Armand. Say hello to the lady, Armand.”

The chimpanzee took two steps toward Lena and held out his hand for her to shake.

“How do you do?” Lena said.

Armand rolled his lips back over his teeth and gave a little squawk.

“Is your husband at home?” Mrs. Miggles asked. “We really wanted to speak to both of you.”

“He’s out right now,” Lena said. “Just what is this about?”

“I don’t know quite how to say it.”

“Just say it. Isn’t that usually the best way?”

“Well, you can probably tell we’re not like anybody else. I’m a witch and my husband here is a ghoul.”

“A ghoul?”

“Yes, a ghoul.” Mrs. Miggles faltered and then continued. “You had a son on the last day of August last year, I believe.”

“How do you know that?”

“I also had a son on that day.”

“And you’re a witch?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Witches have children?”

“Sometimes they do.”

“All right. So you had a son on the same day as me. How does that concern me?”

“Well, to put it bluntly…”

“Yes.”

“I have your child and you have mine.”

“What?”

“The child that you have that you think is yours is really mine. He’s half-witch and half-ghoul.”

“All right, if that’s true, then where is my child?” Lena asked.

“This is him,” Mrs. Miggles said, picking Armand up and setting him on her lap.

“You’re telling me I gave birth to a chimp?”

“Oh, no, no, no! You gave birth to a human child on the same day that I gave birth to my child, who isn’t really human in the sense that you mean it.”

“Then where is my child?” Lena asked.

“I just told you! Your child is Armand!”

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave my house now.”

“Well, perhaps I should backtrack and explain a little further.”

“I think you must!” Julian said in his odd croaking voice.

“When your attention was diverted for just a tiny second, my sister, who is also a witch, stole your baby and replaced him with mine.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Oh, witches can trick you very easily, I assure you!”

“I don’t believe a word of this!”

“She switched babies, and then do you know what she did? To get back at me for something I did to her a long time ago, she turned your baby into a chimp!”

Mrs. Miggles and Julian both laughed heartily.

“Nobody took my baby,” Lena said. “If such a thing had happened, I would have known.”

“It has taken me all this time to find you!” Mrs. Miggles said. “Of course, I had to torture my sister to get it out of her!”

“I’m going to call the police,” Lena said.

“And what do you think they’ll do, my dear!”

“My husband is behind all this, isn’t it? He’s playing an elaborate Halloween hoax on me because he never wanted a baby in the first place.”

“I’ve never spoken to your husband.”

Lena looked down at Armand who was sitting at Mrs. Miggles’s feet. When he realized he was being looked at, he smiled sweetly and yawned.

“So, if your sister turned my child into a chimp,” Lena asked, “why can’t she turn him back again?”

“That is a very reasonable question, my dear,” Mrs. Miggles said. “The truth is that the spell was hers and I don’t know how to reverse it.”

“Can’t you get her to reverse it?”

“Oh, no! I had to kill her!”

“You killed your own sister?”

“Oh, my, yes! She was a terrible trickster! If I hadn’t killed her, she would have killed me in the end!”

“She was a poor jealous thing,” Julian said. “She couldn’t have children of her own.”

“So, if you’ll just go and get your little fellow, whatever his name is,” Mrs. Miggles said, “we’ll make the switch and be on our way!”

“Do you think I’m going to turn my baby over to a couple of crazy people and take a chimp in return?” Lena asked.

“We prefer that you didn’t call him that,” Julian said.

Finley, who had been standing at the top of the stairs the whole time hearing every word, came running into the room.

“Mother! Father!” he said. “I knew you’d come for me on Halloween!”

During the embraces and kisses, Mrs. Miggles turned to Lena and said, “Now do you believe me?”

Armand went and stood beside Lena and took her by the hand. She reached down and picked him up in her arms and he kissed on her cheek, the way Finley was doing with Mrs. Miggles and Julian.

“At last, everything is right in the world!” Mrs. Miggles said.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Baby

Baby ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in the literary journal, Streetcake, Issue 43.)

Louise was gone for three days. When she returned home, she was carrying a bundle in the crook of her arm.

“Where have you been all this time?” Theodore asked. “I was about to call the police.”

“Oh, you silly man!” Louise said. “Where do you think I’ve been? I’ve been giving birth to your son.”

She lifted the corner of the blanket to show him the baby’s face.

“This one has blue eyes,” Theodore said.

“He has your eyes.”

“My eyes are brown.”

“I’m going to name him Nathaniel,” she said. “After Hawthorne.”

“Name him whatever you want.”

“If I give him the name of a great writer, he might turn out to be a great writer himself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You like that name?”

“It’s as good as any other, I suppose.”

She laid the baby down gently on the couch and took off her coat and laughed.

“Believe me,” she said. “It’s not easy carrying a newborn baby home on the uptown bus. I had to stand up the whole way, holding the baby in one hand and trying to keep from falling with the other. You’d think a gentleman might have given me his seat, but nobody even noticed me.”

“I could have come down and met you.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. “I managed perfectly fine. And, anyway, I wanted to surprise you. What do you think of our new son?”

“He’s, uh…I can’t seem to find the words. I’m speechless.”

“I know! It’s a shock, isn’t it? Seeing him for the first time?”

“Especially since I didn’t know he was expected.”

“But that makes it that much more fun, doesn’t it?”

“If you say so.”

“Now, don’t you be an old grump puss! I’m going to need lots of help from you with this baby. Feeding him, changing his diapers, bathing him, and all the rest of it.”

“I don’t think that baby is going to be any trouble at all,” he said.

“No, of course not! He’s such a good baby! I can tell already, as young as he is.”

Theodore played piano in a jazz combo in a bar, so he had to leave to go to work. “Don’t wait up for me,” he said.

“Have a good time,” she said, “and don’t worry about me. The baby and I will be here when you get back.”

With Theodore gone, Louise was glad to have some time alone with the baby. She carried him into every room in the apartment, talking to him all the while, even though she knew he didn’t understand a word she said. She fed him, bathed him, and put him to bed in the crib at the foot of her own bed.

She slept until one o’clock, at which time she got up and fed him again. After she put him back in his crib and got back into bed, she had trouble going back to sleep. She kept thinking about how Theodore didn’t seem very happy about the baby. Well, men, she thought. You can’t ever tell what they’re thinking or how they really feel. They keep it all bottled up inside.

At two o’clock she still hadn’t gone back to sleep. She got up and checked on the baby and when she saw he was sleeping peacefully she knew the problem wasn’t with the baby but with her. She was lonely and sad. She picked up the sleeping baby and put him in the bed beside her. After that she was able to go to sleep.

Theodore came home about three-thirty. He undressed quietly and got into bed and after a couple of minutes Louise began to cry.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I’m not going to have any more children,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I don’t think you love them.”

“Could we postpone this conversation to another time? I’m very tired.”

“Take Nathaniel and put him with the others. They need to get acquainted.”

“I just got into bed. Can’t you do it?”

“You’re the father.”

He sighed and got out of bed again without turning on the light. He picked Nathaniel up by the neck and carried him out of the room and down the hallway to another room. In this room was a bed with six lifelike plastic dolls lying side by side, all exactly like Nathaniel. He added Nathaniel to the collection and went back to bed.

“Better now?” he asked Louise.

“Yes.”

“And this is going to be the last one?”

“Yes, I think so. Seven is my lucky number.”

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

When He Saw They Were Dead

When He Saw They Were Dead ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(This ghost story I wrote was published in an anthology called Legends: Paranormal Pursuits 2016, by Grey Wolfe Publishing.)

His name was Edgar Delong and in 1921 he was fifteen years old. He had an accident in his sleep and his mother and father wouldn’t stop laughing at him. They called him baby and said he ought to be ashamed of himself. They kept it up all day. Finally he went and got a shotgun they didn’t know he had and, at seven minutes after four in the afternoon, he shot both of them in the chest, his mother first and then his father. When he saw that they were dead, he went up the stairs in the old house to the attic. He found a rope, climbed up on a table and tied one end of the rope to a rafter and the other end around his own neck. After pulling on the rope to make sure it would hold at both ends, he stepped off the table into the void. As he strangled to death he said, “This is the thing I’ve always wanted.”

It was written up in all the newspapers. People loved talking about it, recounting and embellishing all the details. The house where it happened stood vacant for years and was said to be haunted. Weeds grew up in the yard. Small boys threw rocks at the windows. The front porch began to sag. People claimed to hear demonic laughing coming from the house, gunshots and screams.

Finally a man bought the house and fixed the sagging porch, the broken windows, the missing shingles and the peeling paint. He lived with his large family in the house for more than twenty years. Then there were other families after that to put their imprint on the character of the house. The day would come when the only people who remembered Edgar Delong and what he had done were the superannuated.

Edgar Delong still existed, though, in the world the living cannot see. Every day in the house his mother and father laughed at him and every day he went and got the shotgun they didn’t know he had and, at seven minutes after four in the afternoon, shot both of them to death, first his mother and then his father. Every day he heard the startled cry from his mother right before he shot her and the strangled shout from his father. Every day he climbed the creaking old stairs to the attic, tied a rope around his neck and hanged himself. Every day he relived the whole thing, even though he was dead. Every day the same, the days unending.

More than eighty years after the death of Edgar Delong, a writer named Charles Delong rented the house for the summer. He was the grandson of Edgar Delong’s father’s brother and, so, a cousin of Edgar Delong. He had grown up hearing the stories and, when he began researching and writing a book about sensational murders, he knew he had to include a chapter in the book on the Delong double murder and suicide. He believed that by living in the house, if just for a few weeks, he would feel close to Edgar Delong and would understand him a way that no other living person could.

The house proved a wonderful inspiration to Charles Delong. While he didn’t believe in ghosts, he did believe that something of Edgar Delong remained behind in the house. Using newspaper accounts and photos of the day, along with family reminiscences and his own grandfather’s diary, he wrote an inspired and chilling account of the crime, to which he added a personal slant. “I am related by blood to the murderer,” he wrote, “and am writing about his crime in the house in which it occurred.”

He finished his book ahead of schedule and was sure it would be a success. He sent it off to his publisher and began working on his next book, a novel and a complete departure from crime. He still had a couple of weeks on his lease in the Delong house—which technically hadn’t been the Delong house for decades, although he still thought of it in those terms. He stocked up on groceries and planned to spend a quiet time alone.

Except that he wasn’t alone. Edgar Delong, his murderous young cousin, was there in the house with him, watching him, standing behind him, sometimes touching him on the shoulder or the back of the head. Edgar Delong would make himself known to Charles Delong when he believed the time was right.

The house had a soporific effect on Charles Delong. He took to taking naps on the couch in the afternoon, hearing only the ticking of the clock, the wind outside rustling the trees or the faraway barking of a dog. One afternoon during one of these naps he was made to see the thing that happened every day at seven minutes after four. He thought he was dreaming as he saw Edgar Delong emerge from the back of the house bearing a shotgun and walk with it toward his parents as they sat in the room they called the parlor. His mother drew back instinctively and gave a startled cry when Edgar shot her. His father began to stand up and emitted a strangled shout as the bullet entered his chest.

After he had killed them both, Edgar Delong turned to his cousin Charles Delong and said, “It’s always the same.”

Still believing he was dreaming, Charles Delong said, “I don’t understand.”

“Every day the same. They laugh at me and I keep killing them but I can’t make them stop.”

“None of this is real,” Charles Delong said. “You’re a figment. You don’t exit.”

“Maybe it’s a figment to you. To me it’s real and I can’t stop. I want to stop. I want you to help me to stop.”

“How can I do that?”

“Let me come into your body so I can have the means to leave this house.”

“No, I would never do that! It’s impossible!”

“I can make you see it every day. Live it every day. As I do.”

“No, it’s out of the question!”

“You wanted to know what it was like to be me.”

“You’re a murderer. I don’t want to be you.”

“We’re cousins. We’re the same blood.”

“No!”

“I’m going up to the attic now and hang myself, as I have thousands of times before. I want you to come along and watch.”

“No!”

“I think we’ve reached the point where there’s no longer a choice,” Edgar Delong said and raised the gun and shot his cousin Charles Delong squarely in the chest.

The body of Charles Delong wasn’t found for five days. When the police were called in to investigate and were unable to find a murder weapon or a motive, they deduced that the murderer was somebody that Charles Delong knew and had willingly admitted to the house.

And so it continued. Every day at seven minutes after four in the afternoon, Edgar Delong shot and killed first his mother and then his father, after which he climbed the stairs to the attic and hanged himself from a rafter. The only difference now was that he had his cousin Charles Delong there to experience the whole thing with him. Without end and ad infinitum. 

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997