Tag: fiction

The Celestial City

the-celestial-city-image-3

The Celestial City ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(This short story is a continuation of “At the Mannequin Factory,” that I posted on September 4.)

Elma awoke, more than ever conscious that Frankie, in the bed beside her in silk pajamas, wasn’t a real person, but a mannequin with movable arms and legs. She groaned and sat up and covered Frankie with the blanket so she wouldn’t have to look at him. It was Monday morning and a squinty-eyed look at the clock revealed that it was already later than she thought.

On this morning she took more pains with her appearance than usual. She stood under a spray of scalding water and washed her hair; after it was dry, she brushed it vigorously in an attempt to give it some body. She had found an ancient tube of lipstick and this she dabbed to her lips, sparingly, to give her face a little color. When she was dressed, she tied a red-and-blue scarf around her shoulders, looking at herself in the smoky dresser mirror to determine if any of these little blandishments had made a difference.

At the mannequin factory, she didn’t say a word to anybody. She went to her desk and began doing the work that had been left to her by people she never saw and who treated her, not badly, but like a piece of the furniture.

In the middle of the morning, she was aware of somebody standing in the doorway looking at her. She turned toward the wall and blew her nose loudly into a wad of used tissue. When she turned back around, the person was still standing there, making clucking sounds with his tongue to get her attention. She looked up and when she saw it was Shakespeare, her heart gave a little lurch in spite of itself.

“Are you looking for someone?” she asked.

“Only you,” he said.

She bit her lip and said, “Humph!”

“You’re looking radiant today,” he said.

She knew how hideously ugly she was; she believed that anybody who suggested otherwise was making fun of her.

“Do you want me to tell Mr. Hilyer you’re here to see him?” she asked.

“I’m not,” Shakespeare said. “I’m here to see you.”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” she said. “I’m not interested in your little games.”

“You don’t mean that,” he said. “Your heart cries out.”

She stood up and walked to the door of Mr. Hilyer’s office and put her hand on the knob and started to open the door. It was the cue for Shakespeare to leave.

“I’ll see you later,” he said, waggling his fingers at her and disappearing around the corner.

She sat back down at her desk and Mr. Hilyer came out of his office. He was unused to hearing her speak at all, so he asked, “Who were you talking to?”

“Nobody,” she said. “Nobody here.”

At lunchtime she went down to the lunchroom to get a little carton of milk to have with her roll and apple. Shakespeare was sitting at one of the tables and when he saw her he jumped up and came toward her. She got her milk as fast as she could and turned her back to him, but he followed along behind her.

“Stay and talk for a little while,” he said. “Have a cigarette.”

“No!” she said. “Some of us have work to do!”

“Don’t you want to ask me anything?” he asked.

“Only why you’re bothering me!”

“So you want me to leave you alone, then?”

“Yes!”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” He laughed and was gone.

When she left work at the end of the day, Shakespeare was waiting for her at the door, as if it was something he did every day.

She groaned and said, “I don’t want to see you!”

“I have a car today,” he said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”

“I don’t want it!”

Nevertheless, she let herself be led to his car, an old black Cadillac, and got in on the passenger side when he unlocked the door.

“At least it isn’t raining today,” he said as he got in and started the car. The car made a vroom-vroom sound and he said, “This is a classic. They don’t make them like this anymore.”

“You can let me out anywhere,” she said. “I’m used to walking.”

“You don’t want to have a drink with me?” he asked.

“No! I don’t drink!”

He turned and looked at her with a smile and she turned her face away.

“You don’t much like the way you look, do you?” he said.

“What business is it of yours?”

“I can help you if you’ll let me.”

“Let me out at the next corner.”

“All your life you’ve been told you’re ugly and they’ve got you believing it.”

“That’s enough. Let me out!”

“No, I don’t want to,” he said.

“Why do you persist in bothering me?” she asked. “Just look at me!”

“You know I spray paint mannequins at the mannequin factory?”

“I’m so happy for you!”

“No, you’re not. You’re very unhappy.”

“You know nothing about me.”

“I know more than you think I know.”

“If you don’t stop bothering me, I’m going to tell Mr. Hilyer.”

“What do you think he’d do? Is he your boyfriend or something?”

“You can let me out anywhere,” she said. “I’ve had enough of this and I’m going to walk the rest of the way.”

“Did you take the pill I gave you on Friday?”

“Pill?”

“Don’t you remember? In the bar after work I gave you a pill and told you to take it when you got home.”

“I remember saying I was going to flush it down the toilet.”

“Did you take it?”

“I flushed it down the toilet.”

“I wanted you to take it.”

“Why?”

“Because it will make you happy and beautiful, at least for a little while.”

“I was going to call the police and tell them you’re distributing illegal drugs, but I couldn’t remember your name and I didn’t think you were worth it, anyway.”

When he pulled up in front of her house, she realized she hadn’t told him where she lived. “How did you know?” she asked.

“I’m a good guesser.”

She opened the door and started to get out.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I have something I want to give you.”

“I don’t want anything you have,” she said.

He took a pill out of a little bottle and put it in the palm of her hand. “Don’t flush this one down the toilet,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It wouldn’t help you to know the name.”

“You’re not going to make a dope fiend out of me, if that’s what your little game is.”

“It’s not like that,” he said.

“What will it do to me?”

“It won’t hurt you, I promise.”

“What will it do to me?”

“You’ll see the Celestial City.”

“Does that mean I die?”

“There is no death in the Celestial City.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but the main thing is I don’t give a shit.”

“You will,” he said. “Give it time.”

For the rest of the week she didn’t see Shakespeare at the mannequin factory. She was both relieved and alarmed.

By the time the work week was over, she was sick. She had caught a cold and ached in every part of her body. When she tried to eat a little breakfast on Saturday morning, she threw up on the kitchen floor. After she cleaned up the mess, she locked herself in her room and went back to bed.

As she lay there, she remembered the pill that Shakespeare had given her. Without thinking too much about it, she arose from the bed, took it out of its hiding place in the dresser drawer, and swallowed it.

She lay back down on the bed, composing herself for death, legs straight out and hands over her abdomen. She knew she was taking a terrible chance by swallowing a pill that a person like Shakespeare had given her, but she was past caring. If she died, she would never have to see Momma and Poppa again or the mannequin factory, which had lately become more and more odious to her.

She felt nothing for a few minutes, but then the room began to move, not in a vertiginous but in a joyful, musical way. The people around her, the mannequins she had rescued from destruction at the mannequin factory, began to move around her in time to a beautiful melody. They were fluid in their motions, even the mustachioed outdoorsman and the little boy at play. She felt herself—saw herself—being lifted up from the bed, suspended in the air, surrounded by the mannequins in a circle of light and love. And just above her head, where the ceiling had been, the Celestial City opened up in a burst of brilliant light and untold beauty. A man stepped forward from the light, perhaps a mannequin and perhaps not; she wanted to go to him but was for the moment unable to move her arms and legs. Slowly the man dissolved into nothingness and she fell back on the bed in blackness and utter despair.

(To be continued.)

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

At the Mannequin Factory

the-mannequin-factory-image-4

At the Mannequin Factory ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Poppa’s face was dry and lined, like old leather. The red pouches under his eyes made his eyes look half-closed, even when they were open all the way. His mouth was a thin, lipless line in which a Marlboro cigarette was inserted. For sixty of his seventy years, he had smoked Marlboros, an untold and uncalculated number of them.

He reclined in his chair that had molded itself to the shape of his body—or his body had molded itself to the shape of the chair. The room was dark and low, the perpetual cloud of smoke hanging like a pall between Poppa and the ceiling. A small lamp with a little cluster of red flowers painted on the lampshade, the only color in the room, sat on a table between his chair and Momma’s.

Poppa and Momma both puffed on their cigarettes. For them, puffing on a cigarette was part of the act of breathing. A breath wasn’t a breath without a puff to complement it. And while they puffed away they both kept their eyes on the screen a few feet in front of them. The screen was the eye on the world, the only eye, to which they had given their fealty. It didn’t matter what was on—a boxing match, a train wreck, news of the world, cowboys and Indians, romance, dancing, drama, music or laughter—it was all the same: they regarded everything the eye brought to them with the same fish-eyed blankness.

The door opened and Elma entered. Momma and Poppa didn’t look up but instead kept looking at the eye. Elma took off her coat and hat and stood in the middle of the room; she looked expectantly at Momma and Poppa, though the eyes through which she saw them were only slits.

“Beer, beer, beer!” Papa said.

“Popcorn, popcorn!” Momma said. “Peanuts, Peanuts!”

Elma went into the kitchen to get the things they wanted and took them back into the living room. When she set the bottle of beer on the table next to Poppa’s arm, he didn’t look up, but his arm reached out, seemingly of its own accord, and brought the bottle to his lips. He took a long drink and smacked his lips and set the bottle back down.

Elma had mixed the peanuts and popcorn together in one bowl, the way Momma liked them. Momma grabbed the bowl and began eating hungrily, never looking away from the eye. Elma opened a new carton of Marlboros and stacked the packs on the table, five on Poppa’s side and five on Momma’s, and when these things were done she went up the winding stairs to her own people.

The room seemed crowded now with twelve of them. They sat or stood about in different poses. Elma had dressed, wigged and hatted them according to her own whims. There was the society lady with the fox fur, the businessman with a pencil-line mustache, the small boy standing beside the dresser in play togs, ready to catch a ball, the lady with one leg canted out, hands on hips. They all had beautiful, painted-on, perfectly proportioned faces, luminous eyes and pearl-like teeth.

Some had movable arms and legs so they might be posed sitting or reclining. Elma liked these best because they seemed more real. To amuse herself, she would sometimes dress a man in a lady’s dress—including a hat with a veil—or a lady in a man’s work clothes or overalls. She also tried different wigs and hats to get a different look or feel. In this way she amused herself for hours and kept from being lonely.

There was one man in particular she liked to whom she had given the name Frankie. His arms and legs moved and his head swiveled from side to side. His skin was soft and pliable and warm to the touch. Elma dressed him in silk pajamas and put him beside her in the bed and covered him up. On cold nights, with the light off, she would have almost sworn there was a living, breathing man in the bed beside her. It gave her a feeling of well-being unlike anything else.

For twelve of her thirty-nine years, Elma had worked in the office of a mannequin factory. All day long she sat at a desk and typed letters or did small errands for the two bosses. They liked her because she always did what she was told to do without complaint, worked for very little money, never missed work, and didn’t mind working an hour or two over when the work was piling up. She was the very rare woman who had little to say and didn’t believe that her opinions were of any importance. If they could have ordered a dozen more like Elma, they would have.

Anytime a mannequin couldn’t be used or was defective in any way, Elma asked if she might have it to keep for her own. Nobody at the mannequin factory ever asked her why she wanted the mannequins or what she did with them, but they were always willing to comply. These mannequins that Elma rescued from the trash heap she added to her collection. When she carried one of the mannequins home, people stopped to look at her, but nobody ever suggested that she was doing something she shouldn’t do or that she should be stopped. Poppa and Momma, of course, never noticed what she did and never went up the winding stairs to her rooms.

One day Elma noticed a man looking at her at the mannequin factory. She discovered his name was Alexander A. Alexander but he went by the name of Shakespeare. She thought at first that he was looking at her because he was new and didn’t know anybody yet, but a week later he was still looking at her, although she didn’t know any reason why he should.

She was delivering a typed report to one of the bosses when she met Shakespeare face to face in an otherwise deserted hallway. Instead of veering away from her and keeping on his side, he stepped in front of her and stopped her in her tracks. He put his hand familiarly on the underside of her wrist and smiled.

“I believe I know you,” he said.

All she could do was shake her head and step around him and walk on. When she got back to her desk, she was breathless and a little confused. No man had ever paid any attention to her before and when she looked at herself in the mirror she knew why. By the kindest and most generous assessment, she was hideously ugly. Her nose was crooked, her hair mouse-brown, her eyes small and ferret-like, her teeth misshapen and brown. She could never remember a time in her life when she had cared much about the way she looked or about the effect that she might have on other people. If Shakespeare spoke to her again, she would ignore him or register a complaint.

On a blustery day in fall when she was walking home in the near-dark, she realized Shakespeare had fallen into step beside her. She hadn’t seen where he came from; he was just there.

“Leave me alone!” she said. “You don’t have any business bothering me!”

She looked at him and when she saw the hurt in his eyes, she knew she had been more unkind than she needed to be.

At home it was always the same. Momma and Poppa never looked at her or spoke to her. They just sat puffing and looking at the eye. She brought their food, which some days was only pretzels, candy, popcorn or beer. When she fixed them a sandwich or a bowl of soup, they hardly ever ate it and she ended up throwing it out.

In the evening after she saw they only wanted to be left alone with their cigarettes and with the eye, she retreated to her rooms and to the people there with whom she felt comfort and peace. She began to ask herself: What kind of life is this I’m living and do I plan on doing these same things every day of my life until I die? The answer, if there was one, did not make itself known.

For the first time in her life, her sleep was disturbed by nightmares, and during the day at the mannequin factory she began to be nervous and tense. She took much longer to do her work than usual and any time one of the bosses sent her on an errand, she usually managed to find a private place, in the ladies’ room or elsewhere, to stand quietly and stare at the wall for a half-hour or so in a trance-like state before returning to her desk.

She didn’t see Shakespeare for several days and wondered what had happened to him. Maybe he wasn’t suited to his job, spray-painting mannequins, and had already been fired. She was more than willing to put him out of her mind.

The next time she saw Shakespeare, it was not at the mannequin factory but on the sidewalk down the street. When she saw him coming toward her in a crowd, she looked away but, again, he stopped her in her tracks and put his hand on her arm.

“I believe we knew each other once,” he said.

She stepped around him and kept going, eyes to the ground.

“Have you ever thought about trying a little makeup?” he said in a loud voice.

“Mind your own business!” she snapped.

Then one day Elma found herself on a tiny elevator with Shakespeare, going up to the fourth floor. For a couple of minutes, at least, she was stuck with him in close quarters and couldn’t walk away.

“We knew each other in school,” he said.

She looked at him with distaste. “I don’t remember,” she said.

“It was a long time ago.”

“I never saw you before,” she insisted.

On a rainy Friday as she was leaving work, Shakespeare was going out the door at the same time she was.

“Would you like to talk?” he asked.

“No!” she said.

He walked along beside her and there was nothing she could do but keep walking with her eyes down and pretend he wasn’t there. When they came to an establishment where liquor was sold, he looked at her and inclined his head to indicate they should enter. Without knowing why, she let herself be led inside.

They sat side by side at a bar. She had never been inside a barroom before and only wanted to leave. When a beer in a glass was set in front of her, she looked at it and didn’t seem to know what she was supposed to do.

“It’s a small world,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know why you’re bothering me,” she said, “but I want it to stop.”

“Do you think whenever a person speaks to you, they’re bothering you?”

“I want to be left alone,” she said. “I have to be getting home.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I have something I want to give you.”

“I don’t want it.”

He gave her a tiny pill that he took out of a little brown envelope in his pocket. She looked at the pill in her palm and started to give it back. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s something that will make you feel better. About the world and about life. Take it and see if it doesn’t.”

“You’re a dope dealer?” she asked.

He laughed, showing his long teeth. “All things are relative,” he said.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said. “I have to be getting home.”

“Put it in your pocket and take it with you. Tomorrow is Saturday and you don’t have to go to work. Take the pill in the morning when you’re alone and see if you don’t have a wonderful day.”

“I won’t take it,” she said. “I’ll flush it down the toilet.”

He laughed again. “Suit yourself!”

When she walked into the house, she was more than usually disgusted by the sight of Momma and Poppa sitting in their chairs staring at the eye and puffing on their cigarettes. She wanted to leave again but the thought of the bleak, wet, lonely streets leading nowhere stopped her. Without acknowledging to Poppa and Momma even that she was home, she went up the winding stairs to her rooms and to the only people in the world who knew and loved her.

(Continued in “The Celestial City”: https://literaryfictions.com/2016/09/16/the-celestial-city/

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The End is Not as Good as the Beginning

The End image

The End is Not as Good as the Beginning ~ A Short Story
by Allen Kopp

“It’s a beautiful day,” Harmon Bracegirdle said as he approached Chaz Spurlock. He put his arm over Chaz’s shoulders and pulled him closer. “Thank you so much for meeting me here today!”

“Not at all,” Chaz said. “I’m free this afternoon.”

“I love the park, don’t you?” Harmon said.

“Indeed, I do!” Chaz said.

“I asked you here today, not so we could take in the scenery, but to have a little talk, just the two of us. A little private talk. There are so many interruptions at the studio, people coming in and out all the time.”

“I understand how it is, Mr. Bracegirdle, sir!”

“Please, Chaz! Call me Harmon!”

“All right, sir! Harmon!”

They walked a little way and sat down on a bench at the edge of a scenic pond, home to a flock of geese and ducks.

“They’re so beautiful!” Harmon said. “Nature is so beautiful!”

“I quite agree, sir,” Chaz said.

“Whenever you begin to feel dehumanized by what you do for a living, just come here and forget your troubles and in a little while you’ll begin to feel inner peace.”

“Inner peace, sir. Yes, sir!”

“But I digress. I didn’t come here to discuss nature.”

“I didn’t think you did, sir.”

“The picture business is a cruel business,” Harmon said, looking over his shoulder up the hill to his car, where his two associates and his driver were waiting. “It’s 1935 and there have been so many changes.”

“Don’t I know it, sir!”

“First sound and then color, and God only knows what’ll be next.”

“You roll with the punches, sir. It’s all you can do.”

“It isn’t easy being head of the largest picture studio in the country.”

“I don’t imagine for a second that it is, sir.”

“I’m responsible for hundreds of jobs. My decisions affect hundreds of workers and their families. If I don’t make the right decisions, a lot of people will suffer.”

“I wouldn’t want that much responsibility on my shoulders, sir.”

“The studio isn’t as profitable as it once was. Competition is fierce!”

“Terrible, sir! I’m sure it’s just terrible!”

“You were one of our most bankable stars for five or six years, Chaz, but your last three pictures have lost money.”

“Not my fault, sir! Those pictures just weren’t right for me.”

“I know. Each person has his own version of where things went wrong.”

“The studio is picking the wrong properties for me.”

“Do you think you could do better choosing your own scripts?”

“I’m sure I could, sir!”

“Well, that isn’t the way our system works. When you’re a contract player in a large studio, those decisions, whether right or wrong, are made for you.”

“I have high hopes, though, for my next picture.”

“The one based on the Russian novel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Literary adaptations haven’t done well for us in the past, I’m afraid.”

“We have a couple of top-notch directors interested in the project and I’m pretty sure we can get Lola Lola to play the female lead.”

“Lola Lola won’t be available to appear in that picture.”

“I just spoke to her yesterday. She said…”

“She has commitments abroad.”

“Oh? She didn’t mention…”

“In fact, we won’t be making that picture at all, Chaz. I’m sorry.”

“Why not?”

“We just received word this morning that another studio has started production on that same story, using a different title.”

“Oh.”

“I know you’re disappointed, Chaz, but that’s the way things are in the picture business. As I said. Cruel.”

“There’ll be something else come along. What about that Western that everybody’s talking about?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I know I can be on top again with my next picture if I’m given the chance. I know I can!”

Harmon put his hand on Chaz’s leg and squeezed his inner thigh. “I’m afraid you’ve come to the end of your run, buddy. I’m sorry.”

“What are you saying? I’ve been with the studio twelve years! I have two years left on my contract!”

“We’re going to buy out your contract. Our lawyers are working on it now.”

“What if I say no?”

“The decision has already been made. I wanted to give you the news myself before you heard it from somebody else.”

“This is so unfair! My pictures have made a lot of money for the studio.”

“You’ve had three flops in a row. Last year alone, Intemperate Stranger and Rascal at Arms were our biggest box office flops. You’re only as good as your last picture.”

“I hope you’ll reconsider.”

“I’m afraid not. The die has already been cast.”

“Just one more picture. One more chance.”

“You have the very best wishes of all of us at the studio.”

“I’m just stunned. I don’t know what to say.”

Harmon gestured to his two associates up the hill, who were at that moment standing beside the front fender of the car smoking cigarettes. They came down in a wide arc so Chaz wouldn’t see them from where he was sitting.

“It’s going to be all right, buddy,” Harmon Bracegirdle said. “Just drink in the splendor of nature arrayed before you.”

“I think you’re making a big mistake,” Chaz said.

“That’s the nature of my job, kiddo. I have to make these hurtful decisions.”

Like children playing a game, the larger of the two men went up behind Chaz so as not to be detected. He waited for a signal from the other man, indicating that no one was watching, and when he received the signal he crept up behind Chaz, took a gun from inside his coat and shot him in the back of the head. One shot and Chaz lurched forward, dead before he hit the ground.

“Get his wallet and his wrist watch,” Harmon Bracegirdle said, standing up quickly. “That’ll satisfy the press.”

The news spread all over the world: Movie Star Shot Dead in Park. Robbery Suspected Motive.”

The funeral was well attended. Leading the pack of motion picture luminaries was studio head Harmon Bracegirdle, in dark glasses and tailor-made suit. On his arm was the great star Lola Lola, looking stunning as she wept behind her lace handkerchief. The picture of her placing one lily on the casket made all the pictures the next day.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Before His Time

Before His Time image

Before His Time ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

What can you say about addicts? That they engage in irrational behavior to get whatever it is they are addicted to? That they will kill if necessary, even if they don’t see themselves as killers? Did he really believe that going into a pharmacy with a gun and killing a woman and shooting another person was the right thing to do? Did he think nobody would know it was him? Did he really believe he would get away before he was caught?

His name was Gerald Lashley, but that wasn’t his real name. He broke his back in an accident. (It hurts so bad!) Doctors thought he might never walk again but he did. A long, slow recovery. He took pain killers for two years and came to depend on them. After two years, the doctor said to him, “You’re well enough now that you’re on your own. I will give you no more pain killers.”

Except that he still had pain. A lot of it. He tried to get along without the pain pills but he just couldn’t do it. He drank prodigious amounts of whiskey to take the place of the pills. Whiskey dulled the pain some but not enough. He began laying around all the time, drinking and not eating. Not washing himself and not speaking to anybody.

He saw himself many times going into a drugstore and stealing the pills he needed but he was afraid. He wasn’t the type of man to steal. He had been brought up in the church and had the fear of God in him.

Finally the pain got the best of him. When he called his doctor once again to try to get some help, the young girl who answered the phone told him the doctor was on vacation. (Do people still do that?) He slammed down the phone and sat on the couch and sobbed. He was thinking about the various ways that he might kill himself, but this, also, was against his moral beliefs.

He didn’t remember who the gun belonged to. Somebody in his family. It was still in an old wooden box in the basement along with some other junk. Also some bullets. He loaded the gun and put it in the pocket of his bathrobe and in that moment he felt better than he had felt in a long time. With hope in his heart, he went to sleep and when he woke up he knew exactly what it was he was going to do.

Except that it would never work without careful planning. There were drugstores anywhere but he would have to pick the right one. Not one in his hometown, either, where people knew him, but away, in some other town. And he would take the loaded gun along, of course, but never use it. It would just be to make sure people knew he meant business and to scare them. Not to hurt anybody.

After two weeks of planning he arrived at the “when,” the “where” and the “how.” The drug store was about twenty-five miles away in a town that was connected to the town he lived in by an old, seldom-used country road. He knew they had the kind of pain medicine he needed because he had called and asked. Yes, sir, the lady said, we have in a fresh supply; always happy to oblige. The pieces were falling into place for him.

He chose a Saturday morning at the end of winter. The sky was gray, threatening rain, like so many other days. He wore a lightweight coat with zip pockets and a knit cap pulled down to just above his eyebrows. That would make it harder for people to identify him later, if it came to that. He put the gun in the right-hand pocket—he was right-handed—and zipped it up.

Traffic was light, as he knew it would be. Not a lot of people out stirring on a dreary Saturday morning. He tried to look at the sky and concentrate on the scenery because when he thought about what he was about to do he felt light-headed and breathless. He believed his nerve might fail him, but only if he let it.

The town was nearly deserted. There were a few cars parked at the drug store and other businesses in the block, but not many. He drove around the block and parked on the street in the direction he would need to take to get away. He checked the gun in his pocket one last time and went inside.

The prescription counter was all the way in the back of the store. As he approached it, a female worker came forward, smiled, and asked if she could help him. He handed her the note he had written out beforehand and showed her the gun, holding it close to his side so nobody else would see it. She nodded her head, one time, and then turned away.

When she was gone for more than thirty seconds, he began to panic. She was taking too much time. She was telling somebody else what was happening. She would try to stall him while somebody in the back called the police. But then she reappeared from the back bearing a white plastic bag of the stuff he wanted and he felt relieved for the moment.

“Anything else?” she asked, and he knew she said this to every customer.

Before he took the bag from her, he said, “Put all the money from the cash drawer in there with the medicine.”

At that moment he was jumped from behind by somebody he didn’t see. His gun discharged with the reflex of his hand and he was aware that the bullet struck the female worker and she went down behind the counter as he was being pulled back.

The pain from the weight on his back nearly tore him in two, but he was able to throw the person off, which, he saw in just a moment, was a small old man with bent back and white hair. As the old man got up from the floor and began to charge him again, he fired the gun again. The bullet struck the old man in the upper thigh, taking him down.

Before the female worker went down, she had put at least some money in the white plastic bag with the stuff and the bag lay on the counter. He grabbed for it and ran for the front of the store, hearing gasps and screams as people in the store realized what was happening.

His hands were shaking as he opened the car door and started the engine. He sped away from the curb without even looking to see if the way was clear and drove through town.

As he was about to make the left-hand turn on the edge of town to get onto the highway, two speeding police cars appeared, their sirens deafening. One of them pulled around in front of him and stopped at an angle to keep him from going any farther and the other one stopped behind him. Officers swarmed from both cars and in a moment had him facedown on the ground. The whole thing had taken seventeen minutes.

He was taken to the town jail and then to the county jail. He was wailing and blubbering and couldn’t speak, so he was put on suicide watch and given a shot that made him feel like he was falling down a black hole that had no bottom. When he woke up he was questioned by a roomful of officers whose job it was to piece together what had happened.

During his various court appearances, he didn’t understand what was being said, but he knew there would be no trial since he had given a full confession. There would only a hearing to decide what to do with him. His lawyer told him it didn’t look good for him. The old man would recover, but the woman, mother of three, had died. The prosecution was seeking the death penalty.

After much wrangling between lawyers, he was spared the death penalty—due to “mitigating circumstances”—and sentenced instead to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

Twenty-two years went by in prison. He was an old man before his time. He walked with a terrible limp or not at all. One morning when he woke up he was too sick to get out of bed and was moved to the infirmary. That same day, as he lay dying, he saw a hill on his grandfather’s farm from his childhood. He looked up the hill and shaded his eyes to see if he saw there any sign of the forgiveness that he wanted more than anything else on earth.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp  

by allen0997

Sylvia Dell

Sylvia Dell

Sylvia Dell ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

In 1926 Mrs. Bertha Indelicato of Burbank, California, took her son, Sidney Indelicato, to a movie studio to audition for a part in a motion picture. She dressed him up in a light-blue jumper and a yellow shirt, with pork-pie hat and strapped, patent leather shoes. With Sidney’s cherubic face and naturally curly blond hair, he looked as much like a girl as a boy.

At the audition the casting director, a man named Perkins Belmont Perkins, wearing knickers and argyle stockings, separated the boys from the girls so he could get a better look. When Sidney was herded in with the girls, Mrs. Indelicato didn’t dare object, afraid that doing so might cost him a part in the movie.

When Perkins Belmont Perkins, eyeing Sidney critically, asked for the name, Mrs. Bertha Indelicato stepped forward quickly and gave the name as “Sylvia” Indelicato.

“She’s rather fat,” Perkins Belmont Perkins said, “but I think she has the “look” we’re looking for.”

“Oh, I’m so glad!” Bertha said.

“Have your daughter here at eight o’clock sharp on the fourteenth and I believe we’ll be able to use her.”

“Oh, thank you!” Bertha said. “We’ll be here! Of that you can be sure!”

After they left the studio, Bertha took Sidney to a drugstore down the street to get a banana split.

“Just think!” she said to him as he stuffed ice cream into his mouth. “We’re in!”

“In where, mama?” he asked.

“Why, didn’t you hear the nice man say they were giving you a part in the movie, honey?”

“What do I got to do?”

“Just look sweet and the director will tell you everything to do. Mama will be right beside you every step of the way.”

When Bertha’s husband, Buster Indelicato, came home from his job as a Ford salesman, Bertha told him the good news: Sidney landed a part in a movie.

“There’s just one thing,” she said. “They think Sidney is a girl.”

“What?”

“I had to think fast. I told them his name is ‘Sylvia’ Indelicato.”

“And they believed that?”

“Yes.”

“You always did dress him more like a girl than a boy.”

“If that’s the only way he can get a part in a movie, then a girl he will be!”

“Well, I always wanted a daughter, I guess,” Sidney said, reaching for a beer.

In the few days she had before the fourteenth, Bertha took Sidney shopping and outfitted him with complete feminine attire, down to the lacy bloomers. She fluffed out his hair and gave it some extra curl, insisting that she and Buster call him “Sylvia” at the dinner table and refer to him at all times as “she” and “her” instead of “he” and “him.”

“You’re going to confuse him,” Buster said, “and then we’ll have a mental case on our hands.”

“He’ll be fine,” Bertha said. “I guarantee it.”

“Why do I got to be a girl now?” Sidney asked.

“Because you are an actor,” Bertha said. “You will someday be a great actor. This will be your first acting lesson. Great actors pretend to be who and what they are not.”

“I don’t think I like being a girl.”

“Just remember that underneath the laces and frills you are still a boy. It’s only to the outside world that you are a girl.”

“If I’m an actor,” he said, “I want to be a cowboy.”

“That will come later, dear, after you are an established star.”

“What’s ‘established’ mean?”

On the morning of the fourteenth, Bertha had Sidney at the studio an hour early and was forced to wait nervously in an outer office to be called. Finally, when Sidney was called for a wardrobe fitting, Bertha was given a copy of the script. It was up to her to familiarize herself with the story and tell Sidney, as Sylvia, what he (she) was supposed to do.

The picture was called Baby Bountiful and starred that lovely young motion picture star, Arlette Joseph. She played a young mother who, when she loses her own baby to illness, goes with her handsome young husband to an orphanage to pick out another child. There are so many adorable children to choose from that the young couple can’t decide which one to take. That’s when the orphans show off their singing and dancing talents to help them make up her minds.

The young couple still can’t decide, so they go home, assuring the orphans they will return later and will, most assuredly, choose one of them to take home with them. That night, all the orphans dream of being the chosen one. The next day the young couple returns to the orphanage with some very exciting news. The young mother’s rich uncle has died and left her his millions. Since she will have all that money, she can take all the orphans and they will all live together on a fabulous Long Island estate with their new mommy and daddy.

Sidney was the orphan named Lulu. He wore a white dress and white stockings, a long wig with a large white bow. When the director told the orphans to jump up and down with excitement or to act sad, they did exactly as they were told.

Bertha stood behind the director and the camera, watching. She believed, of course, that Lulu stood out from the other orphans and that her acting was the most realistic. Her eyes brimmed with tears and her heart ached with pride. After all her years of dreaming, her own little Sidney was finally in motion pictures!

When filming was completed for Baby Bountiful, Arlette Joseph thanked all the children personally for playing orphans and everybody packed up to go home. A few days later Bertha received a fat check in the mail for Sidney’s appearance in the film. When she showed the check to Buster, he whistled and said, “That’s more than I make in a month!”

A week later the casting director from the studio called Bertha and asked if Sylvia was available to act in another picture. Bertha nearly dropped out her dentures on the kitchen floor in saying yes.

They hired Sylvia an agent, who promptly changed her name from Sylvia Indelicato to Sylvia Dell. The agent procured parts for her in five pictures the first year and seven the second year, with each part progressively larger than the one before it.

Buster quit his job and began staying home all the time, “seeing to things.” He managed Sylvia’s career from the sidelines with useless advice that nobody listened to. He began wearing double-breasted suits, smoking big cigars, and hosting luncheons at all the fancy restaurants around town.

Sidney, for his part, went along with what was expected of him. When he was at home he could be Sidney, but the minute he went outside the house he had to be Sylvia. Any time he became downhearted, Bertha presented him with a big bowl of ice cream and waved the most recent studio check in his face. When she went to the bank to cash his checks, she always took him along so he could see the big stacks of green and come to know how important they were to his family.

In 1929 the Hollywood studios stopped making silent films and converted to sound. Prepared as she was for any contingency, Bertha hired a diction coach to work with her Sidney. After all they had been through, she wasn’t going to let the advent of sound end her baby’s film career.

The diction coach, aware of how much money was to be made, declared Sylvia a “natural” after a few lessons. If he knew that Sylvia was really a boy instead of a girl, he never let on. He was accustomed to the ways of movie people and wasn’t squeamish about such things.

Sidney’s first sound picture was a big success. He had five lines, which he spoke with a convincing girlish intonation. After that, there were more offers for parts in other motion pictures. The money mounted up as Sylvia’s fame and popularity increased. Sylvia Dell fan clubs sprang up around the country. There were Sylvia Dell coloring books and dolls, an entire line of Sylvia Dell merchandise.

Sidney began to put on a lot of weight. The doctor advised Bertha to put him on a low-calorie diet, but she refused, certain the “pudginess” was part of his appeal. People had come to know him as fat and if he was no longer fat they would no longer know him.

When Sidney inevitably began to show outward signs of becoming an adult male, Bertha and Buster began to panic. They took him to a doctor and wanted to know if there was some way he, the doctor, could medically “alter” Sidney to enhance his feminine qualities and subvert the masculine ones.

“Are you suggesting I castrate him?” the doctor asked.

“If that’s what it takes,” Bertha said.

“Ask him if he wants to be castrated and I can almost assure you what his answer will be.”

“But he’s too young to know what’s best for him,” Bertha said. “He’s only a baby.”

“Good day to you!” the doctor said.

Luckily Sidney was fair-haired and the whiskers on his chin and cheeks could easily be covered up, but his deepening voice was more of a concern. Bertha began plying him with pills that she bought from a “medical consultant” and giving him cognac and whiskey toddies to “calm his nerves” and help him to sleep. In a few months he was a child alcoholic. He took to smoking prodigious numbers of cigarettes, even when he was in character as “Sylvia.” The sweet little girl had turned into a monster. The movie offers began to dry up.

Right before Sidney’s sixteenth birthday, he disappeared. Bertha believed he had been kidnapped and that soon the kidnappers would make their exorbitant demands for his return. She would pay any amount—every cent if she had to—for his return.

The police searched for Sidney but found no sign of him and after a year they gave up. They would keep his file on record, though, and if anything came up they would reopen the case. Bertha began walking the streets at night, looking for him in alleyways. She was certain he was all right and wasn’t very far away. All he needed was for her to find him.

Thirty years went by and Sidney didn’t return home. Bertha and Buster spent all the money and then there was no more. Buster died, leaving Bertha alone in her home with her memories. Her walls with lined with “stills” from Sylvia Dell movies. She never stopped thinking about Sidney.

Small packages began appearing on her doorstep, a packet with fifteen dollars in it and then one with twenty, a potted plant, a loaf of pumpernickel bread. She didn’t know who was leaving these little gifts, but when a box of chocolate-covered cherries appeared, she knew it had to Sidney. Only he would know that had always been her favorite kind of candy.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Somebody Waits for Me

Somebody Waits for Me image 1

Somebody Waits for Me ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

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

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

I ignored her but as she walked away I turned and looked at her and she turned into a puff of blue smoke.

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

I heard somebody coming and picked up a magazine and opened it and pretended to be reading. I wanted to look busy so they wouldn’t ask me questions or try to engage me in conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I already took mine.”

“I’m so happy for you.”

“Do you have any candy?”

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

“That’s not very nice.”

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cut the comedy now. Stand up.”

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

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

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

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

“Good boy!” I said.

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

“Be well!” I called to him.

I lay down again. I did not want to take a bath and would be just as obstinate about it as I needed to be. I recalled the good old days when the decision to take a bath was mine alone.

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

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

“Doctor’s orders,” she said.

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

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

“Oh, no! Not that!”

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

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

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

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

“Sorry to wake you,” he said.

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

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

“Anything wrong in particular?” he asked.

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

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

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

“Everybody feels that way sometimes.”

“That’s comforting.”

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

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

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

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

“Are you planning on going someplace?”

“Well, you never know,” I said.

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

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

I took a good look at myself in the mirror over the sink and went out into the hallway. Everything was quiet and nothing out of the ordinary. I made my down the stairs to the main entrance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More than anything I wanted to go home, but I knew that was never going to happen. I had developed a smoking habit and I preferred tea instead of coffee, but those were about the only things about myself that I knew for sure. My past was like a slate on which nothing had ever been written.

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

I also knew the people from the place I had left behind were going to come for me. I had done some bad things, including turning my doctor into a bug. I didn’t see how anybody was going to forgive a thing like that. They would take me back and probably never let me go free again.

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

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

I pointed at my reflection in the mirror and turned myself into a pigeon. I flapped my wings on the bed to try them out. From the bed I jumped to the floor and then to the window ledge. There were three pigeons already there to greet me. They knew I was somebody they had never seen before, so they were curious about where I had come from. After introductions were made, they were all eager to show me around the city.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Six and a Half

Six and a Half image 2

Six and a Half ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

A loud, insistent knock. She opened the door, quickly, so as not to have to hear another knock like that one, and there, standing on her doorstep, was a strange, blonde-haired woman holding a young girl by the hand.

“Mrs. Tovey?” the strange woman asked, smiling, or trying to smile.

“Yes,” Mrs. Tovey said, already annoyed by the sight of the woman. “If you’re soliciting for something or trying to get me to vote for a certain political candidate, I’m not interested.”

“Oh, no!” the woman said. “It isn’t anything like that! I was wondering if I might have a word with you.”

“Do I know you?” Mrs. Tovey asked.

“No, but you might know of me.”

“What is this about?”

A car went by on the street and the woman looked nervously over her shoulder. “Can we come in?” she asked.

Mrs. Tovey sighed and stood aside to let the woman and the little girl enter her home. Closing the door, she gestured toward the couch like a TV hostess, where the woman sat down, pulling the little girl down beside her. Mrs. Tovey remained standing.

“First off, I’d better tell you my name,” the woman said, leaning forward on the couch and crossing her ankles. “I’m Gilda Gray.”

“I’m sure we haven’t met,” Mrs. Tovey said. “What can I do for you?”

“I was at your husband’s funeral last week. I know you didn’t see me but I saw you.”

“There were lots of people at my husband’s funeral.”

“I was a friend of his.”

“Oh? I wasn’t aware that my husband had any friends that I didn’t know about.”

“Of course you didn’t know who I was or anything about me, but I figured you at least knew that I existed.”

“Why would I know anything about you at all?”

Gilda Gray put her arm around the little girl beside her. “This is my daughter,” she said. “She’s six and a half. We call her Ta-Ta.”

“That’s a ridiculous name,” Mrs. Tovey said.

“Her name is really Tatiana.”

Mrs. Tovey sighed. “I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but I’m awfully busy and it’s taking you a very long time to say what it is you want to say.”

“Does Ta-Ta look at all familiar to you?”

Mrs. Tovey drew in her breath and lowered her gaze at Ta-Ta. “She looks like thousands of other little girls I’ve seen. I’ve never seen her before, either.”

“The shape of her face or the way her chin sticks out?”

“Where is all this leading?”

“Your husband and I have been very good friends for about eight years. Right up until the time of his death.”

“I’m trying to be patient,” Mrs. Tovey said, “but I’m quite sure I don’t have time for this. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

Gilda Gray drew from her purse an envelope and handed it to Mrs. Tovey. “This might help explain things a little better,” she said.

Mrs. Tovey opened the envelope and withdrew a little packet of pictures, which she glanced through and quickly handed back.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” she said, “but it’s not going to work! That is not my husband in those pictures!”

“They were taken when we—your husband and I—were in Florida together.”

“My husband was never in Florida.”

“I assure you he was!”

“How do I know those pictures are real? Anybody can change a picture to make one person look like another.”

“I also have these,” Gilda Gray said.

“And just what is that?”

“It’s letters your husband wrote to me. He had a very distinctive handwriting. Are you going to tell me that’s not his writing?”

“I have no intention of reading your letters!” Mrs. Tovey said. “And if you don’t get out of my house in about five seconds, I’m going to call the police.”

“Your husband made me a lot of promises. He told me he would get a divorce and marry me. I was young and naïve and I believed every word. Of course, none of it turned out to be true.”

“If you proved to me in a court of law that my husband wrote those letters, I still wouldn’t believe you.”

“You’ll believe what you choose to believe.”

“What exactly is it you want?”

“I’m not a very good mother.”

“That I can easily believe! Your daughter is overweight and has far too much curl in her hair.”

“I don’t have a job. I can’t take care of her. I can’t even take care of myself.”

“Why should that be my concern?”

“You have this big house and property, and know you have plenty of dough in the bank.”

“That is no concern of yours.”

“I’m appealing to your sense of decency.”

“What makes you think I have one?”

“I’d like a hundred thousand dollars.”

“I think it’s safe to say that anybody would like a hundred thousand dollars.”

“It’s what your husband would have given me if he had lived.”

“You should have taken it up with him before he died.”

“I can get myself a lawyer if you refuse to play fair.”

“I can get myself a lawyer, too!” Mrs. Tovey said. “In fact, I already have one who was a good friend of my husband’s. He won’t stand for any kind of a shakedown like this.”

“You really think it’s a shakedown?”

“Indeed, I do!”

“You can’t see that I am in any way entitled to a hundred thousand dollars?”

“I cannot!”

“I could cause you a considerable amount of trouble. If I wanted to.”

“I’m sure you think you could!”

“So, you’re refusing the hundred thousand dollars?”

“I most emphatically am!”

“I have a counter-proposal, then.”

“You are in no position to propose anything! I believe you are only a thieving liar who heard about my husband’s death and are conducting—or trying to conduct—a scam.”

“I propose that you adopt Ta-Ta and raise her as your own daughter.”

“What? Why would I do that?”

“Because I believe you know in your heart that what I’m saying is true and you wouldn’t want your husband’s child to live a disadvantaged life.”

“The kind of life your daughter lives is no concern of mine!”

“If you adopted her, I would completely remove myself from the picture. I swear I would never bother you again!”

“You are a lying, thieving tramp! It’s written all over you!”

Little Ta-Ta looked from her mother to Mrs. Tovey and back again at her mother and then began crying. She sobbed and wiped at her eyes with her knuckles.

“There, there, darling!” Gilda Gray said. “We’ll go in just a little bit. Mother is just finishing up here.”

“There’s nothing more to say!” Mrs. Tovey said. “You might as well take her and go right now!”

Gilda Gray stood up from the couch. “All right, I’ll go,” she said. “I won’t give you the satisfaction of throwing me out.”

“And if you ever think of coming here again, my door will not be open to you!”

After Gilda Gray was gone, Mrs. Tovey tried to put the episode out of her head. She knew, or thought she knew, that there was no woman like that in her husband’s life. He was too conventional, too boring. No young woman would ever have found him attractive or even mildly interesting. In the morning she would call the police and tell them what happened and she was sure they would be sympathetic. She hoped they would tell her that there had been a rash of these cases and it was nothing to worry about. It happens all the time and all you can do to protect yourself is be a little bit smarter than they are.

Just as it was getting dark that evening, there was another knock at the door, a small, timid knock. When Mrs. Tovey opened the door, there was little Ta-Ta looking up at her. She raised her little fist in greeting and the corners of her mouth turned down as though she knew she would not be welcome.

Mrs. Tovey looked behind Ta-Ta, but there was no one else there. “Why, where’s your mother?” she asked.

“They let me out of the car and drove on,” Ta-Ta said.

“Who did?”

“My mother and a man.”

“And I bet they’re laughing their socks off about now.”

“Can I come in?” Ta-Ta asked.

“I guess you’ll have to,” Mrs. Tovey said.

“My mother said you would love me and take care of me. Do you love me?”

“Why, child, I don’t even know you.”

“I’m very smart.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“Can I have a hot dog?”

“I don’t think I have any hot dogs, but come on into the kitchen and we’ll see what’s there.”

Mrs. Tovey pulled a chair out from the table for Ta-Ta to sit on and went to the refrigerator to see what she might fix for her to eat. There was some leftover liver and onions and some congealed spinach, but she was sure they weren’t appropriate for a child. She fixed her a ham and cheese sandwich and slathered it with mayonnaise.

After Ta-Ta had taken a couple of bites, she said, “This is so good!”

“You haven’t eaten for a while?” Mrs. Tovey asked.

“I don’t remember. Can I watch TV?”

“Finish eating and then we’ll see.”

“Can I stay here forever and ever? My mother said I could.”

“You can stay the night.”

“Can I sleep with you?”

“No. You can sleep in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs.”

“I might get scared.”

“That’s a chance you’ll have to take.”

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

I Went Home for Christmas

I Went Home for Christmas

I Went Home for Christmas ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

There’s a little man inside my head who sees with my eyes. I don’t know if he’s an angel or a devil or a combination of both. He told me I was dying and I told him I was too young. Not exactly young but too young to die.

It was December twenty-third and I was walking down a city street, right in the shopping district. You can imagine the press of people and the noise, the car exhaust and the oppressive feeling of being one of thousands in a herd. I crossed one street and just as I made it to the other side I felt a crushing pain; my vision began to fade and I crumpled to the sidewalk like a puppet with its strings cut.

When I woke up, I was lying in a high bed. Everything around me was white. An old woman, a nurse, I presume, stepped into my field of vision but didn’t look directly at me. I wanted to ask her what had happened to me, but the words wouldn’t come.

I drifted in and out, or, to put it another way, I was aware of what was going on around me and then I wasn’t. Doctors and nurses came and went; I was lifted, moved, probed and prodded. Finally, the little man inside my head told me to prepare myself for the unexpected. When I asked him what he was talking about, he wouldn’t tell me.

I don’t know how I came to be there, but I was in our old neighborhood on Vine Street. I was a child again and as I walked up the hill toward our old house, it was nearly dark. It was snowing a little and somehow I knew it was Christmas Eve.

The big sycamore trees, the yard, the house, everything looked just the same. I was sure I was dreaming because the house—the entire neighborhood, in fact—wasn’t even there anymore. I walked up the steps and entered the front door. I was so surprised at seeing my mother standing there, who had been dead for fifteen years, that I couldn’t speak.

“Feed the dogs before it gets dark,” she said, barely looking at me. “When you’re done with that, go up to your room and make your bed and straighten up. We’re having guests. You don’t want people to think you’re a pig, do you?”

What was it she told me to do? Didn’t she know that she was dead, that the house was gone and I was now older than she was?

“How old am I?” I asked, taking off my cap with the ear flaps.

“What? Did you say something?”

“I asked you how old I am.”

“You’re eight,” she said. “Did you forget?”

“No.”

“Are you all right? You don’t have that stomach thing that’s going around, do you?”

She put her palm on my forehead. She smelled like cinnamon and cigarette smoke.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Well, you want to get your chores done before everybody gets here.”

When we were all sitting around the dining room table, I could hardly keep from staring. There was grandma with her shiny new false teeth and her beauty parlor hairdo; it was good to hear her laugh again. Next to her was grandpa with his scented pipe tobacco and his shiny bald head. I wanted to ask them where they had been all the time I thought they were dead, but I knew I couldn’t say that because they didn’t know what I knew. Is that what death is? Reverting back to some moment or other in your childhood? Why this moment in particular of all my childhood memories?

Father sat at one end of the table and mother at the other. Father couldn’t have been more than about forty when I was eight and I couldn’t remember him looking so young. He would only have about sixteen more years before he would die of the heart disease that plagued his family.

Next to mother was her unmarried, school-teacher sister, Doris. Mother used to get mad at us for making fun of Doris’s prissy ways. She fluttered her hands and sucked in her breath because she had emphysema. She wouldn’t live much past the age of fifty.

My sixteen-year-old brother, Jeff, sat to father’s left. People used to make me mad by calling us Mutt and Jeff. I was Mutt, of course. As usual, Jeff and I didn’t have much to say to each other. If he wasn’t making fun of me, he was stealing from me or punching me in the arms, so I had learned to avoid him as much as possible.

Father’s brother, my uncle Quinn, was there with his new wife, Shirley. She was Quinn’s third wife and she didn’t seem to have much to say to any of us other than “Lovely to see you again” or “Thank you for having us.”  Quinn’s daughter from his first wife, my cousin Beryl, sat between Quinn and Shirley. Beryl was fourteen and looked miserable. She had pimples and awful hair. She avoided looking at any of us, I was sure she hated Shirley and I wasn’t sure Shirley didn’t hate her back.

At one point during the meal, grandma looked at me and said, “You’re awful quiet tonight, hon. You’re not sick, are you?”

“Sick in the head!” Jeff said, and guffawed.

“No, I’m not sick,” I said.

“He had a rough day at school,” father said.

“No, I didn’t!” I said defensively. Truthfully, I couldn’t remember a thing about the day before I saw the house from down the street.

“You need to get a good night’s sleep tonight,” grandma said. “You don’t want to be sick on Christmas.”

“I’m not sick,” I said.

“You never know what’s going on inside his head,” grandpa said, and everybody looked at me. Jeff was smirking at me and Beryl looked at me with curiosity.

“Nothing’s going on inside my head,” I said.

I felt guilty with the terrible knowledge I had of everybody at the table, but I tried to keep it from showing on my face. I smiled and nibbled at my ham and sweet potatoes.

After dinner Doris played the piano. She liked to play Bach and Mozart but nobody wanted to hear that. She usually ended up playing My Melancholy Baby or My Funny Valentine. Since it was Christmas, she played I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus and Silent Night, singing along in her quavering soprano.

“Doris should have been a professional musician,” grandma said.

“She became a school teacher instead,” mother said.

With the adults all sitting around drinking coffee and wine and Jeff talking to his latest girlfriend on the phone, I put on my coat and boots and went outside. I was surprised to see Beryl standing in the front yard smoking a cigarette. She tried to hide it, but I saw the smoke coming out her mouth.

“You won’t tell my dad I was smoking, will you?” she said.

“I don’t care,” I said. I wanted to tell her she shouldn’t be smoking at her age, but I knew it was none of my business.

“Where are you going?” she asked as I walked past her.

“Just for a little walk,” I said.

I was afraid she was going to ask if she could come with me, so I broke out into a little run.

In all those decades, more than forty years, everything in the neighborhood looked the same. I remembered every detail, every tree, every house, bush and street light. I had to remind myself that none of it was real and it existed only in my mind. If I was having a dream, it was one of the most life-like dreams I ever had. I was an eight-year-old boy carrying around the thoughts and memories of a man over six times eight. If I wasn’t dead, it had to be the result of a fever.

I took a couple turns around the neighborhood and by the time I got back home it was snowing heavily. Perfect for Christmas Eve, as perfect as it could be.

Father, grandpa and Quinn were in the dining room talking about football and politics. The women were all in the kitchen, laughing and smoking cigarettes, I knew. Beryl sat in the living room alone. She smiled at me and flipped her hair back from her forehead.

“I think your brother is cute,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “He’s a jerk.”

“Do you think he likes me?”

“I don’t think he likes anybody very much.”

I took off my coat and went into the kitchen and had a peanut butter cookie and a piece of fudge. Mother was sitting at the table writing out a recipe for grandma.

“Where have you been?” she asked me.

“I just went for a little walk,” I said.

“You might have at least told me you were going.”

Grandma started in on a story about a couple of girls who were abducted and murdered and I went upstairs to my room.

My flannel pajamas were right where I had left them, in the middle drawer of the dresser. I slipped out of my clothes and into the pajamas and got into the old bed, which, I have to tell you, was the most comfortable bed I ever slept in. I was cold so I pulled the covers up over my head. It was so quiet I could hear the snowflakes falling outside my window. Soon I went to sleep.

I was only eight, so my mother and I still practiced the conceit that Santa was real and I believed in him wholeheartedly. He left for me by the tree downstairs, on Christmas morning, a red bike, a sled, some books, a new coat and lots of other things. In my stocking were nuts in the shell, an orange, hard candy and a carton of Christmas candy cigarettes. I got candy cigarettes every year in my stocking and, in past years, had made everybody laugh by pretending I was lighting up and smoking. The more I hammed it up, the more they laughed.

After we had opened all the presents, we all got dressed up and went over to grandma and grandpa’s. Grandma always cooked Christmas dinner. Besides turkey and dressing, we had roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, cranberry salad, macaroni and cheese baked in the oven that was the best I ever tasted and, for dessert, orange peel cake, apricot bars, cherry pie and pumpkin pie with real whipped cream. I didn’t mind sitting at the kids’ table with Beryl and my cousins Naomi, Tibby, Gloria and Bennett. Beryl was disappointed that Jeff was old enough to sit at the main table. He didn’t look at her the whole time.

After dinner the kids played in the snow and the adults sat around in the house smoking and drinking cocktails. Grandpa went upstairs to take a nap. Doris played the piano again for a while and when she was finished playing grandma played some Christmas records.

There were people at grandma and grandpa’s that Christmas Day that I didn’t even know, uncles and cousins and people from out of town. They would look at me and ask me how old I was, what grade I was in at school and if I had been a good boy during the year. I could have amazed them with what I knew if I had wanted to.

Mother helped grandma put away the leftovers and clean up in the kitchen and, after we all had another piece of fruit cake or pumpkin pie, we packed up and went home. I was tired and I went to my room early. Mother was still convinced I was sick, so she didn’t give me any chores to do. Everything could wait until the next day.

I put on the flannel pajamas and got into bed and turned off the light. It had stopped snowing, the moon and stars were shining and the light coming in at the window was blue-tinged and restful. I was about to drift off to sleep when the little man in my head spoke to me again.

“Have you had a good time?” he asked.

“Yes, yes,” I said, “but I don’t understand what I’m doing here. Is this what happens when you die?”

“You think you’re dead?”

“I don’t know. Am I?”

“There are no simple answers to these questions. Or, to put it another way, it’s not for us to know.”

“I don’t want to be eight years old again forever and I don’t want to live the same stupid life over again. Going through the ninth grade again the same as it was before? No, thank you!”

“Hah-hah-hah!” he said. “You’re such a complainer. Always were!”

When I awoke again, I was in the same high bed. I blinked my eyes a few times and looked toward the window where I could see blue sky and white clouds.

“What day is it?” I asked a woman in white who was standing there.

“It’s December the twenty-seventh,” she said.

“I went home for Christmas,” I said.

She smiled uneasily and nodded her head.

“It was the best Christmas ever. They were all there. All the dead ones. I didn’t know it could be that way. Einstein was right, wasn’t he?”

The woman in white shrugged her shoulders and looked away. I had to look at her again to make sure she wasn’t an angel.

Copyright © 2015 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

If You Don’t Tell Santa What You Want, You Won’t Get Anything

If You Don't Tell Santa What You Want, You Won't Get Anything

If You Don’t Tell Santa What You Want, You Won’t Get Anything ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

We lived in a small town with small stores, where there was no sit-down Santa to talk to. The nearest big stores were in the city two hours away. Every year my mother and grandma took my sister and me to see Santa and do some Christmas shopping.

I was little and didn’t know any better so I liked the city, which was so unlike the town we lived in. I liked the cars and the crowds of people standing on the street corners waiting for the light to change so they could walk across; the tall buildings and the roaring buses that had a particular smell of their own. I liked the whistle of the policeman directing traffic and the clang of the bell-ringing Santa on the sidewalk (not the real Santa, I knew) who was trying to get people to drop money into his pot. Of course, it had to be cold weather (the colder the better) and not raining, or none of this would have held any appeal for me. Cold weather was absolutely essential to get the feel of Christmas.

I was six so I still firmly believed in the myth of Santa Claus. I also believed that if you weren’t able to talk to Santa and tell him what you wanted in the run-up to Christmas, you would be out of luck and would get nothing. No presents, no Santa, no nothing. I already knew the world was a hard place.

Mother had lived in the city before she was married so she knew her way around downtown. As she maneuvered the car through the traffic to get to where she wanted to park, I was still sleepy from the Dramamine I had been given before we left home but I didn’t feel like vomiting, so that was the important thing. She parked in a pay parking lot a few blocks from where we were going and we all got out of the car.

“They charge a dollar now for parking,” mother said. “I don’t know what the world is coming to. Just last year it was fifty cents.”

Grandma helped my sister and me on with our hats and gloves and we began the several-blocks walk down to the department store where Santa was.

This store was famous for its animated Christmas windows. We stopped to take a look at them but there were so many people crowded around that we couldn’t see them very well, so we went on inside the store. I was starting to feel little-kid anxiety about seeing Santa. I might freeze up when I sat on his lap and not be able to tell him what I wanted. I felt my throat constrict at the thought.

To get in to where Santa was, you had to walk through the “Winter Wonderland” that was supposed to be the North Pole. There was a wooden walkway to get through it and there were plenty of elves around to make sure nobody left the walkway and tried to walk on the fake snow, pull on the fake trees (trees at the North Pole?) or try to get a closer look at the reindeer. It was all very pretty, with Christmas music blasting over the sound system, but I couldn’t wait to get through it and in to see Santa.

After we passed through “Winter Wonderland,” There were ropes on poles to keep all the people in a neat line. It was about half adults and half kids. Some of the women held tiny babies or pushed them in strollers. You knew they were too young and would only waste Santa’s time. Most of the kids, you could tell, were trying to hold still and not squirm too much. A few of them looked as nervous as I felt.

In about fifteen minutes, we finally came to the place where we could see Santa on his throne. I breathed a sigh of relief when I was actually able to see him and know he was there. There were still about twenty more little kids in front of me, though, before it would be my turn.

Santa was flanked by yet more elves to keep the line moving and keep any one child from taking up too much of his time. Each child was placed on Santa’s lap, Santa leaned over to let the child speak into his ear for about twenty seconds and then the child was removed in an elfin movement of robotic efficiency.

My heart was beating too fast as I got nearer to Santa. I tried to keep in my mind what I was going to say, but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to remember it. I knew my mother, sister and grandma were somewhere behind me, watching me, but I wasn’t thinking about them. I only wanted to get this over with.

Finally it was my turn. A burly elf with acne put his hands on either side of my rib cage and hoisted me up; I swung my legs over and found myself face to face with Santa. He smiled at me and I could see his thick lips through his whiskers. He breathed on the side of my head.

“What would you like for Santa to bring you?” he asked.

“Uh, I want a sled and a pair of cowboy boots and…”

“What else?”

“A Howdy-Doody puppet and a racing car set and some books and…”

“Yes?”

“That’s all I can think of right now.”

“Have you been a good boy this year?” he asked.

“Oh, yes!”

He gave me a candy cane, and the same elf who had lifted me up then lifted me down. I realized then how silly all this was.

After my sister had her turn with Santa, I rejoined mother and grandma. “Did you tell him everything you wanted?” mother asked me.

“Everything I could think of,” I said.

“Now, that doesn’t mean you’ll get everything just because you told him you wanted it.”

“How does he remember what people tell him without writing it down?” I asked.

“I guess he has a photographic memory.”

“He’s really something, isn’t he?”

We had lunch on the mezzanine level where you could look down and see hundreds of people moving around like ants. There was nothing like that back home. Then after lunch it was on to the serious shopping.

Copyright © 2015 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Looks Like Wally Fay

Looks Like Wally Fay image 2

Looks Like Wally Fay ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

“Did you get a good look at the man?” Officer Miggles asked.

“Oh, yes,” Miss Dragonette said.

“Can you describe him for me?”

“Well, he was kind of heavy-set without being what I would call fat, if you know what I mean.”

“So he was moderately overweight?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“Did you notice anything else about him? The color of his hair?”

“He was wearing a hat so I couldn’t see his hair. I would imagine it would be dark, though. Underneath the hat.”

“How tall was he?”

“Rather on the tall side. About six feet and one inch, I’d say.”

“What was he wearing?”

“A long brown topcoat that came down to his ankles. Cashmere, I think.”

“Cashmere?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Can you tell me anything else about him?”

“He was wearing a brown tie with little yellow birds on it, like parrots.”

“All right. How old would you say he was?”

“If I had to guess, I’d guess late thirties. Thirty-eight or thirty-nine.”

“How would you describe his face?”

“Well, let me think, now. He needed a shave. I did notice that right off.”

“So he had stubble on his face.”

“Yes, dark stubble. The color of the stubble on his face was what made me think he would have dark hair, even though I couldn’t see his hair because of the hat he was wearing.”

“Can you tell me anything else about his face?”

“He looked like that actor in that movie about the woman with a spoiled daughter who shoots the woman’s husband.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am.”

“I know! It was Joan Crawford!”

“So, the man looked like Joan Crawford?”

“No! It was a Joan Crawford movie. The man looked like one of the actors in the movie.”

“Do you know the actor’s name?”

“No, I can’t think of it offhand. It wasn’t the playboy who was Joan Crawford’s second husband and it wasn’t the first husband, either. It was the other man. The one in business with Joan Crawford’s first husband.”

“Okay, ma’am. I don’t think we’re making much progress here.”

“I remember now! His name was Wally Fay.”

“Whose name?”

“The man in the movie with Joan Crawford. The name of the character he played was Wally Fay. I can’t think of his real name, though. It’ll come to me later, I’m sure.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t much help.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Can you tell me anything else about him at all?”

“He was in another movie where he played Paul Newman’s brother.”

“No! Can you tell me anything else about the man who fired the gun?”

“Paul Newman was married to Elizabeth Taylor and he had this brother they called Gooper. I suppose that was a nickname, though.”

“I don’t need to hear about a movie.”

“Gooper was married to a coarse fat woman named May. She and Gooper had a lot of little kids, and Paul Newman’s wife, the character played by Elizabeth Taylor, didn’t much care for them because they made so much noise.”

“That won’t help us to catch the man we’re looking for, ma’am.”

“Well, I’m trying to remember! I’m cooperating with you. It seems the least you can do is be patient and polite.”

“I’m sorry if I seem impatient but I don’t need to hear about any movie.”

“Where was I? Oh, yes. Paul Newman and his brother Gooper had a rich old father who didn’t like anybody in his family. Well, the entire family was gathered because the father had just found out he had a fatal disease and the two sons—especially Gooper—were worried about who was going to inherit the estate. It was in the South, somewhere. Mississippi, I think.”

“Okay, that’s enough about movies. Can you describe for me what you saw the man do?”

“Well, I was just walking along the sidewalk, minding my own business, on my way to buy a new pair of shoes. I heard a commotion in the street and I stopped to see what it was. I saw a bunch of police cars with flashing lights. It seemed to be something terribly important, but I didn’t know what it was.”

“Then what happened?”

“A bunch of people had gathered along the sidewalk to watch, but I stayed back. That’s when I noticed the man in the cashmere coat come out of an alleyway.”

“What made you notice him?”

“He just stood there, looking very dignified. He wasn’t trying to elbow in to get a closer look, the way the other people were. He just looked straight ahead as though in a trance or something.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, after all the police cars had passed with their lights going, I saw the big black car of the governor. I could see him in the car smiling and waving—I recognized him from his pictures—and I knew then what all the commotion was about. All the people were trying to get in to get a closer look at him.”

“So you didn’t know until that moment that the governor was going to be visiting here that day?”

“No. Why should I?”

“Don’t you read the newspapers? Don’t you watch the news on television?”

“Never.”

“Go on.”

“When the car carrying the governor came about even with where I was standing on the sidewalk, the man in the cashmere coat took a few steps forward.”

“Toward the car?”

“That’s right.”

“Then what did he do?”

“I looked away for a moment and that’s when I heard the gunshots.”

“How many gunshots?”

“Three, I think. Some of the people screamed or ducked down as if they thought they were going to be shot, but I wasn’t afraid because I saw where the bullets came from and I knew they weren’t directed at me.”

“All right. Then what?”

“After the man fired the shots, he just simply disappeared.”

“People don’t disappear.”

“I know they don’t, but that’s the way it seemed to me. He was there and then he wasn’t.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“The governor’s car stopped and all the police cars stopped and everybody was running around trying to find out where the bullets came from. There were more people than ever now crowding around to get a better view. You know what people are like.”

“I suppose I do.”

“Well, the police spotted me standing on the sidewalk and, well, I guess it seemed to them that the bullets had come from about where I was standing, so they asked me if I had seen anything and I said I had and that’s when all these questions started. Can I go now? I’m feeling a little shaky after all the excitement.”

“It seems you were the only one who saw the man in the cashmere coat.”

“Yes, that’s because I was the only one standing back where he was standing. Everybody else was crowding toward the front.”

“As the only witness, you’ll need to make yourself available for further questioning.”

“Please, I’d rather you kept me out of this, if you don’t mind.”

After Office Miggles took her name and address, Miss Dragonette continued two blocks up the street and stepped off the curb between two parked cars. Looking around to make sure she wasn’t being observed, she took the gun out of her purse and threw it down a storm drain from which could be heard the sound of rushing water.

Satisfied that she wasn’t seen, she snapped her purse shut smartly and crossed the sidewalk to a store window where two high-fashion female mannequins in fur coats stood side by side. She looked into the face of the mannequin on the right and returned the artificial smile. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to make your acquaintance,” she said before continuing on her way.

Copyright © 2015 by Allen Kopp  

by allen0997