Tag: fiction

Billie Jo, Betty Jo and Bobbie Jo

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Billie Jo, Betty Jo and Bobbie Jo ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

I always wanted to watch Petticoat Junction on TV and couldn’t. We only had one TV and I never got to choose what was watched, except on the rare occasions when I happened to be at home by myself. Our TV was almost always tuned to westerns, war or police dramas, or, of course, the news. Comedies were unacceptable. Anybody who wanted to watch a situation comedy had severe mental problems, or worse (especially if it had the word “petticoat” in the title). If you were a “normal” person you didn’t want to see a show that you could laugh at and talk about at school the next day. Life was just too serious for that. If you weren’t seeing men on horses shooting guns or men fighting battles with other men, you just weren’t entertained. That’s the way the cards were stacked at our house.

Anyway, Petticoat Junction was so cheery and so far removed from reality that it made you forget your problems for a while. It was set in the country (as opposed to a city or town), presumably somewhere in the United States, but what state or what part of the country it was in was never specified. (The nearest town was called Hooterville, if that helps at all.)

In this country setting was a hotel called the Shady Rest, run by an old woman named Kate. The actress Bea Benadaret played Kate. She also played the part of cousin Pearl Bodine in The Beverly Hillbillies and did the voice for Wilma Flintstone. No matter which side of the fence you are on regarding Miss Benadaret, you have to admit that is quite an impressive track record for any thespian!

So, Kate the country hotel owner didn’t have a husband but had a trio of perky daughters, named, appropriately, Billie Jo, Betty Jo and Bobbie Jo. They were the reason we watched the show in the first place. They were apparently in their teens but, unlike teens in the real world, they were perfectly groomed—never a hair out of place—and were never sullen, angry or angst-ridden. They never seemed to go to school or do much of anything, but they did, however, swim in the water tank beside the train tracks, as evidenced in the show’s opening every week, slinging their petticoats over the side—hence the title Petticoat Junction.

Also part of the Shady Rest family was irascible Uncle Joe. He had a big belly and wore a bow tie and a funny hat; took a lot of naps in the rocking chair on the porch and could be counted on to say funny and inappropriate things, stimulating the laugh track more than anybody else. He was played by the gravelly voiced character actor Edgar Buchanan, who, during his movie career, was in a lot of westerns and played the helpful friend, Applejack, of Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in the tearjerking movie Penny Serenade in 1941.

When Kate needed food for her guests at the hotel, she bought it from Sam Drucker, a skinny, baldheaded man who wore a garter on his sleeve and a long apron. His general store, right out of the nineteenth century, had a potbellied stove, a phone with a crank (just turn the crank and you’ll get Sarah, the telephone operator), a display of brooms for sale, and shelves of canned goods behind the counter. Sam Drucker might have been a love interest for Kate as there seemed so few eligible men around, but, on second thought, he probably wasn’t.

And then there was the train, the Cannonball, which we usually saw or heard about when the action moved outside the hotel. More often than not, the Cannonball brought interesting guests to the hotel, such as a sick child and her overly protective mother, an old beau of Kate’s from her youth, or the mean old miser who wanted to buy the Shady Rest and tear it down. The engineer and the conductor of the train were two old country gents who, like Uncle Joe, could be counted on to elicit laughter. Their names were Smiley Burnett and Rufe Davis. They weren’t very smart but we didn’t care because nobody else was smart, either.

As the sixties wore on, Petticoat Junction changed, and not for the better, either. It went from black and white to color, as did every other show on television. The actresses who played the three gals weren’t always the same. When there was a different Billy Jo, Betty Jo, or Bobbie Jo from what we were used to, I think we weren’t supposed to notice, but we did, and it was disturbing. (One of the gals, we heard later, was the girlfriend of Nat King Cole.) When Bea Benadaret became ill and died, the show tried to continue without her, but her absence was felt too much to retain the feeling it once had.

Given the popularity of Petticoat Junction, it was inevitable that there would be an offshoot. It was called Green Acres and it had the same pastoral setting and even some of the same characters as Petticoat Junction, including Sam Drucker. It was about a sophisticated New York couple who moved to the country and set themselves up on a farm. The best thing about Green Acres was Eva Gabor, the Hungarian-accented Park Avenue socialite who had to adapt herself to being a farm wife. (“Darling, I love you, but give me Park Avenue!”)

Eventually the kind of gentle, unsophisticated rural humor of Petticoat Junction fell out of favor with audiences and was replaced by more caustic, politically conscious offerings like All in the Family. The simple sixties passed away and became something else entirely. Would I want to go back and live the sixties over again? Not if it means I have to repeat the hellish ninth grade.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Bye Bye Blackbird

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Bye Bye Blackbird ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

The year Nellis Folts was eleven years old was the year he decided he would enter the school talent contest. He chose Bye Bye Blackbird for the number he would perform, and he wouldn’t just stand there and move his lips to some stupid record the way some people did. He would actually sing the song. He asked Miss Mullendorfer, the assistant music teacher, to accompany him on the piano and she readily agreed, saying that she thought it was “simply splendid” that a boy like Nellis, who was usually so standoffish, was going to participate in something she knew was going to be “lots of fun.”

“I’m not doing it for fun,” he said. “I’m doing it for the prize money.”

That evening when Nellis told his mother at the dinner table that he was going to perform in the talent show, she was less than enthusiastic.

“Are you sure you want to be up there on the stage in front of all those people?” she asked. “They’ll laugh at you.”

“I know. They laugh at me anyway.”

“I didn’t know you could sing.”

“Well, I can.”

“I’ve never heard you.”

“I want you and father to come to the talent show. You can hear me sing then.”

“I’m sure your father will be too tired to go out after having worked all day, but I’ll try to come if it’s a night I’m free.”

“You’re free every night.”

For two weeks before the talent show, he practiced Bye Bye Blackbird every night in front of a full-length mirror in his bedroom, with hand gestures and a couple of dance steps that he made up himself. He sang in a quavery tenor that sometimes verged on the soprano:

Pack up all your cares and woes.
Here I go, singin’ low.
Bye bye blackbird!
 
Where somebody waits for me,
Sugar’s sweet and so is she.
Bye bye blackbird!
 
No one here can love or understand me.
Oh, what hard-luck stories they all hand me!
 
So make the bed, light the light!
I’ll be home late tonight.
Blackbird byyyye byyyye!
 

(At the end of the song, he held out his arms and went down on one knee.)

For his clothes, he would wear black pants, a white shirt, and, from a trunk in the attic, a decades-old yellow sport jacket with wide shoulder pads and a red-and-yellow bow tie. Just the thing.

The night of the talent show brought with it heavy rains and thunderstorms. Nellis’s mother heard on the radio that storm warnings had been issued, but Nellis was not to be deterred. At six o’clock, one hour before the talent show was to begin, he put on his yellow plastic patrol-boy raincoat and, with his satchel containing the clothes he was going to perform in, walked the half-mile to school. He was soaked all the way through when he got there but was gratified to see that a lot of people had already shown up and taken their seats in the auditorium. The school was abuzz with excitement, in spite of the weather.

Without speaking to anyone, Nellis went into the deserted boys’ room to prepare. He took off his raincoat and set his satchel on the floor and opened it. His hair was still wet, so he took a wad of paper towels and dried it off the best he could and poured some Vitalis into his palm, rubbed his hands together and smoothed down his thick mess of dark hair. He then combed his hair exactly the way Sammy Davis Junior would have combed his if he had been there. He felt certain that anybody who owned a television set could not fail to make the comparison.

After dressing, he checked himself in the mirror and, when he was satisfied with the way he looked, especially the bow tie, he went “back stage,” where he and all the other contestants had been told to gather at seven o’clock sharp to draw their numbers out of a hat to determine in what order they would appear on stage. When he picked his number from the hat and realized he was last, his heart did a little thump-jump inside his ribcage. But no matter, he told himself. He didn’t mind being last; he would be freshest in the minds of the judges.

To begin the show, Mrs. Pepper, the music teacher, went out on the stage and waved her flabby arms to shush the audience. She was only four-and-a-half feet tall and almost as wide. Somebody in back of the auditorium whistled at her and yelled “Oh, baby!” but she pretended not to hear.

“Welcome to the annual school talent show!” Mrs. Pepper said in her whiny voice, training her myopic gaze on the middle distance. “It looks like we’ve got a capacity crowd! I’m happy to see that so many of you have braved the bad weather to be with us tonight! And I don’t think you’ll be disappointed! We’ve got a great show for you!”

The public address system squawked and sputtered, eliciting whistles and hoots from the audience.

She tapped on the microphone before continuing. “To make our competition a little more interesting,” she intoned, “our first-place winner, as decided by our three judges, will win a prize of fifty greenbacks. Our second-place winner will win twenty-five greenbacks, while our third-place winner will receive a complementary pass for dinner for two at the Lonesome Pine Restaurant and Grill on Highway 32.”

“Woo-woo-woo!” somebody in the audience yelled. Mrs. Pepper frowned for a moment before resuming her smile. “So, without further adieu,” she said, “we now bring to you our little show.”

The first contestant was Cecelia Upjohn, wearing lots of makeup, even though she was only twelve years old, and a skin-tight, glittery costume with red-white-and-blue diagonal stripes. She twirled her baton to a recording of I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, all the time with a fixed, doll-like grin on her face. When she tossed the baton high above her head, she somehow caught it without even looking at it. She finished her routine with a perfect split, one leg in front and the other behind as she went down on the floor with seemingly no effort at all. The audience rewarded her with resounding applause.

Then Ralph Krupperman with his hair the color of a new penny and Belinda Cornish took to the stage to do their Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance routine. He wore a tuxedo with a swallow-tail coat and she a curly blond wig and a satiny white dress that clung to her immature body and dragged the floor. He flung her around and around at a dizzying pace to keep time with the music as the tails of his coat flapped and she tried hard to keep from falling. After a frenetic five minutes, the music ended and the routine was over. Ralph and Belinda clasped hands and smiled like onscreen lovers as they took their bows and exited stage left to polite applause.

When Curtis Bellinger came onto the stage, a questioning murmur arose from the audience because he carried a chair in one hand and a saw in the other. (What was he going to do? Saw the chair in half?) He carried the chair to the middle of the stage and set it down. Then he sat on the chair, put the saw between his knees, and, producing a violin bow, began playing Some Enchanted Evening. The audience was transfixed as the mournful sounds of the saw carried over their heads and out the doors into the rainy night. When the song was over, the audience applauded enthusiastically—more for the novelty and daring of the act than for its musicality.

(As Curtis Bellinger was leaving the stage, a huge crack of lightning caused everybody to gasp and the lights to flicker, but the lights stayed on, and the moment of danger, if that’s what it was, was forgotten in the wake of the next act.)

Three large-for-their-age girls, who looked enough alike to be sisters but weren’t, came onto the stage, their hair in snoods and dressed in women’s army uniforms. They stood side-by-side, looking silly and self-conscious as they waited for their music to begin and, when it did, they began swiveling their hips and moving their arms like marionettes. They moved their lips to Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy, while everybody (even the most naïve person in the audience) knew they weren’t really singing.

The next act was Gus Goldblatt, a fifth grader who already weighed over two hundred pounds and wore men’s clothes. His grandfather had started teaching him the accordion when he was only two years old and since that time he had become steadily more proficient with that instrument. He favored the audience with Lady of Spain, segueing smartly into I’m Just a Vagabond Lover. The audience was most appreciative.

Gus Goldblatt’s exit brought Bertha Terhune to the stage. She was dressed in a black, full-body leotard with red ribbons in her hair and what appeared to be a bedroll under her arm. She curtsied in the direction of the audience, and, spreading out the bedroll that was really a tumbling mat, began her routine. She did a series of cartwheels, then forward somersaults and backward somersaults. She jumped into the air one way and then the other, twirled, twisted, leapt, spun, and turned, all with the agility of a flea and so fast that she was only a blur. The audience hooted and whistled.

Nellis watched all the acts from the wings as he waited to go on. He stood near a window and was aware of the storm, but what the weather might or might not do was the least of his worries. He knew he could remember all the words to Bye Bye Blackbird, but what he was worried about was “putting the song over,” as they say. The audience had sat though a lot of acts. Would they be ready for his? Would they laugh at him, as his mother had said? Would they boo him off the stage? Suddenly he wanted the whole thing to be over and to be back home where it was safe and quiet. He took deep breaths, felt light in the head, and hoped he wouldn’t be sick.

Miss Mullendorfer was standing beside him with her sheet music when Mrs. Pepper came to him and told him it was time for him to go on. He took a deep breath and walked out onto the stage. When he was installed behind the microphone, he looked out at the audience and tried to smile and they looked back at him, waiting to see what he was going to do. Two hundred eyes trained just on him, waiting for him to begin. Could he remember how the song began?

When Miss Mullendorfer from the piano played the little intro she had worked out, Nellis opened his mouth to let out the first notes. That’s when the storm hit with all its force and fury. The row of windows behind the audience blew inward as if from an explosion. The audience screamed, a prolonged wail of terror, and, as if being awakened from a dream, jumped to their feet and began running in every conceivable direction, except toward the exits and safety.

Nellis was stunned. He didn’t know what was happening. He looked over at Miss Mullendorfer at the piano to see if she might give him some cue as to what he should do, but she was gone. He was all alone on the stage, grasping the microphone stand in both hands. The thing sputtered and sparked. He might have been electrocuted if the power hadn’t failed at that moment, bringing him to the reality of the situation. He was just able to make his way out of the building in the dark as the roof was picked up and deposited someplace else and the walls around him began to collapse like a house of cards.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Color TV

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Color TV ~ By Allen Kopp 

In the early 1960s everybody wanted a color TV, but few people had them. They were expensive and, in the small town where we lived, not easy to get. You had to pay a nonrefundable deposit of twenty-five dollars to get your name on a waiting list to purchase one, which might take six months to a year, depending on how fast the dealer could get them from the factory. And, even if you had a color set, you were still going to be watching black-and-white TV most of the time because there were only three shows on in color. When you think of the early years of color TV, you think of The Wonderful World of Disney and Bonanza on Sunday nights and Hazel in the middle of the week. (I was never able to understand the appeal of Bonanza, in color or black and white.)

Color TV was so much to be desired that Woolworth’s offered a low-cost (cheap) solution to those who wanted a color set but, for whatever reason, didn’t have one. For one dollar, the lucky shopper could have the illusion of color TV with a cheesy little item that was essentially a sheet of plastic with three bands of horizontal colors; the top band was blue to represent the sky; the middle band green for trees or grass; the bottom band brown for the ground. You attached this sheet of plastic over your black-and-white TV screen with adhesive and, if you squinted hard enough, almost closing your eyes, you might have been able to convince yourself you were watching color TV. Of course, if you were watching indoor scenes where you don’t see the sky, trees or the ground, the colors didn’t make much sense, but who’s to quibble with such innovation? Our next-door neighbors had one of these things and their cat, apparently not liking it, shredded it with his claws.

My grandparents were the first to have a real color TV. They were modestly well off and had only themselves to look after, so they bought themselves a top-of-the-line model. It was a squat metal cube with a twenty-four-inch screen with rounded corners. It sat on four spindly legs canted outward, making it look like a Martian spaceship that had landed on earth. If we were ever at their house on one of the nights that a color show was on, we were thrilled (well, I was, anyway) to see TV in color. It was a real novelty. It didn’t matter what the show was; its being in color was the thing that made it cry out to be seen. I could tell everybody about it at school the next day and watch their grimaces of envy.

As thrilling and desirable as color TV was, though, it wasn’t without its problems. The color had to be adjusted every time the TV was turned on. This meant bending over and fiddling with knobs to try to get the color just right. With one knob you adjusted the color of the color. You waited for a face to appear on the screen and then turned the knob until the face was as close to the color of flesh as possible, which turned out to be about the color of baloney. With another knob you adjusted how much color you wanted. Did you want the color to look like it was just barely color, or did you want it to jump out at you in a blatant, unnatural way whenever you entered the room?

By the mid-to-late sixties, everything on TV was in color, so it was no longer the novelty that it once was; it was just one more thing to take for granted like electric lights and the internal combustion engine. TV technology improved, of course, but it would still be many years before we had more than three (five at the most) choices of what to watch. We had a channel for each of the three broadcast networks, an “educational” channel that had shows about such things as blue babies and dentistry, and one “independent” channel that was fuzzy all the time because it had a “weak signal” but had the huge advantage of showing The Three Stooges every weekday afternoon.

Things have come a long way in fifty years. TVs now are sleek and lightweight. Gone are the heavy cabinets and consoles that weighed two or three hundred pounds. No more “picture tubes” (and other small tubes) that burn out like light bulbs and have to be replaced periodically. No more fiddling to adjust the color. No more knobs. No more metal TV antennas on roofs—most people are now connected to some cable or satellite system that offers hundreds of choices instead of just a handful. There’s a “niche” channel for every interest.

Old  black-and-white movies (movies made before the wide-screen format became the norm) are shown on a high-definition TV with the same proportions as they had on the movie screen (with a black space on both sides of the picture), or you can see them “stretched,” in which case they cover the entire rectangular screen and you lose some of the crispness of the picture. Recent movies look much the same as they do in a movie theatre. With a high-end, high-definition, flat-screen TV, it’s almost like having a miniature movie screen in your living room. And the best thing about it is that movies are broadcast as they were meant to be seen. We no longer have to put up with movies being cut up to allow for endless, idiotic commercials and “reformatted” in dreadful “pan and scan.” There are some people who apparently care about the integrity of the art form. That’s the kind of innovation we don’t often see.

Copyright 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Chauncey Peeps

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Chauncey Peeps ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

From the time she was a small child, Juniper Trent wanted to be a mother. She was a lonely child and so treated her roomful of dolls like living children or like the younger brothers and sisters she was never to have. She gave them all names, scolded them when scolding was needed—dressed, bathed, fed them—and treated them with the kindest loving care of which she was capable. In short, she taught herself how to be a mother, and, by the time she was in her early twenties, believed she was ready to embark on real—rather than pretend—motherhood.

She married the first boy who asked her, one Frederick Peeps, and, in a little over a year, she had her own real-live baby. He was a fine animal specimen in every way but not exactly what she or her husband expected. He was covered in dark hair, had a snout and a long tail, a large mouth and perfectly formed teeth. He resembled a baby ape more than a human child and, in fact, an ape is what he was. The doctor explained in his dry manner that these things sometimes happened, a little trick of nature, but there was no reason to believe that the monkey baby wouldn’t live a full and happy life.

She named him Chauncey and, after she recovered from the shock of his being so different from what she expected, she was delighted with him, as pleased and as proud as a mother could be. Her husband was a little pouty at first, wondering just who this woman was who could produce such a child, but took only a few days to get used to the idea of having a son unlike any other and came to love him as much as a father could, taking singular pride in his first steps, his first words and in his first bicycle ride.

Mrs. Peeps took Chauncey with her wherever she went. She soon became used to people staring and whispering, of wanting to get a closer look. Just about everybody who saw him wanted to touch him, to take his picture, or to have him grip their thumb with his furry little hand. They cooed in his face and made faces at him and, in so doing, made complete fools of themselves. Soon Mr. and Mrs. Peeps were receiving invitations to parties and dinners on the condition that they bring their unusual little Chauncey with them. They were invited to join the country club, the lodge and several church congregations, none of which held any appeal for them. They weren’t in any way “group” people or the joining kind.

Chauncey developed rapidly, physically and emotionally. He could read the newspaper at age three, recite Tennyson at age four, and, before he was five, perform the soliloquy from Hamlet. The summer before he started to school, he was juggling and doing acrobatics, singing, dancing and performing pantomime skits. His mother believed he was a natural-born performer.

When it came time for Chauncey to go to school, Mr. and Mrs. Peeps took a long, hard look at the situation. They had both attended public school as children and they knew what a cruel place it can be for someone who is different. They couldn’t stand to think of Chauncey being bullied, taunted, mistreated and made unhappy. They would rake together the money and send him to a special school for oddly turned, one-of-a-kind or freakish children.

He became a student at the Sore Bone Academy when he was six years old. For his entrance examination, he recited The Gettysburg Address (with much feeling) and did impressions of movie stars, including Marie Dressler and Zasu Pitts. The examining board, of course, was delighted, and accepted him on the spot without the usual expect-to-hear-from-us period. (They were privately thinking about the notoriety that such a talented and unusual child might bring to their school.)

At the Sore Bone, for the first time in Chauncey’s life, he had the chance to consort with other children who were as unique as he was. His classmates included an albino boy, Siamese twin girls, a boy with webbed hands and feet, a girl with a “twin” sticking out of her side, another girl with telekinetic powers who could make objects fly around the room, a boy with an exoskeleton and a tail, a girl who was covered all over with silky white hair, a boy whose head was attached backwards to his body, a girl with four working arms but no legs, a boy with the bodily proportions of a beach ball, and on and on. After one came to know them, they were more than just “freaks.” They were all bright and friendly in their own way and all fortunate to be shut away from the cruel world at the Sore Bone. Chauncey fit right in and became a student leader.

He excelled in all his studies and was encouraged to become the clown that he knew he was always meant to be. As he grew older, he began living his life as a clown instead of just as a monkey boy. He developed his “Mr. Peeps” persona that would serve him well in the years to come.

He had a complete clown wardrobe that his mother ran up for him on her sewing machine in her little attic room at home. And what a wardrobe it was, complete with junkyard tuxedos, top hats, the traditional red-and-white striped one-piece suits with ruffled colors, oversized suits containing compartments inside for the traditional rubber chicken and other clown paraphernalia, hobo pants with patches in the knees and seat, a long frock coat that dragged five feet behind him as he walked, and female clown dresses with voluminous padding for boobs and hips for when he performed in drag.

The school years passed happily and then it was time for graduation. Of all the clown students in his class, Chauncey (alias “Mr. Peeps”) was at the top of his clown class. As he accepted his diploma in his deep-purple cap and gown festooned with rubber chickens, his mother and father sat in the audience and beamed their happy smiles.

With school behind him, Chauncey had some important decisions to make. Was he going to be a clown all his life, or was he going to set his clownhood aside and pursue some more serious profession, such as lawyering or doctoring? He knew that many doctors and lawyers are also clowns, but he didn’t think he had it in him to combine the two professions. It had to be one or the other.

Just when he was beginning to enjoy his summer vacation, a bad thing happened. His father was run over by a pie wagon in Philadelphia. It was one of those events that just happens for which no planning is possible. After the funeral, Chauncey promised his mother that he would never leave her, no matter what. He would abandon all thoughts of pursuing a profession to stay at home with her. They had plenty of money and he was tired of the world anyway.

“We will defer all important matters for the time being,” his mother said. “I want to take a little vacation and get away from it all.”

They planned on going to a spa in the mountains to take the curative waters when, on the day before they were to catch their train, Chauncey received a telephone call from the Valeria Brothers Combined Shows. They knew his work, were great admirers, and were prepared to offer him a lucrative clown contract. He and his mother put off their trip for the time being, and he traveled alone two days later to meet with Valeria Brothers to discuss the job.

They gave him more money than he ever imagined and for his very first job! He knew that if he signed with them he was going to have to travel around from place to place, wherever the circus was performing, and he wasn’t altogether happy with that prospect. When he expressed a reluctance to leave his mother behind, they told him he could bring her along if she didn’t object to the nomadic life. The circus might even employ her in some capacity if she was interested.

When he told his mother the news, she was happy for a fresh start in life. What had seemed like the end of things was really the beginning of a new kind of life for her and her monkey boy.

Chauncey’s first experience at performing with the Valeria Brothers Combined Shows was a swing through the Southern states. And he was an instant success! As word of him spread, the Valeria Brothers saw their box-office receipts increase wherever they went. His mother became a sort of wardrobe mistress for Chauncey and for some of the other performers. She repaired their costumes when needed and saw that they were cleaned and pressed and ready for the next performance.

It was in the circus that Chauncey found true love. He was instantly drawn to a midget fat-lady clown who went by the name of Ima Pigg. She was about the same age as Chauncey and very naïve, having been sheltered by her wealthy family. When her father died and her mother remarried, she had stepped out into the world on her own and joined the circus and never looked back. Chauncey was her first romantic attachment and she was his.

In a few months, Ima Pigg became Ima Peeps. The wedding was  performed before a capacity audience in the middle of the regular show. The Valeria Brothers realized they could have sold three times as many tickets if only they had had the space for that many people. They considered making marriage ceremonies part of the regular show.

Within a year, Ima Peeps gave birth to her own little monkey boy and named him Chauncey Junior. He was a tiny duplicate of his father. Chauncey and Ima were very happy, as was Chauncey’s mother, the wardrobe mistress.

But the work of performing in the circus came first. The Valeria Brothers were constantly pushing Chauncey to try new routines. They didn’t want him to get stale. They had him juggling swords and live hand grenades and hanging from his teeth from a trapeze thirty feet in the air. It wasn’t enough for him just to be a clown anymore. The audience expected more from him. He had to do things that had never been done before.

One night to a packed house, when Chauncey and several of his clown colleagues were performing a stunt with rings of fire, the fire got out of control and began to spread very fast. All the lights had been turned off, making the situation more frightening for the audience when they began to see the fire coming toward them. They began screaming and running for the exits, trampling whoever got in their way. Eight people died and many others were injured without the flames ever getting to them.

Of the performers, Chauncey and three other clowns were killed. Those who were present stated later that Chauncey was a hero. He was able to get several people out of the way of the flames at the expense of his own life.

His mother left the circus and went home. She was heartbroken, of course, but not alone. Ima Peeps went with her and her grandson, Chauncey Junior. When she looked at him, she saw her monkey boy and she knew he wasn’t really dead. When she took him out into the world with her, she witnessed the stares and whispers. She was there for his first words, his first steps and his first time alone on a bicycle. Everything that had happened before was happening again.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Hold All Calls

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Hold All Calls ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

“Oh, how I hate Monday mornings!” Dakin said as he sat down at his desk.

“The countdown to the weekend has begun,” Christopher said. “Only one hundred and five hours until five o’clock Friday afternoon.”

“It’s too far away,” Dakin said. “I shall perish before then.”

“Well, you’d better look busy. Pinky is already in this morning and he’s not happy. Production is down again or something.”

Dakin took some papers out of the drawer and spread them out. “I hate everybody on Monday morning,” he said, “but I especially hate my parents for bringing me into the world and not providing me with a family fortune.”

“Alas,” Christopher said, “so few of us have a family fortune.”

“If I had even a small fortune, I would blow this place so fast.”

“A couple million would do.”

“I’d travel. I’d have a home on the Riviera and another one in Rome.”

“Only two?”

“Two to start with.”

“I hear somebody coming. Look alive!”

Agnes Simpkins came into the room, wearing a funereal black dress and a scowl on her face. She was looking at the floor and didn’t look at Dakin or Christopher. She walked to the far corner of the room, stood for a moment facing the wall, and went out again without speaking.

“What’s she looking for?” Dakin asked.

“Her soul,” Christopher said.

“Have you ever seen a more hideous woman? Her dress looks like she’s got it on backwards. Her hair looks like it was chewed off by a wolverine. Her lipstick looks like a chimp put it on for her.”

“There’s a rumor going around that she’s really a man.”

“That would explain a lot.”

“I think Pinky sent her in here to spy on us.”

Dakin shuffled some papers, held a pencil in his right hand and made a few squiggles. “I woke up with a headache this morning and a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I really should have stayed at home.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Production is down, you know.”

“Hah!”

“If I collapse at my desk, go get somebody to help me, as long as it’s not Agnes Simpkins.”

“I’m sure she would be more than willing to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”

“I’d rather die.”

“Really, are you planning on doing any work today at all?”

“Not if I can help it. I’m too sick. I’m fine until I get to work and then after I get here I’m sick. I think it sounds like I need to stay away from work altogether for my health, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a conundrum.”

“I saw these friends on the weekend that I hadn’t seen in years. They own their own yacht. Can you believe it? They were going on a cruise in the Caribbean and they invited me to go along. I would love to have gone with them, but instead I’m here. I am in hell! Why was I even born?”

“Another conundrum.”

“And to top it all off, I’m hungry. I skipped breakfast.”

“I thought you said you were sick.”

“I am sick but that doesn’t mean I don’t desire food.”

“Anytime I’m sick, I…”

“How about if you be a dear and go see if anybody brought any donuts in today?”

“Why don’t you go?”

“I have all this work to do and, truly, I don’t have the strength to walk down the hall and witness the sickening sight of all those frightened little people working themselves into a frenzy just because production is down or something and Pinky is in an uproar. I mean, Pinky is always in an uproar about something or other, isn’t he?”

“I have a candy bar in my drawer if you want it.”

“That’s sweet of you but I really don’t want to eat candy on an empty stomach. It might make me vomit.”

“If you vomit, forcibly—and in front of everybody—you can legitimately go home sick. There’s nothing like a little projectile vomiting to drive home your point.”

“Yes, yes, that’s a good idea and I will keep it in mind.”

“How about if you proofread a report for me and correct any errors?”

“Oh, buddy, not you too!”

“Well, somebody’s got to get some work done around here.”

“I am not in any shape, physically or emotionally, to do any work today.”

“All right, I’ll do it myself.”

“Do you really care if it gets done or not?”

“I don’t care for myself but it would be nice to get it done.”

“’Nice to get it done’. I’m afraid you’re even starting to sound like them.”

“Please forgive me.”

“Where are you going for lunch today?”

“I think I’ll just stay here and get something out of the vending machine.”

“How banal! I’m going to take an extra long one today. I feel like walking down the block to Luigi’s and having some linguini in marinara sauce, a crisp salad, and spumoni for dessert. Would you like to come with me?”

“Somebody’s got to stay here and do some of this work.”

“Will you cover for me if I don’t come back?”

“I’ll say I haven’t seen you and I don’t know where you are.”

“Good thinking.”

Christopher put his head back and closed his eyes. “I can smell Pinky’s cologne!” he said. “He’s within thirty feet! Look busy!”

No sooner than the words were spoken, they spotted the man himself. He came toward them carrying a sheath of papers. He was winded, his face was red and the corners of his mouth turned down.

“Mr. Pinkley!” Dakin said cheerfully. “How lovely to see you! Is that a new toupee you’re wearing? It certainly looks handsome!”

“Humph!” Mr. Pinkley said. “I’ve heard reports that there’s been some hanky-panky going on in this department.” The wattles under his chin quivered with emphasis.

“Hanky-panky, sir?”

“Talking and loafing and not focusing on the work at hand.”

“Not focusing? I don’t know what would give anybody that idea, sir. We’re just as busy as a colony of beavers.”

“I’m warning you that I won’t have any slackers working in this company. If you aren’t prepared to give me a full day’s work, then you might as well leave now.”

“I wouldn’t dream of leaving, sir!”

“Production is down for the third straight quarter! That tells me that a house cleaning is in order, but I believe in giving everybody a second chance. You can consider this your warning. If I have to speak to you again, it’ll be to dismiss you.”

“I understand, sir! I believe I’ll be deserving of any punishment you see fit to mete out.”

“I want a written report from you every day outlining what you are working on and how much you have done that day. Do I make myself clear?”

“As a bell, sir! I only have one question.”

“What is it?”

“Will I be the only one submitting a daily report on my activities?”

“None of your business!”

“Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!”

After Mr. Pinkley left, Dakin and Christopher looked at each other and laughed.

“Who does he think he is, speaking that way to me?” Dakin said. “I have a good mind to call up my lawyer and sue the bastard.”

“I’d like to see that,” Christopher said.

“I don’t have to take that kind of crap from him or anybody else.”

“No, indeed, you do not!”

“I’m ten times smarter than he is. I can outclass him any day in the week and twice on Sunday with one hand tied behind my back. He can’t even write a coherent sentence without some help from a secretary.”

“He is an ignorant son of a bitch,” Christopher said. “It goes with the territory.”

“Now I am completely thrown off my game after being spoken to in such a manner.”

“Some people are just too sensitive for the world of business.”

“Yes, thank you! I’m glad that someone in this rotten, stinking world recognizes that fact.”

“What are you going to do now? It sounds like you’re going to have to show Mr. Pinkley some results or he’s going to fire you.”

“What am I going to do? I’m going to take a long, long lunch and then I’m going home and taking an extended bubble bath to get the stench of this place off my body. After that I’m going to put on a dressing gown and telephone my lawyer. He and I are going to have an illuminating little discussion about how I have been harassed and pressured in the workplace to the point of nervous collapse. Then he will advise me about how we might proceed with a lawsuit. I know a very good doctor who will say on my behalf whatever needs to be said.”

“It sounds like you’ve thought it all out carefully.”

“I have.”

“Just do me one favor.”

“Anything.”

“Don’t mention my name.”

“I don’t even know your name. You are one of the millions of anonymous downtrodden office workers who toil and die. The only way you will ever give your life any meaning is to leave this hellish existence and take control of your own destiny.”

“Those are only words. I don’t know how to do it.”

“Believe me, dear friend, I will pave the way for you and countless others just like you.”

“So, I’ll be hearing from you again?”

“Of course you will!”

“What shall I say to people when they ask me where you are?”

“Tell them to hold all calls, for now I belong to history!”

Copyright 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Ruined City

revolution (1)

The Ruined City ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

It was a Friday in wintertime. I had to stay late at my job and missed the last train. I wasn’t sure if I had the strength to walk home in the cold but I was going to try. I was alone on the dark street—only one streetlamp in ten was lit—when I heard the whirring of the night patrol transport under the wind. I ducked into an alleyway but I was spotted and before I knew what was happening two men were on me, hitting me with clubs.

“It’s after curfew!” one of the men said. “Show me your identity card!”

My hands were shaking and I began coughing uncontrollably, but I managed to get the card out and thrust it toward his face. “I was just going home,” I said. “I thought I could catch the last train but it was gone.”

“Shut up!” he said. He shone the light on the card and looked at it and then at me. “It’s not valid!” he said, pulling me to my feet. “We’re ordered to shoot on sight any revolutionaries.”

“I’m not a revolutionary,” I said.

“You’ll have to come along with us to the magistrate.”

“But I didn’t do anything!”

When they shoved me into the back of the transport, I couldn’t see anything. The only thing I knew was that I was moving very fast through the city. Ten minutes later, I was pulled out and taken into a building and put into a holding cell with ten or twelve others just like me.

My turn came and I was taken into a small room and put in a chair facing a desk. Behind the desk was a man with reddish hair and a round face. He had a scar running from the side of his mouth to his ear. He grinned at me with a lopsided mouth.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” he said.

“I was on my way home. I didn’t do anything.”

“You know about the curfew laws?”

“Yes.”

“If you are out after curfew, we must assume you are one of the enemy intent on doing us harm.”

“I’m not.”

“Then why were you out after curfew?”

“Some of the machinery broke down at work. I had to stay and fix it to keep production going.”

“You are a mechanic?”

“A factory worker.”

“A factory worker who also fixes machinery?”

“Yes.”

“Your identity card is not valid.”

“I don’t understand. It was valid when it was checked yesterday.”

“Are you saying that someone has sabotaged your identity card without your knowing it?”

“I don’t know. Yes, anything is possible.”

“Do you know what can happen to you when you are out after curfew with an invalid identity card?”

“I was on my way home. If my identity card isn’t valid, I have no explanation.”

“Is that the only excuse you have?”

“Yes.”

“It sounds very weak.”

“Nevertheless.”

“You are not with the revolutionary forces?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Where do you live?”

“Outer sector twenty-three.”

“What are your political views?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Did you vote for Leonhardt in the election?”

“No.”

“Leonhardt received ninety-eight perfect of the vote. Are you telling me you were among the two percent who voted for the opposition?”

“No, I didn’t vote for the opposition. I didn’t vote.”

“Why not?”

“I was in the hospital with fever.”

“You were supposed to vote. Everybody votes in this state.”

“I was out of my head.”

“Things look very bad for you. You were skulking about in the dark after curfew. You have an identity card that isn’t valid. You didn’t vote in the election.”

“I want to speak to someone.”

“Revolutionary forces are trying to take over the city and the state. That’s why we have a curfew. Anybody violating curfew is presumed to be a revolutionary and will be shot on sight. I’m surprised our men even brought you to me. They should have killed you outright.”

“I’ve done nothing!”

“So you all say.”

“You can call my employer. He’ll vouch for me. You can call my wife and son. They’ll swear I’m not a revolutionary. I spend my life working in a factory. When I’m not working, I’m at home resting up to go to work the next day. I have no time or energy to be a revolutionary.”

“I will call no one! Why should I believe anything that anybody said about you?”

“Of what am I being accused?”

“Espionage, sedition, spying, treason, plotting to overthrow the government. All of those things.”

“I’m innocent!”

He took a deep breath and looked into my eyes. “I hereby find you guilty,” he said.

“I’ve done nothing!”

“According to the evidence, you are an enemy of the state. You will be hanged by the neck until dead at six o’clock in the morning.”

“Don’t I have a chance to speak to someone?”

“I am that someone.”

“Don’t I get a trial?”

“You’ve just had it. I’ve examined the evidence thoroughly and have found you guilty. The judgment of the court has been rendered.”

I was removed from the room and thrown into a dark, solitary cell. All that was left for me to do was to wait to die. I was like a fly caught in a spider web.

I lay down on the filthy cot and tried to calm myself. I told myself that dying this way wasn’t such a bad thing. It would be quick and I had heard it was painless. All my problems would go away; my feet and back would no longer bother me. No, I didn’t hate it so much for myself but mostly for my wife and son and my mother and brother who lived far away. They would have a hard time learning the truth of what happened to me. They would know in their hearts, though, that I did nothing wrong and that I went to my death like a man and not a cringing coward.

I heard the steady drip of water somewhere for a couple of interminable hours and after a while I began to hear something else. A low, steady drone like the buzzing of insects that slowly grew louder. Could it be that planes were approaching the city? What did it mean?

When the bombs began to fall, I stood up and began banging on the door of the cell and calling for somebody to come and let me out. I didn’t want to be squashed like a bug if the building was blown to bits, even if it was preferable to having my neck snapped. No matter how much noise I made, though, nobody came.

The first blast that hit the building knocked me to the floor. I crawled under the cot, my only refuge. Other blasts followed and finally the walls came down around me. I was certain I was going to die, but my fear was gone. I was strangely calm. I had seen this all happen in a dream and I knew how it was going to turn out.

When the blasts stopped and I realized I wasn’t dead, I began to try to pull myself free of the rubble. My legs were pinned but not too badly injured, I felt, and, with a great amount of effort, I was able to free them. I pulled myself to a sitting position and rested for a few moments. I figured it was useless to try to dig my way to the outside, though. If I displaced a board here or a chunk of plaster there, it only made more stuff rain down on me. I was buried alive but I still believed it wasn’t as bad as hanging from the end of a rope. A slow death instead of a fast one.

Then I felt something on my face I hadn’t expected: a tiny puff of wind and the smell of the outdoors. It smelled like freedom. I began digging my way toward the smell slowly, so as not to bring everything down on my head.

After what seemed like a very long time but was probably only a few minutes, I pulled myself out a hole in the wall that was just big enough and no bigger—as if the hole was made especially for me. I didn’t stop to question it or wonder why. I only began running.

The city was in chaos. Many buildings burning or reduced to piles of debris. People screaming and running every which way. Dead bodies everywhere, some of them blown to bits. Others who weren’t dead cried out pitifully for help.

As I ran, I realized there were others running with me. I had become part of a group of running men. One of them thrust a rifle into my hands. I took it gladly, if only to have something to hold onto that seemed real.

“We got that bastard pig Leonhardt,” the man who gave me the rifle said.

“What?” I asked.

“Leonhardt is dead. They bombed the presidential palace.”

“Who did?”

“The Northlanders. They’re in it to help us.”

“Who are the Northlanders?” I asked, but he ran on ahead and didn’t hear me.

It seemed as if we had run for miles but finally we came to a place where we could stop and look back on the burning, ruined city. There were about a dozen of us. We were all panting for air. Some of us collapsed on the ground.

“I haven’t run like that since I was twelve years old,” one man said, laughing.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“We’re taking back the state,” another said. “No more dictators! From now on we’re a democracy again.”

They thought I was one of them, so I didn’t ask any more questions that would give me away. By morning it was as if I had known them all my life. I learned to shoot the gun and became one of them. With my wife and son dead, as I was to learn later, I had nothing else to live for.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

After You’ve Gone

After You've Gone image 2

After You’ve Gone ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Around midnight Dorothy “Doodles” Plover heard a disturbing sound in the house and went downstairs to investigate. When she saw her husband, Reginald, sitting in the leather wingback chair in the living room, she let out a little scream and jumped back a couple of feet because he had been dead for eighteen months. When she recovered her senses enough to speak, she turned on a light and said, “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m sitting here,” he said. “What does it look like?”

“Still a smart ass, I see,” she said.

“You’ve put on some weight, haven’t you?” he asked. “And what have you done to your hair?”

“After you died,” she said, “I went in for different things. I changed my hair color. Don’t you like it?”

“I can’t say I have a particular fondness for orange hair.”

“Never mind my hair. I want to know why you’re here.”

“Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“No, I can’t say I am, considering you’re dead. When a person dies, you’re not supposed to see them anymore.”

“You haven’t felt my presence in the house these many months?”

“At first I did.”

“And then you didn’t?”

“I guess I just got used to your being gone.”

“In such a short time?”

“You’re not really here at all. I’m only dreaming.”

“That would explain it, wouldn’t it?”

“If you are here, shall we say that are you a ghost?”

“Use whatever word you feel comfortable with.”

“All right, let’s say you’re a ghost. I’m seeing the ghost of my dead husband. But why? Why are you here? Did you forget something?”

“I’m here because this is my home.”

“Not anymore. Your home is someplace else now.”

“You really don’t know anything about it, now, do you?”

“This is one of those dreams that seems like it’s really happening and you don’t know for sure it’s a dream until you wake up.”

“Whatever you say, dear.”

“I’m going to take my pill and go to sleep and when I wake up I’ll know for sure it was a dream.”

“You already took a pill. Two, in fact. That’s probably why you’re seeing me. Those pills always did funny things to your head.”

“They’re for my nerves. Dr. Renault prescribes them.”

“He’s not a competent doctor. He didn’t go to a school that other doctors go to. You only keep going to him because he reinforces you in all your neuroses.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“He’s built up a lucrative practice catering to neurotic housewives who believe they’re ill when in truth they are not. If he gave you a sugar pill you’d think it was a wonderful curative for all that ails you because that’s what you want to believe.”

She opened her bottle of pills and made a show of taking one out and placing it on her tongue and swallowing it. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said, “and when I wake up in the morning I will have forgotten this ever happened.”

“One day you’ll take one pill too many and you won’t wake up at all.”

“You don’t need to worry about that. You’re dead.”

“Dead is a relative term. You don’t really understand what being dead means until you are yourself dead.”

“No offense, but I really hope I don’t see you again. I’m getting along just fine without you. And, quite truthfully, now that it’s been this long, I’m glad you’re gone.”

“But I’m not gone. Not really.”

“Goodbye. Have a safe trip.”

The next time she saw him she was in the supermarket. She picked up a box of donuts and placed them in her cart along with her sweet rolls, candy and ice cream.

“That’s why you’ve put on so much weight,” he said in her ear.

She dropped the donuts into the cart and turned on him. “Why are you doing this to me?” she said, her voice trembling.

“Doing what?”

“It’s bad enough that I’m seeing you in my own home, but now I’m seeing you in public?”

“I’m wherever you are.”

“Don’t I have anything to say about it?”

“Apparently not.”

“Well, I want you to stop it!”

In the checkout line she knew he was right behind her. She would have felt him breathing down her neck if he had breathed. On the way to her car, he was walking along beside her.

“I could find a policeman and tell him you’re bothering me,” she said.

“He’d think you were crazy because he wouldn’t see me.”
“Are you saying that only I can see you?”

“That’s the way it works.”

“Why don’t you go haunt somebody else and leave me alone?”

“I have to tell you I’m hurt that you take that attitude. We were married for over twenty-five years and now you’re willing to turn it off so easily.”

“It turned itself off when you died. I didn’t ask you to die. I didn’t make it happen. It was one of those things over which I have no control.”

“Well, you needn’t take that tone! I haven’t done anything that I need to be scolded for.”

“Why do you want to be here when you can be in heaven? Heaven must be wonderful. You’ll have to tell me all about it some time, but not now. If you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment to see my doctor.”

When she got into the car and drove away, she was relieved that Reginald stayed behind. She didn’t want him interfering with her time alone with Dr. Alonzo J. Renault.

She had to admit she had developed a romantic attachment to Dr. Renault. When she arrived at his office, she freshened her lipstick and brushed her circus clown hair back from her face before going inside. Her knees were shaking and she felt a little short of breath. She was happy to see there were no other patients waiting to see him.

When Dr. Renault knew she was there, he dismissed his nurse and personally escorted her into the examining room. With his thrilling bedside manner, he made her feel as if she was his only patient, the only woman in the world worth anything. He sat her in a chair and pulled his chair around close to her so their knees were almost touching.

“How have you been, dear Doodles?” he asked, leaning forward so his face was just inches from hers. He was as smooth as Charles Boyer ever was.

“Not so good,” she said, sniffling into a handkerchief for effect. “I’ve been having these headaches.”

“Still?”

“Yes, but now they’re even worse. And, if that’s not bad enough, I’m seeing things that aren’t there.”

“What things?”

“I’m seeing ghosts!” She was surprised to find that she was sobbing.

He leaned forward and enveloped her in his arms as though she was a child who had just fallen off her roller skates. “We both know there’s no such thing as ghosts,” he said.

“Tell that to the ghost!” she said.

“Do you want a stronger pill?”

“If you think that’ll help.”

“I’ll give you a pill that I guarantee will make any ghosts go away and leave you alone.”

“While I’m here,” she said, “could you give me another one of those special pick-me-up shots?”

“Of course I will!” he said. “Anything that will make you feel better.”

When she heard that he had recently become divorced from his most recent wife, a woman half his age, she saw the field as being wide open. She called him one afternoon and invited him to come to her house for dinner to get a jump on his other female patients.

The evening alone with him was everything she hoped it would be. He was much more romantic when it was just the two of them. He held her in his arms on her French sofa before the fireplace while they listened to the patter of rain on the window. (Always a gentleman, though, he didn’t try to take advantage of the situation.)

He spoke to her in an intimate way she treasured. He told her all about his life, how he had been raised by his grandmother in a small town and how he struggled to get through medical school by posing nude for painters and picking up odd jobs wherever he could. When he segued from his youth to recent financial reverses, his voice trembled and his brown eyes filled with tears. He took her hand in both of his and faced her solemnly as if to make a confession.

“I don’t know how I dare ask it of you,” he said.

“Ask me what?” she asked.

“I was wondering if you might lend me a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for six months.”

“Of course I will, darling,” she said.

“I promise to pay you back with interest.”

“Are you sure a hundred and fifty thousand will be enough?”

She gave him the money and they began seeing each other frequently. He was attentive and considerate in a way she never believed possible. He lit her cigarettes for her, held car doors, and helped her on and off with her fur coat, like a gentleman of the old school. He took her on little overnight trips to places she had never dreamed of going. And, always, always, he provided her with the pills she needed and pick-me-up shots. She trusted him so completely she never even thought to ask what the shots were.

She reached the dizzying point in her friendship with him where she would do anything he asked of her. One night he called her at midnight when she was sleeping.

“I’m so sorry to awaken you, dearest,” he said, “but I have a favor to ask of you.”

“Can’t it wait until morning?” she asked.

“I’m afraid it can’t. I need you to stop by my office and pick up a little package and deliver it to a patient downtown.”

“I’m afraid to drive downtown by myself at this hour.”

“Nonsense! You’ll be perfectly safe. We can’t go through life afraid of our own shadows, now, can we?”

“Well, all right, if you say so.”

She began delivering packages for him all over the city and then in a fifty-mail radius of the city. Soon she was traveling to other states by airplane, always to pick up or deliver a small package. She didn’t mind these trips because she had always liked to travel and it gave her a chance to see new places and stay in beautiful hotels at somebody else’s expense. She felt as if she was living somebody else’s life, a dream life.

It wasn’t until she went to Mexico City that she thought to question what was in the packages. The first couple of runs went smoothly but on the third trip some men were waiting to pick her up when she landed back in the U.S. They humiliated her by treating her as a common criminal. They went through her baggage and took the package she had gone all that way to pick up. When she professed her innocence, they just ignored her; one of them even made as if to slap her. They took away her clothes, jewelry and money, locked her in a cell and told her she’d better hire herself a good lawyer because she was in plenty of trouble. “But I didn’t do anything!” she wailed. She gave them—or tried to give them—Dr. Renault’s address and phone number. “He can explain everything,” she pleaded, “if you will only call him.”

After several days in jail, she still hadn’t been able to get through to Dr. Renault. She didn’t want to believe he wasn’t willing to come to her aid. There had to be a perfectly logical explanation, she told herself, although, for the life of her, she couldn’t imagine what it was.

One night after lights-out as she lay on her bunk in her jail cell in the almost complete darkness, she realized there was somebody near her, just inches away. When she raised herself on her elbows, she saw Reginald, her deceased husband, looking down at her. He was wearing a cowboy hat and western attire.

“What’s with the getup?” she asked.

“Never mind,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

“He’s not coming to help me, is he?”

“I tried to tell you he was a rat. Worse than that. He wanted your soul and he almost got it.”

“If you hadn’t died, none of this would have ever happened.”

“I didn’t want to die. Nobody asked me.”

“You were the one that was always steady. You always knew what to do. You took care of me.”

“You realize that now.”

“After you died, I couldn’t manage on my own.”

“I thought you were doing pretty well without me.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to me now. I’m afraid. I don’t want to go to prison. It seems that just telling people I didn’t know what was going on isn’t going to work.”

“Do you want me to get you out of this?”

“More than anything. I don’t like being in jail.”

“You know what it means?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t mind?”

“No, as long as I can be with you.”

He reached out and put one hand on her chin and pinched her nostrils together with his other hand. She felt nothing. Her limbs relaxed and in just a minute she stood up and smiled at him. He took her by the hand and they drifted away together like a little puff of cigarette smoke.

In the morning the guard found her dead in her bunk. A doctor examined her, found she had had a heart attack in her sleep, and signed the death certificate. Nobody ever claimed her body, so she ended up in the morgue. It didn’t matter to her, though, because she had gone to a better place.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Head in a Bottle

Head in a Bottle image x

Head in a Bottle ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(I posted this story in September 2013 with a different title.)

A girl named Oubliette lived with her grandmother in a remote mountain area in the wildest part of a wild state. The house they lived in was older than anybody could remember and had a hundred or more rooms. Oubliette loved the house, as it was the only home she had ever known. She felt safe and happy there, knowing she never had to venture out into the world. Grandmother had taught her that the world is an ugly and evil place, with myriad dangers waiting to snare the unsuspecting, and those who live apart from it are the luckiest people alive.

Oubliette didn’t miss going to school the way other children do because she always had plenty to do to keep her body and mind occupied. The house was filled with many interesting things. One enormous room on the top floor was filled with specimens floating in formaldehyde in large bottles. One bottle held a pair of smiling Siamese twins that appeared to be hugging. Oubliette liked to think of them as living in the bottle. She was sure they were as happy in their snug little world as she was in hers. Another bottle that she was always drawn to held the head of a man with his hair floating out from his head like seaweed. His eyes were open wide and his lips were parted as if he had been trying to speak at the moment his head was severed from his body. What exactly had he been going to say? Oubliette liked to put her ear against the cold glass next to his mouth in the hope that she would hear him speak but she never did. It was a tantalizing mystery, though.

Other bottles held a heart, a liver, a brain, eyes, and a set of lungs, not to mention a dodo bird that had been extinct for hundred of years, an octopus, a python snake, side-by-side scorpion and tarantula, a dinosaur egg that was millions of years old, a coelacanth, baby shark and alligator, and on and on. Not in jars but in opposite corners of the room as if they were keeping watch were two complete human skeletons suspended from hooks. The room and everything in it was as familiar and beloved to Oubliette as her own hand.

Another part of the house was filled with departed family members who had walked the earth long before Oubliette was born. One of Grandmother’s sons, the one she didn’t like to talk about very much, had been a taxidermist. His name was Sheridan and he was Oubliette’s great uncle. He had left home many years ago and nobody knew anymore if he was even still alive. Instead of stuffing animals as most taxidermists do, Uncle Sheridan stuffed deceased family members. It had become a sort of tradition in the family that when one died one would be stuffed and mounted instead of being buried in the ground the way most dead people are. And Sheridan prided himself on the lifelike appearance of his subjects: Uncle Julius, for example, was dressed in evening dress, cape and top hat and was just stepping from a carriage as he did so often in life. Baby Margaret sat up in her perambulator, eyes shining and mouth opened slightly in baby laughter, showing tiny, pearl-like teeth.  Grandfather Beauchamp sat in his favorite armchair beside a stock ticker, carefully studying the narrow stream of paper issuing from it. Cousin Grace was dressed in a shimmering gown as Juliet, a part she had triumphed in on the stage. Uncle Cowan, a gifted musician in life (killed by a lightning bolt at age 19), was playing the violin with a look of intense concentration. His sister, Marigold, was sitting at a vanity table brushing her golden hair. Aunt Clytemnestra, Grandmother’s sister, sat at a writing table with pen poised over paper. (She had been a celebrated writer of serials for women.) Eccentric cousin Ludlow, a member of a circus in life, was dressed as a clown with white face paint, a round red nose and a huge grinning mouth. Cousin Melba on Grandfather’s side of the family was on her knees with her hands folded in front of her in an attitude of prayer, asking for forgiveness because she had taken her own life. Melba’s husband, Gustave, having been a doctor, was dressed in a medical gown, with a stethoscope around his neck and a raven on his shoulder (why a raven, nobody could say). Grandmother’s daughter, Meredith (she died on her sixteenth birthday of a brain hemorrhage), was sitting in a rocker beside a birdcage with a book in her hand, looking exactly as she had looked on the day before she died.

Oubliette loved every one of them as if they were alive. She had come to understand at an early age that “dead” is a relative term. Just because you are “dead” in one place doesn’t mean you are “dead” in all places. There are the unseen worlds that living people aren’t supposed to know about. Her only sorrow was that Uncle Sheridan wouldn’t be there to stuff her and Grandmother when their time came. She supposed they would just have to go into the ground the way ordinary dead people do.

She worried sometimes about Grandmother. Nobody knew exactly how old she was, but she had to be over a hundred. Recently she had stopped doing many of the things she loved to do and had taken, about every other day, to staying in bed all day. That wasn’t like her at all. She probably needed a doctor but didn’t like doctors and wouldn’t allow one in the house. She said the only doctor worth anything was nature. When it was her time to go to the other world, she would go, without having any quack doctors fussing around her and expecting to be paid for it.

Oubliette refused to think about Grandmother leaving her. She knew that everybody leaves the corporeal world for the ethereal one, but she somehow believed it wouldn’t happen to Grandmother as long as Oubliette needed her to be there with her. Grandmother was, after all, her only loved one and the only person she had ever spoken to in all her life. They were like two separate parts of the same body. As much as she loved the specimens in the bottles, the skeletons, and the stuffed family members, they were really nothing without Grandmother. She had come to be of the opinion that when Grandmother left the corporeal world, she was going to leave it too.

Grandmother had been thinking along the same lines. One day at tea time she asked Oubliette to come into her bedroom and have tea with her because she had something she wanted to talk to her about.

“I taught you the story of Adam and Eve,” Grandmother said, propped up with a mountain of pillows on her bed.

“Yes,” Oubliette said.

“We all die because of them.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how old I am?”

“No.”

“The clock is winding down for me, as it does for all of us. The moment we are born, we begin to die.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Oubliette said.

“I’ve given you a good life, haven’t I?”

“Of course.”

“Have you thought about what your life will be after I’m gone?”

“No.”

“Because you are so young, the do-gooders will come and get you.”

“And do what with me?”

“They’ll make you a ward of the state. They’ll put you in a home for children without families where you will have to associate with riff-raff the likes of which you cannot even imagine.”

“Can you explain ‘riff-raff’ to me?”

“Girls with bugs and diseases. Filthy-minded boys who want to take away your innocence.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“No, indeed, it will not, if I have anything to say about it.”

“You’re not going to die,” Oubliette said. “You’ll still be here twenty years from now when I’m a grown-up person.”

“We both know that’s not true,” Grandmother said. “I’ve already lived longer than any person has a right to live.”

“What can I do about it?”

“In the corner of your medicine cabinet in your bathroom you will find a tiny bottle.”

“What’s in it?”

“Some white powder to be mixed with water and ingested. I’ve been told it is instantaneous and absolutely painless.”

“Oh.”

“It is, of course, completely up to you whether or not you use it. I know you’re a smart girl and will make the right decision.”

“Do you want me to try to contact Uncle Sheridan to come home and do for you what he did for the others?”

“Sheridan’s dead,” Grandmother said. “I saw it in a dream.”

Grandmother lived for a few more months but finally, one day in the spring, she departed this life, in her own bed, with Oubliette beside her holding her hand.

After a period of mourning lasting one day, Oubliette wrapped Grandmother carefully in a pink blanket like a mummy, using large safety pins, and pulled her off the bed onto the wheelchair. She rolled her into the specimen room and dumped her into a large vat of formaldehyde that she had made ready and sealed it shut as fast as she could.

She wasn’t ready to accept that Uncle Sheridan was dead, anymore than she was ready to accept that Grandmother was going into the ground and she would never see her face again. She would find him and make him come home. Since the two of them shared the same blood, she believed that a bond must exist between them, no matter how slight. She would contact him any way she could.

She called every newspaper in the telephone book (five of them) and placed an ad in the “personals” section of each one: Uncle Sheridan, please come home. Grandmother needs you. Signed, Oubliette.

Of the private investigators in the book, she called the one with the nicest-sounding name, Byron Montague, and asked him to conduct an investigation to find Uncle Sheridan, who might be anyplace in the world, if not dead. Byron Montague asked her many questions, most of which she couldn’t answer, but he agreed to explore every avenue and to send her a bill with the results of the investigation as soon as it was completed.

But that wasn’t all. Being a firm believer in the power of the occult, she conducted a séance. She had only a vague idea of what a séance should be, but she did the best she could with what she had. At midnight in the room with the stuffed family members, she sat before a mirror with a lighted candle between her and the mirror. She stared into the flame until it was the only thing that existed for her in the world. Putting both hands to her temples, she willed (a kind of praying) with all her might to enlist the aid of the departed.

“If Uncle Sheridan is there,” she said, “give me a sign. If he’s not there and is still among the living, let him know in any way you can that he’s needed at home.”

The candle went out at that moment in a room that was absolutely airtight, but she didn’t know what it meant. Was it the sign she asked for that Uncle Sheridan dwelt in the land of the dead, or was it an acknowledgment that she was getting through? The results were inconclusive and unsatisfying.

The next night she climbed all the steps in the house with a hundred rooms to the little flat place on the roof that in olden times had served as a lookout. When she was younger, she loved the lookout because it was so secret and private a place and was impossibly high off the ground. She used to spend hours there in agreeable weather reading a book, surrounded by her dolls and stuffed animals, or looking off into the distance, wondering vaguely what the world out there was really like. Whenever Grandmother couldn’t find her, she always looked for her on the lookout.

A light rain was falling but she didn’t mind. She had always liked the rain and, since it had been an especially warm day, it felt cooling on her skin. She looked into the sky and spoke a prayer to God (if God was anywhere, he had to be there) to send Uncle Sheridan home to her. He could stuff Grandmother the way she deserved to be stuffed and he could keep the do-gooders from taking Oubliette to an orphanage with all the riff-raff. It didn’t seem like a lot to ask.

She caught a terrible cold after that, but she didn’t mind very much. She stayed in bed for three days, napping and reading and wishing that Grandmother was there to keep a watch on her temperature and fix her tempting things to eat.

Weeks went by. She recovered from the cold and kept herself busy in the big, silent house, but she missed Grandmother terribly. She had never understood loneliness before. Now nothing was the same. She took to sleeping on a pallet on the floor of the specimen room next to the vat that held Grandmother, with the smiling Siamese twins at her head and the octopus at her feet.

Summer went by slowly and then it was autumn again. Oubliette was as low as she had ever been in her brief life. She couldn’t stand the thought of a winter alone in the house with its howling wind over the mountain and its dark, abbreviated days.

The day came when she didn’t even bother to get out of bed at all. She slept through the day, dreaming pleasant dreams about Grandmother and the way it used to be, and woke up in the early evening to the dark reality of her life. She knew she had reached the end of her tether and it was time to take the powder.

She cleaned herself up, combed her hair and washed her face, and put on her best nightgown that Grandmother made for her and gave her as a Christmas present the Christmas before she died. She filled a glass with water and took the little bottle of powder out of the medicine cabinet and emptied it into the water. She waited for the powder to dissolve and then drank it down.

She didn’t know how long she had so she hurried and got back into bed and pulled the covers up to her chest. Soon she began to feel a pleasant drowsiness and she knew the powder was taking effect. Her last thought before she passed over into that other realm was that it would be years before anybody found her body and when they did she would be a skeleton in the bed, with mice running in and out of her eye sockets. Maybe her ghost would haunt the house and people would be afraid to come anywhere near it, a prospect she found thoroughly enchanting.

She fell into the oblivion of sleep. Hours later (or was it minutes?) when she awoke she knew that something in the room had fundamentally changed but she didn’t know what it was. She sat up in bed and, turning on the light, saw a man standing at the foot of the bed looking at her. He had a black moustache and green eyes, the same color eyes as Uncle Cowan’s. She took that as a very good sign.

“Uncle Sheridan?” she said.

The man took his derby hat off and held it in his hand. “No,” he said.

“Am I dead or am I dreaming?” she asked.

“Any one of us could ask that very same question,” he said.

She pushed back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed, caring nothing about modesty. “If you’re not Uncle Sheridan,” she said, “who are you?”

“Does the name Byron Montague mean anything to you?”

“The private investigator?”

“One and the same.”

“Did you find Uncle Sheridan?”

“No, I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“You gave me your address to send you my bill, remember?”

“You deliver your bill in person?”

“This is the first time.”

“My next question might be to ask why you are in my room in the middle of the night and if you are really here or if I am only imagining it.”

“It’s difficult to explain.”

“Do the best you can.”

“After I spoke to you on the phone, I started thinking a lot about your situation. It wasn’t what you told me that concerned me but what you didn’t tell me. I knew that you needed help and it came to me that I was the one to help. When I tried to put it out of my mind, it always came back to me, as if I was being impelled in some way, but who or what impelled me, I couldn’t say.”

“How did you even get through the front door? It’s always locked.”

“I knocked repeatedly and when nobody came I was about to leave when the thought occurred to me that a key might be hidden somewhere. People very often do that, you know. I started looking around and found a key high up in a tiny niche—more a crack, really—to the right of the door. I had come this far, so I just had to come inside and look around, although I might have been taken for a burglar and shot.”

“You’re not a taxidermist are you?” she asked. “In addition to being a private investigator?”

“Yes, I am,” he said. “How did you know?”

“Have you ever stuffed dead people instead of animals?”

“Well, once or twice,” he said, “but I think as a practice it’s generally looked down upon.”

“I have something I want to show you,” she said.

She put on her dressing gown and took him into the room with the stuffed family members. At first he thought he was looking at wax figures until he put his face up against their faces and sniffed them like a dog.

“This is very good work,” he said. “Quality craftsmanship.”

“I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“No, indeed, I have not. Who did it?”

“Uncle Sheridan.”

“I get a chill when I look at them. They’re dead yet still they live. They ought to be in a museum.”

“We would never agree to display them in a museum, Grandmother and me.”

“Is she here now?”

“She’s waiting just down the hall. If you come with me, I’ll take you to her.”

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Cigarettes

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Cigarettes ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

When Lester Bright awoke on Monday morning, he thought about how he might skip school that day. He could say he was sick, but he had used that excuse—when was it?—not two weeks ago. He groaned and rolled out of bed. After performing his morning ablutions, he dressed himself in the same clothes he wore on Friday and went downstairs.

His mother, Loyce, was sitting at the kitchen table, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. She barely looked at him when he came into the room.

“I sure do have a headache this morning,” he said, as he poured cornflakes into a bowl and splashed some expired milk on them. “I’m sick at my stomach, too. I think I’m going to vomit.”

He looked at her to see what effect his words might be having, but she was ignoring him. Her eyes were baggy and she hadn’t put on her wig yet or any makeup. She looked like a scary old man. Was it any wonder his friends were afraid of her?

He sat down at the table across from her and eyed her Pall Mall menthol cigarettes while he chewed. Three of them were sticking up invitingly out of the pack. When she got up from the table and went to the sink to rinse out her cup, he reached across and took two of them, sticking them in his shirt pocket.

She turned around from the sink, or maybe whirled around from the sink would have been more like it. “I saw that!” she said. “Put ‘em back!”

“Put what back?” he said.

“Those cigarettes you just stole from me.”

“I didn’t steal any…”

She was on him before he knew what was happening. She moved across the room awfully fast for such a big woman. She grabbed for his pocket and took the cigarettes, ripping his shirt. Any defensive movement on his part would have been useless.

“Have you been smoking?” she asked.

“Of course not!” he said. “I would never smoke!”

“You’re stealing cigarettes from me but not smoking them?”

“I didn’t think you’d mind!”

“What do you mean taking my cigarettes when my back is turned? Are you insane?” She began slapping at him with both hands.

He tried to cover his head with his arms. “You’re hurting me!”

“If I ever see you smoking a cigarette, I’ll cram it down your throat! You’re thirteen years old!”

“I wasn’t taking them for me! I was taking them for a sick friend.”

She stopped the slapping. “Who?” she asked.

“You don’t know him!”

“I want to know his name! Now!”

“He lives down by the river. His name is Harry Burgess.”

“Well, you tell Harry Burgess to get his own damn cigarettes or he’ll be a lot sicker than he ever imagined!”

“I’m going to the school nurse today and tell her you beat me! I’ll have bruises to prove it!”

He had some money he had found on his mother’s dresser, so he stopped at the mini-mart on the way to school and bought a doughnut and a pack of his own Pall Malls. After eating the doughnut in three quick bites, he wiped his hands on his pants and went on to school.

It was still a few minutes before first bell, so he unwrapped his pack and lit up just outside the school gate. His friend Harry Burgess had just stepped off his bus and ran over.

“Where’d you get the cigs?” Harry asked.

“Bought ‘em.”

“I bet you stole them. You never have any money.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“Well, are you going to offer me one like the gentleman you are?”

Harry took one from the pack and was about to light it when the bell rang. “I’ll smoke it during third period,” he said, putting it in his pocket.

At the beginning of third period, when they were supposed to be in study hall working on their American history project, they went to the boys’ restroom on the first floor. After the other boys had gone on to their classes and they were alone, they went over to the row of windows beyond the stalls and lit up, first Lester and then Harry from the same match.

“Oh, tastes so good!” Lester said.

“I’ve been dying for a fag all morning!” Harry said.

After a couple of minutes they were engulfed in a cloud of smoke, so they opened a window a few inches to let some of it out. They were each on their second cigarette when they heard a sound behind them that told them they were not alone. Mr. Phegley, the school principal, had just come in and was looking at them. He had a look on his face that neither of them would ever forget.

Lester didn’t mind the three-day suspension so much—he was always glad for a reason to not go to school—but the bad thing about it was that he was going to have to tell his mother. There would be no way to make a three-day smoking suspension sound like anything other than what it was.

When he got home before noon, she was dozing on the couch. He stood looking at her until she opened her eyes.

“What are you doing home from school so early?” she asked.

“I have something I have to show you,” he said, holding out the letter detailing the terms of his suspension.

“Oh, no!” she said, pulling herself to a sitting position. “What have you done now?”

She reached for a cigarette, lit it and blew a big cloud of smoke in Lester’s face. He inhaled deeply and experienced a few moments of absolute giddiness before she took the letter out of the envelope and unfolded it.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

I’ll Do It but I Won’t Like It


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I’ll Do It but I Won’t Like It ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

I wonder about people who work in offices, and I especially wonder about people who work in offices and like it. I’ve worked in quite a few offices over the long years and I guess I can say I’m stronger for having done it. (That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger). I have to admit, though, that most of the time I didn’t like it. It has mostly been my experience that “office” is just another word for “hell” or “prison.” The best offices to work in are the ones where you have lots of freedom and the worst are the ones where freedom, as a word and a concept, is completely unknown.

I’ve worked at a number of contract positions, meaning that I was part of the organization but not “altogether” a part of the organization. I was, of course, expected to abide by all the rules of the company (start times, codes of conduct, breaks, dress code, etc.) but was excluded from company benefits, social functions and perquisites. If the company was closed for the afternoon so employees could attend the funeral of a fallen executive, for example, I would, as a contractor, have my pay docked, while the regular employees didn’t. Also, being a contractor means that one is completely expendable. If a contract employee’s work is in any way unsatisfactory (and even if it isn’t), he can be removed so fast he won’t even know what happened, with as little fanfare as the changing of a light bulb. So, in a phrase, being a contractor means I am a disposable commodity. If I have human feelings, they’re going to be trampled on.

The best contract position I had lasted for three years. I know I was a fool for hanging around that long, but I was promised a permanent position that never happened. I liked the job—or anyway, could tolerate it—because we had a company cafeteria and a four-day work-week, but also because I had a boss who didn’t much care what I did as long as I did the work I was supposed to do. It was a congenial—some might even say permissive—environment and I probably would have stayed until I died in harness, but my boss (the man who hired me and authorized my pay) was fired for some naughtiness or other, and the corporate robot who took his place decided there was no room in the company for me. (He never liked me, anyway, and the feeling was mutual.)

If you are NOT a contractor, of course, that means you are a “regular” or a “permanent” company employee, which in corporate language very often means “slave” or “possession that we can do with as we please.” At company XYZ, for example, I was never supposed to think for myself or make decisions—that was done for me by a person far superior to me, a manager. I almost felt like I was in third grade again because the manager was breathing down my neck all the time, watching my every move, chewing me out for any little thing. (When I was on kitchen duty, for example, I was chewed out for going to the kitchen to clean up too early, because the three of us who were assigned were supposed to do it as a “team.”) We had endless meetings, some of them conducted over the phone, where we had to sit and listen to some blowhard gasbag of a manager (one of those “superior” people) think out loud, sometimes for as long as two-and-a-half hours. (Of course, nothing was ever accomplished at these meetings.) When the meeting was finally over, I found I had fallen behind on meeting my “deadline.” Guess what the solution was to that? I was supposed to catch up on the work on my own time! (Why else did I have that laptop computer that I was supposed to carry around with me all the time?) If they could figure out a way to get people to work in their sleep, they would do it. They’re working on it, I’m sure.

Of course, managers are notoriously cloven-hooved nincompoops who have no clue about human psychology or how to deal with people. (Some of them don’t even know the difference between “there and “their,” let alone “affect” and “effect.”) They don’t seem to realize that if they treat people like shit, they will get shit in return. You reap what you sow. The good manager, and there are a few of them, knows to treat people the way he himself wants to be treated. It’s so simple. If a manager is liked and respected, he will get so much more from people than if he is hated.

The office, for me, is a very unnatural environment that brings out the worst in people. When you are thrown in with a bunch of office people, strangers with whom you have nothing in common, you learn almost by instinct which ones are to be avoided. You are naturally distrustful of the people who “love” their jobs (or say they do) and believe the company is sacrosanct. (I call these people “abiders”—for them there is no other religion.) They have usually been brainwashed to the point where you can no longer have any possible human connection with them. They believe that every company rule, no matter how stupid, is to be obeyed. If they see you committing some minor infraction or other (he took two ink pens instead of one), they will more likely than not tell on you, just like on the playground in second grade. They cringe if you indulge in any kind of bitchy humor at the expense of the company or its management. They take their jobs so seriously that they become overwrought and face potential nervous collapse if something isn’t done the way they think it should be. They are the watchdogs of those of us who don’t give a shit. Stay away from these people. If you ever hand one of them a knife, you will be sure to find it sticking in your back.

A common question that’s asked in job interviews is, “What is your ideal work environment?” One time when I was asked this question, I said to the female interviewer, “Freedom.” To which she responded, “We don’t have any.” I didn’t get the job, even though I was well qualified for it.

And that brings me to my favorite kind of job, the job where there are no ringing phones, no yak-yakking people, no meetings with a nauseating number of clichés and buzz words spoken, no people (mostly women) complaining about how cold they are while I am dying from how hot it is in the place, no getting up extremely early in the morning, no traffic jams going to or from work, no petty jealousies, no backbiting, no whining, no adult babies, no wishing I was someplace else, no clockwatching, no pretending to be busy when I’m not, no pretending I like something or somebody I don’t, no “Sunday blues” because I have to go to work on Monday, no evenings getting ready for—and dreading—the next day of hell. I control the temperature (a little on the cool side, summer or winter). If my phone is ringing, I don’t have to answer it because it is, after all, my phone. I can work in my bathrobe all day, take extra long lunches, and can take a nap whenever I feel like it. I can have music playing (Mozart, Bach, Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee, Paul Whiteman, or whatever) while I work—or not—and I control what kind of music I listen to without having to defer to anybody else’s preferences. This sounds like heaven, doesn’t it? It sounds a lot like home.

Copyright © 2014 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997