fiction – Page 22 – Literary Fictions

Horse Face

Horse Face ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

I bought only two items, a pound of butter and a jar of pickles. I could have gone through the express lane and been on my way in thirty seconds, but I waited twenty minutes or more behind an old lady with a couple hundred dollars worth of stuff in an overflowing cart. When my turn finally came, I smiled at the checker and placed my items on the conveyor belt. When she looked at me, she blushed a little. I know she did.

Her name, displayed on her name tag for all the world to see, was Patricia. She was twenty-eight years old, wasn’t married, and lived with her mother the same as me. I knew these things from hearsay. I had been seeing her in the Food Giant for two years. We had been on a first-name basis ever since I had told her my name.

“Hi, Patricia!” I said, hoping she wasn’t catching any bad smells coming off my body.

“Hello, Morgan. All alone this evening?”

“I’m just stopping by on my way home from work.”

“Most people go through the express lane when they only have two items. It saves time.”

“I know, but I prefer your lane.”

She laughed and pushed her glasses in place up her knobby nose. “Why is that?” she asked.

“You’re my favorite checker.”

“I didn’t know I was anybody’s favorite anything,” she said with a little deprecatory laugh.

The trouble with buying two items is that it takes such a short time to pay for them. It was over all too fast. I gave her a pained smile, took the bag with my two items in it, and left.

When my mother and I were having dinner that evening, I decided to bring up the subject of Patricia to see what she would say.

“At the Food Giant,” I said carefully, “have you ever noticed a checkout girl named Patricia?”

“I don’t pay any attention to their names,” mother said. “The only thing that matters to me is whether they’re fast or slow. The fast ones I like. The slow ones I don’t.”

“Patricia is the one with brown-blond hair that looks like a curtain that’s about to close over her face.”

“Does she have spots on her hands?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is she the one that’s so fat it looks like she’s eaten half the food in the store before she started her shift?”

“No, mother. The one I’m talking about isn’t fat.”

She thought for a moment. “I know who you mean!” she said. “She’s the one with a long face like a horse.”

“Well, if you want to be cruel about it, that’s the one.”

“What about her?”

“I’m thinking about asking her over for dinner.”

She was speechless for a moment. Then she laughed as though I had made a joke. “Why would you want to do that?” she asked.

“I think she’s lonely.”

“Why should that concern you?”

“Maybe I’m lonely, too.”

“Do you mean you’re thinking of asking her out on a date?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“You don’t know anything about her. She might have filthy habits. She might have insanity in her genes. She might have diseases, for heaven’s sake!”

“Yes, the possibilities are limitless, are they not?”

“Why her?”

“I seem to feel some kind of connection between us, and I have ever since the first time I saw her.”

“The last girl you dated turned out to be a man!”

“That isn’t fair. She was a girl stuck in a man’s body.”

“She could be a frog stuck in a man’s body and she’d still be a man. It’s the body that counts.”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“It proves you have poor judgment.”

“My judgment is as good as anybody else’s!”

“I don’t care what you do. It’s your life.”

“Thank you!”

“But I refuse to stand idly by and see you ruin your life on…”

We went on and on in that way until she couldn’t stand to look at me anymore and retired to her room to watch her TV shows, leaving me to wash the dishes on my own.

The next day I again stopped at the Food Giant on my way home from work. I bought a bag of peanuts in the shell and a bottle of maple syrup and stood in line to pay for them. When Patricia saw me, the pained look on her face went away and she brightened.

“Back again, are we?” she said.

“Always the loyal customer,” I said.

“If you buy only two items at a time, it’ll take you forever to finish your grocery shopping.”

“What are you doing Saturday night?” I blurted it out before I lost my nerve.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t thought about it. I’ll probably catch up on my sleep.”

“Would you like to have an adventure?”

“What kind of adventure?”

“Come to my house and have dinner with my mother and me.”

“Well, um, I don’t know.”

“I’ll make lasagna. Tell me you don’t like lasagna.”

“I do like lasagna.”

“Well, then?”

“What time?”

“You mean you’ll come?”

I gave her directions to my house and told her to be there around six o’clock.

My mother was still peeved with me that evening. She didn’t chatter on about her soap operas and the things that had happened to her that day, as she usually did. She hardly spoke at all and when she did speak, she let me know how much it pained her.

“Is horse face coming for dinner?” she asked, looking down at her plate.

“Yes. And her name is Patricia.”

“When?”

“Saturday.”

“I’ll make it a point to be gone. I’ll go to a movie or something.”

“I’d like for you to be here. I want you to meet Patricia.”

“Why would I want to meet her?”

“Because she’s a friend of mine. I think you’ll like her.”

“When she ruins your life, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

On Saturday I cleaned house, or at least the parts that Patricia was likely to see, and then I took a long bubble bath. I put on a brand-new plaid sports shirt and pants I had been saving for a special occasion. I set the table for three with the good dishes.

Patricia arrived right on time. I gave her a glass of wine and we sat on the couch and talked about small things—the weather, traffic, and her job at the Food Giant. Then we went into the kitchen and I showed her the place at the table where I wanted her to sit. She pulled out the chair and sat down with a set-in-place smile.

Before I took the lasagna out of the oven, I went upstairs to the door of mother’s bedroom and knocked softly. I could hear the voices coming from her TV.

“Mother,” I said, “dinner’s ready and we have a guest.”

She said nothing so I thought maybe she had fallen asleep. I knocked again, this time a little louder.

“It’s time for dinner, mother,” I said. “Please come to the table before the food gets cold.”

I heard her say, seemingly from far away, “I don’t want anything.”

“You have to eat, mother,” I said. “You haven’t eaten all day.”

“Go away and leave me alone,” she said. “I have a headache and I just want to be alone.”

When I went back into the kitchen, I smiled at Patricia and said, “Mother is doing the Greta Garbo routine this evening,” I said. “She just vants to be alone.”

“She what?” Patricia said.

“She has a headache and doesn’t want any dinner.”

After we ate, Patricia helped me clean up the dishes and then we went into the living room and watched Now, Voyager on TV. I had seen it maybe ten times, but Patricia had never seen it. When it was over, I could see she was puzzled about something.

“Did Charlotte Vale really kill her mother?” she asked.

“Not literally,” I said. “Only figuratively.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

I could see then that Patricia wasn’t as bright as I might have wished.

The dinner went well, I thought, in spite of mother’s refusal to come to the table, and the next time I saw Patricia I planned on asking her out on a real date.

Mother was fine the next day, her usual self. She went to church with her girlfriends, Pansy and June Ellen, and when she got home she was laughing about some gossip she had heard involving the minister’s wife. She didn’t mention my dinner with Patricia.

After my third date with Patricia, I realized that if mother was ever going to meet her, I was going to have to force it.

It was Sunday again and she wanted to drive out to the cemetery and put some plastic flowers on my father’s grave. Before we left home, I called Patricia without telling mother and asked her if she’d like to join us for a drive in the country. She said yes, so I told her I’d stop by and pick her up on our way out of town.

As soon as I deviated from the expected route, mother knew something was up.

“Why are you turning here?” she said. “This is not the right way.”

“I have a little surprise for you,” I said.

“You know how I hate surprises!”

When I pulled up in front of Patricia’s house, she came out the door in her coat with a big smile on her face. Her mother, who could pass for Marie Dressler, was right behind her in her bathrobe. She waved to us from the front porch.

“Would your mother like to go with us?” I asked Patricia as she climbed into the back seat. (Mother wasn’t about to give up her spot in the front.)

“No, she’s having a bad day,” Patricia said. “She’s got the twitches.”

“Patricia, I want you to meet my mother,” I said.

Patricia pulled herself forward on the seat back and reached awkwardly for mother’s hand with her left hand. Mother shook her hand and then looked at her own to see if anything had been left behind.

“I’m so happy to finally meet you, Mrs. Fenwick!” Patricia gushed. She seemed about to climb over the seat and crawl into mother’s lap.

“Hello,” mother said.

“You have a wonderful son!”

“I know.”

“And isn’t it a beautiful day to be out of the house?”

“I suppose so.”

Mother seemed disinclined to speak further, so Patricia shut up. I knew what mother was thinking and I was glad that Patricia didn’t know. I was hoping we could get through the day without mother calling her horse face.

At the cemetery when we were standing over my father’s grave and mother was fussing with the artificial flowers, Patricia wanted to know all the details about his death.

“Was it a painful death?” she asked.

“I’m afraid you’d have to ask him that,” I said. “He was in coma for the last ten days of his life.”

“The gophers have been digging again,” mother said.

“How did he die?” Patricia asked.

I mimed dying, the best I could standing up, but that’s not what she meant.

“Silly,” Patricia said.

“Do you mean of what did he die?”

“Yes.”

“He had a heart condition.”

Patricia seemed disappointed that there was so little drama surrounding his death. “Don’t you feel sorry for the people who kill themselves?” she said.

“That’s enough of the chatter,” mother said. “This is a solemn occasion.”

“What’s the occasion?” Patricia asked.

“Anytime you’re in a cemetery, it’s a solemn occasion,” I whispered.

“That’s my place there, right next to him,” mother said. “It’s waiting for me.”

“You’ll outlive us all,” I said.

“I’m going to be cremated,” Patricia said, “unless, of course, I die in a place where my body is never found, like outer space.”

When we were walking back down the hill to the car, Patricia took my hand and twined her fingers through mine. She giggled like an adolescent girl on her first date and whispered in my ear. Mother was right behind us taking it all in.

After I had dropped Patricia back at her house, mother said, “I don’t like her.”

“You haven’t given her a chance,” I said.

“It’s not what I see that I don’t like. It’s what I don’t see.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I said.

“I think you should get rid of her.”

“I’m thinking of asking her to marry me.”

I continued to see Patricia on a regular basis. On the two or three nights a week I was gone, I knew mother knew I was with Patricia, but we didn’t talk about it. She filled in her time alone like the stalwart she was, with her lodge functions, TV programs, and phone conversations.

Patricia won a three-day, all-expenses-paid trip to a lakeside resort in the mountains for two. She asked me if I’d like to go with her and I said yes. I planned to propose to her in the romantic setting of the resort. When we returned from our three-day trip, we would announce our plans to be married. There was no turning back now.

“When I told mother I was going to be gone for three days, she said, “With her?”

“Yes,” I said. “With her.”

“I’m not going to let it upset me,” she said.

“Good,” I said.

“I’m not going to try to interfere because you are an adult now and you have your own life to live apart from me.”

“That’s very sensible of you,” I said.

She sniffled a little into her hanky but that was the end of it.

Patricia and I had a wonderful time in those three days. We indulged in lavish meals, swam in the lake, rode horses, hiked, and just got to know each other better. It was a sort of preview of what our future life together would be like. On our last night there, I asked her to marry me and she accepted.

I couldn’t wait to share my happy news with mother. I was sure she would overcome her reluctance and would come to love Patricia as much as I did. We would be sure to include her in all our future plans and would, of course, expect her to live with us.

When I got home on Sunday evening, I knew right away that something was wrong. All the lights were on, but there was an abandoned feel to the house as if it had not been lived in the whole time I was away. Mother wasn’t in the kitchen or in any of the downstairs rooms.

I found her upstairs in her bedroom. She was in her bed, wearing her pajamas, barely breathing. She had taken a bottle of sleeping pills and had timed it, apparently, so I would find her when I arrived home.

On the bedside table was the empty bottle, minus the lid. Underneath the bottle was a suicide note: “Dear Morgan,” the note read, “If I’m going to lose you, I don’t want to go on living. Love, Mother.”

I called an ambulance. They came and took her to the hospital, where emergency room doctors pumped her stomach. I sat beside her bed for twelve hours until she regained consciousness. When she woke up, she had a terrible headache and a sore throat.

When I told Patricia I couldn’t marry her and wasn’t going to see her again, she took it well. She said she never really believed me anyway. I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I didn’t press it any further.

Now when I go to the Food Giant, I use the express lane. If I have more than twelve items, I use one of the regular lanes, as long as it’s not Patricia’s. I keep my eyes down and don’t look her way. I’m sure it’s all for the best.

October 15, 2013October 15, 2013 by allen0997

Cat Scratch Fever

Cat Scratch Fever ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(This is a slightly expanded version of a story I posted earlier.)

When Miss Cudgel walked into the classroom, the laughter and loud talking stopped at once. She shot a stern look to the class at large to let them know they weren’t getting away with anything she didn’t know about, removed her sweater and draped it over the back of the chair. After sitting down at the desk, she waited a few seconds for absolute silence and began calling roll.

“Phillip Abbot.”

“Here,” Phillip said.

“Junie Adler.”

“Present, teacher.”

“Eli Babb.”

“Wah-wah-wah! Here, teacher!”

Everybody laughed.

“Very funny,” Miss Cudgel said. “Anything for a laugh. Who are you supposed to be today?”

“Nobody, teacher,” Eli said. “I was pretending to play the trombone.”

“Well, you play your imaginary trombone someplace else. The classroom is not the place for it.”

“Yes, teacher.”

“Wanda Baggett.”

“Here.”

“Clarabelle Beers.”

Silence.

“Clarabelle Beers!”

She looked up from the roll book, about midway to the back of the room and saw Clarabelle Beers in her usual seat with her head down and her face hovering over her desk. “Clarabelle, why don’t you answer me?” she said. “Can’t you hear me call your name?”

Veronica Stompers, sitting to the right of Clarabelle, raised her hand timidly.

“Yes, Veronica, what is it?” Miss Cudgel said.

“She wet her pants,” Veronica said. “There’s pee all over the floor.”

At this the class laughed uproariously. Everybody jumped out of their seats to see. There was nothing like somebody wetting their pants in class to spice up a dull winter morning.

“Sit down!” Miss Cudgel bellowed in her finest authoritarian manner. “What is this? You know not to get out of your seats without permission! We’re not a bunch of animals!”

“Oh, yes we are!” somebody said, but she didn’t know who said it so she chose to ignore it.

She stood up and walked back to where Clarabelle was sitting and bent over her. “Clarabelle,” she said softly. “Did you have a little accident?”

Clarabelle looked miserably into her eyes and nodded her head.

“Come with me and we’ll get you fixed up, then” she said.

She took Clarabelle to the nurse’s office down the hall, where she knew there was an abundance of paper towels.

The school nurse, Maxine Phegley, who was not really a bonafide nurse but a sort of medical assistant, was sitting at her desk reading a magazine. When she looked up and saw Miss Cudgel open the door and come into the room with Clarabelle, she quickly stowed the magazine out of sight.

“What’s this?” she asked, standing up.

“We had a little accident,” Miss Cudgel said.

While Miss Phegley went to get paper towels to help Clarabelle get herself dried off, Miss Cudgel went to summon the janitor to come with his mop to clean the mess up off the floor in the classroom. When she returned to the nurse’s office, Clarabelle was snuffling into a paper towel held to her face.

“I’m cold,” Clarabelle said.

“I’m afraid her clothes are soaked through,” Miss Phegley said. “I think you should send her home.”

“I can’t send her outside in wet clothes,” Miss Cudgel said. “It’s five degrees outside. She’ll freeze to death.”

“Well, call her mother, then.”

“You wait here, dear,” she said to Clarabelle, “and I’ll go downstairs to the principal’s office and get your mother on the phone.”

She asked the secretary to get the phone number for the Beers family. When she called the number and got the busy signal, she waited two minutes and tried again. Still the busy signal.

She went back upstairs and informed Miss Phegley that she would drive Clarabelle home herself, in her own car, to get into some dry clothes. They would be back as soon as they could.

“Would you mind,” she asked Miss Phegley, “to sit in on my class and make sure everybody behaves until I get back? Tell them to read in their social studies book the chapter on Peru. Take down the names of anybody who thinks of it as a play period and doesn’t do what they’re supposed to do.”

“Just as you say,” Miss Phegley said.

Miss Cudgel helped Clarabelle into her coat and led her outside to the parking lot. She opened the passenger-side door for Clarabelle, thinking vaguely about the pee on her car seat, and then got in herself.

“Where do you live, Clarabelle?” she asked.

“We live out in Scraptown,” Clarabelle said. She had brightened considerably outside of school.

Miss Cudgel sighed but didn’t say anything. How could she not have known that Clarabelle lived in Scraptown? If she had ever given it a thought, she would have known.

Scraptown was on the southern edge of town, across the railroad tracks near the sewage processing plant. It was where the poorest people lived, the ignorant and hopeless of the world. The one thing the people in Scraptown could do properly, Miss Cudgel thought as she jolted her car over the ruts in the road, was have lots of children they were in no manner prepared to take care of.

The Beers home was the last dwelling in Scraptown, a miserable little gray square of a house set on a hill, surrounded by winter scrub and an assortment of car and major-appliance parts.

“You can pull in there, by the fence,” Clarabelle said.

It hardly seemed like a driveway, but Miss Cudgel turned off into a little scooped-out space that had been washed away by the rain just big enough for a car.

Clarabelle ran on up to the house with Miss Cudgel behind her. When Clarabelle came to the front door, she stood aside and waited. Miss Cudgel knocked, expecting a slatternly, fag-smoking mother to answer the door, but instead it was answered by a frizzy-haired girl in her teens.

“Who are you?” the girl said.

“I’m Miss Cudgel, Clarabelle’s third-grade teacher.”

“Did something happen to Clarabelle?”

“Here I am!” Clarabelle said, coming around behind Miss Cudgel.

“Clarabelle had an accident at school and she needs a clean change of clothes,” Miss Cudgel said. “I’m going to wait for her and then take her back.”

The girl seemed hardly to care, but she stood aside for Miss Cudgel to enter.

“Are you Clarabelle’s sister?” Miss Cudgel asked.

“I’m Rosalie,” the girl said.

“Is it all right if I sit down?”

“Sure.”

She sat down on a sofa the color of mold.

“What kind of accident did Clarabelle have?” Rosalie asked.

“I went my pants!” Clarabelle said proudly.

“Oh, brother!” Rosalie said. “Anything for attention.”

Clarabelle disappeared into the back part of the house.

“She needs a bath, too,” Miss Cudgel offered.

“Take a bath, CB!” Rosalie yelled.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Miss Cudgel asked, smiling to soften the question.

“Well, ordinarily I would be,” Rosalie said, “but my mother is in the hospital with cat scratch fever, and while she’s away I have to stay home and take care of Winchell.”

“Who’s Winchell?”

“He’s my brother.”

“Too young to go to school?”

“He’s twelve.”

“Well, why…”

“He’s retarded and doesn’t go to school. He used to go to retarded school but he flunked out.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s in his room. I gave him a pill to quiet him down. Would you like a beer?”

“No, I…”

“My mother says I should always offer visitors a beer.”

“We have to be getting back to school as soon as Clarabelle finishes dressing.”

“Before you came,” Rosalie said, “I was sitting here by myself wondering and wondering. Do you think I ought to get married?”

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“I think you should finish school before you think about marriage.”

“That’s what everybody says, but I don’t think I’ll wait that long. My boyfriend wants me to marry him and he’s not going to wait years for me. He’ll find him another girl if I make him wait that long.”

“Is he a classmate of yours at school?”

Rosalie laughed. “No,” she said. “He doesn’t go to school. He’s twenty-one. His name is Ricky. Don’t you think that’s a cute name for a boy?”

“Does your mother know about him?”

Rosalie laughed loudly, throwing her head back. “She’d steal him away from me if she thought she could!”

Finally Clarabelle came out of the back room, wearing a stiff corduroy dress three or four sizes too big for her and a knit cap with all her lank blond hair tucked inside. “I got dry,” she said, “and I took a bath, too!”

“That’s the first one in about a month, isn’t it?” Rosalie said.

As Miss Cudgel and Clarabelle were going out the door to go back to school, Miss Cudgel said to Rosalie, “It was nice talking to you.”

“Yeah,” Rosalie said. “You too. I’ll invite you to my wedding. Haw-haw-haw!”

When they were on the highway headed back to town, Miss Cudgel looked away from the road to Clarabelle and said, “Somebody needs to speak to you and I suppose it might as well be me since your mother is, um, in the hospital.”

Clarabelle looked solemnly at her, believing she was about to be scolded.

“I won’t be able to do this again,” Miss Cudgel said. “Bring you home to change your clothes, I mean. This has disrupted everybody’s morning, including Miss Phegley’s. You’re supposed to go to the bathroom before school starts in the morning or during recess. If for some reason you don’t go during recess and you have to go when you’re in class, come and tell me and I’ll let you go. Please don’t sit there in class and let it build up until you can’t hold it in any longer and it comes out on its own!”

“Are you mad at me?” Clarabelle asked.

“Of course not.”

“Could we stop someplace and get a hamburger?”

“I’m afraid not. They’re waiting for us back at school. Are you hungry?”

“Yeah.”

Miss Cudgel looked at her watch. “It’s almost lunchtime,” she said. “You have your lunch money, don’t you?”

“No.”

“When the lunch bell rings, go down to the lunchroom and get yourself a good lunch. Some roast beef and mashed potatoes. Cooked carrots. Tell the head hairnet to put it on Miss Cudgel’s tab. Can you remember that?”

“The head hairnet.”

“That’s right.”

“I like you, Miss Cudgel,” Clarabelle said.

Miss Cudgel turned her eyes away from the road for a moment to smile at Clarabelle. That’s when she hit the icy patch that she should have slowed down for. The car spun around two times like a carnival thrill ride and slipped rearward into the ravine that could not be seen from the road.

October 2, 2013October 2, 2013 by allen0997

Lola Fenwick

Jasper Dill Loves Lola Fenwick ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(This is a slightly expanded version of a story I posted in January 2013.)

A woman in a trench coat and a stylish hat ran down a city street in the rain, ably but not fast in high-heeled shoes. When she came to a certain apartment building, she ducked inside, stopping just inside the door to shake the water off her coat.

“Elevator’s busted, Miss Fenwick,” the clerk said from behind the desk. “I’m afraid it’s the stairs tonight.”

She gave the man a tense smile and hesitated for only a moment before crossing the lobby to the stairs. She nearly fell on the first step but caught hold of the railing and righted herself. The clerk turned around and watched her until she was out of sight up the stairs. He smiled but there was no telling what the smile meant. It could have meant that he knew something she didn’t know but was about to find out.

When she came to the sixth floor, she wasn’t out of breath from running up the stairs, but she had an anxious look on her face. She went along the deserted hallway to the door she wanted and inserted the key into the lock and opened the door. She stepped into the darkened room and turned on a lamp.

“Hello, Lola,” a man’s voice said.

She whirled around, drawing in a sharp breath, and faced the man. “Oh!” she said. “It’s you!”

“Glad to see me?” he asked with a devilish grin.

“I thought you were…” Everybody thought you were…”

“Dead?” he asked. “No, I’m not dead. I’m very much alive and I’ve come back to pick up where we left off.”

Music began faintly in the background and swelled dramatically. With the two of them standing there looking at each other, not speaking and not moving, the picture slowly faded to black.

Dorothy switched off the TV before the commercials began and turned to Jasper. “I knew something like that was going to happen,” she said.

“How did you know?” Jasper asked.

“Oh, the signs were all there,” she said. “The mysterious phone calls. The anonymous letter. I knew Palmer was alive all the time.”

“You did not! You couldn’t have known!”

“Well, anyway, our Lola is certainly in a fix now!”

“He’s going to take that money she has saved for her nephew’s eye operation, I just know it.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know about the money.”

“Of course, he knows! Why else would he come back from the dead?”

“Maybe he really loves her.”

“Bah! He doesn’t know the meaning of the word. He’ll only use her to get what he wants and then run out on her.”

“Just when she was all ready to marry Dr. Blake.”

“Well, she can’t marry Dr. Blake now unless she wants to commit bigamy.”

“I shudder to think what Dr. Blake will do when he finds out that Palmer isn’t really dead and has come back to torment poor Lola again. You know what a temper he has!”

“I hope he kills the son of a bitch,” Jasper said.

“Oh, I don’t think I can wait until tomorrow to see what’s going to happen,” Dorothy said.

“Today is Friday. You’ll have to wait until Monday.”

“Oh, dear! I wish I could just snap my fingers and make it one o’clock Monday afternoon.”

“Wishing your life away, you cluck.” he said.

Dorothy had to go downtown to do some shopping, so Jasper went upstairs to his bedroom and closed the door. He took off his shoes and lay down on the bed and covered up with an afghan. In a few minutes he was asleep.

He slept much longer than he intended and when he awoke it was early evening. He wondered if Dorothy was back from shopping yet. As he yawned and started to get up from the bed, he realized there was somebody else in the room with him.

“Hello, darling,” a woman’s voice said.

He turned sharply toward the voice and saw Lola Fenwick from To Live, To Love stand up from the chair in the corner and walk toward him in her stiletto heels.

“How did you get in here?” he asked. He knew it was a stupid thing to say but it was the first thing that came into his head.

“I’ve been here all along,” she said.

She smiled indulgently with those ruby lips of hers. She was dressed in a stunning wool dress of a tawny color, showing her trim waist and large breasts. He could smell her perfume that smelled like the lilac bush his mother had in the yard when he was a boy.

“Has Dorothy come home yet?” he asked. “She’s got to see this!”

“Now don’t worry about her. She and I had a long talk while you were asleep. I gave her a nice drink and a pill and she’s sound asleep in her bedroom.”

“I’ve been watching you on To Live, To Love for eight years. You’re more real to me than anybody I know.” He realized as he spoke these words that he had been in love with her almost from the first moment he saw her.

“I know, darling. That’s why I’m here.”

“Darling,” he said. “I’ve imagined many times, by some sort of magic, being able to hear you call me that.”

“Now, I don’t want to rush you, but there isn’t much time and we’re going to have to get a move on. They’ll be here any minute.”

“Who will be? Is it that son of a bitch Palmer Belvedere?”

“Yes, him, and all my other past husbands, the good and the bad.”

“But what can we do?”

“I want you to take me away from here before something terrible happens.”

“All right, but where to?”

“I’m thinking Mexico.”

“Mexico! But what about Dorothy?”

“She’ll be fine without you. She has often wished that you would go away and leave her in peace.”

“I’ve always wanted to see Mexico, and with you! I must be dreaming!”

“Now, please hurry and get dressed! You don’t need to worry about packing a bag. We’ll buy what we need when we get to where we’re going. I’ll call a taxi and will be waiting for you downstairs.”

“All right, dearest,” he said.

When he went downstairs, she was waiting for him by the front door in her mink coat. She was more lovely than Kim Novak and Rhonda Fleming put together. He felt a thrill that he hadn’t felt in at least twenty years. She took him by the arm and they went out and got into the back seat of the waiting taxicab.

“Bus station,” she said to the driver, “and please hurry!”

“I figured we would go to the airport and fly down in a plane,” Jasper said.

“No, that’s just what they’ll be expecting us to do. They would never think I’d go on a bus. It’s the perfect dodge.”

“But isn’t it an awfully long way to go on the bus?”

“Several hundred miles. We’ll be there in no time.”

“Well, I’m sure you know best,” he said.

When they got to the bus station, they had to wait for over an hour for the southbound bus they wanted, so they went into the diner and sat at a secluded booth in the back and had a bite to eat.

“Oh, I do hope we can get on that bus before anybody tries to stop us,” she said.

“I think we’re fairly safe here,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “Nobody’s paying any attention to us.”

“There are spies everywhere!” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll protect you.”

“Oh, I just knew you would.” She reached across the table and put her hand over his.

“Maybe I should call Dorothy and tell her where I am,” he said.

“Now, don’t you worry about a thing,” she said. “I took care of all that while you were asleep.”

“You didn’t kill her, did you?”

She laughed the tinkling little laugh that he loved so well. “I can tell when you’re not being serious,” she said. “No, I didn’t kill her. I have some scruples, you know.”

“But what about Dr. Blake? He’s expecting you to marry him. He needs your help with the life-saving serum he’s working on.”

“The marriage to Dr. Blake is off, I’m afraid. When I told him last night that we were finished, he threatened to kill me.”

“He’ll never find you, dearest.”

“You’re sweet,” she cooed.

“I’ve seen you through all your marriages, your miscarriages, your near-drowning, your trial for murder, your brain operation, your kidnapping, your amnesia, your car going over the cliff, your alien abduction and your stint in women’s prison. You always look stunning, no matter what terrible thing you’re going through, but I have to tell you that you have never looked any lovelier than you do right now.”

She looked across the table at him and there were tears in her eyes. There was nothing she could say that was equal to the moment. He thought he might be able to lean across the table and manage a little kiss, but the departure of their bus was announced over the loud speaker.

He took her by the hand and led her to the last seat in the back of the bus where nobody would look at them. She slipped off her mink coat and he put it on the overhead rack for her and sat down beside her. She slipped her arm through his and put her head on his shoulder.

They rode all night without getting out of their seats, talking little and sleeping fitfully. When he awoke and felt the warmth of her body against his, he knew he was as happy as he had ever been in his life. This was, perhaps, his last chance at happiness and he intended to take it.

He thought about their coming life in Mexico spread out before them like a sun-drenched dream. They would lie in the sun to the accompaniment of the splashing surf, drinking exotic fruity drinks out of coconut shells. He would rub suntan oil on her shoulders, and everywhere they went people would admire her beauty and envy him for being her man.

Just as the sun was coming up, the bus stopped for a fifteen-minute rest stop. Lola was still sleeping, using her mink coat as a pillow. Jasper stood up so as not to disturb her and tiptoed away to the front of the bus. Most of the other passengers were sleeping, unaware that there was a celebrated international beauty in their midst, slipping away to Mexico with her man.

He stepped off the bus and was making his way to the little building that served as gas station, restaurant and bus stop, when two men came from around the front end of the bus and stopped in front of him.

“Are you Jasper Dill?” the larger of the two asked.

“Who wants to know?”

He pulled a badge from his pocket and flashed it in Jasper’s face. “I’m Officer Harry Holt and this is Officer Tom Green.”

“Very impressive, I’m sure,” Jasper said.

“We have to take you in, sir.”

“In where? For what?”

“I’m not an information bureau. We’re just supposed to take you in.”

“If you don’t tell me, I’m not going anywhere.”

“Well, completely off the record, now. When your wife ends up poisoned to death and you take it on the lam, it looks like you might have had something to do with it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. My wife is perfectly fine.”

“That’s a good one! It’s a little stale, though. You need some fresh material.”

“What if I refuse to go?”

“We’ll take you anyway. We’ll hurt you if we have to but we’d rather not.”

“There’s been some terrible mistake.”

“Well, if that’s the case, you can get it all straightened out when you get to police headquarters and then you can go on your pathetic little way.”

“Wait a minute,” Jasper said. “I have a traveling companion, asleep on the bus. I can’t just go off and leave her without telling her what’s happened!”

Officer Harry Holt considered for a moment. “All right,” he said, “you can go tell her, but I’ll have to come with you.”

Feeling as if his heart and lungs had been pulled from his body, Jasper stepped up the three little steps onto the bus and walked down the aisle with the officer close behind him. When he came to the back of the bus, Lola wasn’t there. No one was there. He looked for the mink coat but it wasn’t there, either.

The nearest person was a Mexican, asleep several seats away. Jasper grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him roughly awake.

“Where is the lovely young woman that was sitting with me in the back of the bus?” he said. “She was wearing a mink coat! You couldn’t miss her!”

The Mexican sat up straight, alarmed. “I see no one,” he said, holding up his hands as though he would be struck. “No one there. Seats empty. My eyes they are not so good.”

His legs failing him, Jasper sat down heavily on the nearest seat. Officer Holt pulled him to his feet and led him off the bus to the back seat of the patrol car. As they sped away, Jasper craned his neck around to get a last glimpse of the bus. He began to cry, not for himself, but for the lovely Lola. He was leaving her and he didn’t even have a chance to tell her goodbye.

September 29, 2013January 9, 2014 by allen0997

The Next Life

The Next Life ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

To those who knew him, he was known simply as Sidney. He lived on the big, wide-open streets of the city. By day (having nothing else to do) he roamed, ostensibly looking for work but more likely looking to snatch a purse or a briefcase. When he was feeling particularly adventurous, he would try his hand at shoplifting—although he was mostly kept out of the shops and stores because of his appearance—or hang around the train station and filch the occasional piece of stray luggage. At night he slept in the park, the cemetery, or any of the countless alleyways that were available to him, staying always one step ahead of the law.

When he heard about a three-day job with a work crew clearing brush in a cemetery, he was somehow able to produce from his pocket the bus fare to go see about the job. He took the wrong bus, though, and ended up in a far-flung suburb of the city. As soon as the bus roared away, he knew he wasn’t in the right place, but there he was, stranded in a world not his own. To find his way back to where he belonged, he would have to prevail upon some kind soul (who wasn’t repelled by his appearance) to give him, not only a little cash for bus fare, but also some directions.

He looked around at the strange neighborhood in which he found himself. The houses were large and beautiful; the trees that graced every spacious lawn graceful and scenic. All was pleasing to the eye, cool, clean and quiet. He imagined living in such a neighborhood but was unable to reckon what it would be like. For a few moments he had the sensation of being in heaven without dying first to get there. Or was he really dead and just hadn’t realized it yet?

A short distance away was a little neighborhood park with benches, many more trees, and picturesque rolling hills. Since it was getting on toward evening and he was feeling tired, he found a cozy spot, soft and dry, underneath a clump of bushes where he might rest without being seen from the street. He was glad to have eaten earlier in the day because the absence of gnawing hunger made his repose all the sweeter.

He ended up sleeping the night away and awoke at dawn to the singing of birds. He was confused at first and thought he was in the cemetery, but after he had stood up and stretched his legs and worked the kinks out of his back, he remembered the bus ride that had brought him to this place and his mind cleared a little. There was something about a job but he couldn’t recall all the details.

He staggered (he hadn’t had a drink in over a week) out of the park back to the street and stood, confused, on the sidewalk. He looked, first one way and then the other, for a clue to tell him which way to go. Nothing looked as he remembered it. He began walking in an easterly direction, toward the rising sun, because it had the advantage of being downhill.

After a few more blocks, he was even more confused. There were so many streets with odd-sounding names (Calderon, Ishmael, Augur, St. Pike) and none of them seemed like the right street to take.

Up ahead on the other side of the street a woman came a few steps out her front door and looked off to her left, in the direction away from him. He started toward her (he would be careful not to alarm her), but when he saw a police car turn the corner at the next intersection, it scared him so much that he ran into the yard of the house behind him and around to the back.

He looked around frantically for a place to hide. He was about to try to conceal himself behind some trash cans when a dog in the next yard spotted him and began barking. Nothing would attract the attention of a police officer faster than the frantic barking of a dog.

Down three steps was a door built into the foundation of the house. He sprang for the door and turned the knob but it was locked. When he gave one hard push with his hip and shoulder, using all his strength, the door sprang open. He entered, closed the door, and knelt down behind it, his heart pounding and his breath coming in painful rasps.

In a little while the dog stopped barking. He stood up partway and lifted the curtain to take a peek out the window in the door. He could see only a small portion of the yard but all was quiet. He seemed not to have aroused the people who lived in the house. He believed he was probably not seen at all. For once in his life he was lucky.

Instead of leaving at once, as he had planned to do, he lingered. He was in a sort of play room, with pool table, musical instruments (including drums and guitars), TV set, record player, an enormous couch and some comfortable-looking chairs. On the far side of the room was a small bar. He had never known of anybody to have a bar in their own house before and had to take a closer look. He approached it cautiously, all the time listening for footsteps or for the sound of movement somewhere in the house.

Arrayed behind the bar on glass shelves were all shapes, sizes, and colors of bottles, as beautiful as any work of art. There were wines, liqueurs, vodka, tequila, rye whiskey, scotch, bourbon and other bottles that confused him because their labels were in foreign languages. He picked up a small glass from the bar and filled it with vodka and drank it down.

For a minute the room spun around and he thought he was going to be sick. He sat down on the couch that was a deep-red color like the color of wine and put his head forward. When the sick feeling passed, he had another glass of vodka and then a glass of scotch.

With just three small drinks, he was well on his way to being drunk and he knew it was because he hadn’t had any food since the day before. Did he dare go to the kitchen and grab something to eat before he left? Having food in his stomach would make anything that happened to him easier to face.

He sat down on the luxurious couch (he was already in love with the house) and rested. He longed to lay down and kick off his stinking shoes and go to sleep but didn’t dare let down his defenses to that extent.

He heard a clock chime somewhere in the house and jumped to his feet, not realizing at first what he was hearing. There was still no sound, though, of voices, footsteps, or anything else to indicate that anybody was at home. It was still early in the morning, he had to remind himself, and maybe they were still in bed.

The stairs seemed to beckon to him. Come over here and climb us, they seemed to be saying. If you think this room is something, wait until you see the rest of the house. Before he knew what he was doing, he was creeping up the steps, holding on to the wall, his senses on high alert.

At the top of the stairs was a hallway. To the left was the kitchen and to the right the dining room. He paused and held his breath. He took the silence as encouragement and went into the kitchen.

He caressed the immaculate countertop as if it was a religious article and, moving around the room, stopped at the enormous refrigerator. He opened the door and looked over the array of foods inside; he selected a half-full bottle of green olives and began eating them with his blackened fingers. When he had eaten all the olives, he discarded the jar and opened a can of sardines and ate them while standing at the kitchen sink looking out the window.

When he was about to open the refrigerator door again to see what else he might find, he saw a note attached to the door that he hadn’t seen before. The note read: To the maid. My husband and I will be out of the country until the twenty-third. Please be here at 9:00 o’clock on the twenty-fourth to resume your duties. And make sure all the doors are locked before you leave! Mrs. Hester Chuffee.

He smiled and then laughed at the note. So, that’s the way the cards were stacked! He believed, although he wasn’t entirely certain, that it was the seventeenth of the month, meaning that it would be six days before the owners of the house came back. He didn’t need to be in any hurry to leave. What quirk of fate had put a cockroach like him in such a place?

Feeling confident and almost at home, he began exploring the other rooms. First the downstairs with its living room (comfortable, overstuffed furniture, fireplace, thick carpet), dining room (a table big enough to accommodate fourteen chairs and another fireplace) and den (dark-paneled walls with thousands of books and a collection of guns). Then the upstairs with its five bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. He had never seen a house like it before. To live in such a house and to own such things, one must be very rich.

In the lovely surroundings in which he found himself, he was aware of the smell that was coming off his body and of how filthy his clothes were. He wasn’t able to remember the last time he had taken everything off and washed all over. He went into one of the five bathrooms, the one that seemed to beckon to him the most, and closed the door. The gleaming tub looked as if it had never been used. He turned on the water and, while waiting for the tub to fill, removed his clothes and let them fall in a heap to the floor.

He scrubbed himself thoroughly from top to bottom and when he was finished he refilled the tub with fresh water, this time using a generous portion of bubble bath, and washed again. When he was as clean as he was going to get, he got out of the tub and, standing at the sink with a towel around his middle, shaved off his scrubby growth of beard and cut his hair with a pair of scissors.

Emerging from the bathroom, he went into the bedroom to find something to put on, as his old clothes were nothing more than a pile of smelly rags that he couldn’t stand to touch, now that he was clean. He opened the door to the closet, which was another room in itself. He had never seen so many clothes! There were suits of all colors, evening clothes, casual clothes, shirts, ties, shoes. He selected a pair of pants and a shirt. First, though, he needed undergarments.

The men’s underwear he found in the bureau drawer was so big he could hardly keep it on. Holding up the pants and shirt he had selected from the closet, he saw they were enormously big and he wasn’t going to be able to wear them, either.

Not knowing what else to do, he put on madame’s clothes, which, he found, were just the right size. Wearing a silk blouse and loose-fitting slacks made of a soft, stretchy material and a pair of sandals, he felt better than he had felt in a long time, since taking up the hobo life. He didn’t care that he was wearing women’s clothes. Nobody would ever know it and, if they did, let them laugh. One does what one must.

Through the rest of the day he moved quietly from room to room, sitting in one place in one room for a while and then moving to another place in another room. He drank generously from the bar downstairs and ate whatever was at hand from the refrigerator or pantry. That night he slept on the wine-colored couch in the playroom, more drunk than sober, sleep sweet and untroubled.

The next morning, after another bubble bath, he put on madame’s dressing gown and sat down at her dressing table. He looked at his reflection for a long time in the mirror, disliking the rat-faced thing looking back at him.

He longed to be somebody else, to have a different face. He began applying makeup. He didn’t know what some of the jars and bottles were for, but that didn’t stop him. The powdery stuff covered up the flaws in his skin. A bit of red stuff on the cheeks, flattened out with the fingertips, gave his face some color. A spot of eye shadow on the lids and mascara on the lashes made his beady eyes a little less so. An eyebrow pencil gave his eyebrows clarity and shape. A dab of tangerine-colored lipstick was what was needed for the lips. When he was finished, he laughed at himself because he looked so silly with his face all made up that way and his botched haircut. He was going to take a rag and wipe the stuff off his face when a thought came to him.

He had seen madame’s wigs on the top shelf in her closet. (At first he had thought they were small, sleeping animals.) He selected an auburn wig of medium length and carried it back to the mirror and put it on. He turned this way and that and was pleased with the overall effect. The best thing about it was that he looked like somebody else, a person he didn’t know.

And he wasn’t able to stop there. He took off the dressing gown and put on madame’s undergarments and stockings, using rolled-up handkerchiefs where padding was needed. He selected a print dress with a full skirt from the closet and put it on over his head and succeeded in zipping it up in the back. He slipped his feet into a pair of madame’s two-inch high heels for casual wear, and the transformation was complete. He was somebody else. A new life had begun. The old life was over.

Feeling exulted, he began delving into madame’s things, careful to not mess them up or overturn them too much. He loved handling her intimate articles of clothing and uncovering things in the bureau drawers that only she had seen or touched. He felt close to her, almost that he and she were the same in some elemental way that he didn’t understand. He knew now why fate had brought him to this house, out of all the houses in the world.

Deep in one drawer he found a stash in bills inside a little wooden box. He counted it out and slipped it inside one of madame’s large shoulder bags that he planned on taking with him when he left. He believed the money had been left there for him. By her. He also put some blank checks and credit cards in the bag, along with a diamond bracelet and earrings that he would be able to pawn somewhere along the line when the money ran out, if it ever did.

Finding a medium-sized suitcase in the back of the closet, he began filling it with clothes: a couple of dresses, a suit, two pairs of slacks, some blouses, several changes of underwear and stockings, a couple pair of shoes, pajamas, dressing gown. What he didn’t have he could get when he got to where he was going.

He took one last fond look again into all the rooms and called a taxi. He left the house through the same door by which he had entered it, picking up a bottle of scotch and another of vodka and stashing them in the suitcase on his way out the door.

When the taxi arrived, he was waiting on the sidewalk in front of the house. The driver, believing he was a woman, got out of the cab and opened the door to the back seat for him. He got into the cab demurely, giving the driver a big smile and folding the skirt modestly under his thighs as he positioned himself on the seat.

“Where to, ma’am?” the driver asked.

“Take me to the New World hotel downtown,” he said, finding in himself the ability to raise his voice a couple of octaves so that he really sounded like a woman.

On the drive downtown, the transformation from male to female was complete. “He” was now “she.”

At the hotel she asked for a room on an upper floor and signed the register Mrs. Hester Chuffee. When the clerk asked her if the fifteenth floor was all right, she nodded her head, took the key from him, and gave him a significant look.

Alone in the room, she took the two bottles from the suitcase and set them on the dresser, labels facing outward. She called room service and asked for some ice. After it was delivered, she locked herself in and took her dress off and hung it carefully in the empty closet. She fixed herself a drink, switched on the TV to hear what they were saying about her, and lay down on the bed in her slip. The new life was about to begin and when it did she planned on being ready for it.

September 18, 2013September 18, 2013 by allen0997

Ballroom Dance

Ballroom Dance ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

I needed a class for physical education credit. I had always considered myself more the “brainy” than the physical type and loathed the very concept of physical education, the effort, grunting, and humiliation that were a part of it. Of the classes that were available to me, swimming was out of the question. You had to dive from the high dive to pass the course and I’d rather face a firing squad. Archery, I had heard, was no fun at all after you shot your first arrow into the air and, if that wasn’t bad enough, threatening to shoot one of your classmates in the face was grounds for dismissal. Weight lifting class had its charms, I was sure, but it wasn’t for me.

When I heard about ballroom dancing, I knew it was probably as good as I could get. It was held indoors for one thing, but the most attractive thing about it for me was that you could wear your “street clothes.” You didn’t have to change your clothes in a roomful of strangers into “gym clothes” that you would never wear in a million years if you had a choice and then, when the class was over, take a communal shower with the same group of strangers before you could go on to your next class. (This is what hell really is, I’m sure!)

I signed up and hoped they weren’t already filled up. Finally, here was a class that might be a lot of fun where I could actually learn something that might be useful in later life. (If anybody ever needed a person who knew how to do the tango, that person was going to be me.) I found that I was looking forward to the class, a sensation I hardly recognized in myself.

When I arrived for the first class, I was thrilled to discover we had a real “dance studio” in the physical education building. It was an enormous, low-ceilinged room with a gleaming wooden floor like the basketball court. One entire wall was one long mirror with a bar for holding on to. You could dance while seeing what you looked like to other people. (I’m not sure that’s a good thing.)

It was a large class of about eighty people, all looking for an easy physical education credit the same as I was, I assumed. And there was to be no same-sex dancing because we were about evenly divided up (by design) between male and female. None of these girls would be able to dance with other girls because they didn’t like the boys, as they had done in high school. (If you prefer to dance with members of your own gender while people of the opposite gender are standing by, it doesn’t look good and people begin to talk.)

Our teacher’s name was Miss Bobbie Alma. She possessed the warmth and charm of a concentration camp commandant. She was middle-aged, skinny and angular, with no curves anywhere. She wore her hair in a tight roll at the back of her head called a French roll. Her ears stuck out farther than any woman’s ears I had ever seen before. (You didn’t dare laugh.) In her boxy gray skirt with matching jacket and black oxford shoes, she was as graceless as a stevedore. (An older “boy” in the class, who had been in the military, would confide to me later in the semester how he wanted to get Miss Alma alone long enough to remind her she was a woman.)

“All right, now, listen up, you people!” she yelled. “I’m only going to tell you this one time! You are here for one reason and one reason only! That reason is to learn the art of ballroom dancing! This is not a place for cutups or jokesters! If you are not prepared to take this class seriously, then please leave now! Does everybody understand? Are there any questions?”

“What will be on the final?” a tall girl with a receding chin and frizzy hair asked. (I had found that in every class, no matter what it was, somebody always asked about the final on the first day of class. Wasn’t there going to be plenty of time—the entire semester—to worry about that?)

“You will have two tests in the course of the semester that will comprise most of your grade!” Miss Alma said. “You will have a mid-term exam and a final exam! This is one class where you will never wield a pencil! Your tests will be danced! I will be the sole judge of whether or not you have applied yourselves and have learned the steps the way you are supposed to learn them! Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said meekly, although she wouldn’t have needed to say anything because the remarks were not addressed to her personally but to the class at large.

“And let me warn you about something!” Miss Alma continued. “This is one class where absenteeism will not be tolerated! You must make every effort to be present at every class! If you miss a class, you will not be able to catch up! If you miss a class, you must meet with me in my office and tell me why you missed! If you miss two classes without a very good reason, I advise you to voluntarily drop the class! If you miss three classes, whatever the reason, you will automatically be dropped from the roll! Do I make myself clear? Are there any questions?”

When nobody said anything, Miss Alma gave her famous rallying cry: “Men on that side, women on this side!” (She said these same words every class.)

Rather clumsily, we gathered according to gender on either side of the room, with an empty column of about fifteen feet separating the male group from the female group. Miss Alma selected an unlucky “volunteer” from among the “men” and proceeded to show us some waltz steps. After about ten minutes of this practical demonstration, she instructed us to “select a partner” and “listen closely to the music.”

It was not a time to select a partner for suitability or desirability. We had about ten seconds. I tapped the nearest girl on the shoulder (anybody would have been all right except Miss Frizz who had asked about the final). The girl turned around, gave me an appraising look, and fell into my arms. I’m sure she felt as silly as I did and as everybody else did.

In this way, we learned the waltz, the foxtrot, the cha-cha, and (my favorite) the tango. After we had done the dances for a while, we became more confident and less self-conscious. I’m sure I was never anything less than solemn and mechanical, kind of like a dancing robot (no joy, no feeling), but I learned the dance steps and performed them with a stolid precision.

I didn’t miss any of the ballroom dance classes. I was afraid to. I was nervous at first about having to dance in front of a lot of other people (I had never danced before), but after a while the nervousness went away. I never deluded myself that I was a good dancer. I was an adequate dancer, which was all that was needed.

I managed to go the entire semester without angering Miss Alma. When I had to come into direct contact with her, I called her bluff and didn’t let her know I was afraid of her, which, I found out, is the only way to deal with her type. I never crossed her, never did anything to attract her attention in a bad way, and tried very hard to do exactly as she said. (If I had put that much effort into all my classes, I would have been a better student.) I somehow wanted ballroom dance to work for me because it was unlike anything I had ever done before. I ended up, not with an “A,” but with the next best thing.

Of course, when the class was over and I no longer needed to know the dance steps, I forgot them. I received the physical education credit I needed for the year, which was all I ever wanted in the first place. I was on my way. To what, I didn’t know. Certainly not a career as a professional dancer.

September 3, 2013September 5, 2013 by allen0997

Happy Trails

Happy Trails ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

“It’s so hot!” Johnnie said, lifting up her hair to let the wind blow on her neck.

“No fooling,” I said.

She had been complaining all the way across the desert and, believe me, we had had more than our share of trouble. The day before, we had spent six hours at a dusty roadside filling station while a greasy mechanic with tattoos repaired our carburetor. The problems with the car were fixed for now, though, and we were on what was the last leg of our trip. Soon we would be resting in comfort and all our troubles would be behind us.

“Why don’t you try to take a nap,” I said. “It’ll make the time go by quicker.”

“I’m worried about things at home,” she said. “I don’t like being away this long.”

“You were the one that wanted to come,” I said. I reached over and gave her a playful little pinch on the leg. She gave me a dark look and moved farther away.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, but without much conviction.

“Crabby, crabby,” I said. “You know what happened to the crab, don’t you? She got herself boiled in a pot!”

“Very funny.”

“I thought it was.”

“The only way you can stand this heat is to keep moving and create your own wind,” she said. “I think hell must be a desert like this.”

“Oh, no, this is nothing compared to hell!” I said. “This is a cakewalk compared to hell.”

“You would know, of course!”

“Well, so I’ve been told.”

One of those giant bugs came in through the window and landed on her leg. She screamed and nearly climbed up the seat back to get away from it. It fell to the floor and she mashed it with her foot.

We called them giant bugs but the biggest one was only about two inches long. To us they were giant because they were so much bigger than any bugs we had ever seen before. I’m not sure what they were, but I believe they were some kind of desert locusts.

“Why do those things always have to land on me?” she screamed.

“They seem to like you,” I said.

“Well, I don’t like them!”

“That’s the pioneering spirit that made this country great!” I said.

“You can always make a joke out of anything, can’t you?” she said. “I’m getting awfully tired of you.”

“Do you know how mutual it is?” I said. “To find out if you really like somebody or not, you have to travel with them.”

“I’m surprised there aren’t a lot more murders,” she said.

We hadn’t passed another car for at least a half-hour. I pulled off the road so we could take a rest and get a drink of water. Johnnie said she needed a couple of minutes of privacy, so she went off about fifty yards away from the road.

“Don’t go too far!” I yelled but I didn’t think she heard me because she just kept going and didn’t look back.

Johnnie and I got along swell. We had been married for five years. We talked all the time about how we were sick of each other and were going to kill each, but it was just our way of bantering. We never really fought, not the way my parents did when I was growing up.

I was standing by the car smoking a cigarette and trying to get the kinks out of my legs when I heard Johnnie scream. I figured she must have stumbled across a rattlesnake or a scorpion. I went running toward the sound of her voice.

When I found her, she was standing in a hole about three feet deep. She was screaming and waving her arms like a crazy person.

“What happened?” I yelled.

It appeared the ground had given way under her feet and she had fallen into a hive of those big bugs. They were swarming all around her, angry and confused.

“What did you do?” I said.

I grabbed onto her arms and pulled her out of the hole. Some of the bugs were clinging to her face and arms, not because they wanted to but because they had no other choice.

“Oh, my god!” I said. “There must be a million of them!”

When I had dragged her a few feet away from the hole, I let go of her and began pulling the bugs off her face and head.

“You just had to find out where they live, didn’t you?” I said.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I was just walking back to the car.”

She had some little welts on her face, scalp, and hands. I wasn’t sure if the bugs had bitten her or if it was something else. I got her back to the car and into the back seat. She was shivering, in spite of the heat, so I covered her up with an old blanket.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I’m going to have nightmares for a long time,” she said.

“I’m going to get you to a doctor.”

“I’ve been waiting for something terrible to happen ever since we left home,” she said.

“Don’t talk,” I said. “Just rest.”

I wasn’t sure how far it was to the next town, but I would keep driving until I came to it. If I saw a gas station or a roadside café, I’d stop and call for help. Anybody would have a phone, even way out here.

I kept turning around in the seat looking at Johnnie. She was lying on her back, wrapped in the blanket. Her eyes were closed and she was apparently asleep. It was starting to get dark so I pulled off the road to get her a drink of water and to see if there was anything I could do for her.

I went around the other side of the car and opened the back door where her head was. I didn’t like what I saw. She was breathing heavily and her skin was turning a brown-green color.

“Johnnie!” I said. “How are you doing?”

“I feel a little funny,” she said. “Where are we?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think we might be lost.”

“Oh, no!” She started to cry.

“Don’t worry, Johnnie,” I said. “Everything is going to be all right. I’m taking you to see a doctor right now.”

“Just let me rest.”

“You just go to sleep now and I’ll wake you when we get to the doctor. Don’t worry about a thing.”

It was all the way dark now. My headlights were the only light anywhere on the desert. I felt like I was alone in an enormous empty bowl with the sky as the lid. When I looked at the gas gauge, I saw that I only had about an eighth of a tank. I didn’t know how much farther that was going to take us.

Finally up ahead two or three miles—it’s difficult to gauge distance on the desert—I saw lights over to the left. I held my breath until I was close enough to see what it was: a gas station and motel called Happy Trails Auto Court.

“We’re all right now!” I said to Johnnie, even though I wasn’t sure if she would hear me.

As I pulled up to the gas pump, my brakes squealed. An attendant came running out.

“Do you have a phone?” I asked.

“Pay phone,” he said, pointing with his thumb back inside the building.

As he filled my tank, I was digging in my pockets for change.

“Wait a minute,” Johnnie said. “Don’t call anybody. I’ll be all right. I don’t need a doctor.”

I turned and looked at her. “Are you sure?” I said. “You look like you could use a doctor.” I didn’t want to tell her how bad she really looked.

“Just get a room,” she said. “I need to be someplace other than this car. I want to sleep. In the morning I’ll be fine.”

After I paid the attendant for the gas, I engaged a room for the night and then I helped Johnnie out of the car and into the room. She was barely able to walk; her legs didn’t seem to work right. When we were in the room with the door closed, I helped her to the bed. She lay down heavily and took a few deep breaths.

“I’m going to get a doctor,” I said.

“No!” she said. “There isn’t anything a doctor could do.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

She didn’t answer but turned her face away and groaned. That’s when I noticed that her head was elongating and her features flattening as if she were made of wax and melting.

“There’s something terribly wrong,” I said.

“Just leave me alone or I’m going to kill you,” she said, but she could barely form the words. Her lips had flattened out and her mouth was a straight line.

She was resting comfortably so I went into the bathroom and took a much-needed bath. When I was finished, I was feeling sick from not having eaten all day, so I went to the café next door and had a huge steak.

When I got back to the room after eating, I saw right away that Johnnie had changed even further in the short time I was away. She was covered all over with a brown-and-green hide that felt like dried corn stalks to the touch. Her arms were turning into wings, and they weren’t an angel’s wings, either. When I let my eyes travel down the length of the bed, I saw that her human legs had been absorbed by the lower part of her body and she had, instead, three pairs of bug legs evenly spaced along her underside. And her face…it almost defied description. She had no nose to speak of and her mouth was a wide slit that went from one side of her head to the other.

“Oh, my God!” I said. “You’re turning into one of those big bugs!”

“Oh, hello, honey,” she said, opening her eyes, which were as big as saucers and domed.

She had never called me honey in her life. “Are you feeling better now?” I asked.

“I must look a fright,” she said. “Will you get me my mirror out of my vanity case?”

I realized then that she didn’t know what was happening and it was probably better that she didn’t. “You look fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about that now.”

“Did you have dinner?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Would you like something?”

“Did you see those weeds growing in the ditch along the highway?”

“I guess I did,” I said. “Why?”

“Ever since I woke up I can smell them and I can’t think about anything else. Will you go out and grab a couple of handfuls and bring them in to me? Get mostly leaves but some stalks, too!”

I did as she asked and when I brought them to her I placed them on the bed near her head. By manipulating her wings and her six tiny legs she turned herself over and began eating them.

She made little nyum-nyum-nyum sounds as she ate. “They are just every bit as delicious as I knew they would be!” she said. “And so economical!”

When she was finished eating, she wanted a drink of water. I filled a glass for her and held it to her mouth. She didn’t seem to have a tongue but she had a way of drawing the water from the glass up into her mouth.

“I feel so much better now,” she said.

“I’m glad,” I said.

“Will you bring me the mirror now? I want to brush my hair.”

“That can wait,” I said. “You just need to rest now.” I couldn’t bring myself to tell her she no longer had hair.

For the next couple of hours she sat on the bed and groomed herself. She had a way of bending herself double and sticking her legs, one at a time, in her mouth, and pulling on them. (I wasn’t sure if she was washing them or trying to straighten them out.) Every now and then she would flutter her wings as if exercising them or trying them out. She kept looking toward the door and the window, but I didn’t know why. She must have heard something that I didn’t hear.

I was exhausted from all that had happened and went to sleep in the chair. When I woke up at first daylight she was lying on her back again. All her legs were sticking up in the air. I thought at first she was dead but then I noticed a slight breathing movement, so I knew she was alive.

“Good morning, Johnnie!” I said cheerily.

She opened her eyes and looked at me and I knew then that the transformation was complete and she would no longer be able to talk to me.

“What are we to do now, Johnnie?” I said, even though I knew there would be no answer. “Do we just go back home and pretend that none of this ever happened?”

She looked at me and waved all her legs in the air. I knew she was trying to tell me something but I didn’t know what it was.

“I’m going to bring the car around,” I said. “I’ll help you in to the back seat. Before we go, I’ll bring you a lot of those nice weeds for you to eat on the way.”

She became agitated, waving all her legs frantically in the air.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll help to turn you over.”

She began opening and closing her eyes in time to the movement of her legs, moving her body from side to side. A faint sound came from inside her, almost like a whimper.

“What is it, Johnnie?” I said.

I leaned my ear down to her mouth, feeling her antennae touch the side of my head. I heard the little chomping sound that she made with her mouth, but still I didn’t know what she wanted me to do.

It came to me after a while that she was communicating with me in the only way she had left, by gesturing toward the door with all her legs. She wanted me to open it.

After I had turned her right-side-up on the bed, I lifted her gently to the floor and set her down on her tiny legs, a hundred-and-thirty-pound, human-sized bug. I had never seen anything like it before.

I opened the door and stepped back. She took a few tentative bug steps toward it and stopped and looked at me with those bug eyes I knew I would never forget. My Johnnie. I could tell she didn’t really want to leave me but she had to. We belonged to separate worlds now.

As soon as she had crawled out the door, she elevated the front part of her body, opened up her wings, and took flight. I hoped that there were other bug people waiting for her so she wouldn’t have to be alone, and I imagined that I saw some of them across the highway crouched down waiting for her to join them.

“Good-bye, Johnnie!” I called out as she flew away, but I wasn’t sure if she heard me.

I closed the door then and began contemplating my life without her.

August 10, 2013September 28, 2013 by allen0997

All I Have

All I Have ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

It came to Mrs. Russ in a dream. She came awake and sat up in bed as if a light had been turned on inside her head. It was like this: she was all alone in the world and her life really hadn’t amounted to much. She had been grasping and selfish her entire life, rarely thinking of others. There might still be a chance for her to do some good, though. She would sell everything she had and give the money to the poor, just like it says in the Bible. She would start by deeding the house to the church. When she had her attorney, Vernon Bluet, on the phone, she told him what she planned to do.

“And where are you going to live after you’ve given your house away?” he asked.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “That’s the whole thing. I will be taken care of.”

“By whom?”

“You’re not a religious man, are you?”

“Religion and the law don’t mix.”

“Maybe they should.”

“It’s your house to do with as you please,” he said, “but I would just like to know why you want to give it away.”

“It seems the right thing to do.”

“You had a religious experience.”

“Of sorts.”

“The voice of God spoke to you and told you to sell all your possessions.”

“Well, when you put it that way, I suppose that is what happened.”

“After you’ve sold everything you have, then what?”

“I’ll give the money to the poor.”

“And then you’ll be one of the poor.”

“Maybe so, but I’ll be assured of a place in heaven.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“Yes. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what I believe. When it comes to religious matters, I know nothing.”

“I like a man who admits he knows nothing,” she said as she stuck a cigarette in her holder and lit it.

“I knew your husband. He was a very practical man. I don’t think he would approve of what you want to do.”

“He isn’t in a position to either approve or disapprove, though, is he?”

“May I give you a word of advice?”

“Only if you must.”

“Wait one week.”

“That won’t make any difference. I’ve already made up my mind.”

“If you were my own mother,” he said hesitantly.

“Yes?”

“If you were my mother I’d advise you to see a doctor to make sure you haven’t had a stroke that has impaired your judgment.”

She laughed as if he had made a joke. “I can assure you there’s nothing the matter with me,” she said. “I’ve never felt better.”

“Will you agree to have a thorough physical examination before we proceed with this? As a personal favor to me?”

“I just had one,” she said, “not three months ago.”

“Have another one.”

“I want you to start the ball rolling to deed my house over to the church. When that’s taken care of, I’ll decide what to do with everything else.”

She emptied out the closets upstairs, unearthing some garments she hadn’t seen in over thirty years. She threw away the things that she thought nobody would want and boxed up the rest to give to charity. She kept out one change of clothes for herself, a pair of shoes, and a few personal items.

A man who dealt in antiques and second-hand furniture was interested in buying most of the furniture, especially the dining room table, chairs, and sideboard that were over a hundred years old and the beds, dressers and chest of drawers in two of the bedrooms upstairs. (He knew someone else who would buy all the rest of the stuff, including the cast-off furniture in the attic and the old piano that hadn’t been played in fifty years.) When a price was agreed upon, she told him to send the check to the church as a charitable donation for the poor with her name attached, which he agreed to do before his men came to pick up the stuff.

The auction people made an inventory of everything else in the house, which would all be sold in one day at public auction. They arranged all the most valuable items in the living room and dining room: family heirlooms, an antique violin that belonged to her uncle, china and silver, her husband’s book and music collections, gun and coin collections, paintings, artifacts, bric-a-brac, and objets d’art. They took pictures to be used in flyers and newspaper advertising.

It rained the day of the auction, but that didn’t keep people from coming. At first there were about thirty, which increased to fifty, then eighty and then more than a hundred. People were allowed to come into the house and look over the items to be auctioned before the bidding began.

From the beginning the auction was a success. Items sold briskly and brought handsome prices. Mrs. Russ stood to the side with a smile on her face, her hands folded in front of her. She didn’t know most of the people but recognized a few of them from the neighborhood. The minister from her church, the Reverend Frankie Finkle, was in attendance and purchased an antique crystal vase and a table lamp.

When nearly all the items had been sold and the sale was coming to an end, Vernon Bluet, her attorney, stopped by.

“The sale has exceeded our expectations,” she said to him happily as he came through the door.

“There isn’t anything you want to keep for yourself?” he asked, looking around.

“Not a thing,” she said. “I won’t need anything where I’m going.”

“And where is that?” he asked. “Heaven?”

She didn’t answer but only smiled her mysterious little smile.

“I just hope you know what you’re doing and don’t come to regret it,” he said.

She arranged to meet with him the next day at three o’clock to sign the papers to complete the transfer of the house.

After the auction was over and all the people had left, she walked through the house she had lived in for over fifty years, marveling at how different the rooms seemed after they had been stripped of all that had given them character. It was just four walls and nothing more. It meant nothing to her.

That night she slept on a pallet on the floor in her bedroom, reduced to the bare necessities. It would be the last night she spent in the house. Now it belonged to somebody else.

On her way to the attorney’s office the next day, she stopped at the bank to get the deeds to her house and car from her safety deposit box. When she arrived at his office, he was waiting for her. He greeted her warmly and showed her to a comfortable chair.

“Any regrets?” he asked her.

“Not one.”

He showed her where she needed to sign and in a matter of a few minutes the transaction was completed. She signed her car over to him, as well as the house, and gave him all her keys. Before she left, he insisted that she take a glass of brandy with him, since it was unlikely they would ever meet again.

“What now?” he asked.

“I feel wonderful,” she said. “Free of encumbrances for the first time in my life.”

“It isn’t practical, though, to feel that way,” he said.

“Practical isn’t always the same to everybody,” she said.

“You’re going to need at least some money. Cab fare?”

“I don’t need it,” she said. “I’ll walk.”

“As a favor to me, take this.” He opened his desk drawer and counted out five one-hundred dollar bills and handed them to her.

“I don’t want any money,” she said firmly.

“Indulge me.”

She took the money with a shrug and stuffed it into her purse and stood up. They shook hands and then she was gone.

She walked five blocks until she came to a bus stop. She waited and when a bus came along she boarded it and took a seat beside the window. She didn’t know where the bus was going but it didn’t matter. She still believed all would be revealed. All she had to do was go where she was directed.

The other people on the bus seemed dazed and lifeless, as if they had just come from waging battle. The bus crept onward through traffic, stopping frequently to discharge or take on passengers. Soon they entered a part of the city Mrs. Russ had never seen before or hardly knew existed. On both sides of the streets were dilapidated tenement buildings, pool halls and taverns. Some of the buildings looked as if their insides had been bombed out.

At an intersection, a car on the cross street failed to stop at the stoplight and rammed into the side of the bus. The bus driver dismounted and, waving his arms, engaged in furious conversation with the driver of the car, who seemed to be drunk. The passengers came alive, standing up to see what was happening and chattering excitedly.

The car hitting the bus caused Mrs. Russ to strike her head on the metal frame that went around the window. She covered her eyes, experienced a moment of dizziness, and when she took her hands away she didn’t know where she was or why she was on a bus. She never rode on buses!

The passengers filed off the bus to wait for another bus to come along and pick them up, which might take as long as a half-hour. While they were standing in a bunch on the sidewalk, Mrs. Russ disengaged herself from the others and walked away.

She walked three or four blocks, not knowing where she was going but knowing only that she wanted to go home. Her feet hurt, she was tired, and she had a headache. The worst part, though, was not knowing where she was going or why. There was a gap in her consciousness. Something happened but she couldn’t quite fit the pieces together. She tried to remember if she had been sick or had an operation.

She walked until she believed she couldn’t walk any farther. She believed for a while that someone was following her but when she turned around and looked behind her, no one was there. A man standing in a doorway looked at her; he smiled in what she thought was a suggestive manner and flicked cigarette ashes at her. She clutched her purse to her chest and walked on.

When she came to a hotel on a corner, she went into the lobby. It seemed cool and quiet, somehow inviting, after the street. The desk clerk saw her come in and put down the newspaper he was reading. He was bored and hoping for a little diversion.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“This is a hotel?”

“That’s what the sign says.”

“I want a room for the night.”

“You can have anything you want as long as you pay for it in advance.”

She gave him a confused look and opened her purse, seeing the wad of bills just inside that she didn’t know she had. She took them out and, after counting them, handed him a hundred-dollar bill.

“I don’t have change for that,” he said. “I’ll have to owe you.”

She nodded her head. He gave her a key and pointed up the stairs.

“Up one flight and down the hall on your right.”

She took the key gratefully and found the room and let herself in. After she had locked the door behind her, she took off her shoes, sat down and took a few deep breaths. She felt better now that she was in a room by herself, off her feet, and with nobody looking at her. After she sat quietly for a few minutes, she would be all right again.

She nodded off and woke up to a siren on the street outside the hotel. She jumped to her feet and ran to the window. It was raining now and nearly dark. And in the drops of water on the pane of glass before her eyes were all the missing pieces, now found.

July 15, 2013July 16, 2013 by allen0997

Training Wheels

Training Wheels ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Gee was allowed to ride four blocks on the sidewalk toward the school to the stone fence and back. He didn’t want to go any farther than that, anyway, because the Hedgepeth brothers were just beyond that. They threw rocks at him and called him names and he was afraid of them.

He didn’t have a full-sized bike yet because he was only seven and small for his age. He had a half-sized bike. It was really a girl’s bike but he didn’t mind because it was comfortable and easy to ride. The bike had been equipped with training wheels up until a few days ago, but a bigger kid in the neighborhood took them off for him. He was proud of being able to ride without them.

He had just reached the stone fence and was about to turn around and go back when he noticed a man leaning against the fence looking at him. He was in the shade under an overhang of leaves, so Gee couldn’t see his face very well.

“Hello,” the man said, as Gee was making the turn-around maneuver on the narrow sidewalk.

“Hi,” Gee said, looking quickly at the man and then looking away.

“How are you today?”

“I’m all right,” Gee said.

“I bet you don’t know who I am.”

“Who?”

“Would it surprise you very much if I told you I’m you, fifty years from now?”

Gee laughed a little bit because he didn’t know what else to do. “That’s silly,” he said.

“Why is it silly?”

“How could you be me when I’m right here?”

“I don’t know,” the man said. “Except to say that time is a river.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Gee said.

“I know you don’t. I don’t know what it means, either. It’s just what I’ve been told.”

“Do you live in that house?” Gee asked, pointing to the house with the stone fence around the yard.

“No,” the man said. “I don’t live anywhere around here anymore.”

“So you’re just visiting?”

“Yes, I’m visiting you.”

“Does my mother know you?”

“Yes, she knows me. About as well as anybody could.”

“I’d better get going. If I don’t come back right away, she’ll come looking for me.”

“Tell her hello for me.”

“What’s your name?”

“My name is the same as yours.”

Gee looked at the man’s face but still couldn’t see it very well. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Are you a friend of the family?”

The man laughed. “In a way,” he said. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

“I think I’ve heard that one before,” Gee said.

“Before you go, I want to tell you something that won’t mean anything to you now but will when you’re older.”

“What is it?” Gee asked.

“You’ll be married three times. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you skip the first one.”

“I’m not ever getting married.”

“Don’t go into business with a partner named Alonso. He’s a crook. The business fails and you lose all your money.”

“I don’t know anybody named Alonso.”

“After your father dies, your mother will want to marry a man named Bartlett. Whatever you do, don’t let that marriage take place. He wants to marry her for all the wrong reasons.”

“Would you like to come home with me and tell her yourself?”

“No, I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“I’m here to see you. Not her.”

“Okay. I’m going now.”

“Try to remember the things I told you, even though they don’t mean anything to you now. Write them down when you get home and put them away someplace safe where you’ll be able to see them in twenty or thirty years.”

“Twenty or thirty years?” Gee said. It seemed to him like all the time in the world. His young mind couldn’t grasp that much time.

That evening when they were having dinner, mother said, “Millie called me and told me she saw you talking to an old man on the sidewalk today.”

“Yes,” Gee said. “He was just standing there on the sidewalk when I rode past on my bike.”

“What did he say to you?”

“Nothing much. He just asked me how I was and he told me he used to live here a long time ago.”

“He wasn’t trying to mess with you, was he?” daddy asked.

“No.”

“Did he say anything dirty to you?” mother asked.

“No! He was just a nice old man.”

“You’ll be sure and tell me if anybody bothers you, won’t you?”

“He didn’t bother me.”

“I’m going to call the sheriff and tell him there’s an old man hanging around the neighborhood bothering kids,” daddy said. “They can at least keep an eye out for anybody that looks suspicious.”

“I don’t think he’ll be back,” Gee said.

He watched his father chewing and he knew he wasn’t paying any attention; he was already in some other place. His mother sipped her iced tea daintily with a cigarette in her fingertips as a fly buzzed around the table and lighted on the plate of sliced tomatoes.

July 10, 2013July 18, 2013 by allen0997

Queen for a Day

Queen for a Day ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

The year is 1958 and Mrs. Thelma Caswell has applied to go on the TV show Queen for a Day. That’s the show where four contestants, all women, go in front of a studio audience and tell their unhappy stories. Delivery is everything because the audience votes for the saddest, most deserving story, with its applause; that is, the loudest applause determines the winner. (There can be no doubt about which story garners the loudest applause because it’s registered on a scientific instrument known as the “applause-o-meter.”)

The lucky winner is given what she wants and needs most to make her difficult life more bearable, whether it’s a wheelchair or a washing machine or an iron lung—sometimes all those things. The losers are given a basket containing colorful little bars of soap, a set of shot glasses, and coupons for reduced prices on lobster dinners.

One month after applying to be on the show, Thelma is asked to come to the television studio where the show is produced for what they call an “initial interview.” The “producers” of the show (a fat man and a mannish woman) want to speak to her to make sure she is “telegenic” enough and won’t “freeze up” in front of the television cameras and the studio audience. Thelma is told at the end of the interview, which takes an entire afternoon, that she will be notified of the producers’ decision regarding her suitability to be a contestant on the show.

In the days and weeks that follow, she won’t allow herself to become excited at the possibility of being on Queen for a Day. In fact, she tries to put it out of her mind because there is a very real possibility they won’t want her. For that reason, she doesn’t tell her husband, her children, or any of her friends or family; she will tell them if and when she is chosen to be on the show.

Finally, when she least expects it, she receives the phone call. She is requested to be at the television studio at ten o’clock for a twelve o’clock taping of Queen for a Day on Thursday. When she hangs up the phone, her hands are shaking and for a few minutes she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She seems to be walking on air. When she regains control of her senses, she immediately starts going through her closet to see what she has to wear. She doesn’t see anything that she can stand anymore, so she goes shopping.

She tries on many dresses in the store but has a hard time deciding. Since the show is in black and white (color is still a few years away), she thinks she will look better in a light color, although black or navy blue will make her appear thinner. (She has put on a lot of extra weight in the last couple of years and she has heard somewhere that TV cameras add fifteen or twenty pounds to a person’s appearance.) She settles on a simple white silk dress with peach-colored trim, elegant but not flashy. She can’t think about how much it cost.

On the day before the taping, she spends six hours in the beauty parlor, availing herself of all the services they have to offer. She gets a henna rinse, a cut, and a permanent wave that makes her hair look like a poodle dog, but still she believes she looks better than she has ever looked in her life.

That night she hardly sleeps at all. She didn’t think she would be nervous, but now that it’s getting so close she feels as if she might die. She feels alternately sick with dread and giddy with excitement. In the morning she’s up long before she needs to be and spends hours on getting dressed, “putting on her face,” and getting her hair just so. When finally it’s time to leave for the TV studio, she feels thoroughly exhausted.

She can’t find a place to park so she squeezes her car in at the end of a block too close to a fireplug. She is sure she will have a parking ticket when she comes out but that’s a trivial matter, she believes, that she will deal with when the time comes.

She expects the emcee of the show, Durwood Sherwood, to be there to greet her with a little hug and a peck on the cheek, but instead she is directed to a third-floor office where she finds herself before a middle-aged woman behind a desk with facial hair and big glasses that make her look like an unhappy owl. The woman gives Thelma a stony look and bites down on her dentures.

“May I help you?” she asks.

“I’m here to be on the show,” Thelma says.

“What show might that be?”

“Why, Queen for a Day!”

“I know,” the woman says with a laugh. “I was just messing with you. Queen for a Day is the only show taping today. What’s your name?”

“Thelma Caswell.”

“All right. Have a seat. I’ll let them know you’re here.”

Thelma sits on an orange plastic couch while the woman picks up a phone and murmurs into it words that Thelma is not able to make out. In a few minutes a door opens and the fat man who Thelma met earlier as one of the producers of the show emerges.

“How nice to see you again, Miz Caswell!” he says, holding out his hand for her to shake. “Please follow me.”

He takes hold of her arm as if she is blind and leads her down a hallway.

“Are you excited about being on Queen for a Day?” he asks.

“Oh, yes!” she says.

“Well, right this way.”

He takes her around a corner and stops at another door. He opens it and gives her a little shove inside. “Well, have fun!” he says and then he’s gone.

The other three contestants are sitting in chairs against the wall like in a doctor’s waiting room, smiling at her wanly. She sits down with them, making four. It’s quiet in the room and nobody is saying anything, as if they are in a church. It doesn’t seem to Thelma like the kind of room they put you in before you go on TV. She wonders if she is in the right place or if they have mistaken her for somebody else.

Soon a man with a clipboard comes in and gives them nametags that he instructs them to put on their chests over their hearts. There’s Buffy, Chichi, Peaches, and Thelma.

“We use only first names,” he says. “You’ll be up in alphabetical order, but you don’t need to worry about that. Durwood will cue you. Now, if we’re all ready, we’ll go in and meet the studio audience.”

They all stand up as if they are one and follow the man out of the room. He takes them through a labyrinth of dark passages lined with what looks like clutter until they come to a black curtain. He arranges them in a line in reverse alphabetical order (Thelma, Peaches, Chichi, and Buffy), opens the curtain and motions for them to go through it.

The studio audience, numbering about five hundred, has already been sitting for two hours. They have been “primed” and are relaxed and ready to be entertained. They are cued to applaud at the entrance of the four contestants.

“And here they are!” Durwood Sherwood announces in his sonorous voice. “There are four of them! They are all worthy! But only one of them will be. Queen! For! A! Day!”

The audience applauds wildly again while the contestants take their places behind four little podiums bearing their names. Two cameras roll forward to beam their movements to the millions of people watching at home.

After Durwood has dispensed with the preliminaries, it’s time to get down to the business of hearing from the contestants. Buffy is first.

“I think you have a very special story to tell us, don’t you, Buffy?” Durwood cues her.

“Well, Durwood,” she says, “I used to be a bareback rider in the circus.”

“Ohhhhhh!” sighs the audience.

“During a performance to a packed house two years ago, the horse I was riding stumbled and fell. I, of course, was thrown forward. Two clowns tried to catch me but they missed. I landed on a low wall that was used to separate the audience from the performers. I had serious neck injuries.”

Here she pauses for effect and points to her neck brace that is, oddly enough, the same color green as the dress she is wearing, making it look as if she has no neck at all. Her black hair interspersed with gray is splayed over the neck brace to her shoulders. Her mouth is a wide, grim, lipless line. As she stares into the TV camera, she looks like a frog about to catch a fly.

“I was in a coma for two weeks,” she continues. “When I woke up, my doctors told me I would never ride again. Bareback riding was all I knew. There I was, my livelihood taken away, with two children and no husband. My daughter desperately wants to go to modeling school. She is so pretty and everybody who has ever seen her believes she has a future in modeling. If we had enough money to put her through school, she could get herself a good job and support the family while I get myself back on my feet.”

The audience is here cued to applause. The applause is interspersed with whistles and cheers.

“Now we have Chichi,” Durwood says. “Chichi, won’t you tell us your story?”

“Well, Durwood,” Chichi says in a breathy whisper, “my husband and I have eight children.”

“Ahhhhhh!” sighs the audience.

“We were always able to get along quite well on my husband’s salary, but he got into a fight with the foreman at the factory where he worked and got fired. That was six months ago. He hasn’t been able to find another job. When his unemployment runs out, we won’t have any income. He’s depressed and has been drinking quite heavily. I think he’s seeing another woman.”

Here she lowers her head and squeezes her eyes shut. The camera moves in for a close-up, showing the ugly splotches on her face and bare upper arms. For a few seconds she can’t speak at all.

“I know this is difficult,” Durwood says sympathetically.

When she speaks again, her voice is a-tremble. “If we had the money for my husband to go to trade school, he could get a good job as an auto mechanic and everything would be all right again. It would give him a new purpose in life and would make him stop drinking and running around so much.”

“That’s wonderful!” Durwood says, holding up his arms to indicate that Chichi is finished. The audience applauds.

“Now let us hear from Peaches,” he says. “Peaches, won’t you tell us your story?”

“Well, Durwood,” she says, her fleshy chin wobbling. “My husband Stan and I have four beautiful children, two boys and two girls. The oldest is twelve and the youngest four.”

“And there’s something quite different about your husband Stan, isn’t there?” Durwood prompts her.

“Yes,” she says in a kind of drawl, ”Stan is four foot tall. He’s a midget!”

Here a picture of a tiny, smiling man is flashed on the screen. He’s wearing a tuxedo and top hat and is carrying a cane. The audience applauds and cheers.

“And I couldn’t love him more if he was six-and-a-half foot tall!” Peaches shrieks.

“Ahhhhhh!” sighs the audience.

She pivots her head from side to side, obviously enjoying the attention. Her eyes are tiny slits and her cheeks apple-like, her head an inverted black bowl.

“I’ve always been a short woman,” she says, “but I’m a whole foot taller than he is!”

The camera pans out over the audience to show how much they are enjoying this moment.

“All is not well, though, at your house, is it, dear?” Durwood asks.

“No,” Peaches says, a handkerchief at the ready. “Stan works as a bouncer in a nightclub. The pay is meager, at best, but he works very hard and loves all of us very much.”

“Ahhhhhh!” sighs the audience.

“Our youngest son, Leroy, is four,” she says.

“And is Leroy a midget, too?” Durwood asks.

“No, he isn’t. He’s normal-sized. Although he’s only four, he’s almost as tall as his father and is going to be a big man some day.”

“Bless his heart!” Durwood says.

She waits a moment for the laughter to subside before she continues. “The problem is not with his height but with his eyes. He has a rare eye disorder and will go completely blind in the next few years if he doesn’t have an eye operation. We aren’t able to afford the operation on the money Stan makes as a bouncer. We already have a second mortgage on our house and can’t borrow another cent until we pay off the debts we already have. That will take years and it might be too late to save little Leroy’s eyesight.”

She begins crying uncontrollably, covering her eyes, and the audience almost swoons with sympathy.

Durwood gives a big sigh and looks directly into the camera. His eyes are moist. “We’ll all be rooting for little Leroy, won’t we?” he says earnestly, and the audience breaks into thunderous applause.

After a few seconds he holds up his hands to bring the applause to an end. “And, now,” he says, “that brings us to our final contestant, Thelma. Thelma, won’t you tell us your story?”

“Well, Durwood,” she says, feeling more at ease than she expected, “I don’t know where to begin. My husband is in prison and has no hope of getting out for at least six more years. We spent all the money we had for his defense. I have a sixteen-year-old daughter, Lulu, who is a paranoid schizophrenic. She believes aliens from outer space are trying to kidnap her and she needs constant supervision. My eleven-year-old son, Raphael, is an albino. He’s very smart but he has to go to an expensive special school because the kids in public school would kill him.”

“Ohhhhhh!” sighs the audience.

“Our house is heavily mortgaged and we’re behind in the payments,” she continues. “The bank is about to foreclose. I’d like to have enough money to make the back payments to keep us in the house for a few more months until I can finish the novel I’m writing and get it published. It’s sure to be a bestseller.”

“Well, well, well,” Durwood says. “We wish you and your family all the best!” He faces the audience and raises his arms as a signal for them to applaud.

When the applause subsides, he holds the microphone in both hands and looks reflectively at the floor. “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “we’ve heard the stories from our four contestants. Now the time has come for members of our studio audience to vote with their applause for the contestant they believe is most worthy to be crowed Queen for a Day!”

There’s a little bit of stage resetting as Durwood retreats to the left away from the contestants and the TV camera rolls in for close-ups. The first close-up is of Buffy. The picture the audience sees at home is Buffy’s face with the applause-o-meter on the bottom half of the screen. The audience applauds, with some cheering and whistling interspersed. The needle on the applause-o-meter goes over about three quarters of the way. The same with Chichi. Then Peaches. Then Thelma. There is a drum roll. All four contestants are nearly tied, but the judges determine that the needle advanced just a little more for Peaches than for the others. Peaches is Queen for a Day! It was the blind baby and the midget husband that did it!

Peaches is crowned and robed to the cheering of the audience. She cries, screams, and jumps up and down. When the hoopla subsides, Durwood announces in an excited voice that little Leroy will have an eye operation at the finest eye clinic in the country and his eyesight will be saved, all because his mother was crowned. Queen! For! A! Day!

Thelma gets away just as soon as she can. She doesn’t want anybody looking at her. She is the loser, along with Buffy and Chichi, and there’s no joy in that. She wishes now that she had never gone on such a show that’s obviously aimed at imbeciles. She sees now that she’s smarter than that, better than that.

While she’s driving home, her hands are shaking and her mouth is dry. She wants to find a hole and crawl inside and die. She cringes at the thought of her mother and her friends seeing the show and laughing at how insipid she is, along with those others. She has humiliated herself in front of millions of people, bared her soul, and then lost to a fat little woman with slit eyes and a midget for a husband. She can hear the world laughing at her! Woman, thy name is Fool!

By the time she gets home, it has started to rain so she pulls the car into the garage. With the motor still running, she gets out of the car and closes the garage door before any of the neighbors have a chance to see her.

It’s comforting, somehow, with the rain on the roof and the purr of the engine. It feels intimate, restful, secluded. Her own little world. Leaving the car door open, she stretches out on the seat with her feet under the steering wheel and the top of her head against the passenger-side door. Soon she begins to feel drowsy. She has never known a sweeter feeling.

May 30, 2013June 3, 2013 by allen0997

The Beauty Box

The Beauty Box ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

When Noreen set the plate of salmon croquettes and macaroni and cheese in front of Odell, he gave her a significant look but didn’t say anything. He was hoping for chicken or beef stew, at least. He didn’t like salmon croquettes; they had little soft fish bones in them that he tried not to think of as bones as he chewed them.

“Do you notice anything different about me?” Noreen asked as they began eating.

“You’re wearing a different shade of lipstick,” Odell said, barely looking at her.

“I’m not wearing any lipstick,” she said. “Guess again.”

“You got a new pair of pedal pushers.”

“No!”

She turned around so he could see the back of her head. “I’m wearing what they call a ‘fall,’” she said. “It’s an addition that blends in with the rest of my hair so you can’t tell the fake hair from the real hair.”

“Do you mean you’re wearing a hairpiece?”

“Well, if you want to call it that.”

“Why don’t they call it a hairpiece, then?”

“Because ‘fall’ sounds better.”

“The more important question, I suppose, is why do you need a hairpiece?”

“Well, I don’t really need it, but it makes my hair look better, don’t you think? Thicker and fuller? It somehow makes me look younger?”

“If you say so.”

“I went to the Beauty Box today. They have this wonderful new hairdresser named Enzo. He took one look at me and said, ‘A fall would do wonders for your hair!’.”

“Enzo is a man?”

“Yes.”

“Why is it that hairdressers are all men now? Hairdressers used to be women. Now they’re men. Men with foreign-sounding names.”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you conduct a survey?”

“Is Enzo a homosexual?”

“I didn’t think to ask.”

“Well, it seems you would want to know the sexual preferences of a person fixing your hair.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What country is he from? Is ‘Enzo’ an Italian name?”

“If I had to guess, I’d guess he’s an American.”

“Does he speak with an accent?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to go punch him in the face for you?”

“What for?”

“For raising so many questions for which there are no answers.”

“But don’t you think my hair looks cute?”

“It looks flat in the back and pushed up on top,” he said. “The way it looks when you get up in the morning.”

“Enzo said I have lovely hair.”

“Isn’t he paid to say that?”

“He looked at my face with a magnifying glass and he said I have beautiful skin. He said a lot of women have weather-beaten skin, but he could tell that I take care of mine. He said you can tell a lot about a person’s general health just by looking at the skin on their face.”

“And if Enzo said it, you believe it.”

“It’s his business to know about those things.”

“If he told you to make yourself up to look like a frog, would you do it?”

“Of course I would!”

“Are you in love with Enzo?”

She laughed. “Hardly.”

“Why don’t you divorce me and marry Enzo?”

“That’s too much trouble.”

“If you heard Enzo talking to other women, I’ll bet you’d hear him say the exact same things to them, no matter how old and ugly they are.”

“Are you saying I’m old and ugly?”

“No, I’m just saying I’m wondering what Enzo’s game is.”

“I don’t think he has one. He’s just a very nice man.”

“He made you feel important.”

“Well, yes, I guess so.”

“He made you feel special.”

“When you put it that way, I guess he did.”

“And you gave him a great big tip.”

“I always tip my hairdresser.”

“What else?”

“What do you mean?”

“What else did you feel compelled to do for him because he’s such a nice man?”

“I bought some beauty products from him.”

“How much?”

“A hundred and eighty-seven dollars.”

“And that on top fixing your hair and selling you the fall?”

“Well, yes.”

“How much did you spend today at the Beauty Box?”

“Everything is always about money with you, isn’t it?”

“How much?”

“Three hundred and thirty dollars.”

“So there you have Enzo’s game.”

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

“He’s a crap artist! He flatters you and makes you feel special and gets you to liking him. Then he just happens to mention these beauty products he’s selling. By that point you have no sales resistance. You wouldn’t be able to turn him down if he was selling real estate on the moon.”

“Now you’re just being silly.”

“I didn’t get fleeced out of three hundred and thirty dollars today.”

They were silent for the rest of the meal until Noreen was serving the dessert. “There’s a Doris Day movie on tonight,” she said. “It’s one we haven’t seen before. Do you want to watch it with me?”

“I told Willard I’d stop by and see him this evening,” he said tersely.

After he was gone she stacked the dishes in the sink and went to the phone and called the Beauty Box and asked to speak to Enzo. She had to wait what seemed a long time but finally he came on the line.

“Enzo?” she said. “This is Noreen Baggett. I was in the shop today.”

“Yes, darling,” he said. “I was just about to leave for the day. What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted to make sure you have me down for the seventeenth at ten o’clock.”

“Just a minute, dear. I’ll check the book.”

He laid down the phone and when he came back he said, “Yes, dear, we’re all set for the seventeenth.”

“I’m so looking forward to it!” she said.

“Well, so am I, dearest!”

After she hung up the phone, she turned on the TV and sat down in the recliner and made herself comfortable. The Doris Day movie was just beginning.

May 5, 2013May 7, 2013 by allen0997