Tag: short story

The Same Chair at the Same Table

The Same Chair at the Same Table ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

He was losing another job, the third in five years. The job didn’t matter so much—in fact he hated it—but it meant he would have to start looking again and money would be tight for a while. He was going to have to tell his mother but would wait for the right time; ill-timed bad news could keep her from sleeping.

He was dozing in the recliner in front of the TV when he heard her voice from the kitchen.

“Frank,” she said, “supper is on the table.”

He went to the table without bothering to put on his shoes, rubbing his eyes.

“Aren’t you getting enough sleep?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“If you were getting enough sleep at night, you wouldn’t need to sleep during the day.”

He looked at the plate of food she set in front of him, another one of her recipes cut out of the newspaper: a brown-and-greenish mass swimming in watery gravy. She used to be a good cook but now hardly made the effort.

He picked up the fork and began eating, looking across the table at her. She had just passed the threshold of sixty and he could see her creeping toward old age. She had put on a lot of weight and she didn’t seem to care. Pockets of flesh hung from her jawbones like a bulldog. When he was in high school, all those many years ago, she used to be pretty.

“Lon called me today,” she said, “and we had a long talk.”

“What about?”

“He wants me to lend him five thousand dollars. Of course, with him, ‘lend’ means ‘give’.”

“What for?”

“Mary Ann needs some expensive dental work, the car needs repairs, and now they have a leaky roof they have to get fixed. I told him not to have more than two kids, but do you think he ever listens to his mother?”

“Did you tell him you’d give it to him?

“I told him I’d think about it.”

It seemed the perfect time to tell her she should hang on to her money because he no longer had a job, but he kept silent. He rarely ventured an opinion. He was the grown-up child safely delivered to adulthood and, since he didn’t have a family of his own and had never ventured into the world on his own, nobody cared what he thought. He seemed to exist only on the margins of other people’s lives.

“Do you know what Sunday is?” she asked.

He looked at the calendar on the wall. “It’s the twenty-third,” he said.

“It’s your father’s birthday. I want to go visit his grave and I want you to drive me and Aunt Louise out there. I told him not to buy cemetery plots way out there because it was too far for me to go, but he never paid any attention to what I wanted. Being buried in a country cemetery was some whim of his, as if it mattered.”

“What time on Sunday?”

“We’ll go about two o’clock and stop someplace and eat on the way back so I won’t have to fix any supper.”

“All right. If I’m here.”

“What do you mean ‘if you’re here’? Are you planning on being someplace else?”

“One never knows.”

“What kind of way is that to talk? ‘One never knows’.”

“I was just making a little joke.”

“I hope they’ve done a better job of keeping the grass trimmed around his headstone than the last time I was there. Honestly, as much money as it takes to be buried there, you’d think they could at least keep the grass neat.”

He had been sitting in the same chair at the same table in the same kitchen his entire life, listening to his mother talk. What she was saying today sounded exactly the same as what she was saying when he was a little boy in grade school. It was a record he had heard so many times it was indelibly etched into his psyche.

“I spoke to Mabel Groat today in the grocery store,” she was saying. “She doesn’t look anything like she used to look. She’s so thin and pale. She had heart surgery about six months ago and never quite got over it. And she has to go into the hospital next week for more tests. She said she had just been to the funeral home and bought one of those pre-paid funeral plans for herself. I suppose I should do that, too. I don’t want my children to have to be bothered with planning for my funeral. I hate to think what the bunch of you together would pick out. To save a few greenbacks, you’d have me stuffed into one of those cheap caskets that’s made out of pressed paper. I cringe to think of the state I’d be in after I’d been buried in one of those things for a while. Yes, I’d rather do it all myself while there’s still time. At least my final resting place is assured. That’s a blessing.

“Did I tell you that Bernice Pullman had a stroke? And she’s only a few years older than me. She’s completely paralyzed and they say she’s just like a vegetable. They had to put her in a nursing home. I suppose I should get out there to see her before she dies, but they say she doesn’t know anybody. If she doesn’t know who I am, what’s the point in going? They’re having to sell her house and car and all her belongings to help pay the bills. If I ever get in that state, I would just rather die right now and get it over with than to be helpless and run through a fortune in medical expenses when there really isn’t anything that can be done. I don’t know why life has to be so cruel sometimes.

“You remember Podge Halliday, don’t you? I grew up with him and he was a distant cousin of your father’s. He was just the sweetest guy in the world and so handsome! All the girls were just crazy about him. He had a heart attack last year on Christmas Day and has never regained consciousness. I don’t know why they don’t just pull the plug on him and let him die with dignity so people can remember him as he used to be and not as some lifeless vegetable in a hospital bed. They say his wife just sits beside his bed all day long and cries. I think she needs to buck up and tell Podge goodbye and get on with what’s left of her life.

“Podge’s daughter from his first marriage goes to our church. She’s about thirty and has a sweet face but she’s as big as a boxcar. She’s got two kids that she dresses up like little dolls. People say she never bothered to get married and that each of her kids is by a separate father. It was such a mistake to allow young girls to start thinking it was all right for them to have children on their own without getting married. In my day, having a baby out of wedlock was the worst thing a girl could do. She was marked for life and so was the child.”

“I don’t know any of those people you’re talking about,” he said.

“That’s because you never pay any attention to me when I’m talking.”

“What’s for dessert?”

“There’s some canned peaches in the cabinet. All you have to do is get up off your butt and get them and open them and, voila!, there’s dessert.”

“Isn’t there any chocolate cake?”

“We need to watch our figures.”

After he finished eating he went upstairs to his bedroom and locked himself in. He turned on the light, opened the dresser drawer and took out a small handgun that he kept concealed underneath some pajamas he never wore. Looking at himself in the mirror, he held the gun to his temple in his right hand, pulled back the hammer and released the trigger; he found the click it made an altogether satisfying sound. When the time was right, he would get some bullets and, together with the gun, they would make beautiful music.

When he went back downstairs, his mother was lying on the couch in a semi-comatose state, watching TV. He went out the back door quietly and began walking down the street.

He walked for more than a mile until he came to the bridge that led over into another part of town, the part where the taverns, cheap hotels, and whore houses were. It was where one might get a tattoo or purchase some illegal substance or other; where one might just as easily get knocked in the head from behind and wake up with a terrible headache and empty pockets. He came to a place called Uncle Willie’s beside a shuttered theatre and went inside. (He could not have known that Uncle Willie was a woman.)

He sat at the bar and had a drink and then another and another. He liked the darkness, the anonymity, the seedy quality of the place. He found solace in the quiet company of the people there; he believed they were his kind and would understand him if only given the chance.

When he finally decided to go home, he was drunker than he had ever been in his life and it had started to rain. Suddenly he longed for his bed and the safety of his home, for the reassuring presence of his mother. He wasn’t sure if he remembered the way back in the dark.

At the bridge that he had crossed earlier in the evening he became sick and disoriented. He stopped for a moment and looked all around, not sure if it was the same bridge. The light that illuminated the far end seemed to have gone out. Nothing looked as it had looked earlier. He couldn’t see his feet.

He miscalculated distance, believed he was at the end of the bridge when he was in the middle. He didn’t know why the rail was in his way and scaled it. He fell thirty feet to the water and drowned. His body was carried away on the current and wasn’t recovered until two days later.

Such were the facts of his death, but he perceived them in a different way. From the moment he stepped off the bridge he lost consciousness. He was on the other side and there was no rain. It was daylight again. The blue of the sky was inexpressibly beautiful. The trees in the distance glowed in golden light like edifices made of emeralds.

A bus came down the road with barely a sound and stopped. He turned toward it and the door opened. He looked up at the driver but couldn’t see the face of the driver because there was a blinding light there. Without words, he knew he was being given a choice to get on the bus—that he didn’t have to do it if he didn’t want to. He hesitated for only a moment and then climbed the four little steps, shielding his eyes from the light. He heard the door close behind him and felt the bus accelerate under his feet as he settled comfortably into a seat beside the window. He had never felt so happy in his life.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Seeing-Eye Mouse

 

The Seeing-Eye Mouse ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

Bandy was the only blind squirrel in the neighborhood. He had been blind since his youth when he was attacked by a dog and thrown against a large rock for dead. Since that time he had had an unnatural fear of dogs and the men who brought them into the woods to hunt and kill.

Blind though he was, Bandy had learned to get along quite well, mostly with the help of his seeing-eye mouse, whose name was Marcel. The two of them lived together in Bandy’s snug little nest in the fork of a tree high off the ground, where they were safe and happy. Marcel helped Bandy collect the food he needed and Bandy gave Marcel a home and kept him from being alone, as his entire family had been swept away in a flood when he was still just a mouseling.

Winter was over and spring just commencing. Bandy and Marcel had been down to the river, where they had sat beside the water all morning long breathing in the smells. Bandy snoozed in the sun while Marcel sat beside him and knitted a sweater and kept an eye out for danger. They were on their way back home and were almost to their tree when they came upon a lady squirrel, a stranger to the neighborhood. She wore a traveling hat with feathers and carried a bundle. She was looking all around as though trying to decide which direction to take.

“You lost, lady?” Marcel asked.

The lady squirrel gave Marcel a big smile showing all her teeth. It took him a moment to realize she wasn’t smiling at him but at Bandy.

“Bandy, darling!” she said, taking Bandy’s paw in hers and ignoring Marcel.

“Who’s there?” Bandy asked. He titled his head back as if he could
recognize her by her smell.

“It’s Sally Cato,” she said. “From long, long ago.”

“Sally Cato,” he said. “Sally Cato from the home place?”

“That’s right!” Her eyes glistened with tears.

“Well, my good Lord!” he said. “What brings you here?”

“Why, I came to see you, of course!”

“Well, I’m must say! I’m almost speechless. I never expected to see you or anybody from the home place ever again.”

“You’re not really seeing me?” she asked, turning her head to the side to show her skepticism. “Are you?”

“I want you to meet my companion and my best friend,” Bandy said. “His name is Marcel. He’s a mouse.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Sally Cato said, looking down her nose at Marcel.

“Likewise,” Marcel said. He could barely keep from snarling.

“You must come up and have a drink,” Bandy said. “I hope you can stay for supper.”

“I hope I can stay for more than that!” she said with a tinkling little laugh.

When the three of them were in the nest, Sally Cato looked around with an appraising eye. She went from room to room, opening doors and drawers. “My,” she said, clasping her paws together, “you do have a snug little home here!”

“I couldn’t wish for better,” Bandy said.

“This is such a tall, sturdy tree! You’re so high up you don’t ever have to be bothered by those frightening creatures that roam through the woods trying to kill us.”

“They’re called humans,” Marcel said.

“That’s why we chose this spot,” Bandy said. “Marcel and I built the nest together. We’ve lived here ever since. How long ago has that been, Marcel?”

“A long time,” Marcel said. “I don’t remember anything before.”

“Happy, so happy!” Sally Cato said, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

Marcel made a pitcher of martinis and after he had served them Sally Cato launched into the story of her life since she and Bandy had last seen each other at the home place.

“My mother died when I was still in high school and my father remarried,” she said tearfully. “I never got along very well with my stepmother. After she tried to kill me three or four times, I ran away from home. I stayed with friends whenever they would have me, drifting from place to place, never having a nest of my own. I was lonely and unhappy.”

“Poor kid!” Bandy said.

“I met this guy at a party and we hit it off right away. His name was Frank. I didn’t know anything about him but I agreed to marry him as soon as he asked me. Well, that was a huge mistake, let me tell you! He had already been married two times and he had a bunch of kids that he expected me to take care of as if they was my own. And if that wasn’t bad enough, his mother lived with him and, let me tell you, that old lady was a nasty piece of business! She treated me like I was some kind of a hired girl or something. She never stopped yapping at me all day long—do this, now do that!—while Frank was away working. I couldn’t take a nap or listen to the radio or do my nails or nothing. I had to restrain myself to keep from strangling her.”

“I think I see a pattern her,” Marcel said.

“I was all set to leave Frank and that’s when I met Dwayne. He was as dull as dishwater, nothing at all like Frank, but he didn’t have a mother, thank goodness, and I felt safe with him. I divorced Frank and married Dwayne as soon as the law allowed. We moved into a lovely little nest and in that first year I gave birth to a litter of six babies. Dwayne was so happy he wet all over himself.”

“Are you sure it was happiness?” Marcel asked.

“Everything went along well for a while and then Dwayne was killed by a hunter one day just without any warning at all. One minute I had a husband and six kids and the next minute I just had the six kids. I wasn’t equipped to support and raise them on my own. I left them with a cousin of mine—temporarily, of course—and came west. I told them I’d send for them just as soon as I found work and settled in a nest.”

“Gosh,” Marcel said, “everything except the hounds snapping at her rear end.”

Sally Cato dried her eyes and downed a martini before continuing. “I went down to the home place but everybody there had either died or moved on. I heard about your accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident,” Bandy said. “I was attacked.”

“He’s lucky to be alive,” Marcel said.

“We all have our troubles, ain’t we?” she said.

She finally dried her eyes and they had a pleasant dinner, during which Bandy asked her where she was planning on going next.

“Wherever the wind takes me,” she said.

“Would you like to stay here with me and Marcel for a few days until you decide your next move?” Bandy asked. “You can sleep in the spare room and we have plenty of food.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to put you out none,” she said.

“We would love to have you. Wouldn’t we, Marcel?”

Marcel spit a glob of food into his napkin and had to get up from the table to go to the bathroom.

In two days Sally Cato had made the nest her own. She rearranged all the furniture, hung some frilly curtains, and, with a kerchief tied around her head, cleaned the place from top to bottom. She told Marcel she wanted to break him of some of his bad habits, such as picking his teeth and grooming himself at the table. She absolutely forbade him from entering the nest without making sure his shoes were clean. All these things Bandy accepted with his usual good humor.

Soon Sally Cato decided that she and Bandy should get married. She hadn’t had very good luck with her two previous husbands and, truth be told, she liked the idea of having a blind husband, one she could control at all times. She had known Bandy almost her whole life and had always liked him in a way. He wasn’t terribly exciting but, then, there’s always a tradeoff. Maybe she had already had enough excitement in her life and was ready to settle down to a quiet life of domesticity. She might even have more kids if it was in the cards.

She began to try to get Bandy used to the idea that they didn’t need Marcel. When they were married, she would do all the things for Bandy that Marcel had always done.

“And, anyway, I don’t like mice,” she said. “It gives me the creeps having one in the nest. You and he are different species. It just isn’t right that the two of you should be living together, sleeping in the same room. There’s already talk, whispered insinuations.”

“What kind of talk?” Bandy asked, shocked at the suggestion.

“Figure it out, big boy!”

“I’ve never cared what others think. Marcel and I have always been very happy living together. We’re very compatible. If others don’t like it, that’s their problem.”

“Nevertheless, I think the little fellow has to go.”

“Where will he go? This is his home. It’s always been his home.”

“That isn’t my problem, is it? It doesn’t need to be your problem, either. Just tell him he has to go.”

Bandy refused to put Marcel out of his home. He would concede to Sally Cato on almost every point, but not on that one. Sally Cato was not to be deterred, however. She decided to have a talk with Marcel herself and tell him he just wasn’t wanted or needed anymore. Wouldn’t he rather be with his own kind? In a place where he was wanted? Without a word, Marcel produced the deed to the nest stating that he and Bandy were equal owners on into perpetuity. She would have grabbed the deed and torn it up if Marcel hadn’t been a little quicker than she was.

She seemed to have resigned herself, at last, to the reality that Marcel wasn’t leaving. It was going to be Bandy, her, and Marcel living in the nest forever. She toned down her carping, at least until after she and Bandy were married, and seemed to be making a genuine effort to get along with Marcel. She started calling him “dear” and smiling at him whenever she caught his eye. Nothing she did would ever make him like her, though.

One evening after supper, when it was just getting dark out, Sally Cato said she was having a terrible pain in her stomach. She didn’t know what was wrong, but it must have been something she ate. She went to bed and covered up and moaned as if she was dying. Bandy was concerned. Marcel was delighted.

She said she had had such attacks before and all she needed was a certain kind of medicine from the drug store. She wrote down the name and sent Marcel out to get it. He didn’t like going out at night all alone—there were many dangers in the forest—but he didn’t know how he could refuse. He put on his coat and hat and set out.

He had gone only a short distance when he heard a slight rustling sound. He looked up just in time to see an enormous owl dropping out of the tree toward him. He had just enough time before the owl landed on him to remove himself and run inside a fortunately placed hollow log. The owl lighted on the log and picked at it with its claws for a while but, realizing there was no way to extract the tantalizing fat mouse without a major expenditure of time and effort, flew away. Marcel waited a half-hour or so to make sure he wasn’t being tricked and then ran home as fast as he could.

He hoped to find Sally Cato dead, but she was much improved. She was sitting on Bandy’s lap giggling like a young girl. There was no sign that she had been terribly ill just a few minutes earlier. When Marcel opened the door and walked in, she nearly choked on her laughter and stood up, pulling her skirt down over her knees as if she had been caught in a naughty act.

“How much did you pay the owl?” Marcel asked quietly.

“What?”

“I said ‘how much did you pay the owl’?”

“Why, whatever do you mean?”

“You sent me out on a false errand and you arranged for an owl to get me. How much did you have to pay the owl?”

“Is this true?” Bandy asked.

“Of course, it isn’t true,” she said. “Why, the very idea!”

“One of us has got to go, bitch,” Marcel said, “and it’s not going to be me.”

“Bandy, are you going to let that little son of a bitch speak to me that way?” she said, hands on her hips.

The next morning at the breakfast table there was a strained silence. Sally Cato refused to look at Marcel or acknowledge his presence. Bandy’s brow was furrowed as if he was thinking or had a terrible headache. Marcel chewed his food with gusto and slurped his tea extra loud because he knew Sally Cato didn’t like it.

“Read me the headlines,” Bandy said to Marcel, handing him the newspaper.

Marcel took the paper, swallowed his toast, and was just about to commence reading when there was a loud knock on the door. Sally Cato, mistress of the manner, went to the door with a little sashay and opened it to reveal two squirrels in trench coats and fedoras. They flashed their badges at Sally Cato and introduced themselves as police detectives.

“What is this about?” she said with a huff of impatience. “Are you selling tickets or something?”

“Are you Miss Sally Cato?” one of the detectives asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to come along with us, ma’am. We’ve got a warrant for your arrest.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about,” the other detective said as he stepped forward and clapped the handcuffs on her.

She could be heard screaming and swearing all over the neighborhood as the police detectives took her away.

Bandy turned to Marcel at the table. “Are you behind this?” he asked.

“I swear I’m not,” Marcel said. “I don’t know any more than you do.”

“Well, good show anyway,” Bandy said.

Even though it was still only breakfast time, they got out the bottle of brandy and made a celebratory toast.

“Ding-dong, the witch is dead,” Marcel said.

“You’re terrible,” Bandy said, but he couldn’t keep from laughing and being glad.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

My Hundred Years


My Hundred Years ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

The Home for the Elderly was an old-fashioned four-story brick building, not unlike the building in which Billie St. John went to school. She had never been inside but had seen it many times, passing it in the car when she was riding with her mother. She stood on the sidewalk in front of the building, looking up at the windows on the top floor which were just then reflecting the afternoon sun. She took a deep breath and went inside.

Across the lobby from the front door was the reception desk. She went up to it and stood there politely. “Ahem,” she said when the woman sitting there didn’t look at her.

“Yes?” the woman said, barely looking at her. “If you’re selling something, we don’t allow it here.”

“I’m not selling anything,” Billie said. “I’m here to interview a centenarian for a human interest story for my school paper.”

“Name?”

“Billie St. John.”

“We don’t have anybody here by that name.”

“I thought you meant my name.”

“What is the name of the centenarian to whom you wish to speak?”

“I don’t have a name. Just anybody over one hundred years old will do.”

“We have three residents over a hundred. Mrs. Milligan is a hundred and three, Mrs. Oglethorpe is a hundred and one, and Mr. Wellington just turned one hundred.”

“Any of those will do.”

“Mrs. Milligan doesn’t speak, she only babbles. Mrs. Oglethorpe is so blind and deaf she wouldn’t even know you were there. That leaves Mr. Wellington.”

“He’ll do.”

“Go up one flight of stairs and take the hallway to your right and go all the way to the end. Mr. Wellington’s room is 210. You’ll see it.”

“What if he doesn’t want to see me?”

“Just tap lightly on the door. If he wants you to come in, he’ll say so. If he doesn’t invite you in, you’ll know he’s indisposed and you can try again another day.”

She found the room easily enough but suddenly she was afraid. One hundred was terribly old. She had never even seen a person that old before, let alone expect something from them. She wanted to turn around and leave and forget the whole thing, but it would cause her no end of trouble if she did. She would hate having to explain to everybody that she lost her nerve and wasn’t able to go through with it.

The door was partway opened. Through the crack she could see into the room, the corner of a bed and a picture on the wall. She knocked lightly, not wanting to wake up anybody who might be sleeping.

“Yes?” came a voice from behind the door, a voice from which she was able to read nothing.

She gathered her courage, pushed the door open and entered. She saw a withered old man sitting on a chair in front of the window. He was hardly bigger than a twelve-year-old.

“Are you Mr. Wellington?” she asked.

“Who are you?” he asked. “I didn’t send for anybody.”

“I’m Billie St. John. The lady downstairs said you might talk to me.”

“About what?”

“I’m writing a human interest piece for my school paper about a centenarian.”

“About a what?”

“About a person a hundred years old or more.”

“Who said I’m a hundred?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am, but that’s no reason for everybody in the world to know my private business.”

“Do you want me to go away?”

“No, no, no. If I want you to go away, I’ll say so.”

“Is it all right if I sit down.”

“Oh, by all means! Mi casa es su casa.”

She thought it too familiar somehow to sit on the bed, so she pulled out the chair to the writing desk and sat on it. She cleared her throat and fumbled with her pad and pencil, pulled her skirt down over her knees and looked levelly at Mr. Wellington.

To be so old, he had hardly any wrinkles at all. His skin, which was the color of old paper, was shiny and seemed pulled too tight over the bones of his face and head, as if made of rubber. His head was small and round and reminded Billie of a cat’s head.

“Now, let me see,” she said, looking at her notes. “To what do you attribute your long life?”

“Never getting shot in the head.”

“What has been your greatest satisfaction in life?”

“Outlasting my enemies.”

“Do you have any regrets?”

“Yes. Allowing you to ask me these inane questions.”

“What does it feel like to be a hundred years old?”

“Wait about eighty-five years and you’ll know.”

She looked at him and smiled, thinking that maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad. “But what if I wanted to know now?” she asked. “If you were going to tell me what it feels like to be a hundred, what would you say?”

“Think about a small boat on the ocean,” he said. “It goes the vast distance from point A to point B so slowly that you can’t even tell it’s moving. When it reaches point B, finally, that’s when you are where you are supposed to be. That’s when you’re home.”

She didn’t know what he was talking about it but she wrote it all down anyway.

“Now let me ask you a question,” he said.

“What?”

“What does it feel like to be you?”

When she realized she couldn’t answer, she squirmed and blushed. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Not so easy to answer, is it? Not so easy to put into words. You have a stomach ache or a headache. You can say you have those aches but you can’t really put them into words, can you?”

“Yes, I suppose it’s a silly question that doesn’t have an answer,” she said.

“Like so many other questions. Questions that don’t have answers.” His attention drifted to a spot on the floor and for a moment he seemed to forget she was there.

“Ahem,” she said. “Did you have brothers and sisters and do you remember much about your childhood?”

“I had three sisters and two brothers and they’re all dead now. I’m the only one left. I don’t know why.”

“Where did you live?”

“We lived on a farm until I was ten years old. My father gave up farming and we moved to town. He worked in a furniture factory. One of my brothers was killed in a car accident when he was eighteen and one of my sisters gassed herself at twenty-four. The man she wanted to marry was already married to somebody else. Am I going too fast for you?”

“No, just give me a minute to catch up. I never took shorthand.”

“After I finished high school I needed to learn a trade of some kind so I could make a living, so I went to mortuary school to become a mortician. Do you know what a mortician is?”

“An undertaker?”

“I didn’t especially want to be a mortician, but I couldn’t think of anything else. In nearly forty years as a mortician I saw the ugliest side of life. I saw wives killing husbands, husbands killing wives, children killed in every conceivable way including at the hands of their parents, men torn to shreds in factory and farming accidents, drowning victims, shooting victims, knifing victims, suicides by poison, suicides by hanging and just about every other way you can imagine. And in all that time I learned one thing: there has to be a God or all the terrible things that people go through are without meaning. I bet you won’t print that in the school paper, will you?”

“After you stopped being a mortician, what did you do then?”

“I don’t remember. I traveled some, read a lot of books, took a lot of naps.”

“How long have you lived here in the home?”

“Longer than I can remember. The squirrels and birds I watch out this window are several generations removed from the first ones I watched. One day soon they’re going to carry me out of here feet first and some other poor old man will take my place in this chair, but I don’t mind.”

“Do you get many visitors?”

“None. That’s the bad thing about living for a hundred years. Everybody you ever knew in your life is dead.”

“Don’t you have any family?”

“I’ve had four wives. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, would you? Not one of them left me or divorced me. They all died on me. I had two sons but they’re dead too. Even my grandchildren are dead. Now why does that happen? Why does everybody die and leave you behind?”

“That’s another one of those questions,” Billie said, stopping her writing and looking at him. “Would you like me to come and visit you sometime?”

He smiled, showing his jagged teeth. “I’m sure you have much better things to do with your time.”

“I could read to you from the newspaper.”

“That’s okay. Visitors are one thing I can do without. I have my squirrels and my birds and a hundred years of stuff going on in my head. And I haven’t forgotten a thing. It’s all right here.” He tapped the side of his head with his fingertip. “My life is nothing now but I don’t mind. I’m tired of the world and of people and I’m looking forward to what comes next. I know you don’t know what I’m talking about but you will someday if you live long enough.”

She closed her pad and stood up and put her coat back on. “Well, I believe that was all I wanted to ask you. I thank you for allowing me to talk to you.”

“Can you use any of that stuff?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I think it’s more than adequate.”

“Will I be able to read the piece that you write for your school paper?”

“Yes, I’ll come by one day and bring you a copy of the paper.”

“That’ll be fine.”

“It’s been awfully interesting talking to you,” she said. “I hope we may meet again.”

She left the room quickly, suddenly embarrassed, before the old man had a chance to say anything else.

As she was passing the receptionist’s desk to leave, the woman called to her.

“Did you get what you wanted from Mr. Wellington, dear?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I hope he didn’t give you a bad time.”

“No, it went fine.”

“They pretend to be annoyed, but they love talking about themselves. They don’t get much attention, you see.”

She went outside and paused on the top step of the Home for the Elderly. She would have something to tell her mother at dinnertime, and together they would write her piece for the school paper. She was certain they would come up with a story so good it would keep her from failing English class.

With the sun going down, the air seemed much colder than before. She pulled her scarf around her neck, put on her gloves, and headed for home in the gathering winter twilight. She didn’t know it, but Mr. Wellington was watching her from his window on the second floor.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

During the Storm


During the Storm ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

Aunt Glam didn’t have a television set, but she had other things almost as good: an enormous back yard wherein grew a cherry tree, poppies, peonies, roses, irises, bougainvillea, honeysuckle and other growing things that Dermott didn’t know the names of; a screened-in porch on the second floor at the back of the house (more about that later) where you could sit in private and watch the fireflies and listen to the crickets and the tree frogs in the evening and feel the breeze on your face that carried with it the smell of grass and damp earth; an attic snuggled up under the timbers of the roof containing a lifetime of books, clothes, cast-off furniture, trunks, boxes, barrels and objet d’art. (Aunt Glam didn’t believe in throwing anything away.)

Dermott was allowed to roam freely in the attic, to spend as much time as he wanted, as long as he promised not to break anything or light any matches. He loved the smells, the feeling of solitude, the interesting junk (three dress forms of different sizes that looked like headless women standing against the far wall). After supper he liked to go sit by himself among the orderly chaos until it was nearly dark and he felt compelled to go back downstairs because he could feel the dead people—remote ancestors—whose pictures adorned the walls looking at him. He was able to shrug off the haunted feeling during the day but after dark he preferred being somewhere else, although usually not in the same room with his mother.

She was doing a lot of crying these days. A week earlier, after telling him to pack a bag for an extended vacation, she dragged him along with her to the bus station in a taxi cab. They boarded a bus and spent four hours traveling to Aunt Glam’s house, just outside of St. Louis, Missouri. Dermott didn’t remember much of the bus ride because his mother had given him a double dose of Dramamine to keep him from being carsick and Dramamine always put him to sleep. Aunt Glam was there to meet them at the bus station in St. Louis, all smiles and good cheer.

The first two or three days at Aunt Glam’s were all right but after that he started to want to go home. He missed his room and his bed, his books and toys, but most of all he missed Gabby, his dog. He hoped that Gabby was all right without him and hadn’t wandered into the street where drivers drove too fast without paying any attention to the speed limit. He also hoped that his father was remembering to put food in Gabby’s bowl and give him fresh water so he wouldn’t get too thirsty in the hot weather.

While Dermott was occupying himself in another part of the house or in the yard, his mother and Aunt Glam spent endless hours at the kitchen table, talking, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Dermott’s mother poured out all her marital troubles to Aunt Glam, who seemed more than willing to listen and give advice where she could. If Dermott’s mother started out dry-eyed, she usually ended up bawling and sobbing, which Dermott found embarrassing and somehow beneath her dignity. Whenever he happened to walk into the kitchen during these conversations, his mother and Aunt Glam usually stopped talking or one of them changed the subject. If he asked his mother why she was crying, she would either say that it was her time of the month or she just had the blues a little bit but that it would soon pass.

He didn’t want to talk about going home in front of Aunt Glam, so he waited until he was alone with his mother; she came into his room after he had gone to bed but before he went to sleep. She was wearing a chiffon housecoat the color of a school bus.

“How long are we going to have to stay here?” he asked.

She sighed loudly and turned her head away. He could smell her cigarette breath.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I’m worried about Gabby. I’m afraid daddy isn’t watching out for him.”

“I’m sure Gabby’s all right.”

“Can I call daddy?”

“Not just yet. I don’t want him to know where we are. He might come here and make a scene.”

“I don’t have to tell him where I am.”

“I can’t afford for you to make any long-distance calls.”

“Aunt Glam won’t mind.”

“No unnecessary expenses right now.”

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

“That’s the way the world is, I’m afraid.”

“I want to go home.” He thought he was going to cry and he didn’t care if he did.

“I’ve applied for a couple of jobs downtown. If I get either one of them, we’ll get a small apartment and move here. We can’t stay with Aunt Glam forever.”

“Do you mean I’ll have to change schools?”

“Well, of course! You can’t live here and go to school somewhere else.”

“If I can’t go to school where I always have, then I’m not going at all!”

“You’ll like it here. There’s lots to do. Always something going on.”

He turned away from her and covered up his head, signaling an end to the conversation.

The next day he wouldn’t look at her and spoke to her only when he had no other choice. He was concocting a plot in his head where he would leave without telling anybody and hitchhike home. Taking the bus was out of the question because he didn’t have and couldn’t get the price of a ticket. He could picture Gabby waiting for him on the front steps. If he could just see Gabby, everything would be all right again.

Two days later nothing much had changed. Dermott was still moping about the house, spending a lot of time in the attic reading or doing little jobs for Aunt Glam such as emptying the ashtrays or scouring the sink. His mother was still crying and still undecided about how she was going to spend the rest of her life. She was drinking highballs and taking pills that sometimes made her slur her words. Dermott was seeing a side of her he had never seen before. For the first time in his life he was feeling a coldness toward her that a short time earlier he would not have believed possible.

One morning she got up early and put on high heels and a good dress that she wore for special occasions and left the house. She didn’t say where she was going but Dermott figured she was going to see about a secretarial job or a job in a department store.

When she came back seven hours later, she was carrying her shoes and she seemed unable to walk in a straight line. Her clothes looked as if she had been wearing them for a week. The glazed look in her eye was something Dermott had never seen before.

“Well, where have you been?” Aunt Glam asked. “We were getting worried.”

“I went to see a divorce lawyer,” she said as she began removing her clothes in the front room. “I put the wheels in motion.”

“What wheels?” Dermott asked.

“The wheels of justice, silly,” she said. “What do you think? All I have to do is give him a call and he’ll file the papers.”

Dermott didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Did the divorce lawyer serve drinks?” Aunt Glam asked.

Dermott’s mother laughed. “Oh, that!” she said. “I met an old friend and we had a couple of cocktails.” Without another word, she went upstairs to her room and slammed the door.

Aunt Glam grilled a huge steak and fried some potatoes for dinner, filling the house with wonderful smells, but Dermott’s mother wouldn’t come downstairs when the food was ready. When Aunt Glam went to check on her, she said she wasn’t hungry and only wanted to go to bed.

The next day Aunt Glam said they were all being too gloomy and spending too much time in the house. They needed to get out and get their minds on something other than their own problems. She pulled her ancient Cadillac out of the garage and took Dermott and his mother to the zoo to see the elephants and the lions. Afterwards they ate lunch in a Chinese restaurant with genuine Chinese food and waiters in silk lounging pajamas. Then it was off to a matinee to see a movie about a woman whose husband was driving her crazy so he could get her money and marry her sister.

After Dermott and his mother had been at Aunt Glam’s for two weeks, the weather turned stiflingly hot, with the nights just as hot as the days. Aunt Glam made up the daybed on the sleeping porch for Dermott to sleep in. At first he didn’t like the idea but he said he would give it a try. He could always come back inside anytime he wanted to.

He found that he loved sleeping on the porch. It was almost like camping out but with none of the discomforts. He felt up high, almost like being in a tree house, and as safe as if he had been in the house. He didn’t need to feel afraid of any hobos or anybody sneaking up on him around the side of the house in the dark.

In his second night on the porch, a thunderstorm woke him up. The wind blew furiously and the rain pelted down. He got out of bed and stood at the screen, feeling the tiny droplets of water on his face and arms. As a flash of lightning like a million flashbulbs illuminated the tree next to the house, he jumped back and started to run inside, but then he thought he saw something, there beside the tree, that caused him to stop and take a closer look.

Someone was standing about halfway between the house and the tree, looking up at him. His first thought was to go wake his mother and Aunt Glam and tell them there was a prowler in the yard who might be going to try to break in. He wasn’t really sure there was anybody there, though, until another flash of lightning revealed, unmistakably, the dark form of a man. He was going to duck out of sight and run into the house, until a flashlight was shone in his direction and he heard someone speak his name in a soft, though insistent, voice. He cupped his hands around his eyes against the screen.

“Who’s out there?” he said in a steady voice, knowing he had the advantage of being up high where he could get away quickly if he needed to. “Is anybody there?”

“It’s me,” his father said. “Get dressed and come down to the corner where the mailbox is. I’ll be waiting for you in the car.”

He went back inside quietly and slipped into his clothes and shoes without turning on the light. He was glad his father had come. He wasn’t able to remember a time when he had ever been glad to see him before. At last, he could find out about Gabby and home. He felt a tremendous sense of relief.

He ran the half-block to the corner where his father’s car was parked. The rain was still pelting down, but he didn’t care how wet he got. He was going home.

As he opened the door and slid onto the front seat, his father threw his cigarette out the window and straightened up in the seat. The radio was playing softly.

“Seems like you’ve been gone a year,” his father said, patting him on the leg. “How are you?”

“How did you know I’d be sleeping on the porch tonight?” Dermott asked.

“I didn’t. I was just walking around the house to see if there were any lights on when I saw you at the screen.”

“If Aunt Glam had seen you, she would have called the police.”

“I know.” He started the car, turned on the headlights, and drove slowly down the deserted street. “Did you know it’s two in the morning?” he said. “I’ve been driving all night to get here.”

“Is Gabby okay?”

“He’s not quite himself lately because he misses you so much.”

“He’s not sick, is he?”

“No.”

“Are we going home now?”

“Yes.”

“I wanted to call you but mother wouldn’t let me.”

“How is your mother?”

“She’s been acting weird lately.”

“You got out of the house without her knowing it?”

“She’s asleep. So is Aunt Glam. They won’t know I’m gone until they wake up in the morning.”

“Hah-hah! Will they think you ran away and joined the Foreign Legion?”

“I don’t know what they’ll think.”

“What was that woman thinking? Taking a child away from his home and away from everything he knows without so much as a by-your-leave? She could at least have had the decency to tell me she was leaving.”

“She’s going to get a divorce and she says we’re going to move here. She says I’ll have to go to school here.”

“She could do whatever she wanted if I was dead, but I’m not dead. She still has to answer to me, especially when it comes to you. I’m your father. If I say you stay in your home, then that’s where you stay.”

“And I can keep going to the same school?”

“Of course.”

“Can I call her when we get home and tell her where I am?”

“Why don’t you lay down on the seat and try to go to sleep? We’ll be home before you know it.”

When they pulled into the driveway at home, it was a new morning; the rain had stopped and the birds were singing. Dermott was so happy to be at home that he wasn’t thinking about what his mother and Aunt Glam would think when they woke up and found him gone. After he greeted Gabby and found that he was all right and had indeed been well cared for in his absence, he got into bed with his clothes on and slept until about noon. When he woke up and, after a breakfast of scrambled eggs, a fried baloney sandwich and a can of fruit cocktail, he went to the phone without asking for permission to make a long-distance call and called Aunt Glam’s house. Even after twenty-five or thirty rings, there was no answer. He imagined that they were out looking for him, but still he wasn’t very worried; he would clear everything up later.

In late afternoon he was in the back yard, playing fetch-the-stick with Gabby, when he looked up and saw his father come out the back door. He knew from the way he was standing still, looking at him, that something was wrong. He let Gabby have the stick and crossed the yard toward his father to hear the bad news that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to avoid.

Tranquilizers taken with a certain amount of alcohol can prove fatal for some people. For weeks his mother had been taking an increasing number of pills, washed down with generous gulps from a bottle of whiskey that she kept hidden under the bed. The storm must have woke her up and she took more pills on top of the pills she had already taken to try to calm her nerves and make herself go back to sleep. When Aunt Glam found her in the morning, it was already too late. The doctor declared it an accidental suicide.

After the funeral Aunt Glam told Dermott he could come and live with her if he wanted to. She was kind of lonely in that big old house and she had gotten used to having him around. He thanked her and told her he would come and visit her sometime but that he had no plans to ever leave his home and his dog again.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp 

by allen0997

On the Face of It


On the Face of It ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

In the morning when Blanche Mims stepped outside to sweep away the autumn leaves that had gathered around her front door, there was a very small man dressed in black formal attire, a midget, standing in the yard looking at her. She stopped sweeping, adjusted her glasses, and snorted through her nose.

“Looking for somebody?” she asked.

“I’ve found her,” he said.

So, he was one of those! He had heard about her in town and wanted to see for himself. She went back inside as fast as she could, slamming the door. She peeked out at him as he got back into a long gray car and drove away. Oh, but he had an evil grin!

She was not like other women, so she had good reason for caution. She had what was, by any measure, a monstrous deformity: her face was not in front of her head but on top. Her nose was exactly at the top of her head, her mouth tucked in underneath her nose. Since her eyes were always pointed skyward, she had to wear a special kind of glasses made with tilted mirrors so she could walk upright and see in front of her. On the sides of her head, all the way around (covering her ears), was thick hair, the color and texture of a lion’s mane. For several years she had been a headliner in a traveling freak show and was, for a time, billed as The Lion Woman. (To her credit, she was, except for the misplacement of her face, exactly the same as anybody else.)

She continued to see the midget every day for nearly two weeks. He either drove by slowly or stopped the car and got out and stood looking at the house for a while before driving on.

“There’s been a strange man hanging around outside for several days now,” she said casually to her mother, Olga Mims, one evening when they were getting ready for bed. “A tiny man.”

Olga laughed. “I’ve seen the little bastard,” she said. “That’s a hearse he’s driving. He’s an undertaker.”

“What’s he looking for?”

“Maybe he’s trying to drum up some business.”

“In Scraptown? Nobody comes to Scraptown if they don’t have to.”

“Why don’t you ask him the next time you see him?” Olga said as she removed her wig and put it on the head of the mannequin that she kept by her bed to keep her company at night.

All day long the next day Blanche kept an eye out for the little man, but she didn’t see him. The day after, though, he parked his hearse under the trees across the road and got out and stood in the front yard and looked up at the house. He was wearing a top hat and a cape as if he thought he was Spencer Tracy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and was smoking a cigarette in a long holder. She decided it was time to confront the little son of a bitch. She ran her fingers through her mane-like hair to smooth it down and went out the door.

“May I help you?” she asked in a too-loud voice.

He took off his hat, took the cigarette holder out of his mouth, made a sweeping gesture with his arm and bowed. “I am so pleased to finally make your acquaintance,” he said. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Ferris Peabody, mortician. At your service.”

“What makes you think I need a mortician?” she asked.

“I don’t,” he said. “This is purely a personal call, rather than a professional one.”

“All right,” she said. “I think you’d better state your business and be quick about it, or I’m going to call the sheriff and have you removed from my property.” She bent over from the waist so she was really facing him, rather than looking at him through the mirror glasses.

“You have a lovely face,” he said. “It’s too bad the world doesn’t see more of it.”

“What’s the gag? Do you have a hidden camera somewhere?”

“Nothing of the kind, I assure you.” He bowed again as though addressing a queen.

“If this is some kind of trick, I don’t think it’s the least bit funny and I want you to know that I keep a loaded gun in the house.”

“No gag and no trick,” he said.

Hearing their voices, Olga came out of the house. She was wearing a seventy-year-old sailor suit that was too big for her, complete with hat. She smiled at the little man and saluted like a real sailor.

“How-do, ma’am,” he said. “Ferris Peabody at your service.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Olga said.

“You are, I take it, the young lady’s mother?”

“I was the last time I looked.”

“You have a sense of humor, ma’am, I can see. I like that and I think it’s so important in this cruel world we live in.”

Already Olga was fascinated by the little man and found him inexpressibly piquant.

“You still haven’t told me what your business is,” Blanche said.

“I come to pay a social call.”

“Why would you do that? I don’t even know you.”

“So that we may come to know each other.”

“If you’re selling funeral plans, we’re not interested.”

“I’m not, I swear.”

“Well, come on inside,” Olga said. “We don’t have to stand out here like a bunch of statues.”

Blanche opened her mouth to object but she saw no reason to be overly rude and, besides, she was curious enough to want to know what the little mortician was going to say.

They went into the parlor and sat down, Blanche and Olga on the old horsehair sofa and he on the overstuffed easy chair facing the sofa. Since he was about the size of a three-year-old child, he had some difficulty getting on the chair but, once he was settled, he smiled broadly, pleased to have been asked inside.

“I have some beer on ice, if you’d like one,” Olga said.

“I’d love one,” he said.

Blanche sat upright on the sofa so that when he looked at her all he could see was the lion’s mane. She was deliberately being cold to him, which he could read in her posture.

“You’re probably wondering how I drive the hearse,” he said to Blanche with an ingratiating smile, “being deprived of height the way I am.”

“I haven’t given it a single thought.”

Olga came back from the kitchen. She had poured the beer into a glass, which she only did for special guests. She handed it to him and watched carefully as he took a sip of the beer.

“Ah, so refreshing!” he said.

She smiled, ever the gracious hostess, and sat back down.

“Now, to get on with my story,” he said.

“I didn’t know you were telling one,” Blanche said.

“I became acquainted with your cousin, Philandra Burgoyne, about a year ago when she came to me for her after-death needs.”

“Oh, yes,” Olga said. “How is dear Philandra?”

“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s dead.”

“Isn’t that odd? I hadn’t heard that she had passed over.”

“She was very large at the end of her life. There was no coffin available that would accommodate, so we had to bury her in a piano crate.”

“I would have gone to the funeral, had I only known.” Olga said.

“The funeral was quite spectacular, if I do say so myself, but that’s not what I came to tell you. To get right to the point, I had many deeply heartfelt conversations with Philandra in the last few months of her life. I was her spiritual advisor, in a way, as there was no one else to fill that position.”

“You must have been a great comfort to her,” Olga said.

When Blanche sighed with boredom, he turned and faced her. He had no way of knowing if she was even listening to him. It was rather like talking to a mop. “When Philandra told me about you, I knew I had to come and pay you a visit, get to know you any way I could.”

“How flattering,” Blanche said. “I still don’t understand where you’re going with this.”

“I have a successful business,” he said. “I began The Ferris Peabody Mortuary and Funeral Parlor from the ground up. I have a very select clientele. People like us.”

“People like what?”

“Unique people. People like you and me and your cousin Philandra. People that the world thinks of as freaks.”

“Oh, well, thank you very much for calling me a freak!”

“To the world that’s what we are because the world only sees what’s on the outside and never considers what’s on the inside.”

“Ho-hum,” Blanche said, covering her mouth to yawn.

“I’ve taken care of the after-death needs of Hortense the Hippopotamus Girl, Isador the Invisible Irishman, Allesandro the Monkey Boy, Lulu the Flipper Baby, and Otto Osgood the Only Human on Earth with an Exoskeleton, to name but a few.”

“Otto and I used to be sweethearts,” Olga said. “He was very proud of his physical endowments.”

“I don’t believe you ever knew him,” Blanche said.

“Well, maybe not.”

“The point I’m trying to make,” he said, “is that my business is successful and getting more so. I have everything I need, except for one thing, and that’s where you come in.”

“You want me to die,” Blanche said, “and let you take care of my after-death needs so you can drop my name whenever and wherever it’s convenient, the way you drop the names of those other freaks? You little name-dropper, you!”

“I want someone to share my success with.”

“Get a dog.”

“The clock is ticking away. I’m no longer young and neither are you.”

”Speak for yourself!”

“You would complement my business in a way that nobody else could. My clients would feel comfortable with you. The women folk like it better if a woman is seeing to the arrangements. You know, what shroud goes with the casket lining and all that. What panties to wear. What shoes.”

“Are you offering me a job?”

“More than that. I’m offering to marry you.”

“Phht! And wouldn’t we make a fine pair! A woman whose face is in the wrong place and a man who doesn’t even measure up to the yard stick! We could put on a show for Halloween, but I don’t know what we’d do the rest of the year.”

“You’ve been hurt by life and so have I,” he said.

“Me too,” Olga said. “I’ve been hurt by life a lot.”

“In my world you wouldn’t be an outcast. You wouldn’t have to hide yourself away in a little house built into the side of a hill because you wouldn’t be any more freakish than anybody else.”

“Oh, and where is this world, anyway, where everybody’s a freak but doesn’t know it?”

“It’s closer than you think.”

“It sounds delightful, your world, but there’s just one problem.”

“What?”

“How can I believe you? How do I know you’re not just some evil dwarf come to carry my soul to hell?”

He laughed heartily. “I assure you I’m not,” he said.

“I think you should listen to what he’s saying,” Olga said.

“I want to show you something,” he said. “Maybe it will help to convince you.”

He took her by the hand and led her to a mirror on the wall. After he had positioned a chair behind her to stand on so they were of more or less equal height, he placed his hands on both sides of her head and said, “Watch closely.”

She adjusted her mirror glasses and sighed. All she saw was her lion mane of hair, which is what she expected to see, but after a few seconds she saw something different. Her face was somehow projected on the front of her head so that she looked like a normal person whose face was where it should be and not a freak.

“How do you do that?” she said.

“Never mind how I do it. Just know that I can.”

The image in the mirror faded and she turned around and looked at him as he got down off the chair. “That’s just a trick,” she said. “I’ve had enough tricks in my life.”

“I think there’s something to that,” Olga said.

“Come with me now,” he said.

“I can’t marry you without knowing anything about you.”

“We can put off marrying for as long as you like.”

“And you won’t touch me?”

“You’ll have your own private boudoir with the strongest lock you ever saw on the door.”

“And I can come back home if I so choose.”

“It’s not a prison.”

“Can she come too?” Blanche asked, tilting her head toward Olga.

“I can’t leave now,” Olga said. “Poor Butterfly is about to have her babies.”

“She loves her cats more than anything,” Blanche said.

“We can come back and get her and her cats, too, just as soon as she’s ready,” he said.

“That will give me time to get my wig washed and styled and get my nails done,” Olga said. “What should I wear?”

“You can wear whatever you want,” he said.

“Can I come as a clown? I’ve always loved clowns.”

“You can come as a clown, a sailor, a chicken, or anything you want.”

“I have the cutest clown getup you ever saw!”

“Do I need to pack a bag?” Blanche asked.

“No,” he said. “You’ll have everything you need when we get to where we’re going.”

“What are we waiting for, then?”

Suddenly Blanche Mims seemed in a hurry to leave her little house built into the side of a hill in the section of town known as Scraptown. She gave Olga a little squeeze about the shoulders and followed the tiny mortician outside to his long gray hearse waiting for them under the trees.

Olga stood and watched as they drove away, waving and blowing kisses. She saw the hearse as it disappeared from view down the hill in the lane. Unlike other cars, though, it never reappeared at the top of the next hill.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Miss Wessel


Miss Wessel ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

Rain had threatened all day but no rain came. Ragged horizontal clouds took on strange shapes in the sky and then merged with other shapes and moved on. The sun showed its face every now and then but mostly kept hidden. A gentle breeze blew into the third-floor classroom like a sigh, ruffling some papers, barely noticed.

It was Friday, the last day of October, Halloween. The children were restless. They wanted to be released from their bondage so they could don their ghost, devil, or cowboy costumes and go out into the world and make mischief and collect enough candy to last them through the winter that was coming.

Their teacher, Miss Wessel, also longed to be released. It was her day. She had been teaching ten-year-olds for decades. She was leaving for good, once and for all, at the end of the day. The time had come for her to fly off and live the rest of her life the way she wanted to live it. The children didn’t know they’d have a new teacher come Monday morning. That was the way Miss Wessel wanted it. Say good-bye to no one.

There was no need on this day to do any work, to put on a good face. She had designated this, her last afternoon, as a time for silent meditation. This meant reading, thinking, looking out the window, or whatever one wanted to do, as long as one did it quietly. If one wanted to sit and doze at one’s desk, so much the better.

All was quiet, but there seemed to be an unwritten rule that says a roomful of ten-year-olds cannot be perfectly still for more than a few minutes at a time, no matter what. An unusually large number asked to be excused to go to the restroom. Miss Wessel was inclined to tell them to hold on to it, but in every case she let them go because she simply didn’t care. If they didn’t come back right away she didn’t get up to go see what was keeping them. If they were wandering around the halls doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing, some other teacher would see them and send them back; if they never came back, that was all right, too.

A boy named Terry Hughie got up to sharpen his pencil and fell on his backside like the clown he was, causing everybody to laugh uproariously, which was exactly the response he was hoping for. A little while later, two boys were scuffling in the back of the room, apparently trying to strangle each other. When Miss Wessel threw a blackboard eraser at them, somehow managing to hit them both, they immediately desisted and sat back down in their seats.

With order restored, Miss Wessel slumped down at her desk and was just about to go to sleep when she heard footsteps approaching and someone standing beside her, breathing audibly. Opening her eyes, she saw Francine Quince standing inches away, looking at her with her strange dark eyes.

“Yes, Francine,” she said. “What is it? Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“I need to talk to you,” Francine said.

“What’s stopping you?”

“In private.”

“Can’t it wait until Monday?”

“No.”

With a sigh Miss Wessel stood and motioned for Francine to follow her into the cloakroom. She turned and faced Francine beside the fire extinguisher, clasping her hands in front of her to resist the urge to slap her. Of all the students in her class, she liked her the least.

“Did one of the boys draw an unflattering picture of you again?” she asked.

“Yes,” Francine said, “but that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Standing close to Francine, Miss Wessel realized—and not for the first time, either—what an odd child she was. She was taller than the other children and seemed older in some unidentifiable way; more worldly, somehow, than her years would have allowed her to become. She had a very long neck and pale skin and, in spite of the pinched-up features of her face, enormous dark eyes that were like pinpoints zeroing in on all she saw.

“I’m listening,” Miss Wessel said, when Francine seemed to hesitate.

“I don’t know quite how to say this,” Francine said.

“Did you have a naughty accident? Do you need to go home?”

“No, nothing like that. I just wanted to tell you that I know what you are and I know what you’re going to do at the end of the day today.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Miss Wessel said, mustering as much indignation as she could on such short notice.

“I want you to take me with you.”

“Now why would I take you anywhere?”

“Because I’m one of your kind.”

“And what kind is that?”

Francine laughed her grown-up laugh. “I’ve seen,” she said. “I know.”

“Francine,” Miss Wessel said sternly, not caring if the other children heard, “I don’t have the time or the inclination for this kind of nonsense! Please return to your seat and don’t talk of this again!”

“Everybody who knows me would be glad if I went away and never came back. They’d look for me, of course, because that’s what they’re supposed to do, but after a while when they didn’t find any trace of me they’d figure I ran away or was abducted by aliens or something.”

“Would you like to spend the rest of the day in the principal’s office?” Miss Wessel asked, not knowing what else to say.

“No.”

“Then return to your seat.”

“All right. I will. But I still want you to take me with you.”

The afternoon continued to its inevitable conclusion without further incident. When the bell rang to go home, Miss Wessel stood at the classroom door and handed everybody a paper bag of candy as they left. She made a point of looking them all in the face and calling them by name, as she would never see any of them again, and wishing them all a happy Halloween.

When everybody had left and there was one bag of candy left, Miss Wessel realized that Francine Quince was still in the room with her, sitting quietly at her desk. She had forgotten for the moment about Francine. She held the bag of candy above her head and smiled.

“There’s one bag left, Francine,” she said, “and it’s got your name on it. Happy Halloween!”

“I don’t want it,” Francine said.

“Then take it and give it to your little brother.”

“He doesn’t want it either.”

“Go home, Francine! School is over for the day and it’s time for all of us to leave. Your mother will be expecting you.”

“My mother’s a drunk and a whore who doesn’t even know what day it is.”

“Suit yourself. If you’re still here when the janitor comes in to straighten up, he’ll make you leave.”

“I’m going with you.”

“Francine, do you think I want to be responsible for the disappearance of a young girl? I think that’s a fairly serious charge.”

“It shouldn’t matter to a witch.”

“Witch or not, I have some scruples.”

“I’ll bet you’ve cast many spells on people and turned lots of men into toads!”

“It isn’t like that!”

“Then take me with you so I may know what it’s really like. You can make me your protégé.”

“Francine, I don’t even like you. Why would I want you with me all the time?”

“If you don’t take me with you, I’ll go to the police and tell them everything I know about you.”

“Why should that make any difference? I’ll be so far away they’ll never find me and they wouldn’t even know where to look.”

“Then take me with you.”

“I’m leaving now, Francine, and you’re leaving, too, but not with me.”

“I’ll kill myself if you don’t take me.”

“Do you know what it’s like to fly a broom? It takes skill and coordination, not to mention balance.”

“I can learn. You can teach me.”

“Good-bye, Francine. You have my sincere good wishes.”

Miss Wessel went out of the room, turning off the lights and closing the door. She knew that Francine was still inside, but she didn’t care; she was finished with her. When she walked down the hall to the seldom-used door to the attic, she knew that Francine was right behind her.

“You’re not supposed to be in the building after school hours, Francine,” she said.

She went up the dark, narrow steps to the attic, brushing away cobwebs. Francine was right behind her like a shadow. At the top of the steps, the fluttering of bat wings caused Francine to let out a little scream.

“If a few little bats scare you,” Miss Wessel said, “you’re not really a witch.”

“I just wasn’t expecting them,” Francine said.

“If you’re going to be a witch, you’ll learn to expect anything.”

Miss Wessel changed into a long, flowing black dress. After she had fastened all the buttons and smoothed the dress over her bony hips, she put on a black pointed hat with a wide brim. Her face, at that moment, took on a different look. Her nose and chin became more pointed, more prominent; her skin, always the color of ivory, took on a greenish tint. The wart on her chin that was barely visible before became enormous, complete with a tuft of bristling hair.

With her preparations complete, Miss Wessel pointed a long index finger at Francine and laughed a cackling laugh. “Are you quite sure you want to do this, my dear?” she asked.

Francine, in spite of herself, drew back. “Yes, I’m sure,” she said.

“Then follow me.”

She picked up her broom and climbed the ladder that was built into the attic wall and pushed open the trap door that led to the roof. After they had both gone through the trap door and were standing on the roof, Miss Wessel let the door slam back into place. Then, with Francine watching her closely, she straddled the broom with her legs.

“Get on,” she said, “and hold on. I would advise you not to look down until you get used to flying.”

Francine got onto the broom behind Miss Wessel and wrapped her arms around Miss Wessel’s waist.

“Are you ready?” Miss Wessel asked.

“Yes,” Francine said.

“Do you want me to put a curse on your mother before we go?”

“No. Her life is already cursed enough.”

“Very well, then. We’re off!”

The broom lifted, carrying its two passengers. Miss Wessel flew in a broad sweep over the school and the town so they could take one last look at the place that had been their home for so many years. Then, with the full moon as a backdrop, they flew away to points unknown, never to be seen or heard from again.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

In a Cemetery on Halloween Night

In a Cemetery on Halloween Night ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

When we were younger, the three of us were fascinated by the subject of death. We had lengthy discussions about the possibility of a continued existence after life has ended. We all wanted to believe in such an existence. Since Halloween is the one day in the year that the veil between the living and the dead is supposed to be at its most transparent, we decided to put all talk aside and conduct a little experiment.

There were no fewer than eighteen cemeteries in our county, some of them tucked away in forgotten corners. Each of the three of us would select a cemetery to spend the night in—the night of October thirty-first. We believed it was important for each of us to be alone, as spirits were more likely to make themselves known to an individual rather than to a pair or a group. We would meet the next evening and discuss our experiences. We hoped that at least one of us would have the proof we longed for.

I chose the Cemetery of the Holy Ghost because I remembered my grandmother telling me when I was a child that some of her family were buried there, and I also had a vague recollection of being there a time or two with my grandparents when I was in grade school.

It was a once-fine cemetery that had fallen out of vogue about a hundred years ago. It contained many interesting mausoleums, above-ground crypts, stones and monuments. Some of the illustrious (but now forgotten) inhabitants of the cemetery included governors of the state and their “consorts,” a United States senator or two, a celebrated writer (all of his books out of print for fifty years), several war heroes, an actress who appeared on the stage in both New York and London, and a notorious multiple murderer. In checking the records, I discovered that the cemetery had not received a newly deceased person in almost fifty years.

In the early evening of October thirty-first, I drove my car out into the country. I made sure I knew the way before I started and found the cemetery without any trouble. I parked the car in a low spot where it couldn’t be seen from the road (if anybody happened to be passing by, which was unlikely), and went in. There was an iron fence all the way around the cemetery that had fallen down in places. Nobody who wanted in was going to be kept out. I walked around for a while, taking in the sights as much as I could before it was too dark to see.

I found a good place under a big maple tree to sit down where the ground was covered with fragrant, dry leaves. The spot had the advantage of making me feel safe from anything or anybody that might approach me in the dark, so I planned on staying there most of the night until daylight when I would get back into my car and go home again. I took the things out of my backpack that I had brought—a flashlight, some drinking water and snacks, a lightweight blanket, a paperback book in case I became bored with the whole scene—and as I made myself comfortable on the ground under the tree, I realized just how peaceful and lonely an abandoned country cemetery is on a beautiful autumn evening.

I sat with my back against the tree as night came on. I wasn’t especially afraid of the dark but I had to admit that every sound I heard made my heart beat a little faster. Was the snap of a twig or the crunch of leaves someone—or something—coming toward me? What if I really did have an encounter with a spirit of some kind? Would my nerve fail me? Whatever happened, I promised myself that I would leave and go home if the situation became too unpleasant.

Once when I heard a sudden rustling sound right above my head, I jumped up with a little yell, ready to defend myself. When I realized that it had only been an owl—in fact, a pair of owls—I felt a little foolish and was glad nobody was there to see how skittish I was.

I sat underneath the tree for what seemed several hours. I had to get up several times to get the circulation going in my legs and to keep warm. The balmy evening had turned into a chilly night. I was a little disappointed—but not altogether surprised—to see that a country cemetery on Halloween night is the same as on any other night. The dead are sleeping peacefully and there is nothing to be seen or felt. The only thing I was sure of was that it was without a doubt the loneliest place I had ever spent a night in.

When I looked at my watch and saw it was only a few minutes before midnight, I longed to go home and go to bed, but I didn’t. I just didn’t want the night to end that way, with my leaving long before I was supposed to because I wasn’t having any fun. Instead I wrapped myself in my blanket like a cocoon and laid down on the bed of leaves with my head a couple feet from the tree. If I could spend a few hours sleeping, it would be dawn when I woke up and I could go home and have a good breakfast and sleep until noon.

I was more tired than I thought and lying on the ground was more comfortable than I expected it to be. In a very short time I was lost in sleep.

I woke up long before dawn to what sounded like the strings being plucked on a musical instrument. I gasped, believing for a moment I was choking, and sat up.

“That’s Edith playing her ukulele,” a male voice said.

Since it was too dark for me to see anything, I reached for the flashlight but wasn’t able to find it. “Who’s there?” I asked.

“I’m right here,” the voice said.

I squinted into the darkness but couldn’t see anything. Then, as my eyes seemed to adjust a little bit, I could see what seemed to be the blurry outline of a person. After a few seconds I could see the features of a face—nose, eyes, a mouth—but they were very faint. I seemed to be looking at a person who was there and not there at the same time. Lit from within, he seemed to be, as when you put a small lighted candle inside a large paper sack.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I belong here,” he said. “You don’t.”

“Who’s Edith?”

“She’s my daughter. Ukulele player extraordinaire.”

As soon as her name was mentioned, a small girl “lit up” beside the man. Apparently they were able to turn the light on and off at will.

“Is there anybody else here?” I asked stupidly, running my hand across my eyes.

“My son Tom is here and several others who are just now hearing about you.”

A boy of about fifteen made himself known to me the way Edith had done. Then several others behind him did the same thing. As I looked out at them over the man’s shoulder, I saw that they were not quite touching the ground but “floating” above it.

“What are you doing here?” the man asked. I could hear the amusement in his voice.

“Do you know what day it is?” I asked.

“Time doesn’t mean anything here,” he said.

“Well, it’s Halloween,” I said.

“Oh, that,” he said, as if disappointed.

“So you understand the significance of the holiday?”

“Yes. And you are one of those who believe that Halloween is the one day in the year you will be able to see for yourself that we exist.”

“It sounds rather silly when you put it that way.”

“Are there others here also?”

“No. I’m by myself.”

“Are you some kind of medium between the world of the living and the world of those who have passed over?”

“No! Oh, no!”

“Then why are you seeing us right now?”

“This isn’t really happening. It’s just a dream. I’m afraid I’ve fallen under the spell, the romance, of being in an old country cemetery on Halloween.”

There was a murmur among the spirits behind the man. He listened to them for a moment and then turned back to me.

“They’re saying we can’t let you go like this,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“They think, and I agree, that you’ll go back and spread the word that you’ve seen proof of life after death and then this place will never be the same. There’ll be people coming out here in droves—curiosity seekers like yourself and newspaper men and the like. I haven’t been dead so long that I don’t remember what people are like!”

“I won’t tell a soul.”

“No, indeed, you will not!”

I couldn’t help noticing that the spirits had increased in number. Before there were just a few but now there were dozens and behind them dozens and maybe hundreds more. I began to feel a little afraid at what they were going to do to me.

“Why are there so many of you here?” I asked.

“They all want to get a look at you,” he said.

“That’s not what I mean. Why haven’t you moved on in the spirit world? Do you have to stay here because this is where your bodies are interred?”

I heard faint laughter but couldn’t see who was doing the laughing.

“Of course not,” he said. “We’re everywhere. We can go wherever we want. There are no restrictions. That’s what being a spirit is. Some choose to stay here because their loved ones are here; others don’t want to leave because they’ve been here so long they don’t remember any other place.”

“You don’t like living people like me coming around bothering you, do you?”

“Most spirits choose to remain solitary or with other spirits. We would prefer that you left us alone. Nothing good comes out of it for us when you try to prove that we exist.”

“So, are you going to scare me to death so I won’t go back and tell people that I’ve seen you?”

“No, I have to tell you that a spirit can’t kill a living person unless it’s by suggestion. I’ve also heard of spirits causing heavy objects to fall on living people, but that doesn’t happen very often.”

“Well, I think I’ll get into my car now and drive home, then, if it’s all the same to you. And I promise you I’ll forget I was ever here.”

“You’ll go back to sleep. You’ve never really woken up. At dawn you’ll wake up and leave this place. You’ll forget any of this ever happened. You’ll have nothing to report to your friends.”

“I won’t remember any of this,” I said, “because it’s a dream and I never remember dreams after I wake up.”

Just as the sun was coming up I awoke to the enthusiastic singing of birds. As I stood up from my bed of leaves and folded my blanket, I was relieved that morning had arrived, I had survived the night intact and it was time to go home. I had done what I said I would do, which was spend Halloween night alone in a country cemetery. I wondered if my friends had fared as well as I had.

I walked to my car, started the engine, and turned on the heater. By the time I got out to the highway, morning was well on its way and the sky a brilliant autumnal blue.

I didn’t see the deer that came rushing out of the brush toward me like the angel of death. All I saw of it was its back legs as it sailed over the hood of my car. I suppose I had been thinking too much about bacon and pancakes and wasn’t paying as much attention to my driving as I should have. I swerved the car sharply to avoid colliding with the deer. Since I was going about sixty miles an hour, I lost control and ran the car off into a deep culvert that, lucky for me, had no water in it. I hit my head and was knocked out cold.

Somebody passing by on the highway saw my car in the ditch and called for help. An ambulance came and took me, still unconscious, to the hospital. The police had my car towed into town.

While I was still unconscious, I could hear a song being played on the ukulele. I didn’t know what the song was, but it was the same song over and over. A ukulele is not an instrument I’m used to hearing or would expect to hear. It forced me to recall in vivid detail the dream I was supposed to forget. When I regained consciousness, I asked for a pencil and some paper. I knew I had to write it down while I remembered it or risk losing it forever.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Andrew Magenti

Andrew Magenti ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

(Published in Necrology Shorts Magazine)

For as long as I live I won’t forget the night the young master was born. It was during a night of the worst thunderstorms I ever witnessed in all my life. All the fury of the heavens was unleashed upon us. The rain, thunder, lightning and wind tore at the old house on the outside, and the mistress’s screams tore at the inside. I don’t know which was more terrifying.

The mistress had the midwife with her and two women from the town. All night long the women toiled over the mistress and silently wept to witness her agony.  Around three o’clock in the morning, at the height of the storm, the mistress was delivered of the child. Those of us who had heard her screams through the long night and seen the bundles of bloody rags being brought from her room were at a loss to explain how the mistress could still be alive. Toward dawn, while the storm was still raging, the women placed the tiny bundle in the mistress’s arms and withdrew without a word.

When the master was sure his wife was safely delivered of the child and the women had left, he went into his wife’s room. Thinking her asleep, he crept to the bed without making a sound and pulled back the coverlet. The room was dark—a sudden flash of lightning afforded him his first look at the newborn child. He recoiled as with an electric shock and bellowed like a wounded animal at what he saw. He ran downstairs and out of the house and was insensible and unable to speak for several hours.

Grotesque as the child was, we all thought it would die right away but, in spite of all our predictions to the contrary, it lived and began to grow.  The mistress nursed it as she would a normal child. When it was three or four weeks old, it began to grow a coat of lustrous brown fur all over its body. Those of us who had seen the child every day from the beginning were less horrified at its appearance than we had been at the first, and all agreed that it was better looking with the fur than without. The mistress named it Andrew after a beloved departed uncle and told all of us firmly that, when referring to the child, we would use the personal pronouns he and him, rather than it. We all liked the name Andrew and it seemed to go well with the last name, which was Magenti.

When the mistress looked at Andrew, she didn’t see the monster that other people saw. He was fine just as he was—her darling boy. She had him moved into her room from the nursery so she could be with him and watch out for him all the time. Being of a religious bent, she believed that he was the way he was because God made him that way—for a reason. God knew the reason, even if she didn’t, and it was not up to her to question the workings of the Lord. It was her job to be a mother to the poor little thing and protect him from those who would hurt him.

The master didn’t like being in the same room with Andrew. He avoided looking at Andrew or having any kind of contact with him. By mutual consent, he never shared the mistress’s bed again. He believed she was responsible for Andrew, saying loudly and frequently that there never had been any freaks in his family but she obviously had some dark taint in her lineage that she should have told him about before he married her. If he had only known, he would have followed a different path.

As Andrew became older, his appearance changed. His head, which had been very large and elongated at birth, became rounder and more proportionate to his body. His face took on definition and didn’t seem the half-formed face that it once was. His amber eyes, which had once looked like expressionless fish eyes peering out of raw slits that never closed, became very large and expressive and had about them a haunting quality that was part human, part animal—eyes unlike any I had ever seen before or will ever see again.

There were times when the master and the mistress argued over Andrew’s fur. The master wanted all of it shaved off, believing that shaving was the one thing that could be done to give Andrew at least the appearance of being human, but the mistress wouldn’t hear to it. She knew that underneath the fur was pale pink skin like that of a pig and shaving it off would be a cruel denuding and a thwarting of nature. She did agree, as a concession, to have the fur trimmed around Andrew’s mouth and over his eyes to give him, she said, a more civilized appearance.

The mistress had all of Andrew’s clothes custom-made at great expense, including a long cloak with a cape attached in which he could place his hands that were like an animal’s paws but nevertheless as flexible as human hands. With the cloak was an odd tri-cornered hat with an opaque black net attached that could be let down when necessary, allowing Andrew to see where he was walking but keeping anyone from seeing Andrew’s face underneath.

The mistress believed that Andrew should not be kept prisoner in the house, that he should see something of the world, if only a small part of it. She was fond of taking him on little excursions in her closed carriage—visits to an old aunt and uncle in the next county—or to witness the beauty of the countryside in the spring or fall. Occasionally she would take him with her on shopping trips to town, where he, never leaving her side for a second, would draw the stares and gasps of the curious, swathed all in black as he was from head to toe.

For obvious reasons, Andrew wasn’t able to go to school the way other children did, so the mistress undertook to educate him herself. She set aside an attic room as a schoolroom, and there she spent three or more hours every day teaching him to read. (He learned to read and to write in a peculiar scrawl, but I never knew of him to speak a word, other than to make sounds in his throat.)

She bought picture books for him so that he could know about places like Africa, China, and the South Pole. He especially liked books about elephants, tigers, and curious animals like anteaters and lemurs. She read to him from the novels of Charles Dickens and the poetry of John Keats. On his birthday she presented him with a leather-bound volume of Keats’s poems for his very own to keep always.

The master awoke one morning in the spring saying he had a funny feeling in his head. When he tried to go about his daily business, he collapsed on the floor and we carried him upstairs to his bed. The doctor came as soon as he was called, but there was nothing he or anybody could do. The master died that night of what turned out to be a massive hemorrhage to the brain. He was barely forty-five years old.

He was laid out in the parlor in his elegant mahogany coffin banked with lilies and roses, looking more handsome and spruce than he ever had in life. A tiny smile on his lips and a hint of roses in his cheeks told us that dying might not have been what he would have chosen for himself at that particular time in his life, but, now that it had come upon him, all was well. Happy I live and happy I die.

A photographic studio in town offered a service they called postmortem or memento mori photography, meaning they would travel to wherever you wanted them to go (for a handsome fee) with their photographic equipment and photograph a deceased person before he or she was laid to rest. This gave friends and family the chance to own a likeness of the person in death without having to rely entirely on memory.  The marriage of death and photography made perfect sense and proved a lucrative enterprise for those engaged in it.

The mistress engaged the photographer and his assistant to come to the house and photograph the master in his coffin on the day before the funeral. The men set up their equipment and took one shot of the master from the front and another from an angle and a third one from the doorway so that the whole room was included. Then they took a photograph of the mistress standing in front of the coffin in her fancy black silk dress with her hand resting on the satin edge of the coffin. When the photographic assistant asked the mistress if she wanted any other photographs taken, she brought Andrew down from upstairs and stood him in front of the coffin where she had stood.

Dressed in his black wool suit and stiff white collar and black cravat, perfectly tied, Andrew looked like something that wasn’t real but only imagined. To the photographer and his assistant, he appeared to be half-child and half-beast, but neither of them flinched or made a move to indicate that they were not accustomed to seeing such sights every day. Andrew looked straight into the camera with his strangely luminous eyes, his huge incisors slightly overlapping his lower lip, waiting for the man to take the photograph that would have unexpected consequences for him, the mistress and all of us.

Two weeks after the master’s death, the picture of Andrew appeared on the cover of a cheap periodical called The Nocturne, a paper that catered to the vulgar tastes of the masses. We discovered later that the photographic assistant had stolen a copy of the picture from his employer and sold it to the highest bidder, making enough money that he was able to go to the city and begin his own photographic establishment.

Many people who saw Andrew’s picture on the cover of The Nocturne wanted to know if it was a hoax or if such a creature really did exist. If he did exist, they wanted to see him with their own eyes. The Nocturne didn’t go so far as to publish Andrew’s name or where he lived, but many who knew about the master and mistress’s strange freak child —but had never seen him—knew it had to be the same child.

A newspaper reporter appeared on the doorstep, waving a copy of The Nocturne as though it was his pass to enter. He wanted to write a story for his paper, he said, about the life of the strange child that everybody was talking about. We turned him away without his story, but he swore he would be back.

Next came two men claiming to be doctors. They wanted to examine Andrew and explain to the world from a scientific standpoint how such a phenomenon had come to be. When we asked to see their credentials, they blustered and threatened to bring the law into the matter and force us to let them examine Andrew.

After the episode with the “doctors,” there came many other people, curiosity-seekers and the ghoulish who just wanted to laugh and marvel at Andrew as if he was a feature in a freak show. People would gather on the lawn and stare at the front door, hoping to catch a glimpse of something they could tell their friends about. The mistress said she had never wished more fervently in her life to own a shotgun and to know how to use it.

The people would not stay away, no matter how discourteous we were to them. There were those who would have walked right through the front door without so much as a knock as if it was their right to do so. The mistress had a ten-foot-tall iron fence installed all the way around the house. She hired a detective agency to keep some of its agents on the premises at all times. She believed the interest in Andrew would eventually fade and die when the idle masses had something else to occupy their time.

The fence and the detective agency men were effective in keeping people away from the house. Life resumed as it had been before the master died and before Andrew’s picture was published in The Nocturne. The mistress believed that soon people would forget and she would no longer need to retain the men guarding the house. The fence would be enough to discourage unwelcome visitors.

On an evening in late summer, several months after the master had died, we had finished with dinner; the mistress and Andrew were in the parlor. The mistress was seated at the piano, trying to work out a difficult passage in the Chopin piece she was trying to learn by heart. Andrew was seated next to the open window looking through a picture book. The air was stifling and humid and had been all day, but a thunderstorm that was brewing had brought with it a welcome suggestion of cooler air.

About the time the thunder and lightning began in earnest and the rain began pelting the house, there was a knock at the door. The young maid, the one named Alberta, went to the door as she had been instructed to do.

When Alberta opened the door a few inches and looked out into the darkness to see who was knocking, she was knocked off her feet and slammed against the wall. She regained her feet and began screaming hysterically. We all went running to see what was the matter.

Two dark, hooded figures had come into the house, silent and swift. They seemed to know the layout of the house because they moved with certainty, without hesitation. They went into the parlor where Andrew was, while the rest of us stood in stunned silence and watched them. One of the figures picked Andrew up in its arms; the other stood back as if to keep us at bay, but we did nothing. We just stood and stared, so shocked were we at what we were witnessing.

When they were making for the front door, the mistress made to put herself in their way to keep them from leaving with Andrew, but the other figure—the one not carrying Andrew—grabbed her arms and moved her out of the way as easily as if she had been stuffed with straw. While he held her arms in his gloved hands, he leaned into her face and said one sentence: He belongs to us.

They went out into the night, into the pouring rain. We all went running blindly after them but there was no use. They were lost from sight immediately, as if they had vanished into the air. We went to get a light and followed them a half mile or so away from the house in the direction in which we thought they had gone, but the rain and darkness kept us from seeing anything at all. We discovered the detective agency men unconscious in a ditch but still breathing. We carried them into the house out of the rain and tried to revive them.

When we called the county sheriff and told him what had happened, he came at once, bringing with him eight men. The sheriff questioned each one of us in turn. We all told him what we had seen but we weren’t able to give him any kind of a description of the hooded figures because every part of them was covered. When he asked me what Andrew said or did when he was being abducted, I could only answer that Andrew made not a single sound. When he asked me if Andrew seemed to be a willing participant in his own abduction, I could only answer that of that I wasn’t sure.

The sheriff’s men searched the area for any clues but found none. In the daylight, after the rain had ceased, even more men were brought onto the scene. The search went on for several days, but not a single shred of evidence was ever turned up. After that, the mistress hired private investigators to try to find Andrew and bring him back, but their search also was fruitless. There was no trail to follow and nothing to go on; no basis for a real investigation.

Nothing of Andrew was ever turned up. One year after his abduction, the mistress sold the house and all her belongings. She turned over all her holdings to the church and went into a convent to escape the unhappy world. She died in the convent two years later of a heart ailment. She was laid to rest beside the master in the Cemetery of the Holy Ghost on the edge of town. An ornate granite monument marks their resting place.

Several years after the mistress died, the night watchman of the Cemetery of the Holy Ghost, who I had known since childhood, sent me a message and asked me if I could come to see him. When I went to his room, he handed me a little leather-bound book that I did not at first recognize. I opened the book and saw that it was a volume of the poetry of John Keats. Then I remembered that Andrew had once owned a volume of poems exactly like the one I held in my hand.

When I asked the night watchman what this was all about, he said the book was left on the mistress’s grave and he, knowing I was the mistress’s step-brother, wanted me to have it before it was ruined by being left outdoors in the rain. I asked him if he had seen who left the book and he smiled and nodded his head.

I knew then that Andrew was alive. I knew also that I had to find him and talk to him. I wanted to know what happened on the night of his abduction. Most of all, though, I wanted to know where he had been and what he had seen in the intervening years.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Queen of the Monkey Women

Queen of the Monkey Women ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in Ear Hustler Magazine)

I’ve lived in the same small, dreary town my entire life. You’ll hear me use the word “dreary” a lot in describing my life. I graduated from high school three years ago. After high school I tried taking some college classes, but I hated them and stopped going. I work in an insurance office, where all day long I sit at a desk, hold a pencil in my hand with a frown of concentration on my face, and try to give the impression that I’m working. Trying to appear that you’re working is probably harder than actually working, but you get better at it with practice.

I live with my parents. My mother is depressed and takes a lot of pills. My father is gone most of the time, and when he’s at home he’s usually sleeping or hiding out in the basement or back yard to avoid my mother. He’s probably cheating on her and, if it was anybody other than my father, I would probably say he has every right.

Since it’s Saturday night I want to go downtown and see a movie. I call my friend Vernon Pinkston, who I’ve known since second grade. When I hear his voice, I remember that the last time I saw him we hadn’t parted on the best of terms. We had an argument about—what?—I don’t remember.

“Who is this?” Vernon asks.

“Sabu, the Elephant Boy,” I say. I think he’ll laugh but he doesn’t.

“I don’t know anybody by that name,” he says.

I know he knows who I am but is just playing with me. “It’s Warren Peace,” I say.

“What do you want, Warren?” he asks. “I’m busy.”

“Queen of the Monkey Women is playing at the Regency tonight. Do you want to go? It’ll be fun.”

“No,” he says.

“Why not?”

“I told you. I’m busy.”

“Busy doing what?”

“I’m having some friends over.”

“What friends?” I ask, trying to sound like I don’t care.

“You don’t know them. They’re from work.”

Since Vernon works in the produce section of a food market, I can only imagine what his evening with his “friends” will be like. They’ll probably sit around and talk about sorting cabbages.

“Well, okay, I’ll ask somebody else then,” I say, and he hangs up without saying anything else.

I’m getting the distinct impression that Vernon doesn’t like me very much. If truth be told, I don’t like him, either. He was always a fat loser.  His mother was old when she had him and that’s why Vernon is the way he is. He was still wetting his pants in high school. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s walked around with a bewildered look on his face.

I don’t want to go to the movies alone. Since it’s Saturday night, there’ll be a lot of young kids there, screaming and throwing popcorn. I consider just staying at home and getting into bed and reading, but I did that last night and the night before. I get dressed and put on my coat and shoes and leave the house without really knowing where I’m going.

I stop at the corner market and buy a pack of cigarettes and some gum and head downtown. It’s mid-October and the wind is cold; I put my hands in my pockets to try to keep them warm.

I haven’t eaten since morning so I stop at Willy Fong’s place for a plate of chop suey. I sit at a tiny table toward the back against the wall, and when the waiter comes out he doesn’t look real. He’s a grown man but he’s tiny—maybe three-quarters size—dressed in traditional Chinese garb that’s almost like silk pajamas. He looks like a doll. The only thing missing is the pigtail.

After I tell the doll what I want to eat, he leans down toward me and says in a confidential tone, “You want see girls in back?”

I look at him, not sure if I heard him right. “No,” I say, embarrassed.

“You want see boys in back?”

“No!”

He bows and smiles and walks away. I wonder what the girls and boys are doing in back while they’re waiting for somebody to want to see them, and then I light a cigarette. In a few minutes my chop suey arrives.

The pot of tea the waiter brings me tastes better than the chop suey and I drink all of it. I push the food around on my plate. I think it has some shrimp in it. I’m allergic to shell fish and just the thought of it makes me want to throw up. I pick the shrimp out and push it to one side of the plate. I take my time and when I’m finished I smoke another cigarette and pay my tab and go back out into the night.

Down the street is the Rio Rita Roller Rink, always a lively place. I haven’t been there since high school. I buy my ticket and go inside. The place is crowded and noisy, as I knew it would be on a Saturday night. The people who aren’t skating are talking and laughing and having a good time.

I go to the counter where they have the skates and show the man my ticket. When he asks me what size skate I want, I realize it’s Mr. Elmo, my old history teacher from high school. He recognizes me as he hands me the skates and smiles.

“How are you, Warren?” he says.

“You work here?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

“I own the place,” he says.

I check my shoes and my coat and sit down and put the skates on and take a couple of turns around the floor to loosen up. The recorded organ music sounds good. They’re playing March of the Wooden Soldiers, a corny old tune but good to skate to. After that it’s American Patrol and then That Old Black Magic.

I spot a girl I knew in high school named Mimi Boynton. She looks like she’s gained fifty pounds at least. Her hair looks like it’s been whacked off with a machete and she’s wearing ugly red capri pants and a white sweatshirt. I know she sees me and recognizes me. She says something to the girl she’s with and the girl turns and looks at me and they both laugh. At what, I wonder?

When I sit down for a minute to take a breather and tighten the laces on my skates, Mimi Boynton comes and stands beside me. I grimace at the effort of bending over and look up at her.

“Hello, Warren,” she says. “Remember me?”

“Sure,” I say. “High school.”

“On the next couples promenade, would you skate with me?” she asks.

“No, no,” I say. “I’m with some people. They’re waiting for me over by the concession stand.”

“Oh, I see,” she says, embarrassed.

She stands there looking at me for a minute as though she expects me to say something else, and then she says, “Well, it was nice seeing you again,” and turns around and goes back to where her girlfriend is waiting for her.

“Yeah, you too,” I say, but I don’t think she hears me.

I skate for about an hour, until the place starts to give me a headache, and then I decide to leave and go someplace else. When I turn my skates back in, I want to ask Mr. Elmo to give me a job (anything has to be better than working in an insurance office), but he’s busy and I don’t get a chance to speak to him. I tell myself I’ll call him on Monday and then I leave the place.

Outside, traffic is stopped for a red light and somebody hollers at me from a car window, but I ignore it and keep walking. I walk down the street a couple of blocks and cross the street to a little bar I remember being in once before. I’m thirsty from all the skating and decide to go in and buy myself a beer.

The bar seems dark and quiet after the roller rink. The juke box is playing, but it’s not very loud so people can talk and be heard. I sit at the bar and tell the bartender I want a beer. He looks at me skeptically and I think he’s going to give me some trouble, but he serves me anyway. I don’t like the taste of beer very much, but I drink the first one down fast and order another one.

After I’ve started on my second beer, I light a cigarette and look around. The place is not very crowded for a Saturday night. Three or four drunks sit hunched over the bar and a few people sit at the small tables, talking intimately. I hear a woman complaining drunkenly to the bartender about her drink, but the man she’s with quiets her down and they soon leave.

In a little while somebody comes in and sits on the stool to my right. When I turn my head slightly to catch a glimpse, I see it’s a middle-aged woman wearing a black dress and a black hat with a see-through veil that covers her eyes and nose. Oddly enough, there’s a cluster of red cherries on the hat and that’s what you look at first thing because it stands out on the black. She orders a drink and puts a cigarette in her mouth but she can’t seem to find a match, so she turns to me.

“You got a light, hon?” she asks.

I give her my matches and she lights her cigarette and gives me back the matches and smiles. I consider getting up and leaving, but I don’t.

“Could I buy you a drink?” she asks.

I hold up my beer that’s still about half-full and say, “Just leaving.”

“Well, what do you think about me?” she says. “I just came from an undertaker’s conference. Don’t I look the part?”

I look at her and shrug my shoulders. I don’t care what she is.

“You’re not an embalmer, are you?” she asks.

“No,” I say.

“You look like you might be an embalmer. I know the type.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“I want to open my own funeral home but I don’t have the capital. I’m looking for an embalmer with money to go partners with me.”

When I don’t say anything, she says, “What do you do? Do you go to school somewhere?”

“I work in an office, but I’m not going to be there much longer.”

“Oh,” she says.

That seems to end the conversation, so I start to get up to leave.

“Are you sure I can’t buy you a drink?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “I have to get home.”

She looks at me and narrows her eyes as if she’s looking at me from a long way off. “Got a wife at home waiting for you?” she asks.

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“I live with my parents.”

“Oh,” she says knowingly. “So it’s like that, is it?

I don’t like her tone. “Like what?” I ask.

“Even though you’re a grown man, they still treat you like a baby.”

“It isn’t that way at all,” I say. “I’ve been roller skating and I’m tired. I still have to walk home.”

“How about if we go for a drive along the river?” she asks. “It’s a lovely night and there’s a full moon.”

“No,” I say. “Not for me.”

“There’s a full moon for everybody,” she says, and I can see she’s already drunk.

“Well, good night,” I say, standing up.

“Wait a minute,” she says, putting her hand on my arm. “I’d really like you to stay a little longer. I need somebody to talk to. These other people here are duds. They’re all drunk.”

I sit back down and she says to the bartender, “Bring this young gentleman here another drink. He’s going to stay and talk to me.”

She lights another cigarette and seems for the moment to forget I’m there. After a minute or so, she turns and looks at me as if she’s seeing me for the first time and says, “I think you’re kind of cute in spite of what everybody else says.”

“I think you need to go home and sleep it off,” I say.

“Did I tell you I’m very lonely? You probably can’t tell by looking at me, but I’ve been married three times.”

The bartender sets the drink on the bar in front of me and I take a sip, even though I don’t want it.

“Men are such bastards,” she says, “but of course you are one so you already know.”

I don’t say anything but put my hands on the bar and look straight ahead.

“I’ve offended you,” she says.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Nothing you say matters to me.”

“You’re sweet,” she says.

“I’m not what you think I am,” I say. “You’ve got me all wrong.”

“Now, don’t go jumping to conclusions,” she says. “Just relax and have another drink.”

I light a cigarette and then she puts her cigarette out and takes a fresh one and wants to light the fresh one from mine.

“I like you,” she says, “and you ought to be very flattered because there aren’t many people I like.”

“You don’t even know me,” I say.

“That’s true, but I can tell a lot about you just from the way you move and from the way you shift your eyes about.”

“You can’t tell anything about me,” I say. “And I don’t care whether you like me or not. How do you know I’m not a psychopathic killer?”

“Because you’re not,” she says.

“Well, I could be,” I say.

She laughs and pats me on the arm indulgently the way you would a small child.

“I’ve really got to be going,” I say.

“Past your bedtime, is it?” she asks.

“If you must know,” I say, “it is.”

“I’ve got a bottle of Kentucky bonded bourbon in my car. We can have a party.”

“No,” I say. “I hate bourbon.”

“Finish your drink and we’ll go for that drive.”

“I’m not what you think I am,” I say. “I’m not anybody you want to know.”

I don’t know why I leave with her, but I do. I suppose you could say it’s because nobody has asked me to do anything with them for a long time and I just wasn’t ready to go home.

When we get outside, she hands me the keys to her car, an ancient Cadillac the color of brown eggs parked down the street from the bar.

“You drive,” she says.

“Where to?” I ask.

“I’ll tell you.”

We get into the car and I start it and pull away from the curb as she makes herself cozy on the seat beside me. She takes off her hat with the veil and the cherries and throws it in the back seat and takes her bottle of bourbon out of the glove compartment and uncaps it and takes a drink and offers me the bottle, which I refuse.

She has me drive outside of town, to an old country road that I haven’t been on since I was a child. The road is hilly and curvy and I have to pay close attention to keep the car on the road. After I’ve driven a few miles, she tells me to turn off to the left. I hesitate at first because it seems there’s nothing there, but after I turn off I see there’s another road downhill that seems to go off nowhere into the woods.

“Where does this road lead to?” I ask.

“You’ll see,” she says, taking a swig of the bourbon.

“I don’t like it here,” I say.

We come to an old cemetery and she tells me to slow down and turn off the road. I do as she says and stop just short of an old wrought iron gate, part of which is missing.

“This is the place,” she says.

“Why are we here?” I ask, turning off the engine.

“I love this spot,” she says. “It’s the perfect place to think.”

“We probably aren’t supposed to be here,” I say, looking over my left shoulder.

“Come with me,” she says.

She takes a blanket out of the back seat and heads into the cemetery. She seems to be able to see where she’s going, so I just follow her. She goes far in, where some of the old grave markers are taller than our heads. When she comes to a little clearing cut off from view of anybody who might be on the road, she spreads the blanket on the ground and lays down on it, leaving plenty of room for me beside her.

“It’s so restful here,” she says. “There’s no noise. Only the sounds of nature.” She points up into the trees where a brisk wind is rustling the leaves.

I stand looking off into the distance, thinking I see movement. Something or somebody is watching us, but it’s so dark that I can’t be sure of anything. The full moon seems to have gone behind a cloud, or maybe it’s the trees.

“What’s the matter?” she asks. “Why are you standing there like a statue?”

“I’m sick,” I say.

I bend over and vomit on the ground near her feet on the blanket. I didn’t drink enough to be sick. I didn’t touch the bourbon. I’m sure it’s the shrimp from Willy Fong’s chop suey.

“I need to go home,” I say. “I’m sick and I’m not what you think I am and I didn’t want to come here in the first place.”

I turn my back on her and take a few steps away because I’m going to vomit again and I don’t want her looking at me. After I’ve vomited for the second time and am recovering a little bit, I turn to her but she’s gone. While I had my back turned she had picked up her blanket and left.

I almost panic at being left alone in such a dark and unfamiliar place and I start running in the direction of her car, thinking I can catch her before she drives away, but I run headlong into a grave stone and fall on the ground and hurt my knee. As I pull myself up and see that my pants are torn and my knee is bleeding. I hear the Cadillac start and then I see the headlights moving through the trees fifty yards away. As she drives off, I realize I don’t know where I am but—worse than that—I don’t know what I’m doing there.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

My Mother is Away

My Mother is Away ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp 

Opal Ring awoke at seven o’clock with the sunlight streaming through the window and the birds singing their happy song. She rolled out of bed feeling good for a reason that for the moment escaped her and then it came to her: her mother was gone for the day, taking care of some business, and she had the house to herself. She had always liked being alone and it was going to be a good day.

She went downstairs to the kitchen and smoked a cigarette while she brewed the coffee. She fixed herself some toast and eggs. When she sat down at the table to eat was when she saw him out the window.

He was of medium height, thin and broad-shouldered, dressed in white painters’ overalls. His dark hair shone in the sunlight as he leaned back and reached above his head; his arm moved back and forth rhythmically as he applied the paint to the old wood of the garage.

She was transfixed. She had to speak to him, to see the face that went with the part of him she could see. Wearing only her kimono with nothing underneath and her tattered house slippers, she went outside and down the slope of the back yard.

“Yoo-hoo!” she said. “I saw you out the kitchen window and I wanted to come out and say hello.”

“Hello,” he said. He looked at her once, quickly, and then looked away.

“I didn’t know you were going to be here today. I guess my mother forgot to tell me.”

He took a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfolded it and handed it to her. She looked at the paper and nodded her head. “This is the place, all right,” she said, handing the paper back.

He said nothing, so she looked closely at him. He looked even better up close than he did from inside the house. Clean-looking and maybe a little older than she at first thought.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you around before,” she said. “Are you new in town?”

“Nope.”

“If you do a good job on the garage, maybe my mother will have you paint the whole house.”

He looked up the slope of the yard to the house. “Doesn’t look like it needs it,” he said.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

“No,” he said. “It’s bad for you.”

“Well, I’m not supposed to smoke, either, but I do anyway when my mother isn’t around. It’s not as if I’m a child or anything but she doesn’t like to see me smoking and she nags me about it.”

“I’m supposed to have this job done by the time my brother picks me up. If I don’t get it done today, I’ll have to come back tomorrow and my brother won’t like it.” He took a handkerchief out of his pocket with his left hand and wiped his face without stopping the brush in his right hand.

“Well, don’t let me keep you from your work, then.”

She watched him paint for a minute more. She was going to go back into the house, as there seemed nothing left to say, but she didn’t very often have the chance to talk to someone and wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

“Would you like a drink of water?” she asked.

“Brought my own,” he said, pointing to a bottle underneath the tree.

“Don’t you ever take a break?”

“Not when I don’t need to.”

“What will you do when you get finished painting this garage?”

“There’ll be another job somewhere else, I guess. My brother lines up the jobs. If it’s a small job like this one, he mostly leaves me to do it while he works on something else.”

“I don’t have a job,” she said. “I had a job once but it was just temporary. I was a phantom shopper. Do you know what a phantom shopper is?”

“No, I guess I don’t.”

“It’s sort of a department store spy. If they catch you spying, they’ll break both your legs. Another time I worked for a cleaning service, but I had to quit that job because the chemicals we used to clean with made me break out all over. The doctor said I had an allergic reaction. Have you been painting long?”

“About two years.”

“Are you planning on doing that all the rest of your life?”

“I haven’t thought about it. I hope not.”

“One of these days I’ll get me a job that lasts,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind doing what you do, but I guess there aren’t any women that do that, are there?”

“I haven’t heard of any.”

“I think I’d like a job on TV,” she said. “I’d either like to be soap opera actress or a news reporter. If I can’t get a job on TV, then I’d like to work behind a counter in a department store or be a super market checker. I’d be good at that.”

“Uh-huh.”

She sat down on the ground and put her knees up, forgetting for the moment that she wasn’t wearing any underwear. “Did I tell you my mother is gone for the day? I like it when she’s gone. We get on each other’s nerves. She’s always watching me to make sure I don’t do something she doesn’t like. She still thinks of me as eight years old. Are you married?”

“No.”

“I’m not married either. I’ll probably get married one day but for now I like being single. Do you have a girlfriend?”

“I don’t think it’s polite to ask a complete stranger personal questions.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. I just like to know about people, is all. Some people call it friendly and others call it nosy.”

He put down the brush and wiped his hands with a rag. “Look,” he said, “if my brother comes back and sees I haven’t finished the job, he’ll be mad.”

She laughed. “Don’t worry so much. What’s your brother going to do, kill you? Is he some kind of a monster?”

“He’ll think I’ve been wasting my time. He’ll think I’ve been talking when I should have been painting.”

“Tell him to ask me! I know you’ve been working yourself silly without stopping for one second. I’ve got eyes in my head. I can see.”

“I can’t work as well when I have distractions.”

“Do you mean me? Just go on and paint and pretend I’m not here. I don’t keep you from working, do I?”

“Oh, no!” he said.

“You make me tired just by watching you,” she said. “I guess I’m not much for working. My mother says I’m lazy. Well, if I’m lazy, she’s lazy too. She doesn’t do any more work than I do. I do all the housework and most of the laundry and most of the cooking. Do you like to cook?”

“I can cook when I have to, but I don’t like it.”

“Do you have a large family?”

“No.”

“I don’t either. My mother and I are all that’s left of our family. My mother is all I have and I’m all she has. Sad to say. I don’t even have many friends. When I was in high school I had friends but that’s been years ago. The friends I had then have all drifted away. Some of them got married and some moved away. One or two of them are even in jail.” She laughed. “I wouldn’t like to be in jail, would you? If they were going to lock me up for thirty years for a crime I committed, I think I would just prefer the death penalty, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“They just do the lethal injection thing now. I hear about that all the time on TV. It probably doesn’t even hurt. I’m pretty sure it’s a painless death. They used to cut people’s heads off or shoot them in the heart but they had to stop doing that. People were complaining.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to take a little break for a while? Aren’t you tired.”

“No.”

“You must be hungry. Would you like a sandwich or something? You can come into the kitchen and sit at the table and I’ll make you a tuna salad sandwich.”

“No, I’m not hungry and I’m not tired.”

“Well, if you want to take a break, let me know.”

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“I know you’re going to go away soon and I won’t ever see you again. I know you think I’m a terrible pest with all this talking. I don’t know what’s the matter with me today. You just seem like a sympathetic person that I can talk to.”

“Nobody ever talks to me when I’m working,” he said, “unless they’re complaining about something. They just want the job done and all they’re interested in is what it looks like after it’s finished. They never think about the person doing the work.”

“I hope you do come back tomorrow, but if you do my mother will be here then.”

“Will she complain?”

“Probably.”

“I’ll try to finish up today.”

“I have one tiny favor to ask of you before you go,” she said.

“I’m not going yet,” he said.

“I know, but before you do go.”

“What is it?”

“I have this old trunk upstairs in my bedroom. The lock has been busted for a long time. The key won’t turn in the lock. There are some important papers in it that I need to get out. I’ve had a feeling ever since I first laid eyes on you that you would know how to get that old trunk opened, but I hated to bother you.”

“Can’t you bring the trunk out here?”

“It’s too big to carry downstairs.”

He stopped painting, put the brush down, and wiped his hands on the legs of his overalls. “All right,” he said. “I’ll take a little break and look at the trunk.”

She took him into the house, through the house to the stairs and up the stairs. At the doorway to her bedroom, she paused and turned and faced him.

“The room is a mess,” she said.

He shrugged. She pushed the door open and motioned for him to go in ahead of her. She went in after him and closed the door.

She felt a little lightheaded having him in her bedroom. If she didn’t watch herself, she would do and say something stupid that would make him want to run away. She liked him very much but she was going to have to be careful when and how she let him know.

“The trunk is over here,” she said.

Pushing some clothes and clutter out of the way, she went to the far side of the room and opened the door to an enormous closet that was like another small room. “Please come in,” she said. “Here’s the trunk.”

She turned on the light and pushed an old feather boa and a moth-eaten fox stole to the floor that were on top of the trunk. He knelt down in front of the trunk and tried turning the key, first one way and then the other. He asked her for a hammer and a screwdriver and when she went downstairs to get them and brought them back he inserted the screwdriver into the lock and tapped lightly with the hammer until the lock, as if by saying the magic words, opened.

She squealed and clapped her hands together like a girl of eight. “I knew you could do it!” she said. She wanted to pat him on the back but was afraid somehow of touching him.

“It’s an old lock,” he said. “Needed some loosening up.”

“I want to give you something,” she said.

She had a bag of five-dollar gold pieces that she had had since she was a little girl. She had given away a few of them over the years to special friends. She was looking through the dresser drawer for the little wooden box the gold pieces were in when she heard a sound and turned around. Her mother had pushed the door open and was standing in the doorway.

“What’s going on here?” her mother said. “Who is this man?”

“He’s nobody,” she said. “He’s the man painting the garage.”

“What is he doing in your bedroom?”

“We were talking and I asked him if he would take a look at the lock on my trunk.”

“Since when was there anything wrong with the lock on your trunk? That was just an excuse to get him up here, wasn’t it?”

“No!”

“I’ll go,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right. You go. And if you ever come messing around my daughter again, I’ll have you arrested.”

She stood aside to let him pass. As he was going down the stairs, she hollered out after him, “And I’m going to have you fired for this! Don’t think I won’t!”

“You have to ruin everything, don’t you?” Opal said.

“So I was right!” her mother said. “You were about to take him to bed, weren’t you?”

“Of course not! I was going to give him something out of my dresser drawer.”

“What?”

“That’s none of your business!”

She tried to go out of the room but her mother grabbed by the arm and spun her around and started slapping her in the face and then pummeling her with her fists. She gave the kimono a wrenching pull and it came away with a loud ripping sound in one tattered piece. When she saw that Opal was naked underneath the kimono, she believed her suspicions were confirmed. She hit Opal in the face with her fist with all her might. Opal fell back, glancing off the bed to the floor. She hit her head in such a way on the night stand that she was knocked unconscious.

When she awoke she thought it was morning until she realized she was lying on the floor naked and then it all came back to her. She got up and put on a bathrobe and went to the window and looked out into the back yard. The garage looked the same as it always did except that it was half painted and would remain that way. He would never come back and finish it after what her mother said to him. She knew she would never see him again. And she hadn’t even thought to ask his name.

Copyright © 2012 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997