short story – Page 25 – Literary Fictions

Double Indemnity ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Double Indemnity ~ A Capsule Movie Review By Allen Kopp

Bored 1940s California housewife Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) uses her bewigged allure to get malleable insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) to help her kill her repulsive husband for the insurance money and for “love.” After Phyllis and Walter execute as neat and ingenious a murder as has ever been committed to celluloid, their happiness is short-lived. Astute claims investigator Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), who works with Walter, does not believe the story that is being put forth about how Phyllis’s husband died and contests payment of the insurance money. As the story progresses and as the figurative noose tightens around Walter’s neck, we learn that Phyllis is not all we thought she was (or not all Walter thought, which is the same thing) and has only been using Walter to attain her ends. She has been messing around with her stepdaughter Lola’s boyfriend, Nino Zachetti, and has probably murdered before. And will murder again if she gets the chance.

Double Indemnity is a genre film and is the best of its genre, which can loosely be classified as film noir. It was made in 1944 and appropriately reflects the cynical wartime mood the country was in. It is such a perfect movie (if such a thing is possible) that seeing it for the first time is something of a revelation. Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray and Edward G. Robinson are at the top of their form. Screenwriters Billy Wilder (who also directed) and mystery novelist Raymond Chandler take a good story by James M. Cain and make it even better. It is a perfect example of lean writing without any fat. Down to the tiniest detail (cinematography, music, art direction), Double Indemnity is meticulously and beautifully crafted. On a high-definition TV (as broadcast by TCM), it is as clear and crisp as if it was made yesterday instead of sixty-nine years ago.

February 14, 2013February 15, 2013 by allen0997

Where the Frogs Are

Where the Frogs Are ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Giles knocked loudly. When Eddie opened the door, he was wearing a dressing gown of John Barrymore vintage and smoking a cigarette in a long holder. He had put something on his hair to cause it to stand up. It was flat on top.

“I figured it would be you,” Eddie said as he held the door for Giles to enter.

“I was just in the neighborhood,” Giles said.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s a likely story.”

“Are you all alone?”

“Of course.”

“Do you have anything you want to tell me?”

“Not a thing.”

“There’s a rumor going around school today that a certain party had a little set-to with Miss Cratty and scored a three-day suspension.”

“Word travels fast, doesn’t it?”

“Would you care to tell me how it all came down so I can tell everybody about it tomorrow?”

Eddie puffed on the cigarette holder with a flourish and blew the smoke out through his nose. “How much do you know?” he asked.

“Practically nothing,” Giles said. “Try as I might, I wasn’t able to find out any details. Those who might have known weren’t talking.”

“First a drink,” Eddie said.

He went into the kitchen and when he came back he was carrying two whisky glasses containing Coke and two ice cubes in each glass. He handed one of the glasses to Giles and sat down beside him on the couch.

Giles took a sip and looked at Eddie. “Since I’m the closest thing you have to a best friend, you’d better tell me everything.”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“You know I can’t.”

“What if I said I don’t want everybody to know about this?”

“Everybody will know about it anyway.”

“You know I’ve been having trouble with geometry,” Eddie said. “Failing, in fact.”

“Yeah.”

“Why does there even need to be geometry in the world? It’s an affliction to those who are forced to learn it, not to mention a complete waste of time. No matter what I do in life or where I go, I will never need to know that crap!”

“I’ve heard all this before,” Giles said, “but go on.”

“Miss Cratty, the dear old thing, agreed to let me take a makeup test. She said it was the only way I could come out of the class with a passing grade.”

“That was rather sporting of her.”

“Well, you know that geometry is nothing more than just memorizing stuff. You memorize all these theorems for a test and just as soon as the test is over, you put everything out of your mind as if it had never happened. Education is rather stupid at times.”

“You could write a book.”

“Well, I gave up my fifth period study hall—during which I was planning on catching up on my sleep—to go and take the silly old makeup test. Miss Cratty told me to come to the zoology room where they cut up frogs and starfishes and things because the math room was being used during that period.”

“That seems logical.”

“When I got to the zoology room, I was a couple minutes late and Miss Cratty was already foaming at the mouth because I didn’t get there on time. Right off she gave me a lecture about how rude it was to keep her waiting and how she was giving me the makeup test out of the goodness of her heart and not because she had to. You might say we got off to a really bad start. I mean, you could have cut the ill will with a knife. I never liked Miss Cratty anyway and she obviously feels the same about me.”

“Are you sure you were only a couple minutes late?”

“I figured she would just give me the test paper and then fly off somewhere on her broomstick, but I could see she was going to stay in the room with me the whole time.”

“She didn’t trust you not to cheat.”

“After I had been in the zoology room not more than five minutes, I began to feel sick from the smell.”

“Miss Cratty?”

“No, the smell of formaldehyde or whatever they use when they’re dissecting frogs. You know how sensitive I am to my surroundings.”

“You never let anybody forget.”

“Well, Miss Cratty gave me the test paper and sat down about twelve feel away from me, over to my right, where she could see every move I made. She opened her book of spells and incantations and began reading.”

“She probably feels right at home where the frogs are.”

“When I started the test, I was feeling pretty sick, not only from the smell, but from all the stuff on the test I didn’t know. I had crammed my head full of geometry stuff to prepare for the test but it was all gone by the time I needed it. I was suffering from temporary amnesia. I couldn’t remember a thing. I could hardly even remember my own name.”

“That sounds like a pretty good excuse, but I think you’d have a hard time proving it.”

“I looked over at Miss Cratty. Her head was down and she seemed deeply involved in her reading, almost in a trance or something.”

“I’ve heard that witches do that.”

“I had copied some things I was likely to forget on a tiny little index card and had the card in my pocket.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I thought I could slip the card out of my pocket and put it flat on the desk against my stomach, refer to it as needed, and nobody would be any the wiser.”

“So you cheated.”

“I don’t think of it as cheating. I think of it as helping oneself where one can.” He pinched the butt out of the end of his holder, put a fresh cigarette in and lit it.

“Go on,” Giles said.

“Miss Cratty’s eyes were closed, almost as if she had drifted off to sleep, so I became a little bolder. I was referring to my index card freely, copying the stuff into the test. Then it happened.”

“I know what’s coming.”

“She saw what I was doing and was on me like a duck on a June bug. She tried to snatch the index card away from me to see what it was but I wouldn’t let her have it. She began poking me in the shoulder with the end of her pencil. I told her to stop it and when she didn’t I grabbed the pencil out of her hand and threw it across the room. That enraged her. She began punching me with her bony fingers and saying terrible things to me.”

“What things?”

“She said a person who will cheat on a makeup test is just about the lowest thing in the world. She told me I was a disgrace to the school and to my family. She was screaming right in my face like a lunatic. All I could see was the wart on the end of her nose with the little hairs sticking out of it.”

“So what did you do then?”

“I stood up off the stool I was sitting on, and when I did I stepped on her foot. She thought I did it on purpose. She yowled as if I had stabbed her in the stomach. She started punching me on the shoulder, getting nearer my face. I panicked. All I could think was that I had to get away from her, had to make her stop punching me. I reared back as if I was going to hit her in the face but I did something else instead.”

“What?”

“I pushed her. Her feet got tangled in the stool legs and she fell backward and landed on the floor. Her dress went up over her waist and I saw her underpants. It was the most horrible sight I ever saw in my life. I can’t get it out of my mind. It was like looking upon the face of Satan.”

“You actually saw her underpants?”

“She screamed as one mortally wounded. The art teacher and the janitor heard her and came running. They helped get her up off the floor. She told them I hit her but I didn’t. The art teacher took me by one arm and the janitor by the other, as if I was a dangerous criminal, and took me to the principal’s office with Miss Cratty right behind us.”

“Are you making this up?”

“When Miss Cratty told the principal her version of the story, he wasn’t pleased. He would hardly let me speak at all. He tried to get me to apologize to her but I refused, so he suspended me. To await further review, he said. The only way I can get back in school is to have one or both my parents solicit the principal’s office, in person, for my re-admittance. Miss Cratty is going to prefer charges against me for assault. I’m going to end up behind bars. Nobody will take my word for what happened over hers.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m not ever going back to school. I’m leaving tonight. I have a little money.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m not going to tell you because everyone will suspect that I told you and force you to tell them. You admit yourself that you can’t keep a secret.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Tell my friends at school tomorrow that I said goodbye.”

At the door as Giles was leaving, Eddie hugged him with tears in his eyes. “I’ve known you since kindergarten,” he said, “and you’ve always been square with me. Maybe we’ll see each other again sometime, but probably not.”

“Are you sure that going away is the only way to deal with this thing?” Giles asked.

“Don’t tell anybody you even saw me today,” Eddie said. “I’m vanishing right before your eyes. I no longer exist.”

February 9, 2013February 11, 2013 by allen0997

Lola Fenwick

Lola Fenwick ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

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

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

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

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

“Hello, Lola,” a man’s voice said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How did you know?” Vernon asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Maybe he really loves her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When he awoke, he knew from the light coming in at the window that it was no longer the middle of the afternoon but was early evening. He wondered if Dorothy was back from shopping yet. As he yawned and started to get up from the bed, he realized there was somebody else in the room with him.

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

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

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

“I’ve been here all along,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But what can we do?”

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

“All right, but where to?”

“I’m thinking Mexico.”

“Mexico! But what about Dorothy?”

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

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

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

“All right, dearest,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There are spies everywhere!” she said.

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

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

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

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

“You didn’t kill her, did you?”

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

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

“The marriage to Dr. Blake is off, I’m afraid. When I told him last night that I couldn’t marry him, he threatened to kill me.”

“He’ll never find you, dearest.”

“You’re sweet,” she cooed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you Vernon Buckles?” the first man asked.

“Who wants to know?”

He pulled a badge from his pocket and flashed it in Vernon’s face. “We have a warrant for your arrest, sir,” he said.

“For what?”

“For the suspected murder of your wife.”

“You’re crazy! I haven’t done anything!”

“Then you have nothing to worry about, but you’ll have to come with us, anyway. You can tell your story when the time comes.”

“I’m not going anywhere!” Vernon said.

“You can make it easy or you can make it hard,” the second man said.

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

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

Grim-faced, Vernon stepped up the three little steps onto the bus and walked down the aisle, the police officer close behind him. When he came to the back of the bus, Lola wasn’t there. No one was there. He looked for the mink coat but it wasn’t there, either.

The nearest person was a sleeping Mexican four seats away. Vernon grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him roughly awake.

“Where is the lovely young woman that was sitting here?” he asked. “She was wearing a mink coat! You couldn’t miss her!”

The Mexican sat up straight and held up his hands, a frightened look on his face. “Sorry,” he said. “I see no one.”

January 12, 2013January 12, 2013 by allen0997

A Pack of Cigarettes and Thou

A Pack of Cigarettes and Thou ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

When she was younger, April Snow liked school, or at least could tolerate it but, now that she was fourteen, things had changed. Her body had changed, had filled out, and that somehow affected her outlook on life. She was no longer a child and she was ready, she felt, to leave all childhood things behind. She had had enough of her mother telling her what to do and of going to school day everyday and abiding by a bunch of rules that seemed to have lost all meaning for her.

As she walked the four blocks to the bus in the morning, her thoughts turned to suicide. She thought back to the day a week ago when she and her mother were having a raging argument and her mother slapped her in the face and knocked her off the toilet and caused her to hit her head on the bathtub. She lay on the floor and screamed that she couldn’t move her arms and legs, but her mother knew she was just putting on an act. She told April that she was insane—insanity ran in the family—and she was going to “put her away” in the place where they had straightjackets and padded cells and shot charges of electricity through people’s heads like in a Frankenstein movie to try to make them less crazy. If she hanged herself or cut on herself enough to bleed to death, she thought, her mother would certainly be sorry she had been so mean to her. People at school would say, “Poor April! If we had only known she was so sad, we might have given her some money or done something to help her, but now it’s too late.”

At the bus stop, she lit a cigarette and pointedly ignored the two skinny girls standing there. They looked liked little children compared to her but one of them was actually older than she was. They needed some fashion advice, some rouge and lipstick; they needed to dress and act more grown up, or they would always be hopeless losers.

The bus was late. Just when April was hoping it wouldn’t come at all and she would be able to go back home and go back to the bed, it came around the corner with a malodorous roar. She flipped her cigarette away with her thumb and forefinger in her grown-woman way, knowing the two skinny girls were looking at her. When she boarded the bus she went all the way to the back as she always did.

Of the thirty or so people on the bus, the only one who interested her in the least was Selma Butts. She sat primly with her books on her lap and her ankles crossed. She had a face like a bird—a tiny pointed nose like a beak. On her head a silly green-and-yellow knit cap she had made herself. She wasn’t interesting in herself but she was the sister of Seymour Butts, so that made her as interesting as she would ever be.

April was in love with Seymour Butts; she had only just realized it on the day her mother slapped her off the toilet. He was the reason they had been fighting in the first place. Her mother didn’t like Seymour, didn’t think he was the “proper” boy for April to associate with. She had heard things about him, bad things that would curdle cream, she said. He was, figuratively speaking, from the wrong side of the tracks, and was—anybody with any sense could see it—headed for the state penitentiary and probably the electric chair.

April had been out with him three times in his car with the “souped-up” engine that she could hear from half-a-mile away. They had gone driving two times; the third time he picked her up in front of her house and took her for an ice cream cone. Each time, she had been thrilled by his pouty expression, his perfectly coiffed hair and the skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his bulging bicep. She had expected him to sweep her off her feet in an ardor of passion—if he had she wouldn’t have been able to resist—but the most he had done was to touch her lightly on the knee to get her attention and put his hand on the back of her neck and squeeze. He was more of a gentleman than she might have expected.

He had quit high school when he was sixteen and worked at mysterious “odd jobs” for his uncle and his cousins. If he really needed a high school diploma, he said, he could get one without having to go through the hell of going to school everyday and listening to those hypocrites spout their lies that anybody with any sense didn’t believe anyway. April thought him deep and endearingly independent. He wasn’t like anybody she had ever known before.

When the bus pulled up in front of the school to let everybody out, April held back a little, keeping her eyes on Selma. She stood up just as Selma did and made sure they almost collided as Selma stepped into the aisle to get off the bus.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” April said. “Did I step on your foot?”

Selma looked at April and the corners of her mouth turned down. “No, it’s all right,” she said.

“I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

She expected Selma to say something else, but she just kept going with her head down. When she got off the bus, she ran to the door of the school and went inside as if it was raining and she was afraid she would get wet (it wasn’t).

April took her unsatisfying encounter with Selma as rather a bad omen, a bad way to start the day. She had hoped to at least speak Seymour’s name and to gauge Selma’s response, if any. In that way, she might have discovered if Seymour had ever mentioned her name to Selma. On these small things do lovers hang.

In first-period English class, she dozed through a discussion of Endymion, losing interest after “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” She didn’t much like poetry. It was too hard to figure out.

In physical education class, which she loathed more than all her other classes put together, she feigned illness so she wouldn’t have to change out of her clothes into shorts and a red jersey to play volleyball. How she despised volleyball! She never cared whether the team she was on won or not, so she didn’t even try. The result was a barely passing grade.

While the other girls were playing, she lolled on the cot in the locker room, surreptitiously smoking a cigarette. She went through the lockers that hadn’t been locked and “found” a dollar and eighteen cents that somebody hadn’t bothered to secure. She didn’t think of this as stealing, but, rather, as “finding.” She had no scruples where “finding” was concerned.

In math class she failed a test that she hadn’t bothered to prepare for and, in fact, turned in her test paper with half the problems unanswered. After that was study hall, during which she propped a novel, Forever Amber, in front of her and pretended to read. When the bell rang for lunch, she ran to her locker to put her books away and went downstairs to the lunchroom, where a long line had already formed.

After she got her food (a slab of gelatinous meatloaf, watery mashed potatoes and two stewed prunes) and was looking for a place to sit, she spotted Selma Butts sitting alone at a table in the back of the room. She rushed to claim the spot across from Selma before somebody else got it.

“Hi, there,” she said with a winning smile as she pulled out the chair and sat down.

“Hello,” Selma said.

“I’ll be glad when this day is over.”

“See that boy over there?” Selma said.

April turned to look over her shoulder at a very large boy with blond hair and bulging cheeks.

“He just ate his fifth hot dog.”

“You’re counting?”

“Until you sat down, he was all I could see.”

When April looked at Selma, she felt a little rush of pleasure. Here was somebody who was not only related to Seymour Butts (although she looked nothing like him), but also lived in the same house with him.

“You know my brother, Seymour, don’t you?” Selma asked.

It was almost as if she had read April’s mind!

“Yes, I know him,” April said. She didn’t want to be too obvious but she hoped to convey in those few words that she and Seymour were on very intimate terms.

“Did you hear what he did?” Selma asked.

“No. What?”

“He and his boyfriend moved to California. They just packed up and left without a word to anybody. So impulsive!”

“Did you say ‘boyfriend’?”

“Yeah, didn’t you know he’s ‘that way’? I thought everybody knew it. He doesn’t go around talking about it but he doesn’t exactly make a secret of it, either.”

“When’s he coming back?” April asked with a sick feeling.

“Oh, he’s not ever coming back here,” Selma said. “He’s had it with this place. I can’t say I blame him. I’m going to get away from here, too, just as soon as I can.”

“People can certainly surprise you sometimes,” April said.

After lunch she was feeling too dispirited to remain at school, so she left for the day without telling anybody. Nobody cared where she was, anyway, she told herself; she wouldn’t even be missed.

She couldn’t go home because of her mother, so she just began walking, she didn’t know where. She didn’t have a thought about how she would get home; she didn’t care if she went home or not. She just kept thinking about how she had been so wrong about Seymour Butts and how she would never see him again, just when she realized she was in love with him. How could he just go away like that without saying anything to her? Did she mean nothing to him at all?

After walking for eight or ten blocks, she came to a little park that she had never seen before. She entered the park and went in far enough so she felt hidden from view. She found an inviting bench in the shade of an enormous maple tree and sat down. She cried some, knowing that nobody could see her and, after she had cried as much as she was going to, she lay on her back on the bench and closed her eyes.

When she opened them, a young man—more a boy, really—was standing about ten feet away looking at her. How long had he been standing there? She hadn’t heard him at all. Had he seen her crying?

She sat up, a little embarrassed, and smiled at the young man. He came and sat down beside her on the bench. He was nothing like Seymour Butts but quite interesting in his way. Instead of dark hair, he had fine, sandy-colored hair and the beginnings of a little moustache and hairy forearms. All the things she had been told about not being friendly with strangers passed through her mind and then were gone.

She took out her cigarettes and offered him one. He nodded his head as if a cigarette was the one thing in this world he needed and took one out of the pack. When she had taken one for herself, he lit hers and then his own. She blew out a cloud of smoke and he did the same; the two clouds merged into one. She looked into his eyes and he looked into hers. They hadn’t yet spoken a word. They seemed to have passed into a realm where words are not needed.

In a little while he stood up from the bench and motioned for her to follow him. He led her to another part of the park where there was a clump of bushes as big as a herd of elephants. He crouched down and crawled inside. She followed along behind him, smelling the damp earth and another smell that she was unable to identify. For the first time all day, she was thinking about something other than Seymour Butts.

December 30, 2012December 30, 2012 by allen0997

The Christmas Club

The Christmas Club ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(Published in Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k).)

Stanley and Virginia Miller lived in a modest four-room house on a tree-lined street in a small town. They had known each other their entire lives and had been married for ten years. To this union had been born two children: Georgette, age nine, and Ian, age seven. When Ian was born, Virginia experienced some complications and wasn’t able to have any more children, but that was fine with her because she thought two children were as many as she could reasonably hope to take care of. Both children attended the town’s public elementary school, the same school that Stanley and Virginia had gone to when they were growing up.

Stanley was never very good in school, had just barely graduated, and worked as a miner. He spent all day long, every day, below the ground chipping away at rock. The mine where he worked had been in operation for many years, and every year the mine became bigger and bigger until it had become so vast that people never believed how big it was until they saw it for themselves. It had become big enough, Stanley joked, to swallow the entire town. He sometimes had nightmares about the mine, about digging down too far to ever make it out again, and he would wake up calling for help and gasping for air. Every time he came out of the mine at the end of his shift, being out in the open air again seemed like something of a miracle.

Stanley’s take-home pay was meager and he and Virginia never quite had enough money to go around. After paying the rent, buying food, paying the gas bill and the light bill and all the other incidentals, they sometimes ran out of money before the end of the month. To help meet expenses, Virginia took in washing and ironing and occasionally hired herself out for “heavy cleaning” or some other kind of domestic work.

When Virginia was younger, before she married Stanley, she had worked in a tailor shop doing alterations and seamstress work. She thought she was quite good at it and she liked working for the old man who ran the tailor shop. Now that she was older and, knowing that she had real aptitude for the work, she wanted to buy her own sewing machine and whatever else was needed to go into business for herself. She was sure she could make enough money to supplement Stanley’s pay and provide a few little extras for her family.

When she spoke to Stanley about going to the bank and borrowing money to start her own little business, he was against the idea from the outset. He was superstitious about banks and he hated the thought of owing money. He had the idea that Virginia would never make enough money on her own to pay back a loan and he would have to make good on the loan himself.

In spite of the shortage of cash, Virginia was still able to save a little money here and there by scrimping and counting pennies. If she bought a cut of meat, for example, for thirteen cents less than she had paid for it the last time, she would put thirteen cents in her jar at the back of the kitchen cabinet. If the light bill was two dollars less this month than last month, she would put two dollars in the jar. When she had more than two or three dollars in the jar, usually in small change, she would take it out and deposit it into her Christmas Club account at the bank. By autumn she had about two hundred and thirty dollars in the account, but she didn’t want Stanley to know about it just yet. Eventually she would have to tell him, but she would deal with telling him at the appropriate time. She hoped he would be pleased with her for saving money he didn’t even know they had.

She wanted to give Ian and Georgette a wonderful Christmas, the kind of Christmas she had never had when she was growing up. Every Friday when she was finished at the grocery store and had the groceries stowed in the trunk of the car, she would take a walk down the block to look at the bicycles in the window of the hardware store. There was a boy’s bicycle and a girl’s bicycle that were very much alike. The boy’s bicycle was a little bigger, with a crossbar that the girl’s bicycle didn’t have. Both were shiny red, with chrome bumpers, pristine-looking whitewall tires, and streamers attached to the handlebars. She knew that any child would be thrilled to own such a bicycle.

When Virginia was growing up, Christmas never amounted to much in her house. Her father was much older than her mother and, although a decent man, he was odd in his own way. He didn’t believe in any kind of religious observance and would never allow the celebration of Christmas in his house. Christmas was, he said, for people with lots of money to throw away and he had none, in spite of the stocks and bonds he owned that eventually left Virginia’s mother well-off in her widowhood.

There were never any gifts or music or Christmas tree or decorations in their house, and on Christmas Day they usually had stew or hash or beans and cornbread for dinner, while Virginia’s father silently read the newspaper or listened to the stock market quotes or the war news on the radio and Virginia and her mother sat with their eyes downcast and ate in silence.

On the first Friday in December, Virginia went to the bank to withdraw the money from her Christmas Club account. She waited in line behind several other people, and when her turn came she stepped up to the teller’s window and handed the teller her passbook that showed the balance in her account. She told the teller she wanted to withdraw the money and close the account.

The teller frowned and squinted as she looked for the account number in her records. She had a double chin and eyebrows drawn on in graceful arcs halfway up her forehead. When she spoke, her voice had an odd little-girl quality about it. “Hold on a minute,” she said. “I’ll have to go check on this.” She turned and walked away to the rear of the bank and disappeared through a doorway.

When she came back, she smiled at Virginia and handed the passbook back to her. “Your money has already been drawn out of this account,” she said.

“There must be some mistake,” Virginia said. “I haven’t taken my money out.”

“No, but your husband did. I guess he forgot to tell you.”

Virginia just stood there looking at the teller with no expression on her face until the teller asked her if she was all right and if there was anything else she needed.

When she got back home, she felt better because she was sure the bank had made a mistake and, after speaking to Stanley when he returned from work, she would call the bank and have the matter straightened out in a matter of two minutes. Stanley would never take her money without telling her. He didn’t even know the money was there, so how could he take it out? She couldn’t wait for him to walk through the door so she could talk to him about it.

When Georgette and Ian arrived home from school, Virginia gave them some money and sent them to the store to buy a loaf of bread and a quart of milk. She gave them a little extra money so they could each buy themselves a candy bar, but she made them promise not to eat it until after supper.

She was sitting at the kitchen table thumbing through a magazine when Stanley came in from work, a few minutes later than usual. Without looking at Virginia, he set his lunch pail on the table and went to the sink to get a drink of water.

Virginia looked up from the magazine at the back of Stanley’s head. She waited until he had turned the water off and then she said, “I went to the bank today.”

He turned around and faced her with the glass of water in his hand, his hip resting against the sink. “What?” he asked.

“I said I went to the bank today. They told me you took the money out of my Christmas Club account. I was sure it had to be a mistake. I knew that, even if you had known about the money, you would never take it without telling me.”

“Oh,” he said, looking down at the floor.

“So, the question is: Did you withdraw the money from the Christmas Club account?”

“Yes, I guess I did,” he said.

“Why did you do that? That was my money. I saved it.”

“Just what is a Christmas Club anyway?”

“I want to know why you took my money.”

“Well, I think there’s a law somewhere that says your money is also my money.”

“You had no right to take it without telling me.”

“I was going to tell you.”

“That money was for Christmas. I wanted to buy some things for Ian and Georgette. I wanted to give them a nice Christmas.”

He poured his glass of water out into the sink. “Some things are a lot more important than Christmas,” he said.

“Do you still have the money?”

“No.”

“I want to know what happened to it.”

“Ian and Georgette have everything they need. They have food to eat and clothes to wear and they’re getting an education. That’s a lot more than I had.”

“What happened to the money?”

“I’ve owed my brother Richard two hundred dollars for a long time. He was desperate to get it back. He’s getting a divorce and he needs all the money he can get.”

“So, you’re telling me that my Christmas Club money went for your no-good brother’s most recent divorce?”

“He’s family,” Stanley said. “I think family is more important than buying stuff for the kids for Christmas that they don’t need.”

She wasn’t finished with what she wanted to say, but Ian and Georgette returned from the store and she didn’t want them to hear her and Stanley arguing about money. She stood up from the table and went to the sink and began peeling potatoes for supper.

Over the next few days, Virginia wouldn’t look at Stanley and she spoke to him only when he spoke first or when he asked her a question. She slept on the couch and when Stanley got up in the morning to get ready for work, she covered up her head with the blanket and wouldn’t get up and cook his breakfast as she usually did. She wouldn’t uncover her head until after he had left for work.

In the second week of December, there was an accident in the mine. Stanley and two other miners were injured when some rock above where they were working gave way and fell on them. One of the miners died instantly. Stanley and the other miner were rushed to the hospital.

Stanley had a fractured skull and a badly broken arm and shoulder and was in a coma. Somebody from the mine called Virginia and told her what had happened and she got the next-door neighbor to drive her to the hospital in his car. She sat in a chair by Stanley’s bedside and prayed that he would be all right. She twisted a handkerchief in her hand and wept some, but most of the time she just looked at Stanley lying in the bed, hoping to see some sign that he was going to be all right. When there was no one else in the room, she told him—even though he was unconscious—that she was sorry for the way she behaved about the Christmas Club money. He was right, she said; some things are a lot more important than Christmas presents.

After a day and a half, Stanley died without ever regaining consciousness. Virginia knew there had never been any hope that he would live. She went home and sat on the sofa and cried and waited for Ian and Georgette to come home from school to tell them their father was dead.

A week after Stanley’s funeral, two letters came in the mail. Virginia carried them into the kitchen and opened them one after the other with a paring knife. One was from the mine where Stanley worked and it contained his last two weeks’ pay. The other letter was from the miners’ union; it was a letter of condolence and a “death benefit” check in the amount of three hundred dollars. These two checks were all the money she had in the world.

That night she lay awake most of the night, hearing the forlorn sound of the train whistles off in the distance. After Ian and Georgette left for school the next morning, she put on her clothes and drove downtown with the two checks. She went to the bank and deposited Stanley’s paycheck to pay for the rent and other bills that would soon be coming due. The death benefit check she endorsed. When the teller handed her six crisp fifty-dollar bills, she folded the money and put it inside the zipper compartment inside her purse. It was the most money she had ever seen or owned at one time.

Her next stop was the hardware store. Luckily they still had the bicycles in stock that she admired and hoped to get for Ian and Georgette. She bought both bicycles, paying a small down-payment on them and arranging to have them delivered to her house on the day before Christmas. She signed an agreement stating she would make monthly payments on the bicycles until they were paid for.

After the hardware store, she went to another store where they sold sewing machines and asked to see the best top-of-the-line machine the store carried. The clerk demonstrated the machine and told her it was so simple to operate even a child could use it. She bought the machine and asked that it be delivered to her house as soon as possible.

After the sewing machine store, she went to another store where she bought a record player with a radio built into it and a selection of records that she knew Ian and Georgette would like. In the same store she bought new winter coats for herself and for Ian and Georgette, refusing to add up in her head the amount of money she had spent that afternoon.

On her way back home she stopped at the supermarket, where she bought a large turkey and everything she would need for a Christmas dinner. She also bought a lot of extra things she would not ordinarily buy, such as candy and nuts and fruit. Outside the supermarket where they were selling Christmas trees she bought a large fir tree that would reach all the way to the ceiling in their little house. The clerk tied the tree to the top of the car for her.

When she got back home, she carried everything inside, and then carried the Christmas tree in and set it up in the living room. She went down to the basement to bring up the lights and decorations. She was stringing lights on the tree when Ian and Georgette came home from school. She knew they would appreciate decorating the tree by themselves without any help from her.

She stood back and watched as they excitedly took the decorations out of the box and began putting them on the tree. She tried to remember what it was like to be their age and find joy in such simple things; she had lost the feeling long ago and would never experience it again.

The phone began ringing in the kitchen. She didn’t want to leave the Christmas tree and answer it, but she would tell whoever it was that she would call them back later, after supper. It was a woman down the street, a Mrs. Capers, for whom she had done some housecleaning a while back.

Mrs. Capers had heard about Virginia’s past experience as a seamstress and wanted to know if she was interested in coming by her house the day after Christmas and talking to her about making some new drapes for the dining room. If everything went well (that is, if she liked the drapes), she would have other work to be done. Also, she had a couple of lady friends who needed to have all their clothes let out due to the middle-aged expansion. Having their old clothes altered would be so much cheaper than buying new ones.

Virginia arranged with Mrs. Capers to come around to her house at one o’clock on the twenty-sixth. When she hung up the phone and went back into the living room, Georgette stopped what she was doing and looked at her.

“Who was that on the phone?” she asked.

“It was the spirit of Christmas,” Virginia said.

Georgette didn’t ask for an explanation because they had all the lights strung on the tree. When Ian plugged them in and they saw that all of them still worked after their year-long hibernation in the basement, Virginia took that as a very good sign.

December 17, 2012December 17, 2012 by allen0997

The Teddy Bear Phase

The Teddy Bear Phase ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Phillip stood behind the door in his pajamas, clutching Elfie to his chest. He was listening to his parents arguing in the kitchen.

“You should have consulted me first,” father said.

“I didn’t think I needed to ask your permission,” mother said.

“If you had, I wouldn’t have given it.”

“He’s all that’s left of my family. I think we can tolerate him for a couple of days.”

“Yes, but why did you have to invite him at Christmas?”

“Christmas is a time for families to reunite. I can see my mother smiling down at me from heaven for inviting her only brother into my home.”

“What makes you think she’s in heaven? And it’s our home. Not my home.”

“Should I put him in the guest room or do you think he’d be more comfortable in the spare bedroom?”

“How about in the shed outback where we keep the gardening tools?”

“Once you get to know him, you’ll like him.”

“I don’t want an alcoholic around Phillip and Chickie.”

“He’s a recovered alcoholic.”

“How about if I just take them to a hotel and you can have the house to yourself with your wonderful uncle?”

“We’ll welcome him as a family. That’s what he needs.”

So it was decided that mother’s long-lost Uncle Benny would come for a Christmas visit. Father said that if he didn’t leave by the day after Christmas at the latest, he was going to grab him by the throat and throw him into the street. There was to be no extended visit.

When Uncle Benny arrived by taxicab on the day before Christmas, he had a box of candy for mother (she was dieting), a box of Havana cigars for father (he had no intention of smoking them), and Groucho glasses and a flashlight for Phillip and Chickie. Chickie was only five and was enchanted by the flashlight. She shone it all around the room, in her own mouth, in the dog’s face.

Phillip was a little frightened of Uncle Benny from the first time he met him. He was tall, slightly stooped, and had a wrinkled face; he wore a black wig that looked like it belonged on somebody else’s head. His dentures were too big and looked as if they might fly out of his mouth with a life of their own.

“Who is this little chappy?” Uncle Benny asked.

“This is Phillip,” mother said, standing behind him and putting her hands on his shoulders. “He’s our oldest.”

“And how old is Phillip, may I ask?”

“He’s eight.”

“And what is that thing he’s holding in his arms?”

“That’s Elfie, his teddy bear,” mother said. “It’s his favorite toy. He takes it with him everywhere he goes. He can’t go to sleep without it.”

“I see,” Uncle Benny said. “Don’t you think he’s a little old for a teddy bear?”

Mother laughed. “We indulge him in his teddy bear phase,” she said. “I expect it’ll pass after a while.”

“I think we need to take that thing away from him and throw it in the river,” Uncle Benny said, twisting Elfie’s furry ear.

Phillip felt Elfie stiffen in his arms. When he went into the bathroom to wash his hands for dinner, he locked the door and set Elfie beside the sink.

“I don’t like him,” Elfie said. “He’s a jerk and he smells funny.”

“I don’t like him, either,” Phillip said, “but he’ll only be here until day after tomorrow. He’s family so we have to be nice to him.”

“Bah!” Elfie said.

After dinner it was snowing, so mother opened the curtains and turned off all the lights in the living room except the ones on the Christmas tree. Father read in the newspaper that it was going to get down below zero, a record low for Christmas Eve, so he built a big fire in the fireplace.

“It feels exactly the way Christmas should,” mother said.

Chickie wanted to open her presents but mother told her she had to wait until after Santa had had a chance to drop by. She fell asleep on the couch while she was watching the snow out the window, so mother put her to bed.

Mother served eggnog to father and Uncle Benny, adding a little harmless (she thought) whiskey for “body.” Uncle Benny took a drink and said it was too weak; he asked mother to bring the bottle of whiskey in from the kitchen so he could flavor the eggnog to his own liking. She and father exchanged a significant look, but she went and got the bottle anyway and set it on the table next to Uncle Benny.

Father had one glass of eggnog, but Uncle Benny kept drinking. Each time mother refilled his glass, he added a generous amount of whiskey from the bottle. Mother and father could see him getting drunk, but they said nothing. To anybody else she would have said, “Don’t you think you’ve had enough,” but she couldn’t bring herself to say that to Uncle Benny. He was family and she didn’t want to offend him.

Phillip was bored with Uncle Benny; he knew that he was spoiling the fun that he and Chickie would be having on Christmas Eve. He wanted to turn on the TV, but mother said it was rude to have it on when company was present. She made him a cup of cocoa and a bowl of popcorn and told him he could sit by the fire for a while longer with the grownups but he would have to go to bed soon because tomorrow was a big day.

Uncle Benny was telling mother and father about all the places he had been. He had worked as purser on a passenger ship and had been all over the world.

“I had to get out of the country,” he said. “My ex-wife was after me for back alimony payments. They couldn’t touch me as long as I was at sea.”

“Didn’t they get you when you came back?” father asked.

“No, because by that time the old girl had found some other sucker to marry and had dropped the suit against me. She was my third wife and I learned from that experience never to get married again, although I had plenty of chances, believe me. Haw-haw-haw!”

“Whatever happened to your daughter?” mother asked.

“The last I heard, she was living in Texas, but that was years ago. She wants nothing to do with me.”

“If I knew her address, I’d write to her. After all, she’s the only first cousin I have.”

“You’d be wasting your time, I’m afraid,” Uncle Benny said.

Further conversation revealed that he had been living in a cheap rooming house but was going to have to move because the landlady had rented to his room to another man.

“Where will you go?” mother asked.

“Oh, don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ve always got irons in the fire. I always land on my feet.”

When grownups were talking endlessly, or “visiting” as they called it, Phillip had a knack of blocking out the words so the voices began to sound like dogs barking off in the distance or the drone of a machine. After he finished his cocoa and ate all the popcorn, he fell asleep on the settee, holding Elfie in his arms.

He awoke with a start. Uncle Benny was bending over him, smiling at him with those big teeth. Mother and father were out of the room.

“I’m going to do you a big favor, now” Uncle Benny said, slurring the words.

He wrenched Elfie out of Phillip’s arms and, taking three quick steps to the fireplace, threw him in the fire. Phillip jumped up off the settee and screamed as if he himself had been thrown into the fire. As mother came running in from the kitchen, Phillip fainted and fell to the floor unconscious.

When he came to, he was in his bed in his room but he didn’t remember how he got there. All the lights were off but the room was very bright from the drapes never having been drawn and the snow outside. He remembered what happened to Elfie and began crying.

The door to his room opened silently—he could see the bar of light from the hallway—and then closed again. He was surprised—and rapturously happy—to see Elfie climb up on the bed and sit down beside him just inches from his face.

“You’re all right!” he said, reaching out and touching Elfie on the head to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.

“Mother took the andiron and pulled me out before I caught on fire,” Elfie said. “Happy to say, I’m made from nonflammable material.”

“The house is quiet now,” Philip said. “I don’t hear a thing.”

“Mother and father have gone to bed. Uncle Benny is outside smoking a cigarette in his pajamas and bathrobe. He’s as drunk as a coot and it’s killing cold outside. If he couldn’t get back inside for some reason, he’d freeze to death and they wouldn’t find him until morning. I can see him walking down the street in his bedroom slippers trying to get help and falling and busting his hip. There’s nobody around on Christmas Eve. Too bad.”

Phillip threw back the covers and stood up. “I’ll be back in just a minute,” he said. “I think father forgot to lock the door.”

December 9, 2012December 17, 2012 by allen0997

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.

November 24, 2012November 25, 2012 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.

November 19, 2012 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.

November 16, 2012November 17, 2012 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.

November 11, 2012November 12, 2012 by allen0997