Tag: short story

It Was Christmas ~ A Short Story

It Was Christmas image 1
It Was Christmas
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This short story has been published in The Literary Hatchet.)

I had an end room on the fifth floor of Richardson Hall. Having an end room meant I didn’t have to have a roommate because it was a small, odd-shaped room and there was only room for one person. I considered myself lucky to get one of the few single-occupancy rooms, especially considering who my roommate might have been.

I was in my third year at State University, so I was used to dormitory life. Richardson Hall was the oldest building on campus, built around 1895. I liked its creaking elevator, drafty windows, and high ceilings. There were people who wanted to tear it down and put a parking lot in its place, but I think it’s a shame to destroy a historic old building to make way for something new and ugly. It’s like destroying a work of art.

Well, Christmas was here again and I was one of the few staying on campus. I could have gone home, but I wanted to stay at school, even though it meant I would be alone. I didn’t mind being alone. I lived six hundred miles away and the trip by bus usually made me vomit. I could have flown, but I hated airplanes more than I hated buses.

When I told my mother I wasn’t coming home for Christmas, her feelings were hurt and she almost cried. She said she couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to be with my family during the most joyous season of the year, but I told her I was run down and if I stayed at school I could catch up on my rest and read a book I was supposed to read without distractions. She accepted my explanation but wasn’t happy about it. She implied I wanted to stay at school because I was enamored of some girl there. I laughed and let her think whatever she wanted.

The cafeteria was closed for Christmas vacation, so it meant that during the twelve days of vacation I would have to eat at one of the restaurants in town or eat from my stock of non-perishable foods that I kept in the desk drawer in my room. My mother sent me five one-hundred dollar bills in a Christmas card. She wrote that she hoped I had a lovely Christmas. Go someplace nice and have a good dinner on Christmas Day, she wrote. I failed to tell her everybody else went home and I practically had the whole dormitory to myself, not to mention the entire campus.

Besides me all the way up on the fifth floor, there were only four other people in the whole building who didn’t go home for Christmas. In five floors, there were five people. I liked those odds. I liked the feeling of being by myself in this old relic of a building. If there were any ghosts—and I’m sure there were—I was sure to see them.

The toilets and showers were down the hall from my room. I always undressed in my room and wore my bathrobe down the hall to the shower. Now that I was alone, I could walk down the hall naked the way everybody else did. The first time I did it, I walked all over the floor naked, even sitting for a while on the ratty, vinyl-covered couch in the TV room. I loved the feeling of freedom, the feeling of being the last person left alive. I felt like Robinson Crusoe and, like him, I had everything I needed.

On my first night alone on the fifth floor, I covered up in bed and read by my little bedside lamp. It had turned much colder outside and the wind was kicking up. The wind rattled the old windows in their frames and soon it started to rain. I lay for a while, listening to the wind and the rain and the quiet of the old building and soon I turned off the light and burrowed under the covers, experiencing a sense of well-being.

Sometime in the night the rain turned to snow and when I got up in the morning, there were at least a couple of inches on the ground. It was perfect. Nothing felt more like Christmas than snow. I didn’t have anything for breakfast, so I dressed and walked across campus to the student union to get a cinnamon roll and a cup of tea.

While I was sitting at a table my myself looking out the window, Dorian Dye came in and helped himself to the seat beside me. I knew him slightly and didn’t like him very much. He had a thin, rat-like face and discolored teeth. He was nosy and always asked questions that were none of his business. One time he asked me how much a jacket cost that I was wearing and another time he asked me my grade-point average.

“Hello, there, stranger!” he said.

“Hi, Dorian,” I said, wishing he might disappear.

“I heard you were one of the few staying behind in Richardson Hall.”

“Who told you that?”

“Oh, a little birdie told me!”

“There’s no reason to be coy, Dorian,” I said. “Just come right out and say it.”

“So, why did you stay behind?” he asked.

“My family doesn’t like me. They paid me to stay away.”

“Oh, hah-hah-hah! I don’t think I believe that!”

“You don’t think I’d tell you the real reason, do you?”

“Okay, so don’t tell me. I don’t care. Do you want to know why I stayed behind and didn’t go home?”

“Not especially,” I said.

“My mother is bipolar and an alcoholic and I can’t stand to be in the house with her.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Listen. I’m on the third floor of Richardson Hall and I’m the only one there, so if you get lonesome give me a holler.”

“I won’t get lonesome,” I said. “I like the solitude.”

“Yes, you’re the solitary type, aren’t you?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“When I’m in my room alone, I try not to think about the all the ghosts in the building.”

“There’s only one, isn’t there?”

“Yes, there’s the boy who hanged himself in his room, but in a building that old there’s bound to be others.”

“I don’t mind a ghost or two,” I said.

“Tomorrow night is Christmas Eve. What are you going to do?”

“Nothing special, I guess.”

“Give me a call and we’ll get together.”

“I don’t think so, Dorian. I’ll probably just do some reading and then go to bed.”

“Well, if you change your mind, let me know. My number is in the student directory.”

I knew Dorian was another loser like me; what he said about not going home confirmed it. I really did have plans for Christmas Eve, but I didn’t especially want to discuss them with Dorian.

In the afternoon it was snowing again in a Christmassy way, so I put on my boots and my coat and walked downtown. The stores were crowded, as one might expect two days before Christmas, but I braved the crowds and tried to ignore them. I spent an hour or so looking around in the bookstore and bought two books, one that I wanted to read and one that I had to read if I knew what was good for me. Then I braved the department store and walked all over the three floors, absorbing the Christmas atmosphere, listening to the Christmas music, and observing the strange cavalcade of human life. I bought myself a wool cap and a pair of gloves. Merry Christmas to me.

After I left the department store, I stopped at a diner that had festive lights in the window and sat at the counter and ate a large cod sandwich with fried potatoes they called chips and drank a chocolate milkshake. While I was in the diner, nobody spoke to me except the waitress who took my order. I might have been invisible. I might have been the ghost of the boy who hanged himself in his room.

On my way back to the dormitory I stopped at the corner grocery and bought a few oranges, some donuts, a large candy cane, a loaf of French bread, a bag of pretzels, and a small jar of peanut butter. I also bought a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of fizzy white wine. I wasn’t much of a drinker or a smoker, but I figured I needed to do something out of the ordinary to celebrate the holiday. While I was paying for my purchases, an old woman wearing rhinestone glasses who worked in the store put a sprig of mistletoe in my bag. Nobody could say I didn’t have what I needed to celebrate my first Christmas away from home.

That evening I was sleepy, so I got into bed and read for a while and then I turned off the light and lay there listening to Christmas music on the radio. It was still snowing outside and the wind was gusting against the windows. Most people don’t like the snow, but no matter how much it snowed it didn’t bother me. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was happy and comfortable—snug as a bug in a rug, as my grandma used to say when I was little.

After I was asleep, somebody knocked on my door, but I didn’t get out of bed to answer it. I preferred to let them think I wasn’t there. Maybe it was the ghost of the boy who hanged himself in his room, but I don’t think ghosts knock on doors. It was probably Dorian Dye, since he was one of the few people who knew I was there.

The next day was the day before Christmas. I got up and had an orange and a chunk of French bread and a donut for breakfast, and then I took a shower and shaved. The weather forecast on the radio said the snow would continue through the day and into the night, with the temperature in the teens. It was ideal Christmas weather.

In the afternoon I put on my new wool cap and gloves and walked downtown, welcoming the frigid wind in my face. I had an early dinner at an Italian restaurant and then I went to a movie.

There were three movie theatres in town to choose from. I went to the one that showed only old movies and saw a double feature of movies from the 1930s. It was a very old theatre, with appropriate décor and all the pungent odors, and I sat down close to the front, as I always do, and enjoyed the feeling of stepping into another time. There weren’t more than fifteen or twenty other people in the theatre—it was, after all, Christmas Eve—and nobody made a sound when the movies were playing, not even laughing when something funny happened.

When the show was over and I left the theatre, the snow had stopped but the wind was just as cold as before, if not colder. There were still lots of people everywhere, but not nearly as many as before. Most people had gone home, I supposed, to rest up for Santa.

When I got back to the dormitory, it was after eleven o’clock. I put on my pajamas and bathrobe and, since it was Christmas Eve, opened my bottle of wine. I drank about half the bottle sitting up in bed, listening to the radio, until I was partly drunk. I saw out the window that it was snowing again. When I was seven years old, I would have been watching in the sky for signs of Santa.

Thinking of Santa made me think of home and my parents. I wondered what they were doing on Christmas Eve. It was the first Christmas Eve of my life that I hadn’t been with them. They had probably eaten a silent dinner and when they were finished, my mother would start clearing the dishes off  the table and my father would go into the living room and expire in front of the TV. I wondered if they were lonely and thinking of me, their only child.

That night I dreamed of the boy who hanged himself in his room in Richardson Hall. He came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. I sat up and introduced myself. He had dark circles around his eyes and his eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets, but he tried to smile. He still had the noose around his neck that he hanged himself with. I asked him why he was so unhappy, but he didn’t answer. I also asked him if he would do it over again if he had the chance but he didn’t answer that, either.

A little while later I dreamed that I got out of the bed and looked at myself in the mirror over the sink without turning on the light, and I had become the boy who hanged himself in his room. The boy was me. I was the boy. We were the same person. I tried to remove the noose, but the knot was so tight I couldn’t get it loose.

Christmas morning I slept until ten o’clock. I got dressed and was just about to go over to the student union for a light breakfast, when there was a knock at my door. I thought it might be the ghost of the boy who hanged himself in his room, so I opened the door and when I did I was disappointed to see Dorian Dye. He was singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” I wanted to smack him in the mouth to get him to shut up.

“Have you seen any ghosts?” he asked as he came into my room and draped himself on my bed.

“A few,” I said.

“Are you lonely yet and wishing you had gone home instead of staying in this dreary old place?”

“Not a bit, Dorian,” I said. “Would you please get your shoes off my bedspread?”

“Yes, sir!” he laughed. “Do you know Vernon Vogel?”

“No, I don’t know Vernon Vogel,” I said with a hint of impatience. “Is that a person?”

“Hah-hah-hah! Well, of course he’s a person! What else would he be?”

“I don’t know, Dorian. You tell me.”

“Well, Vernon has a car.”

“I’m so happy for him.”

“Well, since Vernon’s alone for Christmas, and since I’m alone for Christmas, and since Vernon has a car, we’re going to Pirandello’s for Christmas dinner. They have a special Christmas buffet. Have you ever been to Pirandello’s?”

“Once, I think.”

“I told Vernon about you, all alone here on the fifth floor, and he and I both decided it would be the neighborly thing to do to ask you to come along. We’ll make it a threesome.”

“I don’t think so, Dorian. Thanks for thinking of me, though.”

“Do you think you’re too good for Vernon and me?”

“Of course not, Dorian! I just don’t feel much like going. I have a sore throat and I’m kind of achy. I might be coming down with something.”

“What will you do for dinner?”

“I don’t know. Probably not much of anything.”

“We’ll have fun and the food will be great.”

“I don’t think…”

“What will you do if you don’t go? Just sit here all alone in your room?”

“I don’t know. I was thinking I might…”

“If you don’t have the money for Pirandello’s, I can pay for both of us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Dorian! Of course, I have the money for Pirandello’s!”

“So you’ll go, then?”

“All right, I’ll go.”

“Excellent! Meet me downstairs at four o’clock and we’ll go to Vernon’s room.”

I wanted to go out for Christmas dinner with Dorian and Vernon Vogel about as much as I wanted to eat ground glass, but it was more fun than I thought it would be. Vernon, a pleasant enough fellow, was the proud owner of a sleek red sports car.

Pirandello’s was about fifteen miles outside of town. It was a swanky place and packed with people, as if nobody stayed at home for Christmas dinner anymore. As Dorian said, the food was terrific. I ate more than was healthy, including turkey, duck and beef, not to mention three desserts.

When we left Pirandello’s, Vernon had had a little too much champagne—I had only had two glasses—so I drove back to school. I was glad for the chance to drive a European sports car for once in my life.

Back at Richardson Hall, Dorian wanted me to walk downtown with him to take in the Christmas lights, but I told him I had a headache and just wanted to go to my room.

I got into bed and drank the second half of the bottle of wine from the day before, listening to Christmas carols on the radio. Christmas really was a special time of the year. There was nothing else like it. My mother would be happy to know I had Christmas dinner with friends (even if they weren’t exactly good friends) and wasn’t alone.

I slept all night without waking up. In the morning I woke up to the phone ringing down the hall. I looked at the clock and saw it wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. Who gets up that early the day after Christmas? I groaned and rolled over and went back to sleep.

In a little while the phone rang again. Everything was so quiet and the phone so loud that it seemed it was in the room with me. It was probably a wrong number or somebody calling somebody who wasn’t there. Without bothering to put on my bathrobe, I opened my door and went down the chilly hallway and lifted up the receiver, ready to slam it down again.

It was my mother. As soon as I heard her say my name, I knew something was wrong.

My father had a heart attack in the early-morning hours of Christmas Day. An ambulance came and took him to the hospital and he died around noon. He was fifty-one years old.

When I hung up the phone from talking to my mother, I wasn’t sure if anything was real. It was Christmas, my father was dead without warning, and I was standing in the silent hallway on the fifth floor of Richardson Hall in my flannel pajamas. I was stunned. I had to wait an hour or so before I could think, or get dressed, or do anything.

I called the airport and reserved a seat on a flight for later that day. I packed my bag and when it was time to go, I called a taxi.

During the short flight, I sat staring out the window and didn’t exchange a word with a single person. My tearful mother picked me up in her Cadillac when my flight landed. From there it was on to the funeral home to pick out a casket and plan a dignified burial. I kept thinking that if I had gone home for Christmas in the first place, my father wouldn’t have had a heart attack and wouldn’t have died. I knew my mother was thinking the same thing. I was the villain of the day.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Christmas Club

Christmas 9

The Christmas Club ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~ 

(This short story has been 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.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Cemetery Christmas

Cemetery Christmas
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

Calvin Horne took the wreath out of the back of his car and walked down the hill with it slung over his shoulder like a garden hose to his parents’ grave. It was the day before Christmas and he didn’t want to be in the cemetery; didn’t want to be reminded of death on a joyous holiday. Christmas was about birth, about what’s good in the world.

He hadn’t been especially close to either of his parents. His mother, dead two years, was a difficult and obstinate old woman. The two of them, Calvin and his mother, could hardly be in the same room together without a clash of wills. His father had been dead for twenty years and was only a distant memory.

He trudged down one hill and up another one. It was there, at the top of the next hill, where his parents were buried. His mother had generously offered to buy the plot for him on the other side of her, but he declined the offer. (He wanted simply to vaporize into the air as if he never existed at all.) Now that space was occupied by a stranger that his mother, in all probability, wouldn’t have liked.

His parents had a large and rather ostentatious granite headstone as tall as a man’s head that his mother bought and paid for. In the middle of the stone, at the top, the name Horne was etched in large letters. Below were the names, birth and death dates of Byron and Julia. Under the names were two intertwined hearts with an arrow shot through them and, in fancy script, the ironic words Together Forever. They were together, he was sure, only in the sense that they were both dead.

He took a deep breath, a little winded from his climb up the hill, and pushed the legs of the wreath’s tripod into the soft earth in front of the headstone. Now, if his sister or any other family members came snooping around, they wouldn’t be able to say he hadn’t discharged his duty to his parents at Christmas.

The wreath seemed secure enough to withstand any winter blasts, so he pulled his gloves back on over his frozen fingers and was just about to retrace his steps back to the car, when he heard someone coming.

“I hear voices in the cemetery, don’t you?” a voice said.

He turned and saw a large woman in a fur coat and fur hat coming toward him. “What?” he asked.

“I said I hear voices when I’m in the cemetery. Don’t you?”

He thought she might be making a joke, but he wasn’t sure.

“No, I don’t hear any voices,” he said. “All I hear is quiet.”

“Yes, the quiet of the grave,” the woman said. “Do you need any help?”

“Why, no,” he said. “I was just leaving.”

“What are you doing here today?”

“I came to put a Christmas wreath on my parents’ graves.”

The woman looked down at the headstone and nodded. “They’re dead,” she said.

“Yes, that’s why they’re buried in the cemetery.”

“I’ll bet you were a good son.”

“Well, I can say I at least tried.”

“Do you have other family?”

“A sister and a son.”

“How old’s your son.”

“Twenty-two.”

“What happened to your wife?”

“We got divorced. She’s married to somebody else now.”

“What does she…

“I think that’s enough questions,” he said. “Especially since we don’t know each other.”

“Are you in a hurry to get away?” she asked.

“No more questions, I said.”

“I’ll bet you have a girlfriend waiting for you someplace, don’t you? Or maybe a boyfriend?”

“Let’s just say that’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Okay. I get the picture. You don’t want to talk to me.”

“Well, it’s cold and it is Christmas.”

“Not today. Today is the day before Christmas. Tomorrow is Christmas.”

“Yeah. Enjoy your walk through the cemetery, or whatever it is you’re doing. I’ve got to be going.”

“Can’t you stay and visit a while?”

“No. I did what I came to do and now I need to go.”

“Haven’t we met before?” she asked. “A long time ago.”

“It isn’t likely.”

“I feel as if I’ve always known you.”

“We’ve never met, I’m sure of it.”

“Do you find me at all attractive?” she asked.

“What kind of a question is that? Of course I don’t!”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“I have to be going.”

He started to move away and she stepped in front of him.

“Could you spare me some change?” she asked.

“No, I can’t spare you any change. I don’t have any change. I might ask why you need change in a cemetery, wearing a fur coat, but the honest truth is I don’t care.”

“That’s not very nice. I thought at first you were a nice man.”

“Well, I’m not!”

“Where is your Christmas spirit?”

“It disappeared as soon as you started talking to me.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“I have no opinion of you one way or the other.”

“My brother, Ogden, will be along to pick me up any minute. He went to buy some cigarettes. When I tell him how you insulted me, he’ll be awfully mad.”

“I didn’t insult you!”

“You did! You said you found me unattractive and you didn’t want to talk to me.”

“If you hadn’t spoken to me first, I would never have said anything to you at all!”

“Well, how are people supposed to get to know one another?”

“They’re not!”

“Can I come home with you?”

“No!”

“I’ll bet you have a beautiful home, don’t you?”

“None of your business!”

“I’ll do anything you want!”

“None of your… I don’t want anything from you except for you to stop annoying me!”

“If you get to know me, I’m sure you’ll like me.”

“Dear Lord, why me?”

She lifted her arms up and put her hands behind his neck, locking her fingers at the back of his head.

“Stop that!” he said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

He took hold of her wrists and forced her to release her grasp.

“You don’t like women at all, do you?” she asked.

“It isn’t any of your business what I like! When I leave here, I’m going straight to the police station and tell them there’s a crazy woman in a bearskin coat accosting people in the cemetery. They’ll send a squad car out here and pick you up.”

“Well, you don’t have to be so unkind about it!”

Down the hill she saw Ogden, her brother, lurking behind a tree. She called to him, he spotted her and began walking up the hill. In less than a minute, he was standing before them.

“Who’s this bozo?” Ogden said with a sneer. With his fat face, fur coat and fur hat, he was the male equivalent of the woman.

“He wanted to leave, but I kept him here,” she said.

“Good work, Bootsie girl!” Ogden said.

“Your names are Bootsie and Ogden?” Calvin asked.

“Yeah, what of it?” Ogden said.

“He insulted me, Oggie!” Bootsie said.

“Oh, he did, did he? How did he insult you?”

“He doesn’t like me. I offered to go home with him and do anything he wants, but he said he’s not interested.”

“Well, that’s not very gentlemanly, is it?”

“Oh, I get it.” Calvin said. “She’s a whore and you’re her pimp.”

“Ooh! Some words are so ugly, don’t you think?” Ogden said.

He pulled a small gun out of his jacket and pointed it at Calvin.

“You’re wasting your time robbing me,” Calvin said. “I only have about two dollars.”

“Prove it!” Ogden said. “Give me your wallet!”

Calvin removed his wallet and handed it to Ogden as if it was something he did every day. Ogden opened it; after he had thoroughly examined its interior, he looked back at Calvin with hatred.

“You’ve got two lousy dollars? And no credit cards? What kind of a loser doesn’t have any credit cards?”

“I always pay for everything in cash.”

“You’re a deadbeat, you know that?”

“I told you it wouldn’t do you any good.”

“How about if I drive you to your bank and you withdraw about two thousand dollars from your account and give it to me and Bootsie here as a Christmas present?”

“What makes you think I have two thousand dollars in the bank?” Calvin said.

“Fellows like you always have lots of money in the bank.”

“The bank is closed for the Christmas holiday.”

“Well, isn’t that that just too convenient!”

Bootsie whispered in Ogden’s ear. His bewildered expression faded and he smiled. “I’ll bet you’ve got an expensive watch, haven’t you?”

“I have a Timex. It cost twenty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents and I’ve had it for six years.

“All right, Mr. Smart Aleck! Hand it over!”

Calvin unfastened the watch and gave it to Ogden with a smile.

“All right!” Ogden said. “I have two dollars from you and a cheap watch. If that’s the best you can do, I’m going to have to kill you and if I do nobody will find your frozen body at least for a couple of days, since it’s a holiday and all.”

“No, don’t kill him,” Bootsie said reasonably. “He’s not worth it. Just let him go.”

“And he’ll go straight to the police.”

“We’ll be long gone by the time they get here.”

“He knows what we look like, for Christ’s sake!”

“So what? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in the penitentiary? I don’t think I do! Only a crazy person would kill a guy over two dollars and a cheap watch.”

“I can’t just let him go without doin’ nothin’ to him,” Ogden said.

“Just kick his ass good.”

“No, I know!” Ogden said. “I’ll make him strip naked and he’ll have to walk home with his best parts on display for all the world to see.”

“You really are sick, you know that?” Bootsie said. “Nobody’s going to strip naked! It’s too damn cold for that shit!”

“Hey! You know what?” Calvin said. “I just saw two police cars turn into the cemetery. They’ll be on top of us in about one minute!”

Ogden and Bootsie turned all the way around in confusion and, seeing nothing, began running down the hill to get away.

“A couple of professional criminals!” Calvin said to himself and laughed.

He picked up the gun where Ogden had dropped it beside the trunk of a tree and slipped it into the pocket of his coat. He doubted the gun would even shoot, but it would be an interesting piece of evidence to turn over to the police so they could know he wasn’t just making the whole thing up.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Frozen Charlotte ~ A Short Story

Frozen Charlotte image 6

~ Frozen Charlotte ~
A Short Story by Allen Kopp

(This short story has been published in The Literary Hatchet.)

The snow has stopped falling. The temperature hovers at fifteen degrees. The wind is minimal. The air crackles with electricity. The stars twinkle like diamonds on a bed of blue-black velvet. Atmospherically it is the best Christmas Eve on record.

Roads are snow-packed and have been for weeks. The best way to get from place to place is by horse-drawn sleigh. The automobile is still not in common use, as it is 1897, but those days are coming.

Charlotte Little will be attending the party at the Whites on her own, even though she is only twelve. Vardaman will drive the sleigh. He will watch out for her and see that she returns safely.

It is to be a party for adults as well as children. There will be an orchestra, bountiful food and drink, musical acts, caroling, magic tricks, surprises and a visit from Santa. Those who attend the party will remember it all their lives into old age. They will take memories of the party to their graves.

As the best friend of Amy White, Charlotte will be an honored guest at the party. She doesn’t mind that she has to go alone but finds it rather exciting and grown-up. She has a new dress made for her by a real dressmaker. It is white bombazine with red satin trim. It reminds her of peppermint, of Christmas. She has never had a dress before of which she is so proud.

She is to leave at five o’clock. Allowing for no mishaps with the sleigh, she will arrive at the party at six o’clock. She is dressed and ready to go hours in advance. Mother tries to get her to eat before she goes, but she is too excited; there will be lots of time to eat later.

When she goes down to leave, mother and father are waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. Mother has her coat and scarf for her and father her fur hat, gloves and galoshes, but she doesn’t want to put any of them on. She has spent hours getting herself ready for the party and doesn’t want to spoil the effect. The coat will flatten the frills and puffs of her dress and the fur hat will mess up her hair. She doesn’t need the boots at all but will walk in tracks that have already been made. As a kind of concession, she puts the scarf around her shoulders and slips the gloves on her hands.

Vardaman is waiting for her in the sleigh at the front gate, whip in hand. He is so bundled up in his riding accoutrements that only his eyes can be seen. Charlotte gets into the sleigh, piling her warm winter coat and fur hat on top of the lap robes in the corner of the seat. She throws her galoshes on the floor of the sleigh and forgets about them. Who wears galoshes with a fancy Christmas dress?

Vardaman drives slowly at first and then faster. Soon he seems to be flying without leaving the ground. The trees and farmhouses whiz past in an icy blur. Charlotte breathes deeply of the icy air and looks up at the twinkling stars. Already she is having a good time, and she’s not even at the party yet. She spreads her coat over her lap, but that is the only concession she makes to the cold.

She doesn’t speak a word on the way. If she has anything to say, she would have to say it to Vardaman and she rarely speaks to Vardaman unless he speaks first. He is what they call all business.

The trip goes smoothly enough without incident. Vardaman has guided the sleigh expertly and efficiently, as he always does. He pulls up to the side of the house belonging to the Whites and gets out, throwing a blanket over the horse’s back. His back is sore and he is in a hurry to get inside and take off his coat and outer wrappings and warm his feet at the kitchen fire. In his haste, he fails to notice that Charlotte hasn’t moved from the sleigh. She still sits there, not moving, her icy blue eyes staring straight ahead.

Sometime during the trip, Charlotte’s blood freezes in her veins. Her heart stops pumping blood and turns into a useless, frozen muscle in the middle of her upper torso. Her eyes become fixed in their sockets, frozen in place, eyelids opened. How can someone so dead look so alive?

It is the easiest of deaths. She has felt nothing, not even a tingling sensation. From one second to the next, she is here and then she is gone.

The party disperses at eleven o’clock. Those who expected Charlotte to attend are disappointed, but they figure something must have come up unexpectedly at the last minute to keep her home.

Vardaman, sated with food and drink, comes out and is happy to see that Charlotte has taken her place in the sleigh and is ready to go home. He is all too eager to get home to his warm bed. He wakes up the horse and takes the blanket off his back and in thirty seconds the sleigh has taken to the road.

He turns and asks Charlotte if she had a good time at the party. He believes she answers in the affirmative but, of course, no answer is forthcoming.

When they get back home, it is near midnight on Christmas morning. Unknown to anybody, Charlotte has been sitting in the back of the sleigh on a frigid Christmas Eve for seven hours.

He stops the sleigh at the front gate. When Charlotte doesn’t get out as he expects, he turns around in the seat and looks at her, at her blue, staring eyes. Right away he knows something is wrong. He runs to the front door and bangs loudly. Mother and father, both in their night clothes, know that something is wrong and come running out.

When they see that Charlotte is frozen through and through, they take her in and set her by the fire. They try to lay her flat, but she is frozen in a sitting position. They rub her hands and wrists and pat her cheeks. They put more wood on the fire. They believe all they have to do is thaw her out and she will revive and start breathing again. Not knowing what else to do, mother sends for the doctor.

In the morning they send for the undertaker’s men. They come promptly and take Charlotte away. In the afternoon on Christmas Day, mother and father pay a call at the undertaking establishment. They choose embalming for their little girl and, after she is embalmed, they want her dressed in her fancy, red-and-white Christmas dress that she wore to the party. They pick out the finest and most expensive cast-iron coffin with a little window over the deceased’s face. Only the best will do.

Two days before the New Year, a service is held at the Methodist chapel for Charlotte Little. All the same people who were at the White party attend the service, except now they are in black and are no longer smiling. Everybody wants to know how such a thing could happen. How could a little girl go out on a freezing Christmas Eve in only a thin dress and no coat, hat, gloves or galoshes? Some of the ladies look accusingly at mother and then look away quickly when she looks back.

The ground is hard as iron. No new graves can be dug until there is an appreciable thaw. Frozen Charlotte is kept in the frigid sub-basement of the church for the duration. All through the winter, people may come and visit her and pay their respects. They line up and peer into the little window over her face and are subdued into silence by the mystery of death.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Third Day of Winter ~ A Short Story

 

The Third Day of Winter image 4
The Third Day of Winter
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

(This short story has been published in Offbeat Christmas Story and The Literary Hatchet.)

They had a little party at work, complete with cake and champagne (Here’s to another successful year!), and then everybody was allowed to leave for the day. It was the day before Christmas and nobody had to be back to work for three days. What a festive mood the downtrodden workers were in! There was dancing on tabletops, furtive kissing in corners, drunken laughter.

As Vesper left the office, it was just beginning to snow so she decided to walk home instead of taking the bus. She had always liked snow, especially at Christmastime, and had seen too little of it in recent years. She stopped on the way home at a little market and bought a dozen oranges and a small box of chocolate-covered cherries. As she was paying for her purchases, the old man behind the counter gave her a sprig of mistletoe.

When she reached her building, she felt agreeably fatigued and slightly frostbitten. As she climbed the stairs to her third-floor apartment, she couldn’t help noticing how quiet the building was. The usual loud voices, TVs, crying babies and yapping dogs were absent. She seemed to be the only tenant who hadn’t gone out of town for the holiday.

She unlocked the door, kicked off her wet shoes and hung up her coat. It was just beginning to get dark outside so she turned on all the lights. She tied a ribbon around her mistletoe and hung it in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room; plugged in the lights on her little artificial Christmas tree that was made to look real but wasn’t fooling anybody with its brown-and-green plasticity. She stood back and admired the comfort, the appeal, of her little home. It was the first home she had ever had that was hers and hers alone without belonging to somebody else.

“I’m really very lucky,” she said to herself as she stood in the middle of the room.

Already she was missing her friend Marlene at work, even though she had just left her a short time earlier. She wanted to call her and tell her about walking home in the snow and about the mistletoe. She knew that Marlene would enjoy hearing those things and would laugh at them in her usual way.

She went to the phone, not to call Marlene—she would be busy now with family—but to call somebody else.

“Hello?” she said when she heard her mother’s voice, sounding very faint and far away.

“Who’s that?” her mother said.

“It’s Vesper.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“No. I just got home from work and I wanted to call you and wish you a merry Christmas.”

 “You know I don’t go in for that stuff very much.”

“I know. Did you get the silver pin I sent you?”

“Yes, I got it.”

“I thought it would look good on your black coat.”

“Oh, I don’t have that coat anymore. It was a little too funereal for me.”

“It was a beautiful coat.”

“If I had known you liked it so much, I would have given it to you.”

“It doesn’t matter. How’s Stan?”

“We’ve separated. I haven’t seen him since summer.”

“Are you getting a divorce?”

“Oh, I don’t know. There’s a new man in my life now. His name is Milt. He’s talked about marrying me, but I don’t think I want to get married again. I’ve been down that road too many times.”

“Any news of Weston?”

“Nothing, except that he’s living the bohemian life and wants nothing to do with his family.”

“When you see him, tell him I said hello.”

“I will, dear. I really have to run now. I’m meeting some people for dinner. I have a terrible headache and don’t really feel like going out, but I said I’d go and I don’t want to break my word.”

“All right, mother. Goodbye.”

As Vesper hung up the phone she was aware of the hurtful omissions in the conversation. Her mother hadn’t bothered to ask her how she was or what plans she had for Christmas, if she had someone to spend it with or if she was going to be alone. Those things wouldn’t occur to her—she simply didn’t bother herself too much with her grown children. She had delivered them safely to adulthood and that’s all that anybody could reasonably expect.

Vesper went into the kitchen to see what she might dig up for dinner, but the prospect of having the usual everyday fare on Christmas Eve and then dozing on the couch in front of the TV until time to go to bed was suddenly dismaying to her. She didn’t have to do what she always did, just because she always did it. She could make Christmas Eve into something special, even if she did have to spend it alone.

She went into the bedroom and changed her clothes quickly before she gave herself the chance to change her mind. She made herself ready to go out again (boots, scarf, gloves, coat) and turned off all the lights except for one small lamp beside the door.

She began walking, not knowing for certain where she was going. The snow had accumulated to three or four inches and was still coming down, the wind blowing it along the sidewalk and causing it to drift along the building fronts. Nothing made it seem more like Christmas.

Two blocks from her building she came upon two men, an older and a younger one, standing with their hands over a barrel in which a small fire burned. Both men looked down into the barrel, but when she passed near them they turned and looked at her. The older man was the nondescript sort that one sees on the street every day, ragged and undernourished. The younger man was thin, medium-tall and sturdy-looking. He wasn’t wearing a hat (in the light from the fire his hair had a reddish tint) and he wore an enormous overcoat that went down past his knees, with the collar turned up to partly cover his ears. On his cheek was a crescent-shaped scar as if once, long ago, he had been gouged by a shard of glass or the blade of a knife. These details about him registered on her brain in the few seconds she looked at him and then she looked away.

She came to a brightly lighted drugstore and stopped and looked through the frosty window at the rows of displays and the people moving about as if they were underwater. After a moment of indecision, she went inside, passing a perfume display over which two fat women were talking loudly, and went to a rack of magazines in the back. She picked up a magazine, thumbed through it and put it back.

The wall behind the magazine rack was a mirror. As she reached out her hand to put a magazine back on the rack where she had found it, she saw the reflection of a man in the mirror. He was half-a-foot taller than she was and standing behind her, to her right, as though looking over her shoulder. Thinking herself in the way, she stepped aside to give the man more room and that’s when she realized it was the same young man with the scar on his face who had been standing over the fire in the barrel. She felt embarrassed at the thought that he might speak to her, so she left the drugstore and went back out into the freezing night.

She walked on from the drugstore for a block-and-a-half and when she had to stop at a corner with a clot of other people to wait for the light to turn, she took a quick glance over her shoulder to see if the young man had come out of the drugstore after her. She didn’t see him, so she was sure he wasn’t following her. Why would she have ever thought he was?

A little restaurant with the smell of garlic and twinkling lights in the window attracted her attention. It was a place that ordinarily would have been too expensive for her, but she was tired of walking and went inside.

The lights in the restaurant were very dim, giving the place a dreamlike quality after the snowy street. A smiling waiter seated her at a small table near the front and helped her remove her coat. He handed her a menu and when she seemed to be having trouble making up her mind, he suggested fried calamari and polpette di baccala. She didn’t know what it was but readily acceded to his suggestion anyway. Since it was Christmas, she was glad to be able to order something unusual and exotic that she could tell Marlene about.

When the waiter asked her if she wanted a bottle of wine, she said yes and as soon as he brought it she started drinking copious amounts of it and eating delicious garlicky breadsticks out of a little basket while she waited for her food.

The food was very much to her liking but what she liked most was the wine. She ended up drinking the entire bottle before, during and after the meal.

When all the food on her plate was gone, she felt happy and fortunate, happy to be alive and fortunate to have a good-paying job that would allow her to have an extravagant meal on a special occasion. She thanked the waiter effusively, gave him a more-than-generous tip, and wished him a merry Christmas. He helped her into her coat and opened the door for her as she left.

In the next block she slipped on an icy spot on the sidewalk and fell sideways into a pile of snow, unhurt, but attracting some unwelcome attention. As a small crowd of people gathered around to see if she was all right and to help her to stand up again, she saw coming toward her the man in the long coat with the scar on his face. Someone blocked her view for a few seconds and when the way was clear again he was gone. Was she seeing people who weren’t really there? It must have been a result of drinking all that wine.

It was not late at all for Christmas Eve and, in spite of the snow and cutting wind, she wasn’t ready to go home just yet. She would make a night of it. She would have lots to tell Marlene and her other friends at work how she spent Christmas Eve while they were all with their families. They wouldn’t exactly envy her but would admire her for having a good time on her own without having to depend on somebody else.

Four or five blocks farther on was the Odeon movie theatre. She was delighted to see that the show was just about to begin. She paid her admission and went inside and took a seat in the orchestra among a handful of other people. She dozed during the previews of coming attractions and a featurette about a Christmas tree farm, but when the feature began she was fully awake.

In the feature presentation, a woman named Mildred was released from a mental hospital at Christmastime. She had to become reacquainted with her children because she had been away so long they almost forgot she existed. She tried to resume her role in life as wife, mother and society hostess, but she had terrible nightmares and hallucinations that showed she should never have been released from the mental hospital at all. What was even worse, though, was that her fifteen-year-old daughter, Veronica, was showing signs that she had inherited Mildred’s mental illness. She would put her dress on backwards without even knowing it and stand up during mealtimes and scream there were Martians on the roof. These were the exact same things that Mildred had done that caused her to be sent to the mental hospital in the first place when Veronica was in grammar school.

When the picture was over, Vesper sighed heavily, put on her coat and went back out into the cold. She was feeling tired now and the movie, although she had enjoyed it, made her feel like crying. It had been a lovely evening, though.

It was nearly eleven o’clock. The snow had stopped but it seemed colder now because the wind was blowing. When she thought of the long way she had to walk to get back home, she wished she was already there, relaxing in her pajamas, drinking hot chocolate and listening to Christmas music on the radio.

The streets that had been so crowded before were almost deserted now. Everybody had gone home to celebrate Christmas. A drunk stepped out of the shadows and asked her for a dollar but she sidestepped him and kept going without looking back.

Two blocks from her building she came upon two men, an older and a younger one, standing with their hands over a barrel in which a small fire burned. Both men looked down into the barrel, but when she passed near them they turned and looked at her. The older man was the nondescript sort that one sees on the street every day, ragged and undernourished. The younger man was thin, medium-tall and sturdy-looking. He wasn’t wearing a hat (in the light from the fire his hair had a reddish tint) and he wore an enormous overcoat that went down past his knees, with the collar turned up to partly cover his ears. On his cheek was a crescent-shaped scar as if once, long ago, he had been gouged by a shard of glass or the blade of a knife.

As she walked past these two men, looking straight ahead, the younger man disengaged himself from the older and began following her. She didn’t hear  a sound—his footsteps in the snow were silent—but she knew, she felt, that he was a few paces behind her.

She came to her building and climbed the stairs to the third floor, opened the door with her key, let herself in, and reclosed the door without locking it.  Without turning on any lights, she went to the window overlooking the front of the building and looked down. Standing there in the snow, looking up at her, was the young man in the long overcoat with the crescent-shaped scar on his cheek.

She wrote on a piece of note paper from beside the phone these words: Come up, apartment 320. She wadded the paper into a little ball and opened the window just wide enough to insert the ball of paper and let it drop to the ground. She stood there in the dark and watched the man approach the paper, pick it up and read it. She took a couple of deep breaths and in a few seconds she heard his footsteps on the stairs, exactly in time to the beating of her own heart.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

 

by allen0997

Another Christmas Eve ~ A Short Story

I Want to Spend Christmas with You
Another Christmas Eve 
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~ 

My parents got their divorce the summer I was fifteen and sold the house we lived in. My mother, my little brother, and I moved into a small, four-room flat in an old apartment building downtown. It was on the fifth floor and there were no elevators, so that meant we were constantly walking up and down the stairs.

The flat wasn’t big enough for me to have my own room, so we moved my bed into a little space off the kitchen, which was originally meant to be a pantry. It was tiny and cramped, but the best thing about it was that I had my own window with a good view of buildings and trees far off in the distance. I liked to lay in bed at night and look out at the sky. The best nights were when there was a full moon. When there were thunderstorms, it felt like the lightning was going to come in through the window and zap me into oblivion.  

Now it was Christmas again, or almost. Our first Christmas in the apartment. Our Christmas tree stood in the corner of the front room, aglow with multi-colored lights and loaded down with tinsel and ornaments, stacks of presents beneath its branches. A sprig of holly hung in the doorway into the kitchen. On the front door was a wreath that would probably be stolen before Christmas morning ever arrived.

My little brother Georgie, age six, jumped up and down on the couch and screamed. He was wholly invested in Christmas. It was snowing out, he didn’t have to go back to school until after New Year’s, and he believed that Santa was going to be especially generous with him this year.

“You’d better calm down,” I said. “Santa will pass you by if he gets word that you’ve been bad.”

“I haven’t been bad!” he screeched.

My mother came in from her bedroom, where she had been putting on makeup and fixing her hair. She was afraid I was going to divulge the great secret that Santa doesn’t really exist.

“What did you just say to him?” she asked, looking at me threateningly.

“I didn’t say anything,” I said. “I just told him he’s giving me a headache.”

“Get down from there, Georgie! You know you’re not supposed to use the couch as a trampoline! The couch is for sitting, not for jumping.”

“All this Christmas stuff is making me puke,” I said. “A person can only take so much.”

“Well, it’s too bad you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be excited about Christmas,” she said. “I guess you’ve grown too sophisticated for your family.”

“He’s grown too sophisticated!” screamed Georgie.  

“Shut up!” I said.

“When do we get to open the presents?” Georgie screamed.

“For the eighty-seventh time, we will open the presents on Christmas morning after we’ve had a good breakfast.”

“Why do we have to wait so long?”

“Because I said so, that’s why!” She sat on the other end of the sofa and patted her hair in back.  

“I want to open one now!”

“No! We’ve been all through that a dozen times. You have to wait like everybody else.”

“Tomorrow’s Christmas and we haven’t heard anything from daddy yet,” I said.

“No, and you probably won’t, either. He’s probably laying up in some hotel room, drunk as a skunk.”

 “Drunk as a skunk!” Georgie screamed.

 “I thought he’d send at least send us a present.”

 “You’re old enough to know you can’t count on him for anything.”

“We always had a good Christmas with him,” I said.

“I know, but those days are over. Your daddy is out of the picture now. He was the one that wanted the divorce.”

“I’m going to the movies tonight,” I said. “It’s a Christmas Eve horror double feature.”

“I don’t care what it is,” she said. “You’re not going to the movies on Christmas Eve. You’re going to spend the evening with your family.”

“But I’m meeting someone.”

“Call whoever it is and tell them you can’t make it.”

“Is he going to be here?”

“He has a name, you know.”

“Is Regis going to be here?”

“Yes, he’s going to be here in time to eat dinner with us and later we’re all going to church.”

“I don’t feel like going to church.”  

“You feel like going to the movies but you don’t feel like going to church?”

“Church gives me a headache.”

“You’re insane.”

“If I am, I get it from you. Insanity runs in your family.”

“I think Regis is going to ask me to marry him.”

“Why would you want to marry Regis?”

“Why shouldn’t I marry him? He’s the sweetest, kindest man I’ve ever met and he’s got a good job.”

“He sells washing machines in an appliance store.”

“Someday he’ll be manager. There’s really good money in that.”

“What about daddy?”

“What about him?”

“You’re going to marry Regis without telling daddy first?”

“You’re a smart boy, but you just don’t seem to understand. There is no longer any connection between me and your daddy. We are kaput!”

“What does that mean?”

“Your daddy and I are finished with each other. All ties are severed.”

“All ties are severed!” Georgie shrieked.

“If you marry Regis, does that mean we can move out of this crummy apartment?”

“Not right away. Regis will probably move in here with us. His business hasn’t been so good lately. He’s a little strapped for cash at the moment. He expects things to pick up next year, though.”

“If Regis moves in here with us, I’m moving out.”

“Why don’t you like Regis?”

“He belongs to a bowling league.”

“A lot of men belong to bowling leagues.”

“He’s old!”

“He’s forty-three.”

“He wears cologne that smells like bug spray.”

“I’ll get him to stop wearing it after a while.”

“He has hairs sprouting out of his ears. Haven’t you ever noticed that?”

“Of course, I’ve noticed it. His grooming isn’t the best. That’s because he lives alone. All that will change after we’re married.”

“I think you should check with daddy first before you marry Regis. He might want to come back. If you marry Regis, it’ll be too late.”

“Your daddy is not coming back. Ever.”

“You might be surprised.”

“It’s time for you to face reality.”

“I am facing reality and I don’t like it.”

“I think I see Santa way up in the sky over there,” Georgie said, standing at the window.

“You’re hallucinating again,” I said.

“It’s too early for Santa,” mother said. “He won’t come until we’re all asleep. He doesn’t like for people to look at him.”

“I can certainly see why,” I said.

“I hope he remembers everything I wanted,” Georgie said.

Mother went back into the bedroom and in a little while came back out in her red Christmas dress that in my opinion was too tight. She had dowsed herself in perfume. When she saw me lying on the couch staring at the ceiling, she decided I needed something to do.  

“I want you to go down to Friedlander’s market and buy a carton of eggnog for tonight,” she said, digging in her purse for some money. 

“I don’t like eggnog,” I said.

“Well, are you the only one here? Regis says it’s not Christmas without eggnog.”

“Regis says. Regis says. What else does Regis say?”

“Can I go to the store, too?” Georgie asked excitedly.

“No! You stay here and help me wrap Regis’s present.”

“Regis, Regis, Regis,” I said as he went out the door. “He’s certainly a big man around here, isn’t he?”

The snow was falling heavier now. Cars made hissing sounds on the pavement as they passed by. Last-minute shoppers were still keeping the stores busy. With the setting of the sun, Christmas Eve had officially arrived.

The store only had one carton of eggnog left, so I grabbed it and went and stood in the long line to pay. When the cashier smiled at me and wished me a merry Christmas, I gave him a sour look.   

When I got back home, Regis had arrived with presents for all of us. He was throwing Georgie up near the ceiling and then catching him on the way down. Georgie squealed with delight. Mother stood at the stove and beamed her approval.

Regis had brought Georgie a stuffed elephant and some other toys. My present from him, still wrapped in a big box with a red bow, was at my place at the table. Before I sat down, I picked up the box and set it on the floor.

“Aren’t you going to open your present from Regis?” mother asked.

“I’ll open it later. I have a headache now.”

When we were all seated at the table, mother insisted we join hands while Regis said grace. Regis’s hand felt clammy and unclean in mine. When he finally let go, I wiped my hand back and forth along my leg before I touched any food.

While we ate, I could see that mother was wearing a diamond engagement ring. This, of course, would be her Christmas present from Regis. So, it was official, then. He had proposed and she had said yes.

Regis talked about his day at work and laughed while we ate. Mother didn’t say much. Georgie kept looking out the window for signs of Santa. When Regis seemed to have run out of things to say for the moment, mother looked at me and said she had something she wanted to tell me and Georgie.

“What is it?” I asked with a sick feeling.

“Regis has asked me to be his wife and I’ve consented. We’re going to be married on New Year’s Eve.”

“What’s the rush?” I asked.

“I think it’s so romantic to be married on New Year’s Eve,” she gushed. “It will be a new start of a new year for all of us.”

She turned and looked at Regis. There were tears in her eyes. Regis took hold of her hand and pulled her in for a kiss. I knew he was getting ham grease all over her.

“I think I hear Santa’s sleigh outside!” Georgie said.

After we finished eating, mother told me to go put on my dress pants and a white shirt for church. She would help me with my tie before we left for church.

Except there wasn’t going to be any church for me. I grabbed my coat and hat and ran out the front door before she had a chance to see what I was doing.

The snow must have been five or six inches by that time. I still had on my tennis shoes and I could feel the snow soaking through to my socks after a few steps, but I didn’t mind. I needed to talk to daddy.

I knew that Colson’s Drug Store, about four blocks down from where we lived, had a pay phone. I had a pocket full of change especially for that purpose.

Right after the divorce, daddy gave me his private number where I could reach him any time. If I ever needed him, all I had to do was give him a call.

There were a lot of people at Colson’s, mostly at the pharmacy counter. Nobody paid any attention to me as I went all the way to the back, where the pay phone was.

I was sure he would answer. He would probably figure it was me calling on Christmas Eve.

The phone rang ten or twelves times, but finally he answered.

“Hello,” a little groggily.

“Daddy?” I said. “Is that you?”

“Who is this? Is this Evan?

“Yeah, it’s me. Evan.”

“I couldn’t hear you very well at first.”

“Can you hear me better now?”

“Yeah, I hear you fine now.”

“Well, since it’s Christmas Eve, I wanted to call and wish you a merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas to you, Evan!”

“Do you know where we’re living now?”

“No.”

“In an apartment downtown, on the fifth floor of an old building.”

“I’ve been wanting to come and visit you and Georgie, but I wasn’t sure where you were living. How’s Georgie?”

“He’s fine. Waiting for Santa to bring him everything he asked for.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m in Colson’s Drug Store, near where we live. Do you know where that is?”

“Yeah, I’ve been to Colson’s a few times. Don’t you have a phone in the apartment?”

“We do, but I didn’t want mother to know I was calling you.”

“How is your mother?”

“She’s fine, but she’s the main reason I wanted to talk to you.”

“She’s not sick, is she?”

“No, she’s not sick. She’s getting married on New Year’s Eve.”

Daddy was silent for a moment and then he laughed. “Who is she marrying?”

“His name is Regis. He’s a creep. He smells funny. I don’t like him.”

“Maybe that’s because you don’t know him very well.”

“I want you to come and get me.”

“What?”

“I said I want you to come to Colson’s Drug Store and get me. I want to spend Christmas with you.”

“Wait a minute, Evan! I’m afraid that’s not possible. I’m not living in a very nice place. I don’t even have a tree.”

“That’s all right. I don’t need a tree.”

“If your mother doesn’t know where you are, she’ll be worried.”

“I’ll call her from your place.”

I started to cry like a blubbery crybaby. I hadn’t meant to cry, but I couldn’t seem to help myself.

“Is it that bad?” he asked.  

“Mother just isn’t herself. I don’t want to be around her. She acts like Regis is some kind of a god. They make me sick.”

“All right. If it’s that bad, I’ll come and get you.”

“How long? How long will it take?”

“Give me a half-hour or so.”

“Colson’s Drug Store. I’ll be waiting outside for you.”

It was still snowing, harder than ever now, but I didn’t mind waiting in the snow for a half-hour. People coming in and out of Colson’s looked at me and then looked away. Maybe some of them thought I was going to try to rob them. I tried leaning back against the building, crossing my legs and putting my hands in my pockets. I tried to look casual, but I felt conspicuous. 

I wasn’t sure what kind of car daddy would be driving, but I looked at every car. One of them would be him.

The half-hour passed and then an hour and then two hours. I was determined to wait as long as it took. I would wait all night. I would still be waiting on Christmas Morning if I had to. My fingers and toes were numb. I could no longer feel them. I wasn’t sure if they would ever work right again or not. I didn’t much care.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

A Mate for the Monster

The mate for the monster.

A Mate for the Monster
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

The monster is seven and a half feet tall and as strong as ten men. He walks in a frightening, slow-gaited, halting manner. He has a bolt in his neck; his face is stitched onto his enormous head. He probably doesn’t know that he is made up of body parts from dead people (and if he did know he wouldn’t care). No matter where he goes or what he does, he scares people without even trying. That’s what makes him a monster.

He lives in a lonely castle on a mountaintop. He has no friends and his days are empty and pointless. His brain is not so addled that he can’t ask himself why he was ever created in the first place. He has recently taken to talking a bit and, when he’s not smoking cigars, drinking wine, or running around the countryside scaring people, he says things like, “Love dead—hate living.” This is not a good sign.

The mad scientist who made him, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, and his equally mad colleague, Dr. Pretorius, see that the monster is not happy. He is not fulfilled and is not living up to his full potential as a monster. After much thought and deliberation, the two mad scientists decide that the monster needs one thing above all others: a mate who will appreciate him for what he is and won’t be repulsed by the way he looks or by his crude manners. They toy with the idea of creating a male mate but that just doesn’t seem the thing, somehow, so they decide they will create for him a female mate.

Dr. Frankenstein sends his hunchback assistant, Fritz, out on a midnight graveyard run. From the graves of the newly dead, Fritz will gather the body parts needed to cobble together a female mate for the monster. He knows just the place, he says. Leave everything to him.

Now, Fritz has never been overly scrupulous about where he gets what he needs. He isn’t above going to the village and, seeing a lone woman standing on a corner singing a song, hitting her in the head to subdue her and then strangling her. When he makes sure she’s dead, he puts her in a burlap bag and throws it over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and goes back to the castle. He knows Dr. Frankenstein will never ask questions as long as Fritz delivers the goods. The woman was just a nobody anyway. She’ll never be missed.

Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius spend about two weeks creating what they think is a perfect mate for the monster. They take as much time as they need without rushing; they want to get every little detail just right. When the next violent thunderstorm occurs, they will be ready to harness the lightning.

They don’t have long to wait. All day long the next Saturday the sky is turbulent and dark. Finally, at night, a fearsome storm comes down the mountain, tearing at the castle walls. The wind howls and the rain falls as if a spigot has been opened in the sky. The lightning seems to be exactly on top of the castle, as if made to order. The two mad scientists place the as-yet lifeless body of the female mate on a table, connect the conductors that will attract the life-giving lightning, and hoist the table upwards through a hole in the ceiling.

The monster knows what is going on in the laboratory and paces his chamber nervously. Dr. Frankenstein has told him he must stay away until they are ready for him to see his mate. He combs his hair; he tries on several suits of clothes but nothing seems just exactly right. He fears that his mate will be afraid of him and will try to get away. He wonders if he will have to tie her up or club her in the head to be able to get a kiss from her. He lies on the bed and watches the storm out the window until there is a knock at the door; it’s the hunchback Fritz telling him that Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius are ready for him to come to the laboratory.

When the monster sees his mate for the first time he is a little disappointed. She is standing between Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius and she’s swaying from side to side as if she might fall over. Her hair is very high off her head and frizzy as if electrified; white strands on both sides resemble bolts of lightning. Dr. Pretorius has dressed her in a flowing white gown that goes all the way to the floor.

She tries to pull away when she sees the monster standing in the doorway, but Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius hold her by the arms. As the monster walks across the room to her with a welcoming smile, she screams a piercing scream that rattles the castle to its very foundations. The monster is not put off by the scream but advances toward her. When he is face to face with her, Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius let go of her arms and withdraw to the dark recesses of the room. She surprises the monster by hissing at him like a snake, which he finds very arousing. When she screams again, he puts his enormous hands around her throat to get her to shut up. And so begins a great romance.

Dr. Frankenstein proposes a toast and they all have a friendly glass of champagne. They break the champagne glasses in the fireplace for good luck and then Dr. Pretorius, who is also an ordained minister, marries the monster and his mate so there won’t be any question of immorality going on in the castle.

They all live happily for many years to come in Castle Frankenstein on their mountaintop. Eventually Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius—even Fritz—all die because they are just ordinary men. The monster and his mate, however, live on and on. Through studying the writings of Dr. Frankenstein—and also Dr. Frankenstein’s father and grandfather—the monster has learned how to prolong his life and that of his mate for a very long time. The next thing he is working on is how to resurrect Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius from the dead. If he is able to do that, there will be no stopping any of them.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

All Hallow’s Eve ~ A Short Story

Halloween 2021 3

All Hallow’s Eve
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~ 

Mother stood over him while he ate his dinner of liver and onions. When she decided he had eaten enough, she told him he could go. He ran up the stairs to his room and put on his Halloween costume. A ghost this year, same as last year. Next year he was going to have to be something different. Wearing the same costume more than two years in a row was terrible.

His false face still had dried spit around the mouth, but it was his own spit so he didn’t care. He put it on and checked the entire effect in the mirror, costume, mask and all. Something was missing. Oh, yes, the old derby hat. It was the one thing that made his costume look just a little bit creepy and scary. Without the hat, the costume was just a cheap little-kid’s getup.

Mother was in the living room when he came down the stairs. “Come here, Buster, and let me take a look at your outfit,” she said.

“It’s a costume,” Buster said.

“Oh, don’t you look cute!”

“I’m supposed to look scary!”

“So, where are you going tonight? What are you plans?”

“I’m going tricking-or-treating, mother, the same as every Halloween.”

“Who are you going with?”

“I don’t know. Some of the kids from my class, I guess.”

“What are their names?”

“You want the names of all the kids in my class?”

“Of course I don’t. You’ll be careful, now, won’t you?”

“Yeah, I’ll be careful.”

“Make sure you’re not alone. Wherever you go, go in a group.”

“I don’t care.”

“What?”

“I said okay, I’ll go in a group.”

“Be home by ten o’clock.”

“Mother! It’s Halloween and tomorrow is Saturday!”

“All right, then. Eleven.”

When he finally got out the door, he broke into a run. The evening air felt good after the stuffy house and smelled good, like leaves and burning candle wax. It wasn’t all the way dark yet, but trick-or-treaters were everywhere, mostly little kids accompanied by their mothers.

He met his friends at the corner by the park. Eric was a skeleton, Stan a hobo, and Squeamy the Lone Ranger. Squeamy’s sister, Oda May, stood apart from the others, smoking a cigarette and looked bored. She carried a rubber-and-fur gorilla mask loosely in her hand like a rag.

“What’s Oda May doing here?” Buster asked.

“My mother wouldn’t let me go out without an adult,” Squeamy said.

“She’s fifteen!”

“I guess that’s enough of an adult.”

“Let’s get going, you losers,” Stan said, “before all the good candy is gone!”

Oda May flipped away her cigarette and put on the gorilla mask and they headed for the neighborhood on the other side of the park where all the best houses were.

It was a lucrative neighborhood. Three-quarters of the houses had their porch lights on. When people took one look at adult-sized Oda May in her gorilla mask, their smiles usually faded.

The treats were good, Hershey bars and popcorn balls instead of stale jelly beans. After three blocks, their bags were starting to get heavy. They sat down on the curb to rest for a while.

“That’s how it’s done,” Oda May said, hefting the bag of candy appreciatively between her legs. “If they’re just a little bit scared of you, they’ll fork over the candy quick enough so they can get rid of you.” She lit a cigarette without taking off the gorilla mask.

“Where to now?” Buster asked.

“I don’t know about you little turds,” Oda May said, “but I’m going to go meet my boyfriend.”

“What about us?” Stan asked.

“You’re on your own. I’ve played nursemaid long enough.”

“It’s all right,” Squeamy said. “We don’t need her.”

“And don’t follow me,” she said, “or somebody’s gonna lose some teeth!”

“Leave the mask on!” Squeamy called after her. “Your boyfriend might like you better that way!”

“What will she do with all that candy?” Buster asked.

“Probably give it to her boyfriend.”

“Who is this boyfriend, anyway?” Eric asked. “Why don’t we get to meet him?”

“He’s a criminal, I think,” Squeamy said. “She doesn’t want me to see him because she’s afraid I’ll tell on her. He’s twenty-three years old. I’ll bet he’s really terrible looking, like a convict.”

“I’d like to see him,” Stan said.

“Hey, I stole some of her cigarettes when she wasn’t looking,” Squeamy said, passing them around and lighting them.

“Boy, I like smoking!” Eric said. “I inhale the smoke deep down into my lungs and let it stay there.”

“Me too,” Stan said. “I’m always going to smoke for as long as I live.”

“My mother told me if she ever caught me smoking a cigarette she’d knock it down my throat,” Squeamy said.

“Doesn’t she smoke?” Eric asked.

“Of course she does. They all smoke.”

“Then why does she care?”

“Because I’m in fifth grade.”

“She’s a hypocrite,” Stan said.

Buster had never smoked before except for a quick puff off his mother’s cigarette when she wasn’t looking. He didn’t like the taste of it, but he wasn’t going to be the only one not to smoke.

Several times, he took the smoke into his mouth and quickly blew it out again. He wanted to have the others see him with smoke coming out his nose like a dragon, but he wasn’t sure how to do it without inhaling.

“Don’t you like smoking, Buster?” Squeamy asked.

“Yeah, I like it all right. I smoke all the time when my mother isn’t looking.”

“Well, finish your cigarettes, ladies,” Eric said. “We’ve still got a lot of territory to cover.”

They went over a couple of blocks to another neighborhood where the treats were bound to be good. They covered several blocks, both sides of the street, in just under an hour.

“My bag is getting really heavy,” Squeamy said. “I think I’d probably better go on home now.”

“Somebody gave me a guitar pick as a treat. Isn’t that weird?”

“Hey, it looks like it’s going to rain! If our bags get wet, they’ll bust through on the bottom and all our candy will spill out!”

“What time is it?”

“I think it’s about a quarter to ten.”

“I think we should call it a night.”

Some older kids, sixteen and seventeen, came up behind them with the intention of stealing their candy, so they began running furiously into the dark to get away from them. Stan knew the neighborhood better than the others, so they all followed him.

He led them around in a circuitous loop over to Main Street, where there were lots of lots of lights, people and cars.

“I think we outran them!” he said.

“Can you imagine the nerve?” Eric said. “We’ve been out all night trick-or-treating for our candy, and somebody thinks they can just come along and take it from us? What is the world coming to?”

Some of the businesses on Main Street were giving out treats. A lady at a bakery gave them day-old pumpkin cookies, which they devoured like hungry wolves.

A man standing in front of a tavern was giving out treats from a large plastic pumpkin. “You kids need to be home in bed,” he said.

“If we come inside, will you give us a beer?” Stan asked.

“Come back in ten years,” the man said.

There was a big crowd at the Regal Theatre, a long line of people waiting to buy tickets to the Halloween double feature: Bride of the Gorilla and The Terror of Tiny Town. Anybody in costume could get in for half-price.

“If we had enough money, we could go,” Stan said.

“Aw, I can’t stay out that late,” Buster said. “My mother would come looking for me.”

They were about to walk past the theatre, but Squeamy spotted Oda May in the ticket line in the gorilla mask and stopped. She wasn’t alone, either.

“She’s with a little kid and he’s a cowboy!” Squeamy said. “Her boyfriend is a child and a cowboy! That’s why she didn’t want us to meet him!”

From where they were standing, they all had a good look at the little cowboy. When he turned around to look at the line behind him, Buster saw his face. “That’s no little kid,” he said. “That’s a midget!”

“A what?”

“Oda May’s boyfriend is a midget and his face is all wrinkled! He must be thirty years old!”

“Oh, boy!” Squeamy said. “I’m really going to tell on her now!”

“I think we should go over and say ‘hi’ to her,” Eric said.

“No!” Squeamy said. “She’ll think we’ve been following her!”

They stood and watched Oda May and the midget cowboy move up in the line. When it was their turn, Oda May moved around behind the midget, put her hands on his waist and lifted him up so he could buy the tickets and then set him down again. Several people in line behind them laughed, but they seemed not to notice.

“Now I’m seen everything!” Squeamy said. “Can you imagine what their children will be like? I don’t even want to think about it.”

“Let’s go,” Stan said. “It’s ten o’clock and it’s starting to rain again.”

They decided to walk home with Stan, since he lived the closest. The interesting thing about Stan was that his father was an undertaker and the family lived above the funeral parlor. It was a subject of endless fascination to Stan’s friends.

“I think I’m going to call it a night,” Stan said when they were at the corner near his house. “Thanks for walking me home.”

“Do you mean you’re not going to ask us in after we’ve come all this way?” Squeamy said.

“Do you have a body in a casket we can look at?” Eric asked.

“Stan’s right,” Buster said. “I should be getting home, too.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Squeamy said. “I don’t think I can wait until I get home.”

“Oh, all right!” Stan said. “You can come in but you have to wipe your feet first.”

Stan’s parents were out for the evening, so they had the place to themselves. Stan took them down to the basement to show them around but made them promise not to touch anything. First he showed them the room where the embalming was done with its white cabinets full of jars and bottles and then a separate room where bodies were dressed and prepared for burial. The most impressive part of the tour was the casket room, where more than fifty caskets were opened up so people could see inside them. Eric, Buster and Squeamy took turns taking off their shoes and getting into a casket to see what it felt like, while Stan closed the lid on each of them for a few seconds and then made them get out.

“My dad wouldn’t like it if he knew we were down here,” he said.

“Let us know when there’s a body so we can come back and see it,” Eric said.

“I’ve seen plenty of dead bodies. It’s people you don’t know. You don’t feel anything looking at them.”

“You are so lucky! I’ve never seen a dead body!”

“I need to get home,” Buster said. “It’s getting late.”

Buster walked part of the way home with Squeamy and Eric, but they left him at the corner by the church and he had to walk the last four blocks alone. He held his bag of candy in his arms because it was heavy and soggy and he didn’t want the bottom breaking through. He didn’t see a single other person on his way home. Everybody was finished for the night. Halloween was over for another year.

Mother was sitting on the couch in her bathrobe and slippers watching a Charlie Chan movie on TV. “Did you have a nice time?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was okay.”

“I’m glad you’re home.”

“Why?

“I always worry about you when you’re out by yourself.”

“I wasn’t by myself.”

“There’s an escapee on the loose killing people. I just heard it on TV.”

“We just missed him.”

“Now don’t eat all that candy at once. You’ll make yourself sick. You still have to eat your fruits and vegetables.”

“I know. I want to go to bed now. I’m tired.”

She was saying something else as he went up the stairs, but he didn’t hear what it was.

He weighed himself on the bathroom scale, first without the bag and then with it. He weighed eighty-four pounds without the bag and ninety-five pounds with it. Eleven pounds of candy. One pound for every year of his life.

He undressed and put on his pajamas and set the bag of candy on top of the chest of drawers where he could see it from the bed. He got into bed, took one last look at it, turned off the light. Before he could have counted to ten, he was asleep.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

At the Time of His Disappearance ~ A Short Story

At the Time of His Disappearance image 7
At the Time of His Disappearance
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

Trent arrived home from school at the usual time. He threw down his school books and went into the kitchen. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table, reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette. Without a word of greeting, he ate some cookies and drank a glass of water, standing between the table and the back door. When he was finished, he set the glass on the table and went out the door.

“Dinner in an hour!” she called, but he gave no indication of having heard her.

It was October and the yard was full of golden sunlight and the smell of leaves. The yard was a refuge for squirrels and birds and other small animals. It was, by far, the best place to be on an autumn afternoon. And it was private. Nobody ever came snooping around. The nearest neighbor was over a mile away. The boy had it all to himself.

Abutting the yard at the south side was an old cemetery. The boy spent a lot of time in the cemetery. He loved the old gravestones and the elaborate growth of trees, bushes, vines and weeds. It was a private world unto itself. The newest grave that he had found so far was fifty years old. If there were any graves more recent than that, he had yet to find them. It was a lost world with all those long-ago dead people. He imagined some of them in their graves, exactly as they were when they were when they were alive. He could hear them laughing and whispering. Sometimes they reached out and touched him on the shoulder or the back.

From the bay window in the dining room, his mother watched him go into the cemetery. She told him to stay out of there, but since he turned twelve he had a mind of his own and he did exactly as he pleased. That was the problem with children getting older, she thought.

She believed he was developing a morbid interest in the dead because of all the time he spent in the cemetery. Any time she didn’t know where he was, it only took one guess to figure it out. One night she heard him talking long after he should have been asleep, and when she opened his door and asked him who he was talking to, he said he was talking to a sixteen-year-old boy who died in a flood in 1893.

It was time for the evening meal, and still the boy hadn’t come back. She was going to have to have a very serious talk with him. He might at least show some respect for her after all the trouble she went to to cook the dinner.

She put on a sweater and went out the back door to try to find him. She went all the way around the house, calling his name, but she knew he wasn’t there; he was in the cemetery.

She went to the entrance to the cemetery and stopped. She called his name, but she knew he wouldn’t answer, even if he could hear her. He loved playing tricks on her. It would be just like him to jump out at her from behind a gravestone and make her jump and scream. And of course he’d laugh at her and call her a panty waist.

It was almost dark now. She went back to the house and sat down at the table and began eating the food she had fixed. She could only manage a few bites. She was nearly in tears. She was a little worried about him, but she assured herself he was all right and had just lost track of time, as children do.

By ten o’clock, his customary bedtime, he still hadn’t returned. She got her flashlight out of the drawer and went outside. She walked all the way around the house, calling his name, shining the light into the darkest places. She didn’t see any sign of him. She knew the cemetery was the place to look.

She had been in cemeteries before, but never at night and never alone. She assured herself that the cemetery was full of people long dead. There were no ghosts, nothing  to bother her or cause her worry. She had to find her son, and she couldn’t be a big baby about it. Maybe he was in trouble. He might have fallen and broken his leg or something.

She gathered her courage and, walking slowly, shone her light all around, at the tops of the trees and all over the ground. Some of the gravestones were huge slabs, and others were so small you might easily trip over them if you weren’t paying attention. She called his name every few feet, but her voice was drowned out by the wind and the rustling leaves.

There was nothing out of the ordinary in the cemetery. Just the graves of those long forgotten. There were no signs of the boy having been there. All she could think to do was go back to the house and wait for him to return.

Rather than go to sleep in her bedroom upstairs, she took a comforter out of a closet and made a bed for herself on the couch in the living room. If he came in the back door, left unlocked for him, she would hear him. He would come back, she believed, with a wild story about having been abducted by a spaceship. He had quite an imagination. She would be torn between laughing at him and wanting to slap his face for scaring her so.

She spent a nearly sleepless night. Any time she almost went to sleep, she would be awakened by what she thought was the back door opening and closing, or by his calling out to her across a vast distance.

At seven in the morning she called the police and told them her twelve-year-old son never came home yesterday. Within a few minutes, two uniformed officers appeared at her door. One of them was old and the other one young.

Sobbing intermittently, she told them what happened: Her twelve-year-old son disappeared in the yard and/or cemetery the day before and didn’t come home all night. She went looking for him with a flashlight and even called his name repeatedly, but it was all to no avail.

The older officer said, “In about fifty percent of these cases, the adolescent runs off on his own and comes back on his own when he gets hungry enough. Do you think he might be one of these?”

“Oh, no! I don’t think so.”

“Has he ever run off before?”

“He hasn’t run off now.”

“Might he have been abducted by strangers?”

“I don’t have any reason to think that.”

“Was he having trouble at school?

“No!”

“Was he being bullied?”

“No, I don’t think so. No.”

“Did he ever use drugs or alcohol?”

“Of course not! He’s twelve years old!”

“What about the boy’s father?”

“My husband and I are divorced.”

“Was the boy upset when you got your divorce?”

“No. He was four years old at the time.”

“Do you ever see or hear from your ex-husband?”

“No.”

“Might your ex-husband have had anything to do with the boy’s disappearance?”

“Certainly not!”

The older officer had been writing her responses on a yellow legal pad. He stopped writing and, with his pencil poised above the paper, turned and looked at the younger officer. “Can you think of anything else?” he asked.

“Was the boy, um, I mean, is the boy sexually active?” the younger officer asked.

“Of course not! He’s a child!”

“Do you have a recent picture of him?”

She stood up, walked a few feet, opened the drawer of a desk, took out a picture and handed it over to the older officer.

“We’ll need to keep this picture.”

“Of course.”

“What was he wearing at the time of his disappearance?”

“A shirt and pants. A jacket. A cap.”

“Does he have any distinguishing features?”

“A small mole on his right cheek.”

“Height?”

“What?”

“How tall is the boy?”

“I couldn’t say for sure. He’s rather small for his age. I’d say about four feet, six inches.”

“Can you tell us anything else about him?”

“He loves to spend time in the cemetery.”

The older officer shifted his big legs and coughed. “And why is that?”

“We have an old cemetery adjoining our property. My son has been fascinated by it for years.”

“Why is that?”

“I’m not sure. I always told him he should stay out of there.”

“And what did he say when you told him to stay out?”

“He said he felt close to some of the dead people. Don’t ask me why. He’s a lot like  his father, I suppose.”

“Would you say he is obsessed with death?”

“No, I wouldn’t say he’s obsessed with death. He’s going through a phase.”

They’d keep a close watch out for him, the officer assured her. They’d send the boy’s picture and his description to every law enforcement agency in the state. They’d talk to every person in a ten-mile radius. If anybody saw anything, they’d say so.

“We’ll find him,” the older officer said.

She wanted to believe the boy would be found, but something about the way he disappeared defied logical explanation. It was going to take somebody smarter than the local police to figure it out.

They sent a team of men and boys to search the cemetery, the woods and the fields. After five days of finding nothing, they called off the search. The search would resume at a later date.

The story appeared in newspapers and on television. There was an outpouring of interest and sympathy. The mother’s phone rang all the time. Most of the calls were from well-meaning people, but a few of them were crank calls. One person claimed to know where the boy was and would divulge his location for five thousand dollars.

After the boy had been missing for a week, the mother received a phone call from a woman named Hortense Rathbone. She said she was a psychic who had been helping locate missing children for sixty years. She would do a “reading” for a hundred and fifteen dollars.

“I don’t believe in that sort of thing,” the mother said.

“I can tell things about the boy just by looking at his picture.”

“What things?”

“You’re not his real mother. You adopted him.”

“Nobody knows that. Not even he knows that.”

“Also, he’s a very old soul.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means his soul is prized.”

“Prized by whom? What are you talking about?”

“I can come to your house and do a reading. You have nothing to lose. I won’t charge you a penny if you get no results.”

“What results? Do you mean you can find him?”

“I don’t know, but I can try. No charge. This is an interesting case.”

“All right. This is Thursday. You can come on Saturday morning. And if  you’re another crackpot, I’ll throw you out and I won’t be nice about it.”

“I’ve been called a lot of things,” Hortense Rathbone said.

She was a very old woman, dressed in a man’s suit and wearing combat boots. She drove a fifty-year-old Cadillac, once white but now many other colors. When she walked into the house, she wanted to walk from room to room, but she especially wanted to spend time in the boy’s room, absorbing his “essence,” as she said. She wanted a shirt of his that he had recently worn. She wadded up the shirt into a ball and held it over her mouth. She lay down on the bed where he slept and closed her eyes.

“I’ll leave you alone,” the mother said. “Come back downstairs when you’re finished.”

The psychic wanted to know every detail about the boy’s disappearance: time of day, what he said before he left the house, what he was wearing. Did he mention any other person by name? What was his mental state at the time of his disappearance?  When the mother told the old woman about the cemetery, she said she needed to see it right away. It might contain an important clue that nobody else was able to see.

She spent four hours crisscrossing the cemetery, and when she came out she looked happy.

“I’ve had a breakthrough in the case,” she said. “I know what happened to the boy.”

“You know where he is?” the mother said.

“I don’t know where he is, but I know what happened to him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s lots of psychic activity in that old cemetery.”

“Yeah? What about my son?”

“You said he spent a lot of time there?”

“Yes.”

“He’s passed through a portal. I can hear his voice. He’s calling for you to help him. He wants out.”

“What are you talking about? What portal?”

“It’s not something in the ground, but in the air. Think of it as being a door into another dimension.”

“Another dimension? That sounds too fantastic!”

“Well, believe it or not, portals are everywhere. People, especially children, will fall into them. It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.”

“But how do we get him back here?”

“I wish I knew, honey.”

The mother half-believed, half-disbelieved, the old woman’s version of what happened to her son. It made sense in a way, but it strained credulity. Another dimension? Is such a thing possible?

She began going to the cemetery every day. She wanted to find the portal that her son had fallen into. She wanted to hear his voice, pleading with her to get him out. If she just heard his voice, she’d do anything in the world to get him back home. She didn’t know how to look for a portal, but if it was there she’d find it. Being in the cemetery made her feel  close to him. She’d sit for hours, listening to the wind and hoping to hear his voice.

The police investigation was going nowhere. An officer called her occasionally to report nothing at all, but also to reassure her the case would remain open.

Sometimes she caught a fleeting glance of the boy out the window, turning a corner of the house. Other times, she heard him moving around in his room late it night. He was there. She was sure of it.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

You Were Kind to Me ~ A Short Story

You Were Kind to Me image 1
You Were Kind to Me
~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp ~

The once-every-two years carnival was in town. Anybody who was anybody would go at least one night. Vicki-Vicki LaGrasse went on Saturday night, accompanied by two friends from high school, Pansy Dowd and Mary Lee Kaiser. When they arrived at the fairgrounds, it wasn’t quite dark yet and the crowds were thin.

“I want to go on the Ferris wheel first thing,” Pansy said.

“Before it’s even dark?” Mary Lee said.

Mary Lee was afraid of heights and, so she sat in the middle and kept her eyes closed the whole time.

“What good does it do you to ride the Ferris wheel if you don’t look down?” Pansy said.

“With my eyes closed it feels like I’m flying. I don’t have to have my eyes open to appreciate it.”

“When we get all the way to the top, I’ll push you out, and then you can really get the sensation of flying!”

After the Ferris wheel, they went to the House of Mirrors and howled with laughter at their ridiculous, distorted images. The three of them together looked three times sillier than one.

“We look like freaks!” Pansy laughed.

“Well, isn’t that what we are?” Mary Lee said.

“Say, I’m starting to get hungry. Let’s go get something to eat.”

They went to the food pavilion and ordered hot dogs and Cokes. While they were waiting for their food, they saw a tall boy across the way who seemed to be looking at them.

“Hey! Do you know him?” Pansy said. “He’s kind of cute.”

“I don’t know him,” Vicki-Vicki said without looking up.

“He’s been following us since the mirrors,” Mary Lee said.

“He’s not looking at me,” Pansy said.

“He’s not looking at me, either,” Mary Lee said. “I think he’s looking at Vicki-Vicki.”

“He’s not looking at me,” Vicki-Vicki said.

“He’s an older boy,” Pansy said. “He’s got whiskers.”

“Are you sure you don’t know him, Vicki-Vicki?”

“No, I said I don’t know him.”

“I never saw him before in my life,” Pansy said.

“He is definitely looking at Vicki-Vicki,” Mary Lee said.

“Well, I don’t want to be looked at,” Vicki-Vicki said. “So why don’t we just forget about it and go ride the Tilt-a-Whirl?”

They rode twice until Mary Lee began vomiting and the attendant had to stop the thing and let her off.

“I always get sick when I ride the Tilt-a-Whirl,” Mary Lee said.

“Then why do you ride it?” Vicki-Vicki asked.

“I’ll be all right once my head stops spinning.”

They found a place to sit quietly for a while until Mary Lee felt better. While they were sitting doing nothing, the tall boy walked past, eating from a box or popcorn.

“There he is again,” Pansy said. “It’s no coincidence that he keeps popping up.”

“Just ignore him,” Vicki-Vicki said. “He obviously just wants attention.

“He is so cute!”

“I don’t see anything about him that’s appealing.”

“Maybe you’re not looking at him in the right way.”

“I don’t want to look at him at all.”

“I’m feeling better now,” Mary Lee said. “Let’s do the Haunted House.”

“Are you sure?” Vicki-Vicki said. “I don’t want you vomiting on me again.”

“I only vomited on your shoes,” Mary Lee said. “I said I was sorry.”

They stood in a long line at the Haunted House. When they finally got in, they were surrounded by screaming younger kids.

“I didn’t know this was such a kiddie attraction,” Pansy said. “They need to be at home in bed.”

The Haunted House was screaming ghouls, severed heads, clanking chains, puffs of air, moaning corpses, flashing lights, and lots of screaming. Mary Lee admitted that she wet her pants when a monster jumped out at her but that it would dry on its own as soon as she got out into the air.

After the Haunted House, they were on their way to get some cotton candy when they stopped to watch the “Dunk the Clown” booth. A clown with an enormous nose and a painted-on mouth sat on a swing over a pool of water. For twenty-five cents, anybody could try to hit the target with a baseball that would dump the clown into the water. While the clown was in the water, he gestured to the crowd and made faces, eliciting screams and jeers. After a while he climbed out of the water and got back on the swing again for somebody else to try.

“Can you imagine being the clown?” Pansy said. “So degrading!”

“It’s his job,” Vicki-Vicki said. “Like any other job.”

“Wait a minute,” Mary Lee said. “There’s that guy again.”

“What guy?”

They all turned their heads toward the person trying to knock the clown into the water. There were lots of people standing in the way, so they had to wait for somebody to move before they could get a good look.

“Yes, it’s him,” Pansy said. “He’s there and then he’s here. He’s everywhere.”

He hit the target effortlessly with the baseball and the crowd roared. A carnival worker man handed him his prize of a stuffed animal, and the next person in line took his place.

“Now we’ve seen everything,” Pansy said.

“Let’s get some cotton candy,” Mary Lee said.

“No, he’s coming this way,” Pansy said. “He’s looking right at us.”

“Just ignore him,” Vicki-Vicki said. “He might be looking for somebody to knife.”

“I don’t think so,” Pansy said. “He looks very sweet.”

Ignoring Pansy and Mary Lee, he walked up to Vicki-Vicki and smiled at her. He towered over her.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” he said.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” she said with a tight smile.

“I remember you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Here. I want to give you this stuffed toy.”

“Thanks, but I don’t accept stuffed animals from strangers.”

“You really don’t remember me, do you?”

“I’m with a couple of my friends from school. We were just leaving.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “Don’t let me intrude.”

She looked at the stuffed animal in her hand and gave it back to him.

When she turned to go, he said, “It was in sixth grade.”

“What was in sixth grade?”

“When we knew each other.”

“That was years ago.”

“I know,” he said, “but I always remembered you.”

“I think you have me mixed up with somebody else.”

“It was Miss Spengler’s class. She had white hair and she looked just like the picture of George Washington hanging on the wall.”

“It wasn’t me. It was somebody else.”

“No, it was you, all right.”

Pansy and Mary Lee were standing behind Vicki-Vicki, taking in every word. Mary Lee giggled and Pansy pinched her on the arm.

“Maybe if you told me your name, I might remember.”

“It’s Harry.”

“Harry what?”

“Just Harry.”

“You don’t have a last name?”

“I was living in a foster home. I moved around a lot. I left school after a few months to go someplace else.”

“You sat in the back of the room?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You were taller than anybody else in the class.”

“I think you remember me now.”

“You were the only one in the class who could spell the hardest words.”

“That was me.”

“You had fried chicken for lunch. Everybody else had junk food.”

“What a memory you have!” he said.

She blushed, in spite of herself, and turned to Mary Lee and Pansy for support.

“Since you remember me now, I wonder if you’d let me give you a ride home.”

“What? Oh, no! As I said, I’m with some friends.”

“I can give them a ride, too.”

“I don’t think so. My friend’s mother is going to pick us up.”

“How about if you go with me, and your two friends can go with your friend’s mother.”

“I don’t think I should go off and leave them.”

“Surely they wouldn’t mind. Just this once. It’s a beautiful evening. There’s a full moon. We can go for a ride in the country. Tell me that doesn’t sound good.

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t think I should leave my friends.”

“Ask them.”

She turned away and consulted with Mary Lee and Pansy. They shook their heads and shrugged, showing how indifferent they were to Vicki-Vicki’s comings and goings.

In a minute she returned to him. “It’s all right,” she said. “My friends think I should go with you.”

She knew that if she didn’t accept his offer, there might never be another one. Never as in not ever. She’d die a dried-up old spinster, playing bingo in the church basement on Friday nights while smoking Marlboro cigarettes. She would be forced to remember that she had once been asked but had foolishly declined.

He drove far out into the country, twenty miles or more. She didn’t ask where they were going. She didn’t tell him she had to be home by a certain time. She didn’t care about any of that.

Finally he stopped on a bluff overlooking a river.

“I didn’t even know this was here,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking.

“People don’t know about it,” he said. “It’s private. That’s why I like it.”

“It’s kind of scary in the dark. You don’t know what’s lurking in those trees over there.”

“Maybe an owl or two.”

After a while she asked him about his life since sixth grade. He lived in foster homes until he was sixteen and then he struck out on his own. After he got his high school diploma, he said, he no longer needed to live with strangers.

“You’re self-sufficient. Most boys your age are still such adolescents.”

He reached her for and began kissing her. He smelled of soap and peppermint. She resisted a little bit, but not much.

“I like you,” he said. “I’ve liked you since sixth grade.”

“It’s funny how people meet again after years. When somebody appears unexpectedly in your life, I always think there’s a reason.”

“I know you didn’t think about me after the sixth grade, but I thought about you a lot. You made a very favorable impression on me.”

“Why me out of all the others?”

“You were kind to me. Nobody else bothered.”

“I’ve never done this before with a boy.”

“It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”

Soon she was on her back and he was on top of her.

When he drove her back to town, it was almost three in the morning. She was relieved to see that her house was all dark, meaning that her mother had gone to bed. She opened the door of the truck. Before she got out, he said, “I want to marry you.”

It was the last time she ever saw him.

In a few weeks she knew that something was happening with her body. She missed one cycle and then another. She was pretty sure what was wrong, but she hoped it was something else. When she told the school nurse the symptoms she was having, the nurse gave her a test to do on herself when she got home. When she saw the results of the test, she felt a stab of panic. She was going to have to tell her parents about the carnival, the boy from sixth grade, and all the rest of it. She couldn’t keep it a secret forever.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997