Category: short stories

a short story by C. Wrenn Ball

They gathered in the center of the cabin, away from the world, the four of them talking about their family’s heart. She would drive her son South on 321 to Charlotte, early on a Saturday morning. By the time they reached the highway, her husband and daughter would have offered excuses around town. A trip across the country. Some time together, before her son’s wedding. They’d return like nothing had changed, if they were lucky.

The discussion had been short and to the point, her husband and daughter had not argued, despite the danger, the illegality. Her husband was too old to receive the organ, her daughter too young and was, of course, without a lover. The organ was naturally tender, already pressed to its limit, so they were resolved to tradition. Her daughter had not betrayed jealousy, and over the course of the night, her son had not uttered a word.

She had a doctor’s number, passed between pages in a book that was three generations old. Stored in a bedside drawer, a key to her cardiovascular system. She’d been staring at the faded ink for months. Borrowed time, borrowed, borrow. Then freely given, while fear reigned in her body.

Before they cut open her chest cavity, she had to know that her son would not waste the heart. She cornered him on the couch, the night before their drive down the mountain. They sat together, discussing the secrets of the universe and their family’s illicit organ, while she searched his eyes for doubt.

Continue reading…

 

When Clive broke up with Clara, who worries if she is intelligent, he told her that their relationship was only sexual.  When he left me, always unhappy with my body, he said I didn’t really turn him on.  Our common hurt was what brought us together.  We felt he’d negated us, body and soul.

We met at a party in my cousin’s backyard.  Bonnie steered me past her overpoweringly fragrant jasmine vine to a small woman sitting on the shaded bench.

“Celia, my dear, you must cheer Clara up.  She’s feeling rotten about a man.”

“Really?”  I stared at the beautiful, flower-like woman.  “Me too,” I added after Bonnie strode away.  My cousin was too close to my our family for me to let her know about the failures in my personal life.

“Aren’t they fuckers?”  Clara’s voice was low and slightly guttural.

The obscenity put me at ease.  “Christ, yes, and this one you wouldn’t believe.”

“Mine was worse.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

We compared notes.  Clara’s story of a blissful beginning, uneasy middle, and final betrayal was familiar, similar to my story, to the stories which many of my friends tell about their one or two disasters.  Then she mentioned the name Clive.  The dates of our relationships overlapped.  We discovered the depths of his treachery.

We became friends.  There was an immediate intimacy between us.  We could talk endlessly about Clive with a degree of obsession we hid from others.  Clara didn’t say, annoyance tingeing her voice, “Why don’t you just forget him?”  She knew the answer.

We did things together to distract ourselves.  We discovered that we liked the same movies, the same parks, the same cafes.  We spent much of our days together, since we both worked part-time.  I taught art classes to small children and their mothers.  She was a secretary to a psychologist who once a week good-naturedly tried to seduce her, while she good-naturedly refused.  Jerry was remarkably easygoing.  She told me that he didn’t protest when she pulled the filing cabinet down on herself by opening the two top drawers at the same time, the day after Clive broke up with her.  She sat sobbing, surrounded by papers, until her employer returned from a long lunch and helped her straighten up.

Events take on significance later.  Once Clara appeared in the doorway of my classroom, her face streaming with tears.  The mothers shifted in their low childs’ chairs.

“Clar,” I ran to shield her from them, “are you O.K.?”

“Yes.  Get back to work; I’ll wait in the hall.”  She slid her back down the wall and landed sitting, her knees drawn up, as though she were pulling into a shell.

I returned to the classroom and busied myself mixing paint, my back to the mothers.  God damn their eyes, I thought, for the first time understanding the phrase.  I didn’t want our sorrow to be observed.

“Hope your friend feels better,” Mrs. Gruber remarked at the end of class as she pushed Johnny out the door.

“I’m sure she’ll be all right,” I answered brusquely.  Clara huddled in the hall, staring through the passing procession of knees.  “Did you notice the figure Johnny drew today?” I continued.  “He’s really developing fast.  The blue painting…”  My eyes were drawn to some movement or change.  Had Clara left?  I didn’t see her.  Then she was there again, crouching motionless.

Mrs. Gruber coughed delicately.  “The blue painting,” I responded, “is very, ah, thoughtful, sophisticated.”

I watched Mrs. Gruber click down the stairs, her firm hand on Johnny’s wrist as he thumped from step to step.  “Come in,” I called to Clara.  “I’ve got to clean up.  What happened?”

“I just needed to see you.”

I put my arm over her shoulder, holding my paint-crusted hand away from her mauve flowered blouse.  “We clash,” I said, fingering my red apron.

“It’s a disguise.  So people won’t know how close we are.”

“Conspirators.”

She smiled slowly.  “Yeah, it’s us against Clive and the world.”

Another time she lost me for a moment.  We were at an art opening I felt obliged to attend.  I edged the crowd with Clara, trying to seem absorbed in Billy Sagan’s slick, expensive paintings.  “So this is how he does it,”  I gestured at a large canvas of geometric shapes.  “The colors this year; it’ll go with any room your decorator designs.”  I glared at the genial drunk in the center of the crowd.  He saw me, flopped his hand, and smiled lopsidedly.  “Nice work,” I shouted.

I turned back to the wall.  There were too many people there that I recognized and might have to speak to, and they were dressed too flamboyantly.  What had I been thinking of, coming to an opening without jewelry, a hat, or a period costume?  I felt conspicuous.  I hated the crowd for their successes, for the way they chatted and laughed, the way they slid, plastic wine glass in hand, from one conversation to another.  There was Laura Rogers moving toward us like a ship.  I knew what our exchange would be like.  I would admire her ponderous ceramic necklace, which, of course, she had made herself.  She’d ask me what I was doing and I’d answer that I was still teaching kids and finding time for a few drawings.  I’d ask her what she was doing: another grant, a new show opening soon, a choice teaching job.

“Celia?”  Clara turned slowly, peering through the crowd.

“I’m right here.”  I put a hand on her shoulder.

“Huh?”  She whirled around.  “That’s funny.  I didn’t see…”

“Oh Celia, and who is your gorgeous friend?” Laura bore down upon us.

A few days later we sat in a cafe.  I played with the sugar in the bowl.  I wanted to relate last night’s dream:  Clive chasing me into a public bathroom, my terror as I waited in the gray stall, knowing he would enter when the other women left, knowing he had a knife in the pocket of his pale blue jacket.

I wanted to hear how Clara would interpret this, what sexual connotations she would catch.  I wanted to spill the frightening dream onto the white tablecloth between us, letting her rearrange it into a daylight phrase.

But a man was watching us.  I was angry at the intrusion, angry at his arrogant expression, angry because I was sure it was beautiful Clara who interested him.

“What’s wrong?” Clara asked me.

I leaned toward her.  “That man’s looking at us.”

She turned.  Her eyes met his.  “Are you looking at us?”

He half rose.  “Yes, you look too good to ignore.”

“Well please stop.  We want to talk.  You’re making us uncomfortable.”

He slumped back into his chair.

“Clara, that was fantastic.  I never know what to say to them.”  The man gulped his coffee and left.  “I just get so flustered.”

“It’s O.K.  Men looking at us has been bothering me lately too.”  Her shoulders drooped.

I poked the spoon into the sugar.  “I wish we were invisible.”  I looked up.  Clara was gone.

“Clar!”

“Celia?”  I felt a hand grope for mine.

“Clara, are you there?”  The table where our hands were clasped was empty.

People looked in our direction.  What would they do to invisible women?  I heaved Clara’s weight toward the back door.  A small strip of grass behind the building.  I crumpled, panting.

“Clara, what should we do?”

A gasp or stifled giggle.

I lay back on the grass.  I held up my hand and looked through it at an alligator shaped cloud.  My breathing slowed, sank.  The sky darkened.  I saw the flesh of my solid hand.

Clara sat nearby, her legs crossed tailor-fashion.  She had lost her air of exhaustion; she looked alert, interested.

“Celia,” a smile of greeting, “you’re back.  What do you think?”

“I don’t know.  It just happened.  I didn’t feel anything.  It just sort of happened.”

“Let’s try it again.”

I stared at her.

“Come on.  Think about something you want to get away from.  I know, that dinner party I told you about, the one when Clive talked to that woman photographer all night and I didn’t know anybody.”  Her shoulders sagged; her image wavered.  She was gone.

“Clara, come back!”

“It worked.”  Her voice was exultant.  “Come on, Celia, try.”

“I don’t want to.  Please come back.”

“In a minute.”

I felt scared, lonely.  I thought that there had been plenty of times when I would have loved to be invisible.  The high school dances, before I knew better and stopped going.  Oh God, trying not to stare at Walter Griffin as he sauntered in my direction, but also not looking away in case he did want to ask me to dance.

I started.  I couldn’t see myself.  I reached for Clara’s hand.

We went in and out of being invisible.  Our lives didn’t change much.  Lighter and more pliant than most people, we floated in this new element, entering museums and movies for free, watching others unobserved, though it was hard to remember not to talk, and more than once our voices puzzled or scared some passerby.

Before, we had avoided going anywhere near Clive’s house, though we were drawn to it, imagining the blue shutters, the brick stairs, the one pine tree in front.  Now, invisible, we walked past it often, gorging ourselves on pain and the freedom to feel it.  Once, we peered in the kitchen window.

“Wonder If he still keeps a jar of caviar in the fridge,” I said.

“And green olives.”

“Ugh,” I responded.  Clara liked to eat bitter things.  I loved everything fattening, sweet or salty.

“You know, he keeps the back door key under the third geranium.”

“I know.”  I thought ruefully of Clive’s luck; I had never let myself in while Clara was waiting for him in the bedroom room with a book.

“Let’s go in.”

“Clar!”

“Why not?  I’m hungry.”

The key clicked, scaring me.  We entered cautiously.  The house reeked of his presence and I wanted him.  I also wanted to smash the antique porcelain fu dog in the hall, to kick the Oriental rugs into a heap, scrawl on the etchings, and, most of all, to batter the shiny, inscrutable suit of armor that stood on the landing of the stairs.  His perfection, his horrible self-sufficiency.

“Clara,” I whispered.  I had gone into the living room without her.  I called into the doorway of each room except the bedroom.  If I didn’t find her soon, I knew I would wait, visible, on Clive’s bed for his appearance, probably with a startled woman holding his hand.

“Hi,” she answered in the kitchen.  “I’m eating.”  An enormous sandwich, several layers of cheese and meat, lifted into the air.

A few evenings later we felt restless.  There were no movies we wanted to see and Clara’s television bored us.  The summer air settled on my shoulders.  I stretched my arm; it was like moving through soup.  “I wonder what he’s doing.”

“Fucking.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“We could go see.”

“Okay,” I surprised myself by agreeing.

He was alone.  He lay among his colored pillows, the sheets crumpled around him.  His body was thin, long.  He looked vulnerable, yet closed.  We stood several feet from the bed, holding hands, trying to be angry.  Clara sobbed once and he stirred, an uneasy sleeper.

“Should we go?” I whispered.

“Yes.  Oh, he looks so innocent.”

I pulled her toward the door, my stomach furry.  She reached out as we passed him and laid her fingers on his thigh.  He sprang up.

We clattered down the stairs and fumbled with the front door lock.  In the uproar of our escape, I can’t be sure I heard his voice, higher than usual, shouting behind us.

At my apartment we fell into the two fat chairs.  Clara finally spoke, “I bet he was really scared.”

Her face twisted between a smile and a sob.  My mouth twitched and we laughed.

“Oh God, can you imagine?  He must be petrified.”

“Good.”

“Celia,” Clara looked at me eagerly, her full-lipped mouth half open, “Let’s go back; let’s really scare him.”

“Yes.”  My tongue lay in my mouth like a pastel lozenge.  Evil had a delicious taste.

For a week we didn’t talk about that night.  We stayed visible and saw several movies.  On Friday we went to a department store.  The number of customers surprised us until we realized it was lunch hour.  I felt uneasy among the crowd.  Clara gasped.  “Look.”  She pointed and vanished.

Clive stood by a table, examining a bolt of blue cotton printed with enormous red roses.  The blue matched his eyes and, possibly, his living room curtains.  In the daylight, I saw he had gotten very tan.

His head turned, and I disappeared, reaching for Clara’s hand.  We stood still.  I was afraid the shoppers would bump into seemingly empty space, more afraid to try to push through them.  Clive bought several yards of the fabric and left with the parcel under his arm.  The store began to empty; lunch hour was over.  “Let’s get out of here.”  I pulled Clara into visibility.

That evening we went to his room.  It was sunset, the sky a tender pink-tinged blue.  Colors fluoresced in that light–the geraniums by the door, the roses on the new cloth draped over the living room sofa.  We climbed the stairs quietly.  Clive lay against his pillows, his right hand resting on an open book by his side.  He was looking at some treachery, his eyes reflective, inward.  He wasn’t thinking about us.

Clara gripped his arms.  I sat on his legs and unbuttoned his shirt.

His mouth, like an O, floated above us, the screams issuing from the cream colored ceiling, the round moon scaling the window.

 

Judith Serin has taught Literature at CCA for many years. Her books include the poetry collection, “Hiding in the World” (Eidelon Editions), and an artist’s book featuring Serin’s poetry in collaboration with book artist Nikki Thompson, “Days Without (Sky)” (Deconstructed Artichoke Press). She has published numerous short stories and poems in journals and anthologies. 

Short Fiction by Kevin Sharp

My life changed when I turned seven.

It seems so long ago now, and I guess it was–especially with everything that’s happened to me since.

In 1976, my mom and I lived at the Starbrite Mobile Home Park outside Flagstaff, Arizona. I divided most of my free time there between reading in my room and playing in our yard (really a square of rocks occupied by some faded plastic flamingoes). I could stay in my fictional worlds for hours, until Mom called me for dinner or bed or because the approaching siren meant that something was going down (again) at one of the other trailers.

My mom’s name is Cinderella. Really. She hates it, always going by Cindy or Cin. She told me over and over not to name my future kids anything weird, that to parents it may be a spur of the moment thing but the kids had to live with it.

“For instance, I wouldn’t have named you Galahad,” she said.

I didn’t tell her that I wished she had, because Galahad is a way better name than Herman.

I knew my dad only as a faded image of blonde hair and sideburns. The card he sent for my seventh birthday showed an astronaut, untethered to any rocket, floating alone against a blue-black galaxy. Inside: Have An Out Of This World Birthday! Printed below that: Love, Your Pop.

Mom cried as she watched me sound the words out.

She took me to celebrate on January 1, 1977 – I’d been a New Year’s baby – and to give us both a break from our usual Rice-A-Roni or plain pasta dinners. The restaurant was called the Squat & Gobble, which doesn’t sound too fancy, but to me anyplace with cloth napkins and hardcover menus was like dining as a king. After I blew out the candle on my slice of chocolate cake (chosen off the silver dessert tray), the waitress, Dot, leaned down and whispered in my ear, “My mama poisoned my stepdad and made it look like an accident. He was a terrible man.” Then she gave a big smile; she had a smear of lipstick on her front tooth.

I lay in bed that night playing with my new Aquaman doll, wondering if Dot had told me something from a movie or a grown-up book.

The next day, my friend Richie and I waded in the creek behind his house, looking for crawfish or tadpoles. “Guess what, Herman.” His eyes were wide behind the giant lenses of his glasses. “I peeked through my parents’ keyhole and saw my mom tied up to the bed with my dad’s neckties. She shouted at him to…” Here Richie listed phrases whose meanings neither of us were sure of, exactly, nor did we know who to ask.

The school bus driver, Ms. Brenda, held me back Monday morning after all the other kids. She told me about the time she and her friends stole the principal’s car in high school. Only they didn’t know the principal needed his car to drive his sick wife to chemotherapy. There was a big mess – that’s how Ms. Brenda said it: “a big mess.”

“Not a day goes by I don’t think about that poor woman,” she told me. She wiped her eyes with a wadded Kleenex from her jacket sleeve.

After Ms. Brenda came Mrs. Nelson, my first grade teacher. The yard duty supervisor at recess. The assistant principal. The kids I talked to, on the playground, in the lunch line, in the bathroom. Even kids from the other classes, whose names I didn’t know. People who probably never even knew I existed.

They would all lean in and whisper to me, even if nobody else was around. Like what they were about to tell me was the biggest, most important thing ever.

Pug-nosed Tommy Gregson, who I guess would’ve been categorized as the class bully, told me his mom put a wad of toilet paper in his underwear every day so she wouldn’t have to wash brown stains out of it. Do you know what I could’ve done to Tommy with that information, especially as his reign of terror expanded in later grades?

What had happened when I blew out that candle? Since when was seven a magical age? In case you’re wondering, hearing all this stuff wasn’t my wish; I’d asked for the same things as every year: a life-size Batmobile, and for my dad to come home.

 

#

 

But whether I wished for them or not, my collection of secrets grew day by day, with every person I encountered.

My dentist said he ate chocolate at every meal, which I thought was a pretty cool secret for someone with that job. But then he added, “I fantasize about your mother every time you come in here. I hope you get lots and lots of cavities, young man.” (I didn’t know what fantasize meant; I pictured my mom with fairy wings, riding a unicorn.)

Mrs. Hooper from the trailer next door told me she’d once secretly dated a black boy even though her parents were super-racist. (I pictured checkered flags as her mom and dad drove fast around a track.)

Richie’s mom, when I was playing over at his house, told me she was pregnant. I thought from TV that this was good news, but she kept saying, “What was I thinking?”

Mom’s hairstylist. The gas station attendant. The red-haired girl who scooped at 31 flavors. The mailman with the cowboy mustache.

 

#

 

After a couple of weeks I felt all those stories dragging after me wherever I went, like the ghost’s chains in a Christmas movie I’d once seen. Mom and I were watching a show called Charlie’s Angels on our itchy green couch one night, when I told her what had been happening.

She ground out her cigarette in the abalone shell ashtray. “What do they say?” she asked.

I paused, wondering what the etiquette was in such a situation.

“No, you’re right. Always respect a secret.” She lit up a new one. “So what’s mine?”

I thought this over while one of the TV ladies karate-chopped a guy. I knew everything about Mom already, like that her hair wasn’t really black and she never wore underwear. But, no, it would have to be something she’d told me since my birthday.

“Um, that you didn’t pay for your new scarf. The purple shiny one.”

She stared at me while smoke swirled around us in the blue light of the TV; every other light was off to save power. “Hell, I’m just taking that thing for a test drive. Stealing is wrong and you shouldn’t ever do it. Okay?”

When she shook me awake however long later, Godzilla roared on TV and half my face was numb from the couch. Mom said, “I have an idea.”

I never saw any of the men she dated, because she’d never let them pick her up; instead, she’d put on her finger-length eyelashes and her one fancy dress to go meet them in our old blue station wagon. “It’s not as glamorous as a pumpkin coach,” was how she described the car. It used to crack me up, picturing the poor guy seeing that thing driving up and wondering what he’d gotten himself into. Then Mom would get out, all beautiful.

I’d stay up late reading comic books with a flashlight so she wouldn’t see my lamp on through the window shade and worry that I wasn’t sleeping again. Only when she was home, when I’d heard her kick off her high heels and the click-click of her lighter, could I relax. The walls of our trailer were thin as cardboard; it felt like we were right next to each other even when we weren’t.

She always said her dream man was “a young Elvis Presley with the soul of John Denver.”

Anyway, Mom’s idea…

She reached out to the TV knob with her bare foot, turned down Godzilla’s volume. “Baby, you’re gonna help me find Prince Charming.”

 

#

 

The pretty nurse at my doctor’s office led me into the exam room and told me she was head over heels in love with the doctor. Then Dr. Schwartz tapped my knees with his little hammer and told me he was gay.

A girl named Winnie Munson joined our class well into the school year; Mrs. Nelson put her in the only empty desk, which happened to be right next to mine. And so, five minutes into her time there, while everyone else focused on their subtraction problems, Winnie told me that her father locked himself into her older sister’s room every night. I didn’t respond; whatever weird games her family played were none of my business, and it wouldn’t be good for me to be seen whispering with a girl.

 

#

 

Mom stopped going out on dates – now she invited men to dinner at our trailer. If he was supposed to be there at 7:00, she’d start preparing around 6:50; the guy would show up and Mom would say she got stuck at work or had car trouble (both lies). Then I’d be in charge of entertaining him – except it was more like a job interview he didn’t know he was on.

Roger, who seemed like a giant in my tiny room, looked around and asked what sports I liked to play. “None, really,” I said. “I can’t run very good.”

His voice dropped to a familiar whisper. “You’re looking at a former college wide receiver. I was plenty fast enough, but I missed a lot of practice because I was boinking my coach’s wife the whole time.” He illustrated the concept using his finger and a closed fist.

Oh, Roger. It was nice meeting you. Sort of.

I signaled to Mom when we came out of my room – blink twice slowly – and she pretended she was getting a migraine, clutching her head with good authenticity. Then the two of us ate the nice dinner on the checkered tablecloth.

I had to open my window because of Tom’s cologne. He looked at my bookcase and my pile of comics while I looked at the curly carpet of chest hair he showed off. Tom seemed nice, and he knew about the Hardy Boys. If the worst problem had been his grooming we might’ve been ok. But then he had to kneel in front of me. “I took money from some bad people. Real bad. Now I sleep with a gun under my pillow.”

Bye, Tom.

Bye, Nate, with the night terrors you brought back from Vietnam.

Bye, Frank, with your five ex-wives and the reason why all of them left you.

Bye, Anthony, with your glass slipper jokes after seeing Mom’s name on the electric bill. (He didn’t even make it to my room.)

#

As the weather got warmer on its way to brutal, Mom took me to the public pool each weekend. I usually spent my time there lathered in Coppertone, watching the lucky kids whose dads played with them in the shallow end. Now it was all whispers in my wet ears: swimmers, parents, lifeguards, the lady at the snack bar. I got pretty good at holding my breath – and ignoring the blinding sting of chlorine – because I tried to stay underwater as much as possible. Finally I told Mom I didn’t want to go anymore; instead I’d sit three inches from the squeaky fan at home and mist myself with a spray bottle.

I didn’t want to go with her on her usual errands, either. People who had confessed once left me alone, but strangers were too risky – the man in the grocery store who was planning his suicide gave me actual nightmares. The only places I felt safe were at the movies (where I could sit way down in front by myself) and the public library (where I could hide in one of the carrels).

#

 

I thought Clay might be the winner of the Prince Charming sweepstakes when he offered me half a Kit-Kat bar outside the trailer while we waited for dinner. I’d been trying to avoid chocolate (and thus more cavities) but my seven-year-old will was weak.

Clay looked both ways before lighting what I knew was a joint. “I spend every day stoned – it’s the only way I can get through my shitty life. You’ll understand someday, kid.” When I was in bed later I heard him and Mom giggling; the smoke smell rolled in under my door. But I never saw him again after that.

Yale the draft dodger got to stay for dinner. So did Ben, who hadn’t been on a date in nine years. And Leroy.

But none of them were Mom’s guy. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted her not to be lonely.

“Oh, baby,” she said as she tucked me in one stuffy night. “There’s a world of difference between alone and lonely.”

This went on through the spring and summer. Richie’s mom had a baby. I lost a front tooth. Two girls vanished from my life: Winnie Munson, who stopped showing up to school, and the red-haired girl from 31 flavors (probably because the boss found out what she was doing in there after hours). Star Wars came out. Elvis died; Mom drank beers and sang along to his records all day.

 

#

 

The phone rang during Saturday morning cartoons. I held the receiver in one hand, my bowl of Cocoa Pebbles in the other. “Herman?” the man said. He spoke loudly over music and chatter in the background.

I didn’t know the voice, but I knew the voice. “Dad?”

“Yes, son.” A song played about blue eyes crying. “Say, is your mom there?”

“No, she said she’s splurging on a new haircut.”

I heard a sound like ice cubes. When he spoke again, he was much quieter, as if the phone was stuffed inside his mouth. “My folks had a terrible marriage. Fought all the time, cursed, hit each other – like they weren’t in love and never had been. I didn’t want me and your mom to end up like that. I didn’t want me to end up like that. Like maybe being a violent asshole was something my dad passed down, and then I’d pass it down to you. So I made myself leave.”

The operator asked him to deposit more money. Coins clinked.

He said, “The last time I saw you and Cin was the last happy day of my life.” A new song started: something-something country roads. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.”

And there in our tiny kitchen, for the first time when someone had finished whispering to me, I smiled.

 

 

Kevin Sharp teaches high school creative writing in Northern California. He is the author of the YA novel After Dakota; his work has also appeared on The Weeklings and in Bookmarks magazine. While he has technically grown up, Kevin has yet to outgrow Looney Tunes, The Price is Right, fantasy novels, or comic books. This story makes him want to confess his secret celebrity crush on Kate Winslet. Visit him online at www.kevin-sharp.com.

Image courtesy of Pawel Kadysz at unsplash.com

 

A Short Story by Enid Harlow

“Goodbye,” she said. “I have to go now.”

He didn’t answer but watched with steady eyes.

Meeting his eyes, she had a sense of herself reduced in size and given wings and flown out of herself toward him like a moth. She took a step closer as if to shake his hand, but he hadn’t extended his hand so she fluttered there, her purpose lost, around his head as if it were a flame.

Come back here, she called under her breath, and obediently the moth flew back inside her skin.

He took a step closer and made an expansive gesture with his arm, sweeping it out and quickly back. Instantly, she saw the flap of his greatcoat pulled open, revealing dozens of pockets neatly sewn inside. Each pocket held a tiny, flaming candle. As she stood entranced by the blazing spectacle, dozens of moths escaped her person. Each was drawn out of her toward a pocket inside the man’s greatcoat. They fluttered there above the flames.

“You’re full of tricks,” she said.

He smiled a magician’s smile.

Once more she recalled the fluttering creatures. Once more they returned obediently and folded themselves back inside their accustomed places where they lay still.

“Well, goodbye,” she said and walked away.

The moment she left him she felt better. Her breathing came easier, then tension in her shoulders relaxed. By the time she had reached the end of the block she had nearly forgotten him.

It was March before Joyce heard from him again. A tricky month. She didn’t quite know how to dress. Misled by a bright sky and dazzling sun, she’d underestimated the chill in the air and had worn only a light jacket over her sweater and skirt. Shivering and jamming her hands into her pockets, she waited at the entrance to the park where they had arranged to meet.

A park as familiar to her as her own childhood. She knew the turns of each of its paths, the exquisite danger of its large, climbing rocks, the limits of every swing in its playground. From where she stood she could see over the wall to where a few young children were being pushed on the swings. A heavy rubber mat had been laid on the ground beneath them for protection, but other than that nothing in the playground had changed since she had played there as a child.

Continue reading “Magic Man”

Enid Harlow is the author of three novels: GOOD TO HER, CRASHING, and A BETTER MAN. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Boulevard, Nimrod, TriQuarterly, The Ontario Review, Northeast Review, Southern Review, and Southwest Review, among others. “Magic Man” originally appeared in Southwest Review.

Image courtesy of New Old Stock

a short story by John Timm

The actuarial office is exactly 6.1 miles from the house via the 405 Freeway. When the 405 is backed up (it often is), the distance is 7.2 miles on surface streets. Travel time using either option is difficult to calculate with the same exactitude, given such random variables as traffic accidents and weather. Still, a pattern has developed over the past eighteen years that allows me to predict closely (within 45 seconds) where I will be at any given time once I leave my driveway at precisely 7:30 a.m. There are certain markers along the freeway that permit this: mile posts, billboards. exit ramps. Likewise, on the surface streets there are intersections and traffic signals, a Target, a Ross, a Michel’s, a Von’s, seventeen strip malls, nine fast food restaurants (including one that is presently closed) three car washes, a railroad crossing (which introduces a random variable into the equation) and a fire department (another random variable).

Today at 7:35 a.m., I am stopped at the corner of Sawtelle and Sepulveda, in the left driving lane, second car back from the stop light. At this hour, the light remains red for 25 seconds. It is .8 miles to the freeway entrance ramp. It requires a left turn, and experience has taught me to be prepared, hence my left lane position. The radio is tuned to its customary place on the dial, and I’m listening to Traffic and Weather on the Fives. Regularity and consistency have their comforts.

The car in front of me is familiar. California 6DMW935, a 2007 grey Honda Civic, purchased in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The lone occupant has a husband (or male companion), three children and two dogs. (This assumes that the family decals on the rear window belong to the driver, and if so, have been updated regularly). While I admit I’ve not done an actual calculation on paper, there is a high degree of probability I will follow this same vehicle three out of every eleven travel days.

To my right in the curb lane is the green and white Peerless Laundry Company van (PLC 1706). It’s slightly ahead of its usual daily pace, normally parked until 7:37 a.m. in the Pep Boys lot back at Sepulveda and Franklin.

At Sepulveda and Barman, I see Marvin in the curb lane, awaiting his opportunity (Marv would never call it his “chance”) to move into the left lane in order to make the same left turn as I onto the freeway. We exchange our ritual morning greeting, a quick flourish of the hand (my right, his left) as we focus intently on the road ahead. I am ninety-five percent confident that Marv and I will enter the freeway ramp in tandem at 7:39 a.m., exiting together, at 7:51 a.m. onto San Vicente Boulevard. With only one long block to go (.2 miles), we’ll be parked in our designated places (Row 3, stalls 15 and 16) two minutes thereafter and will enter the building at 7:53 a.m., as duly recorded by the Simplex Time Recorder. If the 7:35 a.m. radio traffic report demands an all-street routing, we will arrive at the lot with at 7:59 a.m. with just one minute to spare. Neither of us has ever arrived late.

Marv has been my co-worker for seventeen of the last eighteen years. We both joined the firm on our birthdays, a coincidence we often discuss, and since his birthday is exactly thirty days after mine, it’s easy to remember.

We take our daily lunch together in the cafeteria, as we have over these seventeen years, and it’s there we play the game, seated at our regular table. Marv and I agree in advance on the same entree in order to finish eating by the appointed starting time, 12:20 p.m.

It’s a game of our own invention. We didn’t know what to call it at first, but on Marv’s second anniversary at the office (March 17, 1997) we gave it the name What If? I remember that moment as if it were yesterday. Here’s how we play. On alternate days, one of us is the guessmaster (the title was my idea). As guessmaster, we have to bring with us the name of an occupation, along with a job description, education and skill requirements, tools or devices employed and any licenses, if required. The guesser (I’ll give Marv credit for that one) has three minutes, no more, no less (we employ a digital timer), to come up with the exact name of the position. If he does, the guessmaster must buy lunch the following day. If not, the guesser must buy lunch the following day for the guessmaster. Simple game, simple rules. Over time, Marv and I stand virtually even, the tally swinging back and forth day to day, week to week, month to month. We often joke it’s the law of averages at work more than any special talent on the part ofeither of us.

But the game doesn’t end there. Officially it does, yes, but Marv and I spend the balance of the lunch hour (until 12:59 p.m.) discussing the relative merits and disadvantages of the position of the day.

Continue reading this story at Beacon.

 

John Timm teaches communications and foreign languages at a university in the Phoenix area. His work has appeared in Bartleby Snopes, Perspective Literary Magazine, Story Shack, 300 Days of Sun, Romance Notes, Luso-Brazilian Review and elsewhere.

Image courtesy of quicksandala, via morguefile.com.