Hibernation

by

Doug Murano

 

 

"Are you listening? Get over here and watch me do this," Dusty says. He holds his fingers up to the sun and spreads them wide as he checks them for mud before he rakes them back across his scalp. His long legs make short work of the muddy slough. "Let's go!" he says. Dusty grunts as he plunges the aluminum net downward into the water and drags it back towards him before he lifts it up. "Look," he says.

I look.

For a moment, I forget about the fifty-six degree water and the mud tightening its greasy, creeping grip on my thighs. In between the broken reeds and mud dripping from the fine webbing of the net, I see little green and brown hands waving through the air, grasping at nothing. I see kicking legs and flat, webbed feet. I see big golden eyes.

"How did you know they'd be here today?" I ask.

"I'll tell you if you say you're a sissy and you're glad I brought you out here."

"I'm not a sissy. Stop it. Just tell me."

"With brown sugar and sprinkles on top?"

"With brown sugar and sprinkles on top."

"Sorry, sissy, not good enough. Try again." He flicks some more sludge from the net onto my head.

"Fine. I'm a little sissy. Please," I say.

Dusty revels in this for a few beats before he starts talking. He lowers his voice to a confidential tone and tells me that frogs live their lives according to a cycle. Every winter, when the weather started turning cold and food was scarce, the frogs hopped back to the slough where they were born. Once home, they burrowed deep down into the mud, insulated from the frigid cold of winter. After the first big thaw, on days just like today, the frogs escaped from their homes under the mud where they slept through the winter. The best time to catch them was just after they dug themselves out.

"Hold it steady."

"I'm trying."

"They're getting away!"

Some of the frogs cartwheel over the sides and back into the murk, but most splatter at the bottom of the bucket like little wet sponges.

From somewhere beyond the tree strip surrounding the slough a woman's voice yells our first, middle, and last names. Mom.

I stand for a moment and listen, hoping I had misheard.

Then we hear her again. "Dusty…Ryan… Pickett. Bring your little brother back here right now."

"Let's get back," Dusty says, grimacing and hitching up his pants. His fingers leave a black handprint below his belt loops. He takes up the bucket and starts back towards the house, while I struggle to follow. 

Mom waits on the porch near the front door. She rests one fist upon her ample hip. The other hand she presses palm towards her eye, like someone holding a bag of frozen peas to a shiner.

"Oh cripes, Dusty. What did you do to him? And where are his shoes?"

"He begged me, Mom. He begged me to take him out to the slough to look for frogs. I told him it was too cold and that we'd get all dirty, but he just grabbed the bucket and the net and took off. I had to."

The phone rings. Bill collectors. She ignores it. "Well, neither of you are coming inside until you both get cleaned up. If it's warm enough for you to go swimming in the slough, it's warm enough for you to rinse off with the hose." She turns around and slams the door.

Dusty grabs my arm and leads me across the driveway over to the standpipe next to the garden. He wrenches the curved handle of the waterspout upward and washes his hands. Then he smiles and looks at me. One of his big hands folds a kink in the hose. From inside the pail, I hear the shuffling sounds as the frogs jump all over each other and try to escape.

If you're not in here in ten minutes, no lunch! Mom shouts through an open window.

Dusty looks toward the house, then to the bucket, and then back at me. "Did you know this is one of the oldest wells in the state? One time, Mom told me that our great-great grandparents were the first settlers in the county and that they dug this well with their own two hands."

I say, boy is that interesting. I ask him for the hose.

"Not yet." He tells me Mom said that because it was one of the oldest wells, it was also one of the shallowest wells, which is one reason why the water tastes like blood sometimes and we have to make our soup with distilled water from town. Too much salt and too many minerals make it taste like sucking on a penny. 

"That's great, Dusty, now please gimme the hose. I'm cold."

Dusty kinks the hose a second time and I can see the pressure build from the way one of the green loops on the ground shudders. “You want to know what else she told me? She said that one long, cold winter great-great grandma Evelyn got an infection in her leg and great-great grandpa John had to amputate it with a hack saw."

"They had to chop it off?"

Boys. Now!

 

 

 

"They had to chop it off. Can you imagine it? Mom said since it was the middle of the winter when it happened, and they didn't want the coyotes to get to the leg, they buried it next to the well because that's the only place they could soak the ground enough to make it soft enough to dig."

I imagine great-great grandpa tying up the stump of a leg up in a burlap sack with twine. I can see a red stain soaking through one of the corners as he throws the sack over his shoulder. I think of all the times I drank right from the hose. "They wouldn't bury great-great grandma's leg apart from her. She needs to be whole. That's what Pastor Richardson said last week." I'm inside the church. Pastor Richardson sweats and points and with a flourish shouts, "And the dead in Christ will rise first!"

"You'd think so, but times were different back when she was alive. Maybe she'll have to hobble on up to heaven one-legged. Maybe she'll hear the call and crawl out of the ground from the cemetery, and her stinky leg will hop out of the ground right here and not know where to go. It'll just hop around forever." Dusty stiffens his arms, bends one of his legs at the knee, slackens his jaw in a hideous grimace and hobbles around like a one-legged zombie.

"Where…is…that…damned…leg…of…miiiine, John?" moans Dusty as he staggers toward me. He releases the kink and the hose sneezes cold water all over me. It chills me. My teeth ache.

I try to think of something else: Kirby Puckett, Labrador retrievers, riding the Zipper at the State Fair, but a slow certainty builds. Every time I'd sipped a cool drink straight from the hose and enjoyed the salty metallic twang, I had drank a little of great-great grandma Evelyn’s old, infected leg. I notice the sour taste again in the back of my throat. I think of Pastor Richardson shouting down from the pulpit about how on that great, happy day, all of the faithful would rise up again out of the ground. That their bodies were just waiting for Jesus to come back for them to raise them up into the sky. This was supposed to be eternal joy. But now all I can see in my mind's eye is the ragged corpse of an old woman with one leg shambling toward me.

I imagine an enormous Jesus walking across the earth in great strides with a vast, swooping steel net in one hand and a titanic white plastic pail in the other snatching them all away like so many frogs out of a slough: the limping corpses of everyone who's ever died a Christian. I think of great-great grandma's leg pushing its way up through the dense prairie sod and not knowing where to go. I can taste the sour metal of well water and I think of the frogs, digging up out of the mud and swimming upward in their slow, counterclockwise carousel to the water's surface.

I'm screaming "Stop! Stop! Stop!"

Dusty smiles. "Fine. I'll quit. It's all just bullshit anyway you big baby. I'm gonna go get a grilled cheese. Wash up on your own."

I watch him pick up his pail and I can hear the spongy thuds of dozens of frogs jumping against the white plastic sides grow softer as he moves away from me. I feel my feet sink another inch into the softening ground. When I wiggle my toes, the earth makes greedy sucking sounds.

 

 

Doug Murano is a South Dakota-based writer of short fiction. You can find more of his work in Deadlines: An Anthology of Horror and Dark Fiction published by Comet Press (available at Comet Press and Amazon) and at Well Told Tales, a horror and pulp fiction podcast (also available through iTunes). “Hibernation” first appeared in the 2008 Vermillion Literary Project Magazine.

Frog in Grass, Wheaton, MD courtesy Art.com

A Good Day for Sledding

by

Tom Deiker

 

 

The old man dreams a dream of cold pellets of snow striking his face. Of moving downwards on a hissing sound. Of a child’s laughter chasing, catching up, shooting past on a layer of white. His eyes open to stare at hissing snow on his television screen. Past the television the whiter snow of his bedroom wall stares back. And against the wall, wrapped in maple-sugar varnish, stands a sled. Down its center, letters sprout red balloons on their fingers and toes. He turns his head and reads aloud:

“Flexible Flyer!”

“Guaran-dang-teed.”

This from his grandson, Jamie, home from college, lazily scratching his back against the edge of a half-opened door. Jamie’s winter-pink cheeks could not have been there long.

“Trying to make me cry?”

The boy turns off the television and sits on the arm of his grandfather’s stuffed chair.

“My major goal in life.”

“You remember Dugan’s Hill?”

“Enough to go buy a sled.”

The boy swings his legs across the arms of the chair, studies the ceiling. “So tell me about Christmas in the good ol’ days.”

“Bring a tear to your eyes. Changing tires in a snowstorm. Freezing your fanny off. Christmas tree lights that don’t work. Or burn the house down. Furnace on the fritz. Hanging out the laundry in a snowstorm. You’ll never know what you missed.”

“No, come on, I wanna hear about riding in a one-horse open sleigh.”

“Never saw one. Christmas card companies invented them. Can’t sell Christmas cards of people freezing their fannies off.”

“Especially at Dugan’s Hill.”

“Bite your tongue, Boy. Never use that name in vain. Dugan’s Hill yesterday, Dugan’s Hill today, Dugan’s Hill forever.”

“What’s so special about it?” asks the grandson as he gets up from the chair, lays the sled down on the floor, sits on it.

“I’ll take that for a rhetorical question. It makes selfish brats go out and buy me sleds. It’s our family spiritual center.”

“Everybody in the family know about this?”

The man wraps his blanket tighter. “Just you and me so far. It’ll catch on.”

The boy puts his feet on the steering bar, holds onto the sides of the Flexible Flyer, pantomimes going down a hill.

“Did I tell you it’s snowing at Dugan’s Hill even as we speak?”

“You’re a cruel man, Charlie Brown.”

“Knew you’d chicken out.”

“Remember Dead Man’s Drop at Dugan’s Hill?”

“The same Dead Man’s Drop at Dugan’s Hill where it’s snowing?”

 

 

 

The gleaming black utility vehicle sits in the driveway with a trembling idle. Its exhaust has melted a bare spot in the snow. Its wiper blades take an occasional swipe at falling snowflakes. Inside the van the grandfather sits cocooned in an excess of winter clothes.

The grandson kicks snow off his boots, slips behind the wheel, idles down the drive, points the car toward Sheridan Avenue. The vehicle easily takes the hill across the creek despite several inches of unplowed snow, skids from side to side for the fun of it.

The man points excitedly to a side street. “Here, here — turnturnturn!”  He points to a house between swipes of the wiper blade.

“There’s Dale Jenning’s house. We’d take turns pulling each other over to Bradley Park. There’s Jo Ann Beebe’s house. We never got up the nerve to ask her to go with us. She was a girl, you know. Wasn’t allowed.”

***

A wall of native stone, banged by three generations of car bumpers, still guards the narrow parking lot along the rim of Bradley Park. The lot is unshoveled and unoccupied. As the van’s bumper approaches the wall, the park opens up below the two men like a page in a photo album. Every photo in that memory album is intact: the stone gazebo set against the back of the narrow glen; oaks and elms and an occasional spruce holding up the western hill; Farmington Road running down the far ridge, meeting the creek at the bottom; the sidewalk from the parking lot curving to the picnic area; fire pits circled by hardwood benches scarred but still alive with messages of love and loss. And at the steep end of the glen squealing children rush to their terror: Dugan’s Hill.

The shock of sudden remembrance takes away the man’s breath as his words interrupt each other to explain:

“Look! It’s, it’s ... there, down behind ... see the way it goes. See?  Up on ... that side there, that tree? No, no, the blue-green one.” He measures the tree against his open hands. “It was that big. I grew and it grew! See the boy standing on this side, with the ear muffs?  That’s Dead Man’s Drop. At the bottom there, that bump?  We called it Devil’s Leap.”

“Still do.”

The grandfather points again. “Look, that little squirt in the blue suit, he’s gonna try Devil’s Leap.”

“Bet you a Flexible Flyer he chickens out.”

Both follow the boy with their eyes. He disappears below the rim, then emerges on the flat. They lean with him into the bump.

“Pay up, Grandpa!”

“He did it!”

“He dragged his feet — that’s cheating.”

“Only if you’re ten years old.”

An older boy sails over the Devil’s Leap, seems to hang in space. Both watchers cheer.

The old man studies the glen. “Sometimes the snow was so deep we’d pull each other down on an upside-down sled, carve out a path.”

“Us too. Or stomp and kick out a path.”

“Other times we’d have to lug snow from the shade over there to cover bare spots. Wore two pair of pants and still got sopping wet. Mittens, too. Wring ‘em out and keep going.”

“Now they got waterproof snow suits and gloves.” The grandson holds up his own gloves as proof.

“They’ll never know the thrill of wiping your nose on a wet mitten.”

The grandson takes the sled out of the van and pulls it along the ridge to Dead Man’s Drop. The man follows in his footsteps.

The grandfather sits in the front, feels the same comfort his grandson once felt when he sat behind him, unafraid. As they push off, he feels the same mix of joy and terror that he has felt in life since that first time on Dead Man’s Hill — but never so intensely.

As they build up speed, snow sprays up from the runners to numb his cheeks. He looks to the blue blur of sky beyond the flying flakes. He feels in his tensing muscles the approach of the Devil’s Leap, closes his eyes like he did that first time, wishes he could drag his feet like he did that first time.  As the moment approaches, he leans his head against the warm chest of his grandson, sucks in a breath. Holds it for an eternity.

And as he hangs in space, as time and motion distill past and present into a world of futures, as sky and cloud scatter more glimmery snow, as he and the moment float back to earth like a snowflake, he feels fluttering above his grandson’s laughter.

Or maybe it is his own laughter.

 

 

Tom Deiker recently retired from research, training, and program development in public mental health, serving as administrator of psychiatric hospitals in Louisiana, New Mexico, and Iowa. His 60+ articles, essays, short fiction and poetry have appeared in several dozen publications, including American Psychologist, Animal Behaviour, Cimarron Review, Galaxy, Newsweek, and The Plain Dealer Magazine. Thirteen of his plays have been staged by community theaters.

Boy Sledding courtesy Art.com

Wine and Spirits

by

Kathleen Gerard

 

 

When Rosalie heard the creak of the front door hinges, she catapulted straight up in bed. Empty PopTart boxes, candy wrappers and kernels of popcorn became airborne from her goose-down comforter. No one had been in her apartment since her boyfriend walked out on her months before.

Alton Fumalholt, the super from her building, suddenly appeared in her bedroom doorway. His body filled the frame like a thick Roman pillar. “What 's going on here?”

The cast on Rosalie’s left leg landed with a thud when she set it down upon the floor. She said, “You can't just break into someone's apartment—”

“—I can, if I suspect someone’s dead.” Fumalholt stepped into the room. His paint-splattered work boots crunched over glittering shards of mirror, melted plastic, TV guts and circuit boards like ice cracking beneath his feet. “Were you trying to kill yourself or set the whole building ablaze?”

Rosalie reached for her crutches. She stood them next to her vertically like a pair of wooden soldiers. “I had a bad night.”

“Yeah, well, everybody goes through tough times.” Fumalholt reached down and picked up a broken wine bottle from the rubble. “Drinking doesn’t change anything—”

“—I’m not some sort of raging boozer.” Rosalie hurled herself up on her crutches.

“Mrs. Smithers said that when she rang your bell earlier, she thought she smelled liquor.”

“You don’t waste a Super Tuscan Red ‘tying-one-on.’”

“But it’s good enough for target practice?” Fumalholt eyed the jagged glass edge of the bottle and positioned it over the hole on the shattered TV screen. “Building insurance isn't gonna cover all this—the wall mirror’s custom made. And the oak on this floor’s gonna need to be replaced . . .” When Rosalie didn’t respond, Fumalholt went on, “Folks in this building don’t go for hot-heads throwing temper tantrums.”

“Look, I’m a good tenant. I had a bad night. I’ll pay for the damages, alright?”

Fumalholt put up the palms of his hands. “Do you have a broom?” he asked.

Rosalie narrowed her eyes on his broad back and his neck as thick as a shoulder of pork.

“Long stick, brush at the end of it?” A grin spread across his face.

“It’s alongside the refrigerator,” she told him. “But, you don’t have to—”

“—You know what they say - break a mirror, seven years of bad luck."

"Yeah, well, I think I'm working on that - retroactively."

*   *   *

It’s what keeps her up at night. She tosses and turns, folding her pillow like a crepe, remembering every last detail. Her chef’s hat as high as the Eiffel Tower . . . the recipe for roquefort canapés . . . roulades of veal. She was top of her class and on her way to becoming the first female chef to man the kitchen at Le Cirque. That was until one bottle of champagne divided her from her future.

Wine and spirits didn’t hold Rosalie’s interests like the range and the broiler pan. But on the day of her final exam in Beverage Services, she was asked to retrieve a simple bottle of champagne – a Yellow Label Reserve of Veuve Clicquot.

I’ve aced this thing, Rosalie thought, etching a smile face into the dust on the bottle. She hurried up the long staircase from the wine cellar. The curve of the sommelier’s belly—her final examiner—shone at the top of the landing. When Rosalie reached him, he took one look at the bottle and his expression scrunched up like a sunken soufflé. That’s when it hit Rosalie like a proverbial pie in the face. She’d accidentally retrieved a bottle of Veuve Clicquot La Grand Dame. The labels were so similar, yet this was a vintage champagne that was triple the price of the Yellow Label Reserve. With the realization, her body broke out in a cold sweat, and her eyes glazed over like the shimmering surface of a crème brûlée. As if in slow motion, the instructor handed the bottle back to her, pointing his finger back down the flight.

She was shocked—and thrilled—for a second chance. But just as she turned to descend to the cellar below, the heel of her clog caught the edge of the stair and snapped her free, along with the Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame.

The bottle lurched from her grasp and plunged toward the dark depths. Her body followed, twisting and turning—coiling down the long flight. By the time she lay splayed in a dizzying puddle of bubbly all her hopes for a bright culinary future were as shattered as the bones broken in her body.

*   *   *

Rosalie popped a frozen breakfast burrito into the microwave. While she waited, she noticed an envelope wedged under the front door. When she slipped her finger beneath the seal and read it, her heart leapt to her throat. She reached instantly for the telephone.

“Are you for real with this estimate, Fumalholt?”

“Cool your jets. I’ll be right up.”

The shrill dial tone pierced Rosalie’s eardrum and heat rushed into her face when she heard keys jiggling in the front door.

“From here on out, you ring the bell,” Rosalie ordered, a stunned Fumalholt facing her.

“I was trying to save you the trouble of crutching down the hall.”

“If you really want to save me trouble, then cut me a break on this price.” She waved the written estimate his way.

“No can do— building policy.”

“So you’re the only one authorized to do the work?”

Fumalholt intertwined his big arms like trussed up turkey legs. “Look, lady, it's your choice; you can make things easy or hard."

Before Rosalie could tear into him, the buzzer on the microwave rang alerting her that the breakfast burrito was ready. She crutched away from him, into the kitchen.

“I knew something smelled good in here,” Fumalholt said, oscillating his nose. “Mrs. Smithers tells me you’re one helluva cook—”

“Chef,” Rosalie corrected.

 

 

 

Rosalie had been watching too much Emeril Lagasse. For months, the fiberglass cast wrapped around her surgically-repaired left leg was an anchor that kept her holed-up in her apartment. There were piles of cookbooks ranging from Tuscan to Thai and calls on the machine from classmates sharing good news about jobs they’d landed in kitchens locally and abroad. But every night, Rosalie dined with a host of TV actors who masqueraded as chefs—those she lambasted with insults from beneath her goose-down comforter.

“Yo, ease up on the garlic,” she’d hollered at Emeril, slugging back a gulp of a Super Tuscan that tasted like bitter cherries. “Are you making Osso Bucco or doing an exorcism on that veal?”

The doorbell rang. Rosalie crutched down the hall and through the peephole of her front door, she eyed her neighbor Gloria Smithers.

When Rosalie opened the door, annoyance and pity oozed from Mrs. Smithers’ face and her tone. “Is everything all right, dear?” Mrs. Smithers tried to gain a glimpse around Rosalie, into the apartment.

“Yes. Yes, everything’s fine. I sometimes get carried away watching cooking shows. Emeril Lagasse’s making a mockery of Veal Osso Bucco as we speak.”

“Oh?” Mrs. Smithers’ tone leapt an octave. Rosalie knew that, for some, not taking a shining to the king of modern cuisine was like rejecting apple pie, baseball and Chevrolet. So, she rushed quickly to her own defense. “It’s just that some chefs have made cooking into a circus. I think of it more as an art form.”

“Yes, well, some of the neighbors have talked about cooking a meal for you, but we’ve all been intimated, with your being a gourmet and all . . .”

Mrs. Smithers prattled on. Rosalie nodded and smiled graciously at every compliment her neighbor offered, but inside her spirits were sinking faster than a meat thermometer plunged into a deep freeze.

When Rosalie finally bid goodbye to Mrs. Smithers, she closed the door and flipped on the light in the kitchen, eager to get another pain pill and a glass of water. But the sight of dirty dishes piled in the sink and the trashcan overflowing with take-out containers was just too much for her.

She retreated to her bedroom and downed the rest of the wine. But her face tightened at the sight of herself in the floor-to-ceiling mirror behind the television set. With Emeril jabbering away, garlic cloves dancing on a gold rink of olive oil in a sauté pan, Rosalie thought, I’m not a chef, not anymore. I’m a fraud, that’s what I am. Who’ll ever hire a crippled gourmet? Rosalie reached for the half-empty bottle of the Super Tuscan Red and hurled it across the room, right at Emeril. The immediate effect was magical as the bottle hit the TV with the force of an exploding grenade. The monstrous box bowled over backwards, bursting into flames and crashing into the floor-to-ceiling mirrored wall behind it. After the avalanche and sparks had stopped, Rosalie slunk back onto the bed and crawled under the covers, chilled by the awesomeness of the pyrotechnics display.

*   *   *

Alton Fumalholt spent three weeks replacing the floorboards in the bedroom and installing a new floor-to-ceiling mirror, while Rosalie went against doctor’s orders and pushed up the timetable on her healing. She graduated from crutches to cane. She called a caterer and landed a temporary job preparing business luncheons. Every day, she hobbled into the kitchen where she rolled up her sleeves, slipped on an apron and peeled cold-cuts off deli-paper, while Fumalholt traipsed in and out of her apartment, sweating. Everything about him got under her skin, especially the way he pulled squashed Powerbars from the pocket of his carpenter’s pants and inhaled them like a slobbering dog devouring Milk Bones.

On the last day of work, Fumalholt stood in the doorway to Rosalie’s kitchen, his toolbox grazing at his waist, and watched as she piled mounds of tuna salad atop slabs of marble rye. “Well, I’m just about done . . . How about one of those sandwiches for the road?”

“Okay, but it’ll cost you.”

“How much?”

“This tuna fish’s imported from Italy, packed in extra-virgin olive oil.”

“All right, I’ll knock five bucks off your bill.”

“Five bucks?” Rosalie gasped. “Try more like fifteen.”

“Fifteen dollars? For a sandwich?”

“I’ll throw in a pickle.”

Fumalholt conceded with a nod, and Rosalie set down one sandwich like a bulls’ eye in the center of a piece of waxed paper.

“You know," Fumalholt said, "I’ve been meaning to ask what you’d charge to make dinner for me and my girl?”

Rosalie laughed, sawing a serrated knife through the sandwich. “I don’t think you could afford me."

“Well, it might be a way for you to pay down that debt.”

“Wow. This lady must be something special.” She pleated the waxed paper around the sandwich the same way her thoughts formed around the idea of financial absolution. “Well, give me a zero balance, and I’ll make you a meal you’ll never forget.”

“You still owe a couple hundred dollars. What are you gonna cook with gold?”

“It’d be a real shame for your sweetheart to call a cab before dessert and then you’re stuck taking a cold shower. . .”

Rosalie handed Fumalholt his fifteen-dollar sandwich. He didn’t take it right away. Instead, he held his dark, green eyes on her like moss clinging to a stone.

“All right, but I want lobster and filet mignon – maybe even champagne.”

Rosalie wiped her fingers on her apron then put out her hand. “Deal.” Her fingers slipped inside his firm, warm grasp. “But champagne’s not included. I don’t do wine and spirits.”

Fumalholt released her hand and said, “Hey, what about my pickle?”

“Here, take the rest.” Rosalie handed him the whole jar of kosher dills. On his way out, he walked, obliviously, past empty cans of generic brand tuna fish, packed in water, sitting on top of the trash heap.

*   *   *

Rosalie inspected the fat marbling of the beef tenderloin as if an investigator from the FDA. She made certain the pair of lobsters she’d selected looked healthy enough to swim the English Channel. Even when she tossed up the tablecloth, it spread and fluttered down to drape a perfect fit over Fumalholt’s kitchen table - first try.

But at eight o’clock on the big night, as Rosalie pictured that beef tenderloin spewing succulent juices and the lump white crabmeat stuffed inside those lobsters turning as creamy as butter melting in Fumalholt’s 400 hundred degree oven, her doorbell rang.

When she opened it, she was met by Alton Fumalholt. He was clad in a dress shirt and his slacks were creased so sharp they could’ve sliced Genoa Salami. He was holding a bottle of champagne.

“What are you doing here?” Rosalie looked at her watch, taking a mental run-through of the meal itinerary. “Did you let the tenderloin rest? You didn’t over-cook the lobster, did you?”

“She’s not coming,” he blurted out.

“What?” she gasped.

Rosalie was interrupted by the sound of Mrs. Smithers’ door opening.

“Everything all right out here?” Mrs. Smithers’ hair billowed through her half-opened door like a thick fog.

“Yes, everything’s fine. Right on schedule," Fumalholt told her, his fingers tightening around the neck of the bottle. Then he turned and faced Rosalie. “The tenderloin’s just about done – how about we crack this thing open and dig in?”

When Fumalholt held up the champagne, Rosalie gasped at the sight of an infamous gold label – Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame.

“What’s the matter? Did I get ripped off?” Fumalholt turned the bottle around to reread the label. “The guy at the liquor store told me it’s vintage. I paid a fortune for this.”

“Oh, I bet you did.”

As the bouquet of Alton Fumalholt’s aftershave filled the air between them, Rosalie felt as though the floor were falling away, right out from under her feet . . . Tumbling, twisting and turning, she cleaved her sights to Fumalholt’s steady, mossy green eyes.

“Well, then, how about it?” he asked, a smile unraveling across his face like a red carpet. “Are you hungry?”

“As matter of fact, yes,” she said, giving him a nod. “I’m starved.”

 

 

Kathleen Gerard’s writing has been awarded The Perillo Prize and was nominated for Best New American Voices, national prizes in literature. Her work has been featured in various literary journals, anthologies, and broadcast on NPR (National Public Radio). She is currently at work on a novel.

 
 

Mix It Up courtesy Art.com

A Small Matter of Honor

by

Vrinda Baliga

 

 

Is Father actually singing? His face is hidden in his hands, and the words emerge faint and soggy from between his fingers, but, yes, I do believe it's a song.

He sings of love. Of filial duty. Of betrayal.

I'm glad, now, that we are not in a crowd. Aftab, I know how important it is to reach the station, but I really am glad that Father and Vijay found us here. It simply wouldn't do to have people see Father like this. The maestro will never age, they have always said of him. He lives not by his heartbeat, but by the percussion of his tabla. Yet here is Father turning mysteriously into a very, very old man.

His palms move in small, hypnotic circles. Round and round, his fingers massage decades into his temples, centuries into his eyes. He looks up and it seems that his face has sucked up time from all around, for everything else has slowed almost to a standstill. Every syllable of the song stretches a lethargic mile. We can't stay, of course, we have to rush, but right now, I would give anything to lie down and close my eyes and be lulled to sleep.

Father is singing of Mother now. If Mother were here, he tells me, it would never have come to this. Mother is still alive in my face and his own music comes to life in my feet. What more could any parent want? So what if Vijay repeatedly failed them, their daughter would compensate for their son's shortcomings.

Vijay stands a few feet away, still as death, his frame etched in sharp strokes by the moonlight. His eyes are focused on the flickering lights far behind Father. He seems perfectly detached from this scene.

Only his hands betray him: they are fistfuls of tension.

It's not his fault, Father. It's been those hands all along. How can you not see it? They are too rigid with fury. No matter how hard he tries, he can never play the tabla—at least not the way you want him to. But perhaps, now that I am going, he will finally learn to unclench his music.

Father isn't listening. Their daughter, he continues, the daughter who could have made them proud, if only—he’s barely audible now—if only, there weren't the small matter of honor…

He stops abruptly, his mouth half open. Throaty frogs reclaim the night, jarring the mood of the moment; they are louder today than I have ever known them to be. I wish I could pick up Father's orphaned tune and drown their irreverent cacophony. But I am no singer. A tabla-player should let his hands do the talking, Father has said as far back as I can remember. And a dancer—I had easily extrapolated back then—should let her feet do her singing.

Perhaps that's what I ought to do now. If only I had my anklets on. I can hear them now, thundering wildly, unstoppable even when they shatter into a million tiny bells, and blood seeps into the very beats. They tell me I have to go, and quickly, but where? Aftab, I am so exhausted, I can't seem to recollect…

 

 

Vijay bends down and wipes his dagger clean on Aftab's shirt. He toes Aftab lightly over the incline. Aftab rolls slowly, oh, so slowly, onto the tracks. It's going to take quite a bit of scrubbing to get those stains off that shirt.

Oh, now this is hilarious. Here I am, already thinking wife-thoughts, and we have not even boarded…

Oh, yes! The train to Bombay. That's what all the urgency is about. We have to get to the station. We have to be on that train tonight. It's our only chance. Once we reach Bombay… Well, anything's possible in Bombay. The lights aren't too far off. We can still make it if we hurry.

Father has risen now. He comes to me. There is the familiar pressure of his hand on my head. The customary blessing before a performance. Is there one tonight? I'm so mixed up today. I need to stay focused…mustn't neglect to touch Father's feet, seek his blessings. But somehow I'm bending the wrong way, falling…

Two blurred faces look down from a great distance. My family. I must call to them, tell them not to worry. I am not hurt. Aftab has cushioned my fall. But the words seem caught in a gurgling vortex at my throat, and before I can extricate them, the faces are gone.

They weren't supposed to be here, Aftab. But it's okay now. They've left.

Aftab is staring into the distance, his ear pressed to the track. I listen hard, and I can hear it, too.

Perhaps it is Father's fingers dancing furiously across the taut surface of his tabla. Or the vibration of the stage under my feet.

The music of stolen glances, hidden smiles, quickened pulses. The melody of Aftab's first letter, hidden aptly among sheets of music. The telltale ditty of the one that was discovered.

The beats of Father's silences. Vijay's fist, finding on my face all the breadth of music he could never discover on the tabla. The duet of fear and defiance.

Clarity dancing in and out of view.

Mother's heart resonating in my fetal ears.

No, I know now. It's the tracks, throbbing with the sound of wheels. Aftab, can you hear? We don't have to wait much longer. The train to Bombay is on its way.

Vrinda Baliga is a freelance writer, living in Hyderabad, India. Her fiction has appeared in Cezanne's Carrot and EveryDay Fiction.

 

Negative Image on Paper of Composer Igor Stravinsky at a Party in His Honor courtesy Art.com

Clasp

by

Tai Dong Huai

 

 

My adoptive mom hands me the small, white cardboard box and says,
”This is yours.”

It’s a Sunday afternoon in early August, the thirteenth anniversary of my adoption–Gotcha Day as some families call it. We’re sitting at the dining room table having just finished a late breakfast. I can see my father outside the window pushing a lawnmower back and forth, and I know tonight when we go out for our customary Chinese dinner at The Ginger Dragon, his knees will be killing him.   

“Should I call Dad in?” I ask.

“Not for this,” my mom says. “This is between girls.” I’m surprised to hear her use the word girls. With my mom, a product of the seventies, it’s usually women and young women.

”Open it,” she says.

I lift the lid, unwrap the red tissue paper, stare at it. This is a joke, I think to myself. Or maybe a clue. Perhaps this cheap piece of junk somehow leads to my real present. 

“It’s a hair clasp,” my mother says. I weigh it in my hand. It’s as light as a shelled peanut. I study the thing–a mesh butterfly with red and blue plastic inserts on the wings, with a hooked pin, its silver plating flaking badly, curled around the back. My mom tells me, “I know we usually give you a gift, but I thought it was time you got this.”

“Was it your mother’s?” I ask.

“No,” she says, “it was your mother’s.” 

The story–and it’s little more than that–goes like this:  My Chinese mother–my “bio-mom”–was wrapping me up shortly before abandoning me in front of the Lucky 8 Supermarket in Taizhou. This hair clasp either fell, or was placed, in the blanket with me. This is what my adoptive mom wants me to believe.

But what I actually believe is that this cheesy trinket was placed by someone at the orphanage. A sob story to pass on to whatever fool-hearted white person was naive enough to believe it. A trick. Like turning back the mileage on a car nobody wants.

I leave it on the dresser next to my bed along with my ceramic moose from Canada and my crystal dolphin from Sea World. Then one Saturday, right before school is getting ready to start, I clean my room. The hair clasp, along with whatever other junk has accumulated, is raked into my wastebasket.

The next day, my mom takes me shopping for supplies at Office Max.  When we get back into the car, she begins digging through her tote bag.

“Did I ever show you this?” she asks as she takes something from a small, brown velveteen sack. I glance over at the hand she holds out and see a small gold band on a thin gold chain. 

 

 

“It’s a baby’s ring,” she says. “Your grandma bought it right after I was born.”

“You wore this?” I ask as I study the minute ring.

My mom shakes her head. “Grandma wore it. Right up until the time I was your age. Then she gave it to me. ‘Wear this,’ she said, ‘and I’ll be able to pick you out in heaven.’” 

“So why don’t you wear it?” I ask.

“Probably because I’m not planning on dying any time soon.”

“Can I have it?”

“Uh uh,” she says as she takes it back and returns it to its pouch. She reaches forward and starts the car. “This one’s mine.”

When we get home, I take my new spiral notebooks, my pack of ten Bic pens, my four different colored Hi-Liters, up to my room. I drop them on my desk, reach under, pull out my wastebasket. It’s empty. The garage, I think to myself. I’ll find it if I have to go through every can. 

Except then I see it. The hair clasp. Back in its place on the dresser as if it had never been touched. Placed there, or so it seems, by the hand of one mother or another.

 

 

Tai Dong Huai was born in Taizhou, China. Clasp, is from her collection in progress, I Come From Where I’ve Never Been. Other selections have appeared, or are scheduled, in Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, Word Riot, Hobart, Thieves Jargon, rumble, Underground Voices, Wigleaf, and other terrific places. She lives in Connecticut, where she teaches.

   

Asian baby courtesy Art.com

Nightcap

by

Digby Beaumont

 

 

The call went up for his flight. As he followed the signs to the boarding gate, he reached out for Sherrie’s hand, forgetting that now he travelled alone.

This holiday was the deal he’d made with himself one night in front of the TV when he’d been drinking. Too late to go back on it now.

Phyllis sat next to him on the courtesy coach to the hotel. She was a divorcee—the first thing she mentioned. “What’s your situation, Ray?” was how she asked about him.

“My wife died,” he told her. “Two years ago.”

He kept running into Phyllis—in the hotel bar, by the pool, in the gym, at the Marina Grande. For the first few days, she was always with a different man. Then she started to appear on her own.

He was polite but felt uneasy around her, as though he’d be sucked into something dark and slippery if he let her get too close. “We must get together one of these evenings,” she’d say whenever he made an excuse to leave.

On the last night, after dinner, she came knocking at his door. “How about a nightcap, Ray?” she said, brandishing a bottle of the Capri Bianco she knew he liked. He glanced at his watch. “Come on,” she said, powering through the door. “It won’t kill you.”

 

 

After he opened the wine and poured two glasses, she started to weep. “Phyllis,” he said, “what is it? What’s wrong?”

“I’m lonely—that’s what,” she said. “So fucking lonely.”

He opened his arms, and she moved into them, burying her face in his chest. “Can I stay tonight and lie next to you?” she said. “We don’t have to do anything.”

Around four he woke. She was sitting up in bed watching him. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asked.

“Of what?”

“Dying alone.”

He fumbled for her hand in the dark. It felt big and fleshy, scaled up somehow, so unlike Sherrie’s. He held on to her, grateful for this unexpected moment of contact, until his own hand seemed tiny, hardly there at all.

 

    

Digby Beaumont is a writer living in Brighton on the south coast of England. His recent stories appear or are forthcoming in a number of literary magazines, including The Linnet’s Wings, 34th Parallel, Insolent Rudder, Pequin, and Opium Magazine as well as in the anthologies Small Voices, Big Confessions, Late-Night River Lights, and City Smells.

Fractured - Holding It Together courtesy Art.com

Silent Partners

by

Hilary Davidson

 

 

“I hear you’re the best in New York,” said the blonde in the short red dress. “You’re younger than I thought from that picture in the paper. Cuter, too.”

Sam flushed as he stepped around his steel desk. There were two metal chairs in front of it, theoretically for clients, though most people were too ashamed to cross his threshold. The chairs were piled high with files and Sam tackled the shortest stack.

“You can guess why I need to talk to you,” the blonde said, sitting down.

Sam looked her over. She was showing a lot of skin, but he didn’t see any telltale red marks. “You think you got an infestation? Lotta people come to me thinking they got bedbugs, turns out it’s just carpet beetles.”

“No, no infestation. Not yet,” said the blonde.

“Nothing to be embarrassed about. Neighbor could pick ’em up, then they crawl on into your apartment. Little bastards are thin as a credit card.” Sam’s male clients cut to the chase, but women agonized about being unclean. Bedbugs were the new leprosy.

“How do I get bedbugs? Can I buy them?”

Sam had seen cases of delusional parasitosis, where clients who had once experienced an infestation hallucinated that the bedbugs were back, running up and down their backs and eating them alive. He’d watched couples break up over bedbugs, usually when one person went nutso and covered every piece of furniture in plastic and slept on a metal table with the lights on. But in his nineteen years as an exterminator, no one had asked for bedbugs.

“I know this sounds . . . strange.” She fumbled with the zipper of her tote bag. “I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t need to know.”

“You writing about bedbugs?” Sam knew she wasn’t. He’d talked to plenty of reporters, and even the hotter ones reminded him of bag ladies. More likely she was a spy. His bitch of an ex could have sent her in to sweet-talk him.

“No. I just want to know. . . .”

“Who sent you here?” Sam asked. “You recording this?”

“What? No.”

“Gimme your bag.”

The blonde uncrossed her legs and stood, clacking over to his office door as if she were about to leave. She wasn’t skinny like those Upper East Side broads--Sam thought of them as stick insects--who called his cell in the middle of the night because they’d caught a bedbug in the act. She shut the door with a quiet click and unzipped her bag. When she turned around, she was holding a snub-nosed revolver in her hand.

“What the hell’s this?” said Sam. “A hold up? I don’t keep cash here.”

“I want bedbugs.” Her voice was steadier than her hand.

“Okay, okay, I’ll give you bedbugs. How many you want?” Sam reached for the lower drawer of his desk, extracting a wide-necked glass jar. Inside crawled half a dozen bedbugs. The largest was reddish brown and the size of an apple seed. The others were smaller and paler, almost translucent. He held the jar out to the blonde. “Don’t get scared and drop it.”

“You just keep them in a jar?”

“They’re great business partners,” said Sam. “When I tell people how much the extermination is gonna cost ’em, this is exhibit A. Here.” He jiggled the jar in front of her, but the blonde took a step back.

“Put it down. Down on the desk.”

“You want ’em on a platter?”

“They’re ugly little monsters.” The blonde stared at the jar. “Okay, let’s say you wanted to set them loose in somebody’s apartment.”

“You want an instruction manual?” asked Sam. “Put away the gun and I’ll tell you what to do.”

The blonde bit her lip and dropped her gun back into her purse. “I’m not the kind of girl who goes around pulling a gun on a fella,” she said.
          
“Wouldn’t it be easier to burn the rat bastard’s clothes?”  Sam asked, suddenly empathetic. “Torch his collection of baseball cards, or whatever shit he likes?”
          
“I can’t go within two hundred feet of my apartment. I never should’ve married a lawyer.”
          
“My ex is a lawyer,” said Sam. “I put the bitch through law school, then she ditched me for some pompous prick who teaches Gender Ethics and the Law.”

The blonde zipped her bag shut and set it down on the metal chair. “I’ve barely been able to eat or sleep,” she said, sitting on the edge of Sam’s desk. “I thought I could shoot him in the head. Or the bitch he’s got living with him now.” She shook her head sadly. “But I couldn’t decide which one to do in. I mean, what are the odds that I get them both? I realized I need to get creative.”

“That’s where the bedbugs come in.” Sam was feeling lightheaded. “You not worried you’ll get caught?”

 

 

“It’s not like the bugs can rat me out. So, how do I do it?”
          
“Put one bedbug bitch in the place and you got a full-blown infestation in a couple weeks. They got a geometric pattern of expansion.” Sam had picked up that gem at the New York Pest Expo last year and he loved repeating it. Most people reacted with horror. Not the blonde.
          
“That’s perfect! They’ll never figure it out. Will it be hard to do?”
          
“Not if you got someone who can deal with them.” Sam spent most of his days with people who went hollow-eyed with fear and fatigue as they battled to keep their bedbugs at bay. He couldn’t brag to them, this diverse but eerily similar group of people who examined their bodies with a hand mirror each day, cataloging every red bump. Sam didn’t have the heart to tell them that their sleepless nights were wasted. Sure, bedbugs preferred the dark, but they weren’t shy about coming into the light when they wanted blood. Lying awake, waiting to feel a bite was pointless. The bugs injected an anesthetic into the host when they fed, and so an attack was never felt till after the parasite had skittered off on its six legs. He knew so much about bedbugs, but no one cared about any of it except for the part on getting rid of them. Until now. “But you got to get ’em into the apartment.”
          
“I’m sending them a present, this gorgeous lambskin throw. I figured the bugs could get nice and cozy with it first.” She grinned briefly. “The thing is, how do you keep the bugs from crawling out of the box?”
          
“Feed ’em before you send the box over,” Sam said, putting his thick wrist over the mesh that covered the mouth of the jar. The bugs scurried up and latched onto his flesh. He watched her horrified eyes and put his other hand on her leg, just above her knee. Bedbugs took five minutes to feed, he knew, and while the seconds ticked away neither of them spoke. Finally the bugs slunk back to the bottom of the jar. By then Sam had certain knowledge that the blonde had recently had a Brazilian wax.
          
“You can see the blood inside them,” the blonde whispered.

Sam handed her the jar and she lowered it into her handbag, holding it like a ticking bomb. “You got 12 hours before they’ll want a snack.”

After she left, Sam wondered if the blonde would chicken out. When his wife had traded up for her legal eagle boyfriend, Sam had used the same tactic and he didn’t regret it. That pompous ass had ended up in Bellevue, gouging his own flesh. The best part was that the stupid prick lawyers hadn’t been able to prove a damn thing in court. Like the blonde had said, it’s not like the bugs could talk.

 

  

Hilary Davidson is a freelance journalist and the author of 16 nonfiction books. Her short story Anniversary, originally published by Thuglit, is included in the anthology A Prisoner of Memory and 24 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, which was edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg (Pegasus, 2008). Visit her online.

Bedbug courtesy Art.com