Talespinning

Word Count:  436

It was his job to go out and pick apples. He moved his stepladder around each tree like a shadow on a sundial. It would take him all day to pick three. Every day for the month of September he would rise with the sun, nod to the nurses and they’d nod in turn to security who would unlock the door to the courtyard, let him out, and lock it back up again.

He’d climb up, linger on each step, look around. Finger the fruit as it grew. Noted the red skin from the sunny side reach around to paint over the green. Knew exactly when each apple was ready, left it to ripen until he was sure.

He was their success story, their poster boy pointed out through two-inch thick glass lobby walls as the annual influx of board members walked by. Hard to imagine, said the doctor bringing the small group tour to a halt, this man killed, much less (and a pause) ate five neighborhood boys. Good that they met in September, for the winter he spent tied down in his bed.

In spring he was let out one day a week. To trim branches, inspect blossoms and such. In summer it was still a weekly assignment to ensure no bug nor disease bothered the trees. But late August, depending on summer conditions he would start his daily routine.

The cook was the major complainer, since the patients and staff all complained straight to him. They wanted pies, crisps, just the raw fruit to enjoy while the apple picker took his own time. One time the doctors suggested he pick a bit faster, a bit sooner perhaps. He’d reacted quite badly and had to be put back on meds.

Another strategy was cooked up, an assistant to help. One he could teach and employ. Carefully selected, a young man who was also a patient, slight of build, non-threatening and who showed interest in fruit trees and quietly followed direction. It seemed to work well, for the helper was pleasant, convinced the apple picker to pick more every day. With the two of them working a basketful was gathered in no time at all.

Everyone was happy though the picker soon realized that a trick had been played. In the cooling last days of September, the trees nearly picked clean, he brought in a basket full to the brim. He set it down in the lobby. The guards grabbed him, the nurses screamed as they peeked inside. The blood painted each ripped-off part of the body a glossy, bright, ripened red.

Word Count:  522

It’s not like he had no idea it could happen, been unaware or in some lover’s form of denial. It hung like a large shade tree over their lives every day. Her husband was bound to find her eventually.

“Come here!” she said. “Come see this.”

He went over to where she was sitting. Looked over her shoulder at images laid out in grid on her monitor. “This was at St. Lawrence last June. The riverboat ride, our second date. Remember?”

The image showed two happy people who he didn’t recognize now. He nodded. Hesitated while she clicked on the squares. Brought them up close. He saw the look in her eyes.

“What are you doing?” he asked. Quiet, half bitten-back. She was using the pictures like a big ring of keys. Hoping to unlock what she wanted to hear him say.

She looked up at him sadly. “I have to delete them. He’d be hurt. You understand.”

He nodded again. Went back to the couch and sat down, stared at her back. He knew she was waiting. Sitting there hoping. He spoke quietly.  “You don’t have to go back to him, you know.”

She turned around, but only halfway. “I’ll be needing someone…you know, health-wise. Insurance. Care. Eventually. He has that, and you…can’t take care of me, you know, at the end.”

He wanted so badly to say that he could. That he would. He honestly couldn’t tell her he could. She needed marriage, commitment. A long-term agreement that ironically wasn’t going to be long term. He looked away from her and down to the book he was holding. He didn’t know what to say. He thought that he loved her. Felt that he did. But this was so much to take on.

“I’ll be going tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s spend our last night not thinking about it.” She came over to him, took his hand. “Let’s go to bed.”

The morning was awkward. He hadn’t slept well. She tried to be cheerful as they went through the normal routine. Told him she loved him and the past year had been the happiest she’d ever spent. Thanked him, kissed him goodbye. Told him she’d let him know when she got there. Would keep in touch if he’d like. Said he’d better hurry or be late for work. He held her tighter, trying to push out the words but all that came out was goodbye.

He tried to call her from work mid-morning. Didn’t know what he would say but knew that he missed her already. Felt the sad emptiness. Felt the shame. He thought about her all day.

He opened the door and the silence was overwhelming. More than he thought it would be. Wished he had been able. Wished he had been what she needed. Wished he could be.

On the table he found the letter. Read the words over twice and went pale. Ran into the bedroom where he found her. You didn’t really believe I could go back there, she’d written. I’m so sorry, but I rather die now, here with you.

Word Count:  422

Today I went to shop at all my usual Friday spots. I’d sliced my nose off from my face last night. I wondered if someone might notice. Say Oh my God what happened? or Are you okay? No one does.

It is a time of pulling back, reflecting.

Someone told me once that having read my words they expected me to be tall, a larger person. There was genuine surprise to find I was so short and small. It brought me back in time to a communications course in college, when split into little groups we each applied words to each other of what we thought defined them. My pile of words were things like leader, self-confident, outgoing, extrovert. I was in shock.  I’d believed I was a mouse.

Both my ears are missing now but the sound still filters through. And I respond to what I hear. I guess answering in a way that I don’t think I do. I get around on crutches since my right leg is gone. I’ve pared inches off my body over time.

I went down to the butcher’s where I bought the knife, point with what remains of my left arm to pork chops. Asked for them by name. He nodded and wrapped a New York strip because that’s what I always got before. A friend once told me that she liked me better when I was wishy-washy. When had I changed?

These past few months have been a lesson. I may believe I am of one mind and while so cautious now to render that opinion I am still not understood. I’ve taken out my vocal chords. It hasn’t helped. My right hand is still assisting my deception. Whether it is a false perception of myself that I hold or whether I present a false image to the world it doesn’t matter. In either case the fault is mine.

Christ said, “If thy hand offend thee, cut it off.” I do. My written words are just as sly and crafty as my voice in their false impressions of what I think that I have said. I am confused.

So here I stand, atop a building, looking at the space that yawns into horizon on all sides. I am about to run into a whirring turbine. To cut what’s left of me into puzzle pieces that no one will ever find to put them all together. I wish I still had both my legs. It wouldn’t hurt so much if I were faster.

Word Count:  436

She was old, stingy-mean with her money. Wore thin cotton dresses covered with flowers that once had been blue. Kept her cookie jar filled with freshly baked oatmeal or chocolate chip. In a hug, she smelled like bread dough.

Typical grandma with red linoleum kitchen floors and checkered oilcloth covering the table. Black olive-wood rosary beads hung on a crucifix over the bed in her room. I’d seen them wrapped in my grandfather’s hands in his casket. Unraveled from his fingers before he’d been put in the ground. Nothing wasted, that was my grandma.

Somewhere locked away in that shivering old house was her jewelry. Somewhere too was the cash from the policy when grandpa died. I visited often and snooped  whenever she turned around. The bathroom was right past her bedroom down the dark hall. I’d made my way through her sweater drawer, her undies and bras. The slips and the balled up silk stockings. She was likely the only lady alive yet to have them; real silk was scarce during World War II.

The jewelry in the box on top of the doily on top of the dresser were all paste. Yet I knew she had rings that she’d put away when her fingers crippled and curled. I needed more time to find the good stuff, the cash. I am seventeen. Cookies don’t satisfy me anymore. And impatient; she’s old but if she has her way she’ll outlive us all.

Grandma was making soup. I was sitting at the table, dabbing my finger on the red squares of the tablecloth. Plotting my next move. The stash had to be in her bedroom closet; I’d gone through nearly every other possibility. All I needed was for her to be occupied elsewhere long enough so she wouldn’t catch me in the middle of my search.

She poured out a glass of milk. Put a plate of cookies out for me. And excused herself to go use the bathroom. I smiled. I’d rigged it, you see, left the seat up so she’d likely near fall in and be stuck for a while.

I ransacked that closet. Ignored her weak old-lady calls for help. Found nothing. Nothing! I left. It served her right.

They found her three days later. On the pot, holding a strongbox full of cash, her jewelry, some Apple stock certs. I, of course, was arrested for murder. Who would’ve thought she’d have hidden it all in the tank? As they explained to me later, it served as a filler, saving water. She was planning on handing it to me that day.

Word Count:  383

She hated the chickens. Hated the bees. Hated the bees the most.

When they’d met he had called himself a gentleman farmer. She thought that meant tomatoes and peppers and beans. By the time he took her up to the house in the country she was so far involved that she believed she could handle it all. But the chickens were dirty, the bees dangerous, and she was deathly afraid of the cow.

He’d insisted that after they’d married she give up her job. She, hating the work that she did and not seeing room for advancement nor other employment in the current economy was reluctant but finally agreed. That left her home to feed chickens, collect honey, and milk the damn cow. There was fresh air and sweet scented lilacs and tree frogs and birds replacing the city traffic noise. She enjoyed the big garden and home-baking bread, and some small part of the days available to sit back and read. Literature and poetry books that had long been stacked up finally filled her spare time.

He’d come home to a clean house and dinner ready to be laid out on the table. Loved the freshly picked peas and tomatoes and corn. The first winter she carried in firewood from the pile she’d cut, split and stacked. She bitterly shoveled the driveway and trails to the coop and the cow. But she refused to slog through waist-high drifts to check on the hives. He brought her fine things from the city. An expensive coffee bean grinder. An apple corer and a cherry pitter. A brand new shovel and hoe.

She begged him to let her take a job as a clerk typist. He asked who would be home to collect eggs, milk the cow. She brooded and steadfastly refused to take over the bees in the spring. He at least compromised there.

He never noticed the small holes she had cut in the netting. It took a long time for him to recover from that. The hives were destroyed. Soon after, the cow appeared to have suffered a heart attack and the last chicken was made into soup. As for him, he hung on through mid-winter until sadly, he died of what she told everyone must have been flu.

Word Count:  656

In my mother’s fine script, a note: This is your grandfather’s finger. Cut off right after he died.

First, shock. Then a giggle. My mom had been well known for her great sense of humor. I should have expected she’d leave a few tricks behind. I opened the small wooden box. Watched it fly in an arc across the room, crash into the dresser and land with a clunk on the floor. My hands hung on my mouth to muffle the streaming scream that slowly died down. When I’d moved the cotton layers and saw the glass tube with a finger floating inside I’d freaked out.

The tiny glass coffin rolled under the bed. I realized it had to be fake. A cigar tube with a Halloween rubber finger suspended in water most likely. Still, on hands and knees, it was not with the firm grip of confidence that I reached under the bed and grabbed it. I held the glass vial up to examine the finger more closely. It sure looked real to me. Bloodless, gray. Man-size with a neatly trimmed nail.

I picked up a paper that parachuted out of the box as it flew. Sat down on the bed, laid the glass tube back in the box, bedded down in its cottony fluff of filler. Unfolded the paper and read:

Dearest Jenny,

When your grandfather died, we were instructed to have the index finger of his right hand severed, embalmed, and secured in a safe place in case it was needed one day.

You see, your grandfather was a forward thinker, and in keeping with both his sense of rainy day savings and his admiration for technological advances he ensured that any inheritance he left behind would not be frittered away but available for any of his future generation should a downturn induce a need. I’ve never been forced into such a position, and so have handed this down to you. There is a safe behind this dresser that can only be opened by fingerprint match. That is why his finger has been preserved.

Jenny, while I sincerely hope that fortune is kind to you, and that you never find yourself in such desperate need, at least I can leave this life knowing that thanks to your grandfather’s foresight, my ability to weather the small storms, your intelligence and ambition to achieve success on your own, there is still this little cushion of kindness that will always be there to catch a fall.

Love Always,
Mom

Wow. I thought. Wow. I picked up the box, took out the tube, looked at the finger dancing in fluid–not water, I guess–from the movement. Held it still. But I’d have to touch it, no?

I got up and moved the dresser and sure enough, there was a small safe hidden within a hollowed out bottom. With an electrical cord. I plugged it in. A panel lit up on the front. But I still wasn’t going to touch the finger without something between it and me. I found a pair of my mother’s white cotton gloves and pulled them on.

It felt weird. Not the breaking into the safe before I needed the money. That moral dilemma was already made up in my mind. No, the finger felt weird. The gloves soon soaked through with what I guessed was formaldehyde from the smell. My own fingers sensitive to the bone and slight fleshy feel of my grandfather’s.

I took a deep breath and the formaldehyde stuck in my throat. I held the finger tightly, pressed its tip to the lit panel.

There was a slight clicking sound, as if gears turned within the safe and the panel blinked three times. I turned the small knob and easily opened the door.

And there, mom’s sense of humor or not but real as could be, was a note along with a glass dome holding grandfather’s head

Word Count:  362

The phone rang and I climbed down from the ladder to answer it. I was expecting a call. I’d left questions on a tape at my health insurance office and three days later, I figured they’d be only too happy to claim that I missed the call.

It was my neighbor, a widow next door. For fifteen years she has used me as a lookout for the mailman (remedied by suggesting to her that as a handicapped person, she can request doorstep delivery) and tester on her phone systems (persistent title). While she had argued with me when I politely told her the car phone was ear-splitting loud, I’m still trusted to answer her phone when she calls me to see if it works. And to call her back to make sure it rings and to adjust the voice level at her end. Though I’ve also suggested that she call her landline phone from her mobile and vice versa, somehow she’d prefer to use me.

So when she came home from shopping for yet another new phone it happened to collide with my being up on a stepladder wrestled into place amid furniture since we’ve little room to move things around. I was painting the ceiling. It was a balancing act of stretching on tiptoes, straining arms with a dripping white painted roller. To jump out of this scenario to the phone would have been laughable to watch, though I’d expect some sympathy on the twisted ankle. She was patient and let the phone ring annoyingly long while I limped to answer. I growled my hello. She didn’t notice nor hear my excuse why it took me so long. The whole thing escalated from there.

See, just when I got back up on the ladder, she called again.

So I sit here staring at the casket. Feel horrible as I murmur regrets to her grown daughters. If only I’d answered the phone. I wish I just had. She’d still be alive I’m sure. Letting years of pent up anger overrule patience. How could I?

But what’s done is done, I suppose. There are always regrets. And I can’t unstrangle her now.

Word Count:  401

Her name was Sabia and she had the walk of a poem. Flowing and brimming with quiet life. Each step, like each line, subtle beauty. Each one important as a word. Her young body, hidden within the drifting folds of a burqa, somehow more sensual as a curve, a soft silhouette gliding against the hard blue of the horizon. The gritty gold of the sand.

Ashraf was the son of a prince of the desert. Handsome and tall with curls in his night black hair. Skin the color of tea. He had his choice of the women after ridding himself of the ten year-old bride he’d been promised when he was sixteen.

“She was a whore,” he had later laughed. She had laughed too, at him he felt, and he had silenced her with a cupful of acid thrown directly into her face. Her family left the village in shame. He ruined many more girls in his bed after that, tasting but unsatisfied in love until now.

He fell easily in love with Sabia. With the lute of her voice as they talked for hours in her garden. The scent that came not from the flowering jasmine but from the air around her. The graceful way she moved her hands as she strummed words. She had come to the village to stay with a cousin’s cousin of her mother’s. A marriage was quickly arranged.

The oldest widow in the village confirmed her virginity. Secretly instructed to ensure she was as beautiful as Ashraf imagined as well. Sabia submitted to all that was asked of her. The widow herself was kind. The wedding was a great celebration, for Ashraf’s family was large and he had many friends.

Sabia looked around the bedchamber. She had never been in a house so lush with carpeting of bright colors. Polished teak tables and chairs. Pale blue silk canopied curtains surrounded the bed. She slowly removed her clothing. Put on a modest white gown. Blew out the lamps except for one. Drew the curtains, pulled loose her thick long black hair. She lay back on the pillows, her heart beating so loud to her ears. The fingers of one hand lightly ran over the ruins of her face. The other clutched the dagger she held close to her body under the sheets.

She waited, breathing quick in anticipation, for her new husband to come in.

Word Count:  139

“Who’s up next?”

“I’d say the elderly. The Boomers.”

“We’re down to six weeks, right?”

“About that.”

“Who’ve we hit so far?”

“The college crowd. Education, two in one on teachers and students. Wait, parents too, with the costs. Immigrants. Ethnics.”

“Middle class?”

“Constantly. Blue collar, white collar, both.”

“Good. Good. That’s the big sell. That one’s the hardest for both of us.”

“So the old folks?”

“Hmmm. Six weeks left yet?”

“Yeah.”

“I think we can hold off till the last two. Make a big splash to them. Medicare, Social Security.”

“Hah! You figure they’ll forget if it’s too far before the election?”

“Well, that too. But studies will back up that more of them will be dead. Why waste words. We’ll hit unions. That’s hot right now.”

“Yeah, unions are good.”

“Then target whatever elderly are left.”

Word Count:  364

“Score!” he shouted, nearly knocking over my soda. He took football a lot more seriously than I did but I did enjoy a good college game from the stands.

They got the field goal and Ted looked up at the scoreboard. He sat down and looked back up at it again.

“It’s not even lit,” he grumbled. “That’s stupid.” Then the scoreboard lit up with “TOUCHDOWN!” and he stared at it, missing the next play of the game.

“What’s going on?” he said. Why don’t they have it updated?”

“They won’t,” I replied. He gave me a weird sort of frown coupled with an ‘are you crazy?’ look and I realized he didn’t know about the change in the game.

“They don’t score anymore,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter who wins.”

This time he said it. “Are you nuts? What do you mean they don’t score?”

“Well they didn’t think there should be any losers. it’s bad for player morale.”

“No losers?”

“Nope. Nor any winners. Something new they’ve decided to make it more fair playing the game.”

“Lookit that guy,” he pulled on my arm. “He’s not even trying to get away with the ball. Moron. You’d think they let anybody play.”

“Well yeah, they do. Whoever wants to, can. There are no academic requirements any more.”

“No requirements?”

“Because there are no grades.”

The game ended. Everybody stood up and cheered as both teams came out on the field. Coaches, players, cheerleaders, referees. Even the water boys. Someone came out, stood in front with a microphone, looked around to make sure everyone was ready.

“Most valuable player,” I told Ted before he could ask. Then we clapped as each body out there got a plaque and a handshake.

Ted vented all the way down the stands, out through the parking lot, till we came to his car.

“Shit, someone backed into me! Son of a bitch,” he screamed. “Bastard didn’t even leave a note,” he moaned, “goddamn it.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, trying to calm him. “It doesn’t matter who did it.”

He looked at me as if he wanted to kill someone. “No-fault?” he asked.

I nodded and grinned.