Talespinning

Word Count:  382

He was Peter Rabbit and Cupid and Santa. He was Uncle Sam on the Fourth of July. Bozo the clown on summer Saturdays and birthdays, a stripper at bachelorette parties usually held Friday nights. He was forty-seven years old and whatever you paid him to be.

No one could blame him; he was just trying to make enough to hold onto the house. He’d been an accountant in a large corporation and escaped all but the last downsizing cut.

His wife was expecting their third child in two weeks. He had no idea how much hospital costs would be. He scrambled as best as he could from one job to another. Worked three nights sweeping floors at the grocery but it didn’t pay well.

As her due date drew near he held off on paying the mortgage. Someone had said that they wouldn’t admit her without proof of insurance or cash at the time. He doubled up on his parties, stacking them up back to back when he could. Running from one to another, the costumes all kept in the back seat of his car. He often wore his tear-away cowboy pants and fringed vest under his coveralls as he swept runaway grapes off the grocery floor.

They called him in for an interview at the same place from which he had been let go. Different department, but people he knew at least by sight. It went well, he drove off feeling hopeful. Things were looking up at long last.

He checked house numbers as he drove down the street. Pulled into a driveway of a large brick colonial. He got out of the car, pulled his suit off from over his costume and put on his big Bozo head.

He skipped in as they told him they’d wanted. Blowing the silly-ass horn in one hand, touting a mass of balloons with the others.

“Hiya kids!” he shouted. “Hiya!” Already hoping it would be the last time he did.

The kids screamed with excitement and glee. Three mothers just screamed. His former boss came running out of the house and pointed. When he looked down the blood drained from his face. He was wearing what was left of his tear-away cowboy pants after they had been torn away.

Word Count:  662

“Look, you just can’t play here anymore,” I said. He looked at me without saying a word.

“Really,” I persisted, trying to ignore the large lump of bad I felt hanging around me. I hated being forced into acting like the Wicked Witch of the West. It wasn’t fair. But this was the third time I’d asked the boy not to dig on my property. He had a red plastic beach shovel and pail. I hadn’t said anything the first couple of times hoping he’d give up and go away. This was the reason I was so happy to move out of the city. Thrilled to finally be able to own my own home on two acres of land.

“Where do you live?” I asked and he pointed down the road. “The yellow house?” and he nodded. “Why are you playing here? You have a nice big yard of your own and you probably shouldn’t be crossing the street. It’s not safe.”

“Lookin’ for my mom,” he said. He wouldn’t look at me and he stood there with the shovel and pail hanging down.

“She isn’t here,” I said, “but why don’t you play in your own yard. You really shouldn’t be digging up here.”

He left and I felt horrid. I’ve never had strong maternal instincts, never been one to be awed by other people’s kids. But I’m not a bad person, I’d never be mean to a child. I just don’t know how to talk with them, I suppose. How to play games or join in. I always felt awkward, as if I were trying too hard.

Three days later I came home to find him digging in my yard again. He looked up as I drove in the driveway. Skulked off before I got out of the car. I did stall, it’s true, pretending to gather up my purse and things before I opened the door.

“Why don’t you just talk to his parents?” was the suggested tactic from several people at work. But I was new to the neighborhood. Didn’t want to start off by complaining. No one had brought over fresh homemade brownies when I moved in so it didn’t look like the friendliest group. Which was fine; I’d wanted privacy. I’m sure they’d help out if needed, as I would be willing to do.

I never saw him there again but it was obvious he was still digging in an area a few feet inside my property line. It’s where I wanted to put in a garden and thought maybe I should start on it right away. Maybe he wouldn’t be so determined if he saw it was carefully tended and not an abandoned far edge of the lawn.

It was a sunny September Saturday morning. One wheelbarrow full of sod and the dirt piled to the side. Hostas and pachysandra and a little Japanese maple waited patiently as I dug up the soil in a fairly straight line. I looked up and the boy was watching me.

I felt guilty so I waved him on over. He stood shyly looking into the trench as I dug. “You can help, if you want,” I told him. It made me feel kind of good. We dug side by side for a few minutes when my shovel struck stone.

He looked up at me, then back down at the soil.

“Pirate treasure!” I said. A perfect example of why I don’t do well with kids. It was a piece of quartz or mica, most likely. I just hoped it was pretty enough to pass as some sort of treasure.

He got down on his hands and knees in the dirt and started uncovering the rock with his fingers. Then he stopped, stood up and I was startled to see tears well up in his eyes. I looked down and saw the obvious round creaminess of bone. “Ma,” he whispered. And I hugged him as hard as I could.

Word Count:  222

She wished upon a star to be a cloud. But then, floating with the wind she thought she’d rather be the sky. Clouds grew big and bulbous with rain, stormy black and mean.

But the sky saw too much living all at once. She saw war in the Middle East. Starvation and disease in parts of Africa. Icebergs crying into oceans. She saw lush green turn golden brown in drought. All going on at once in worldwide chaos.

So she picked another star and asked to be the moon. But what she saw embarrassed and distressed her. Sneak thieves in the night. Muggings, rapes and robbery. At its best she watched in aching loneliness as lovers kissed, caressed each other in her light. She could only handle two nights as the moon before she thought again and wished upon a star to be the sun.

She waited patiently through the early morning hours to sink below the one horizon and pop up above another. Bright and cheerful, making all of mankind smile as earth forever circled. Like a carousel to give each man and woman, boy and girl and every living thing the golden ring of sunbeams.

And at exactly 5:53 a.m. EST, she rose and in a screaming second burned into a cinder no larger than a speck of dust.

Word Count:  408

He is a strange little boy, lonely with no brothers or sisters. Raised alone by his mom. His father was killed in the Afghanistan war when he was four.

He likes school but he has no real friends there. Where he lives there are no children his age. His playmate is a daddy long-legs spider who he pretends is his dad.

The spider goes with him everywhere, though he doesn’t take him to school. He did once and the other kids laughed and laughed and teased him for over a week. He found the spider in the bathroom, climbing a wall. This was at the other apartment. He made sure he took it along to the new place but it must have lost its way around the unfamiliar rooms. He cried every night, searched every day, but it took a whole month to find him.

He was playing on the big old front porch with the spider. A girl with hot auburn curls and pink sandals walked by with her mom. He watched them walk up the street, turn and walk up the front steps to a house about halfway down the next block. His heart beat so fast like when he runs in a pretend game of tag.

Three days later she came by all alone. Stopped in front of his house. “Hi,” she said timidly. “Whatcha doing?” she asked. But she didn’t step up off the sidewalk.

“Just sitting,” he said from his perch on the porch.

“Can I come up?” she asked. Her name was Sandra, “but you can call me Sandy,” she said. She clomped up the stairs and sat down beside him. He stuttered out his name and started to sweat.

He hid the spider under a saucer he uses to carry it back and forth up to his room. They sat for a while, he a blushing red pink while he held out his fingers for her cat-in-the-cradle string.

“Let’s go to my house,” she said, “I’ve got a baseball and glove.”

He started to follow, turned back, saw the spider free of its prison.

“Eeeek!” the little girl screamed and jumped two at a time down the stairs. Stopped for a second and waited for him to decide.

He looked at her hair catching the sunlight, her feet poised to run. He stomped on the spider and proud as a hero, turned and hopped down the stairs.

Word Count:  275

The day they found him and brought him up from his cellar room he screamed and fought them but they didn’t understand why.

He’d lived there since he was three. A boy instead of the girl that she desperately wanted. It was dark in his room, with thin light coming in through a window filtered by fences and trees. But it was warm. His room was next to the furnace so he never was cold. Once a year they brought him outside in a snowstorm. Just to show him how lucky he was. Frozen by winter’s wind, blinded by light, he was grateful the rest of the year.

It took them ten months to teach him to speak and to write his own name. It took him longer to trust other people. He missed his mother who he used to see once a day. They told him they were searching to find her but hadn’t had any luck yet. He tried to tell them they were there, his mother and father, in the cellar, living in separate rooms.

They went back one more time to the house that was boarded and due to be knocked down any day. It came as a shock to find two skeletons hidden away in the basement and felt horrible that they hadn’t found them sooner. His mother, his father, likely left to starve because no one had found them there.

But the medical examiner knew the minute he saw the bones. Two boys, one older one younger, dead many years at least. They never did find the parents, or the daughter who was lucky to have gotten away.

Word Count:  481

The pact had been Mona’s idea. Said she didn’t want to go on living without him and Ralph thought that was sweet. He resisted but she persisted and he finally agreed.

The actual execution of the act she was leaving to him. Since he was the one who was dying they’d have to decide pretty quick while he was still physically and mentally able. Once the topic was open, she freely discussed the means.

“Poison,” she said. “Maybe slipped into a last glass of Burgundy wine.”

“How about a beer?” he laughed. There was a touch of sadness in it. “I’d really love a final beer.”

Mona slyly asked Ralph’s doctor for sleeping pills. She refilled it twice and hid the bottles in the kitchen spice carousel inside the cabinet. Right behind the cinnamon and cloves.

“What about a gun?” she asked one day.

“I can’t shoot you!” He started shaking. She didn’t bring it up again.

“Carbon monoxide,” she said. “I think that might be the best way. We’ll just both go sit in the garage in the car. It’ll be like when we were dating. Falling asleep at the drive-in.”

“Who fell asleep?” he grinned.

Ralph was beginning to have second thoughts. He was still feeling all right though weak. It was harder for him to get around. “I don’t know, Mona. I think I’d rather I just die in bed.”

Truth was that as time dwindled down, he grew hungry for each extra day. He also was more aware of a belief in something beyond, maybe even a God. Maybe even a hell where he’d surely go if he killed her and himself. Mona would go straight to heaven.

They were on their way back from his doctor’s. Mona drove for a while in silence. The doctor’s news had been bad.

“Well then, the wine,” she said. She reached out, gently laid her hand on his knee. “Tonight,” she said. “I’ll make something special for dinner. The quiche you said you like and can still eat.”

He put his quivering hand over hers though it took him some time to find it. “Mona, I don’t want to do this,” he said.

“I’ll do it,” she said. “Don’t worry, I can.”

“No, Mona. Thing is, I don’t want to die.”

She turned to him sharply, her eyes open wide. Horrible thoughts raced through her head. “We have to!” she shrieked. Really, there was only so much she could take.

“Mona…” he said.

“No! Ralph, we’ve decided.” She rounded a corner, tires squealing. She was upset and a little bit angry. “Ralph, we agreed!”

“Mona, please…”

“Ralph, I’m not going through a long drawn-out dying and then being left alone.”

“Mona! Watch where you’re going!”

They could not have planned it better. She was killed instantly as the car hit the oak. He lived a full week longer.

Word Count:  393

He was unarguably the smartest kid in his class. Though a sixth grader, Steven was probably the smartest kid in the whole school. He loved books more than ball games. He loved math and literature and science. Science he loved most of all.

He’d spent almost a year on his entry for the state Science Fair project this year. It was the most important thing in his mind and he dedicated all the time he could give it, determined to have a legitimate win.

Steven felt he’d won last year but he was never awarded the prize. The committee decided that since a little girl had been killed in the explosion and so many others hurt that it was best to just not declare any winners at all.

Oh, they knew that it wasn’t his fault because he had no intention of setting it off and didn’t think he even could,  and only reprimanded the two older boys who had because they thought it’d be fun. No one felt they had really believed there was any danger, just laughed at Steven when he warned them that what he had built for display was a bomb.

Some believed he should be banned from submitting an entry. His parents finally convinced the committee that even Steven hadn’t believed it would work. He was warned not to make anything explosive. To focus instead on something that would benefit all.

Why would I make something that wouldn’t do what it was supposed to? But he was smart enough not to say that to even his dad. He had no intention of setting it off and tried to stop those two jerks that did. He really did deserve to win, he felt. It was the best project at the fair last year.

The committee took a long time at his table. Asked questions and inspected his work. They had to agree that his chemical substitute for flour was a great concept. It would save on agricultural land use, was cheap to produce, and with the nutrients added in, much more healthy than rye and wheat for the heart.

Steven was awarded first prize of a thousand dollars. He was given a plaque with his name in gold. But the celebration dinner planned for April was cancelled because so many of the committee members were hospitalized or already dead.

Word Count:  501

If you asked him he wouldn’t tell you but he’s afraid of being alone. He’d say he hasn’t “gotten any” in two years since she died. A little laugh, near a snicker. Surely anyone can understand and empathize with that.

He’s cursed her a million times and wonders why she put the pots in that particular cabinet. Down low, where he has to get down on hands and knees. Why the spatula is in that drawer alongside gleaming knives that nick knuckles. It took him weeks to find the ladle and he’s left it handy in the drying rack ever since. One plate, one bowl, one fork and knife, and a teaspoon he uses both for canned soup he has for lunch and his morning coffee. The mug is rinsed out right away and stands ready each night by the pot.

He’s pretty sure she changed the bed sheets every Saturday but once a month or so doesn’t make any difference. See’s no reason to make up the bed every day since it’s rumpled only on his side of the bed. Laundry offers its own set of problems. White tee-shirts and Jockeys have a pinkish tone to them now. He runs the vacuum over the carpet, mops the kitchen floor when they look dirty. There’s no need for a stricter routine. You never know what’s going to happen, what you can count on. He didn’t think he’d ever have to figure out how to dust.

He started dating through online services. Paid hundreds of dollars upfront. Remembered to wear a clean shirt and pants. Get a haircut. Open doors. Pay for the meal, not to eat with his hands, cover his mouth when he sneezed. Wondered in these modern times when he could expect to get laid.

There were the tradeoffs which he finally had to learn to accept. The bodies that came on the twenty year-olds most often didn’t come with a mind. He couldn’t afford going out every night, and the gamut from salads to burgers and fries took their toll on his stomach. What he thought was often was never enough; what he thought too much seemed to bore them.

And the housecleaning became more of a problem as he worked to always make it look nice.

He ran into an old friend back from high school. Rounded now, touched with gray. But she knew the words to the same songs he crooned. Made meatloaf and chocolate chip cookies and chicken soup from scratch. He married her as quick as she would say yes.

They spent a good year of dishes put away in the cupboards. Beds made up every day. Bleached white laundry and tables dust-free. And of course, occasional sex.

She took ill and died while his fear and his grief fought inside him. But the fear won out and he went through the whole thing again. The bed is unmade, the dust layered thick, and the mug stands alone by the pot.

Word Count:  350

There was no heaven nor the hot flames of a hell. Mary believed when people died they lived on in your memory. Her older sister Ruth had been raped and murdered when Mary was twelve. Her mother told her only that she was dead. She found out the truth when Ruth told her in a dream where Ruth was forever seventeen.

Ruth told her things all the time. From her room in Mary’s mind, she whispered secrets. She told her about boys and about sex. Mary asked her about things she dare not ask her mother. Ruth was easy to talk to, unless Grandma listened in from her own room above Ruth’s in her head.

In college Mary’s friend Todd died in a car accident. Afterward, he moved in with Ruth. It was fine with Mary because Ruth was a chatterbox and Mary couldn’t keep up with her by herself.

By the time Mary was thirty-two her head was as full as a Chicago convention hotel. Not everyone was talking at once but it was hard to understand all the voices except for her mother’s. She spoke in a harsh disapproving tone that Mary could always pick out from the rest.

When Mary got married she never told her husband about the people she carried around with her every day. She didn’t know how to explain why she avoided making a lot of new friends. She quit her job in the city to work out of the relative solitude of her house. Mary wondered how everyone else seemed to manage their private menageries. She frankly felt hers was driving her crazy but it seemed rather rude to ask.

When Mary was near the end of her days things grew quiet and quieter and nearly stopped. All the people she’d known escaped memory. Her husband was silent. Even her mother’s voice faded away.

Then one summer morning Ruth invited her over. Ruth, who never did go away. Mary had nowhere else she could go. She let out one long last breath, closed her eyes, and disappeared inside her own head.

Word Count:  211

He giant-stepped up three steps, hopped back down two. Again and again and again as he made his way up the stairs. He was seven years old and hated going to bed.

It took him two hours to get to his room. Sometimes a little bit more. His mom usually gave up, stopped threatening and pleading. His father pretended to ignore the whole thing.

He had tried to tell them about the monster who lived in there but they usually just laughed it away. Sometimes got serious, looked into his eyes, and explained that monsters weren’t real. That he was a big boy and if there really were monsters, they wouldn’t be bothering him.

For a year it went on, a game scary to him, a full blown annoyance to his mom more than his dad. Then his brother outgrew the crib in their room and a bed was moved in next to his in the room.

That’s all it took, it made him feel better to have little Nick in his room. Now all he need do was wait a few minutes after his brother was upstairs, tucked in and asleep. For the monster, he knew, having feasted on brains, would be contentedly full and asleep by then too.