Lunch Reads

A Good Idea but. . . .

2010-06-29T03:42:00.000-07:00

by Libby Malin Sternberg
www.LibbysBooks.com

When I started this blog, I thought what a wonderful idea it would be, to have short stories available every day for hungry readers, to have a place where talented authors could showcase their work . . .

And I still think it's a good idea. I just have so little time to keep up the blog the way I'd like -- to solicit great stories, read them, make suggestions for edits where appropriate. . .

So the blog has languished. I apologize. I wish I could promise that it will revive soon, but I'm not sure when my schedule will free up enough get it moving again. Don't give up on it just yet -- it might be humming in the future!

And now for a moment of promotional zen -- stop by my personal blog for interesting discussions on Jane Eyre, the Kindle and more.

Dust to Dust (Young Adult)

2009-11-28T11:49:00.001-08:00

by Kelly C. Roell

The funeral was just stretching on and on that hot Sunday in the middle of the summer. I took a look at my long bony fingers, sweaty and clammy from the 90-degree weather, and ached to be splashing around in the creek behind the church. Daddy promised that the rain from Friday would cool everything down, but the sun just sucked up all the water the same as it did every year. All the women, dressed in black with funny-looking hats, whispered at each other and blew their noses into hankies as they fanned themselves cooler. Pastor Tom preached on and on in his booming voice like it was just another boring Sunday and no one had even died. Miss Patterson, my favorite Sunday school teacher, whispered ‘cross the aisle to Daddy that “It’s a cryin’ shame, ya know.” Daddy shrugged his big old coal-mining shoulders and said, “The good Lord knows what’s best.” I knew he wasn’t really sad because he was a “hard-hearted man with no sense and no decency,” like Momma used to say when he’d come home smelling like whiskey.

At the end of the sermon, which lasted around five days to all us pew-squirming kids, I finally got to get up and stretch my scrawny legs. “Chicken legs,” like Momma said. I spread my arms out to the side and yawned so wide my insides felt clean with the new air, muggy as it was. Daddy pushed me up to the front with a “Git movin’, Katie” and I sulked out of the yawn and made my way up to the casket. My silly frilly dress, made by Momma’s loving hands, scratched and bothered me into a tither as I stood by the coffin and pretended to like everyone hugging and squeezing me. I hated frills and foo-foo dresses, and hated sweaty people touching me just the same. I thought that just because someone died, I shouldn't have to be scratched to death by the dress and hugged like it was my own self that was dying.

Although really, I wouldn’t have minded.

At least then I’d get to see Momma again.

Momma had died last Friday from some sort of nasty infection. No one knew exactly what had finally done her in, but I thought with anger that it was Momma trying to please Daddy all the time, and not getting no thanks for it, neither. She was always trying to make him like her in some way or another. She would eat every bite of Granny Davis’s cooking even though everyone knew she couldn’t fix nothing tasteful. But since it was Daddy’s momma, Momma would eat her awful fixins anyway. She’d situate her long blonde hair up in some kind of twisty-do that I always liked, just to see if Daddy would notice. He never did. Then she’d go and fry up his favorite meal, pork chops with milk gravy, and bake some apple cobbler just to be safe. He’d just eat and never say a word of “please” or “thank-you” or anything else proper. One time, I even heard Momma whisper to Daddy that there was more dessert waiting in the bedroom for later, but I could never figure out just where she hid it, because I had looked, yesiree. Yup, Momma had tried too hard, too much, for too long and I was plumb furious that it had gotten the better of her this time.

I kicked the heck out of some pebbles as the whole church headed the mile down the road to Momma’s new home.

“Pauline! Didja see that one? It almost hit Pastor Tom!” I whispered loudly to my sister.

“Katie Sue. You better knock that off ‘for Daddy comes around her and beats your hide. You got that? ‘Sides, what would Momma think?”

I grumbled that Momma wasn’t here so how was I supposed to know, but quit kicking anyway. I shuffled my feet, cramped into those dang tight foo-foo shoes, and watched as dust circled up around my shins. “Dust you once were and dust you’ll be once ag’in,” was Pastor Tom’s sermon, and I wondered how long it would take to actually turn a whole 32-year-old momma into dust.

As the group of us circled around a set of some good climbing trees at the entrance of the graveyard, I thought back to the hour I found out Momma wasn’t gonna be around no more. Last Friday afternoon, the rain beat up against the windowpanes and made them rattle like a ghost knocking on hell’s gates. I sat in the middle of the floor, "dirty as a mud rat", as Momma would say, trying to make a hammock for my frog, Mr. Jim, out of Pauline’s brand-new training bra. I just finished tying up the hook side to the end of Pauline’s quilt, when Daddy came to the door.

“Ya done workin’ for the day, Daddy?” I jumped up, trying to look as sweet and innocent as my brand new baby calf. I shoved the bra, Mr. Jim and all, under Pauline’s bed and bit my thumbnail so he wouldn’t know what I was up to.

“Yup. I’m done for the day.” He walked with heavy boots over to my bed, and sat down sighing like the whole world had just been hit by a tornado.

“C’mere, Kate,” he said. I wasn’t smart, but I could figure out that him being there wasn’t good, so I got up, wiped my sludge hands on my blue jean cut-offs and went to Daddy.

That same night, I lay awake and listened to the rain and thunder pounding real hard on the windowpane. Somewhere, Someone was mad and I knew the feeling. I shoved off the old sheet I’d had since I was a babe in arms, and scooted out of bed to the window. The pane was cool and damp to my fingertips and I rested my burning cheek against the rattling.

“Why did Momma have to die?”

I jumped about four feet in the air at Pauline’s question.

“Why don’t ya just skeer me ta death, Pauline!? What the heck’s the matter with ya?" I whispered and tip-toed over to her bed. “Cain’t ya sleep, neither?”

“Not a wink. I keep thinkin' that Momma is dead and I’m still here, and Daddy don’t care neither way,” Pauline said into her ratty quilt as I squeaked down on her bed.

“Well, I don’t care about Daddy,” I said. “He ain't decent anyway. As for Momma, I’m just mad and sad because she done gone and left us to ourselves. I heard that fat choir lady talking, ya know the one who sings like she’s got a chipmunk in her skirt?”

Pauline giggled.

“Well she just had to say that the welfare people is going to come and steal us away. Well, no ma’am and nosiree am I going to go to some welfare place.”

My words made Pauline get some backbone for once, and she sat right up in bed looking all determined and such.

“Don’t you worry, Kate. I won’t let nothing like that happen, you got it? They ain’t never gonna take us away, even if Daddy wants us to go.” She grabbed me and squeezed the living daylights outta me, but for once, I didn’t even bother to wriggle outta her arms.

Pastor Tom was just finishing up the last words of the graveside speech as my mind came back to the here-and-now. He was clearing his throat, “hemming and hawing,” like Momma said, and everyone knew he was trying to finish his sermon off with something that would stick in people’s heads like they’d taught him in the preacher school. I stood just as still as a stone as Pastor Tom finally shut up and everyone fumbled away from Momma. They all tried to look busy, staring down into the hole at the casket, and finally stumbling around gravestones to our house for supper. Pauline grabbed my hand to go pay our last respects to Momma, but I would have none of it and snatched my hand back where it belonged. I watched as Daddy whispered something down into the grave and dropped some daisies on top of Momma’s casket, and I, real bold and such, marched right up next to him.

“Well, Momma, I’ll miss ya,” I said real loud and marched down the road, knowing that hell was on my heels for being so disrespecting. Pauline told me later that after I left, Daddy said she better “See about helping them women with the supper.” Then she said that Daddy walked home after her with his head hanging like a dog.

Fourteen hours later, in my estimating, all them ladies and men finally started to get the heck out of my house, smiling and saying, “God bless yer soul, darlin’” or “We’ll see ya real soon.” It was just in time, too because they were all about to get on my last nerve. The last lady left, just crying and carrying on, telling me and Daddy and Pauline that she “knew how ya’ll felt and would be ‘round when ya’ll needed somethin’,” and Daddy just said “Thanks so much.” After the last dish was wiped and the crumbs were swept off the floor with Momma’s old broom, the three of us stood eye-balling each other in the kitchen.

“Welp, guess there’s nothin’ left to do but go to bed, so ya girls git to yer room and git some sleep.” Daddy wasn’t fooling around, neither. “Got another busy day tomorra, too.” Me and Pauline went.

I tussled around in my sheets on the night of Momma’s funeral, just burning and aching on the inside. It felt like my blood was so boiling it was going to blister and pop and melt the skin right off my bones. The air felt hot and thick and wet and made my lungs feel as heavy as a bucket of mud. Pauline had cried for a while, then fell asleep just as easy as you please, but I could not empty my soul like that and forget that Momma left me and Daddy didn’t care.

A chair scraping against the floor in the kitchen pricked my ears and I sat up all twisted in my sheets. I wondered why Daddy was still fumbling around in the kitchen when normal people were in their beds, so I decided to see just what the heck was going on. I untangled myself from the bed and snuck into the doorway where I could just baaarely see into the kitchen. Daddy was out there, all right; I could just make out his figure in the moonlight peeking in from the window. He was sitting in his “head of the table” chair, and was holding something in his big, dirty hands. I crept down the hall real quiet, like a tomcat hunting birds, to see what he was looking at. I crouched down low to make myself real small, and peeked in the kitchen at his big old shoulders. He was hunched over the table holding something square with his right hand and his head with his left. What was it? He slumped back in his chair with a sigh, and I got to see just what it was he was looking so hard at: it was the wedding picture of Daddy and Momma.

And Daddy was crying.

I could not believe my eyes, and I guess I was real surprised like ‘cause I jumped up for some dumb reason and ran to my room. I knew I was in trouble ‘cause Daddy’s chair scraped backwards real quick. I scrambled into bed and threw my quilt over me just as fast as you please. Daddy’s heavy footsteps stomped down the hall, and stopped at the doorway.

“Kate?” he said.

I pretended to be asleep as he started into the room. I lay there just quaking, trying to look gone to the world, when his footsteps stopped at my bed. He sighed some big long, sad sigh and I could feel him staring at me pretending to be asleep.

“Well, Kate, I guess ya caught me,” he whispered with real tears all choked up in his voice, turned around and walked out.

I lay there quiet as a mouse after Daddy left the room. For the first time since Momma died, I felt happy and the feeling ran all through my body like that cool little creek behind the church. I knew it was wrong to feel so happy, but I couldn’t a cared less. I had caught him. Red-handed! I had caught him caring for something and he couldn’t hide it! He couldn’t even say it wasn’t the truth, because as Momma always said, “tears will tell.” I didn’t even know what all this caring meant; the only thing I knew, was that the air in my room was somehow cooler, and my blood wasn’t itching to boil out. He cared. At least for Momma. And maybe if he cared for Momma, he could care for me, too. I’d find out tomorrow, and when I did, I’d tell Pauline.

-----------
Kelly C. Roell is an aspiring YA author currently seeking representation. In the meantime, she's the test prep writer for About.com, a NY Times company.

Be Back . . .SOON!

2009-11-28T06:57:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers,

After a hiatus, I'm getting ready to relaunch LUNCH READS. I might not be posting one story daily, but will try to keep fresh inventory up as much as possible. I'll be sending out notices to other blogs and loyal readers soon! Watch this spot!

And. . . thanks for your patience.

Best,
Libby Malin Sternberg

Deadlines, deadlines!

2009-06-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

Well, I've probably disappointed you, not posting new stories for awhile. My excuse--suddenly, I'm swamped with shortened deadlines for writing projects. Freelance articles, manuscript revisions, editing jobs--they loom over me.

I'm not complaining about the work. I love writing and feel blessed to be able to earn money doing it. But these fast and furious job requirements mean no new Lunch Reads stories for just a little while. An eensy-weensy little while.

I promise to get some good tales up soon!

Best,
Libby

Stumbling Along

2009-06-17T04:09:00.001-07:00

Dear Readers,

Lunch Reads is "dark" today and might be void of a story here and there as we stumble and sputter our way toward regular postings. I'm stocking up inventory but could use more stories -- so get crackin', all you aspiring authors! Mysteries seem to be a popular read, but we're open to almost anything.

Since there's no story up today, check out some of our past entries -- Jenny Milchman's "The Very Old Man" (a two-parter) is one of my faves. And oh yeah, I love my daughter's droll "Sheep."

Since I'm the moderator of this blog, let me put in a pitch for a longer read -- my recent humorous women's fiction, Fire Me, is a good summer escape.

Best,
Libby Malin

The Very Old Man - Part II (Genre: Suspense, Magical Realism)

2009-06-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

by Jenny Milchman

VII

Concussion was on her mind when Denise crawled into bed. “Do you think we need to check on her in the night?” she asked as she tried to get comfortable.

“Kids fall,” Bill replied, beginning to stroke her. “Quit worrying.”

For a moment, Denise let herself enjoy the feel of his hand on her skin. Then she said, “She’s not a kid, she’s a baby. Besides, mothers are supposed to worry.”

Bill pulled her closer, easing down the strap of her tank top. “I don’t know if they’re supposed to,” he murmured. “I do know it can drive you crazy when they do.”

Denise hesitated. If they talked about Bill’s mother now, they’d never finish what he had begun. And she wanted to. For the first time in over a year.

But then Bill himself rolled away. It’s the nursing bra, Denise thought wryly. She had decided that nursing bras were the least sexy garment ever made for a woman. They beat out flannel nightgowns and granny underwear.

“Another big day tomorrow?” she asked.

“They’re all big,” Bill said, already starting to drift. “You can’t even imagine.”

Denise let the full sting of the comment penetrate. Then she sighed and turned over.

Her last waking thought was that the old man never would’ve gotten near Bill. Her husband didn’t loiter in the supermarket aisles, killing time; he strode down the lanes snatching up items, and throwing them into his basket with a flourish that made Bethany giggle.

VIII

Denise dreamt she was in a carnival funhouse. Everything had gone topsy turvy. “Because of the mirrors,” someone hissed from the shadows.

Denise knew, in the way of dreams, that the voice belonged to the old, old man. It was him – the cold vapor of him – that made it so opaque in here. Clouds floated like mist from dry ice. She tried to back away from the man, but when she did, she hit the mirrors. They were cold too, sheer sheets of ice that distorted everything.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Her breath melded with the rest of the fog. And still the man kept pressing closer, until Denise knew his aim was to rob her of all her warmth, to make her as cold as he.

She came awake with a start, the covers wrangled off her, although Bill still lay under them, protected.

That old man had really burred into her skin. Applying a few of the self-analysis skills she’d picked up from the psychologists at her old job, Denise wondered if her recent transformation – from working woman to stay at home mom – had shaken her up more than she realized. Who was she now? What did she see when she looked in a mirror?

IX

But the next day, Bethany took a second fall, and Denise knew this wasn’t just about her former life. Denise’s raptor eyes were on Bethany the whole time, and even Bill happened to be standing nearby at the exact moment of her tumble. And still neither was able to stop Bethie’s swift and seemingly impossible passage from inside the sling seat of her walker, up onto its tray, and then down onto the uncarpeted floor. Denise couldn’t get her head around the choreography of the incident. A nine month old couldn’t hoist herself. She couldn’t even climb.

Had she not been placed in it correctly? But Denise never would have made a mistake like that.

This time, the fall left marks.

Why did they have the damn walker anyway? The pediatrician had warned against their use, and even Bill had shrugged and agreed to put the contraption away. It was Denise who dispensed with caution for once and stopped her husband on his way to the attic. Denise’s father had sent the walker as a gift; the only contact he’d ever had with the baby.

Denise couldn’t bear the sight of the roses blooming on her daughter’s perfect flesh. She toyed with the idea of taking Bethie to the pediatrician until Bill stopped her.

She settled on a bath and early bedtime instead. Except that when Denise carried Bethie, warm from the tub, her flossy hair fragrant, into the nursery she saw that she couldn’t lay the baby down in her crib.

“Bill!” Denise shrieked. “Come here!” Bethany started to whimper. “Shh,” Denise begged. “I’m sorry, Bethie. We’ll get you to bed.”

But where?

Hearing Bill’s lazy amble up the steps, Denise ran to the doorway. “Hurry!”

“What is it?” he asked. His gaze traveled round the room. “Christ. How’d that happen?”

The entire wall behind Bethany’s crib was water-logged, vertically flooded, the rosebud paper turned brown and gone to mush.

“I don’t know,” Denise practically cried. “How did it happen? That’s our room next door. There aren’t any pipes in there. And it hasn’t rained in weeks.”

Bethany whimpered again and screwed her face into her mother’s shoulder. Denise didn’t look down at her. She was transfixed, her gaze pinned to the stain, the shape of which resembled some great, winged creature.

“Is it cold in here?” she asked, her voice quivery, unable to find solid ground. “It feels so cold in here.”

Bill didn’t respond. “It’s an old house,” he mused. “Maybe there was plumbing somewhere around here once.” He poked at the wall above the crib and his finger sank all the way into it, came out coated with the innards of the house. “Oh man. That’s pretty gross.”

Denise burst into tears, and the baby started to cry along with her.

Bill gave her arm a brief pat. “It’s OK,” he said, taking Bethie. “It’s a leak, that’s all.”

His air of ease didn’t soothe her, but Bethany began to quiet in his hold.

“We’ve got to get Bethie to sleep,” Denise said, rendered a little less wild by the call to routine. “Where can we put her to sleep?”

Bill handed the baby back. He swiped one hand across the crib slats. “This is fine. Not even damp. Put her down.”

“No!” Denise cried, causing the baby to lurch in her arms as if shocked. “Not in there!”

Bill gave her a funny look. “The problem is the wall, not the crib. We can move it over a bit.” He started to pull on the top bar and the crib slid on its casters.

But no way was Denise going to agree to that.

Bill let out a sigh and left the room. Denise stood in place, swaying back and forth to lull the baby. After a few minutes, her husband returned to the doorway, hooked his thumb and jerked it sharply. Denise followed him.

He’d gotten out the Pack ’n Play and set it up in the guest room. Denise was sure that Bethie would balk at her new sleeping environs, but the baby was so zonked that she didn’t even twitch when she was laid down. As Denise straightened up, arms suddenly free and light, she saw that Bill hadn’t stuck around to see if the arrangement had worked.

X

Denise could hear a faint shadow of voices downstairs, and wondered if Bill had managed to get a plumber out to the house already. She didn’t go down to check. Instead she backed out of the guest room, pulling the door to without latching it, in case Bethie woke up in the night and didn’t know where she was. Then she headed toward the nursery, approaching it as one might a menacing dog. Puckered all over with gooseflesh, teeth ground together to keep them from chattering, Denise walked over to the dresser and grabbed the Mother Hubbard bank. Holding it at arm’s length, she stalked downstairs. Without pausing to see who Bill might be talking to, she opened the back door, went out into the yard and unlatched the lid on the plastic garbage bin. She threw the bank and all its contents into the depths of the trash below. Then she dragged the bin to the curb.

XI

“There was a curse on that coin,” she informed Bill once they’d settled into bed for the night. She didn’t care if he refuted her.

Bethie was sleeping soundly in the guest room. Bill had gotten Harold, their next door neighbor and amateur fixit man, to come over and take a look at the wall. The guy had promptly prophesied the existence of an old pipe and suggested they go in and remove it. Denise had murmured something about getting a second opinion before hacking up their home; unbelievably, Bill had accepted the word of caution.

“My mother believed in that stuff,” he said now, shouldering off a sheath of blankets. “Crystals. Tarot readings. It’s all bullshit.”

Denise lay there without a flutter, she lay there like wood. She and Bill almost never spoke about their pasts. Bill’s mother had died before Denise ever met her. Absent parents, that was the one thing they had in common. Other than that, theirs was a connection of opposites.

Bill yawned hugely. “That quarter was just a coin belonging to some guy who wanted to connect to the life of the young. He didn’t have anything else.”

It struck Denise as an insightful thing to say, but still she didn’t fully buy it. Not after the nursery wall. “Even Maryann agrees with me.”

Bill chuckled, low. “Sure, Nise. Use the neighborhood crazy to bolster your case.”

Denise bit her bottom lip. So her days were trifling and her only current friend was worthy of ridicule.

Bill raised himself on one elbow. “Come on,” he said. “You don’t really believe it, do you?”

“Yes,” Denise said. “No. I don’t know what I believe.”

“Ah,” said Bill, a measure of humor in his tone. “That’s dangerous. When you don’t know what you believe, you can believe anything.”

“You’re really deep tonight, you know that?” Denise replied, beginning to giggle herself.

Bill lifted himself fully then, looming over her. Before Denise could even react, they were doing what had been postponed between them for so long, and it was at once novel and familiar.

Still, Denise couldn’t prevent an image from growing in her head as she and Bill moved. Of little work-shrunken creatures in some kind of warehouse, going back and forth, back and forth, between shelf and assembly line, assembly line and shelf.

XII

Denise decided to take Bethie out for a late afternoon stroll. The plumber – a real one this time, who emerged from a van with a logo painted on it, carrying a toolbox and everything – was occupying both their bedroom and the nursery, contributing an unpleasant buzz, punctuated by the occasional loud whirring, to the atmosphere of the house.

Something strange in the weather lured her out as well. It was unseasonably warm, the November wind blustery, but tepid as bath water.

She put the baby in her winter coat anyway, opened the door, and stepped out.

Of late Bethany had been refusing to be strapped into her stroller. She liked to sit forward so she could reach out, touch things as they passed. Denise never indulged this, forcing herself to tolerate her baby’s bubbling cries of fury.

“I’m sorry, Bethie,” Denise would say after the baby finally wound down, not daring to lean over the carriage lest she start a fresh barrage of tears. “But it’s not safe.”

Only today she was a little lost in recollections of last night, not the nursery wall, but the interlude between her and Bill, and she let herself forget to secure the straps.

Giddy with novel locomotion, Bethany managed to pinch a bud off a bush. She twisted in her stroller, holding the crushed bit of plant flesh out to Denise like an offering.

Beth smiled and nodded at her daughter, knowing the little girl would scream if she reached for the bud, that Bethie didn’t really intend an exchange. She wanted to hold onto the new thing for her own.

They entered the park.

Denise had been glad to find a house near a park, especially one whose layout was so perfect. An asphalt loop, perfect for jogging back in Denise’s pre-motherhood days, and for strolling now, circumnavigated an inner field. At one end of the field, a cluster of playground equipment mushroomed. At the other, a bridge hunched over a stream. Denise decided to give the stream a miss today, and struck out for the baby swings, cooing to her equally happy baby.

Benches lined the left side of the loop, which was the reason Denise always took it. Retired ladies with even more time on their hands than Denise had tended to stake out the seats, and sometimes one of them would summon Denise over. The retired men who belonged to them spent their time in the park walking.

Denise would give the stroller a little lift off the path, then nudge it across the grass until she was close enough to allow whoever had beckoned to gaze at Bethie, pat her dimpled fists, murmur compliments in singsong.

Up ahead now, Denise spied her favorite of the ladies; Denise thought her name was Natalie. Twice already, Natalie had found something in her purse for Bethany. A rubber frog on a string the first time. Then a Thumbelina bracelet. She must’ve planned for them to come; who would just happen to possess such novelties? Denise had been suspicious of the woman at first, but now she thought of her as a kind of low key fairy godmother. Not princes but trinkets.

Or maybe she was just a grandmother. Maybe that’s why she had things in her bag.

Denise gave the stroller a hearty push forward. “Who do we see, Bethie? Who’s that?”

Bethany raised her head obligingly.

Natalie was attempting to pull herself off the sloping seat of the bench, planting quavery legs on the ground.

“There’s that luscious little fella,” she said.

“Girl,” Denise replied, a little embarrassed. “Bethany. Remember? You gave her the frog?” She drew the stroller closer so that Natalie could peer inside.

“Oh yes,” the old woman said. “What a love.” She beamed up at Denise. “You must be so proud.”

“Yes, thank you – ” Denise began to say when her gaze was yanked by a figure walking further down the path. She spun around, momentarily letting go of the stroller.

Natalie turned slowly to look where Denise was looking.

Denise grabbed for the disappearing handle and Bethany let out a startled yawp, pitching backward. Denise had forgotten she was unbelted.

The old man from the supermarket was coming toward them along the asphalt trail. His pace was rather clipped; he’d lost that slow, deliberate quality to his movement, liquid almost, as if anything more sudden might shatter his bones.

His eyes sparked when he caught sight of the stroller, and he hastened on.

Denise began to back up. Natalie was scrabbling around in her shiny black purse.

“Wait a moment, dear, I have something for your little one here…”

Denise peered at the old man. He looked – but that couldn’t be, how could it be – not quite so old anymore. The ghostly moon chill of his face had altered, replaced by a rosier hue. The flesh on his arms, exposed beneath rolled up sleeves of sweater, shone with beads of sweat. That was the difference, Denise realized. The old man looked like he’d gotten – warmer.

Denise wondered if he’d started to get warmer the day he handed Bethany the quarter. Or the first time Bethany fell. Did their troubles, the infiltration of small fears into their lives, in some way restore and revitalize the old man?

“Baby,” he said, digging in one slack trouser pocket. “Something nice for the baby.”

Natalie smiled. She placed her hand on the man’s bare wrist, but Denise couldn’t tell if it was a gesture of longtime companionship, or if Natalie was doing her best to forestall something.

Denise thought of that heretofore nonexistent pipe bursting behind Bethie’s crib. If unreal water could ruin a wall, who was to say that the next time it wouldn’t invade the whole room? Send icy water rising up from the floorboards, to the bars of the crib, until it filled her baby’s mouth and nose –

“No!” she said aloud.

Hearing her mother’s distress – or was she somehow sensing the man’s true nature? – Bethany began to wail and squeeze her fists together.

Denise thrust the stroller forward, and started to run. But she halted as soon as she came to a far enough remove, feeling apologetic, silly. It wasn’t as if the old man could give chase.

Not yet at least.

Denise glanced behind her.

He was holding out a quarter.

XIII

Bill headed her off halfway through the brief walk home. Was it really five-thirty already? Today, the day had gone fast.

“It was a pipe,” Bill called out. “Just an old buried pipe!”

Denise came to a stop with the stroller.

“Wow, watch out,” her husband added, extending one hand, resituating their daughter on the seat. “Bethie can really wriggle around in that thing.”

***
Jenny Milchman is a New Jersey writer whose first suspense novel is currently in the nail-biting throes of submission. Her two-part suspense short story "Gone" was featured on Lunch Reads June 1 and 2. Readers are welcome to visit her website at jennymilchman.com

The Very Old Man - Part I (Genre: Suspense/Magical Realism)

2009-06-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

by Jenny Milchman

The man looked older than God or the devil. Pale hair and missing teeth, pleated skin and what were surely almost sightless eyes. He came up to Denise in the supermarket.

Denise was strolling down the florescent lit aisles with nine month old Bethany, out not so much to run an errand as to kill some portion of the two hours between naptime and the absolute earliest she could serve dinner, and it was actually the baby whom the man approached.

Bethany sat in the cart, legs splayed so as to fit through the slots in front. She’d only just mastered that solid wedge, only just gone from weeble wobble to real, sitting girl such that Denise could trust her in the wagon. Denise gave her baby a look of pride, then reached for a box of dried milk. She added it to everything these days to up her calcium intake; she was still nursing. Bethany emitted her newest sound, a kind of squawk.

“Riyaah?” Denise said, trying to echo the sound. She turned to put the carton in the cart.

“Baby,” the man said, his voice reflecting his age. It sounded punctured, as if the full dose of air had long since been expelled, leaving only the faintest wisp.

Denise manufactured a smile and began to spin her cart around, but the man reached out and latched onto Bethany’s ankle.

Denise lunged for her baby, her mind blown instantly clear and focused.

As she started to tug Bethany free, the sight of her baby’s leg sliding through its keeper’s palm turned her stomach. Denise had the idea – and it was mad, of course it was, one of those post-post-partum glitches maybe – that the man’s flesh only lightly adhered to his body and would leave a layer of itself behind on Bethany. Like snakeskin.

“Let go of my – ” Denise tried. Should she scream? Summon supermarket security? Her husband would tell her she was overreacting.

In a slow exchange of motion, the old man switched his grasp from Bethany’s foot to her chubby fist. Bethany began her birdsong again.

Denise hardly registered the happiness of the sound. Her baby was being held captive by a stranger, a stranger who was surrounded by a cold wind, whose bowed form seemed to give it off as if his body had lost the ability to heat itself.

“Babies love this,” the old man said, and Denise saw he was pressing something into her daughter’s hand.

Snakeskin be damned. Denise swiftly extricated Bethany, backed the cart some distance away, and unclenched her daughter’s fist.

In it sat a dingy quarter, the eagle rimmed with copper-colored dirt. Denise snatched up the coin. What kind of person gave something small and round to an infant?

She tripped back a few more steps. But the man’s mouth was drawn into a smile, tissue paper creasing the skin on his cheeks, and Denise faltered, feeling silly. The old guy was harmless, ignorant perhaps, but well-meaning. Who was Denise to interfere with his desire to bestow a gift on her daughter? There she went again. When life handed Denise lemonade, her husband often said, Denise tried to get the lemons back out of it.

The man was now executing a slow, careful turnabout in the aisle. “Baby,” he said as he shuffled off. “I give it to the baby.”

II

The encounter with the old man seemed to have eaten up a chunk of the waning afternoon; Denise had no idea how so much time had passed. She hurried with the rest of her unnecessary shopping: spying out-of-season peaches and selecting two of them, adding a package of tofu she already knew she’d never turn into healthy servings of soy protein for her and Bill. She could see herself cleaning out the fridge six weeks from now and upending this very box to read its expiration date before dumping it in the trash.

“Riyaah, riyaah,” Bethany peeped, before dissolving into tears.

Denise positioned her last purchase – a plastic tub of some dip that could be thinned and used as pasta sauce for a rushed meal – in the cart before darting round to Bethany.

“Ohh, Bethie, are you hungry, I bet you’re hungry.” She ran for the bins of baked goods and grabbed a bagel. Taking time to tear a few miniscule pieces off, she rolled them into safe beads for the baby. Bethany gummed her booty just long enough to coat her mouth and hands with beige paste before reigniting her wails.

“No good?” Denise cried, steering the cart between shoppers as if they were on some kind of amusement park ride, earning looks that ranged from empathic to rueful to ticked off. “Not hungry?”

In the checkout line a good-looking man in his forties – probably childless, or what were they calling themselves these days, child-free? – indicated with one jabbing thumb that Denise should go ahead.

Bethany’s cries were ratcheting themselves into all out shrieks. Denise began to stuff her items – her useless, frivolous items – into bags herself to hurry up the process. But her jerky fingers allowed one of those baseball-hard peaches to spill out and roll beneath someone else’s cart, at which point the supermarket clerk said, “Let me bag, ma’am,” and the forty-something man got down on his hands and knees and retrieved Denise’s peach.

III

That night when Denise was stripping off her clothes, something dropped out of the pocket of her sweatpants and thunked to the carpeted floor. Crouching, Denise picked up a coin she at first couldn’t place. She never kept loose change on her; rather stowing it in the zippered pouch of the leather wallet that was the last vestige of her former workaday life. Denise had been an administrative assistant in a psychological services practice until she quit to become a mother, and boxed up her pantyhose and good purse and suits that could be mixed and matched.

Then she remembered. The quarter from the old, old man.

Denise rose with the coin calipered between her thumb and index finger. Lemonade, she was thinking to herself. It was meant as a gift, it’s lemonade.

“What are you doing?” Bill asked from the edge of their bed. He kicked one shoe off with his heel.

Denise knew how Bill was going to react, but she spoke anyway. “Something strange happened today.”

“Strange?” repeated Bill.

Denise told him about the supermarket trip, careful not to sound overwrought, leaving out her sense that the brief encounter had somehow eaten up too much of the snail-slow afternoon.

Bill rose in his bare feet. He took the quarter from Denise, then strode out of the bedroom and down the hall to the nursery. Hurrying to catch up, Denise cracked her shin on the edge of Bethany’s toy chest, and stifled a singing swear. She watched Bill navigate by nightlight to the Mother Hubbard bank perched atop the radiator cover.

The coin met its companions with a dull clink and Bethany stirred in her crib and let out a sigh. Denise froze, motionless, while Bill walked heedlessly over the creaky boards to exit the room. Despite the risk of waking the baby, Denise ducked down, reaching out to rap a painted pull toy three times in quick succession. Knocking wood. There was something about that quarter, now hidden, its singular identity concealed, which caused her to do it.

Was it cool tonight in the nursery, usually the hot point of the house? Deciding it was not, Denise crept out.

Bill was balling up his clothes. Before climbing into bed, he turned and met Denise’s gaze with his own steady stare. “Okay?”

It was as if he’d just done something for her own good and was checking whether Denise would be able to accept it as such. She drew on pajamas – their room was the cold one – and joined her husband under the covers. The lilting sound the quarter had made as it dropped home continued to play in her ear.

“Don’t want to check on the baby one last time?” Bill asked.

Denise heard humor in his tone, but ignored it. She sat up in bed. “Maybe I should.”

“She’s fine,” Bill replied, letting out a heroic yawn. “You’ll make her into a momma’s girl.”

“I think that only applies to boys,” Denise said, as she started to lie back.

Bill kissed her before turning on his side. “I have a pretty big day tomorrow.”

“Tell me,” Denise said to his back. “Remind me what it’s like out there.”

But she got no reply and decided that her husband must have already fallen asleep.

IV

Whether lemons or lemonade, the encounter with the old man was just too unusual to keep to herself, or even between her and Bill. In her mind, Denise likened the incident to witnessing a grisly car wreck on the highway. You wanted to describe what you’d seen. Plus, staying home day after day, Denise’s life had become somewhat routine. She didn’t often have tidbits to share.

Maryann came over every morning around ten after Bethany had gone down for her nap. Maryann called herself mommy to two golden retrievers; she didn’t like children. After all, she’d say, kids learned to walk and talk and feed themselves. Dogs needed you forever. They never did any of that. It was kind of the woman’s tag line; she’d say it to anybody.

Well, Denise often wanted to interject. They do walk.

She served her friend the last of Bill’s morning coffee, pouring it into a mug with a decal of a dog on it, which Maryann touched appreciatively.

Then Denise launched into the story of what had happened at the grocery store.

“Ooh,” Maryann said when she’d finished. “So the quarter’s like a good luck charm? What’d you do with it?”

Denise told her.

“You put the quarter in Bethany’s room?” Maryann asked.

“Yeah,” Denise said. “Or Bill did. In her bank. Why?”

Maryann shrugged. “I’m pretty careful with what goes into Meesha and Pogey’s rooms. No toys unless I’ve bought them myself. Who knows what kind of germs they might get?”

Your dogs lick their own anuses and drink from the toilet, Denise thought. But she just smiled and put on some fresh coffee. It was hard finding friends who agreed to stay away if they had the slightest hint of a cold, or who put up with dates that meandered in time based on when the baby finally woke up.

“But hey, you know me,” Maryann went on. “I love my girls with my life. Infertility my ass. Think any of those doctors has a heart as fertile as mine?”

V

The next evening Bethany fell down the stairs.

Denise was in the kitchen, fixing Bill a drink so he could unwind after his tough day. She’d called out instructions for him to watch the baby while she poured and iced and stirred.

The thuds came fast and furious, and there were a lot of them. An ax blade instantly cleaved Denise’s stomach in two. Those sounds could mean only one thing and the fact that they weren’t followed by the expected yowls of a tumble –

She raced for the stairs, inadvertently knocking over the green jug of gin, which didn’t fall to the floor and shatter, but instead rolled to the edge of the counter where it emptied its contents in one clear gush.

Bill was standing in the living room, cell phone still pressed to his ear. Denise registered the sight with a stab of anger as she dashed past.

Bethany lay in a curl like a shrimp on the landing.

How long had she been lying there like that, so still and silent? How long since the first of those gut jarring thuds?

Denise dropped to her knees, arms extended but frozen. Suddenly the hands that patted and stroked and felt for fever were as good as weapons. Should she touch her own baby? Or not move her at all?

“Call somebody!” she screamed at Bill in an animal snarl. Time drew out as long as taffy, stilled by a terrible awareness. I don’t love this man more than anyone else anymore. She wondered, if something happened to Bethany, would she and Bill survive? And if so, would it be together, or apart?

That was when Bethany started to cry, cry and roll over, nimble as a chubby gymnast.

Denise could only watch and sob as Bethie pulled herself up and crawled toward Denise’s lap, angry tears hiccupping in her baby throat.

Bill had dropped down beside her. “She’s fine, she’s fine.”

Denise turned to him, her anger swept away by a river of relief.

Bill passed a palm across his daughter’s round form. She began to laugh and bat at her father’s big hands. “Riyaah,” she squawked.

Bill laughed. “Gets her voice from her old man.”

Denise couldn’t respond.

Bill spoke again. “Sorry. I had a work situation.”

Denise made a conscious effort to suppress the endless moment on the landing. If Bethany had continued to lie there, she would have blamed Bill, she knew she would’ve. Bitter words – you and your hands off ways, I always knew you’d let my baby get hurt – had coursed through her mind.

“She’s not a beetle anymore, Bill,” she said instead. They used to call Bethany that when she was newborn. “Pinned on her back. Now she moves. She crawls.”

“I can see that,” Bill said dryly.

Denise stared up at him with a feeling of stark helplessness. “Something bad can happen any time.”

Bill turned to head out of the room. “Not if we knock wood about it, right?” he said, sarcasm a sludge in his voice. “Why don’t you just throw a little salt or something?”

Denise had been trying to hold him back; now she let her hands fall to her sides.

Bill stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I just think you’d be happier if you could relax a little bit. Enjoy Bethany more.”

“I couldn’t enjoy her more!” Denise retorted. “I love every minute with her!”

Something was repressed in Bill’s voice when he answered. “Then stop with the superstitious mumbo jumbo.”

Bethany let out a powerful riyaah at that moment and launched herself toward her mother. Denise swooped her daughter up in her arms, receiving a face swat in return. She would have to clip the baby’s nails, a chore she hated. How hard it was to get those pincers to splice the papery nail without squeezing the thin skin beneath!

Bill went off to deal with the lake of gin in the kitchen.

VI

Bethany stirred slightly, waking up, when Denise laid her down in her crib. “Nuh uh, Bethie,” she said softly. “Sleepy time now.” She navigated round the toy chest, sense memory reminding her of that thwack on her shin, then stopped to squint at a corner flap of wallpaper high up near Bethany’s ceiling. When had that started to peel?

Knowing it was stupid, that if the baby hadn’t been edging back to consciousness a moment ago, now she surely would be, Denise edged back toward the Mother Hubbard bank. She picked up the piece of pottery, trying to muffle its clang. Bethany rolled over and let out her own jingling cry.

Denise began to croon an automatic lullaby while she stood there.

The bank had gotten awfully heavy in nine months. How many coins were in it? And how many of them were quarters? She’d probably be doing away with a good fifteen or twenty dollars worth. And for what reason? Because Maryann had shamed her into it? Or had the accusation Bill hurled been true – was she just beseeching false gods?

Denise set the bank on the nearest surface at hand, and went over to rub Bethany’s back. But the baby had quieted down all on her own, although she wasn’t asleep. Her eyes didn’t react to her mother’s appearance, either. A shiver rippled through Denise, and she told herself that she must be as crazy as Bill said. Because the baby’s gaze looked for all the world as if it rested far across the room, by the top of the dresser, on her Mother Hubbard bank.

To be continued....stop back tomorrow for Part II

***

Jenny Milchman is a New Jersey writer whose first suspense novel is currently in the nail-biting throes of submission. Her two-part suspense short story "Gone" was featured on Lunch Reads June 1 and 2. Readers are welcome to visit her website at jennymilchman.com

Wrong Place, Right Time (Genre: Romantic Comedy)

2009-06-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

By Libby Malin

Sunshine screamed in Thomas Charlemagne’s face, triggering a headache. The warmth closed in on his nose and eyes so fast he had to blink fast and wave the light away or risk being blinded.

He stumbled over the threshold of the Eastern Winds Motel and Car Wash onto the main street of his home town, Oyster Point, Maryland, a sleepy village on the “Eastern Shore” of the Chesapeake Bay, as southern and slow as Baltimore tried to be northern and hip.

“Get me to the church on time,” he sang to himself, looking at his watch. A blur. He felt his face. Where were his glasses?

Memories cascaded over him as he licked his lips, trying to rid himself of the sour taste of too much bad beer and whiskey.

Glasses, glasses. Oh yes, Corey Bainbridge had taken them at some point during the bachelor’s party he hadn’t wanted to attend.

Wasn’t that when they were all shouting “Timid Tommy, Timid Tommy, Timid Tommy” just like they had when he’d been in high school?

God almighty, why’d he come back? Thank you, sis, he thought.

His sister Megan had nagged him not to miss their cousin Wendy’s wedding to old classmate Corey. “And you can stop in and see Dad, too,” Megan had nudged, knowing that suggestion would be sure to light the embers of filial guilt.

So he’d packed a bag after spending all day in the Hopkins library with the Aefle collection they’d recently acquired under his direction and driven the three hours over the Bay Bridge from Charm City and checked into the town’s main fleabag hotel before going off to visit Dad in the Assisted Living facility.

Not exactly a fun-filled evening. So when Corey and crew had seen him on Main Street and shanghaied him into the party, he hadn’t put up much resistance. He’d needed a drink by then. Maybe a couple. And he was an almost-tenured university professor now, with an important ongoing research project, and colleagues who admired and respected him. He was no longer the geeky nerd all the high school jocks had made fun of nearly twenty years ago. No longer….Timid Tommy.

He squared his shoulders and squinted up the street. Well, he’d show them.

He burped. “Sorry,” he said to the air.

He stepped off the curb, just as a big Chevy Four Wheel came around the corner, letting out a blast on the horn that would have awakened the dead.

“Timid Tommy no longer!” he shouted, holding up his hand as the driver screeched on the brakes. “Timid Tommy my ass!”

He strode across the street with purpose, wishing he could clear his mind. Muss be the shunsine. Forgot how shunny it is here in April. Knocks thoughts right out of the ole head.

He tried to reconstruct the night but it was as blurry as his vision. There was drinking, yes, in vast quantities. And a hail-fellow-well-met camaraderie he’d wished he’d enjoyed as a youngster, and some dancing by scantily clad girls around a pole, and some more drinking, much more drinking, more drinking still…and then….

He stopped, a smile pulling up his face to greet the sun.

And then, as always, a dare. Just as in high school. Dare ya, dare ya, dare ya. And he’d always said he would take the dare and then…he didn’t. And then….Timid Tommy.

“Timid Tommy my ass,” he said, chuckling to himself. “You dared me, Corey Brainbradge. Bainbadge. Brainbridge.” He waved the air again as he peered up at a large stone building he was sure was the church. “And I shall, at long last, show you.”

***

DeeDee McGowan sat in the bride’s room off the vestibule patting the sweat from her nose with a soft powder puff, her porcelain face and blue eyes a mask of serenity. But inside—a battlefield, rage outpacing anger, vengeance galloping ahead of wrath.

“Church looks real pretty,” said her only attendant and best friend Kelly Danforth. “And everybody’s here. We can start any time now.”

Without giving a shred of anxiety away, DeeDee looked in the mirror and fixed a tendril of her white blonde hair under the frothy veil. “Is Buck here?” she asked, her voice a low murmur, giving nothing away.

“Sure thing. I saw him and the fellows pull up a few minutes ago.” Kelly smiled and stepped to the door, a bouquet of pink roses quivering in her nervous hands. She was the anxious one. “I can check, though.”

She didn’t need to. A soft knock at the door, followed by a man’s voice—Kelly’s husband—saying “we’re ready when you are,” gave them their answer.

Kelly grinned, came over to her friend and, after placing her own bouquet on the vanity, helped DeeDee pull the sheer veil over her face. She then handed DeeDee a bouquet of white lilies and asked her friend to stand.

“Oh my, Dee,” Kelly said, tears welling in her eyes. “If your Dad could see you…”

Dee looked down, not liking to think of her late father. She wasn’t sure at all he’d like what he saw, his only child about to wed Buck Bewley. He’d not been that fond of Buck.

“Could I have a moment?” Dee asked, swallowing.

“Sure, honey. I’ll be right outside, ready to go whenever you are. You just say when.” Kelly sounded unsure, as if she knew now that something wasn’t quite right in DeeDee’s heart.

***

Thomas really didn’t know why the couple in front of him insisted on glaring at him when he burped a third time. He’d excused himself each time. Quite profusely, in fact.

“I’m truly, truly sorry,” he said this time with a slight British accent. There, that should add an extra level of sincerity to my apology.

When was this show going to get on the road? And where was his sister Megan? She’d told him she’d meet him here. Of course, he had trouble making out anybody without his glasses. The whole church was awash in colorful blobs, like something from an Impressionist’s painting. He squinted, trying to locate her golden brown hair amongst all the brown blobs. No luck.

Someone was playing wretched music, and a woman was singing something about love. God almighty, it made his head pound. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.

No, no, no. He was here. And he would slay Timid Tommy forever, if it was the last thing he did.

***

“What should I do, Dad?” DeeDee whispered into the blue shadows of the room, her hands bunched into fists. Anger coursed through her veins as she thought of what she’d learned the night before.

Her girlfriends—what few she had since most of her work at the car dealership involved men—had treated her to a night at the Fancy Fiesta restaurant, a Mexican joint on the highway east of town. She’d had her fill of Margueritas and fajitas and sexy lingerie gifts and was about to pack it in to get her beauty sleep before the big day when she’d headed to the bathroom.

There, she’d overheard two women in the stalls, not from her party.

“Isn’t that DeeDee McGowan marrying Buck Bewley in the morning?”

“Yeah, I hear he’s real keen on getting his hands on that car dealership of hers.”

“Never would have happened if her Dad was alive.”

“Poor DeeDee—Buck’s a wanderer.”

“He’ll have to settle down now.”

“Saw him over at Gretchen Waters house this week.”

She’d left the ladies room in a rush, her face enflamed. Yes, she’d heard the rumors about Buck. She herself had been particularly suspicious of Gretchen and him. Gretchen was an old, old flame of his, dating back to when they were all in high school together and DeeDee had first lost her heart to big strong Buck.

But it was the car dealership remarks that cut deepest. The dealership was her Daddy’s gift to her—a thriving franchise in a time when the economy sucked and car dealerships everywhere were struggling. She’d worked in it since she was thirteen and knew more about cars than most men. Buck, who owned only a used car lot, had coveted that business for years.

“Is he just marrying me for my Malibus?” she wondered, looking out into the sun-drenched street. “Oh God, give me a sign. Tell me what to do. Tell me what to do.”

***

“Aefle the Minuscule,” Thomas was explaining to the couple in front of him, “wrote sacred and secular poetry in a time—the eighth century, to be exact—when poetry was hardly a concept. Now, it’s not particularly good poetry, mind you. But it tells us a great deal about life during that period—what people ate, how they dressed, and how annoying it was to be constantly in the shadow of Aefle the Greater.” He burped and smiled. No need for apologies now. He was giving them far greater pearls than simple “sorry’s.”

The couple got up and moved to another pew.

“Really,” Thomas muttered. “Oyster Point never was much for culture.”

He rubbed his head, which was beginning to feel like someone was slowly tightening a vise around it. He imagined a medieval torture device and shivered.

Another couple on the other side of him moved away, too.

He shrugged and sat up straighter as the vocalist started in on something about love being….there.

He didn’t need to justify himself to these people, he thought. He was respected by colleagues not just at the university but around the world. He’d done groundbreaking research, finding this Aefle the Miniscule’s personal journals hidden in the flypaper…no, the flyleafs….of old manuscripts. He’d rocketed to academic fame right after his dissertation as the result and landed the job at Hopkins as a mere pup in his field.

He’d authored a paper “(Two Aefles: Identity and Contextualitly in 706 AD”) that had earned him worldwide acclaim. He’d written a monograph (“My Heart Is a Turnip in God’s Cellar: Platonic Romance in Aefle’s Monastery”) that experts had praised, and was now hard at work on a presentation for the next International Medieval Manuscript Scholars’ Conference (“Reading Between the Pages: Space, Place and Boundaries in Eighth-Century Bookbinding; A Study of Textual Violation.”) He was on his way, godammit, even if these peasants couldn’t see it. He was but a hair’s breadth and committee meeting’s report away from full-blown tenure.

God his head ached to think of all this stuff!

What was that? The music had stopped. The multi-colored blobs had hushed. The blobs were turning.

The organ was starting Wagner’s Bridal Chorus. Here Comes the Bride, Thomas thought to himself, squinting at the center aisle where some pink blob had sailed past and now a very curvy white blob was gliding into view. Why, that must be Wendy.

Hmm….he’d remembered her as a bit…plumper.

Well, good for you, Wendy, for trimming down.

He turned with the crowd of blobs to the front. That must be Corey up there. Ah yes, linebacker Corey. Big shoulders on that black and white blob. Of course, that blob looked bald and Corey had quite a bushy head of hair….

Thomas couldn’t help himself. He snickered at the thought of what he was about to do.

Someone shushed him.

“Sorry, sorry,” he muttered, unable to suppress the chuckle in his voice.

It gurgled up inside of him like a geyser about to blow. All through the opening prayers and the thises and thatses and the imploring the Almighty for peace in our time or whatever the ritual was, Thomas kept thinking of Corey Bainbridge pointing his finger at him over a keg of beer and daring him, taunting him.

“You do it, Tommy, and I’ll give you a hunert bucks. A hunert!” And he’d pulled out a five dollar bill to make his point.

Thomas giggled.

“If there is anyone here…” the minister intoned.

Thomas chuckled.

“Shh!”

“…who objects to this union…”

Thomas laughed.

“Cut it out, buster!”

“….speak now, or forever…”

Thomas guffawed.

“…hold your peace…”

Thomas shot up like a missile launched from the shores of North Korea into the Sea of Japan.

“I object!” He waited, expecting to hear the black and white blob Corey give him a big congratulatory acknowledgement. “I most strenuously object!”

Still nothing.

Thomas cleared his throat. “Ha, ha….no more Timid Tommy, eh, Corey?”

Sound was sucked out of that church so fast it was as if God had just used a vacuum sealer on the building. No pins dropped. No blobs moved. No organs wheezed.

Thomas knew in that instant that something was wrong.

He ran his fingers through his wavy brown hair to neaten it, disappointed to find what felt like hardened cake icing there. He swallowed. He decided this might be a good time to leave.

“Uh…catch you at the reception….” He mumbled, stumbling toward the side of the church

But just as he made the aisle, he heard a woman speak behind him, cutting through the icy silence of the church like an angel’s voice from on high.

“Wait! I’m glad you objected, darling! I’m coming with you!”

And the next thing he knew, Thomas had a phenomenally beautiful bride clinging to his arm—a bride, he now realized, who was not his cousin Wendy—rushing him out of the church so fast his feet hardly seemed to touch the ground.

This was either the luckiest day of his life—or a terrible mistake he’d regret for the rest of his days.

“C’mon,” the bride hissed into his ear in the foyer, glancing over her shoulder to make sure no one was following. “Are you with me or not?”

Staring into a porcelain face of exquisite beauty, his mouth gaped. The words “I’m sorry, Madame, but I have no idea who you are and I really must apologize for this inconsiderate interruption of your nuptials and be on my way” formed in his brain, but not before his lips blurted this other message:

“Damn straight—where to?”

*****

Libby Malin, the moderator of this blog, is the author of six novels, the latest of which, Fire Me, was released in May and has been praised as “hilarious,” “inspired” and the “perfect beach bag” book. She writes young adult mysteries under the name Libby Sternberg --her first YA was an Edgar nominee. Her website can be found at www.LibbysBooks.com.

sonnets for spiderman (Genre: Literary Fiction)

2009-06-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

By Tom Murphy

“Arachne’s sigil, blazed on azure fields, with Crimson sinews bulging in such might—“ Gwen looked up from the sheet of paper, unable to stop laughing but almost feeling embarrassed. “Ben, are you kidding me?”

She had been assisting Ben as he sorted through the boxes in the hall closet, pulling out things like plastic light-up martini glasses and cotton Halloween cobweb packets. Since the closet had been, until this point, the place where the now ex-couple’s crap went to die, it had seemed like a good hiding place. However, the shoebox and its incriminating contents were now in Gwen’s possession. Things did not bode well for him.

“Give me that!” he said, snatching the paper from her. As soon as it was in his hands his grip relaxed, in an effort to minimize the creases on the paper. Number 133 had been a particular favorite of his. He grasped for the box, but Gwen pulled it out of reach and raced into the other room. He chased her. His athletic endurance being somewhat weak compared to the average male, Ben stopped so he could catch his breath. “As I recall, you were just about to move out!” he panted.

“With parabolic flights you cut through skies, with insectile grip you climb to clouds—“

“Stop it!” Ben roared. Rolling his eyes, he staggered into the room.

He found Gwen seated on the couch, her face contorted with a gleeful but disgusted smile. The shoebox’s contents were laid bare beneath her hands. She looked up at him as he entered the room. “How long has this been going on?”

Ben thought it best to play things cool. “Gwen, can we keep being adults about this?”

“Somehow, Ben, having a secret box of… what are these, sonnets? Well, it doesn’t strike me as very adult.” She began rifling through the pieces of paper until she found the bottommost. Ben grimaced—number one, though by its nature groundbreaking, was clumsily written, and far from anything he would show anyone. “This one is from 2005? Ben, you’ve been doing this two years—“

“Three,” he quipped. He regretted the word the instant his mouth formed it.

“Three years,” Gwen repeated. She did not read this one out loud, not like the other, but she held it in front of her face and murmured to herself. She released the paper from her hands and it drifted to the floor, like, an oversized piece of confetti a descending pendulum. Ben dropped on his haunches to retrieve it.

“But we’ve only been going out two years,” Gwen said, turning her face to avoid his gaze.

Ben reached out his hand for the box, but Gwen ignored it. She opened her mouth to say something, she made a sound, but snuffed it out before it could develop into anything coherent. Finally, she turned back towards him. “Ben, are you gay?”

Ben was taken aback. “Gay for whom?”

Gwen gave an indignant laugh. “I’m not sitting with a box of sonnets written to me. You’re gay for… who are these for, Superman?”

“Spiderman!” Ben yelled reflexively. Then, recalling the actual question at hand, he said, “No. Yes—no. I mean, maybe—no.” For a moment, the question saturated his thoughts. “Can I be gay for Spiderman?” he wondered aloud.

“If the boot fits—“ Gwen began to say, but Ben, seeing her guard was down, snatched the box from her lap and made off with it.

***

“Ben!” she said, taking after him. To Gwen’s annoyance, he had locked himself in the bathroom. She pressed her back to the door and, sliding to the floor, let out a groan. “At least I got out before things got weird,” she said, feeling exasperated. There was some truth to that, but she did not look at the past two years as something entirely normal—just as the immediate future, while somewhat disappointing, was also a long-due relief.

“Well,” Ben countered, his voice exuding sarcasm, “one can clearly see you’re rushing to begin your new life in Houston.”

“You still have the keys to the U-Haul, Ben.” If this kept up much longer she may as well pay Ben to drive her belongings down. It was not as if he would refuse.

Her remark was met with silence. After a moment, she could hear Ben rifling through his pockets and the jangle of the keys in his hand. “Damn it,” he muttered.

“Are you going to come out and give them to me?” Gwen asked.

“Hold on.”

She felt a pressure against her lower back and jumped away reflexively. The bottom of the bathroom door was being forced outward, and she could hear the scraping of metal on the linoleum floor. The action abated, and a disappointed-sounding Ben muttered, “The keychain won’t fit under the door.”

“Why don’t you throw them out the window?” she murmured to herself.

“Isn’t that, like, sixteen stories?”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” she said. “Besides, I was joking.”

She didn’t make an effort to interrupt the silence that followed, but returned to her seated position against the door. Barricades—physical ones—had not been a usual element in their relationship. Fights had popped up, from time to time, snappish and occasionally brutal, and towards the couple’s dwindling days it became apparent that they were both unhappy but neither was willing to walk away. Gwen’s fellowship was something of a godsend, and, with striking amiability, they recognized the impossibility of their situation—long distance relationships never worked out, as they frequently assured each other—and they let theirs die gracefully.

Ben made no response. After waiting for what seemed to her like an appropriate amount of time, she asked, “So, why Spiderman?”

She heard a flush of the toilet. Over the dull roar of the running water, she heard Ben ask, “Did you say something?”

A sense of revulsion flittered in her head. “Did you go to the bathroom when I was talking to you?”

“I am in a bathroom.”

“But… I’m talking to you.”

“Yeah, while I’m in a bathroom.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure we were doomed from the start, if I’m finding reasons to break up with you after I’ve already broken up with you.” Gwen was insulted enough to consider backing off the topic: she had been raised a ‘pretty girl’ by her family, had socialized and fraternized with the proud and the elite in high school and college. Ben had been both a joke and a dare placed on her—though handsome enough, his somewhat eclectic style, less-than-handsome friends and bizarre, pun-filled bar-talk was a far cry from the men her friends normally set her up with. However, his need to prove himself worth her attention had, at first, been flattering. He was intelligent and charming, at points: they connected well at some levels. But Ben had remained at heart the eclectic and silly person she met in that crowded bar two years ago. She would not have put it past him to maintain a box of sonnets for a superhero —but that he had actually done so, especially while dating her, was a blow to her pride as well as her understanding of his feelings. “Besides, it’s not as though you wrote any sonnets for me.”

“That you know of.”

Gwen paused for a moment, and wished for once that Ben had a less-than-perfect pokerface. “What, really?”

“No.” He laughed a little at that.

“You can be a real jerk sometimes, you know that?”

“What does it matter? You’re moving out.”

“Which would be easier to do if you gave me the keys, already.” The world spun around her as she said this— Ben opened the door while she was still leaning on it. He did not look alarmed to see her lying on the ground like a turtle on its shell, but if he found it amusing, he didn’t let on.

Gwen tried to regain some gracefulness as she stood. “So, something I say get through to you?”

“None of it,” Ben said, grinning sheepishly. “It’s just kind of, um, smelly. In there.” He hustled her into the hallway and closed the door behind him. He dangled the keys in front of her. Gwen sneered at him, and snatched the keys from his hand. She went back to the hall closet to parcel out the stuff that neither of them wanted to keep.

***

Ben walked back to the living room and sat on the couch, being careful not to sit where Gwen had been sitting some minutes earlier. He placed the box of sonnets in front of him and looked out the window. Second Ave was bustling at this point, and though the sun had come out for the afternoon, everything still glistened with a wet finish from the morning’s rain. Everything he saw had flaws —it was less than brilliant, or wondrous. The city outside and all its people struck him as mindless servitors of monotony. And still it was the closest he could come to the ideal, to the dream-like New York where robbers had metal octopus arms, where the women were all beautiful, red-headed and understanding, and where a weedy, wisecracking young man could swing on webs, free from gravity and the painful gravitas of the real world’s problems. Though he assumed that he had actually known all along, he realized around six weeks ago that Gwen was included in those outside problems.

“Do you want the pepper grinder?” Gwen asked as she walked into the room. It was shaped like a penis.

“I think you’d have more use for it than I would,” Ben answered.

“Well, after today, I wouldn’t be so sure.”

Ben rubbed his temples. “Move out already!”

“Fine!” Gwen said. “But will you tell me one thing? What’s so special about Spiderman?”

“Well, he doesn’t insinuate that I’m gay once we’ve broken up, for one—“

“I was being serious.”

Ben knew that she was. He had known Gwen long enough to realize that the box of sonnets was not only incriminating for him, but insulting to her as well. For two years he tried to dote on her and be someone deserving of her affection—there had not been a point in the relationship where he truly felt that his status as boyfriend was secure. But there was no real way for him to say anything to Gwen and have it sound genuine. His relationship with Gwen was like his Spiderman thing—even he was unsure what to call it— in that respect: but the devotion was different. With Gwen, he tried to be immediate and obvious in his adoration, even if it was false. With Spiderman, it was so personal, so private that he could squirrel away scraps of paper for years at his leisure. It wasn’t romantic—though maybe somewhat Romantic, as Ben liked to think—but what was it? Ben might have cried a Pygmalion influence, how the imitative world of Spiderman only accentuated the flaws in this one, the original. But he refused, mostly on the grounds of seeing My Fair Lady with Gwen not three weeks ago. He did not want to confuse his intentions.

“Got an answer for me?” she asked.

“He’s perfect.”

“Oh. Well, in that case…” she left the novelty pepper grinder on the table. “I don’t know if it’s my third dimension, or my lack of super-powers, but I’m pretty sure I’m as good as you’re going to get in the real world.”

Ben soured at this. “Why are you so upset?”

“Well, it really isn’t that awesome finding out I’ve been competing with Spiderman for your affection for the last two years. And apparently I’ve been losing pretty badly.”

“Look, we managed to stay civil with each other so far.”

“Obsessing over a costumed man behind my back seems pretty uncivil to me! For two years the Other Woman was a fictional man bitten by a radioactive spider!”

Ben had had just about enough of the argument. “Oh, how bitter and melodramatic fate is!” he cried, craning his neck backwards and placing the back of his palm on his forehead. “Well, now’s your chance to find a new beau, far superior to stupid old me.”

Of all the things Ben had considered saying to her, this had seemed to him to be the most innocuous, the least likely to be anything more than a re-statement of fact. They had reached the decision to break up together, but he had always secretly assumed that his own inadequacies were the underlying, unsolvable problem that had forced them to the point. However, he saw that his words did not just wash over her; Gwen’s face looked heavier with frustration than it had a moment before, and the prettiness that both lured and repelled him initially was replaced with a scowl; the vibrant blue eyes seemed darker and almost hidden under a furrowed brow.

Ben instinctively leaned backwards into the couch. “You’re not going to slap me, are you? I detest getting slapped.”

Gwen stood where she was. “I loved you,” she said. Seeing his face, she said “I did, Ben, for a while, I did. I maybe—maybe you loved me too, I don’t know. ” She paused, trying to find the right words to say. But her mind was robbed of them, or they didn’t exist—either way, she found herself unable to communicate to Ben about the guilt she was feeling, whether she was a bad person, or he was, or they both were. “Sometimes I get the feeling, that in a perfect world, we would have worked out great together.”

“In a perfect world,” Ben echoed. The thought of it drove him crazy, that he might live another sixty years in this world of flaws instead, chasing windmills just to feel like he was slaying giants. “There are so many things in a perfect world…”

Gwen took her seat next to Ben on the couch, smiling but sounding glum when she said. “I might have been Spiderman.”

Ben looked at her, trying to gauge which emotions were worth reading and which were fakes. “Spiderwoman might have worked out better. Or at least would have helped counter the image of, you know, homosexuality.”

“Is she just like a female version of Spiderman?”

“Kind of. Not really. She has weirder powers.”

Her face did not change. “Oh.”

They were silent—neither was quite sure what to say, and both were very willing to let the other begin talking. After a moment, Ben said, “Well, there’s one less thing I have to worry about now.”

“What’s that?”

“Holiday cards. Do you know how much shit my brothers gave me for ‘Ben and Gwen’?”

Gwen laughed. “I know! What were we thinking?”

“Benjamin and Gwen?”

“Gwendolyn and Ben?”

When she stopped laughing, Ben asked, “So, I may be wrong, but maybe we want to take a step back? Reconsider?”

Gwen smiled flatly at him. “No, Ben. Even if you come to Houston.”

Slightly embarrassed, but relieved, Ben said, “Yeah, I figured as much.”

She stood up and walked to the hall. Leaving the sonnets on the table, Ben followed her. Gwen surveyed the pile of boxes and bags flowing out of the closet. “Well, I guess I know why we had so many cotton spider-webs now,” Gwen said.

“So clever this one is,” Ben murmured.

She looked at her watch, and realized how late she was running. “Look, I really should have been on the road an hour ago.” She glanced at the contents of the closet strewn along the floor. “If I end up actually needing something from here, just ship it to me, ok?”

Ben wasn’t in the mood to debate the issue, so he let it slide. “Ok.”

Gwen walked to the door, and, half grinning, said, “Maybe I’ll see you around?”

“I guess. There’s only, what, three hundred million people in this country?”

“I figured I’d just look for the guy swinging from the rooftops.”

“Maybe not quite yet. I’m probably going to do some experimenting into the weird and exciting world of celibacy.”

Gwen laughed politely and closed the door behind her. Ben locked it and, walking to the living room, grabbed the shoebox of brightly colored paper. He carried it back to the hall closet, stepping over Christmas lights and old bags of clothing, and placed it on the top shelf, where it belonged.

***

Tom Murphy is a video game writer based in Baltimore, MD. He strives to remain unprofessional.

High Heels and Sequins (Genre: Young Adult)

2009-06-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

By Cindy Betsinger

It’s finally over. Tonight marked the final rounds to select Miss Campbell County, Alabama, and I didn’t win. “Thank the good Lord for small favors,” my daddy always said.

I’ve been in beauty pageants ever since I was eight years old and this was the absolute queen of the Who-Really-Gives-A-Rats-Ass-Anyway competitions. Still, I out-performed seventeen others and finished as the runner up. Not a small task.

Oh, you should have seen the preliminaries. The talent was so-so, at best. Five of the contestants tap danced, seven tried their best at singing Faith Hill songs, three attempted to sound like Reba, two twirled batons (one lit hers on fire), and one was a ballet dancer. Oh, and Jenna Lee, Miss Let-Me-Try-Once-More Tremplo, tried her hand at Shakespeare. Have you ever heard Juliet cry over Romeo with an Alabama accent? She didn’t make it very far. She never does.

Me? Oh, I did my usual. Momma put me in gymnastics when I was five and since then I’ve been able to bend this perfect body into nothing less than a State Fair pretzel ever since. My routine always wows the audience. Once I even got a standing ovation. Momma actually hurt her hands she clapped so hard. And daddy cried. I don’t think I’ve ever seen daddy cry before. Never saw him cry since.

I don’t remember who it was that taught me the appropriate parade wave. Momma was always hiring someone to teach me the basics. Anyway, to this day I find myself doing the “elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist, wrist” to even my closest friends just walking across the street. Can you believe it? I’m only seventeen and it’s embedded in my brain, just like the walk, and the smile, and wanting world peace.

Momma decided a long time ago that if I was to make anything of myself, I needed to find a good husband – someone to take care of me and her grandchildren. And, if she was to get the best, I needed the proper education and be groomed to perfection. Daddy thought I was perfect since the day I was born. But he also loves momma with all his heart and goes along with pretty much whatever she asks to make her happy. Me winning pageants sure makes momma happy.

Anyway, like I was saying, there we were; me and Cora Beth up on stage looking pretty and trying to keep from sweatin’ all over our sequin gowns. Cora Beth was first to answer the all important question of the night to see if we had any brains.

“So, Ms. Huntsport, if you become our new Miss Campbell County, which one of your responsibilities in representing this community will be the most important to you?”

Of course, she had the winning response. She always does.

“Well … I think the education of our youth is the most important thing we can focus on and I will try, with all my strength and with the good Lord's help, to be a positive role model for the children of Campbell County.”

You should have heard everyone. It’s like they’ve never heard it before. Chrissakes, she’s had the same answer for the past four pageants. It doesn’t even make any sense if you think about it. Still, it’s the one that clinches it for her. Not that I care.

When they began the drum roll and announced her as the new Miss Campbell County, Cora Beth put her hands to her face and the tears began to flow. Oh brother, I thought. Here we go again. I hugged her and held one of her shaking hands as she knelt down so the rhinestone tiara could be placed on her head; the tiara she would cherish and place with the collection of others she keeps displayed for all to see.

While Cora Beth was basking in the limelight once again, I snuck out the back entrance of the auditorium where Billy was waiting in the alley for me. He hates these competitions my Billy. He swore to me the first week we were together that he’d never watch me up on that there stage making a spectacle of myself. He says when we’re finally married he’s never going to let me enter one again. Well, if I don’t want to, anyway. He said I could go on to be Miss Fucking Universe - that’s what he said, Miss Fucking Universe - if I wanted to. He just wasn’t going to be there.

He snuffed out his cigarette on the sole of his boot and kissed me on the cheek as he opened the passenger door. He’s so sweet. When he got in the driver’s side, I put my head on his lap and my feet out the window, showing off my brand new red patent leather high heels. I did like my new high heels.

I don’t think momma or daddy even noticed I was gone. No, I’m sure they didn’t. When I don’t win, momma always tells daddy she needs a drink and they go over to Slim's Shady Saloon without even coming back stage. Oh, she always says she’s sorry the next morning and that she’s proud of me anyway, but I can tell she doesn’t really mean it.

After Billy and I drove up the bluff and made out for a while, he took me home like he always does. I went to my room and hung my dress on a hanger, hooking it on the top of the door. I laid in bed and stared at the red sequins of the gown, the moonlight hitting it just so and shining in my eyes.

I heard daddy’s car pull into the drive and the front door open and close. The two of them stumbled up the stairs. Momma was being dramatic again and daddy shushed her, telling her not to wake me up. He had his arm around her as they walked by my doorway. I could see momma’s makeup was smudged and she was wiping her nose with her handkerchief. Daddy closed the bedroom door and I could just imagine him stroking her hair and telling her there’s always next time, . . . always next time.

I pulled my suitcase from under the bed and opened it one last time to see if I forgot anything. I threw on my pink sweat suit and climbed through the window, onto the front porch roof, and crouched down on my butt to wait. Billy’s car turned the corner just as I lit up a cigarette. Momma would have my hide if she knew I smoked. But, I guess I don’t really care anymore.

Billy parked in the street by the neighbors and ran across the lawn to the house. He grabbed hold of my suitcase as I lowered it down and he put it in the car, then ran back to catch me as I jumped to the ground. I squeezed him around the neck so hard he could hardly breathe. “Not now, not now,” he whispered. My God, I love that boy.

We must have driven a hundred miles before we decided to find a motel. Billy pulled into this old roadside inn just outside the Alabama state line. The Cozy Corner. It was straight out of the 50’s — wood siding painted pink, those old metal lawn chairs in front of each unit, the office next door with a big VACANCY sign flashing in the window.

Billy went in and I stayed in the car. He said it was best that way, me being a minor and all. I just sat there with my hands between my legs and my head down, trying to be inconspicuous. I think that’s the right word. The owner kept peeking out over the counter to see if he could get a better look at me, but it was still dark and I don’t think he could really see anything. He looked like a perv. I lit a cigarette and opened the window after deciding I didn’t really care.

Billy came out all nonchalant-like, looking over his shoulder one more time and waving to the innkeeper like we were just regular folk, just passing through. We drove over to unit number five and began to settle in for what was left of the night.

I started to unpack some things and told Billy that I was getting kindof hungry. I hadn’t really eaten much all day. Oh, I downed a couple of Diet somethin’ or others and choked down some lettuce leaves and carrots, but that was about it. “Gotta keep that girlish figure!” momma would always say. Five pounds can mean the difference between a crown and Miss Congeniality. Man, would I like a cheeseburger right now – with curly fries – and a shake.

Billy said he’d see if there were any vending machines with sandwiches or something and he’d be right back.

He just left.

So here I am. I just took out my red patent leather high heels from the suitcase and placed them on the floor of the closet. They sure are pretty.

Daddy’s gonna miss me. I’m gonna miss him, too. And I’ll miss . . . Miss. …Tennessee.

Has a nice ring to it.

***

Cindy Betsinger has had several short stories and poems published on the internet and some poetry selections included in a nature preserve literary publication in 2008. She is polishing her first novel, a women’s fiction manuscript.

There's No Place Like Home (Genre: Women's Fiction)

2009-06-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

by Jenny Gardiner

Crème brulée. That’s what her legs remind me of. Smooth, firm, lightly browned crème-fucking-brulée. An indulgent treat you’d kill to sink your teeth into. At least a food lover like me would. Her legs strike a cruel contrast to my own, which are more like a sickly pale curdled yogurt, with some lumps of smashed varicose blueberries thrown in for good measure.

She sits across from me on my mother’s sofa, cracking her gum and kicking an ankle in an impatient staccato. She’s got on a chase-me-beat-me red leather skirt, so short it could be mistaken for a belt, and thighs so tight she could—hell, probably has—cracked a nut between them. I can’t help but think Uncle Marvin, whose eyeballs have been riveted to her assets since this gruesome family gathering commenced twenty-two insufferable minutes ago, would like a demonstration. Someone should crack that guy’s nuts.

But enough about tight thighs. And cracked nuts. Because despite my sister-in-law Amanda’s lower extremities being a thing of envy-inducing beauty with which I’ve partially reconciled myself, the truth is, it’s not her thighs that have me mesmerized this time.

“So, Julia,” my mother shouts from the kitchen pass-through window. Her shrill, judgmental Jersey accent causes a twinge of annoyance in me even before she gets out the first jab. I feel like an ornery hound locked in a closet with a dog whistle. “It certainly looks like you’ve been working overtime.”

I stare at her, wondering if she plans to draw back the veil to expose the true message she wants to convey, or if she’s going to play coy with me. It’s half the game, really, trying to get to the meat of the matter with her. I’m the butcher, carving through the fat of my mother’s verbal bloat.

“The restaurant’s been busy lately,” I say, choosing to take her remark at face value. “I lost a prep chef and a line chef and haven’t been able to replace them yet, so I’m doubling up.”

“Doubling up?”

Amanda deigns to lift one eyebrow, which is, of course, groomed to the perfection of a bonsai tree. “I’ll say you’ve doubled.”

Now, I have been trained to use a chef’s knife with the finesse of a surgeon. I could easily eviscerate a human being with as little waste as possible. And I’d dearly love to do so with Amanda (and suspect I’d not find a beating heart). Yet her verbal carving skills are damn near as professional as my actual ones.

Amanda’s collagen-enhanced lips spread into a self-satisfied grin. Until I deliberately avert my wounded gaze from her unnaturally azure eyes (courtesy of blatantly colored contacts) to her latest center of attraction.

“Interested in picking up some work on the side at the restaurant?” I ask, nodding toward her chest.

“Yeah, right,” she says. “Why would I do that?”

I raise my verbal cleaver and take a gratifying whack at her. “I was thinking you could do double-time yourself, serving cocktails on those things.” She knows exactly what I’m referring to, and casts the shadow of her ire over me with a piercing glare.

The doorbell rings, and Amanda springs to answer it. Fine by me, as I’m happy to be off my feet for a few minutes. I mentally roll my eyes as she mermaid-wiggles her way to the foyer. Naturally, this does not escape creepy Uncle Marvin’s leer. I can hear him mumbling, “Hrrr, hrrr, hrrr.” I’m almost surprised the man isn’t wearing a trench coat and sunglasses. The lech.

“Why Walker Lee, if you aren’t a sight for sore eyes. Toby has been dying to see you!” Amanda gushes so much she’s like a fire hydrant that won’t shut off.

Walker Lee. My brother’s best friend since forever. And the object of my unrequited affection for longer than I care to admit. How’d I get so lucky as to have him light up the doorway on this gloomy holiday afternoon?

Amanda thrusts her new tits in front of Walker with the force of a Ford Mustang in overdrive. As Walker politely avoids gaping at Amanda’s hooters, he glances my way and looks surprised, just as she reaches in for a hard squeeze. He places his arms around her like you would someone drenched in sweat that you don’t want to touch, while his mesmerizing sage-green eyes gape in mock distress.

“Help me!” He mouths in my direction, and I can’t help but laugh. I haven’t seen Walker in ages, and the sight of him gives me great relief, as I know now that this meal can’t end up being nearly as bad as I’d anticipated. After all, in front of me stands a tall, gorgeous, single (I hear his wife left him for the tennis pro) man. If nothing else, he’ll make for far better scenery than my plasticized sister-in-law.

My once kind and mousy sister-in-law. Sheesh. When I first met Amanda, she sported a meager set of tentative little bunion-like breasts. If a blind man were fumbling along the minimal contours of her chest, he’d have mistaken each one for the Braille letter A. Back then Amanda had a bulbous beak that looked as if it had been spliced awkwardly onto her face, like a child had placed the wrong nose on Mrs. Potato Head.

And then there were the saddlebags. I’m talking cowboy-on-a-walkabout-in-the-Australian-outback saddlebags. No matter how much her weight fluctuated, and boy, did it ever, those thighs remained as bulgy and immutable as a mountain range. Don’t even get me started on her hair. Those now-flaxen, Pat Boone-straight locks used to be the bland shade of dirt you find beneath your fingernails, with the texture of a shag rug badly bicketed by a cat.

Amanda’s transformation from drab to dazzling—complete with new nose, cheekbones, tits, thighs and ass—has been as remarkable for it being un-remarked upon as for its sheer audacity. Thanks to my brother’s financial tap, which Amanda has kept running at full force. Since their marriage four years ago, my sister-in-law has gone from quietly unassuming (and homely) to radically unlikable (and gorgeous) in five easy steps. I wonder if Walker Lee has noticed her personality metamorphosis as well.

“Jules!” Walker runs over to me and throws his arms around me. It’s funny, but he’s about the only man tall and broad enough to let me feel almost diminutive by comparison. No small feat. Wish I could bottle that and sell it in stores.

“Skeets!” I’ve called Walker Skeeter since we were very small kids and he gave me an empty mayonnaise jar full of mosquitoes for my birthday one summer.

“Damn, Jules, you look awesome!” Walker says to me as he holds me at arm’s length. “You been popping those gorgeous pills?”

Amanda’s sneer doesn’t escape my line of vision, so I smile broadly. “Nah, I gave my bottle to Amanda, can’t you tell?” I wink at him, enjoying the conspiracy.

Walker enters the living room, greets my uncle and shouts hellos to my mother in the kitchen. He then plunks down between Amanda—who’s decided the couch is where she’ll get the most attention right now— and me.

“So what’s shakin’ with you, chickie poo?” Walker turns toward me and asks. Amanda begins to answer but realizes his question is directed at me, so she crosses her arms and scrunches her eyebrows downward to express her dismay.

I tell Walker about my restaurant, which I opened last year, and fill him in on the great reviews I’ve gotten from several premier restaurant critics.

“So all those years of baking muffins for your brother and me paid off, then?” he asks.

“No doubt. Thanks for being my guinea pig, Skeets!”

“You can try your wares out on me any day of the week,” he says, elbowing me in the ribs.

“You better watch yourself or I might just take you up on the offer,” I say.

Amanda mutters something spiteful under her breath, something along the lines of “Oh, please, spare me.” I choose to ignore her, but Walker looks a little surprised at the snide remark.

I don’t want to ask Walker about his divorce, but he volunteers the information unbidden. “I guess you know Samantha and I parted ways?” he asks.

I frown and nod.

“I guess that ‘till death do us part’ line loosely translated means that Bobby the tennis pro’s real name was Death.” He laughs at his corny joke, and I laugh with him. Amanda’s dazed look indicates she doesn’t get it.

“You doing okay now?” I ask him.

He turns toward me again, this time holding up his hands to mine like a mime and linking my fingers with his. I’m not exactly sure why he does this, but I’m not going to protest it. His hands feel warm and strong and encouraging. “I’m better than okay, Jules. I’m fantastic. It wasn’t till Sam betrayed me like that that I realized what an idiot I was. I never belonged with her.”

This is true. Samantha was the altar at which Amanda bowed with reverence, and it’s no small thanks to Samantha that Amanda is the stunning beauty-slash-bitch that she is today. I don’t think Walker’s marrying Samantha helped my brother Toby either, considering what it’s cost him in restoration work on his wife. Although maybe it was worth it to Tobes, having a much better looking wife. Who the hell knows? I guess to each his own.

My mother interrupts my momentary bliss, and I jump away from Walker as if I touched a hot flame.

“You’re eating well, then, Julia.” Mother nods toward me as she carries a turkey-laden platter to the table. “I can see that much.”

Ouch. An arrow directly to my Achilles heel. I’m never sure if my mother enjoys humiliating me, or if she’s simply so intent on showcasing my brother’s prize wife that she’s willing to sacrifice me to the cause. Either way, the results are the same.

I squirm uncomfortably in my seat. As much as I loathe my mother’s chronic yet oblique color commentary on my shortcomings, I am equally disinclined to raise both her hackles and mine by drawing further attention to her efforts.

“Do you tend to sample a lot of what you’re cooking at the restaurant?” Uncle Marvin asks me, all the while fixing his stare at what must be the upper balcony segment of Amanda’s ongoing self-reconstruction project. I can’t help but notice Uncle Marvin has bouquets of hair sprouting forth from both his nostrils and ears like early-spring forsythia. God, I want to take a set of pruning shears to them.

I’m ashamed to look over at Walker, what with the familial fanny-spanking to which I’m being subjected. Instead, he reaches over and gently moves a wisp of hair away from my eyes. He puts two fingers on my chin and turns my face toward him.

“Ignore them,” he mouths so that only I know what he’s saying. I want to cry, it’s such a kind gesture.

I shift my ample-enough weight from my right hip to my left in an ungainly yet graceful way, much as an elephant deftly lumbers on a narrow forest path while avoiding protruding trees. I look down, disillusioned, at my chubby calves, which remind me of that elephant, but not in a kind way. I notice my clunky clogged feet and my puffy ankles, swollen from standing for fourteen-hours a day in the kitchen. And those damned varicose veins, professional battle scars, really, from all that standing. Despite my shortcomings, I’m not bad looking. I’ve got beautiful wavy black hair that is the envy of my wait staff, dimples my friend Anna says are so cute you just want to stick your fingers in, and a friendly smile. I think about an elephant—with scarred-hide, broken tusk, gashed ears. Nevertheless a beautiful—and so very capable—creature. A survivor, like me.

I turn my attention to my uncle’s veiled question. Do you tend to sample what you cook? What kind of question is that? Do I look like I go without?

I nod my head and smile with tepid effort. “I sample everything before it goes out to the floor.” As I say the words, I know what comes next.

“Well that’s obvious.” Amanda smirks.

I don’t recall precisely when Amanda decided to take a sharp right down bitch alley, but I do know that once she headed in that direction, there was no turning back. Bummer for me. Right now, I want desperately to boast to Amanda that at least I didn’t cheat with the Hoover Maneuver, like she did, her once-voluminous breeder hips destined for the hazmat dumpster at the surgi-care center.

I want to say that at least when I get thin, I’ll do it on my own terms, with hard work and no surgical intervention. But I can’t. Because I don’t talk about my weight with my family. Since forever, physical looks have been the only currency of value for my relatives. Odd, considering what a motley—and at times, homely—group they are. I only need glance at Uncle Marvin and his florid whiskey nose to reinforce that reality. Perhaps this is why my mother adores Amanda so much: she’s (now) gorgeous, and she belongs to the Hartman clan (by default). She’s one of us! Good looks by association, perhaps? But I refuse to pray to their god, thank you. Take me as I am, or don’t take me at all.

Truth is, I rarely eat one actual meal a day, let alone many. Yeah, I taste much of what leaves my kitchen, but teaspoonfuls of sauce or soup here and there, not entire servings. I do always keep a candy bar nearby because I have low blood sugar and can’t risk passing out in a dangerous commercial kitchen. But I can’t tell you the last time I’ve had a bite of one. Plus, I run two miles a day, four on my day off. My internist declares me healthy and fit. So my size fourteen body doesn’t conform to this groups’ concept of acceptability. I’m happy enough with me as I am for now. And I don’t have the energy to fight them on it.

My brother Toby arrives, saving me from more immediate interrogation. Thank goodness. He and Walker visit for a few minutes while Amanda’s gaze throws daggers my way, and I feign ignorance. I’m sorely tempted to say something along the lines of, “Why, Amanda, I do believe you are jealous that I’m getting all of Walker’s attention!” But I refrain, mostly for fear of it backfiring and Walker wouldn’t hold my hand and Christ, I’ve waited half my life for him to hold my hand so I don’t want to blow it.

With the tinkling of a tiny bell, my mother and Aunt Irma—who’s been helping out in the kitchen—summon us for dinner. Uncle Marvin, beads of sweat forming on his shiny pate, crushes his third beer can in thirty minutes into his hammy fist and plods to the dining room, his man-breasts jiggling in time to his footsteps. I follow on the heels of my brother Toby, who is busy groping Amanda’s butt implants en route to the table. I guess all that home-improvement on her has ratcheted up the horn-toad in him. Ugh. Walker pulls up the rear, reaching his arm half around my shoulder as we advance to the dining room. Whoa. All this touching, it’s kinda sorta, uh, nice. Time was that Walker wouldn’t even look at me (except when he was mooching my muffins). I was a gawky teen, and he was all dark wavy hair and those eyes of his and his broad chest and, well, you know. Everything I didn’t dare dream about in a guy. I suppose I contented myself by investing my yearnings in the sweet and edible variety, thank you. Of course look where that got me: not yet out of my twenties and already thirty or forty pounds overweight.

We sit down and dispense with formalities and most conversation, instead focusing on passing the vittles. It’s amazing that when Mother says grace, I’m spared a humiliating prayer for her only daughter to get back to a size eight.

“Julia, honey, are you sure you should eat those?”

My mother, the calorie Gestapo, nods in my direction at the bowl of what looks like lumpy paste before me. Just for good measure, and to piss her off, I dollop a second spoonful of mashed potatoes on my plate and slather a healthy serving of gravy atop the mound. I don’t even bother to look at her. I do, however, glance over at Walker who is snickering at my antics. It’s great to have an ally in this verbal war.

Across the table, Amanda is nursing a salad (which she brought) and a piece of broiled chicken (made special for her by Mother; I guess turkey’s too high in fat for her delicate constitution) that wouldn’t even fill up a cat. It’s a good thing her plate’s no fuller, because she’d clearly end up wearing some of it on her tits, which are thrust obtrusively onto the tabletop. I wonder if she regrets how those things get in the way, like fake fingernails when you’re trying to type. At least those you can pop off when they become problematic.

Instead of focusing on my family, who are watching my feeding process with great interest, I simply hunker down and deliberately shovel it in. If I’m going to be forced into the role of family heifer, then I may as well play to my audience. In sympathy, Walker joins in. Before I know it, he’s clotted his plate with all sorts of my mother’s Thanksgiving staples, and I watch with pleasure as his plate becomes an impressionistic blur of cranberry, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes and turkey.

“Our Amanda, she stays so svelte because she eats like a mouse!” Mother exclaims, her over-painted coral lips forming an exclamatory O. Her lipstick seeps from tiny wrinkles, forming a fringe-like orange-ish wreath around her mouth. Hello! Does no one realize how faux Amanda is? She gloats in my direction with an unrelenting narcissism in her eyes.

“Uncle Marvin, will you please pass the Jell-O salad to me?” I say between mouthfuls. He reaches for it and sends it the long way around the table, so as to rub his arm across Amanda’s breast while passing the platter. I smile with vindication at her, my plan having worked so successfully. If she’s to reap the benefits of her newfound beauty, may she also suffer the slings and arrows of its follies.

Slings and arrows. I think about that for a second. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them. My sea of troubles is overflowing with fetid waste. I’m thinking I ought to hop an ocean liner out of here and be done with this group of bozos.

“Julia, something looks different about you since the last time we saw you,” my Aunt Irma says.

“In a good way or bad one?” I ask, knowing full well the answer. If by different she means last year at this time I was a more diminutive size twelve, well, then, she’s right. I grab the dish with the stuffing and pile seconds onto my plate.

“Oh, just, er, different, I guess.”

I look up to see all eyes fixed on me (with the exception of Uncle Marvin; I don’t need to say what he’s watching). I glance at Toby, who’s sitting next to me, and see that while he’s staring absently at me, he’s removed his shoe and extended his leg beneath the table, evidently diddling his slutty wife with his toes. I glance at my watch to see how much longer I’ve got to sit through this. I figure I might as well make it worth my effort and really hunker down to eat.

I’m not even that hungry, and I don’t particularly care for my mother’s cooking. But Thanksgiving dinner is pretty hard to screw up, so I can tolerate it. I ask each relative at the table to pass another serving dish my way and fill my plate with yet another helping. For emphasis, I begin to make noise while I eat, playing up their unspoken assumption that I’m a gluttonous cow. I especially relish my moans, though with each moan my creepy uncle’s ears perk up.

Walker reaches his hand out to mine beneath the tablecloth and squeezes it. His eyes twinkle with glee watching me yank my family around in this way. I just can’t believe this total hottie next to me is actually in my corner! I’ve never had a good-looking man on my side before. But I could get used to it, very easily.

“Julia, are there any men in your life?” Aunt Irma asks, her eyes growing wider as I continue my feeding frenzy.

“Mmmphh mmmpphh mmmpphhh.” Too much food in my mouth to talk. God, I’m loving this show. I should’ve been an actress.

“I’m sorry, dear, I couldn’t hear you through your food.”

“No time for men, Aunt Irma. With the restaurant and all, I’d have to say I’m married to my cooking.”

Shit. Yet one more segue for Amanda, whose breathing has escalated in time with Toby’s fancy footwork. She looks flushed. Perfect, I verge on the precipice of a food orgasm while she has the real thing. Life is not fair sometimes.

I wait for Amanda’s smart-ass retort, but instead she suppresses a half-moan, and Toby covers for her. “In that case, Jules, you ought to consider a divorce.”

You know, there was a time when Toby and I were best friends. When we shared confidences, presented a united front against our parents, were allies in life. But now that he’s sleeping with the anti-Christ, I guess he’s going to speak on her behalf. At least when he’s having furtive footsie sex with her underneath the Thanksgiving dinner table.

“And you ought to consider getting a room, Tobes,” I say with a knowing glare.

Dinner finally ends, and I choose to retreat to the kitchen, where I’m most comfortable. I’m sort of glad that Walker stays out in the living room visiting with my mother and brother and the rest of the hoodlums. Not that I like doing dishes, but it is here that I feel somewhat at home, even here in my own childhood home, where I now feel least at home. I pop in my headphones and tune out with my iPod, effectively shutting out my family-borne misery. Just gotta get through the dishes and I’m home-free, literally, for another glorious year.

As I scrub away methodically at the soiled plates, I look up at the cupboard above the sink and recognize a homemade popsicle stick frame which surrounds a sorry little drawing of a very round little girl on whose shoulder sits a bird. Something I made for my father, actually, years ago when I was in grade school. Odd that my mother has it scotch-taped to the cabinet above the kitchen sink. I squint to read the words I’d hand-written in amateur calligraphy, dangling from the frame on what looks like toilet paper: O fat white woman whom nobody loves, why do you walk through the field in gloves, when the grass is soft as the breast of doves, and shivering sweet to the touch?

Jesus, my sense of art sure has evolved since then. Why on Earth did my mother dredge that thing up? Is this simply a reminder to her that I’m fat? Or maybe that I liked Daddy way more than I liked her and made him cute little cards with poetry on them to show him how much more I preferred him? I’ll never understand why my family can’t be proud of my achievements, like I know my father would have been. Christ, I own my own restaurant. I’m a talented chef. And most importantly, I’m a nice person. My biggest failure is that I don’t look like Amanda. And yet here we have Amanda, Bitch of the Underworld, who can do no wrong despite doing very little right. Go figure.

“She got great big legs, she got wanton thighs, big fat woman got wanton thighs, ev’ry time she moves makes my temp’rature rise,” I’m singing the blues out loud, jiggling my hips to the beat.

“What is that you’re saying, Julia?” My mother startles me from my solitude.

Singing my anthem, I want to say to her. “Oh, nothing, just singing.”

“Huh. I thought you were talking about yourself.”

Oh, my God. This fat-legged woman needs to get her fat legs marching right on out of here.

“Come to think of it, I’d better get home to feed the cat. I’ve got a two-hour drive ahead of me,” I say, taking my mother’s comment as a cue that conversation is only going to devolve from here if I stick around. I leave the rest of the dishes unwashed and grab my coat and purse on my way to the door. Walker pulls me into a little alcove near the powder room before I reach the foyer.

“Jules, where ya headed?”

“I’ve gotta get outta here, Skeeter. I just can’t take them and their criticism anymore.”

He reaches out and wraps his arms around me, tightly. The opposite of the way he embraced Amanda earlier in the evening. Wow.

“I think you look just about perfect,” he says, pressing his forehead against mine. He lifts my chin and stares straight into my eyes. “In fact, I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

I’m too tough a girl to let free those tears that are pressing into the backs of my eyeballs like a homeless child’s face on a fogged-up window on Christmas Eve.

“I have an idea,” Walker says. “How about we get the hell out of here together, and you can take me back and show me your restaurant?”

What a good idea. Gee, why didn’t I think of that? But really... “I live two hours away, Skeets. It’s not like you can just pop over there, you know?”

He shrugs. “I’ve got nothing going on. I’m just a lonely bachelor with nothing to do for an entire holiday weekend. I mean, I guess I could watch football, but I’d prefer playing games to watching them…” he trails off with a suggestive arch in his eyebrow. Is he thinking what I’m thinking? Or what I’ve been yearning for, for, like, ever?

“My car or yours?” I ask.

“Let’s take mine—it’s pretty fast.”

Suddenly the rest of my beloved family is crowding us out of our private moment as everyone takes leave from this happy little holiday affair.

We’re exchanging disingenuous goodbyes when my uncle pipes in.

“So, uh, Amanda,” Uncle Marvin says and raises his arm into his shiny black Members Only parachute jacket. “I like the new tits.” He gives her the two thumbs-up sign with his hands and winks. The parting conversation stops momentarily, everyone speechless at Uncle Marvin’s comment and overt observation. “Oh, and Julia. I got this for you when I was waiting in the doctor’s office for my colonoscopy last month. I’ve been wanting to send it to you.” He hands me a glossy brochure with his big fat sausage fingers. I flip it over to read the title: Are You Serious About Losing Weight?

I look at Uncle Marvin, his eyes glazed with lust, liquor and loathing (the latter toward me, I assume) and at Amanda, still stunned at her augmentation outing. I crumple the paper into a ball, reach along the edge of Amanda’s scoop-neck silver sparkly shirt, pull hard, and discard the brochure into my sister-in-law’s well-endowed cleavage. With that, I whip out an emergency Snicker’s bar from my pocket, rip open the wrapper, and take a chomp out of it, chewing demonstrably in front of my beloved family. I reach over to give Walker a bite as well. Then I lumber out the front door, hand in hand with Walker Lee, me quiet as a mouse, save for a little giggling. Hey, if I can’t eat like one, at least I can silently slip away like one.

***

Jenny Gardiner is the author of the award-winning novel SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER (available now), and the upcoming Winging It: A Memoir of Caring for a Vengeful Parrot Determined to Kill Her (Simon Spotlight/March 2010). Her work has been found in Ladies Home Journal, the Washington Post and on NPR’s Day to Day. She likes to say she honed her fiction writing skills while working as a publicist for a US Senator. Other jobs have included: an orthodontic assistant (learning quite readily that she was not cut out for a career in polyester), a waitress (probably her highest-paying job), a TV reporter, a pre-obituary writer, and a photographer (claim to fame: being hired to shoot Prince Charles--with a camera, silly!). She lives in Virginia with her husband, three kids, two dogs, one cat and a gregarious parrot. In her free time she studies Italian, dreams of traveling to exotic locales, and feels very guilty for rarely attempting to clean the house. Visit her at her website, www.jennygardiner.net, her blog, www.jennygardiner.net/blog/ , on facebook, or twitter http://twitter.com/jennygardiner

Off for the Weekend

2009-06-06T08:39:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

I post stories on Lunch Reads Monday through Friday (one a day). Check back on Monday for great new reads -- in women's fiction, sci-fi, and even (gasp!) literary fiction.

Libby Malin

Hostage Situation (Genre: Mystery)

2009-06-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

by Carolyn J. Rose

Standing there in the bank lobby, with Len Dupew's arm around my neck and the barrel of his revolver grinding into my ear, I had a real good view of my life passing before my eyes.

I also had a good view of Merle McGillivray. Through the big glass window I saw him come sprinting across Main Street. He hit the door like it was a tackling dummy and skidded to a stop on the fat rubber mat just inside.

A million thoughts and pictures careened through my brain, but I still had plenty of brain cells free to wonder what the hell Merle thought he was doing when he drew his gun and pointed it at Len.

Everyone knows you're supposed to keep a hostage-taker calm, not rile him up even more. You've got to convince him he has options. Let him think you're working with him. Get him to trust you.

Just last week we went over all of that at the yearly refresher course with the State Police up in Little Rock. But maybe Merle hadn't been paying attention. Meetings always bored him silly. Maybe he figured he had more cause to worry about livestock loose on the highway down here in our corner of Arkansas than about hostage situations. Maybe he just flat didn't like the state boys telling him what to do and how to do it. Or maybe, like always, Merle believed he could just fake his way through and come out okay.

The way I saw it, though, pulling a gun was only going to make things worse. Len was already edgy as a bachelor at a bridal shower. He'd got his tail deep in a crack and I'd bet my badge he was looking for somebody to share the blame, and the consequences.

Fact is, though, Len had a lock on the blame. The circulars I’d seen claimed he spent several days casing the banks he robbed, always made a big haul, never pulled a job in Arkansas where he was born and raised, and used make-up and phony hairpieces to disguise his appearance. But this robbery exhibited all the careful planning of a hen bolting out into a hailstorm to get a drink of water.

First off, everyone in town knew the vault had a time lock set for one o'clock and there wasn't more than a thousand dollars in the tills on a Monday morning. If you needed a big chunk of change on a Monday, you waited 'til one when Porky Wilkins got back from his regular long weekend in Hot Springs.

On top of that, Len's clever disguise consisted of a red toupee and some green wax vampire fangs.

I guessed those were what made Marliss Hunsaker hit the silent alarm, the one that rings in the Sheriff's office, the one that brought Merle running. Marliss is sharp. Cool-headed, too. When I heard the door swish open behind me, I saw her glance up, but she never gave a sign anything was wrong, just stood there, with that "next customer, please" smile on her face. But her foot must have been feeling for the button.

Vernie Blackstone's another story. She'd dated Len in high school and never forgave him for standing her up on prom night because he thought he could get farther around the bases with someone else. If she hadn't been so fixated, she might have taken a few seconds to consider her actions. But no. She'd screamed out, "Len Dupew, you’re a lousy excuse for a man!"

Before I could react, Len snaked an arm around my neck and fired one shot into the ceiling and another at the camera over the door. The lens splintered and the camera gave out an electronic yelp. Vernie emptied her lungs again and Len put a bullet through the velvet bow on top of her beehive. Hell of a shot.

After that, Vernie was downright eager to get out from behind the counter and hit the floor on the spot he pointed to. Marliss followed, stopping to look him in the eyes and tell him he was making a big mistake. He jerked his arm tighter around my throat and ripped off another round that stopped the clock on the back wall. Len might not be the sharpest pencil in the box when it came to planning, but the boy sure could shoot. Marliss shrugged, knelt, adjusted her skirt, and lay down beside Vernie.

And that's when Merle ran in and pulled his gun.

So there we stood, with the camera yelping every few seconds and me thinking about how Merle hadn't paid attention at the state police seminar, and how he hated loud noises. Even from twenty feet away I could see his eyes squinting and his mouth puckering like maybe he could pull his ears closed that way.

Gunshots irritate Merle, too. He makes all us deputies go to the gun range every month, but he always finds some excuse, like paperwork, or a trial he needs to testify at. To my knowledge, he hasn't taken target practice in two years. Of course, that's his privilege, him being the Sheriff and all, but you can see why the sight of him with a gun in his hand and the feel of Len's pistol against my skull made me a little shaky about the prospect of living to see the sun come up tomorrow.

Still, Merle had probably been to the range more recently than he'd been to the eye doctor. Who knows when he had his eyes checked last, or the wire-rim frames of his glasses straightened? They tilted downhill on one side and bowed out on the other and the lenses were smeared with fingerprints.

But it wasn't Merle's vision or marksmanship that worried me the most. Even a crack shot can miss when the pressure gets to him, and I could tell Merle had a bad case of nerves. Sweat glistened on his forehead, and his gun-hand was twitching.

Len Dupew, on the other hand, might have been jumpy, but his gun didn’t waver. Of course, its barrel was wedged in my right ear. And that was my one consolation—a shot like that surely would kill me instantly. No need to worry about a slow and painful death. Cops from all around would come to my funeral. And after the twenty-one gun salute, Merle might stick the medal of valor on the wall or on my tombstone.

"Put your gun down, Sheriff. All I want is to get out of here with the money."

Len’s words came out in a garbled lisp. He spit the vampire teeth on the floor and tried again.

"Put the gun down now, or you'll be looking for a new deputy. I'll shoot. You know I will."

Merle chewed at his moustache, looking at me and the two tellers sprawled on the fake marble floor at my feet. Vernie whimpered like a newborn pup and I wished I could do the same, but a law enforcement officer is supposed to set an example. Merle gave me a little smile and through the smudges and smears on his lenses, I thought I saw him wink.

"Fine by me, Len. That deputy ain't worth shit, anyway. Can't shoot straight, don't like to carry a gun, can't write a coherent report or make a decent pot of coffee—doesn't even meet the weight requirement. Don't know when I've seen such a tub of lard. Won't be no loss to me if you shoot."

I felt myself flush, opened my mouth to unload on Merle, then bit my tongue and told myself this wasn't a job-performance review. Merle was just establishing his position.

Len laughed, a harsh sound like shifting scrap metal. He tightened the arm around my neck, wrenching my chin higher and giving me a view of the chandelier with its two blown light bulbs and a host of dust-clotted spider webs clinging to the pressed-tin ceiling. Porky needed to get a new cleaning service. If I lived, I'd suggest that.

Len laughed again. "I’m walking out of here, Merle. Step aside."

"Can't do that, Len. Besides, even if you get past me, you're not going far. Most everyone in town knows you and half of them saw me run in here." Merle chuckled.

"Most bank robbers have sense enough not to come back to their own home towns to make a withdrawal." He sounded as relaxed as if he was leaning back in his swivel chair, his feet up on the corner of his desk. "I'm staying put."

Len growled and punched the barrel further into my ear. "Then your deputy's DOA."

"That's a dumb move—shoot a deputy and every cop in the state will be after you. Think it over, Len. Put the gun down and I'll try to get the courts to go easy. You can trust me. We used to be friends, remember?"

Len snorted and yanked me up on tiptoe. His wool shirt stank of old sweat and cigarettes. "I wasn't never your friend. Nobody wanted to be friends with a do-gooder like you. I might have known you'd grow up and pin on a badge. Sissy britches."

Merle winced at the nickname from grade school. "I don't want to shoot you, Len. Don't make me do it."

"Bullet will have to go through your deputy first." Len flattened himself against my back.

Merle looked at me again, eyes as gray as November rain. "Don't matter. One way or another, you're dead." His gun hand trembled. A cold spasm rolled south through my gut.

"You're bluffing." Len shoved his left elbow up again. I gasped and thought my bladder would burst.

"Try me."

"I will." Len crouched until my heels touched the floor. "You walk when I do," he muttered in my ear. "Understand?"

I nodded, my nose rubbing against the sleeve of that wool shirt.

"Get ready. We're going."

I nodded again, felt the sneeze swelling at the back of my eyes.

"Kuh-choo." My head jerked forward.

Blam!

Marliss and Vernie clawed at the floor, screaming like their hair was on fire. Len’s hold on me loosened. My bladder twitched, my knees turned to pudding, and I tumbled over beside them.

"He's dead," I heard Merle say after a minute. "Turn off the alarm, Marliss. But don't touch anything else. Take Vernie over to the diner and get a cup of tea. We'll have to shut the bank down for a while. I'll get your statements in a bit."

I heard them getting up, heard Marliss' heels tapping around behind the counter, heard Vernie telling Merle how Len left her waiting on prom night in her periwinkle chiffon dress and the shoes she'd had dyed to match.

After a moment I opened one eye, squirmed around and saw Len Dupew's surprised expression and the dark hole in his forehead. I stared at it for a long minute, and then peered up at Merle.

"Come on, Billie Jean." He bent down and helped me wobble to me feet. "You and that overdue baby go over to the office, change your clothes, get the camera, and get on back here and help me process this crime scene."

He strode to the phone on Porky’s desk, not even looking back to make sure my knees hadn't buckled again.

I sighed and waddled to the door in my damp pants, his comment about my weight still stinging. A little sympathy would be nice right now. A big hug would be better. But I'd been his deputy long enough to know that while I was on duty, I'd have to do without either. Merle McGillivray doesn't believe in showing favoritism or mixing personal feelings with the job. He's forever reminding me to be professional when I'm on duty.

I swear, sometimes I don't know why I married that man.

Carolyn J. Rose has five mysteries and a fantasy available through www.synergebooks.com and will have a mystery published by Five Star Mysteries next summer. A resident of Vancouver, Washington, she has a website at www.deadlyduomysteries.com.

Sheep (Genre: Sci-fi/Paranormal)

2009-06-04T04:51:00.000-07:00

By Hannah Sternberg

When they diagnosed me with lycanthropy I was surprised, disgusted. Obviously there’s quite a lot of pain involved, not to mention the huge personal transformation. I did not savor the thought of becoming an animal. But my distress was soon tamed by the doctors’ reassurances of palliative breakthroughs, and even a formula in the first stages of clinical trials that may decrease the length of the active phase from three nights to one during every lunar cycle. The side-effects sound daunting, but potential sterility is a small price to pay, right? I didn’t even have a girlfriend.

So I had to tell the whole neighborhood about my condition because it’s a law now after a streak of maulings when the condition first emerged. It was fairly humiliating; the mothers took it the harshest, shrinking away from me like I was a monster all 28 days of the cycle. But I found out who my real friends were. Brian down the way helped me install the bars and shackles in my basement – he’s often the fellow people call up to help fix something. He wouldn’t sign to be my watcher, though, even just for the first time; he shrugged sheepishly, trying to let me down gently – he had a family, he mumbled. He did offer to take care of my cat during that weekend, though. He said he and his wife were thinking of getting one for their daughter.

So I had to do the most humiliating thing of all; I called up my grandmother and asked her to drive up to dog-sit me. Doing it, I could already smell the rubbery meatloaf of my childhood. Though she didn’t say it aloud, I could imagine her habitual chant as I gave her the news of my diagnosis: It’s a blessing your parents aren’t here to see this.

Grandma is, by nature and by choice, cantankerous. But when she walked in my door she was positively bristling. Apparently, as she had climbed out of her car, one of the neighbors watering her lawn called her over and asked if she knew the man living in that house had The Condition. What were you doing out there that you got bit by some freak? she wailed at me while I put on some tea water. Is that what they do in those sick clubs you go to to find company?

I only invited Grandma over for the three nights of the transformation, and she arrived late in the afternoon of the first. Just as the kettle shrieked I began to feel a severe migraine, and blindly turned my stove off and stumbled into my basement. I must have fixed the shackles on myself because the last thing I remember clearly is feeling their cold weight around my wrists and a sensation like lead sinking in my chest as Grandma’s feet appeared at the top of the stairs. The rest is a fury of pain and darkness.

When I awoke the next morning, Grandma was turning the pages of People magazine and smoking a cigarette. I was so sore I could barely move, I was frozen to the bone – I was naked, I knew without looking at myself – and my shoulder protested against the hard cold floor I lay against. I began to prop myself up and had an odd feeling of being diminished.

I had read all about the change in the two weeks I had to wait before my first transformation. I thought I had prepared myself entirely for the wracking pain and the psychological distress of becoming a beast. But all along, at least I had the comfort of knowing I would return to my old body at the end of it.

I was wrong. The books were wrong. I woke up in a different body. I had chained myself to the wall last night as a man. This morning, after the fur had shed and the fangs receded, I had become a girl.

Grandma just sat back and laughed and laughed.

Hannah Sternberg is a writer living in Baltimore.

Escape from Southern Point (Genre: Cozy Mystery)

2009-06-03T00:00:00.000-07:00

By Beatrice King

Nearly two hours after the wedding was scheduled to begin, Rev. Dillon McAllister steps before the altar and makes the following announcement:

"I'm sorry to disappoint you but the nuptials are postponed."

He then opens his mouth as if he wants to say more, stops himself, clasps his hands in front of him and shakes his head so quickly it looks almost like a nervous tic. A handsome man in his mid thirties, he runs his hand through his hair and leaves the sanctuary, his black robe and white stole fluttering in the breeze.

"What on earth?" a woman in a peach pantsuit several rows behind me says. She’s commented in fretful tones about everything from flowers to church construction to weather, all in a high-pitched nasal whine that probably is summoning all the dogs of Southern Point, North Carolina to the church’s doors. "Does that mean we should leave? Or is it just postponed for another hour?"

Good question. I have no clue who she is, even though she’s on the bride’s side of the church and I’m the bride’s aunt. I'm surprised at how many people I don't know in our territory. In fact, in the hours that we've listened to Julia Dennison sing the Ave Marie three times, There Is Love four, and The Rose what seemed like a dozen, I've counted more folks on the groom's side with whom I have at least a passing acquaintance than those on the bride's side that I even recognize.

But maybe that's because Liddy, the bride, doesn't live here anymore. Here being a tourist town on the Outer Banks. As a matter of fact, none of my family lives here anymore. Despite its physical beauty and summertime appeal, Southern Point is a small nowhere kind of place, the only good jobs being in rental housing, waitressing, or lifeguarding during the season. Liddy and her groom Perry had thought a “hometown” wedding would be rustic and charming, and attendees could enjoy some early summer sun once the festivities were over.

Most of my family skedaddled from this rustic charm once they grew up and went to college, but I'm not that keen on change. I've hung on, my job as a paralegal at the inland law firm of Beagle and Smyth enough to pay the bills. My wages and my divorce settlement keep me comfortable. When property taxes rise, I call out Ron Beagle to argue my case.

"Is Addy here?" I hear the peach woman whisper. "I thought I saw her. I'd love to get her autograph."

Addy is my younger sister, who not only left Southern Point years ago but left ordinary middle-class life behind when she became a successful actress, her most notable role that of the beloved Jennifer Blaine, owner of a knitting store in Petal Point, Maine, and amateur sleuth extraordinaire, in the long-running television series "Knit One, Kill Two." Addy, with whom I share a passing resemblance, lives in California and couldn't make it for the wedding. She's shooting a movie.

I put away the Sudoku I was surreptitiously working on during the delay and rise. My older sister Beth disappeared down the aisle an hour ago. Maybe I should have gone after her. But that's when I dozed off for a little while as Peach Woman stopped her chatter, only awakening when Wayne Bigley, the organist, launched into the Widor. I cast a glance at Peach Pantsuit as I leave and see her do a double-take. I graciously smile the lopsided grin Addy favors.

In the bride's room at the back of the church I find Liddy red-faced and swollen-eyed, with Beth standing over her, handkerchief in hand, hand on her daughter's shoulder. Ben, Beth's husband and Liddy's father, stares out the window, hands in his pockets.

"If you think something has happened to him, we should call the police," he says through clenched teeth. I get the impression he's made this argument before.

I look at Beth, raising my eyebrows.

"Perry isn't here," she says of the missing bridegroom, Perry B. Gates, III.

Liddy looks up, shaking off her mother's hand. "I told you, Mom, he got a call last night and wouldn't tell me who it was. I think something's happened to him."

I start to suggest the police, remember Ben just did that, and look again at Liddy, who's grabbed another tissue from a box on a nearby vanity. Have they just been sitting here like this for two hours?

“Why didn’t you come get me?” I address the question to my sister.

Beth responds. “We thought he was just late—one of the groomsmen said he knew they were running late at the hotel so we waited…”

“For a half hour,” LIddy chimes in.

“And then,” Beth continues, “we called Perry’s cell and left a message…”

“We figured they were on their way. He’s staying at the Holiday Inn outside of town and traffic was fierce because it’s the beginning of the season…” Liddy says.

So that probably accounted for Half Hour Number Two.

Ben looks at his watch and steps forward. “And then we called John, his best man.”

“What did he say?” I ask.

“He was mysterious,” Liddy says, her voice catching. She starts to cry again.

“He said everything would be all right,” Beth continues. “That Perry had something he needed to take care, something personal.”

The door to the bride’s room flies open and Rev. McAlister steps in, rushing to Liddy’s side. He kneels by her, placing his hand on her shoulder, which seems like a liberty given she is wearing a strapless satin. But there is something overly friendly about his overall manner, something that suggests he wants her to notice he’s taking liberties.

And then I remember—Dillon McAlister was recently divorced, his wife of ten years running off with a doctor from Raleigh. I recall Dillon during his high school days when he had a thing for Liddy, and Beth thought he was such a serious young man. But beyond a few dates, they’d never pursued a relationship. High school, in fact, was where Liddy had originally met Perry but they hadn’t dated, hadn’t even been in the same circles. It wasn’t until they’d run into each other in New York, both up-and-coming advertising executives, that the spark of romance had been lit. Like our family, Perry’s had moved away from Southern Point, too.

“What would you like me to do?” Dillon asks Liddy in a hushed tone, as if he doesn’t want us to overhear. “I could call the police.”

“She doesn’t want the police,” I feel compelled to say. Something about Dillon bothers me. Or maybe it’s something about Liddy’s reaction to him. She’s not pushing him away. She seems to like having him here, even putting her hand on his on her knee. I’m about to suggest someone go to the Holiday Inn to look around when the door opens yet again and Peach Pantsuit enters.

“I thought you might need help,” she says, stepping into the room, but she’s looking at me with a bright smile that immediately signals she followed me here in hopes of snagging that autograph. Peachie thinks I’m my sister Addy.

“Oh, Evelyn, thank you so much,” my sister Beth says, going to the woman and giving her a hug. So she’s a friend of Beth’s, maybe not even a Southern Point resident. Beth points to me, “This is my sister…”

“Yes, I know,” Evelyn says, shaking my hand and beaming. “I’m Beth’s friend and neighbor from Philadelphia.”

Now, I know I should tell her I’m Beth’s sister Olivia (after whom Liddy was named) and not our famous sister Addy but, Peach Pantsuit, or rather Evelyn, annoyed me with her constant commentary in the church, so I let her think what she thinks. Maybe I’ll even fudge that autograph at some point.

“I was going to suggest someone go to the Holiday Inn to check Perry’s room,” I say.

Evelyn nods her head. “Excellent idea! But of course, you’d come up with it!” My God, the woman not only thinks I’m Addy. She thinks I’m Jennifer Blaine, master amateur sleuth. I don’t even knit. I don’t do any of the homey things Jennifer does—cook like a gourmet, have friends who own bookstores and restaurants, or know everybody in town (a very useful trait when solving homespun mysteries).

Dillon looks up. “I can go.”

Liddy stops him. “No. Let Dad.”

Ben seems relieved that he has a mission and heads out the door without a word.

“What else do you suggest?” Evelyn asks, staring straight at me. “I would think we should contact his family, shouldn’t we?”

His family should be in the church. Why aren’t they back here?

As if reading my mind, Beth says, “We talked to Perry’s mother and father and they’ve been trying to reach him for the past hour. They said he has a terrible sense of time and not to worry.” I remember opening my eyes during my doze in the church to see Beth floating up the aisle and talking to the parents of the groom for quite some time. I figured it was some last-minute instruction about the ceremony or just friendly chit-chat.

Liddy nods. “He’s always late for everything.”

But a wedding? Hardly seems likely.

Dillon agrees, too enthusiastically. “But for an occasion such as this, one would think he’d be on time!” He stands, but keeps a hand on Liddy’s shoulder. She reaches up and doesn’t move it away, but again covers it with her own hand.

“It does seem odd,” I say, “that his parents aren’t concerned.” I step to the doorway, intending to go back into the church to peer at them, as if their visages would give away some clue.

Evelyn beats me to the punch. “Why don’t I go fetch them?” She smiles, patting me on the arm. “You stay here and interview people.” I let her go.

Beth looks at me. I look back and shrug.

Dillon asks Liddy if she’d like a glass of water. She shakes her head no. Had Dillon been this friendly at the rehearsal dinner? I think back to last night at the Clam Shack Restaurant, the long table with our family on one side and Perry’s on the other as if arranged for the Last Supper. I remember thinking how prosperous everybody who’d moved away from Southern Point looked and wondered if my navy blue slacks and cotton safari jacket were too casual for this bunch. Dillon had been there, clerical collar in place, wavy hair neatly combed, and he’d sat next to Liddy if I recalled correctly. Had he been this solicitous? I remember seeing him lean toward her more than once, but I assumed it was to make small talk in that noisy joint. Why had they picked the Clam Shack anyway? Probably because it was an old Southern Point restaurant, been around since the dawn of time while newer, trendier food places sprung up. Old didn’t mean it was good. The shrimp was overcooked and too small and the crab tasted like it came from a can. The owner, Doug Weymuth, was a skinflint.

I move closer to Liddy and grab her hand, forcing her to turn. Good, Dillon moves away. Looking at both of them, I ask, “Do either of you remember anything odd last night about Perry? Did he seem out of sorts or worried about anything?”

“No,” Liddy answers first. “He was his usual fun self. He was in a great mood.”

“He was cracking a lot of jokes,” Dillon says in a disapproving tone. “With everyone.”

Another memory comes to me, of Perry laughing with a carrot-topped waiter, a young high school kid I see around town a lot. Who was he? An odd name I can’t conjure up. Maybe Dillon knows. I start to ask him when the door opens again and Evelyn ushers Mr. and Mrs. Gates in, Perry’s parents.

“We’re so sorry,” Mrs. Gates begins, looking at Liddy and quickly looking away. She knows something.

“Maybe I should go to the hotel,” Mr. Gates says. He looks uncomfortable too, and clearly doesn’t want to be here. While they’re obviously uneasy, they don’t telegraph any fear. They must know their son is all right.

“My brother-in-law’s got that covered,” I say.

“Does your son have any gambling debts?” Evelyn asks.

“What?” I say in unison with Mrs. Gates. But Evelyn is undeterred.

“That’s the type of thing you—I mean, Jennifer—would ask. Gambling debts could mean someone was after him. And if he was acting a bit off last night and got a strange phone call…”

“I’m not Jennifer!” I cry.

“Oh, I know. Sorry,” she says. “You must get this a lot.”

No, I don’t, since I’m not Addy either, but I don’t correct her. Instead, I turn to Mrs. Gates.

“What about the strange phone call?”

Mrs. Gates doesn’t answer but Dillon does.

“Before dessert, I was going to say a few words and I had to wait for Perry to return from the men’s room. He was taking a long time and I saw him in the hallway on the phone.”

“Yes,” LIddy says. “I did, too.”

Evelyn pipes up. “We were dining there, too – didn’t know that’s where the rehearsal dinner was. And I saw Perry in the hall. Saw you, too,” she says to me, that smile coming back. Has she been stalking me? Or rather, my sister, Addy?

“So he received a phone call last night…”

“He did seem different when he came back to the table,” Liddy says. “More subdued. I thought maybe his stomach was upset.”

Not a bad assumption at the Clam Shack.

“Had you argued about anything?” I ask Liddy.

“No, nothing at all. We were both very happy.”

“And they got along just great,” Beth adds. “They worked out all their problems amazingly amicably. All of them.”

I know she is referring to one problem in particular, Liddy’s inability to have children. Five years ago, Liddy had undergone emergency surgery for ovarian cysts that had left her with slim-to-none possibilities for pregnancy. Beth had told me Liddy had sweated telling Perry about her inability to get pregnant because she knew Perry wanted children. But he had been very understanding, Beth said, and they’d talked about adoption.

“When he said good-night last night,” I continue, “did he seem worried about something?”

Liddy responds quickly, “No.” Then she pauses, looks at her hands, and a silent tear drops onto her perfect nails. “Maybe.”

“What did he say, Liddy?”

“When we got back to the hotel, he told me he loved me and never to forget it.”

Evelyn snorts. I ignore her. “And you sensed he meant something important by that?”

Dillon puts his arm around her shoulders. I am beginning to wonder if Dillon said something to Perry to scare him off.

“Obviously, he meant he wasn’t planning on showing up today,” Dillon says.

Liddy’s body trembles as a sob overtakes her. For a minister, Dillon is remarkably insensitive.

Beth reaches out and hugs Liddy, stealing her away from the Rev. McAlister. “He could have just meant what he said – that he loved you and didn’t want you to ever forget it. Nothing more. There, there.” She pats her daughter on the back.

The Gateses, I now notice, have managed to slip into the hallway, where Mr. Gates is talking on the phone, his voice if not his words carrying back into the room. I follow him.

“Who are you talking to?” I bark.

He reddens, bids the caller good-bye, and pockets his phone. “No one.”

“You were on the phone with Perry!”

“Perry doesn’t have his cell phone with him,” Mrs. Gates says indignantly. “He left it at the restaurant by mistake.”

“Who were you talking to?” I repeat to Mr. Gates. He glares at me but says nothing. I see him fingering his cell phone as if I would confiscate it.

But his protectiveness of the phone gives me an idea. I race back into the bride’s room, closing the door on the Gateses as I dig through my purse for my own phone. “What’s the number for the Clam Shack?” I asked Beth while I continue to rummage.

“Really, Liv, I don’t know off the top of my head.”

“Did you ever call them from your cell? The number would be stored there.” I find my cell while she gets her purse and digs for hers.

Evelyn beams at me. “You’re so clever,” she says.

In a flash, Beth finds the number and recites it while I dial. When I get Doug Weymuth on the line, I mention the lost cell phone and he tells me he has it and that someone said they’d stop by and get it later that day.

“Could you get it for me?” I ask him. I hear the clink of glassware, a television set, and voices in the background. The restaurant sounds busy. Doug doesn’t even ask me why I want the phone. He directs “Beau” to locate it and bring it to him.

Beau. That was the name I couldn’t remember earlier. Beauregard Simpson, the red-headed high schooler who’d been one of the waitstaff at the dinner last night, the one that Perry had been joking around with.

Something sends goosebumps up my back but I don’t know what it is. The room grows silent as we all wait for Perry’s phone to be fetched. When Doug says he has it, I direct him to click through the menu and find the last received call. I repeat the number aloud to those in the room.

“That’s my cell number,” Liddy says.

I ask Doug for the time stamp and it corresponds to Liddy calling Perry before the rehearsal itself.

“Maybe it wasn’t a call that he received,” Evelyn says. “Maybe it was one he made.”

Of course—we all assumed it was a call Perry had received that had sent him into a tailspin. But it could have been one he initiated. I instruct Doug to check those. Only the last one is an “unknown,” a call placed at the approximate time Dillon had seen Perry on the phone in the hallway. I write it down and thank Doug for his help. “Anything for you, Liv,” he says before hanging up.

Beth’s own cell phone chimes as soon as my call is over. It’s Ben, reporting that Perry had left the hotel early that morning, not in his tux but in jeans and sweatshirt. He’d not taken his bags. The Best Man was nowhere to be found, but Ben suspects he’s just not answering his door.

After Beth reports this, I nod. “He knows where Perry is. He’s stalling to give him time.”

Evelyn claps her hands in front of her face. “You’ve figured it out! I knew you’d be able to do it!”

“I’m not Jennifer Blaine,” I say, stamping my foot. “And I’m not Addy Thompson either! I’m Olivia, her sister!”

“But still,” Beth says in a near-whisper, “you know something, don’t you? Shouldn’t we call that number you got from his phone?”

I’m not sure we need to. I look at Dillon. “You dated Liddy in high school, right? Who did Perry date?”

Dillon scratches his head. “I don’t know. A couple different girls. It’s hard to remember.”

I look at Liddy. “What’s Perry’s middle name? What does the ‘B’ stand for?”

“Beauregard. It’s a family name,” she murmurs.

Dillon’s eyebrows shoot up and his mouth gapes. He swallows. He’s coming to the same conclusion as I am. “I remember one girl he dated – Gwendolyn Simpson.”

Gwendolyn Simpson, single mother to Beau Simpson, the red-headed high school kid who waited on us. Red-headed like Perry Beauregard Gates himself.

“What?” Liddy asks, looking from Dillon to me. “What does that have to do with anything? Perry couldn’t even remember half the girls he had crushes on in high school.”

That might be so. But Perry Gates did more than just date this particular girl. And last night he discovered that Gwendolyn Simpson’s boy Beauregard could be his kid.

“I know where Perry is and I know whose number he called last night.”

****

Three hours later, the wedding was officially called off after Liddy had a stormy reunion with Perry on the porch of Gwendolyn Simpson’s bungalow, where he’d spent all of the morning. He’d learned from Beau that his mom worked the night shift as an emergency room nurse in nearby Hatteras. Perry had confronted her when she came home from work and had been talking with her ever since.

Knowing he had a son changed things. It made him realize how much he wanted to father his own kids. And it made him realize how stupid he’d been to break up with Gwendolyn. Dillon remembered the cause of the break up -- Perry’s desire to move away from this “hick town Southern Point,” while Gwendolyn didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Liddy allowed herself to be comforted by Rev. McAllister, so much so that I was sure I’d be seeing more of my niece in the coming months.

Funny how it all worked out – two Southern Point kids who’d gone off to the big city, returning for a wedding that didn’t happen and finding something to stay on for all the same.

Beatrice King is an aspiring writer from Indiana.