Ten-Word Tragedies

by Tim Lebbon

  But this simply wasn’t the same place as the one he’d come to, or the one she had visited so few years ago. UC Berkeley had become Annapolis West, a literal pipeline to send men like Shawn overseas. And thanks to all the migrant workers from the South, Oakland, California, had become Oakland, Mississippi. And that didn’t even touch the fact that everyone who looked like the kind old couple who had regularly sold him fruit had been shoved into pens like cattle.

  And yet, to his own dismay, none of that was what bothered Harold the most.

  They had to win this war. Had to. Harold had no doubt about that. It was a genuine battle between good and evil, and Harold knew he was working on the side of good.

  But while it was one thing to fight fire with fire, it was another to fight fire with the biggest fireball the world would ever know.

  He barely recognized the Radiation Laboratory that he’d joined as an undergraduate anymore. Now, under the Manhattan Project, ‘The Rad Lab’ raced Oak Ridge to be the first team to separate their isotopes and deliver them to Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. That was what kept Harold up so many nights—the knowledge that, no matter how necessary his work was, he’d have no answer at the Pearly Gates when he had to explain what he’d done. And even if his fingerprints were firmly on the most horrific thing humanity had ever created, he’d be damned before he’d let his sister join him.

  Harold stood back up and continued to follow Sophie’s directions until he was standing in front of the post office. And while he still had no answer to the question that had been weighing on him like a millstone, the five-and-dime next door gave him one breath’s respite when their display of local postcards in the front window caught his eye. There, staring at him through the glass, was a perfect photo of Campinale Tower on Berkeley’s campus. Harold always felt that the three-hundred-foot clock tower seemed to keep time for all those who wandered beneath it, like a peaceful guardian. Even if he, himself, might have been cutting those minutes short.

  Harold slipped inside, snagged the postcard off the top rack of the display, and took it to the register. Even if he didn’t know how he would write Elsie back, he knew that he should at least let his parents know that he’d received her letter. More importantly, he knew that mailing the postcard would force him to keep his word by the time the sun set into the ocean.

  ‘May I borrow a pen?’ he asked, once his transaction was complete. When the clerk obliged, he wrote an innocuous message to his parents—

  Dear Folks,

  Just got a letter from Elsie today that I’m going to answer tonight—it took her letter a long time to get here this time.

  Love,

  Harry

  Then he moved next door to the post office and dutifully waited in line for his turn at the counter.

  ‘Good morning!’ the mail clerk welcomed him. ‘How can I help you?’

  Resigned, he handed her the card.

  ‘I’d like to post this,’ Harold told her. ‘And I’ll also need a sheet of stamps.’

  I HATE TO LEAVE THIS

  DELILAH S. DAWSON

  WHEN YOUR LIFE IS A COLD, LONELY THING, it’s only natural to pine for sunshine. That was me, once—a hard little seed trapped in the darkness, deep underground. And then a postcard showed up to brighten the Pennsylvania winter, and it gave me an idea.

  There were words on the back, but they weren’t very interesting; nobody ever said anything good on a postcard. It was the picture that was important: a horse racing park somewhere in Florida. The aerial shot showed a whole lot of nothing around the track, the land razed and seared amber like the sugar crust on a cake—that’s what got me. I wanted to feel that sun on my cheeks, tilt my head back as the humidity undid all my careful curls. I ran my thumb over the worn paper, thinking about how far it had traveled.

  I wondered what blood would feel like, mixed with that hot, golden sand.

  Pompano Park. The Winter Home of Harness Racing.

  Sure can write a headline, can’t they? Thing is, I have never much cared about horses, nor do I care about gambling. But I know my Kenneth, and I knew that he would bite that bait in one big chomp.

  ‘It’s so cold,’ I said one night after fixing him a big dinner. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to go somewhere warm for Thanksgiving? The children aren’t coming home, after all, spread out as they are, and I keep thinking about that postcard.’

  ‘Postcard?’ he mumbled from his recliner.

  He sounded disinterested, but he almost always sounded disinterested unless certain code words were uttered. Steak, beer, baseball, Brigitte Bardot.

  Or gambling.

  ‘The one Mae sent us last year, from her trip to Florida with her sister. Surely you recall?’

  ‘Foolish widow women. Taking trips together.’

  I put the postcard on the pillow he kept splayed over his chest even after he’d eaten his dessert, scooping pie and ice cream directly from the bowl and into his mouth. He picked it up, frowning.

  ‘What the hell is this?’

  I knew his pattern, so I said nothing; just let him read.

  ‘Pompano Park?’

  I busied myself with straightening up his poorly folded newspaper. ‘Well, they’ve got the race track, of course, and you can watch the horses and eat in the dining room with famous people like Mickey Rooney. Mae said it was decorated all over in flamingos, can you believe? And then there’s a beach, and you can go boating or fishing. We could rent a little cottage. Mae said it was cheap as a dream.’

  He flipped the postcard over several times as if expecting to find more information than our batty old neighbor’s dull thoughts.

  ‘Why’s ol’ Mae writing you about pretzels?’

  ‘We gave her a tin of my nice rye pretzels before they left, to eat in the car. The neighborly thing to do, you know.’

  He snorted derisively. This was one of many traps I’d learned to avoid over the past thirty years. If I wasn’t neighborly and good and he heard about it, I got hollered at for not being ladylike and a fine Christian. But if I did do the neighborly thing, he later harangued me for being womanly and sentimental and silly. Snorts were better than slaps, so I’d gotten quite good at quietly making cheap pretzels.

  ‘If she doesn’t wanna leave the warm climate, she should’ve stayed there,’ he finally said, tossing the postcard on the floor where he knew I would pick it up, even if the arthritis was starting to make my knees creak. The sun in Florida would help that, too. ‘We’re in Pennsylvania. It’s gonna get cold. You oughta know that, too, Barbara.’

  I picked up the postcard and headed for the kitchen, where a mound of dishes awaited me. Over my shoulder, I said, ‘Mae told me she saw a man win a thousand dollars cash. Just like that!’ I snapped my fingers. ‘He bet on the right pony. That must be a good piece of luck. He must’ve known something, huh? About the ponies.’

  And then I slipped into the kitchen, out of his sight. Kenneth always made his best decisions when he couldn’t see me. I suppose he needed to feel like he’d done everything on his own, that he was the master of his own ship and not just following the suggestions of some silly female.

  A few minutes passed as the TV news droned on, and then the recliner creaked and groaned. He rubbed his hands together as he came into the kitchen, and I thought about how this had once been a signal for me to turn off the faucet and let myself be led into the bedroom. But wrinkles and a matron’s weight didn’t do it for a man, Kenneth said, and I wasn’t a girl anymore. I was an old biddy pushing sixty, for all that I would never forget the feel of his meaty hand closing on the nape of my neck to guide me through the den.

  But he was old, too, and whatever he needed I suppose he found somewhere else, so he just stood in the door to the kitchen and watched me work.

  ‘Pompano Park,’ he finally said. ‘Never seen Florida. And I know a thing or two about the ponies. More than that fella who won a grand.’

  I nodded, scrubbing a pot, staring out the window at the first brown leaves carpeting
the lawn.

  ‘That’ll be nice,’ I said.

  Because showing too much enthusiasm was just as bad as showing too little. What a fine tightrope Kenneth made me walk. To think—I wasn’t allowed to be too excited about a trip!

  ‘I’ll put in for time tomorrow,’ he said, weary as if he was talking to a small child with a long Christmas list. And then his voice got sharp. ‘You better budget, though, Barbara. Don’t you go buying a buncha saggy dresses and umbrellas. Gas ain’t free.’

  I nodded meekly.

  ‘Of course, Kenneth.’

  And with that, he left, muttering, ‘You’re a lucky woman. Don’t you forget that.’

  ‘Of course, Kenneth,’ I said to the empty room.

  I realized I’d been scrubbing the same pot the whole time, the hot water nearly overflowing the basin and my hands as red as boiled hot dogs. I ran my knobbled pink knuckles under cool water and dried them off gingerly.

  Those last few years, when I could no longer provide what Kenneth thought a good wife should or even look agreeable as I delivered his dinner, he’d gotten cruel. Not with his fists or anything, nothing worse than a slap here or there. No, he’d mostly started treating me like a broken icebox. Little digs here and there, not really talking to me but at me, moving around me instead of touching me. As if there were nothing left to want from me and I was just another hulking thing taking up space in the kitchen. And I’d stayed silent. But something was changing inside me. That little seed was starting to send out shoots, to feel around, to plan.

  The thing about beauty is that it fades. But harsh, arid things—they get dried out and stay awhile. Rocks and fossils are things that don’t budge, that can’t be softened. They wait, patiently. That’s what I liked so much about that postcard. That particular spot of land looked like it was old and baked and hard and had secrets. Just like me.

  It was a long drive, and not a pleasant one. Two days in my old Ford Falcon, as Kenneth prized his Mustang above all else and didn’t like me to touch it.

  ‘This car’s too small,’ he said after a few hours of radio news, shifting his bulk back and forth as if the seat might magically grow wider. ‘How can you drive this piece of shit?’

  That was another game of his. If I didn’t answer, I got hollered at for ignoring him, and if I agreed with him that it was a piece of shit, I got hollered at for being ungrateful. But even if I complimented the wretched little automobile, that was still disagreeing with him, and he didn’t like that, either.

  ‘Maybe we should stop for lunch?’ I asked instead. He didn’t know it, but Kenneth was always meanest when he was hungry.

  He didn’t speak again for another hour, and then he turned into a diner, grumbling about the price of the newspaper. He next grumbled about the stickiness of the booth inside, and then about getting the old waitress instead of the pretty young one, and then about their ideas on over easy eggs. He grumbled about the bill but paid it, and I quietly left a quarter on the table, since Kenneth didn’t believe in tipping if you were never going to see a person again, anyway. That poor lady had put up with him all along as if she knew well how to deal with an angry man. No matter how mean he was, she just called him sweetie and honey and kept on filling up his coffee. She deserved a lot more than a quarter, but Kenneth never gave me much pocket money, and I needed every bit I had saved.

  That night, we stopped at a terrible motel somewhere in one Carolina or another, a mountainy sort of place with so many pine trees, and it was the cheapest little thing with the saddest mustard yellow carpet. We ate in another diner across the street, and it might as well have been the first one. Everything tasted like sawdust. Breathing in the same air with Kenneth all day, the car just heating and reheating it for us, had left a bad taste in my mouth. I barely had the energy to keep up with his grumbling and almost told him I had a headache before I caught myself. Complaints would only make it worse. Mine, I mean. His were perfectly acceptable and nearly constant.

  I ordered a flat iron steak because it wasn’t too pricey, and when they gave me my knife to cut it, it felt so good and smooth in my hand, with a pleasant sort of heaviness.

  ‘Barbara, what the hell are you doing?’

  My head snapped up to find Kenneth staring at me like I’d grown a third eye.

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  He pointed at my plate. ‘You about done cutting that?’

  My medium rare steak was just all sliced up to ribbons, blood leaked all over the plate and coloring my mashed potatoes pink.

  I put the knife down, so carefully, and put the pieces of my face into a smile.

  ‘Silly me. I was just dreaming of that restaurant. The one at the horse racing place? Mae said it was fit for a queen.’

  Kenneth shook his head. ‘We don’t have a queen. We’re a democracy.’

  We’re a republic, but he wouldn’t want to hear that.

  ‘Fit for a movie star then. We have those. Maybe we’ll see one when we’re there.’

  His smile was a little ridiculous, something that lascivious on a sixty-year old man. ‘Yeah. Movie stars. Brigitte Bardot and Marilyn Monroe. Maybe we’ll sit next to Frank Sinatra, huh?’

  ‘Wouldn’t that beat all?’

  He dissolved back into his daydreams of being someone swell, and I slipped a bit of steak into my mouth. It tasted of salt and grease, because you can’t taste any blood, even when a steak is rare, can you? It’s just juice. It wasn’t even good juice at that.

  I promised myself I’d order a much nicer steak at that fancy restaurant at Pompano Park. I really was dreaming of that dining room. And even more, I was dreaming of what would come after.

  We arrived in Pompano Beach after dark. I was about to go mad after hearing that much talk radio, all those angry men with thoughts they needed others to know, just bleating at each other like goats, with toothpaste jingles in between. Kenneth didn’t like anything that took any imagination if it was made after 1940. All the music was for hippies and degenerates, and even television shows were ridiculous, unless there was a lady wearing a short skirt, at which point his eyes got real round while he foamed at the mouth and yowled about what classy ladies should wear. I’d secretly caught him watching Mary Tyler Moore a few times, but he didn’t know about that.

  I’d hoped to rent one of those cute little pastel beach cottages, but Kenneth had assured me early on that I would throw money at a hole in the ground and we could just as well stay in a far cheaper motel. It wasn’t like we were there to go to the beach, anyway, was it? Nobody, he’d assured me, wanted to see my elephant skin on display in a bathing suit.

  He had a talent for picking terrible motels, and this one was just as sad and saggy as the last one. It had a warm, wet feeling, as if all the damp towels and suits just sunk into the walls, and it stayed as moist as the inside of a dog’s mouth all the time. Everything smelled like salt and chlorine, and when I stepped inside, the carpet squelched under my feet. I was the first one in. It was dark as I fumbled for the lamp pull, and I allowed myself to silently snarl. It took so much energy, keeping my face like a flat mask and smiling and nodding and agreeing with Kenneth all the time, and it was good, for just a moment, to let that mask fall.

  ‘Smells like a dump,’ Kenneth said behind me, as if it were suddenly my fault.

  I put my face into place and turned on the lamp.

  ‘Looks like a dump, too.’

  ‘I like the paintings,’ I said softly.

  He snorted. ‘You would.’

  It was decorated in a beach theme, with pink walls and gold plaster shells and crinkled watercolors of the dunes looking over a placid ocean. I’d never seen the ocean before, and it didn’t look like Kenneth would be indulging me on this trip, either. All our family trips had been to the historical places he was interested in—the Capitol, Civil War battlefields, the Grand Canyon. And whether it was said or not, I knew we were only here so Kenneth could gamble at the horse park and maybe fish a little, if he lost too much m
oney at once. My job was to pretend I didn’t exist, stay out of his way, and supply anything he needed without grousing a bit, and if I performed ably, I would be allowed that one magical dinner at the restaurant.

  This, in his mind, was more than adequate payment for my…

  Servitude?

  Yes, that’s it. We can call it an indentured servitude. All those years ago, when I’d stood in front of everybody in a pretty white gown, I’d been tricked into thinking Kenneth Moyer believed his own half of our wedding vows. He didn’t love, he didn’t cherish. Neither in sickness nor in health. He did remember with great exactitude that I was supposed to obey him, though. He told me so often enough, frequently with a bible verse from Ephesians that he could never quite remember. One time, when I’d spent too much on Carla’s school shoes, he’d gotten nearly apoplectic and hollered, ‘Look, I’m God to you, okay? God is God to me, and I’m God to you! So buy the cheap shoes!’

  I’d almost cried, back then.

  Now I can see how ridiculous it was. How his threats were empty ones. All those years, I thought the worst thing he could do was leave me, but now I see that it might’ve been the best thing. For me, for the kids. For everyone. Maybe even him. He could’ve gone out to find Brigitte Bardot and realized that she’s got just as much morning breath and cellulite as anybody.