Life is Short: The Collected Short Fiction of Shawn Inmon

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by Shawn Inmon


  “So, I’ve got a deal I’d like to offer you. I haven’t met the right man, yet…”

  “Yes?” I urged her, although the nausea returned.

  “Anyway, now that Ma’s gone, this place—“ she swept her arm around her head, “and that tape is all mine. Lots of other stuff, too. A bunch of Dad's old clothes, lots more pictures. I think his old guitar is up in the attic, somewhere.”

  August Wolf’s lost Stratocaster. Of course. Who could ever be worthy to strum its long-silent strings?

  I dropped to one knee. “Patricia Simper,” I said, looking over her shoulder into the far distance, “I do not yet have a ring, but would you marry me?”

  “Oh, my,” she blushed. “This is all so unexpected. You’re not exactly what I always dreamed about, Lawrence, but if I put a mirror to your lips, I’m sure you’d fog it. Yes, I’ll marry you.”

  She held her ham hock arms out to me. I hopefully reached a hand out for a firm handshake, but she was having none of it. She enveloped me in an embrace so full of flesh, polyester, and talcum powder, I nearly choked. I closed my eyes and waited for it to be over. Eventually, and I mean a long eventually, it was.

  “When?” she asked.

  “No time like the present.” Forcing those words out, I am sure, shortened my lifespan at least a few weeks.

  “Oh,” she said, batting me with one meaty hand, “You are an anxious one, aren’t you?”

  I was, of course.

  While Patricia made a few phone calls to arrange our nuptials, I ran upstairs to check out the situation in my room. She had indeed tossed it. I neatened everything up, put it in the suitcase, and set it by the door. I put my shoes on and rejoined Patricia in the foyer.

  “Lucy Mae Walcott is our Justice of the Peace. She advised me not to do anything hasty so soon after Ma has passed. Do you think she’s right? Should we wait?” She batted her eyes.

  “True love knows no peril, although fraught with adversity, it must always win out.”

  “Huh?”

  “I don’t think we should wait.”

  She smiled broadly, revealing that spinach had been part of her breakfast. “That’s all I wanted to hear. We can walk over there and be married in less than thirty minutes. But first, let me look at you.”

  She cast a critical eye upon my rumpled shirt and trousers, my red suspenders, my poorly-shined shoes. “Well, it's not a tux, but I guess this will have to do.” She licked her thumb, leaving a small globule of saliva hanging perilously from it, and smoothed out my eyebrows.

  I smiled and said, “Excuse me, dearest, I need to visit the men's room first.” I managed to make it to the bathroom and close the door before heaving. I didn't vomit, but it was touch and go there for a moment.

  Sure enough: less than thirty minutes later, we had walked the four blocks to the Justice of the Peace’s home, filled out the paperwork, and paid our twelve-dollar fee. In the eyes of the State of Alabama, if perhaps not the Lord, we were now Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Culverhouse.

  We celebrated by stopping at the Wetumpka Café. By then it was early afternoon, so I displayed my knowledge of local cuisine by ordering “Dinner.” My blushing bride did the same, and enjoyed it so much she ordered a second round of baked ham, chitlins, biscuits and gravy, collard greens, and a thick slice of banana cream pie. Say whatever else you will about Patricia Culverhouse, the woman was an impressive eater.

  Once home, Patricia's voice grew husky. “I suppose you’re anxious for the wedding night to start?”

  I swallowed to force a bit of moisture down my barren throat. “Oh yes, dear, of course. But first, I’m wondering, can I get the other half of our bargain? The tape?”

  “Oh, pooh.” She put on the most grotesque pout imaginable. “Don’t you trust me? Every good marriage needs trust.”

  “Of course I do, but…well…but I will perform so much better once I have just seen it and held it in my hands once more. That will get it off my mind so I can focus on us.” I thought it one of my best lines.

  She narrowed one eye. “Humph. I suppose. All right. I left it down at the station. After that little stunt you pulled last night, I didn’t think I could trust you in the same house with it. For all I know, it could be worth a lot of money.”

  “Well, if you’ll run down to the station and retrieve it, I will take a shower so I’m nice and fresh when we attend to our marital duties.”

  She frowned, and I knew I had bungled. “That makes it sound like a chore. Is that what it is to you?”

  “Of course not, dear. That was just the turn of a phrase. This will be heaven made flesh for me: joining the family of the greatest musician of our age.”

  “Okay, Larry, if you say so. You go take a bath. There’s no shower in the house. I’ll be back in two shakes. Get ready for the time of your life. I’ve got a lot of frustration to work out.”

  I managed to wait until she closed the front door before I shuddered.

  I hurried upstairs, took the quickest bath imaginable, and changed into my clean set of clothes. Neatened up, I went downstairs and perched on the edge of the sofa. Twenty minutes after she had left, Patricia came back. She had the tape box, but looked unhappy. “What’s wrong, dearest?” I asked.

  “I’ve just been thinking. You haven’t seemed all that excited about us getting married. And now, you don’t seem all that excited about our wedding night. I’m starting to have second thoughts about our whole deal.”

  I settled my stomach, thought about faraway places, and stepped into a clinch with her. I worked my way past the shelf of her bosom and stomach, and forced my lips against hers. I held them there while I counted to ten. As we pulled apart, I learned that I hadn't sold it well enough. “Well, that’s the least passionate kiss I’ve ever seen, but I’ll give you a chance to improve on it. Give me ten minutes to freshen up and get more comfortable, then come up to my room.”

  “Yes, dearest, that is my fondest wish. But, first, can I have the tape?”

  “After,” she said, and pirouetted like one of the dancing hippos in Fantasia. She flounced up the stairs, and I heard water filling the tub. It was now or never.

  I sprinted up the stairs to look for the tape. I ran into her room and conducted a quick search, but it turned up nothing. I was about to move on to another room when I remembered where I hid my bad magazines from Mother when I was a teen. I lifted up the mattress and there, tucked between it and the box springs, was my true love. I snatched it up and held it to my breast. My joy knew no bounds. It was the happiest moment of my life.

  I ran to my room, grabbed my suitcase, then paused for a moment, thinking of all the other August Wolf treasures she had promised. The photographs. The guitar in the attic. Then an image popped into my mind: Patricia's nude form sprawled on her bed, body and eyes beckoning. I put the tape inside the suitcase, threw the door open, and prepared to flee.

  I found myself staring into the face of Patricia Culverhouse née Simper. Her eyes blazed. My stomach turned, but held.

  “I knew it,” she hissed. “I knew you were a two-timing low-down wet fart of a little weasel.”

  “Wait, Patricia. What’s wrong?”

  Then I looked down at my suitcase and knew that it told the story of my betrayal. That was when I spotted the knife in her hand.

  “You’re not exactly my Prince Charming either, you know. I was just gonna close my eyes and pretend you were Phil from Duck Dynasty."

  The question of whether to take that as a compliment or an insult would keep until weightier matters found resolution. “Wait! Are you going to kill me?”

  The question hung in the air for a moment.

  “I thought about it, but you ain’t worth it.” She stood back, no longer barring my passage. “You want to welch on our deal? Fine. Go ahead.”

  She didn’t have to make an offer like that twice. I slid past her and ran down the stairs. As my hand touched the doorknob of the front door, glorious freedom in sight, she spoke again. “But wait.
r />   There’s something you need to know before you take off out of here with your tail tucked ‘tween your balls.”

  I didn’t dare ask, but she continued anyway.

  “I have just one word to say to you: degaussed.”

  Until that moment, I would have been willing to bet there were no words in Patricia's vocabulary that were not also in mine, but here she proved me wrong. “De…de-what?”

  “Degaussed. Oh, that’s right, you’ve never worked in radio. You probably don’t know what that means, do you, Mr. High and Mighty?”

  I didn’t, and for my own sanity, I knew I didn’t want to know.

  “A degausser is a piece of equipment we keep in the Production Room at the radio station. We use it to erase the tapes that we record commercials on.”

  My sight dimmed at the edges. My stomach plummeted to somewhere below the soles of my shoes.

  “I knew what kind of a dickless wonder you were when I first laid eyes on you. I thought maybe the chance to be with a real woman would wake you up, but as soon as the wedding was over, I could see there weren’t gonna be no honeymoon. So when I went to the station to get the tape, I ran the degausser over it. Not just one pass, either. Dozens. Nothin’ left on that tape but a few hisses."

  “Hisses…” I repeated numbly. “You…you erased the tape? There’s nothing left?”

  “Six ways from Sunday, honey. Now get your big city ass out of my house, and never come back.” She smiled her porcine, contented, resentful smile.

  Afterword

  And that’s just about all of the story that is worth recounting. It’s why I’ll be spending the next twenty-five to thirty years of my life here in the Kilby Correctional Facility in Montgomery County, Alabama. I remain constantly surprised to find myself here. If proposing the destruction of an invaluable, timeless work of art and then bragging about it isn’t justification for homicide, then I don’t know what is.

  I don’t actually remember killing her, truth be told, but apparently I was found still stabbing her body several hours later, when the postal lady came to deliver the mail.

  The ironic thing is that she was lying about destroying the tape. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I think she put a fake tape in the box, or perhaps a copy. Either way, I learned at the trial that the real tape still exists, as the police found it among her things at the station. I believe she thought that if it meant that much to me, it would have value to someone else as well. And, since we were married at the time of her death, it now belongs to me. The music, thank God, is still out there.

  I wouldn’t bring that piece of divine musical history into this living purgatory, of course. I arranged for it to be shipped to Mother in West Covina. She promised me she would put it in the safe deposit box, along with all the other things she didn’t want me to steal or hock.

  Every night as I drift off to sleep, I picture the tape safely tucked away waiting for me. I know these next twenty-five to thirty years will pass in a blink. The odd thing is, the more I think about the tape, the more I would swear I can hear it playing all the way from West Covina.

  Author’s Note for The Legacy of August Wolf

  If you read a lot of classic literature, you might recognize the bare bones of this story, as I pulled it from Henry James’ great novella, The Aspern Papers. Don’t worry, it’s not plagiarism. I didn’t lift so much as a single passage from Mr. James story, just the idea of an individual being obsessed with a “lost” object from a dead celebrity. For Mr. James, it was a series of letters from a dead poet. For music-obsessed me, it was, of course, a lost recording.

  By the way, several early readers of the story inquired as to where they might find some August Wolf music to listen to. The answer is, “only in my mind”, as I made him up out of whole cloth. He never existed, although I used Hank Williams Sr. as my starting point for him.

  I’ve been wanting to write a story like this—with an unreliable narrator—for quite some time, but I had to work my way up to it. I’m glad I finally did, as Lawrence Culverhouse, warts and all, definitely came alive in my mind. I hope you enjoyed his story.

  Life is Short Author’s Note

  There you have it. Thirteen stories I wrote over a four year period. I sincerely hope you enjoyed them. If you did, and you would like to know when I am releasing new stories, you can sign up for my New Alert List by clicking http://bit.ly/1cU1iS0. When you sign up, I will send you an ebook copy of Rock ‘n Roll Heaven for free. You will also be the first to know when I publish something new. I will also be sending out brand new short stories for free to everyone on my mailing list every other month or so.

  As usual, I have many people to thank. It’s my name on the cover, but so many people work with me behind the scenes to make this book better.

  Linda Boulanger of Tell~Tale Book Covers created the cover, which I absolutely love. I think I told her I wanted something surreal, and this was the first thing she came back with. She’s been designing my covers from my very first book, and I owe her a huge debt of gratitude. Linda also did my formatting on the book, which means she took my messy Word file and turned it into a book.

  J.K. Kelley provided substantive editing on every story, with the exception of The Short Goodbye, and provided developmental editing on most of them. That means that I approached him with an idea, and we batted it around, looking for flaws, before I wrote it. Once I did write, he took my words and polished them into the vastly superior version you hold in your hands.

  Debra Galvan served as proofreader on each of these stories, Chad Stinson Goes for a Walk, which I think I forgot to thank her for when it was first published. Debra is the final set of eyes to look at my manuscripts before I send them off to Linda to be formatted. No matter how often I have gone over and over a story, she always manages to find at least a few errors and save me the embarrassment of publishing them. Thank you, Deb!

  I owe a huge debt to Dianne Bunnell, John Draper, Gene Inmon, Laura Heilman and Terry Schott. They act as first readers for me, giving me feedback at the earliest stages. Dianne also came up with the title for the book at one of our book critique meetings. Thank you, Di!

  I have at least 6 more books planned for release in 2017, so I hope our paths will cross again a little later on.

  Until then, constant reader, thank you for your time and attention. You are the reason I sit down at my keyboard every morning and ask myself, “What if…”

  Shawn Inmon

  Seaview WA

  January, 2017

  Also by Shawn Inmon

  Feels Like the First Time

  A true love story of loss and redemption, set in the ‘70s.

  Both Sides Now

  The flip side of Feels Like the First Time, told from Dawn’s perspective.

  Rock ‘n Roll Heaven

  Jimmy Velvet dies, but wakes up in the presence of the greatest icons in rock ‘n roll history.

  Second Chance Love

  Steve and Elizabeth were best friends and undeclared lovers, until fate separated them. Twenty years later, they have a second chance, if they are strong enough to take it.

  The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver

  What if you could do it all again? Thomas Weaver dies, but awakens in his teenage body and bedroom, all memories intact.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Sigh

  Fallen

  Old Man

  Lucky Man

  Shannon

  My Monarch Summer

  My Matanuska Summer

  One Last Cup of Tea

  Chad Stinson Goes for a Walk

  Bull Lick Lodge

  Christmas Town

  The Short Goodbye

  The Legacy of August Wolf

  Life is Short Author’s Note

  Also by Shawn Inmon

 


 

 


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