He was so old, a young woman like her would know there was nothing he could do but stare. Might even appreciate that her beauty transcends generations. Maybe she would think of him as a creepy old man or get down on herself for only being attractive to senile old men, but Jeff didn’t think that she should feel either. Hers was a classic beauty.
Her blonde hair bounced from shoulder to shoulder as she looked around. Whatever was in the small bag she buried wasn’t something she wanted people to find. Jeff wondered if she suffered from incontinence as he did. He imagined her on the move, long trip from somewhere and not being able to stop. So she fishes out a bag, does her business and keeps on moving. Only then it starts to smell. She gets off the interstate and lucks into asphalt-less ground just off of 295.
No, that wasn’t it. Jeff could tell there was something a little more to be concerned about, whatever was in that bag seemed important. She seemed to get her bearings as if trying to remember the exact spot she buried it. Then she took off with the subtly of the Apollo missions.
Jeff considered another episode of Law and Order but his hand had already removed the chain on his door and he was hobbling across the street.
He could still smell the exhaust from the woman’s battered red hatchback. What was left of the cartilage in his knees ached as he braved the short incline off the street into the ditch. Level ground was welcoming though slippery. He felt his shoes slide a little on the muddy grass beneath and then he saw where she had dug. There had been no effort to conceal it. The woman must not have thought anyone would venture off the street in this area.
Jeff hadn’t owned a shovel in fifteen years but he wanted one now as his arthritis reminded him he was no young pup. His digging days were over. He kicked at the loose dirt instead, working his way until he felt something unearthly beneath the clumps of grass and mud. His body popped. A moan forced out of his stomach as he knelt and pulled the object out of the ground.
The bag was purple and an imitation of velvet, like the kind liquor pretending to be fancy came in. It had a drawstring that was pulled as tight as could be and then knotted to where Jeff Simms’ years of experience knew to get a pair of scissors rather than trying to pick it open.
As he foraged through his kitchen cabinetry he imagined what could be in the bag. He hoped it wasn’t shit. Jeff knew all about incontinence. He still couldn’t bring himself to wear the adult diapers his children kept sending him to ‘help out.’
People had so many medical problems these days. Jeff couldn’t assume a woman of her youth would not be forced to make an embarrassing roadside stop. And if that was the case then Jeff was the jerk for digging it up. But the bag hadn’t felt mushy aside from the obvious mud clinging to it. Instead there were hard forms within.
Jeff remembered not to run with the scissors once he found them in his junk drawer, however his trembling hands were hazardous enough. He dropped the scissors as soon as he clipped the knot. The bag immediately pursed open and with a soft shake Jeff watched the contents roll out onto his kitchen table.
The sight registered in an instant but Jeff did not gasp or sigh. He just stared, wondering if he was really that senile. He tried to imagine the story behind the woman in the car and the reason she stopped here just outside his home and buried such a thing.
He tried to remember life wasn’t like television, that there often times wasn’t any justice, and perhaps this woman had done the wrong thing to the right person and this was the last bit of evidence to link her to an unfair case in court system which would not listen to the reasons.
No, Jeff knew he was senile. These were not human bones. He was sure of that, for all he knew they were chicken bones that had stunk on the woman’s drive and she just finally had to get rid of them. But then why did she put them in a bag and bury them. She could’ve tossed them anywhere. Every gas station has a trashcan.
Occult sacrifice.
No, pet. Just a pet.
Jeff liked the simple idealism of his final thought. It was a dead pet that another pet kept digging up in the yard so this woman took what she could get and drove it miles and miles away and just picked a spot she knew her dog would not sniff out and dig up again.
Jeff started to shovel the bones back into the bag when his knee popped.
He shrieked as his arm swatted at the table for support. The bones scattered about the room and with a whine Jeff rolled on the floor. The pain was too much to bear. He hated taking the drugs the doctor’s gave him. It made his mind all fuzzy and just like that another day of his last days would whimper away without producing so much as a memory of what he had for breakfast.
Jeff refused to go down that easy. He cursed the linoleum and used the counter to pull himself back to up to his feet, they felt numb and offered no support so he twisted himself into a chair at the table. His eyes fell on the table and spotted one of the few bones that had not been flung across the room. He reached for it.
><><
Jeff stared back at the kitchen table. He was on the floor again holding a different bone than the one he swore he had just picked up on the table. Only Jeff could see clear as day the bone he had grabbed remained on the table. He tried to search his memory for a sign that he only imagined sitting down in the chair.
But his memory was angry that he no longer trusted it.
Dammit, I just sat down. I know it.
Jeff dropped the bone in his hand and reached for a nearby doorknob to aid him. He stood up for less than a second before his knees buckled again and he landed face down on the linoleum floors. The smell of antiseptics still fresh from when he last cleaned it. He couldn’t remember that either.
His mind felt like it had slipped a gear. How could he be in the wrong place? He knew he wasn’t on this side of the kitchen a second ago. He clutched the bone he had dropped and his mind flipped again. He felt nauseous as suddenly he stared from the opposite side the kitchen, and he was sure this time that he was holding a different bone and the one he had picked up by the door was still lying on the floor.
><><
Jeff laughed.
He tried to toss one of the bones as far as he could but it landed in the middle of the street, like some prepubescent girl had thrown it. He was grateful all of his fellow Little Leaguers were not present or at least too dead to have commented on his throw.
Then Jeff walked back into his house, grabbed another bone and continued his laugh out in the middle of the street.
He’d read of this kind of thing in his science fiction magazines as a kid. It was called teleportation. And some how the six bones could transfer Jeff from one to the next like playing connect-the-dots. And he knew their path worked like that of whatever structure the bones once formed. As he collected them he found as long as he had all of them he wouldn’t jump to the next and so soon he was laying them out on the table and from his frail memory he knew they had once formed a human finger.
In all his years Jeff didn’t remember believing more in magic than he did just then. Figures, that beautiful woman was a witch.
But here he was with the answer to so many of his problems. He started small and taped one of the bones to the mailbox just outside his door. He practiced a few times and thought he might scare the postman one day just for a laugh. The next of the bones he took to just outside the grocery store and placed it where he figured it wouldn’t be spotted in some badly hedged boxwood. He was delighted to find that he would no longer need the bus. And that he could carry his grocery bags directly into his kitchen in the speed of a snapped finger.
Convenient.
He then addressed an envelope to his grandchild and mailed him a bone.
><><
“I got your letter grandpa,” His grandson, Will said over the phone.
“Do you have the bone?”
“Yeah, that’s cool is it like a dog bone?”
“No, it’s a wish bone! Go ahead and wish that I was there?”
Before the six-year old could finish hesita
ting, Jeff was standing next to him.
“How did you? Grandpa you’re being silly you were hiding in the closet,” Will said.
“Was I now? Did you check that closet?”
“No.”
“But you’re glad to see me?”
“Yeah. Want to push me on the swings?”
Jeff smiled and wondered if he could mail a bone to China so he could finally see The Great Wall.
><><
Jeff had every intention of becoming a globetrotter. But he never lost his priority of being a grandfather. He visited little Will every chance he got.
They had become the best of friends and Jeff’s daughter appreciated the time his watchful eye gave her to rest. Jeff felt like a million-bucks, or better yet, Grandpa-of-the-Decade!
Then one day much to his surprise he did not arrive in Will’s bedroom.
He arrived in a dark and dank and terrible place. Soda and beer cans and black trash bags swallowed his footing and he collapsed into a heap of trash. The smell barreled him over until he wretched up his morning cereal. He fought to stand again and knew exactly where he had ended up.
This can’t be happening!
Only it was, Jeff was stuck in a garbage truck.
His daughter must’ve found the bone in Will’s room and thrown it out thinking it was simple garbage that the boy had collected. Jeff was so angry he didn’t notice right away that he had lost the bone. It was somewhere in the trash heap.
He fought through wet newspapers and packing materials and all kinds of slime.
Then the air compressor hissed.
“No!” Jeff cried as he could hear the gears starting to churn. He would be crushed alive.
“Help I’m trapped in here!” he screamed. “Somebody help! I’m in here!”
He dove through the garbage hoping in the darkness his hands might stumble upon the bone. He tore apart bag after bag, unleashing the foulest of stenches.
“Stop! Please!” he hoped the garbage men could hear him, but the truck was already growling forward and Jeff was tossed into the compacting mess. He could feel his pressure of the trash as it snapped the bones in his ankles, and his brittle old shins soon followed.
Please God help me, please!
He screamed and dug. He begged that it be a quick death if he couldn’t find that stupid bone. He could feel his heart sputtering. It wasn’t made for this. He was going to die, he just needed to accept that, but he couldn’t. He dug until the familiar shape appeared in his hand. It was too dark to know for sure, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. He squeezed as hard as he could.
><><
Will jumped over a headstone.
“Did you see that, Mommy?”
“Will, be respectful this is a cemetery.”
Will didn’t know what that had to do with anything. He jumped another one and this time his mother yanked him by the arm back off the grass. She almost lost the bouquet of flowers she was carrying.
“Don’t do that, you will make people mad!”
“But nobody sees me. Nobody here is alive anymore. And I know these places aren’t haunted. I’m not six anymore. I’m seven, duh.”
“Oh really?”
Will nodded with pride. He wasn’t afraid of anything.
“Do not jump on people’s graves.”
Will nodded and his mother tugged him back towards another grave.
“Hi, Grandpa!” Will screamed.
“Please,” his mother corrected him, “show some respect.”
“Ah mom, but dead people can’t hear. They’re so old they can’t hear. You’ve got to yell way louder than I did.”
“He’s right,” Jeff said looking at his daughter and grandson.
“How’d you beat us? I thought you hadn’t left your house yet?”
Jeff smiled and rolled forward in his wheelchair. He’d never shared his secret with his daughter, even after the incident with the trash compactor. No, from now on Jeff decided it was best to keep the bones out of places where other people might move them.
“How are you doing?” his daughter asked.
“Well the wheelchair is different, but I’m getting around.”
His daughter bent down and kissed his forehead. “You aren’t a young man. You can’t go jumping around anymore. Mom would’ve chewed your ear off if she could.” She set the flowers in a vase in front of her mother’s grave.
“Oh really?” Jeff smirked, “well I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”
His daughter looked him completely dumfounded and then he laughed.
“Forget about it, all’s well that ends well.”
THE END.
THE GREATEST TRICK
It had been done. No matter what I could’ve done that might’ve convinced me otherwise; it was far too late to try.
Beyond me the cold Manhattan morning doesn’t want the sun to break through the clouds. The wind laughed its way between the tall buildings, smacking the poor excuses for trees as it whisked by.
My nose was cold, but my hands can’t move to warm it as they fight to keep freezing. Only my ears burn.
It was far too late. It had been done.
What use did it make to repeat the words in my head over and over again? Maybe in hopes to numb my mind to the cold pulling its way through my nostrils with every breath?
I still felt the shame though. At least that kept my veins from icing over, reminding me I was still alive. I shouldn’t be shameful for I have saved myself from damnation. I was right. They were wrong. All of them.
Every last one of them.
Maybe the shame dwelled upon me because my choice was just because I feared what could be as opposed to believing what I was doing was actually the right thing? Maybe.
No one wakes throughout Manhattan today. It’s just my eyes that scan the city skyline. Searching the streets for someone, anyone, who had lucked out like me. Had anyone else had enough fear of a possibility that they saved themselves?
No. There’s no one.
Not a soul. Even the birds know what has finally taken place. I haven’t heard a bird in months. But maybe they all flew south. I hope so. I hope they are still alive. Maybe there are others, and they are just smart enough to stay indoors on this morning.
Perhaps they’re still wrapped up tightly in their beds, afraid to venture out because they know that it had been done. The greatest trick.
The greatest trick.
My knees jolted back into place as I rose up to my feet, I must be going now. My cheeks were flush with a sudden rush of blood, at once everything seemed clear to me, and then everything goes in and out of focus. But the air…the air feels so clean.
There is a card shop a few blocks away. They don’t just sell cards. They sell flowers to go with the cards, and chocolate candies and coffee and teas. They sell elegant pens and pencils with twirls and goofy fuzzy erasers. They have a window full of books for your coffee table, cookbooks for every holiday and theme, and collections of photos of almost every photographical subject. They sell prints of famous masterpieces in all shapes and sizes. And have cards just the same with a goofy message on the inside.
I pick up the Mona Lisa. I have never liked her smile. On the front of the card it says, “I know why she smiles.” Inside the card reads “you would be smiling too if you knew you would never be as old as your mother!’
I suppose it’s supposed to be funny in one of those rude sarcastic ways. It’s in the section labeled: Birthday – Mothers.
I shouldn’t have broken the door. The wind seemed to crawl its way through picking up the nature of the shattered glass and cutting through the warmth that still slightly hung in the card shop.
I wasn’t here for the cards, even though I couldn’t help flipping through a few more. I’d never really bought a card before. I’d received plenty, but I never saw the point in them. They seemed to lack substance for me. But someone must’ve gotten something out of them. Look at how many of them there are.
; No, I wasn’t here for the cards, even thought they could be used to start a fire, and I wasn’t here for the chocolate, or the coffee or the tea. Or for the cash that was probably in a safe somewhere close. None of that mattered anymore. I reminded myself again: it had been done.
I still wasn’t numb yet.
On a top shelf they still had three of them stacked on each other. Three of the best selling board games ever made: The Black Hole.
The Black Hole wasn’t any board game. It was the first board game you could play by yourself, or with as many people as you wanted to. There were no limits. The board itself seemed to be magic, but as science proved it was just cool technology using gelatins and electricity.
That’s how you were able to make as many game pieces for the unlimited amount of players who wanted to play on one board. You went online real quick and you selected one of a billion or so styles of game pieces, then you placed a piece of the gelatin into a contraption that went right into your USB port.
Zap!
Just like that your game piece has been formed. It had something to do with metallic particles in the gelatin that reacted to certain magnetic energies or something. I did watch the special on Discovery Channel about it, but I didn’t really retain all the facts. It was interesting but not that interesting. Not at the time anyway. Plus that was five years ago. I shouldn’t be held accountable for stupid facts from that long ago that weren’t important to me then.
I pulled one of the boxes down and stared at the cover. The words “Black Hole” spiraled into the blackest of spaces. “Don’t Get Sucked In!” was fighting its way out of the center.
The shrink-wrap was cold on my fingertips as I pulled away at the plastic covering. It was like opening a Christmas present that I already knew what it was. Disappointment entered my mind as the wind howled, mocking me: “What did you expect?”
The box made it seem so harmless. It was just this colorful cardboard box complete with cheesy catch phrases. I went along with this idea and was able to pry the lid off just like I was about to play Monopoly. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t sure what I was about to do.
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