by Joan Boswell
“He was working here late,” another said.
I held my coffee cup steadily in my hand. Not a drop would spill.
The little lady gym teacher said, “He was going through a rough time recently. His wife left him and took their daughter. It was hard on him. But I can’t believe it came to this.”
“The students all loved him. This will devastate them.” This came from the Home Economics teacher.
The police came. They questioned me intensely. Yes, I was here last night. Yes, working in my classroom the entire evening. No, I never noticed anything out of the ordinary. I keep my door closed, you see. Yes, I knew Lewis quite well, and yes, he had been going through a rough time of late. His wife had left him. Taken their daughter. Yes, I would say he did seem suicidal to me. Yes, most definitely. We were all concerned for him, all of us. And yes, several times I’d seen him working late on something in his lab. When I would go in and ask him about it, he tried to hide it, not that I would know anything about bombs. No problem at all, officer, glad to be of assistance.
I realized that I couldn’t tell the authorities that I’d just killed a noted terrorist. Most of these local authorities are in bed with the Taliban. But I knew what had happened. There was one less terrorist on the planet.
Already news cameras were filming students hugging each other on the grounds, tears coursing down their precious cheeks. Oh, this will make for maudlin television, I thought. Hello, Oprah.
And suddenly I was thinking about fingerprints that I must have left on the door to the roof. Casually, ever so casually, I made my way up the stairs to the roof. A uniformed policeman was there, a young nervous looking man with darting eyes. Before he could stop me, I ducked under the yellow crime scene tape and grasped, firmly, the doorknob to the roof. I made sure he saw me do that.
“Sir,” he said, “Sir, no one is allowed up there. This is a crime scene.”
“Oh, dear, of course. I didn’t realize. I’m so sorry. I’m not myself this morning. Lewis was a dear friend, you see. You’ll have to forgive me. I wanted to put flowers at the site.” And I held up the scraggly bouquet of weeds I had just scrounged from the cracks in the pavement out front.
A year has passed. There is a new chemistry teacher at school, a large woman who wears denim jumpers and Birkenstocks. I ignore her and she ignores me. But Lewis has found a way to torment me from the grave. At night I hear a sound like a roaring in my head, a choir of Lewis’s voices, as if Lewis has become many Lewises, hundreds of Lewises, all calling out to me in unison, “Fly. Fly, fly Maury. Come back up to the rooftop and fly! Burst into a thousand pieces like me and fly.”
I have taken to sleeping with the radio on at night, tuned between stations, but Lewis has found a way to speak through the white noise. “I can fly. Watch me. Watch me...”
“Quiet!” I cover my head with my pillow. “Leave me alone!”
But the voices have only multiplied. I hear them when I am in the middle of a mathematics lecture. I hear them when I am pushing a cart in the grocery store, the wheels squeaking on the tiled floor, “The rooftop, Maury...the rooftop, Maury...the rooftop, Maury.” I can hear them when I am stopped at a red light or driving through traffic, or sitting in a staff meeting. “Come to the roof...come to the roof...come to the roof. Watch me fly...watch me fly...”
His harassments, also, have not stopped with his death. Little things. Always little things, he does. My toilet paper roll placed wrong way on the holder. My toothpaste tube squeezed from the middle. Fruit I have just purchased, spotted and withered in my fridge. Fresh cheese replaced with old bluing blocks. Milk in my fridge, not even my brand, soured and with lumps. Homework erased from the board. Students coming in with the wrong assignments. “Section Twenty-three!” I yell at them. “I assigned Section Twenty-three, but all of you have done Section Twenty-four! How is it that you have all done Section Twenty-four?”
“You assigned section twenty-four,” they tell me, looking at each other in wonder. “You wrote it on the board yesterday.”
I didn’t, of course, but there is no use in arguing. It is Lewis who is doing this to me.
Tonight as I sit here at my desk, my classroom is in shambles. I am writing, writing, but the lead in my pencil keeps breaking. Papers are strewn across the floor. Books are upside down. Students’ desks are upended. The chalk board is full of nonsensical scribbles. I cannot clean up fast enough from Lewis’s tirades. They are getting worse.
He is above me now, dancing on the roof, prancing in those little black shoes of his. I yell loudly for him to stop, stop, but he does not. The dancing continues. I must go up there. To tell him to stop. To make him stop. I must do this. Must go... Must go up to the roof and make him stop. Fly with me, Maury, Fly with me. I pat my breast pocket, where I have made another bomb, and ascend the stairs.
Linda Hall is the award winning author of fifteen novels and a number of short stories. She has received the Word Guild Award five times, and has been short listed for a Daphne Award and a Christy Award. She loves writing short crime fiction. When she’s not writing, she and her husband enjoy sailing. She invites readers to her website: http://writerhall.com
Bad Chef
Joy Hewitt Mann
There was a bad chef named Lang
Who wished to go out with a bang,
But his bomb packed the punch
Of his abominable lunch
And he ended up in meringue.
Decked
Lou Allin
As Evelyn stared into the churning cement mixer, she made three vows about her life in the next world. First, forget graduate school. Second, marry a plumber or an electrician, someone useful. Finally, have fun. None of these tenets related to her marriage with Eliot.
At a turning point fifteen years ago, she could have followed her friend Becky to a private prep-school teaching position on Vancouver Island. Kayaking the Pacific surf, exploring Haida villages, feasting on salmon. But the University of Toronto had offered her an assistantship in English Renaissance literature, and her parents in St. John’s, who had been fortunate to finish high school, were so proud. “You can never have too much education. Think of the choices, dear. Dad wrecked his back working at the warehouse, and I’m on my feet all day at Canadian Tire.” Old saws for old times.
Plain as a wren and too studious and shy to have had many dates, in graduate school she had met Eliot Bracebrook, who was studying eighteenth-century French political philosophy and living in a garret with a leaky waterbed and ten dead plants. His witty banter and dark Byronic looks melted her heart. Every time she saw that sweet curl nestling at his temple, she longed to twine it around her fingers. After a dizzying year of foreign films, cozy ethnic restaurants, and evening strolls along Lake Ontario’s beaches and through the quiet footpaths of the Don Valley, they reached a mutual understanding beyond the plebeian nature of a proposal. She still shuddered at the roseate kaleidoscopic tone of their woodblock wedding invitations:
On the sunlit rocks of Georgian Bay, Evelyn
and Eliot wish to celebrate with you. Barring
some misgivings and calming a few fears, we
believe that we will be good for each other
for a long time to come. Bring a favourite
food to share and a drinking vessel for soft red wine.
She could have wept for the gullible romantic she’d been, a keeper of scrapbooks and photographs. All for a career, then all for love, and where was she? Five hours north of Toronto in Sudbury, a roasted rock mining town where astronauts had trained for the moon walk. The trees had gone south to rebuild Chicago after the Great Fire; then open-pit nickel smelting had rained sulphur until the smaller growth had surrendered and the very earth had washed away. Progress towards regreening had been made, but the giant pines and lofty oaks would never return to an area the size of New York City.
Snatching an assistant professorship at the local university, Eliot had been the soul of logic. “Professional couples have
to make tough choices. We need to go where the better job is. You’ll get on here if you’re patient,” he promised, stressing his budding friendship with his chairman. “Bernard can pull some strings, and besides, English doctorates are flexible.” So flexible that she had been lucky to crawl into a rundown junior high, with large, unruly classes, gargantuan piles of marking, and no fat sabbaticals such as Eliot was planning for this fall. He had his plane ticket for Rouen, where he intended to consult documents on the political ramifications of one of Montesquieu’s trials. “A half-decent offer on the continent, and I’m out of this deep freeze,” he had told everyone at the faculty Christmas party, as if he were a carefree bachelor. “We” was not a word that passed his lips.
But this summer, there was the deck to finish. Last year, for investment purposes, he had insisted that they build a cedar home on a large wilderness lake miles from the city. Land was reasonable, and since a new nickel mine was underway in the area, property values were due to skyrocket for the well-paid white hats who wanted to live near their job.
Suddenly an angry yell broke through the hum of the mixer. “Evelyn, get over here!”
She leaned her shovel against the gravel pile and looked toward the boathouse, where her husband held up several bundles. “What a mess. Boxes of your junk and an old suitcase. Come and get this stuff. I need room for my tools.”
He tossed everything into a heap, settled into a lawn chair and lit a cigarette while he watched a loon dive for minnows. A few minutes later, he went into the house and brought out his boyhood BB gun, seeing how close he could come to spraying the frightened bird with shot.
Evelyn felt her neck muscles tighten as the poor creature fluttered down the lake to safety. During the months of construction, she had developed a non-specific arthritis. It hurt like hell, jumping from the hips to the knees to the feet while leaving her knuckles perpetually sore. How odd that it didn’t run in her family. Maybe those weeks of clearing brush in the cold fall rain. Or cleaning up debris after the work crews: broken shingles, scrap wood, drywall, electrical and plumbing trash layered in chronological fashion like the cities of Troy. He’d made her responsible for tamping the basement earth with a gut-wrenching machine, as well as the parging and interior painting. “Subcontractors are ripoff artists,” he would say. “Top dollar, and there’s still a crack in the foundation. Drunken bastard. Good thing I know the meaning of the word ‘backcharge’.”
Instead of pitching in, Eliot made a more comfortable home at the university for research with his twenty-two-year-old blonde teaching assistant, Tammy. Next year, another nubile candidate would take her place.
Eliot’s Rhodesian ridgeback Monty (short for Montesquieu) chugged into view and observed Evelyn’s movements with a suspicious growl. Their dislike was mutual. It wouldn’t have bitten her but considered her a poor third in the pecking order. The large, beefy dog forced her to the perilous edge of the king-sized bed and barked when she sat in Eliot’s recliner. Evelyn remembered with a lump in her throat how her husband had made her get rid of her two cats, Merlin and Gunner, claiming that he couldn’t tolerate the smell of the litter box. No matter how often she scrubbed and refreshed it, he persisted until she had finally given the animals to the humane society and hoped they wouldn’t be put down. Monty, however, was necessary for security. “A small price to pay for peace of mind out here in the boonies. Worth his weight in gold,” Eliot had said with a scoffing gesture when she had showed him the shreds of her sheepskin slippers.
Down by the boathouse, she picked up the books, old friends almost warm in her hands again, Tucker-Brooke and Levin, her leather-bound Tamburlaine bought at Marlowe’s Cambridge on a graduation trip to England, underlined obsessively, each colour a deeper analysis. They smelled musty but were in good shape, merely needed some dry air.
Then she opened the suitcase her mother had given her for college and found her dissertation, its pages spotted with mildew. She turned to the preface:
Ever since Marlowe was “rediscovered” in a Romantic age ill-equipped to understand him, critics have reeled in horror at the atrocities of this Scythian shepherd, rejoiced in his painful ending, and cited Marlowe’s own atheism as a bellwether for the play, yet could it be that the young poet, well-skilled in the duplicity of his role as a British spy, was playing a joke on his audience, limning a satire to which he planted clues throughout the ten acts?
Limning? Her thesaurus had been too well-thumbed. Evelyn placed a hand over her mouth to avoid laughing out loud. And what a preposterously long sentence, typical for a young doctoral candidate, foolishly confident that the fiery hoops through which she was faithfully jumping for her stern professors would deliver the keys to an honoured career. The realities of a crowded market had hit home when the rejection letters poured in, fresh wounds every day the postman arrived. “Barring an attack of the Black Plague,” one read, “there will not be an opening in our department for another twenty-five years.” How cruel, snug in their tenured nests. She recalled the single offer she had received from a small college in southern Alberta. “Really, my dear,” Eliot had chuckled, inking a New York Times crossword. “A one-year appointment in a hick town full of rednecks. Trust me. You’d be miserable.”
But once she had left academia, Evelyn’s career had suffered the same fate as virginity in Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”: “Jewels, being lost, are found again, this never. ‘Tis lost but once and once lost, lost forever.” Or in the more modern phrasing of one of her eighth graders when he returned from the bathroom to find his books missing. “You leave the room, you take the risk.” The Alberta job might have opened up connections in Calgary or Edmonton, but it was too late.
A scuffling startled her. Eliot strode toward her, tapping his watch, his florid face contorted in scorn. “Jesus, that trash stinks! Stop maundering around in it and get back to business. Don’t you dare bring it inside. Evelyn, do you hear me?”
She rose painfully from her knees, swiping at a blackfly which had nestled into her neck and inspecting the blood on her fingers. The oily repellent was wearing off. “I’ll take my books to school.”
“You haven’t missed them in years. Why get so attached now?” He flipped a cigarette onto the lawn, where it joined a collection. “I’d better not see them in the house. And don’t try to sneak them into the basement.”
As he walked away, Evelyn returned to her treasures. On the bottom of the suitcase, a note from her advisor appeared. “I’m distressed that you cannot take the assistant editorship of the Elizabethan Quarterly next winter. It would have been quite a feather for your resume, but you must do as you see fit.” She had needed the extra time to edit and type Eliot’s five-pound dissertation. What had a wise feminist said? That learning to type enslaved women? That chore had been a first step in trying to please Eliot. But no sooner had she learned one rule, mastered one task, than another took its place. It had taken her years to discover how clever he was at keeping her off-balance, at manipulating her self-doubts and making her feel unworthy of his slightest attentions.
After locating the Deep Woods OFF and spraying herself from head to toe, she returned to the droning mixer. The seven support pillars were ready to be filled. Only a hellish week ago, though it seemed like a lifetime, Eliot had rented a Bobcat backhoe, a “gravedigger,” to excavate the massive holes, leaving piles of boulders as large as bowling balls. Evelyn had been dispatched with a fifteen-pound mine pry bar borrowed from their neighbour to hack down the last foot since the machine couldn’t reach the deeper clay and rock of the Northern Ontario lakeside. Finally, with a small trowel, she had chipped away a quarter-inch at a time, Eliot sipping a frosty lager in the cab of the machine. Then the rain had begun.
“The water is filling the hole. I can’t go any further, farther, whatever,” she had said, her dripping glasses blurring the fine line between rock and clay.
“I told you over and over that the code says five damn feet, so get something to bail with. A margarine
container or an old pot. Then grab a sona tube. We’re ready to go on this one.”
When the hole had been scooped to satisfaction, Eliot held each huge cardboard tube while she shovelled gravel to anchor the base. Then he called the rental agency to send the float to take away the expensive backhoe, so most of the excavation had to be refilled by hand, and the heavy, settled clay did not yield easily.
“Throw the bloody rocks back down, Evelyn. We’re not farming here,” he called as he headed for his Audi. “I have a lunch date with my new grad assistant. Tammy got on my nerves.”
The last hole had been filled yesterday, just before they took Monty to town for his tooth cleaning with an overnight stay in case there was a reaction to the anaesthetic. Now the empty tubes waited for cement. Evelyn put her books and luggage into the trunk of her rusty Neon and returned to work. Her job was to combine the ingredients, not too thin or it wouldn’t harden, and not too thick to pour into the wheelbarrow. Eliot’s careless placement of the gravel pile forced her to walk backwards to hoist the shovelfuls over her shoulder into the mixer. He refused to relocate the cumbersome machine. “Too much trouble. People make such a big deal about ergonomics. Just don’t trip. All I need is a broken ankle for you at this critical point. I’ll be sitting for twenty-four hours in the Emerg.”
She added a slurp of water from the hose and paused to see if the cement was dropping off the blades with the right hesitation. Eliot stomped over, huffing at the delay. “What kind of a mess do you call this?” he asked with a contemptuous grunt. “Aren’t you being scientific? I said, and I said distinctly, five shovels of gravel and sand to one of cement powder. Do I have to write it down? And you should be measuring the water, not just hosing it in.” He removed his canvas hat and wiped his brow. I’m going for a brew. Fool around with this until you have it right. Then come and get me.”
Three beers and several sandwiches later, Eliot was holding the wheelbarrow ready and still frowning. “Too thin. It’s gruel. Never going to set. Do I have to mix this myself? Are you stupid or something? Don’t you have a Ph.D.?” After adding a shovel of cement powder and nodding in satisfaction, he trundled the barrow to the waiting tubes, poking up a foot above the ground. Evelyn’s shoulders ached as she eased each lumpy mass down the hole, hearing the smuck as it hit bottom far below.