Grinning Cracks

by K W Taylor

  The director sighed. “Aunt Sarah, sit down. Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

  Sarah folded her arms in front of her and remained standing. “Lost another, have you? Well, there’s another wedding I have to plan for myself, I suppose.”

  “We can always stop growing him.”

  Sarah gave her nephew a sad half smile. “I know, lad. But dammit if I don’t love him. This time, we’d at least be the same age. Less confusion for him. We can actually be together longer.” She shrugged. “Take your time, though. I’ve got wine to make.”

  Jim gave his aunt a wan smile. “Sometimes I envy what you have, Sarah.”

  Sarah glanced at the photograph on her nephew’s desk. “Don’t,” she said. “You get to keep your memory pure.”

  “Then let him go,” he suggested. “You could just hold on to that, if you’d prefer.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Maybe someday,” she said. She took a deep breath and let it out in a ragged sigh. “But not just yet.”

  bugul noz

  There were no sounds of animals, not in this part of the forest. No birds sang. There was nothing but the stir of the wind through the trees.

  Under the traveler’s feet, something hard crunched. She paused. The ground beneath her slippers did not feel rocky. She crouched, feeling along until one finger pricked something sharp. With a little cry, she drew back her hand. Liquid oozed from the wound. Something was broken here, something glass, perhaps.

  She ventured on. Her cane touched flagstones a few paces on.

  “Hello?” she called. She proceeded forward and discovered the cottage door. She knocked.

  “Go,” came a gruff voice.

  “Sir, I merely seek water. I shan’t keep you.”

  “Go!” the cottage dweller repeated. “Or risk a terrible assault on your senses!”

  The traveler laughed. “My senses are already assaulted, some of them even missing.”

  There was a whoosh and a change in the air and the light. The traveler could sense something standing over her, something tall, and she heard the cottage dweller’s sharp intake of breath.

  “Come in,” he said, his voice now softer, gentler. She sensed him stand aside.

  “I simply need a cup of water,” she said, still standing on the threshold. “You needn’t invite me in if I’m disturbing you.”

  “This is...people don’t ask for my hospitality. I’ve forgotten my manners. Please, come in.”

  She smiled and proceeded forward. A chair was immediately at her back, a cup of cool water thrust into her hands.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked. “I’ve got a stew on.”

  “You’re lovely.”

  The cottage dweller began to weep.

  blackout

  As Amber reached for the door, the lights went out. She gasped but made no other sound.

  The hallway was empty. The only illumination came through far away windows deep within each glass-doored office suite. The light was so filtered and far away that it was but a faint glow, enough to prove she was headed in the right direction for the exit, but little else. She put her free hand in front of her face and could only make out a fuzzy blob.

  Keeping her eyes alert, Amber reached into her purse for her cell phone. Still looking forward as she walked along the corridor, Amber pressed a few buttons on the phone before glancing down at it. She could feel it there, could tell she had her thumb against the pound key, and yet there was no blue-tinged illumination. “Crap,” she muttered. She moved her thumb to the power key and pressed firmly. Still nothing. Great time for a dead battery, she thought.

  Now her heart began to pound in earnest, even as she tried to reassure herself that nothing was wrong. The weather today was fine. This couldn’t be a thunderstorm-induced power failure.

  But, then again, if it wasn’t…

  No, she decided, that was no way to think. She just had to leave the building. Elevators certainly wouldn’t work, so she moved toward the corridor wall and kept her fingertips there to guide her to the stairs. She walked through the open fire door and onto the landing but proceeded no further.

  This would be a problem.

  The stairwell did not benefit from any illumination whatsoever. Apparently none of the lower floors’ fire doors were open to allow even a sliver of light through. There were no windows until street level, a full six stories down.

  I can do this, she told herself. I’m capable, I’m brave, and I’ll be fine.

  She pulled her purse strap over her head, slinging it across her body securely. The useless cell phone, she shoved back inside the front pocket, along with her keys. The handrail on the left was just a slender pole screwed into the wall, and it didn’t continue at each landing level. She decided instead to reach out for the handrail on the right, which spiraled into the center of the stairwell all the way down and had a wire mesh panel beneath it. After a few seconds of batting at empty air, Amber’s hands pounded against the cool, reassuring metal.

  Clutching the rail, Amber crouched down and swung her legs out in front of her, sitting in an awkward forward bend. She drew her knees up and thrashed out with her heels, trying to feel along the floor for where it broke into the first few steps. When she couldn’t feel the spot, she moved her left hand in front of her right and slid forward a few inches. She then repeated the move with her heels and continued the careful scooting and banging process until she finally found the first stair.

  Amber shuffled along until she was able to slide down each step, keeping her right hand clinging to the wire mesh under the handrail and her left hand on the stairs themselves, feeling along each tread and riser until she’d cleared that spot with her tailbone. After excruciating moments, her hand struck what she could tell was the first landing.

  “Only eleven more to go,” she said aloud. This somehow made her both relieved and sad, and she bit back a rumble of laughter.

  After continuing along in the same manner for several more flights, she could at last see a grey glow just barely illuminating the last few levels. When she was two flights away, she finally felt comfortable enough to rise from her seated position and, still clutching the handrail, walk down the rest of the steps at a pace that would’ve made a snail seem like a stock car.

  The front door of the building was gorgeous; the sparkle of the now-nighttime street beyond it was the most beautiful sight Amber had ever seen. Streetlights and stars and neon and headlights, cars whizzing by reminding her that humanity did still exist...it was almost too much to take. She felt tears slide down her cheeks.

  As she pressed on the horizontal bar in the middle of the door, a rush of cool, early spring air dried her tears. Amber was greeted with the scent of motor oil and cherry blossoms.

  CHOLERIC

  Jeremy used to like it when people were afraid of his house. He especially used to like it when neighborhood kids sang out “I vant to drink your blood!” in a hail of giggles whenever he emerged, black-clad and skulking, from the house. Never mind that he immediately put on a Taco Hut ballcap and climbed into a Chevy, not a hearse. Never mind that there were neither ghosts nor vampirism going on inside, just lots of jangly noise from poorly-played guitars. The worst thing the house had seen was poverty—the elegant, noble sort of poverty suffered by overeducated, ill-prepared folks like himself who were long on ideas but short on talent. And so he pushed underfed limbs into black turtlenecks with threadbare seams, pretending to be a Ginsbergian beatnik rather than another victim of economic meltdowns.

  He and Kendall found the place dirt cheap when they’d taken to getting their real estate listings from less straightforward means. Their friend Doug made the most money of any of them. “Least I can do is tell you when I think a gig could get you a pad,” he’d told them long ago. “If I gotta be elbow-deep in other people’s brains, I sure as hell hope a buddy gets something good out of it, right?”

  Doug had texted Kendall the details at his latest cleanup site. “They’re not moving back
in, so the landlord’s kinda stuck,” she told Jeremy. She was blinking very fast. “C’mon, it’s got two bedrooms!”

  Jeremy sighed. “Murder?” he asked. “‘Cause the last time it was a murder, Doug didn’t do so hot and I could still see the chalk outline.” He didn’t mention imagining he could see a tint of blood on the kitchen walls.

  “No, it was a hoarder.”

  A brief flicker of memory, like a few frames of an old eight millimeter projected crookedly against rough plaster, danced through Jeremy’s head. It wasn’t so much the stacks of newspapers that came to mind, but the unwashed dishes and overflowing litter boxes. Flies buzzed everywhere. Whenever one got full, his mother would shuffle across the street to the dollar store for a new box, leaving the old one to keep pumping ammonia into the air.

  “I can’t live where there was a hoarder,” Jeremy mumbled.

  But Doug was getting better at his job, and when they finally went to see the house, it was devoid of all unpleasant stench and bio-hazardous material. Its bones were solid, all hard wood and brick. Given wealthier tenants, it might have been modestly grand. Instead, the per-hour paychecks of a taco slinger and a grocery clerk couldn’t manage to take care of the little things. And so the porch steps cracked, the scraggly yard grew weeds, and the windows were covered from the inside by Indian blankets instead of curtains.

  “It’s the VOM-pire!” Laughter and running feet and kids crouched down unsubtly behind parked cars. Jeremy was paler than usual, spending more time indoors than out, a pile of grad school applications pored over and left with sweaty smudges on the edges but without a single pen stroke. He knew he was hunger-and-nicotine thin.

  He thought of Kendall upstairs, curled into a ball in her room—her room, not his, because she “didn’t want to ruin their friendship.” It was funny how their friendship was inversely important based on the size of his checking account.

  He wanted to laugh at the kids, to chase them with a silly grin and pretend to be a monster, but he couldn’t. “That’s right!” he screamed instead. “I’m a vampire, and I’m gonna kill you in your sleep!”

  Tiny gasps went up. Too late, Jeremy realized there wasn’t a single hint of joking in his tone. He felt sick as he watched dozens of little feet scatter and scurry off down sidewalks and alleys, getting as far away from the young man as they could.

  When Jeremy sealed himself up in his car, it muffled all sound outside. He sat hunched over the steering wheel, listening only to his own breath and heartbeat, both rapid. He took one last look back up at the darkened windows of the house before pulling away from the curb for the last time.

  christmas wrapping

  Part I: Boxing Day

  Dave rolled his eyes when he pulled up to the farmers’ market. The Christmas carols on endless loop were bad enough. The token Hanukah songs were worse; nobody likes dreidel songs as a kid, and their inclusion in retail playlists every December always seemed like so much politically correct pabulum used to assuage Gentile guilt. But now that the holidays were almost over, the loudspeakers were churning out something truly awful.

  Show tunes.

  “Shirley Jones,” he muttered under his breath. “Fuck you, Shirley Jones. I don’t need you and your Music Man bullshit today.”

  Sighing, Dave marched to the produce vendor. Fruit was easy to take to a potluck. He pulled a crumpled paper lunch sack from his jeans pocket and scanned the baskets before spotting what he wanted.

  One green pear sat alone. Just as he reached for it, a smaller, wrinkled hand shot out. The old woman had the pear before Dave had time to do more than let his jaw drop open.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  The woman looked stunned, not to mention ancient in a ridiculous, sitcom way. White hair pulled back in a bun. Crocheted sweater. Knee high stockings falling down around her ankles. “I beg your pardon!”

  “Please, lady. You heard way worse in bed with Moses back in the day.” He raised an eyebrow. “I hear he liked the dirty talk.”

  The woman made a noise that sounded like the growl of an angry Muppet. “I should report you!”

  “To who? The yuppie police?” Dave looked around at their fellow shoppers, all L.L. Bean-clad young couples. “C’mon, that was the last pear. It’s mine. Give a fella a break.”

  The woman walked around Dave and plunked her pear down on the counter.

  “Fine.” Inwardly, Dave wished she’d die before getting to eat the damn thing.

  Twenty-four hours later, Dave stood in the hallway outside his apartment. In one shaking hand, he held a red piece of paper. The door across from his sprang open. “Hey, buddy, I thought that was you!”

  Without responding, Dave turned and glared at his neighbor Bernie. “They’re evicting me.” He let the paper flutter to his feet. “They can’t fucking evict me.” He took a step toward the other man. “I almost wanted to murder an old lady yesterday over a piece of fruit! When I went to my car after work today, two pigeons were sitting on the hood, and they wouldn’t move. It was Hitchcock creepy. And they let me watch while they took two epic shits on it! And now—”

  “Don’t forget your divorce,” Bernie added. When he saw a vein bulge out on Dave’s forehead, he cleared his throat and looked down. “Sorry.”

  “This is unbelievable, Bernie.” Dave waved his keys around. “I pay my rent! I’m not some fucking loud music playing kid!”

  “Hell, no,” Bernie agreed. “You’re some fucking loud music playing oldster.” He chuckled and offered Dave a sheepish grin.

  Dave shoved a key into the door lock. “Whatever. I’ve got to the end of the month, at least.”

  “Dude, why are they kicking you out, anyway?” Bernie asked, following Dave inside.

  “I’m not opting in when they go condo,” Dave replied. “But I thought they weren’t actually removing residents until their leases were up. I thought I had another eight months!”

  “Lemme see what I can do.” Bernie picked the notice off the hallway floor.

  “Forget it. It’s a sign I need to buy a place,” Dave said. “I’m too old to live like this.”

  “Ya think?” Bernie looked intrigued. “Because if you’re serious...”

  The restaurant was all golden light and subtle violin music. Sprigs of evergreen were festooned on every table and lighting fixture. “Game hens, all around.” The man doing the ordering was silver-haired with a handlebar moustache. He winked at the college girl who took their orders. “Thanks, darlin’.”

  “So, Mr. Lord, Bernie said this was a housing development opportunity,” Dave began.

  “Well, it’s not so much a development, son,” Lord said. “Let me clarify, this isn’t an investment property that you can actually occupy.”

  Dave fell back in his chair and stared at Bernie. “Dude, you said this would solve both my housing problem and my money problem. I got alimony, cocksucker. I can’t afford to make an investment and get a mortgage.”

  Bernie started to respond, but Lord held up two huge, well-tanned hands. “Gentlemen, if you’ll allow a man to finish?” he drawled. “Now, I could’ve held this meeting in a back alley somewhere with a suitcase full of somethin’ or other, all mysterious-like, but I took y’all out on the town.” He gestured vaguely at their surroundings. “Finest spot for a Dickens Christmas, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It’s not Christmas anymore,” Dave mumbled.

  “What’s that, son?” Lord leaned over his empty plate. “The hell it’s not. Haven’t you ever heard of Epiphany?”

  “Three wise men met the baby Jesus!” Bernie announced with all the pride of a Sunday school scholar. “Considered an extension of the Christmas season. Celebrated early January.”

  Lord smirked beneath his bushy moustache, his eyes crinkling up at the corners. “Boy, you are as eager to please as a bull on the first day of spring.” He pointed a bony finger at Bernie. “I like your enthusiasm. Awful glad Leslie referred you to me.” He turned back to Dave. “Now, Mr. Mark. David. Can
I call you David? What I’m offerin’ you ain’t gonna by itself get you into a new abode, as it were.”

  Dave glanced at Bernie. “You said—”

  “But it’ll get you the cash to get there,” Lord interrupted. “And I expect that’s really all you need, isn’t it, son? A good-sized chunk of cold, hard cash?”

  Huge black crows were perched on the telephone lines above the house on Discovery Court. Dave spotted them as he walked up the driveway, their impossibly large beaks creaking open and closed to let out eerie cries that echoed through the cul-de-sac. Dave forced himself to look away from the birds.

  A car pulled up seconds later, and out came a tall, slender woman with a neat cap of shiny black hair. She was too tan for the season, but she had a wide, merry grin that Dave couldn’t help but find charming.

  “Mr. Mark?” she asked, extending a hand to him. “I’m Leslie Angle, Bernie’s agent.”

  “Dave, please.” He shook her hand and half-turned back to the house. “This place is out of my normal price range.”

  Leslie exhaled a dry laugh. “Don’t I know it,” she said. She gestured to the front door. “Still, you ought to see what you’re going in on. Shall we?”

  Immediately inside, they were greeted by a staircase that wound in a curved arch from the open second floor landing down to the foyer. A fountain had been installed at the banister’s end, its marble bowls currently empty. “Damn,” Dave remarked at the sight of it all. “This house is way too MTV Cribs for me.”

  “We’ve established that,” Leslie said, not unkindly. Her heels clicking on the ceramic tiles. “I’m sure Edgar’s explained the whole process to you?”

  “Yes, but I still have some questions.”

  The door burst open and a barrel-chested man entered. He took a wide-legged stance and pointed a gun at Dave. After a moment, in a voice far calmer than Dave would have suspected, the stranger spoke.