Unidentified Funny Objects

by Resnick, Mike

  It might be interesting to ponder what the ditch-digger’s Holem would do, and how it would act—but this is not that story. Wisely, the villagers shuddered and went to Moishe the Tailor.

  “Wouldn’t you rather have a nice jacket?” the tailor asked.

  But the village of Plodnik didn’t need a nice jacket. Or new drapes, or gabardine trousers. They needed someone to defend them from their neighbors. So after much arguing, and wheedling, Moishe agreed to make a golem out of scraps, if the townspeople also bought a well-made suit, and he would throw in a couple of shirts for free.

  ALONE AGAIN, the tailor thought about how to fulfill the commission. In the stories his mother told him, the golem was a man, about eight feet tall, made of earth and clay. But Moishe was pretty sure an eight-foot rag doll would not strike fear in the hearts of the Cossacks, no matter how well it fought. It might have a momentary advantage while they were laughing. But more likely, some Cossack would capture the golem and take it home to his children.

  No, if Moishe wanted his golem to do its job, it would have to be something that wouldn’t get the stuffing knocked out of it. So he gave the golem long ears to hear its enemies far away. And he gave it powerful legs, so it could run when it was outnumbered. And he gave it buck teeth, because how else was this project going to let him make a buck? He made it small and dark so it could blend in to the night—and because he had the fabric left over from Mrs. Shapiro’s upholstery. And, being a simple man, Moishe didn’t bother with grandiose words like truth and death, but took his embroidery floss and stitched the word for what the golem looked like, right on its tuchus, just under its fluffy little tail.

  THE PEOPLE OF PLODNIK were unimpressed. “That bunny is our protector?” said Yankel the Tinker.

  “He’s not even a man,” said Zelda the Matchmaker.

  “He’s not even kosher,” said Avram the Butcher, who’d always envied Moishe the circumcision business.

  “Hey! Is that from my sofa?” said Mrs. Shapiro.

  “What?” Moishe asked the butcher. “Would you rather I made for you a chicken?”

  “How about a big, strong ox?” said Avram the Butcher. “An ox is kosher.”

  “Why does he have to be kosher?” Moishe asked. “He’s our defender, not our dinner. Would you have complained if he were a man? A man isn’t kosher.”

  “Unless you’re trying to steal my business, too,” Sol the Ditch-Digger said to the butcher.

  That shut him up. And pretty much everyone else as well. But the Velveteen Golem heard everything with his long ears.

  AND AT FIRST the Velveteen Golem did little to ease the people’s doubts. He never engaged the Cossacks directly, but raided the Russian farms instead, stealing the beets and carrots they needed to make their borscht. This initially led to more raids, just to make up for what was lost. But the golem asked his maker for advice, and Moishe taught him how to make a tailored strike. So the Velveteen Golem went after the farms that were further away, so that people would blame their neighbors on the other side. And soon there was so much strife between neighboring villages that Plodnik was left alone, in relative peace. Soon the golem only had to go out once in a while to keep the quarrels alive, and the rest of the time he could help out around the town.

  He wasn’t much use to the tailor, but he helped the ditch-digger out, and they built a system of burrows to irrigate the village farms.

  Around about the end of the golem’s first year, he began to remember the things that people had said when he was new, and to wonder about his place in the village.

  “What am I?” the Velveteen Golem asked Sol the Ditch-Digger.

  “You are life where there was no life,” said Sol. “A hole filled with Grace.”

  “What am I?” the golem asked his creator.

  “The best thing I ever made with scraps,” said the tailor.

  “What am I?” he asked Mrs. Shapiro—who, like most of the village, had come to accept him over time.

  “Eh, you match my sofa,” said Mrs. Shapiro. “That’s good enough.”

  But it was not good enough for the Velveteen Golem, who was the only one of his kind and still did not feel quite at home.

  “But everyone loves you,” said Moishe the Tailor. “You have allowed us to live in peace. What can we do to show you that you belong?”

  The golem thought about this a long time before finally he answered, “It’s been almost a year since you made me.”

  “Yes,” said the tailor, nodding.

  “I want a birthday party,” the golem said.

  SO THE VILLAGE OF PLODNIK threw him a party, with games, and streamers, and a carrot cake with a single candle on top. And they played Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and they danced to a klezmer band, and the Velveteen Golem felt loved and, finally, like he almost belonged. And Zelda the Matchmaker brought out the carrot cake and said, “Blow out the candle and make a wish.”

  And only then did the golem realize—he had no breath.

  It’s strange, the things that will make a person snap. The Velveteen Golem, so close to finally feeling he was just like anyone else, had that feeling yanked away, and he lost control.

  A golem on a rampage is a terrifying sight. Have you ever seen it? It is terrible, I tell you. For starters, he hopped on the cake and he got frosting all over the tablecloth. And then he ran outside and tore up the system of drainage ditches he had dug with his own four paws. And he ripped up the crops and left them to shrivel on the ground. And finally, he left muddy footprints on Mrs. Shapiro’s sofa—toward which he’d always felt a sort of sibling rivalry. According to some accounts, he even bit the heads off of the Knights of the Round Table, though I must admit I’m not sure how that could be.

  “This is unacceptable!” said Avram the Butcher.

  “Is he a little boy, to be throwing such tantrums?” said Zelda the Matchmaker.

  “He was supposed to keep us safe from this sort of thing,” said Yankel the Tinker.

  “At least I picked a dark color,” said Mrs. Shapiro.

  Moishe the Tailor knew he must do something. So he and Sol the Ditch-Digger chased the Velveteen Golem out from under Mrs. Shapiro’s couch, across the living room and into the yard, and the fields beyond, where they could see the devastation he had wrought. Finally they chased him into a hole where they could not go. But Sol had his shovel, and he dug the hole out behind the golem, and Moishe the Tailor grabbed his rear legs and took a seam ripper to his butt.

  With great sorrow and a heavy heart, the tailor slowly pulled away the threads from the last letter of the word that gave life to his work. He watched, despondent, as his craftsmanship unraveled, leaving nothing behind but a rabbi in a dark brown velvet suit, hanging from his ankles, with a Torah scroll tucked under his arm, and his beard hanging over his face.

  “Huh?” said Moishe.

  “Could you please put me down?” said the rabbi.

  Moishe let go, and the holy man fell on his tuchus in the fresh-dug hole. “What does this mean?” asked the tailor.

  Sol the Ditch-Digger smiled. “It means less work for us,” he said, looking kind of relieved.

  THE WORKING STIFF

  Matt Mikalatos

  The townspeople gathered at the crest of the cemetery hill, torchlight glittering along the tines of their pitchforks. I looked to my thrall. “Has there been a misunderstanding, Richard?”

  Richard shrugged. “I don’t know, Master. I’m just your lowly idiot servant, as you’ve reminded me countless times.”

  I gestured impatiently. “Read the note again.”

  Richard fumbled in his pockets, found a crumpled piece of paper, threw it away, found his smart phone, pressed far too many buttons, scrolled so many times that I almost grabbed it from him, cleared his throat and said,

  “Dear Sir,

  We have a vampire hunter problem and thought you might be able to help. We will gladly pay 1,000 dollars for your assistance in this matter.

  Signed,

/>   Mayor Rigby.”

  “Seems pretty straightforward.”

  “If you say so, Master.”

  “But why the torches and pitchforks?”

  “An evening threshing, Master?”

  “Silence, Richard.”

  “Perhaps the local hardware store had a pitchfork sale and the electricity went out.”

  “I said silence, you fool. Come. We’ll speak to Mayor Rigby.”

  We approached the small crowd of thirty. They gladly parted for us, revealing a plump, jolly fellow who extended his chubby palm, which I immediately identified by the still-beating warmth to be the palm of a man who was very much alive. “You’re not a vampire,” I said.

  The mayor chortled and threw his hands up in mock horror. “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me!” All the townspeople laughed. I smiled weakly. “We’ve trapped the vampire in a barn and barred the doors.”

  One of the townies shouted, “It tried to bite me!”

  I slapped my forehead. “Your note said you have a vampire hunter problem?”

  “Precisely. We are in need of a vampire hunter.”

  I shook my head. “My website is very clear on this. I am not a vampire hunter.”

  The mayor’s frown deepened. “On the contrary, Sir, it repeatedly mentioned your role as vampire hunter.”

  I held my hand out and Richard slapped a business card into my dry white palm with a practiced flair. I held it up, and the mayor and all the townspeople leaned forward, squinting. “Isaac Van Helsing,” I said, without reading it, as it was my own business card, “Vampire ‘Vampire Hunter’ Hunter.”

  The mayor shook his head. “I don’t see the problem.”

  I sighed. “It’s basic English, Mayor. The first time my card says ‘vampire’ it reveals that I’m a vampire.”

  “Oh?”

  “The ‘vampire hunter’ set aside in quotation marks shows my specialty: vampire hunters. Not vampires, not werewolves or zombies or pixies or vermin or magicians. And the final ‘hunter’ reveals that not only am I a vampire, but I’m also a hunter. Of vampire hunters.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “A vampire ‘vampire hunter’ hunter.”

  “That is a bit confusing,” the mayor said.

  “I told you it was confusing, Master,” Richard said, sneering.

  “Shut up, Richard.”

  A townie said, tentatively, hefting his pitchfork, “Kill the vampire?”

  His wife shushed him and said, “Vampires. There’s two now, dear.”

  I looked at them both dispassionately, then continued, “Usually I’m hired by communities of the undead who are being hassled by a vampire hunter. I go in and trap him and…well, I can see there are children here so I’ll skip the description.”

  The mayor nodded. “We thought it might be instructive for the children to watch you kill the vampire. I believe we agreed on one thousand dollars?”

  “I don’t kill my own kind, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Nonsense. Humans kill their own kind every day.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a thick wad of cash. “You don’t want our money?”

  That was, of course, the problem. Other vampires build up a pile of treasure over the centuries, surviving off the interest. Money drips through my fingers like water. They live in castles, I live in a cargo van with a coffin in the back, because I can’t afford a hearse. They flit around as bats all night, or hang out at night clubs, and I try to find work that can guarantee night shifts. I hung my head. “I need it.”

  One of the children said, “This one seems smarter than the one in the barn. Might be more fun to kill.” His mother hushed him.

  I held my hands up. “I assure you that if you try to kill me you’ll regret it. I’ll slaughter you all and bathe in your blood.”

  Richard rolled his eyes. “He won’t turn you into the undead, either. Believe me, I’ve been trying to get him to make me into a vampire for years. Ten long years. He likes to call me his ‘thrall’ but he doesn’t even use magic on me. Not even hypnotism or pseudo-science. He just keeps promising to turn me into a vampire but he never does.”

  I gave Richard a vicious look designed to procure his silence and raised my palms toward the townspeople. “I don’t want to bathe in your blood. It takes several regular baths to undo one blood bath.” I studied their pitchforks and torches. “You don’t even have anything here that could kill me.” I looked at their torches more carefully. “In fact…are those tiki torches?”

  The mayor cleared his throat. “It’s surprisingly difficult to find torches. It was that or flaming batons for juggling. “

  “You people definitely need my help. You know that pitchforks can’t kill vampires, right?”

  Richard snatched a pitchfork from a townie and with a terrific grunt he stabbed it into my chest, through my shirt, ribcage, and then out the back. I stumbled backward, startled. I regained my balance, stood up straight, reached down, yanked the pitchfork out, broke the handle in two, and threw the shattered remains off into the darkness. I had fed recently, too, so it wasn’t just a hole. I actually bled for a minute. “Dammit, Richard, that was my best shirt.”

  “That was my best pitchfork,” a townie said.

  An old lady pushed her way to the front of the crowd, one eye bulging as she stared at me, her hand crooked into the ancient symbol of the evil eye, which she waved at the unconcerned mayor. Her shawl made her look hunchbacked, and her frilled bonnet caught the torchlight and gave the eerie appearance of rounded teeth across her face.

  The mayor took her hand and unfolded the evil eye. “Mother Holmes, let me do the talking.”

  She glared at him. “It’s the only thing you’re good at. Listen here, Jasper. This boy may not be a vampire hunter, but I can tell by his lean and hungry look that he needs money. Let’s pay him and let him kill the other vampire.”

  The mayor nodded. “That’s precisely what I suggested.”

  Mother Holmes squinted at him. “Are you sure? I was in the back of the crowd. Hard to hear back there.”

  I sighed. “I’ll dispose of your vampire and go on my way marginally wealthier, feeling dirty and disgusted with myself.”

  Mother Holmes nodded, satisfied. “As is only right, since you’re a monster.” She crossed her arms and looked at me, her head cocked to one side. “What are you waiting for? Shoo. Off you go.”

  I rubbed my hands together. “I didn’t bring any vampire killing equipment. Richard, collect the standard equipment. And a sun lamp. If you can find a Dustbuster it makes clean up much more convenient.”

  “I have all those things,” Mother Holmes said. “Send your man to my place and I’ll lead you both to the barn.”

  IT TOOK AN HOUR to gather the supplies, meaning we had about three hours before dawn. I figured half-an-hour to get to the barn and set up, a quick fight and death blow (Fifteen minutes? Twenty?). I’d leave Richard to do the vacuuming and I’d go collect the money and then, if I was feeling peckish, perhaps a quick bite before we went back to the overpass. We’d get there in plenty of time to get settled before sunrise.

  “Keep up, Richard.” He had to walk several feet behind me because of the garlic. He carried all the equipment. Not just the vampire killing equipment from Mother Holmes, but also the vampire hunter killing equipment. A few knives, some handcuffs, a pistol, an inflatable decoy vampire, that sort of thing.

  Richard called out to me. “I’m tired of calling you master, especially in public. It’s awkward. People always look at us strangely. Couldn’t I call you sir or boss or something? This is the twenty-first century.”

  “If you want to live forever, get used to being out of style occasionally. You can’t keep up with every crazy new fad.” I picked up the pace and moved alongside Mother Holmes, who held a lantern in front of her crooked face as she led us over yet another hillock and into a depressed meadow.

  “Are we nearly there, Mother Holmes?”

  “Very nearly, young man.”


  “I’m 139 years old, Miss Holmes.”

  She clucked her tongue. “That doesn’t make the barn any closer, dear.”

  “How is it that your townsfolk managed to catch a vampire in a barn, anyway?”

  She cackled. “We promised him a thousand dollars and then shut the doors.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  She glanced at him with her bulging eye. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about your surname.”

  “It is, of course, my father’s surname.”

  She nodded. “Abraham Van Helsing. The famous doctor, philosopher, and vampire hunter.”

  “Indeed. I was his apprentice.”

  Richard laughed gleefully. “Then something horrible happened.”

  “Richard! The only thing between you and life as a vampire is that I don’t want to spend eternity listening to what comes out of your infernal mouth.” I turned, again, to Mother Holmes. “My father sent me to kill a clutch of vampires and, short story, they turned me. In my defense, I was only twenty and they were female vampires.”

  “What did your father say?”

  “As I recall, he shrugged, killed the vampires and said, ‘Berufsrisiko.’ I never understood why he spoke German all the time. He was Dutch and we lived in Amsterdam.”

  “That’s terrible, poor boy. What did your mother say?”

  “Father told mother I had died. She went insane. Father said that was due to me flying in her window.” I shrugged. “I was still in my grave clothes. Nonetheless, dad was driven, mom was insane. They weren’t pleasant people, really. Oh, they cared for me, I’m sure, in their controlling, tight, interfering way. To be honest, I miss them. The life of the drifter is lonely, sleeping in rest areas, not even able to afford the blood bank. Now I’m killing vampires like my father. It’s too much to bear.”

  Richard made mock sobbing sounds behind us. I mentally added another five years to his thrall timeline.

  Mother Holmes said, “Speaking of bears, here’s the barn now.”