“Well, you can point the lens at just about anything from a postcard to a child’s drawing to the finest Cezanne. Then you click the blue button and you are transported into the scene immediately. Wherever the place, whatever the time, it is yours to visit, for good or for bad. When you want to return, simply point the lens at yourself and click the green button and you’re home. Imagine, you could visit the Great Pyramid of Giza in the morning, have lunch with Churchill, and then stop by Yankee Stadium for Game 7 of the 1975 World Series. Now, should you visit someplace where there’s danger, the Amazon jungle for example, that’s where the yellow button comes in. If someone or something threatens your safety, point the lens at them and click the yellow button. Your foe will disappear as quick as you please.”
“I’ll give you fifty dollars to rent it until tomorrow evening.”
“You must never touch the red button. That’s why it is separate from the others.”
Her Shih Tzu barked at us from the living room window. “I’ll be a minute, Mitzy!” the woman exclaimed without turning.
“I’ll give you fifty dollars to rent it until tomorrow evening,” I repeated.
“My husband kept it in the cellar for years. He only used it a half dozen times. It can be dangerous. He was knocked out by Joe Louis twice. Some people never learn. I started putting things out at six-thirty. Everybody loves yard sales. I had customers here before seven a.m. Mitzy hates men, why, I don’t know. She loves women though—and kids.”
“Fifty dollars, until tomorrow evening, I’ll have it back no later than eight p.m.”
“Hold it,” she said as she lifted the device and handed it to me. “Feel the weight.” I examined the device. It was indeed weighty.
“After noon,” she explained, “no one came, except you. Right now, it’s entirely dead. I suppose I made about eighty dollars, enough to buy dog food.” Mitzy barked on cue.
“How much will you give me for it?”
I pointed the lens at the old woman and clicked the yellow button. Then I took care of Mitzy. I’ll be back from the Bahamas on Thursday.
Black Lung and Broken Heart
Tom J. Lynch
In one hand Harry Boydman held the cashier’s check that would save his life. With the other he shook hands with another satisfied customer. Thereafter, he fled into the night, away from the Dice Street Warehouse, a semilegal satellite accumulation area for industrial waste. Not until he reached the corner of Dice and Hamilton did he examine the check under the glimmering eye of a lone street lamp. A fog, like cigarette smoke, gently grabbed his hand, making Boydman feel a tad uneasy. It hadn’t been so long since he’d quit smoking.
The check was paid to the order of Milwaukee Toxic Takeout, a racket of Boydman’s in which he charged the going rate for clean and green disposal of hazardous waste, while he dumped the sludge in the sewers when nobody was looking. The number next to the dollar sign was big. Not bank heist big, but generous enough to raise the sword of Damocles that hung over his head. Boydman had borrowed a substantial sum from Roddy Size, a local kingpin and owner of Soapy Sam’s Laundromat up on 21st Street. The capital was intended to grow Boydman’s disposal business, but instead he blew it all on bubblegum and hookers. Consequently, Roddy sent out a guy to have a chat with Boydman. Monkey Cowalski was his name, and he was the kind of guy who could lift twice his own weight in soggy towels and underwear at the laundry joint.
Boydman folded the check in half and extracted his wallet from his pants pocket. After inserting the check, he flipped to the wallet’s photo sleeve, in which he had sequestered a picture of a bird named Cheezy, a cockatiel with a crooked beak, long since dead, and the last friend he’d had on this Earth. She had a voice like a chainsaw on helium and he had taught her how to shriek, “I looove youuu!” And he had loved her back, until the day Cowalski had darkened his doorway.
Boydman closed his wallet abruptly, refusing to chain himself to that train of thought. No sense letting himself get dragged behind that memory when he already felt vulnerable beneath the street lamp’s cone of illumination. He put the wallet in his pants pocket and started across Hamilton street. He was halfway across and inches away from a manhole when the cover erupted and spun in the air like a coin, sprinkling asphalt all the way.
Something green. Something scaly. Something altogether unnatural and unexpected lunged from beneath the street. It looked like a giant iguana and it grabbed Boydman’s ankles, pulling him hard, dragging him into the hole. He was halfway beneath the ground before he arrested his descent by hooking his fingers in a deep pothole. He screamed, but no one answered. The street was empty and this was the kind of neighborhood where, if it wasn’t empty, people looked the other way and kept walking.
His trousers ripped and slipped off his waist. The creature fell with a fistful of pants, freeing Boydman to struggle up onto the crosswalk.
“My wallet!”
Without a second thought, he lowered his bare legs into the manhole and climbed down to a dark river of cold filth. His socks slurped it up like sponges. His feet tingled, as if a weak electric current ran through the sludge. The air smelled like turpentine.
Water gurgled and beasts groaned.
As his eyes adjusted, the dark coalesced into shapes. Man-sized lizards. Goldfish the size of buffalo standing on quivering young legs. A hamster with three eyes and enough room in its cheeks to pouch a Volkswagen.
“Who’s got my pants?”
They approached. Silent. Hungry.
An ear-piercing shriek stopped the animals and a hulking cockatiel, tall as an ostrich, pushed passed them. It had a crooked beak.
Boydman gasped.
“I thought I flushed you down the crapper!”
Monkey Cowalski had been an accessory to Cheezy’s murder. Boydman himself had done the murdering. When Cowalski had come around to collect for Roddy Size he put a gun to Boydman’s head and pinched his ear with two jagged fingernails. He gently instructed Boydman to smoke cigarette after cigarette and blow the smoke in Cheezy’s cage until the bird fell belly-up in the newsprint. As Boydman flushed the bird down the toilet, Cowalski told him that next time he’d pull the trigger if Roddy didn’t receive a return on his investment.
In the sewer, Cheezy approached, wings spread in a benevolent gesture. She stood a head taller than Boydman, and her wings blocked his view of the other creatures. She dipped her head, as if to preen her chest feathers, then raised it again with Boydman’s wallet clutched in her beak.
Boydman took the wallet and couldn’t hold back a smile, nor tears.
“I’m so sorry.”
Her black eyes never blinked as her wings embraced Boydman. She reeked of sewage and rotting meat. And chemicals.
“Cheezy, come home with me!”
She pushed him away and pointed a wing at the ladder leading back to the street. Boydman hesitated, but Cheezy backed off and lowered her wings, permitting the menagerie of mutant pets to resume their approach.
Boydman put the wallet in his mouth and scrambled up the ladder. Back on the street, he opened the wallet. The check was there, but the picture was gone. He wondered if, after paying Roddy, he’d have enough cash to buy another bird.
A cold breeze wafted up from the manhole, chilling Boydman’s naked legs and carrying the echo of a distant shriek.
“I looove youuu!”
Irreversible Dad
Kenton K. Yee
I noticed Dad shrinking when I was in third grade. He could no longer pull books from the top shelf, and his pants mopped the floor. I wanted to tell Dad to see a doctor, but Mom told me to let him be. “He is what he is,” she said.
By the time I reached high school, Dad was the size of a teddy bear. Fortunately, he had academic tenure, so his condition was not a problem at work. The morning after I got my driver’s license, I threw a blanket over him, locked him in a cat carrier, and drove him in for testing. “Collapsing wave function,” the man wearing the stethoscope said. “It’s irreversible.”
Dad continued teaching until a student nearly stepped on him. By the time I was packing for college, Dad was smaller than a mouse—a baby mouse. We kept him in a gallon mayonnaise jar with two cotton balls. He licked one for water; the other absorbed his waste.
I had to squint to resolve him during my first visit home. We sat in the kitchen. I munched a donut and flicked specks of powdered sugar into his jar. He chased after the falling flecks like a goldfish gobbling food flakes.
“Be nicer to Mom,” I said. “Changing your soggy cotton balls through the mouth of a mayo jar with tweezers is making her twitchy.”
He cupped both hands over his mouth and shouted, but all I could hear was the quiet of cotton.
A few days later, Mom phoned to say she could no longer find him.
I rushed home and took his jar to the research hospital, where they stuck it into an electron microscope. The computer screen flickered a black-and-white image of Dad sitting on a molecule of atoms, his legs crossed, an elbow on a knee. Engrossed in the undulations of a proton wave, he was as I had always imagined: the tall physics professor who reached up to the top shelf and pulled down books for me; the skinny graduate student who worked up the courage to ask Mom out on the final day of class; the little boy who stayed alone during recess in his second-grade classroom to read about subatomic particles in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Death & Taxes
A.J. Sweeney
Martin walked home from work in the rain. Bus fare was not an option; he didn’t get paid until the end of the week, and rent was due. In a perfect world there would be no work, or rent, and he could curl up in a ball under a big blanket and wait for it to all be over. But, the world not being perfect, he got up and went to work every single day.
In the dim light of his living room, his answering machine blinked red. He hit play and listened to the message: “Martin, it’s Bob Jenkins. Long time, no speak. I’ve got something to discuss with you. Be at Mary’s Bar tonight at seven-thirty. It’s important. Try to make it. It’s important. That’s all. It’s Bob Jenkins.”
A cold sweat broke loose and ran amok under his shirt. It couldn’t be. It was impossible. Literally, figuratively, physically—metaphysically—impossible! But a third replay confirmed it was indeed the voice of Bob Jenkins.
Martin knelt on the ground beside his bed and pulled out a box containing a newspaper clipping dated August 17, 2001. “Banker Burned in Biz Blaze,” it read. The story detailed how fire gutted Jimson and Sons Light Fixtures on Midwood Avenue and claimed the life of accountant Robert Jenkins, who’d been visiting the office on a routine audit.
Staring at the clipping as if looking for reassurance or proof that he was not insane, Martin tried to figure out what to do. Should he meet this guy, this disembodied voice from beyond the grave? If so, it might prove to be a more interesting than average Thursday night. Not only was it dark and stormy and filled with voices from the dead, but Mary’s was supposed to be quite trendy, and Martin hadn’t been there before.
And so Martin went forth into the night. Very wisely, he remembered his umbrella.
Bob was the same as ever: slender and gangly with sloping shoulders and thin, light-brown hair.
“God, I’ve been busy,” Bob said. “Tons of work. Mountains.”
Martin frowned but said nothing. He wasn’t sure how to ask Bob why he wasn’t dead.
“So,” asked Bob. “How’s work?”
“Boring.” This was true. “And you?”
“Well, like I said, busy.”
“Oh. Right. Seen any good movies lately?”
“Nah. I feel like I haven’t been out of the office in about ten years.”
Martin nearly choked at that.
The rest of their conversation passed surprisingly smoothly, aided by the liberal imbibition of beer. At no point though could Martin broach the subject of the big, dead elephant in the room.
At the end of the evening, Bob said, “Walk me home, Martin. I don’t live far.” He led Martin past the park, down Fifth Street, and into Greenwood Cemetery. They stopped in front of a grey marble slab simply engraved with
BOB JENKINS 1969–2001
Bob grabbed Martin’s shoulders. “Listen to me. You and I have been friends for years, right?” Martin nodded. “So you won’t take this the wrong way, but…I have to tell you something that you probably don’t want to hear.”
Visions of death danced before Martin’s eyes. So this was it—this was the meaning of the visit from beyond the grave. The great big duvet in the sky was calling him home and he never would worry no more. Tears of joy and self-pity sprang simultaneously to his ducts.
Bob pressed an envelope into Martin’s hands. He opened it slowly, cautiously. “We are writing to inform you that there are inconsistencies on your tax return for the year ending 2001—” Martin looked up in disbelief. The letter was signed Robert Jenkins, Claims Adjuster, Internal Revenue Service.
“You owe an additional $4,584.93.”
“I’m being audited?” Martin bellowed.
“We don’t get to choose our cases, if it makes you feel any better.”
“This is insane! I’m getting out of here!”
Martin attempted to run but tripped over a votive wreath. Bob was on him in a second, pinning him to the ground. Martin struggled, but the dead man was too strong for him.
“Either you bring me a check,” Bob grunted, “Or you’ll have to call our toll-free service number and set up a payment plan.”
Martin screamed—shrieked, really—in a manner most bloodcurdling.
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” said Bob.
But it wasn’t his heretofore unknown debt that was making Martin scream.
During the scuffle, he’d fallen on his umbrella and driven the pointy end of it right through his own heart, impaling himself atop Bob’s grave.
The last thing he heard before he died was Bob whispering, “I’m sorry but you can’t fight us, Martin.”
Martin opened his eyes. It was very dark at first, until—
scraaaaaaaaaaaaaaapppe
—the lid came off his casket.
Bob was smiling down at him. “I told you you couldn’t fight us.”
He dumped a sheaf of papers in Martin’s lap and threw him a ballpoint pen and a pocket calculator.
“If you start working it off now…” He consulted a small calendar and made a few notes. “Shouldn’t take more than a couple of months. That’s our one advantage here—no expenses.”
“And when I’m done with these? Then I can finally…rest?”
“Well…” Bob looked around helplessly. “Dave, do you want to field this one? I don’t know how to tell him.”
“Hi Martin.” A friendly-looking face appeared beside Bob’s. “I’m Dave Glass. I represent the Great Lakes Savings Company?”
Great Lakes. The name alone made Martin freeze in fear.
“Ah, yes. I see you haven’t forgotten. Neither have we. Martin, today I’m here to talk to you about your student loans.”
Brains for Breakfast
Beth Cato
Russell Thompkins’s mind maneuvered as swiftly as a stump, but it worked out pretty well for him. His job as a night stocker at the Wal-Mart Supercenter followed a basic pattern he could have sleepwalked through: Put out the new freight, empty the bins, front the shelves, rinse, and repeat. He got the job done, and that’s what mattered.
But that night, Russ kept wandering over to the meat case to stare at the brains all pretty with their Styrofoam trays and cellophane wrap. And he was hungry.
He didn’t think to wonder why yet, and he certainly would have been stunned to realize he’d been a zombie for over two weeks. When weird Uncle Billy bit him on New Year’s Eve, well, he figured Billy was just being weird like always.
Russ picked up one of the packaged brains, testing the heft in his hand. Was $3.99 a pound a good price? The little twists and curves in the gray matter intrigued him. He could just imagine
that texture against his tongue. Maybe it could even unravel like a long pasta noodle. Grated Parmesan was on a good sale on a front end cap, and he had some spaghetti sauce already stored away at home.
Or maybe brains could be a dessert, topped with confectioners’ sugar or rainbow sprinkles…
Footsteps approached from behind, and Russ set down the brain and focused on a pork-chop value pack instead.
“Man, what’s up with you? Get back to your aisle.” Duder tugged him by the sleeve. “If Mikey sees you at the meat counter so much, you’ll get yourself busted. He’s in a right mood since GM has three trucks tonight, so don’t even get his attention.”
“I don’t know, Duder,” Russ said, swallowing down his drool. “I’m hungry, and it’s not letting up.”
“You need a good girl to look out for you. Ever read the labels on those canned soups you buy? That sodium content could pickle a person.”
Russ sighed. A girl would be a fine thing, especially if she didn’t mind that he worked nights or that he smelled like something a dog rolled in. He’d tried all kinds of soaps in the past week, too, and none made a lick of difference.
“Hour till lunch, man. Hold on. Buy a sandwich then.”
A sandwich? Russell sidled back to his blue cart of cereal boxes. A sandwich didn’t sound right, not unless it was a fat, juicy brain sandwich with some au jus, maybe with a side of one of those fried onions from that Australian spot. Or a brain with a slice of American cheese melted on top—or maybe a couple of slices—still in those perfect, unnatural orange squares of goodness. He could picture how it would squirt and ooze when he dug his fork in and raised it to his lips—and darn it, there he was, standing at the meat case again. If he wasn’t careful, Mikey would notice, and the boss man could be a terror on those three-truck nights.
Russ gnashed his teeth so tight they squeaked, and forced his attention to his freight. Working always came easy to him, but tonight it was hard, and the craving only got worse.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction Page 7