Off the Rack

by Paperback Rack

drowned either. This is a miracle of God, Charlene. People need to know about this. I might be a new messiah, for all we know.”

  “Oh no, I will not listen to this,” she said incredulously. “Ned, you go home right now and go to bed. Take a sleeping pill if you need to. Call me tomorrow if you’re still feeling out of sorts, okay? And for pete’s sake, put on some dry clothes before you catch pneumonia.” Charlene shook her head and walked up the riverbank to her car.

  “I’m not crazy, Charlene,” Ned called after her. “You said yourself you shot me in the back six times. I know you didn’t slip up. You don’t miss. Ever.” Charlene turned around.

  “There’s a first time for everything, Ned. Either I miscalculated my shots, or you are one lucky guy. That’s all there is to it.” She got in her car and drove away quickly, without looking back.

  “I am not crazy!” Ned yelled at the retreating car. He looked back at the river flowing behind him. “There is more to this than just luck.”

  Charlene woke up the next day and dragged herself into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. She opened the door to let the cat out, and saw the morning paper on her doorstep. The headline read, “Miracle: Local Man Defies Death.” She immediately called Ned, but the line was busy and remained so for the next hour. As she walked out the door to go to work, Charlene stopped to pet the cat. “Ned is taking this too far,” she told it. “I have to stop him. Any ideas?”

  At precisely that moment, Ned was talking to a Mrs. Marie Billings, who desperately wanted him to cure her chronic headaches. Before her, it had been old Michael Winters with heart problems, and before that it was Annie McLarsen wanting to rid her youngest son of nightmares. “This miracle business is tough,” Ned thought to himself as he patiently tried to explain to Mrs. Billings that he was not, as yet, a healer.

  “I am a death-defier,” he told her. “My expertise has nothing whatsoever to do with headaches. I’m still testin’ out what other miracles I can perform, but for the time being I don’t think I could do much for your afflictions. I’m truly sorry, ma’am.” Mrs. Billings angrily hung up on him. Ned sighed, stretching his arms out. His phone had been ringing nonstop since six o’clock that morning with people wanting him to perform miracles. “I wonder if Jesus ever got this tired,” he said aloud to the empty room. “I could use a cup of coffee.”

  That evening, Charlene decided to drop by Ned’s house after work. They had been friends for a long time and she knew from experience that once he got his mind set on something, he absolutely did not let it go. One time, when they were children, he had jumped off his garage fourteen times because he was sure that he could fly if he just got the hang of it. The only reason he finally quit trying was because his father threatened to whip him if he didn’t get off the damn roof. Charlene was afraid Ned would keep attempting suicide just to prove again that it couldn’t be done.

  She turned onto Ned’s street and saw police cars lined up against the curb. Her hands began shaking as she drove closer. “Maybe they’re just asking him questions,” she said, trying to calm herself down.

  She parked the car and walked up to Ned’s house, and her heart dropped into her stomach. An ambulance sat in the driveway, but the sirens were off and there was no frantic hustle to get to the emergency room. Instead, a stretcher was being wheeled out slowly, covered with a white sheet. Charlene’s body slowly started to go numb.

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but you’re not allowed to be here.” A cop tapped Charlene on the shoulder, startling her into dropping her purse. He picked it up for her.

  “I’m a friend of Ned’s…is he…” she couldn’t finish the question.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” the cop said, his eyes blank. “I just can’t believe it, it was so strange. We reckon he was making coffee and the machine went haywire. Water flew everywhere, and he got electrocuted. You can even see where part of his hand melted onto the coffee pot. The chances for something like this happening are one in a million.” He looked down at her and noticed the distress in her face. “Aw hell, I’m sorry, ma’am, I wasn’t supposed to say anything. I, uh, I mean, you must be in shock. Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” Charlene replied. “I’m fine. I just need to go home and…and…”

  “Ok, ma’am,” the cop interrupted, “I’m sorry but I have to ask you to move along now. We have a lot of cleaning up to do.”

  “Right,” Charlene said. She turned and walked slowly back to her car. She drove home carefully and went straight to bed, feeling exhausted from the inside out.

  That night she dreamed that she and Ned were fish. They were swimming along playfully when Ned suddenly shot up towards the water’s surface. Too late, she saw the thin line reaching from his mouth up into a tiny boat. While she swam around in circles underneath it, she heard the rip of Ned’s flesh. His head plopped into the water, and she watched it sink slowly into the darkness. If only she had seen the line before he took the bite…

  Charlene woke up in a cold sweat. She went downstairs and poured herself a glass of orange juice. She opened the door to let the cat out and saw a new paper lying on her doorstep. The headline read, “Invincible Man Killed by Coffee Maker.”

  Nice and Easy

  Len Schweitzer

  “Balls!” It was a diurnal curse at oneself.

  Cassidy slid into the booth where I was camping with a pint of Bass Ale and my Toshiba laptop. Her hair was so black obsidian that it flashed blue under certain lights. One side was bobbed, the other buzz-cut, framing her white Kabuki face. Her indigo lipstick matched the indigo of her arm tattoos. At a nearby table were two horsey women with deep-sea tans. Wearing tennis togs and drinking bloody marys. They ogled Cassidy with bourgeois disdain.

  “Balls what?”

  “Somebody stole my newspapers.”

  “Bought one and took the rest. Sorry, Kid.”

  I’m a 30-year Air Force retiree with a website. Not much action there. Maybe ten hits a day. What the hell? It gives me an excuse to call myself a bookseller. My military career stationed me around the world. I own about a thousand rare paperbacks, some in German and Japanese. At the moment I was composing business letters. The ale loosened me up to creativity.

  When I left Miami I thought I would never return. But here I am, and the place is going nuts over a little Cuban kid. You’ve heard of him. The world has. Elián Gonzalez. My minuscule condo apartment is located on the 79th Street Causeway midway across Biscayne Bay. An easy stroll from where a famous nightspot used to be. Jilly’s. Swank and exclusive. We townies crashed it once or twice before going to Vietnam and other scenic places. Two of my buddies were drafted into the Marines and got blown to pudding. Wo, stop me. This ain’t a war story.

  I can imagine Cassidy in Jilly’s. Some kind of Holly Golightly in black turtleneck and pedal-pushers. She ambushes Frank Sinatra, handing him a zen poem wrapped around a long-stem hibiscus.

  And he would turn and ask with a twinkle, “What’s this, Doll?” Blue eyes.

  “Oops,” the clunky thing dropped her cigarettes and matches.

  Clove cigarettes and box matches. The floor must have eaten them. When she looked they were gone.

  Barely audible. “Back in a minute.”

  “Where’re you going?”

  “Buy smokes.”

  Ain’t that a kick in the head? I struggle for years to give up the damn things and kids today go for them fast as you can say Joe Camel.

  I watched her clomp across the hardwood floor in her Doc Martens. She was totally noir, wearing a black muscle-shirt and a black floral grannyskirt that swished in her wake.

  She returned with a pack of Camels and a borrowed book of matches. Memory flash. I asked her, “What happened to the Zippo I gave you?”

  “Godawful thing torched my nose.”

  “In The Nam that was its beauty.”

  She drilled me with a plume of smoke and showed me her teeth. She needed a chimney-sweep, not a dentist. Winsome smile. Goth mouth.


  She reminded me of Morticia. Or one of the erotic dead.

  Cassidy earned rent money selling out-of-town newspapers from vending machines. She said she lived in a roach-hotel with pink stucco walls and red spanish tiles. The only good thing there was a terrazzo patio with a PVC plastic table-and-chairs under a bright Cinzano umbrella.

  “So,” I asked. “How’s work coming along?”

  “Bought an SUV Lexus.”

  “You frigging yuppies.”

  She returned my smirk.

  Don’t laugh when I tell you how we hooked up. In the library, at a lonelyhearts book club social. We read The King In Yellow by Robert W. Chambers.

  Yeah, I like weird tales. Believe me, she has a weird tale of her own.

  The place we were in now was called a brasserie. Up-scale bar & grill. What would normally be a cheap-eat cost a ten-spot. The array of available drinks, micro-brews and unheard-of imported liquors, was the main draw. Lots of brass fixtures and mirrors. On a Saturday night, with stand-up comics and lounge-crooners, the place could pass for a New Jersey roadhouse.

  The morning manager was a scheisskopf. His family named him after his papa in Cuba, so everybody called him Segundo. He sat like a manatee behind a baroque cash-register, ringing up breakfast sales.

  He gladly waited on diners, unctuously schmoozing them and snapping his fat sausage fingers for table help. He didn’t attend to booths like mine, staying as far from daylight