Collected Short Stories: Volume IV

by Barry Rachin

  “No, I shouldn’t think so.” Nicholas went into the bathroom, showered and changed into pajamas.

  “Anything else I can get you?”

  He lay down on the thin mattress. It was surprisingly comfortable. “No I’m fine.”

  Mary Beth flicked out the light and rolled over on her side away from him.

  Despite the muggy, midsummer weather, the tiny apartment was reasonably airy. An occasional car passed in the street, accompanied by the incessant drone of crickets. The studio apartment felt infinitely comfortable; it offered safe passage through the predicament of present uncertainties. Stripped of all worldly luxuries and material excesses, except for an ivory-handled brush, it helped ‘even the odds’. “A mausoleum,” Nicholas said without prefacing the remark, as though in response to a conversation already in progress. “Mom made a goddamn shrine of your bedroom.”

  Mary Beth groaned and lay flat on her back. “She put all your medals and trophies on a shelf,” Nicholas confided. “Even had the snapshot of you with Doina Melinte blown up and hung on the wall. It’s so God-awful morbid!”

  Mary Beth stretched her hand over the edge of the bed until it came to rest on his face. The feathery touch went through his body like a benediction. “She can’t help it.” The hand brushed him a second time and disappeared. Shortly, he heard his sister's regular breathing. She was sound asleep.

  Tell me what to do to make your pain go away.

  In late March, the day Nicholas visited Mary Beth’s room and found her lying on the bed with hands sandwiched between her thighs, his best intentions counted for nothing. All his furtive prayers produced no benefit. During those sullen, wintry days, he could do no more to help his sister than his mother with her blustery chatter. Now this pilgrimage to Providence but for what purpose? A social visit? An act of atonement for having done so little at a time when so much was required? Before dozing off, a phantasmagoric image flitted across Nicholas’ fading consciousness. He saw Elliot rear up vertically, while gripping the milkweed stem with the rear portion of his body. Like an automated, spring-loaded mechanism, the caterpillar launched his jaws kamikaze-style at the leathery leaf, hardly bothering to masticate the soggy pulp before swallowing. Chop. Chop. Chop. The attack was grim, relentless.

  In the morning Mary Beth showed Nicholas the chrysalis. Mint green and wrinkled like a bloated raisin, the cocoon hung by a single thread in the topmost corner of the butterfly box. Elliot had shifted from the shriveled milkweed stalk to the fresh offering and was weaving and bobbing at the meaty leaf like an overweight, punch-drunk fighter. The caterpillar had grown noticeably overnight. “The larvae feed on the milkweed plants and produce a bitter alkaloid that’s distasteful to other birds and predators. Each fall the butterflies migrate south to Florida and Mexico.”

  “Here’s the tricky part.” She replaced the lid, taking special care not to jostle the green sack. “The slightest trauma and the butterfly emerges deformed.”

  “Deformed,” he said, wondering if she caught the implicit irony. “How long do they live?”

  “Two years.”

  At ten o’clock there was a knock at the door. A young woman with blonde hair and dishwater-blue eyes stood in the doorway. Mary Beth brought her into the kitchen, sat her down at the table and handed her a manila folder from which the woman removed a pamphlet slightly larger than a small book. The pages were wrapped in a stiff, expensive looking covering - eggshell white with flecks of blue and reddish purple. A single strand of crimson floss ran through the spine holding the contents intact. “Shall we say 200 copies?” The blonde woman seemed pleased.

  “I’ll have them ready in a week.”

  “About the price,... ”

  “I quoted you a fair price,” Mary Beth parried the remark deftly. “My costs are the same no matter whose poetry I bind.”

  “Two hundred copies,” the blonde repeated without further quibbling and went out the door into the bright, morning light. Mary Beth made a note on a slip of paper and placed it, along with the manila folder, in a drawer. Later that morning at a graphic arts store near the municipal court building, she purchased supplies for the blonde woman’s pamphlets. On the ride home, she stopped at a bridal boutique on Wickendon Street. The owner had sold two satin, wedding albums over the weekend and placed an order for several more.

  After lunch they assembled 50 of the pamphlets. Using a paper cutter, Mary Beth showed Nicholas how to trim the decorative coverings to size. “The unusual blue and purple flecks are seed husks tossed into the mush before the paper is cold-pressed to its proper thickness and left to dry.”

  Running a length of linen thread through a ball of beeswax, she demonstrated how to sew the booklet signatures together, pushing the needle through the paper from the innermost fold to the back. Mary Beth creased the individual pages with a bone folder and collated while Nicholas used a carpenter’s awl to punch holes in the spine. By three in the afternoon a hefty pile of poetry was scattered over the length of the table. “Enough for today,” Mary Beth announced throwing the bone folder aside.

  Later that night, Nicholas said, “If you’d tripled the price, that woman would have placed the order.”

  It was almost midnight and pitch dark; the crickets were in rare form. “Yes, I suppose so.” Mary Beth giggled at the queer notion, her soft, musical laughter rolling out of her throat and resonating in the blackened corners of the tidy room. A group of Brown students returning from the last show at the Avon Cinema passed by their window, hooting and jeering. They were intoxicated - not with liquor, but the warm weather and their own, unquenchable youth.

  “Mother has her birds to look after,” Nicholas said, “and you have Elliot.”

  By now the Brown students had disappeared down the street, their joyful exuberance swallowed up by the rowdy crickets and steamy, night air. “Maybe that’s what it’s all about,” his sister murmured. ‘Looking out for each other, evening the odds.”

  “I’m going to tell Mom to dismantle the shrine,” Nicholas said, the last, few words catching awkwardly in his throat. “And I’ll explain that the deep sea diver remark was a figurative slip of the tongue.”

  “Yes, do that.”

  “The picture with you and Doina will go up in the attic.”

  “Or, preferably, out with the trash,” She was leaning far over the side of the bed. Though he could not see his sister’s face in the darkness, Nicholas could feel her warm breath on his cheek. “What I’m doing her in this apartment,...it’s not a life,” Mary Beth whispered. “It’s a beginning and nothing more.” There was a long silence. “A person must start somewhere.”

  In the morning before leaving, Mary Beth said, “Mom’s birthday is next month. I thought I’d surprise her and come up to Boston for a week. Is there anything she could use?”

  “She dropped her binoculars last week and cracked the lens.” Mrs. Holyfield owned an Eagle Optics model featuring nitrogen purged fogproofing.

  Nicholas went out onto the porch to say goodbye to Elliot. A gooey puddle stained the lower left-hand corner of the butterfly box - an afterbirth of sorts. The cocoon was in tatters and an orange and black monarch, its moist, newly-formed wings closed together, was resting on the topmost leaf. Oblivious to everything, Elliot continued his eating frenzy.

  Mary Beth removed the lid and placed her hand under the butterfly’s slender legs. “Problem is, we don’t know how long he’s been free of the cocoon. Once the wings dry he’ll have the urge to fly, so we need to get him out of the box.” The insect stumbled onto an outstretched finger. She lifted him gently from the enclosure and went down the backstairs into the sun-drenched yard.

  “Did you want to hold him?”

  Nicholas shook his head. He was too shocked by the transformation. The butterfly, which was easily three times the length of the wispy chrysalis, flexed its moist wings several times, laying them flat on a horizontal plane. Another five minutes passed. The insect hardly moved as the wings grad
ually dried and stiffened. Suddenly, in a frenetic burst, it flew straight up in the air and was gone from sight.

  “If you come again,” Mary Beth flashed her low-keyed, convoluted smile, “I can’t promise such a spectacular ending to your stay.”

  Nicholas had a dream.

  He was in the mountains west of Mexico City. The trees were painted reddish brown with millions of monarchs. Shimmering showers, molten firestorms of burnt umber and black. His head rocked forward, eyes opened. Just as abruptly, the millennial dream came to an abrupt end. Nicholas had dozed off on the black woman’s fleshy shoulder. “Excuse me.”

  “You looked so tired, I didn’t have the heart to wake you,” she said. The gold-capped tooth caught a burst of noonday sunlight and flamed in her mouth like spontaneous combustion.

  He rubbed the back of his neck. “My sister raises monarch butterflies.” He told her about Elliot and the butterfly they released earlier in the day. The bus passed through Sharon and Canton on the Massachusetts south shore. The Blue Hills loomed into sight. Another half hour and they would be entering downtown Boston. Nicholas couldn’t stop talking about the butterflies. The black woman was an eager listener. She shook her head, asked intelligent and thoughtful questions and even laughed when he described how the newly hatched insect rested quietly on Mary Beth’s finger. “Well, imagine that!”

  “The longest recorded flight for a tagged adult is eighteen hundred miles from Ontario to the American Southwest.”

  “Eighteen hundred miles!” The black woman exclaimed, stunned by the improbable statistic. “Wherever did you learn such a thing?”

  back to Table of Contents

  A Work in Progress

  Glancing up from an inch-thick pile of invoices on her desk, Tawana Saunders recognized the middle aged fellow standing in the doorway as a reporter with the Brandenberg Gazette. Back in April, he had written a few paragraphs on the ShopRite Supermarket when they donated food to the local soup kitchen on the south side of town.

  “Eudora Grossberg working today?” the reporter asked.

  Peering over the reporter’s shoulder at an oblique angle, Tawana could see the beanpole of a girl stuffing butternut squash in a plastic bag. Favoring dark-framed glasses that were forever sliding down on the bridge of her narrow nose, she reminded Tawana of the rubber-necked Olive Oil in the old Popeye cartoons. And then there were the wrinkled cotton blouses haphazardly thrown together with frumpy, mismatched skirts that looked like they were bought, sight unseen, off the bargain rack at a consignment shop. Eudora Grossberg was a grotesque—a physical train wreck of a woman with no polish or pizzazz. “Checkout aisle three… she’s bagging groceries.”

  He fished a fountain pen and small pad from a shirt pocket. “Mind if I borrow her for ten minutes?”

  The black woman pushed her seat away from the desk. “For what purpose?”

  “We received a letter from the senior editor of the Yale Review. They published one of her short stories in their hoity-toity literary quarterly this past February, and now the piece is being anthologized. There may even be a book deal in the works.” The reporter was noticeably pleased at the young grocery clerk’s good fortune. “Our newspaper wants to do an article in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday edition on a local, up-and-coming fiction writer.”

  “Yes, I don’t see why not. Spend as much time as you need.”

  The reporter made a motion to leave but turned back. “Do you know how many unsolicited manuscripts the Yale Review receives in the course of a month?” Tawana shook her head. “Hundreds if not thousands, and that includes a smattering of established writers with national name recognition.”

  “And they chose our own Eudora.”

  “Chose her twice - once when they printed the story and a second time when the editorial staff recommended it to the anthology.”

  When the man left the office, Tawana craned her neck staring up over the flat panel computer screen. The reporter was gibber-jabbering away with the lanky girl who never even bothered to pause from sorting the customer’s groceries as she fielded his questions. Eudora positioned a bulky, twenty-five pound bag of Purina dog food on the bottom rack of the metal cart along with a jumbo pack of toddler diapers. Fifteen minutes later Tawana looked up again. The reporter was gone. Eudora had shifted over to aisle five, where an older cashier, who was painfully slow and prone to mood swings, was ringing up an order.

  By noon everyone in the store knew about the reporter and Eudora’s short story, but that wasn’t the girl’s doing. Gail Crowley, the bigmouth gossip from customer service, collared the reported as he was leaving and extracted a blow-by-blow description of what was going on. “We got a regular Shakespeare among us!” the tubby blonde crowed. Gail, who probably hadn’t read anything more challenging than the National Inquirer in the last dozen years, waddled off to tell the workers in fresh produce about Eudora’s newfound celebrity status.

  Back in her office, Tawana checked her calendar. In the morning, she had to be in district court. A seventeen year-old Negro was caught shoplifting the week before Thanksgiving. At his arraignment, he pled ‘no contest’. An incorrigible thug, it was his sixth offense, and Tawana had to appear in court Tuesday morning representing the market as plaintiff. The previous month the perpetrator had been a fourteen year-old Caucasian, a bleary-eyed, latchkey brat from one of the inner city subsidized housing projects. Before that, an unwed Latina on AFDC. Driven by poverty, stupidity and enlightened self-interest, they came at you from multiple directions, in all ethnic varieties, sexes, shapes and colors.

  In the parking lot, two plain clothes detectives nabbed Reginald Owens as he was unlocking a metallic blue Cavalier sedan. They handcuffed him and threw the black youth in the back of an unmarked police car but not before relieving him of his stash of stolen meats. A small crowd gathered, watching from a discrete distance.

  A black kid ripping off fillet mignon in the meat department - what must they be thinking? The fourteen year old boy, who was caught in a similar bind in October, became so unhinged when the police collared him that he wet his pants. The urine dribbled down the front of his dungarees reaching to the cuff. That was a good thing. At least, at some primitive level, the under-aged crook grasped the severity of his predicament. Reginald Owens was too thick-skinned. When the cops pulled him aside, he smirked brazenly and affected the hollow-eyed indifference of a hardened felon.

  * * * * *

  “Congratulations!” As she was leaving work for the day, Tawana bumped into Eudora running down stray grocery carts in the ShopRite parking lot.

  “It’s no big deal.” She jabbed at the bridge of her glasses with a taut index finger, pushing the frame up on her nose, but they immediately careened back down coming to rest at a cockeyed angle.

  A grocery cart began rolling away and Tawana positioned it back in the stack. “What’s your short story about?”

  “It’s creative fiction,” the girl replied.

  “Yes, I understand, but where do you get your ideas?”

  Eudora stared at the black woman then waved her bony hands in the air. “That’s a bit hard to explain.” She leaned heavily into the train of stacked shopping carts that ran a good twenty deep and inched the mass forward toward the front of the store.

  Tawana felt her face flush hot. Of course Eudora would conveniently sidestep both questions. Properly understood, creative fiction was meant to be read not served up like a platter of exotic pastries at a coffee klatch. “I just read a wonderful book.” For some inexplicable reason, the store manager was tripping over her words. “Maya Angelou’s collected poems.”

  By way of response, Eudora snorted making a disagreeable sound. “You don’t like her poetry?”

  The unlovely girl studied her bony hands which were chapped and raw from the cold. “Robert Hayden… now there’s a decent poet.”

  “Never heard of him,” Tawana replied.

  Eudora swallowed and her Adam’s apple bobbed
up and down in typical Olive Oil fashion. “Hayden wrote a poem, Those Winter Sundays.” Lowering her eyes, she recited the poem from beginning to end in a lilting singsong cadence.

  Sundays too my father got up early

  And put his clothes on

  in the blueblack cold,…

  When the poem was done, she raised her head and noted, “A poet could spend a life time laboring at his craft and never create anything quite so perfect.”

  A flurry of icy wind caught up a pile of dead leaves and sent them swirling in a brittle, orangey funnel. The poem was devastatingly beautiful. Tawana could feel her heart pounding in her ears. “Yes, that was quite amazing.”

  A freckle faced boy and his mother passed by with a load of groceries, mostly junk food -potato chips, frozen pizzas, ice cream, three quarts of cream soda plus a carton of cigarettes. Tawana had a compulsive habit of psychoanalyzing customers by their purchases. "I’ve wanted to write something for quite a while but don’t seem to get anywhere.”

  Eudora smiled opaquely. “And what’s the something you want to get down on paper?”

  “That’s the problem,” Tawana replied with an embarrassed frown. “Perhaps I should join a local writers’ group.”

  “In all likelihood, you’ll end up with some MFA graduate student.” The thin girl pulled her collar up around her throat, but the flimsy coat was of the early fall variety and much too thin for a blustery December. “A snooty misogynist, who filters your prose through his male chauvinist biases.”

  Eudora collected the shopping cart that the freckle faced boy had abandoned, adding it to her collection and pushed off toward the front of the building. “Bring me a few pages of your writing and I’ll take a look at it.”

  “Yes, I’d appreciate that.” She watched the girl struggling with the absurdly long wagon train and had to stifle an impulse to help Eudora negotiate the carts toward the front of the building. But then, store managers were obligated to maintain a certain professional decorum.