Milkshakes

 

He loved his job.

Who wouldn’t love a job making people happy?

The cheesy uniform was a little much, but he took pride in the milkshakes he made.

He told his preacher about it one day, how proud he was of his perfect milkshakes, but the preacher didn’t smile.

“Son, only God can create perfection. Everything Man does is flawed somehow. I’m sorry, but for you and your customers to believe your milkshakes are perfect is a sin.”

From then on, he added just a dab of mustard into the center of every shake, to keep it from being perfect.

Night Noises

 

She was used to city noises- cars and sirens, music and other people’s conversations. And the city was never completely dark. There were always streetlights and spotlights and the lights from neighbors’ windows.

Out here in the middle of nowhere, there were only wild noises- crickets and frogs, owls and coyotes. And the darkness smothered her like heavy black velvet shot through with stars.

It made her uneasy, surrounded by only wild things and darkness.

It made her afraid.

When she told her grandmother about it, her grandmother laughed.

“Lordy, girl. You only have to worry when the noise stops.”

A Good Day

 

Water rushed into his lungs as blood flowed out of his body, it had all happened so quickly in slow motion when he dove into the ocean, right onto a very surprised shark, who had not stopped attacking him even though he punched it in the nose like they told you to, he was going to end up as dead as if he’d kissed it on the snoot, and he couldn’t help smiling as he lost consciousness thinking of the thought he’d had that morning looking at the sun shining in a perfect sky- “Today’s a good day to die.”

Estate Sale

 

“What do you mean you won’t go through that trunk?”

They were already behind evaluating and tagging the estate. The sale was tomorrow.

“You’re the boss. You do it.” she replied and moved on to a table full of glassware.

Grumbling about the lack of good employees anymore, he opened the steamer trunk and froze.

Staring up at him were at least a dozen dolls.

Hair matted, clothing mildewed, their plastic skin was dusty with mold, and their eyeballs were chalky, the pigmentation of their pupils long gone.

He quietly closed the trunk and carried it to the burn pile.

Footprints

 
There were tiny little footprints on the outside of the window, and she had no idea where they came from.

They weren’t bug prints, and they weren’t mouse prints (a mouse couldn’t make prints like this unless they had access to one of those skyscraper window washer get-ups).

It was a mystery.

Later, she realized that the Christmas wreath hung over that window, and that’s what made the marks, not little creatures trying to get in.

Whew!

Later still, she touched the window from the inside and erased a tiny footprint.

Wait.

The little creatures were trying to get out.

Fiction

 

She loved a particular author and had read everything they’d ever written.

Once, she’d read some reviews and been surprised. “Every book is like the others, save the landscape and names of the characters. Formulaic drivel.” And that was the nice one.

That had hurt her feelings as if she’d penned the novels herself. Even after going over the plots of them and realizing that they were formulaic, her love still stood strong.

Her own life was unpredictable, messy, and sometimes dangerous.

She needed the assurance that stories made sense and people lived happily ever after, or she’d go insane.

Inside Her Head

 

She couldn’t see them with her eyes closed, but if she’d been listening, she could have heard them snickering.

Of course, not everyone laughed at her. Most people just gave her a wide berth, averting their gaze with pursed lips as they went on with their day.

Her time was spent inside her head, away from her outer self; that old lady living out of a shopping bag on a park bench. The old parka, sweatpants, and ragged oversized galoshes disappeared inside her head.

Inside her head, where the music never stopped playing, she was a young diva again, forever.

Intruder

 

He’d been watching the house for a few days, learning the routine of the family who lived there.

Things would go much more smoothly if no one was home when it happened.

Now, he had a plan, and the next morning, he waited while the family got up, ate breakfast, and headed off to school and work.

They didn’t lock the back door when they left- fools.

Within five minutes he was in the house, and ten minutes later, he was gone.

Happily sipping the luxuriously hot coffee in the park, he wondered if they’d ever notice the missing mug.

Honeysuckle

 

The vines were everywhere, and they were impossible to get rid of, like any invasive species.

She knew she should hate it, poison it, burn it, physically tear it out of the earth, but she never could.

For a shimmering few weeks in the heart of Spring, every breath taken outside was full of its intoxicating scent.

Dripping from the vines in drifts of white, the flowers were alive with honeybees and the promise that winter was gone for good.

So, she left the honeysuckle to clamber and grasp everything in their path, silently strangling their hosts with their beauty.

Volunteer

 

She was an atheist.

He was a Christian.

He made it his mission to convert her.

She spent her time volunteering.

It was her decision after looking at her options, her time that she spent, her money that she donated; to try to rectify really shitty things that happened to people who never deserved it.

“You’re doing God’s work” he’d tell her, which just pissed her off.

Because if there were an omniscient and loving god, you’d think this floating mess of a planet wouldn’t be filled with broken, bleeding, dying humans.

She’d love to have nothing to volunteer for.

Appointments

They were about my age, in their sixties.

Sitting across the table from me in the waiting room, I couldn’t help but hear their conversation.

He was stout, but not obese, and she was unassuming in a no-makeup sort of way. They were talking about their day’s schedule of appointments.

The woman talked to her companion as if he were a small child, and I wondered if maybe he had dementia, but it didn’t look like it (whatever dementia looks like).

Suddenly, the woman looked across the table and smiled.

“We met online” she confided quietly, like that explained everything.

  

Jiggs

 

His name was Jiggs, and he lived alone in a tiny old trailer house.

He’d run off and joined the Merchant Marines at age 14 and been all over the world but landed back in East Texas in his old age.

She needed money, so she cleaned his tiny home and did his laundry once a week.

One day, he said, “Well. Now I’m going blind. I can’t see a goddamn thing.”

She took a good look at him, removed his glasses, washed them, and put them back on his nose.

“Well, I’ll be damned” he said, “It’s a miracle.”

Babies

 

She was attending a festival in the town her son lived in.

Wandering around, enjoying the art and the music and the food, she began absentmindedly collecting them.

There were five in all.

When her son came home, he asked her where the babies had come from.

“No one was watching them, so I brought them home.”

He sighed.

“Mom. You have to take them back.”

“But no one was watching them!”

Patiently but firmly, he repeated it. “Mom. You have to take them back.”

Sullen and disappointed, she did as she was told.

But she wasn’t happy about it.

Life

 

She woke up reluctantly. She had so much to do today and was not looking forward to any of it.

What a life. What a grind. Discontent welled up like bile.

Her little dog danced around, ready to go outside, and she opened the door, distractedly watching the dog.

The large shadow filled the yard, and the dog yelped in fear.

The woman leaped off the porch and snatched up the dog before the hawk could strike.

Feeling the dog’s heartbeat against her chest as it gazed adoringly at her, she thought, “What a life. What a fucking glorious life.”

Everglades

 

The little boy ran ahead of his parents.

They didn’t really notice. They never noticed.

It was totally safe there on the lonely little one lane road through the Everglades.

Coming to a culvert, he bent down to look into it. There was a log sticking out about a foot. As the little boy watched, the log slowly backed completely under the road.

Intrigued, he ran to the other end of the culvert in time to see the end of a thick scaly tail backing out.

His parents had caught up to him by now, but he didn’t tell them.

Galveston

 

The Gulf waves lap at the shore, tickling the toes of seagulls screaming at each other over nothing at all, stepping lightly around the iridescent jellyfish.

In the scruffy reeds between sand and grass, unblinking rattlesnakes watch families building sandcastles, no thoughts of danger in their heads.

On the bay side, alligators and egrets vie for the small fishes in the marsh.

At night, the spirits of those long-dead turned to ash by fire, washed to sea by hurricanes or victims of a flamboyantly sordid history whisper through the island, floating companionably beside the silent paws of the red wolves.

Knocking

It was a tiny knocking.

Nothing demanding or aggressive, just persistent enough to be heard over the television.

She only had one night left in her current lodgings.

This was the first time she’d heard the knocking, though.

Being there alone with no close neighbors, she wondered if she should be concerned.

It was windy outside, with gusts that were truly impressive, but it had been windy all day and there had been no knocking.

It would be easy enough to open the curtain that covered the door and see what was knocking.

But it was easier to ignore it. 

If Only

 

If only there had been more time.

Everyone told her it wouldn’t have made a difference. Nothing would have changed the outcome.

But it haunted her every day and took over her dreams every night.

She couldn’t eat and was consumed by the guilt of it.

Eventually, she had to quit her job and spent all of her time locked in her apartment with the drapes closed and the lights off.

Calls went unanswered and mail was returned “Recipient unknown”. It was very sad, but people had their own lives and routines and pretty soon she was all but forgotten.

Yellow

 

People always said, “Yellow is such a happy color!” and he’d just turn away.

They were commenting on the flowers in his yard; hundreds of  daffodils and lilies and roses and daisies- all yellow.

His wife had planted them, adding more and more every year, she said because yellow made her happy.

He wanted to pull them out, poison them, set them on fire, but he couldn’t do it.

Because of her. Because she loved them.

He’d sat by her bedside as the liver failure turned her lovely skin sickly yellow and eventually killed her.

He hated the color yellow.

Lamp

 

The lamp was ugly even for that vintage.

Made of ceramic, in the shape of a pyramid of fruit, it was glazed a shiny iridescent pink. Its shade was fringed, of course.

She was looking for a makers’ mark, when she saw the note tucked inside, and she unfolded it.

The note was in spidery handwriting and notated the wedding date of the couple who had received it. It also included their birth and death dates, as well as the birth and death dates of the relatives who got it after the original couple died.

Did the lamp kill them?

Fifteen Minutes

 

He turned the corner, then stopped.

Confused, he looked up at the street signs to verify that this was his street, his block, where his house was.

There was a neat row of houses on either side of the street, but he didn’t recognize any of them.

He walked up and down the block, slowly, trying to find something familiar, but all the houses and their neat yards and cars in the driveways were strange. Completely normal, but strange to him. He’d never seen any of it.

“What the fuck” he whispered to himself. He’d only been gone fifteen minutes.

Unhinged

 

 Gingerly, she checked her jaw, sliding it left, then right.

She told herself every time to act scared, lower her head, but she never did. Her tilted up chin was just too tempting a target for his anger.

It was a miracle that she still had all her teeth.

Over time, her jaws started popping, becoming more loose with every blow.

One night it finally happened, and she smiled to herself.

He never saw the blow from behind coming, and the sledgehammer made a satisfying sound- like smashing a frozen watermelon.

Her jaws unhinged like a snake, and he disappeared.

Cabin

 

The faded little cabin perched on the shores of a peaceful lake. Even the road to the cabin was peaceful; the honey-colored sand of central Wisconsin.

It was surrounded by planted pine forests, where nothing grew under the trees, and the fallen needles were deep and soft, muffling all noise save the whistling wind through the pine branches high above.  

An old rowboat swayed next to the wooden pier, waiting for children and old men and their fishing poles.

Summer smelled of lake water, earthworms, and hot pine sap, and sounded like a creaky hand pump, surly chipmunks, and crickets.

 

House

 

She’d spent hundreds of hours inside the grand old house as a child, and now it was for sale.  She asked the realtor why it’d been on the market almost yearly since the owner died and the realtor laughed nervously and said everyone who tried to live there swore it was haunted.

“I’ll take it” she told the realtor, before even walking through it.

The realtor asked if she was sure, and she smiled and said, “Yes. It’s OK. I know the ghost.”

Slowly, the house was restored to its original façade and décor.

And they lived happily ever after.