Good God. This sweater is hideous.

I mean, what if I actually wore this sweater? And then, while wearing it, I were to die. I don't want to be a dead man wearing this sweater. Imagine the look on the coroner's face when he sees my lifeless body swathed in this obscenity. Immediate disdain.

Or what if while, on some miserable day when I deigned to wear this sweater, I were to at long last meet the one, true love of my life? If she really were, in fact, the one, true love of my life, my soul mate, she surely wouldn't give me a second's thought in this sweater. No woman I could ever love could ever love a man who would wear such a sweater.

Of course, the probability of dying while in this sweater is pretty minuscule. Besides, there's always the off-chance that it could prove beneficial. Like, maybe on the day I choose to wear the sweater, I could stave off unwanted attention--some crazy woman who would otherwise become my stalker, perhaps? These things are impossible to predict.

But that's beside the point. It's an ugly sweater. I'm not going to wear it.

Labels: short stories

Bartholomew J. Pinafore--that wretched cad!--tied his last knot, affixing dear Rosaline, fair of both skin and heart, to the railroad tracks. With an elegant hand gesture, he produced a handkerchief, flamboyantly embroidered with the villain's initials. He had no issue with the townspeople discovering whose handiwork had sullied the landscape and destroyed the girl.

Lashed to a tree overlooking the grisly scene, simple yet noble Floyd watched helplessly as the girl for whom his heart had spent many a moonlit hour pining was gagged, her cries for help stifled. How desperately Floyd wanted to bargain for the girl's life! To appeal to Pinafore's humanity! Or, at the very least, damningly paraphrase Paster Gimsby's last hellfire sermon. But alas, his mouth too was silenced by one of the bastard's perfumed handkerchiefs.

With a flourish, Pinafore turned to face Floyd, a wicked grin stretching the boundaries of his face. "See now, boy, that you and the rest of the townsfolk take this as a lesson that it is I, Bartholomew J. Pinafore, who makes the rules around here!" Pinafore let loose a diabolical cackle and twirled his magnificently waxed mustache, black and shining in the midday sun.

"Now, please excuse me, boy. Mother always said I had a weak constitution when it came to blood and guts. Besides, I do believe I have an appointment with your own mother." With that, Pinafore leaped onto his horse and shot off across the plains. By Floyd's estimation, in no more than two minutes, Pinafore would pass the very train scheduled to decapitate dear Rosaline. One minute later, it would pass the tree, having already performed its wicked deed.

Naturally, within two minutes and fifty-five seconds, Floyd had loosed himself from his bonds and saved the life of dear Rosaline, carrying her in his arms back to town. Together, they would lead the townspeople to stand up to Pinafore and end his dreadful influence. And at long last, they would be married.

Nonetheless, the image of Pinafore twirling his magnificently waxed mustache, black and shining in the midday sun, would stay with Floyd for the rest of his life. For truly, it was a magnificent and beautiful thing to behold.

Labels: short stories

"I'll never forget you!" cried the boy. And how could he? With her at his side, he had just completed what was surely the greatest adventure of his life.

The fairy continued her return to the heavens, slowly ascending, bathed in a sourceless green light. "Nor I you!" she promised, masking the tears streaming down her own face with a faint laugh. "Remember always the advice I gave you! Always keep your fears and frustrations and anger locked deep within you. Share them with no one. Keep them bottled up!"

"I will!" he choked, waving. Heeding her advice would be the only way to honor her memory. "I will!"

Labels: short stories

This is a sequel to A Query for a Man of Refinement

At long last, Nigel drove the towncar to a stop in front of Lady Angeline's manor. Wanting to spend as little time in the cold as possible, Quincy J. Applethorpe, III, Esquire, dashed through the door, running stiffly and awkwardly, but still projecting an impression of poise and grace to the statuary that flanked the walkway.

Nigel, always precisely as quick as the needs of his master, had already positioned himself in front of Quincy's door. Flashing faithful Nigel a warm smile and a chocolate truffle he had procured for his most faithful manservant, Quincy ducked into the back seat. "Thank you, Master Quincy," nodded Nigel, his black cap getting damper.

As Nigel drove the young gentleman home, Quincy found dwelling on the words of the raucous youth he had strangely encountered in Lady Angeline's vestibule. Leaning back in his leather seat, he began to conjure up the images of his past lady loves, taking a mental inventory of the women with whom he had romanced or shared a bed.

Guinevere, his first real girlfriend and favorite playdate as a child, had always possessed her beautiful blonde locks. The names of nearly all his other childhood friends and acquaintances had long since faded into anonymity, though he retained a dim recollection of turning down the invitation of a certain raven-haired girl with impossibly rosy cheeks to a formal ball.

Louisa, his most recent interest, had been a friend of his family's for years, their fathers being longtime business partners. But it was only this Autumn, when she had bleached and dyed her long red hair, that he had felt compelled to whisk her away for a weekend in Vienna. This spontaneous trip had initiated the most ferociously passionate relationship of Quincy's life.

Among other more fleeting romances, his mind wandered back to Abigail, the maid who had been responsible for maintaining the carpets in the West wing of his grandfather's country estate in his seventeenth year. He had been summering there in preparation for his first semester at Harvard. One afternoon, she discovered him exploring herself, when she removed her bonnet, let loose a yellow fountain of hair, and introduced Quincy to a new world.

Pulling himself out of his nostalgic reverie, the remembered scents of perfumed necks and intimate sweat dissipating, Quincy could not ignore the one trait they all shared. Though he was sure he was not so shallow as to be exclusively attracted to any such superficial feature of the well-bred women in his past, it was true that he had never expressed anything more than a polite interest in any woman without blonde hair. When his polo mates would set him up on a blind date, he never agreed until the color of her hair had been divulged. Curious, he thought to himself, I don't seem to get particularly excited by just the thought of blonde hair.

Attempting to convince himself of his impartiality, Quincy pictured Lady Angeline, who was two years his junior. He imagined her wearing the black dress she wore while hosting this very evening, then mentally removed six inches from its hemline. Certainly, she had a comely smile and a magnificent body. In his mind, she was collapsed on her couch, her auburn curls splashed behind her head on a pillow. He tried to picture her naked.

Nothing. The exercise provided him with nothing.

The window behind his head caught flakes of snow and melted them instantaneously. Perhaps gentlemen did prefer blondes, he thought.

Labels: short stories

Quincy J. Applethorpe, III, Esquire, stood in the vestibule, gazing out at the stillness of the night through the window adjacent the door. In the hours between his arrival at Lady Angeline's elegant soirée, a light snowstorm had moved in, quite unnoticed by himself and his inebriated compatriots, the celebrations of which could still be heard faintly echoing down the corridor to kiss his ear. The snowfall looked as if it had been superimposed, a complementary layer upon the wet, picturesque scene.

As he waited for his manservant Nigel to bring the car round the front of the manor, his eyes shifted focus from the serenity of night to the moody highlights of his own reflection in the window. Quincy, of course, had the most immaculate poise. Positioned as he was, he found his beautiful, twenty-eight-year-old face cast mostly in darkness, only select contours of his face receiving illumination from a street lamp at the edge of the yard beyond him and the dim overhead light, centered on the ceiling of the vestibule. Whenever presented with a partial image of himself, he liked to a play a little mental game: his mother or his father--whose pedigree was most visible?

Representing his mother were his high-set cheekbones, the earlobes that hung free from his head, and the barely suggested dimples that were peculiarly prominent in this configuration. His father's chin, though, was very pronounced, as was the funny strip of skin that ran between his nose and his upper lip. Quincy's eyes (set in his face in the manner of his father and his father's father) were not visible in this light, so on this night, his mother was the victor. Neither team got to claim the nose, the left side of which was most striking in his reflection, he mused, as no one in the family had anything quite like it. Though his understanding of genetics told him otherwise, he liked to think it was his own invention, his own contribution to the family line.

His eyes still fixed on his reflection, he watched himself withdraw a pair of white gloves from within his coat pocket. Tenderly, he donned first the right glove, then the left.

"Dude!"

The voice from behind Quincy caught him off guard, causing him to tug his left glove over his hand in a fashion too snug. Regaining his composure, he whirled around to face two youths standing nearby, both slouching, both plastered, both all giggles.

The youth nearest Quincy wore a baggy sweater and baggier denim pants, and may well have been wearing the contents of his half-empty bottle of domestic beer. His friend, hunched over and giggling uncontrollably wore what Quincy believed was called a skull cap and some ill-applied facial hair. Both stank. Actually, Quincy did not know whether they youths or not--at least in relation to himself--with the dark rings around their eyes and poorly maintained skin belying nothing of their age, but placing them in the wide, vague demographic Quincy recognized as middle-class post-adolescence. Their apparent maturity, however, assured Quincy that "youth" was as fine a word as any to describe them.

Needless to say, they looked woefully out of place in Lady Angeline's abode. Still, he saw no cause for alarm. Perhaps they were friends of some lowly kitchen help. "May I help you, lads?" Quincy asked, his voice cordial but for a playful twist of snide inflection, which he suspected the drunk youths would not detect.

"Dude, ask him already!" the second youth urged.

"Okay, man, okay," the fellow nearest him assured. Sucking in a breath, he struck a more upright pose, cleared his throat, and shifted his voice down an octave. Behind him, the capped one erupted in breathless laughter, as if transporting himself into the future, once his compatriot's stunningly witty quip had entered the annals of history.

"My good man," he coughed out, as if a woman imitating a man, "is it true that... that gentlemen prefer blondes?"

The youths fell to the floor laughing.

Labels: short stories

Simtepkin, son of a hide tanner, stood at the edge of the forest of his youth. This barrier separated the world he knew from the world he feared, its landmarks and inhabitants the stuff of hushed whispers and grotesque legend.

The forest stood atop a mountain, overlooking a valley down below. This valley was the only thing outside the forest of which the strapling young Simtepkin had heard a firsthand account. The Valley of Assholes. But across the valley stood another mountain; beyond that mountain was a stretch of plains and short hills, green and pleasant. Atop one of these hills, crudely marked on the tattered map in Simtepkin's left hand, was the faint promise of a fruit so rare that his people had never named it--the juice of which was now was the only hope to heal his fast ailing sister.

Rumored to share a distant ancestor with Simtepkin's own people, the denizens of the valley, Assholes all, shared at least a common tongue. Even nestled deep in the forest as Simtepkin's village was, they would still hear the bawdy taunting and foul mockery rise up out of the valley

To Simtepkin's ear, the wind carried a whisper of "Fuck your mother, limpdick," slurred and somehow even more vulgar in tone than in words. Simtepkin the tanner's son shuddered.

But Simptepkin the man--the adventurer--steeled his nerves, and stepped out from under the secure canopy of mountain trees.

Labels: short stories

The odd, yellow statues stood in the middle of their torn purple wrappings. Inexpertly crafted from tin foil, they each appeared to be models of the same subject. The children, all aged between four and nineteen, stared at the gifts--first their own, then each other's--in bewilderment.

"Y'all deserve them golden calves," spat Grandpa, his hands in trembling, unclenched fists of righteous rage, "'cause y'all are idolators."

The heads of the children all turned to look at the old man at the head of the long table, their living ancestor, gloomy and feeble in his wheelchair.

"With your iPods and your DVDs, your Nintendos and your hybrid cars..." Grandpa muttered, sinking his head between his shoulders, trailing off into incoherence.

Labels: short stories

God leaned back in the chair, surprised again that it didn't roll with Him when He shifted His weight. The view from this side of the desk was quite different and He wondered how long it had been since He had taken a moment to appreciate His office from this perspective. He also noticed a crude etching. How long had that been there, he wondered. It must have been some time; it was in cuneiform.

Somehow, God couldn't bring Himself to look the accountant in the eye. The old man's delicate, wiry frame looked downright comical in God's majestic office chair. Fidgeting, God considered catching up on some sort of work that wouldn't require sitting in his His His usual seat. There was some mail He could catch up on. But the desktop was already cluttered with thousands of pieces of paper, and God didn't feel like contributing to the chaos. So God fidgeted.

"Where were the aught-three receipts again?" the accountant squeaked.

God gestured to a plaid-print shoebox. "Though I think there might be some aught-four in there, too."

The accountant picked up the forms on top of the shoe box and suspended them in the air, searching for a safe place to put them. God extended a hand and the accountant coldly passed them over. God examined the papers only briefly, quickly determining that even if He knew what purpose they served, He couldn't possibly have cared.

"There's some nineteen-aught-three mixed in here," the accountant grimaced. "That would've been nice to know last week."

God gave a tight-lipped nod. "Well, I do work in mysterious ways, you know."

A bit of levity. The accountant smiled and began sorting.

Labels: short stories

"No, no, no!" the little terrorist boy shouted, stamping his feet with each utterance. "You're so unfair! All the parents of the other boys in the madrasah are letting them go!"

"Well," the terrorist mother said, folding her arms sternly, "I'm not the mother of all the other boys in the madrasah, now am I?"

Blocked. The terrorist boy seethed young, impetuous anger. His mother, a good foot taller than him, had the upper hand if only by virtue of size. "What about the neighbors?" she teased with a smirk. "I don't think they'd be letting their son go." She turned away from him, her hand reaching for the telephone.

"I hate you!" he screamed, intercepting the distance between his mother's hand and the receiver. Her son had crossed a line. She turned to look at him, her eyes wide and instinctively welling up with tears.

"I hate you!" the terrorist boy repeated. "I hate you more than I hate precious American freedoms!"

Labels: short stories

Jana had lost the thread.

Of her life.

More immediately, though, she had lost the thread that matched the hem of her black slacks, which in turn matched the pink pinstripe that ran down each leg. "Funky fresh!" Clarisse had cackled three months ago, when Jana modeled them out of the dressing room, arms akimbo, twisting her torso in an exaggerated fashion. "Funky fresh" was a very funny thing for Clarisse to say three months ago, though Jana couldn't tell you why now. Thinking about it, it didn't really even make sense. Still, on the mornings on which she deigned to wear this new fixture of her wardrobe, as she unlatched them from their hanger, she said the words "funky fresh" to herself with a giggle.

For the past four weeks, though, the slacks had been hanging uselessly in Jana's closet, passed over every morning due to a snag—a fishhook embedded in the carpet of her office, of all things!—that unfurled the hem of the right leg. Put out to pasture prematurely, they were consistently passed over in favor of tan and navy-colored slacks and skirts.

But this morning at about eight o'clok, she found herself staring absently at the cotton-polyester blend, whispering "funky fresh" almost mournfully. That did it. After work, she made a point of venturing into the sewing aisle at the supermarket for the very first time.

* * * *
A sheet of Internet-retrieved, freshly printed instructions detailing how to mend a hemline slowly crinkling in her left hand, Jana presses her ear to the carpet, scanning underneath her bed—no spool in sight. Letting out a sigh, she pauses a moment to hear the strains of an anonymous John Williams score coming from the apartment of the neighbors below.

Two thoughts enter her mind. First, that according to her mother, things were always in the last place you looked, which only makes sense, because why would you continue to search? Still, it seems there could only be so many places to look within her apartment. And she's seen them all now, twice, including the fridge. Second, she can't really imagine herself going to the store again tomorrow for yet another spool of pink thread, for which she would have precisely one use, and then discard. The thread couldn't have just disappeared, right?

She rolled over onto her back, staring at her open closet. The hemline of her funky fresh pinstripe pants dangled lower than any other item in her closet.

Jana had lost the thread.

Labels: short stories

"Is the quarter note the one with the tail?"

"What do you mean by tail?"

"You know, with the little tail," he gestured in the air with two fingers to compensate for the lack of new information.

"Like coming off the end?"

"Right," he repeated the gesture with a bit more flourish.

"I think you're describing an eighth note."

"Oh."

"What is it you want? A quarter note or the one with the tail?"

"I can't remember now," he shrugged. "So which one's the quarter note?"

She drew the tail in the air in front of her, a mirror to his action, "The eighth has the tail coming off the stem," her hand became a vertical line and cut the space between them in half, "while the quarter note has just the stem."

"Is that what you'd call that? The stem?"

"Sure, it's what I'd call it," she pulled her hand back to bring her Coke cup up to her lips. "I don't know what it's called, but for the time being, that's what I'd call it."

"Right. So you throw two tails on the stem, that would be what? A sixteenth?"

Lena titled the cup back, but realized it was empty. Jack didn't know that. On some other occasion, she might have told him, and both might have had a good laugh about it. It might have turned into an inside joke. Instead, she carried the motion through, the wide brim briefly obstructing her vision. She even swallowed the nothing that remained in the cup. With a slight breath, she cleared the imaginary, carbonated fizz out of her throat so she could reply, "And a third makes a thirty-second."

"Do they go up to four tails? Sixty-fourth notes?"

"Sure."

Jack noticed he was absently shepherding the stray salt, collecting the granules in the folds of his stained wax paper wrapper, forming the shape of an L. "That's crazy. That's sixty-four notes in a measure."

"They can handle it," Lena leaned back in her chair to signal that it was perhaps time to move to some other part of the mall, some other corner of conversation. "Musicians, they're dexterous like that, with their air."

"Or their fingers," he said absently, noisily compressing the wrapper between his hands.

"Sure," she shook the empty cup to communicate to Jack that it was, in fact, empty. "Sometimes both."

Labels: short stories

The last time she saw Morris, two fingers protruded from the back of his head, beckoning her to follow. Allison nearly did, too. Her knees locked tight as she stepped off the curb. For some reason she would not pretend to understand, Allison could never tolerate—let alone obey—the two-finger beckon.

Morris's departing figure was perfectly lit by the stoplight, outlining his square body in green, then yellow, then red. Rain drizzled in a mist, forming glossy spots on his perfectly tailored coat, yet he held his umbrella closed firmly in his left hand; a briefcase clasped with a symmetrical, military precision in his right. Everything Allison knew he had was stored in that briefcase. Everything that was Morris was making its way across the intersection away from her, passing from her life. Yet, still, the fingers—so inviting, so intolerable.
. Rain drizzled in a mist, forming glossy spots on his perfectly tailored coat, yet he held his umbrella closed firmly in his left hand; a briefcase clasped with a symmetrical, military precision in his right. Everything Allison knew he had was stored in that briefcase. Everything that was Morris was making its way across the intersection away from her, passing from her life. Yet, still, the fingers—so inviting, so intolerable.

Either Morris took naturally small steps or he took deliberately small steps, as it seemed to Allison that he should have passed through the intersection whole minutes before he did. Yet all she could do was bear witness to every little step, her mouth agape, head cocked, eyes wide, brow furrowed, shoulders shivering.

Two things confused her, keeping her petrified: First, why this aversion to the two-finger beckon? Seriously, who has that hangup? Well, Allison, apparently. And for as long as she could remember, too. Second, Morris had two fingers extended, beckoning from the back of his skull. What was with that?

Finally, Morris accomplished the other side of the intersection. In two too-small steps, his feet passed over the white line of the crosswalk. Allison stood in the center of the street, suddenly secure again to breathe. She heaved a sigh which seemed to her to conjure the large truck that stole across the intent line of vision she held on Morris’s retreat. With its passing, Morris was gone.

In the hours Allison spends squinting at the windows in the office building across the street -- the one where she believes her doppelganger works (as a travel agent, she presumes) -- she ponders that night, that September. What would have happened had she been able to overcome her repulsion to the two-finger beckon? Had she too achieved the other side of the intersection? Had she offered to carry Morris's umbrella or his briefcase? Had she stroked the two fingers she had refused? Would her brother have left his wife? Would she have discovered her doppelganger? Would that blouse still have been stained with ketchup? Would her name still be Allison? Would her 10-key skills have slacked off so poorly?

Of course, such thoughts are all for naught. The thought of overcoming her aversion to the two-finger beckon was too fanciful to occupy her mind even in the time spent squinting at the building.

Written in ten minutes. Revised in twenty.

Labels: short stories