NO FEELING BETTER

A horse was in the house. No one knew how it got there. It was intended for the garage. Its carriage was still out there, where the horse was supposed to be. No one would have been opposed if the horse had never entered the house. But he had. He had already stepped on a carpet and broken two lamps. One by one we went around the room and asked the guests if they were responsible for this turn of events. “Alex?” Alex shook his head. “Terrence?” Terrence shook his head. “Louis?” Louis shook his head. “Richard?” Richard shook his head. Those were all the guests. We had no suspects left. Terrence raised his hand. Detective Javier Ruiz de Larrinaga-Somavia smiled at me. He was sure that Terrence was about to give a confession, and his certainty made me smile, too. I was every bit as interested as Detective Javier Ruiz de Larrinaga-Somavia  in solving the mystery of the horse in the house. “Yes,” said Terrence. “You see, what I think, well, the thing is, I mean to say.” Detective Javier Ruiz de Larrinaga-Somavia rushed over and began to strike Terrence with a riding crop. This was a technique of his that I had read about in books. It was called “Get The Villain With the Victim’s Gear.” Some police departments had come to abbreviate it as GVVG, or “Givivig.” Detective Javier Ruiz de Larrinaga-Somavia was givviging Terrence to move the words along. The technique works. As the books say, “The technique, if administered correctly, always works.” “Kirkpatrick,” Terrence said. “Kirkpatrick is not in the room.” We looked out the window. Kirkpatrick was in the garage with the carriage, pointing at us and snickering. He had been responsible all along. We forgave him because he had a beautiful sister that we all wanted to marry, even Detective Javier Ruiz de Larrinaga-Somavia. I sighed wearily while Alex, Louis, and Richard began to clean up the pieces of the broken lamp. Kirkpatrick kept snickering. The culprit profited from the pulchritude of another. The brother escaped on the basis of the sister’s face. A horse was in the house.

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE BUTCHER

By Ben Greenman

From forthcoming collection of stories, as yet untitled

He delivered the liver, delighted. The house wasn’t lived in; the lights were unlighted. He left, his night blighted. He redelivered the liver the next night. Still no lights. He quivered with rage. He felt his age. He lived to deliver. He had no other love. He left, livid. Someone had lied. He died.

TO THE POINT

This is the first dog in this century, and only the second or third in recorded history, which has bitten someone in a pattern that can fairly be called a composition rather than simply an injury. This dog is a house dog that belonged originally to a family that petted it and played with it to the point where it looked as though it might smile evermore, spending much of that pet-and-play time listening to music to the point where the dog developed the ability to discern one melody from the next on the strength of just a note or two. Interactions between musical sounds became its specialty. After one year the dog learned to read sheet music though he told no one. How could a dog tell anyone anything close to that? It would not be believed in any form or fashion. But then after reaching a sort of plateau of satisfaction with music and its various iterations, the dog was rudely thrust out of that situation when the two parents developed cancer from chemicals leaked into the air by the company where they both worked, one developing a cancer in the throat, one in the stomach, and the pair of them became sicklier and sicklier over the course of a year and died within a week of one another, and the children were sent to live with relatives out of state, resulting in a situation where the dog was transported to a shelter where it put its paws over its eyes and ears, making a noise that the shelter staff called whining but was in fact a process of designing and assessing new melodies and various tempos at which those melodies might be deployed. Again, the dog told no one. There it languished, in that shelter, making melodies, until it was adopted by a very mean man, his very mean wife, and a very mean son. This new family hated music and hated dogs but hated strangers worse and planned to use the dog as a guard for their large and lavish mansion, which was putty-colored and located at the head of a large artificial lake. The dog looked mean but was nice. It was nice when it walked around the house. It was nice when it ran to and from the lake. The dog persisted in its fundamental kindness until it came to the point where it was not only not rewarded for that temperament but actively punished, and then overnight one night the dog had a nightmare, which dogs can have, and violent visions appeared to it, and the next day it was a perfect guard dog. When placed near the front gate it growled loudly and harshly, not musical any longer. It did not sleep. It  could not sleep. it walked around the house with only silence in its head and went stiffly to and from the lake, no longer interested in running, which connoted a joy no longer felt. Toward the end of its first week of cruelty the dog heard someone behind it and turned and lunged and bit. Its teeth went into a leg, came out, went in again. The victim was the mean son of the mean man and mean wife. He screamed and fell to the ground. His parents, mean but also immensely wealthy, called a private ambulance company which came and treated the boy. The ambulance driver and on-board medic both recommended that the dog be destroyed, but the mean rich people had only one trait that was more powerful than either their cruelty or their wealth, and that was their arrogance. As soon as the driver and medic offered their advice, the man put his hands on his hips and insisted that the dog would stay. The wife backed him up yelling a little. The boy, still crying, said nothing. The ambulance driver and medic went away. The mean man and his mean wife proceeded to station the dog by the gate, just as it had been before. The bite had alarmed them but had also reassured them. This was a dog capable of guarding. They looked at the dog from their window. They had not looked at the bite. Or rather, they had looked at it but had not truly seen it. Even if they had truly seen it, they would not have been capable of understanding it. Only a composer could have understood it. If a composer had looked at the bite, he or she would have gasped and dropped whatever he or she was holding—a coffee mug, a baton, a book about Scriabin, a bottle of pills—because the marks of the teeth were arranged exactly in what was almost certainly a nocturne. The year of 2019 coincides with the twentieth anniversary of this composition left on the leg of the mean boy by the talented, essentially kind dog, and the twenty-first anniversary of the death of the dog’s first and most beloved owners, the musicians who gave it love and affection and the gift of music. The nocturne, never performed, was composed in their memory. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

THE FRIENDS

By Ben Greenman

From forthcoming collection of stories, as yet untitled

They got together for a chat. They were recording it. Everything was recorded, and to pretend otherwise would have been naïve or worse. Sam started. It was Sam’s house where they met, partly because that’s where the quality of the recordings ended up sounding the best, something about the acoustics of the den, the kind of panels on the walls, the kind of carpet on the floor. “Let’s start,” Sam said. They were talking about a television show they all liked. That was the projected topic not only for that chat, but also for the seven chats of similar length that were scheduled to follow, one each week, over the course of the next two months. They would not discuss the same show they all liked, but different shows they all liked, one after the other. Sam had suggested the first show that they would discuss. It was a show about a supernatural high school that had aired when Sam was nineteen years old. Sam had not been a fan at first. The pilot had reeked of desperation. Sam had almost turned off the television. But the show had righted itself over the course of the first season, and the second season was considered by many to be one of the finest examples of the supernatural high school genre. Sam watched every episode religiously, which always seemed ironic, since the show itself was so heretical, featuring witches and demons. “Apostate is enough,” Sam said. The joke fell flat. Sam made a mental note to remove that from the chat before it was released. Sam was always thinking that way, and as such always divided between the demands of the moment and an awareness of the final destination of the discussion. The host had duties. That was a demand of the moment. “And what did you think of the pilot?” Sam said. Chris and Alex both started shaking their heads. “I didn’t like it,” Chris said. “But then again I didn’t like the entire show. I rarely watched it and have almost nothing to say about it.” Alex was nodding now. “Me too,” Alex said. “Couldn’t stand it.” In the silence that followed, Sam made another mental note, larger than the first, about what else would have to be removed from the chat before it was released, and wondered if there had been a drastic error in judgment, not about the show that had been selected for the chat, not even about the chat about the show that had been selected, but about Chris and Alex. Were they even her friends?

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL

By Ben Greenman 
From forthcoming collection of stories, as yet untitled

Let’s consider the possibility that the events of the past two years were no more than a series of misunderstandings, that even though all of them acted in ways that were not commensurate with the duties of their office, that they meant well, that things got away from them, that it’s not always a good idea to judge. So the mayor embezzled. So what? So the sheriff stole cars. So what? So the superintendent of schools trafficked drugs in the halls of the junior high, shades on, tucked into a corner by the lockers outside the band room, running his sales patter, “smoke smoke smoke, get yer smoke.” So what? So the rest of them served as the willing tentacles of a vast and wide-reaching criminal enterprise overseen by Susan Fairbanks, a middle-aged freeholder who lived in an “elegant Cape Cod” with a “bright and beautiful master suite” and a “spacious living room” featuring “Anderson windows and skylight,” not to mention “central A/C, two-zone” and “sliding glass doors” that “lead out” to a “backyard ideal for parties.” In that backyard, Susan Fairbanks assembled her lieutenants and planned mischief and mayhem, larceny and depravity, not only commanding the selectmen and -women, the aldermen and -women, the assemblymen and-women, but also instructing them to invite the others and tell them to stand by for their orders: the mayor (the order: embezzle), the sheriff (the order: steal cars), the superintendent of schools (the order: sell dope), and the head of the local chamber of commerce (the order: murder the rest of them, put the bodies in a storage space, build a Stonehenge of filled-to-the-brim gasoline cans, toast their immortal souls with a glass of whiskey and a cigar, walk out whistling, drip a trail of gasoline from the storage space, at a safe distance drop the lit cigar into the tail of the trail, drive away, don’t look back, never look back, drive straight to Susan, sit in lounge chairs, have some burgers). So what?

DENNIS SEES ALL

By Ben Greenman
Originally drafted in 1919
Revised in 1954
Re-revised in 1971
Finished in 2015

“Oof,” said Dennis. It was not the worst time for him to say it, but it was not the best. He looked around. No one had heard. “Oh,” he said. This time, another person noticed and briefly lifted eyes to meet his. He nodded at this other person. This other person was a young woman holding a sharp stick. Dennis gasped in fear and even recoiled a little bit but the part of his brain that was not afraid took over the part that was, recognizing the sharp stick as a pencil. He moved on. He had a talent for reading upside-down and backwards, which he had cultivated since childhood, and which now allowed him to glance not at the young woman or her weapon but at the mirror over her head, which reflected back what she was writing with the pencil. She had a large-format notebook open in her lap. It was covered with words. Glorious words, Dennis thought, wonderful words. Words that built worlds. He did not say any of this. He coughed. The young woman did not lift her eyes. He squinted at the mirror, thinking hard, until he could flip the glorious wonderful words and then flip them again. He could read them now. “Wash clothes?” she had written in large block print. And then, beneath that, in even larger print, “Yes!” And then, beneath both of them, there was a longer message in a smaller handwriting, but still neat enough for him to read. “Make an appointment with Professor Brandy." Or was it "Professor, Brandy"?  "The spirit of wine," Dennis said. "Medium dark red," Dennis said. "87413F," Dennis said. That was the code for the color. He had once used it as the background hue for a website for a shoe store. It was the oldest shoe store in town. Dennis's father had shopped there. His grandfather had shopped there. Dennis had suffered through toes pinched into dress shoes and his grandfather not taking charge. "They feel good to me," his grandfather said, though his grandfather, standing six feet away and filling out the racing form, was not feeling them at all. His grandfather had begun to decline. He had wandered into the fields near town and Dennis and his father had to go retrieve him. Dennis thought of the fields. They had been farmland once but were no longer arable by the time Dennis was born. They were vast and yellow-brown. Dennis's grandfather was standing toward the back of the field, near a fringe of trees whose leaves were #87413F. It was November. Three weeks later, he might have frozen to death. Dennis ran toward his grandfather. He wrapped his grandfather's arms around him until he felt safe, and imagined that his grandfather felt safe as well. Now, Dennis was almost as old as his grandfather had been. He imagined running into the fields. He imagined being safe. He tore his eyes away from the mirror and looked once more at the young woman. She was beautiful. His words had earned her gaze. When he met it, she blushed and went back to writing, writing quickly, writing words that he knew he would never read. "Oof," he said a second time, getting up to leave. It was not the worst time for it. It was the best. 

OLD STORY IN MULTICOLORED INKS