Stray Reprints

Sunday, March 6, 2022

HEAVEN

The Order was never large, but by the time that Susannah joined, its numbers had dwindled to a few. They had been decimated by old age and accident, by marriages that took them out and simple loss of faith. She was a true believer and followed every precept. She would not own a house. She often walked around her rental property naked. She turned the lights on and off at odd times. She ate mostly burgers and exercised like a champ. She greeted the dawn by shouting out the names of her husbands, past and future. She got off mostly only in the car, driving out to the manor or the swamp with Hetty, who had brought her into the Order and was everlastingly grateful. “Hey honey,” Hetty said, “I’m happy when you’re happy. That is why I have learned to drive and also do what needs to be done.” Susannah didn’t know why there weren’t more in the Order. It was heaven.

MADRIGAL

The customers who came in just before closing time were not of the usual sort. The man was slim like a pocketknife, with hair that came to a point. The woman, teakettle-stout, had a large macramé bag slung crossbody. Porter thought for a moment that they meant to rob him. He slid down the counter to the spot with the silent alarm on the underside, and when the woman reached into her bag he got his finger on the button. What came out was not a gun but a small metal disk with letters around the edge. She pressed it to her lips and blew for a tone, and then the pair of them began to sing. The sound was lovely, their voices twining around each other, the melancholy at first and then heavenly, the song conveying a movement of the heart, the melody rising, falling, sailing up, swinging down, though Porter didn’t understand a word of it. When they paused, he asked what language it was. “A type of Italian,” said the woman. “Though not completely,” the man said. “It’s mixed and matched. Oltremontani, you know.” Porter did not know. “Can we sing you another?” said the woman. “This one is at first just a solo.” She began to sing, and he saw that she had the finer voice of the pair. She sung in English of a city high on a hill that was to be conquered by love. Porter smiled to himself. His store was on a hill, and like the hill in the song, it had a trio of trees at the base that served as sentinels. He marveled at the coincidence to the point where he did not notice the thin man coming around behind him with a rope and a hot metal stick. “That’s what they do,” said the policeman, six hours later. “Come in, sing, make a dreamy evening of it, then tie ‘em up and brand ‘em.” The losses from the robbery were estimated at eight thousand dollars.

HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH

“They say I am nostalgic,” he told his students. “But I criticize the past by refusing to visit it.” This usually got a big laugh but this time a student in the front row fixed him with an icy stare. After class she lingered by the lectern. She was tiny, with large eyes that now darted nervously from side to side. “Can I help you?” he said. The eyes settled on the space between them. “Don’t you think it’s irresponsible to take all the criticism of your work and dismiss it with a joke?” she said. “Especially a bad joke.” He could not answer because he could not say the only thing he was thinking, which was that he was in love.

Saturday, March 5, 2022

THEY DWELT THEREIN

There! That all happened within 48 hours. Who said this was going to be a dull week? First Maribel writes a letter to a a former college classmate of hers, now a prominent judge, explaining the fix she has found herself and her business in these days and asking for a reading of an obscure statute, ideally to her advantage but clear on the merits of her case at any rate. That was on Thursday. Pola, her classmate, apparently considered the letter confidential or else failed to receive it. Klara, Maribeth’s nemesis for years now, the neighbor who always shows her up with a better casserole or dress or understanding of code, waited until Friday afternoon and then a copy of the letter was made public in the form of copies distributed throughout the neighborhood. Paul Fico, publisher, read the letter out loud on Saturday morning and then printed it in his newspaper, where it was read by many, including Klara’s husband Henrik, who was thinking of himself decreasingly in terms of his nuptial status and more as a free agent who was sleeping simultaneously with Maribel and Pola—not in the same bed at the same time, but in different beds on consecutive nights. Henrik, loath to see two of his lovers calumniated thusly, lowered his horns and charged the rag, first by phone threats, then by fisticuffs in front of Daffodils, the cafe Paul Fico owns with his wife Gertie, a sometime lover of Klara who let the fact slip while breaking up the fight. No wonder Maribel doesn’t like the town. It must appear woefully amateurish in comparison to the sophisticated tone of her original latter.

Friday, March 4, 2022

NOT COMPLETELY LYING

Gerald took her back to his apartment. His girlfriend was out of town, which is what had sent him to the bar, and what had made him lonely, and what had made him jaunty, and what had made him drunk. He lined up all the results for the young woman down the way, who was glancing at her phone with frequency. “My friend is stuck at work,” she said. “It’s my last night in town and stranded like a fool.” Gerald had moved seats then, sensing an opening. It turned out they had more in common than two people ten years apart in age who lived on opposite coasts and had never heard of each others’ companies had any right to. “Are you in a position to take me home?” she said after only two drinks, and he held his glass up and clinked invisible air. “To life,” he said. They thumped in through the front door trying to whisper. His hands were interlaced at the back of her neck. Kind laughter tumbled from her mouth when she saw the picture of him and Kim on the refrigerator. “Oh,” she said. “Are you two happy?” He shrugged. He never knew how to answer the question and he wasn’t about to start now. In bed, sliding wonderfully across each other, she said “maglev,” which made him laugh again until he thought about what she probably meant, which was that they were moving fast because they were never really touching, and that made him go to the bathroom while she was sleeping and look in the mirror and cry a little. It was the last time he cried until twelve years later when he heard she had died. “Why are you crying?” Kim said. He pointed at the crystal flutes behind her, the tenth anniversary present they had bought each other. “Those,” he said, not completely lying.

Thursday, March 3, 2022

PHONING CRITICS PERSONALLY

Patty Perkins has been on a roll with her reporting all year but rose higher in the public eye in November when she traveled to San Antonio to cover the Smoke Bird Murders, so named for the doodle chalked on the ground beside each victim. Perkins’s work in Texas surpassed journalism and entered a realm that was best summarized by James Relicson as “psychological portraiture of such an intensity and specificity that the killer, upon hearing her account and analysis, would feel fully seen, terrible as that may sound.” Relicson’s words were prophetic. David Freck, a drifter and former train mechanic, turned himself in after only a week of Perkins’s on-air reports, telling police that he “wanted to meet the woman who has already met me.” Perkins is now taking a much-deserved break from the grueling world of journalism to return to her first love, music; her debut album, Secret Argent, on which she not only plays flute and guitar and also manipulates sound with cut-and-paste tape effects, will be out next summer. Her husband, Mal, who has never held a job but calls himself her manager, has been phoning critics personally to promote the record. “Her title refers to the way she uses sound as a heraldic tincture,” he says. “Metal is never placed on metal, nor color on color.”

TWO BITS

The man in the chair told the barber to take a little off the top, but not too much. He closed his eyes and thought about how he had gone around the world many times without ever really going into it. Yes, he told himself, that was a felicitous phrase indeed. He filed it alongside all the other peerless aphorisms and apothegms of his life: how jazz was audible brushstrokes, how the paths you choose have already chosen you, how one unkind face in a crowd grows until it eclipses the rest, how sleep was time inhaling. He opened his eyes to see his hair cut to the length of a newborn chick’s, and it was all he could do to stop himself from leaping to his feet and throttling the barber.