When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail’s response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, “My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.”
– David McCullough
Tag: death
haiku 199
earworm –
digging a grave
for my brown-eyed girl
Fiction: The Last Reunion of the Capper Gang
As the day wore on and the chloroform wore off, Silas Capper regained consciousness. He wanted to rub the bump on his head but found he couldn’t move his hands. He shook his head to clear it and felt something around his neck that brought him fully awake.
He opened his eyes and looked down to see three former associates standing near the horse he sat atop. This forced a great bellow of laughter from Silas.
“Well, now! Haven’t the three of you gone to some kind of trouble for this reunion. I’d been thinking just last month that it’d been too long since I’d seen any of you. And now, here we are, with me on my horse, hands tied behind my back, the guest of honor at a necktie party. You sure gone and arranged quite a meeting, I’ll say!”
Capper’s former associates – Juan, Luther, and Beak – stared up at him silently.
Continue reading “Fiction: The Last Reunion of the Capper Gang”
Fiction: Paying the Price
Lon heard a knock on his door. That was cause for concern; he had no friends, and the Girl Scouts and Jehovah’s Witnesses had better sense than to visit his neighborhood.
Still, it was a knock; someone had manners enough for that rather than to knock down the door – or make a new one. So maybe this wouldn’t end fatally.
He threw back three deadbolts and opened the door. Sonia was there, and Jerzy loomed behind her. He stepped back to let them into his little house. Jerzy closed the door.
Fiction: The Hope Chest
“You have hope chests at this sale, is that correct?” Eloise asked.
“Oh, yes,” the auctioneer’s assistant said. “Right over there. We’ll probably get to them in about twenty minutes.”
“Thank you.” Eloise walked in the direction the man had pointed. She gave each chest only a quick once-over; the one she hoped to find was distinctive.
Eloise tried to tamp down the constant flare of anger she felt toward her late sister’s daughter and that rogue she was married to. After Marnie’s death, Junie – doubtless prodded by Fred – sold her mother’s hope chest at a yard sale. Fred had conned the buyer into thinking the chest was a valuable antique that the family ever so hated to let go, but you knew how it was.
Antique it may have been, but its value was primarily sentimental.
haiku 180
in the street
small wide-eyed cat
sees nothing
Fiction: Bad Brake
Maureen’s fear of driving had never abated, and her foot constantly rode the brake of her two-year-old ’62 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. She had had the brake lights replaced twice. The mechanic didn’t know about Maureen’s bad habit and chalked it up to bad bulbs, missing an opportunity to warn her about the impending consequences of her actions.
Inevitably the day came when it did not matter how hard Maureen pushed the brake pedal or how near to the floor it came: the car would not stop. She was too flustered to think to use the parking brake or to shut the car off. Death and property destruction ensued, but Maureen survived and was released from the hospital after two weeks.
Maureen finally embraced the bitter truth: even when using the brake full time, driving was – for her – unsafe. From now on, she vowed, on those occasions when she had to go beyond walking distance, she would rely on her lucky friends and on taxi drivers.
Some people just seemed to float through traffic, leading charmed lives, never suffering the problems of ordinary folks. It wasn’t fair, she muttered, but that was life.
Fiction: Tree House
“Hi, Daddy!” Five-year-old Jana ran to her father and he scooped her up in a hug.
“Hi, Sweetheart. Did you have a good time at Grandpa and Grandma’s all week?”
“Yeah! We had lots of fun.”
“Good. I’ve been very busy while you’ve been gone. Want to see what I’ve been making?”
“Okay.”
Curtis returned Jana to the floor and led her into the back yard. She saw it instantly.
“A tree house!” She ran over to the tree and clambered up the ladder.
“Tree ‘house’ is right,” Helen said quietly, joining her husband. The new structure faced the family’s home. Part of it was built into the tree, but two sturdy poles provided much of the support.
“There has to be enough room if she ever invites me to a tea party up there,” he explained.
“Oh. Well, that makes perfect sense.” She shook her head and smiled at him. “But given your influence on her, I doubt there will be many tea parties.”
* * *
Fiction: Hippocratic Oaf
Shawn began a lap around the hotel’s pool. He wore shorts, sandals, a tank top, and a white lab coat with the name Dr. Kemann stitched underneath the hotel’s name and logo.
This was one of his favorite parts of his most excellent life in Ecuador. He had spotted a nubile young blonde on the other side of the pool. She was sunning herself and was a scant few centimeters of fabric shy of getting an all-over tan. Kemann would go over to her, introduce himself, caution her to take care in the sun, offer to apply more medically thorough sunscreen, and — if history repeated itself — end up in her bed that evening.
The beautiful young woman, and more than a hundred others before her, was why he had become a hotel doctor in the tropics.
As he approached her, the pager in his lab coat pocket chirped at him. He frowned; this was no time for some guest to have indigestion. Still, such interruptions ensured his continued employment.
The little screen said merely “Urgente.”
Fiction: Road Kill
Jeanette saw the body first and breathed a low sigh. Her husband, Will, at the wheel, noticed but kept his eyes on the road. Their sharp-eyed young twins, Jane and Teresa, quickly spotted it too.
“There’s another one!” Jane said.
“Oh, no!” Teresa moaned. “That’s the third one since we left home.”
The car whooshed by the corpse, neatly composed in the shoulder, and yet they all got a good look at it.
“Why does that happen, Daddy?” Teresa asked.
“They don’t seem to understand what cars are. They just run out in front of them.”
“Why don’t they stay at home where they belong?” Jane asked, looking at her mother.
“It’s hard to say, dear. Sometimes they run away from home. Their families can’t or don’t take care of them. Often they just don’t have homes. They’re out looking for food and shelter and they accidentally get killed.”
“That’s terrible,” Teresa declared. “Why doesn’t somebody help them?”
“There are too many, honey,” Will said. “And you could never know where they all were to help them, even if there was enough time and money. It’s sad, but there’s nothing that can be done, really.”
There was a silence in the car for about a mile, filled only by the engine’s whine and the thud of the tires rolling across the broken and pitted highway pavement.
“He was a nice-looking boy,” Jane said. “For a boy, anyway,” she quickly amended.
“The girls we saw first were pretty, too,” Teresa said. “I hope there aren’t any more dead kids on the road today.”
“I hope that too,” Jeanette said. “But that’s just part of life. Here, though, let’s not let it spoil our fun trip. Shall we play a game of Highway Alphabet?”
The girls bounced in their seats and began scouring the landscape for something beginning with an “A.”