A Collection of Short Stories - Excerpts

From “Getting Rid of Pigeons”
This story will appear in the Fall 2010 issue of The Fourth River, a publication of Chatham University

Mr. McQueu had been standing beneath the awning of 4 East 88th Street when, out of nowhere, he was struck by a skateboard. It was that Steinberg girl from apartment 2A. For all he knew she had aimed and shoved the thing like a shuffle board puck to traverse the distance of two sidewalk squares and collide dead center with the protuberance of his ankle bone.

“Sorry,” she said from where she squatted on the pavement, leaning back on her hands and looking up at him bravely. She was the one with the big brown eyes, tiny face, and hair that made her head look too heavy for that skinny little neck to hold up.

Mr. McQueu decided not to answer. Or really, to answer her didn’t occur to him because Mr. McQueu didn’t talk to children unless it was to tell them to do something, like to be quiet or to stop roller skating or to stop hop scotching or to stop hoola hooping, all in front of the building, and to definitely stop doing what they were all doing all the time now on those little wooden boards on wheels – obviously far more dangerous than roller skates since they were unsecured by strap or key, and could escape their owners to cause bodily harm to people like him.

His ankle bone having now become the focal point of all his nerve endings and his day by possibly requiring that he spend the rest of it in the Lenox Hill Emergency, what better response than silence to communicate to this little girl that he would not forgive her and that the injury she had caused may very well be permanent? So he only glared at her and didn’t stop until he had turned completely around to convey himself with a tragic limp back into the lobby and back into his apartment which was in the very far back of the building’s first floor where all the superintendents had lived before Mr. McQueu and would live after him too.

From “Devotion”

Lucretia Foster prayed in the basement of a community center on a 123rd Street sitting on a squeaky folding chair in front of a rickety table pushed against a dirty white wall for the purpose of propping up a cross that was spray-painted gold. Even though one son had been killed three years ago in a driveby, and the other was in jail, and nothing much could get her hypertension and diabetes under control, she still believed that God was listening.

“And may the Lord look after Miz Helen Moskowitz and grant her safe passage into His arms if she is soon to leave this world to enter into them.”
It didn’t matter to Lucretia that her employer, Helen Moskowitz, did not really believe in God -- and if Helen did, certainly not in any kind that would have arms, nor did Helen believe that she would go anywhere after death but into the ground and she didn’t even know if she wanted to do that.

Yes, Helen knew her son would protest by saying that she’d be breaking the laws of Yahweh were she to go and have herself cremated, but really, who, including Leonard, was going to fight the traffic on the Long Island Expressway to visit a piece of granite with her name on it? She guessed it was nice for her son that it would be next to his father’s. And she remembered having taken just about the same amount of time choosing Irwin’s stone that she had over the Corian sample book when she replaced her kitchen countertops ten years ago. All that attention to color, grain, and finish, useless, when it came to the headstone, given that she’d only seen it once just to confirm that it was finally up. And it looked nice enough, but she was sure that by now it was undistinguishable from a highway’s length of other ones each divided by a foot of chemically treated grass, the whole cemetery resembling those split-level developments that had sprung up on the last undeveloped land left in the town of Great Neck, New York, just before she’d sold the house and moved back to the city.
She could better imagine her ashes being shaken from a baggy by a grandchild or Leonard, into the East River, a little puff of the finer grains floating off into the air and maybe onto someone’s suit coat, and then everyone having brunch afterward at the Brasserie if it hadn’t yet gone the way of the Russian Tea Room. She wasn’t sure.

How could she be? The last time she’d gone to a restaurant was on her way back from the park with Lucretia at the helm. The only entrance accessible by wheels as heavy and unmanageable as those on her chair, was off the alley, past three reeking garbage cans and two sweaty cooks who gazed at her under the merciless blaze of the kitchen lights until she was through the stainless paneled doors and in the dim and empty dining room, feeling as if she had just glided to the finish of a sickening carnival ride.

From “Cat in a Box:

Mr. Burger’s fur started falling out in clumps, and so before he went completely bald, Millie decided she better take him to be looked at. Nothing that couldn’t be solved with a daily dose of fish oil the vet informed her while she absently ran her hand the wrong way up Mr. Burger’s spine, creating such a maelstrom of orange that Millie feared he’d emerge stripped bare as the branch of a dried up Christmas tree.

Mr. Burger was old, eighteen to be exact. Millie had named him after her favorite sixth grade science teacher who taught her things she had never needed to know but had never forgotten like the definitions of a dwarf star and a black hole and about how dying stars turn red. Her other cat, a gray tabby named Mr. Magoo, or Goo, for short, had already died of old age. It had taken him about six months in all, his body changing like the squirrel’s that Millie had spotted on her walking route, lying behind a bench near Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park, the only difference being that Goo had been alive during the process, while the squirrel had not. Over a week or two, the squirrel had shrunk into a leathery strip of something that would not have been identifiable as a squirrel, except for the giveaways of a remaining claw and the tufted tail. No question, Goo had looked pretty bad the months before he’d breathed his last, and so as not to shock her book group, Millie locked him in her bedroom when it was her time to host. For Mr. Burger, though, it hadn’t yet come to that. He’d still have the run of the apartment, for tonight at least, when the book group was coming again.

“Okay,” Millie said to the vet, and ineffectually brushed fur from the front of her blue wool coat, then wound a red scarf around her neck. “Thank you,” she said, and thought, sure, she’d squirt two pinpricked capsules of the smelly stuff down Mr. Burger’s throat, add to that a little low fat yogurt, as the vet had also suggested, but she knew he’d be dead within the year.

From “Perfect Light”

He was well-dressed, well-groomed. Clean. He wore a pink button-down shirt and Chinos, not too tailored, not too perfectly pressed. Comfortable. And he wore tennis shoes. Nikes, or something. White, clean too, but not too clean looking. He had salt and pepper hair. An early grayer. And he had a lot of hair like a lot of guys then, but not like a hippy or anything. He was clean shaven, had the sideburns, though. And the other thing. He had a camera with him. A Nikon 35 millimeter, similar to what her parents would buy her three years from then, when she took a photography course, third trimester Junior year at her boarding school.
The camera was very important to him. He kept it in its leather case. He wrapped the strap around his wrist a few times, held it in his hand that way, instead of dangling it from his neck. He didn’t want to look like a tourist. He was a professional photographer, definitely not a tourist. Even so, if you had a camera at all, it would be easy to be mistaken for a tourist here, at the stone steps that rose like a pyramid on three sides to the entrance of the Metropolitan Museum. That’s where she sat, where he saw her, sitting in the middle of the second tier, the one that faced uptown.

She had blond, thick, wavy hair, waist-length, side-parted, that she held off her face by hooking behind her ears – the way all the young girls did then. No make-up, brown corduroy Levis, a striped brown, orange, and white, crisp, cotton man-tailored blouse and blue suede hiking boots. She was natural, an outdoorsy type, so fresh. Like a farm girl. That’s what he’d say to her. He knew it as he pressed his right sneaker down onto the first step and followed it with his left on the next step, and followed his left with his right again, climbing carefully, deliberately, while he looked up at her smiling, so that she’d notice, even though he knew she was trying to pretend she didn’t until he was close enough to make that impossible. Now she looked up at him and smiled politely back and then looked down, then past him, then up at him again, then down.
“You know, I have to tell you,” he said “You’re really beautiful.”

From “Prophet Man”

Roger sat on the sidewalk using the foundation of a five story apartment building as his backrest, and looked up to contemplate what he believed were the gravitetic orchestrations and the spangular interrational systems of the universe. He knew that the world would end in three days’ time, but it was a process that had to be respected, beautiful to watch in its own way, like the eruption of a volcano, the detonation of a bomb, and to report upon when he wasn’t blessing every pedestrian, whether they did or did not drop something in the Grande size Starbucks coffee cup that he’d lifted from a dozen tied off bags of dog excrement in a New York City sanitation barrel, and washed out in the puddle over on East End Avenue that he knew took sixteen hours, twelve minutes and forty-three seconds to evaporate.

It had rained the night before, the kind that made the gutters into torrents, the awnings into drums and called the doormen out to hold above them the great disks of black umbrellas that they raised like pagan effigies in the tribal rites that the chieftains had asked Roger to join when he’d explored the Amazon a few years back, or maybe it was just a few weeks back, because the experience felt so fresh in his mind. Whenever it was, he had at least recovered sufficiently from the malaria to be clear headed and swift footed enough to have claimed the sheltered stoop of the Church of the Epiphany from which he’d comfortably watched the deluge until Rufus showed up with his three brown plastic bags of refuse and the one paper one of debauchery and told him he better move his crazy white ass on out of there.

“Well, enjoy it before you’re vaporized,” said Roger, getting up.

From “War Stories”

Who cared how long the climb took, or the descent, for that matter? Half hour? Forty-five minutes? If it took long enough, that cute, and friendly little college girl who lived with her Jack Russell in the corner apartment, might go hopping by him, give him a hello and her sunny smile and inspire him to raise his head for an unimpeded view of her firm little buns as she skipped up the same flight he was aiming for. And anyway, what did he have to rush home for, but to sleep and to feed himself in order to be able wake up and repeat the same trek down to walk Barney and buy cigarettes, and eggs, bread, milk and cereal that provided him the sustenance needed to make the trek up again and then down again to walk Barney and buy cigarettes, eggs, bread, milk and cereal? And even if he were going to have to lug an oxygen tank up and down with him one of these days, and walk that too, along with Barney, in its little wheeled contraption, he still would never move to the first floor.

Way up here no one woke him trying to be Twinkle Toes at three in the morning. Sirens, breaking bottles, drunken fights, traffic disagreements, horns, and car alarms were just soothing background, having nothing to do with the rage and misery, tragedy and strife they came from. And finally, he could figure he was safe from becoming an entry in a police log. What criminal in his right mind was going to climb five flights to steal a television, when he could climb one, or none, or maybe head down a flight to a sublevel flat for the very same thing?

Well, none. Except for a young addict named Kevin Jones who decided one night that Harry’s door would be a good one to break down, with, of all things, a crowbar. Something Harry didn’t waste any time telling him was the stupidest, most unoriginal choice for a tool with which to break and enter that he’d ever seen. “Do you know how well these building’s are built? You’d have to use TNT,” he said, unaware that Kevin Jones might have thought TNT was a street name for a new drug that would make him super hero strong, rather than just make him think he was.

How Harry Gordon came to be talking to Kevin Jones like this was due to a combination of sleepiness, confusion, and irritation that acted like a pharmaceutical cocktail that suppressed what might have otherwise been some good self-preserving fear. It consisted of Barney barking in his big hound dog hoops, “HOOP! HOOP! HOOP!” along with all that banging and splintering and scraping, simultaneous to the Germans’ well-aimed Schmeissers nicking and clipping the field hedge that Harry hid behind, while he opened an Aid Kit only to find in it a pair of round blue eyes stuck gooeyly to the bottom, their optic nerves still attached and tangled like the tentacles of bait squid. They were exactly what was missing from the bleeding sockets of the soldier sitting next to him, so all he had to do was to stick them back in. But they kept popping from between his fingers like peeled Lychee nuts and this, along with the approach of hunting hounds, and then the banging banging banging -- he started up with a muffled curse and began climbing out of bed before both his feet were solidly on the floor, so fell back to sitting, which worked to awaken him more fully -- to anger at whoever was at the goddamn door. My God, he hadn’t ordered-in in months! Too expensive. And why were their panties tied in such a knot? And that damn dog. “SHUT UP, BARNEY!” he said, wrenched the lock knobs around, slid the chain to dangling, and yanked the door open to see the startled face of a young black man who was holding a crowbar up in what might have been a threatening manner except for the fact that he seemed to have forgotten it was in his hand.

“Mr. Anything”

Mr. Harmon fell for the new elevator man the second time he asked him to take him up to six.
“I know,” the elevator man said, and smiling, tapped his temple with his index finger. “I remember.”
He had a dimple just under his right cheek deep enough to be secured with an upholstery button, an afro, light brown skin, dark brown eyes that were as shiny as a doll’s and a space between his front teeth the width of a nickel slot. He was young, a good ten years younger, Mr. Harmon figured, and the elevator man’s way of rolling the sleeves of his green work shirt to the middle of his forearms made Mr. Harmon weak with desire. Beautiful, muscular forearms, delicate wrists, small hands and clean, well-cared-for fingernails.

“What’s your name?” asked Mr. Harmon.
“My name is Jose.” This, he said stiffly, like he had learned it in last night’s ESL class and he’d just been given his first chance to say it for real. Then the new elevator man looked up to concentrate on the brass arrow skimming the numeral of each floor they passed.
“Your full name. What’s your full name?” asked Mr. Harmon.
“Full. Name.”

Clearly “full” had not been on his list of vocabulary, or at least not in association with the word, “name.” Mr. Harmon made a note to be more sensitive to the complexities and illogic of the English language when speaking to Jose.

“Your last name. Surname,” said Mr. Harmon.

At 5, the elevator man eased up on the lever by his hip, to slowly halt the whole contraption flush with the building’s sixth story. Because the elevator was now stationary, Mr. Harmon had become aware of how only the two of them were in it. It was an hour before the first bell, so the building was still mostly empty, the way Mr. Harmon liked it for his morning prep. The elevator man had not opened the door and Mr. Harmon felt a little trapped, but he couldn’t say that the feeling was particularly unpleasant.

He’d not intended for this to happen though, to be caught alone in the elevator with the new elevator man. He’d not asked the question to purposefully stall. Mr. Harmon was not the crafty type. The question had been legitimate. For years it had irked him that the students and teachers called the elevator operators by their first names and didn’t even know their last ones. Mr. Harmon, not being much of a crusader, would not wage one of his own with meetings and flyers and memos and whatever else he knew you had to do to raise some consciousness and instigate change in the intractable system of education, even one as liberal and progressive as this school’s was purported to be. But at least he could be pretty sure that he would not be penalized or shunned if he exercised his individual right to refuse to participate in a practice that he considered offensive and wrong.

From “Riding in Back”

He has accomplished the U-turn. He said to do a U-turn was also no problem and it wasn’t. There are not many cars on York Avenue this high up at this time in the evening on a Sunday.

“Boston is nice,” she says, “Small. Much smaller than New York. A small town, really. But the people, they’re friendlier here. Kind of stuffy in Boston.” She looks out the window. Mostly to get around the city she takes the subway but it’s a walk from York to Lexington and with the bag, and she knew she had to change to the E train at 51st Street and it was just starting to rain, so what the hell, she thought, she’d treat herself and now she can just watch the city go by, look at the storefronts that are warm and bright looking, cozy inside while the sky begins to disappear between the buildings and beyond the streetlights. As long as the driver is not too reckless she likes riding cabs and this cab driver is nice and she wants to talk to him. She likes talking to cab drivers, to strangers who are nice. She has found that most of them are. Most of them, though their faces are at first grim and closed and uninviting, quickly change and the conversation is easy.

She likes talking to strangers because lately she wasn’t talking much to anyone. Suddenly, it seems, she’s begun living another kind of life in the house has lived in for eighteen years. She can go for days without talking to anyone but her dog and her dog is getting old. She doesn’t really know how this has happened except that her children are where they are supposed to be now, and doing what she’d hoped they would. She knows very well how to be alone. She cooks. She exercises. She practices an instrument. She listens to the news on the radio. She reads. And her kind of work requires solitude. She likes it. But sometimes it is just nice, very nice to talk to someone, not on the phone and not on a screen, and to make her thoughts into words that she speaks and to not know exactly what she might hear back.

From “Gretta’s Ghosts”

Gretta Kaplan saw ghosts.
Not the kind she’d seen featured on a television documentary about some lily-livered family who’d been driven from their just-purchased Victorian home in Roxbury Connecticut by things that looked as harmless as cirrus clouds and the bouncy beam of a flashlight. No, her ghosts looked as real as anyone who might have waited with her on the 33rd street platform for the Lexington Avenue local; and if they thought they were going to drive her out of her rent-controlled, one-bedroom apartment, just off Madison and 38th, they had better think again.
So far, they hadn’t even come close, because as ghosts went, they weren’t particularly scary. In fact they were pretty dull, so well groomed they looked like they’d just hopped off of a barber’s chair, sideburns trimmed with a straight edge, damp hair side-parted, combed, and close-clipped. They were always men, and were, in good New York City melting pot style, a diverse group: Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Indian and African American.

But still, they all looked alike. They wore the same brown suit pants, well-shined leather shoes, the same mid-priced, khaki overcoat that would naturally cover a white shirt and an unexceptional tie. But more than that, they all exuded the same personality, which was to say, none at all -- this, providing further evidence that they were not something she should report to her local precinct; this, and the fact that they made no sound: no breathing, no coughing, or footsteps, and they had no odor, be it the pomade that looked like it should be in their fifties-style haircuts, or the kind of smell that only a woman could say was a man’s.

From “Lover Man”

Sure enough, there was the drive back where they both got quiet, then him telling her to come inside, that she should stay over because the drive up past Boston was way too far, dangerous, that time of night. And then of course he pulled out the bourbon and started pouring in the basement room where he holed up to practice, write his own tunes, listen to music and just chill, he said. And from the pillow she saw placed on top of the quilt that was folded on the floor beside the plaid sofa, it was clear where he was sleeping.
“So where’s Laura?” she asked.
“Mother’s.”
“Things have really have gone to shit, haven’t they?”
“Yup. Pretty much,” he said. But then, suddenly protective, he said, “She’s got problems. You know, issues from her childhood. Nothing I can really help her with,” he said. “I mean I tried.” He bent down to Marty who sat on the couch and handed her her bourbon that he’d poured into a cloudy looking water glass. No ice, but she didn’t care. She liked it that way, how, on the very first swallow, it felt hot going down, burned in the belly and instantly made her brain feel like it had come unmoored to bob gently and not unpleasantly against her skull. And then by about the third swallow the feeling disappeared along with the majority of her worries. She loved booze, that way. Prolong the buzz though, and she was sure to end up over a toilet bowl. So she never got drunk. She never really could stop thinking.

From “Visitation Day”

Evan Finkle’s parents were getting a divorce. His mother told him on a school night, the two of them sitting at the dining room table. “Yeah. I know,” he said. He looked at the bones of the broiled chicken breast lying on his plate. Now, everything he’d eaten felt like it didn’t fit in his stomach anymore, but he couldn’t exactly take it out, now could he? Why hadn’t she told him before he’d eaten? He swallowed. He took a deep breath. He placed his hands on either side of his plate, leaned back, stretched his arms straight and drummed his fingers. His hands were clean and square with fingernails that were also clean, and that he kept short with his teeth.
Of course he didn’t know. He had never imagined that divorce was something his parents would do. It was what everyone else’s parents were doing. And his parents were not like everyone else’s so that would have made his parents even more unlikely to get divorced in his opinion. His mother was a librarian and his father was crazy. His father had broken the bathroom mirror with the heel of one of his dress shoes, then sifted through for the most suitable piece to cut his wrists. Since then, his father had been in a hospital. His parents lived like they were divorced anyway.

From “Shortwave”

He didn’t even know how he’d invited her. Couldn’t remember after the whole miserable weekend was over. Maybe Ruthie was the one who suggested it when he told her on the phone that he’d be going out there, but that was doubtful. Or maybe she said she missed the place and he’d said before thinking, why don’t you join us?

He might have invited her in any number of ways, but the reason he’d done it was because he was happy. What was the crime in that? He’d admit, the pleasure of showing off Gabrielle wasn’t that different from the one he took in showing people his Dubuffet, or the East Hampton house just after he’d bought it, or his new apartment in the city when the decorators were done. It made him feel good when his old fraternity brother and squash partner, Morry Hirsch, saw her on his arm at the MOMA opening, and when he’d brought her to Billy’s Restaurant for dinner with the Mellows. But Ruthie was different from Morry and the Mellows. He had to concede that. Still, though, he wondered why? Why couldn’t she have been happy for him? Why couldn’t she have even tried? She was, after all, his daughter.

But from the moment he spotted her in Grand Central, he’d had a bad feeling. She smiled and everything, waved. She’d only stopped smiling once she saw Gabrielle, and Gabrielle wasn’t there yet. They’d first, the two of them, go get the car, pick Gabrielle up, and all drive out together. So no, it had nothing to do with that. It was more like he hadn’t until then, really thought about who it was, exactly, he’d invited, until he saw the wild, curly hair. That’s when he got the first inkling, when he remembered that usually things did not go with her the way he wanted -- with any of his daughters for that matter. Not since they’d grown up. He’d say one lousy little thing and boy, would he get an earful. Telephone, restaurant, wherever. Totally unpredictable. Except when it came to their looks. Because thank God all three of his daughters always had been and were still knock-outs.