Bedside Manner

When the day came that he was lying in bed, wasting away toward death, what Albert Carlson, the famed writer of short stories, did not want to see was that the Caregiver assigned to aid in his crossing over to the other side lacked three of the four standard limbs given to most humans at birth.

     A teaser on the radio for an upcoming program had informed Albert that just such a man was in existence. A man who not only lacked three limbs, but had been somehow inspired by his amputations to pursue a career in hospice care. From the teaser Albert had also gathered that it had been an accident that left the man—whose name was entirely too Asiatic for Albert to remember—lacking all but the single appendage. Which appendage the teaser had not specified.

     Albert had immediately imagined the Asian man, bedside, in an array of different configurations. One arm, no legs. One leg, no arms. With hooks for hands. At eye level, wheelchair bound. 

      

     He assumed also that the man’s heart was in a good place. It would have to be. Possibly his accident had brought him near enough to death that he felt now qualified to comfort others at that door, had the credentials to give them a glimpse of what lay in wait on the other side. 

     Good for him, Albert thought, but found it a bit presumptive of the Asian triple amputee. He hoped that they would at least consult him before bringing such a man into his dying room. Not the Asian part. Albert had no issues with that. The missing limbs. There should be a waiver of some sort. Notification. 

     Of course, he might change his opinion between now and then, but at the moment it struck him that such a man would only complicate the matter of letting go. He will have finally come to terms with all of the question he would have to leave unanswered, the stories he would have to leave unwritten and in would hop this Asian man on his one leg and stir the pot anew. 

     He’d need someone entirely banal.    

     No. That wouldn’t even work, would it? He was already imagining the story there, the questions piling up. He’d have to die alone. 

     Albert Carlson placed his favorite pen and the last of his writing paper into the fire and went into his bedroom to die. 

     Perhaps it would be just as well, Albert thought, the one legged Asian man. 

Notes

What he wanted was a notepad. The smallish type, often given away by businesses. Something on which he could jot down his grocery list, a couple things to pick up at the hardware store. 

     There’d been several in the kitchen junk drawer, and he had looked there, but he must have used them, because they weren’t there now. 

     Had he made that many lists? he wondered. That many trips to town? How many sheets were on one of those pads? He pictured the years of his life, passing, not like pages being torn from a calendar, but as lists for bread and eggs, for three-inch screws and a dozen two-by-fours. He wondered of the things he could calculate, had he saved all of those lists, kept them in a box of some sort. Hours and days, gallons of gasoline, pounds of chicken and greens. 

     When there were no notepads, he would sometimes write his lists on the blank squares of the envelopes that his bills came in, or on unused swatches of the statement itself. But it was late in the month. The bills had been paid, the refuse used as tinder. 

     There was his writing pad, but he never tore paper from that. Never. 

     He’d have to go upstairs, get a sheet of typing paper from his desk. 

     Upstairs, it had occurred to him that if he got several sheets, he could quarter them, and although the paper would be loose, not quite as nice as an actual pad, it would suffice until he came across some more giveaways. 

     Downstairs, folding a sheet in half, he remembered how his father had taught him that he could cut paper without scissors. How he had marveled at his father performing this feat. The folding. The ironing of the crease with his thumbnail. 

     Had he not moistened it with his tongue as well? 

     And then the gentle parting of the two halves. The release of those fibrous edges as if by air. 

     At that moment, his father had been a god. 

     He had been the son of a god. Bequeathed a knowledge equivalent to that of fire. He would survive with this. Mystify. 

     Of course, he would find out later that no one was impressed by this newfound knowledge. That it was a thing well known and he was late in its learning. But that moment. When it was new. And the magic pure ... 

     On the first of the quartered sheets he wrote not a list, but simply, REMEMBER, folded the note down into quarters again, and then from his pocket, drew out his wallet and there, tucked the note away, in hopes that he would do just that ... remember.  

The Great Pumpkin

It’s almost funny. Everyone worried about the bees. And here it’s the pumpkins that are going to get us. 

   The 2021 Blight struck one hundred percent of the World’s living pumpkin vines. All of them. Wiped out. Dead. Withered. The pumpkins deflating so fast they couldn’t be gathered from the fields. 

   There were some Mennonite growers, real Orthodox backwoods no-power-having types, who managed to get a few to market before the blight reached their farms. But you’d have thought those pumpkins were solid gold, for what they were asking for them. I guess, in hindsight, they were. 

   Spores they say. Some shit that mutated in Asia. Travels through the soil. Crazy fast. There was no stopping it. Boom. The pumpkins were gone. 

   We were stunned, more so than panicked. I mean, it was a little like waking up to the News telling you that there weren’t any more rocks. An odd thing to get your head around. They’re pumpkins. Yeah, you care, but not much. Not really. 

   Sure, there was some speculation as to how sad Fall would be without them, Halloween, Thanksgiving. #lonelyporch #missingthepumpkins #carvingnotcarving, but we bought up the plastic and plaster replacements, and pumpkin pie filling isn’t even made from real pumpkins. So we were covered. We moved on. They’d have the spores cleared up in no time, breed some resistant pumpkins, a little genetic modifying, something, and next year we’d be scooping the guts from those big orange guys again, stuffing them with candles to stave off the spooks and mark with light our homes as treat ready and waiting. 

   But we were wrong. So wrong. And so slow to make the connection between our own growing death rate and the loss of those taciturn and mostly ocherous fruits. 

'Jack Bender', Interstate Short

“What I’d like to know is,” the man named Brooks asked, leaning forward in his chair to adjust the wood of the fire around which they had gathered for the evening, “Where does the man shit?”

There was never a shortage of opinions around the evening fire. Especially when the days take had been good, which it had, and the alcohol was strong, which it was, so it was clear to Brooks from the silence that came from the other eight, that none of them had considered this. 

Brooks’ eyes narrowed. He let four cars pass overhead, chunk ka chunk, chunk ka chunk, as they crossed the seam that bound Trinity Lane and the Bypass, before he spoke again. 

“I’m not sure that he even does shit,” Brooks said, and leaned back, looking upward to find a star, any star, in the washed out night sky. He missed the dark. Good, deep dark. Disorienting dark. 

“Oh come on Brooks,” one of the eight finally said, “everybody’s gotta shit.”

It was Packy. 

Packy was the oldest of the bunch, allegedly, a tiny man, who always broke first when the conversation grew tense. 

“I’m not so sure about that, Pack,” Brooks replied, and again, the eight grew silent, each studying deeply the image they cherished most of the man they believed to be named, Jack Bender 

   Christ was homeless. 

There’s a quiet belief among those who live without an address attached to their name, in tents and cardboard boxes, or beneath an overpass, as with the eight, that the Savior, should he return as promised, will do so, not in a blaze of triumphal glory, but as one of them. 

One eye was always open. Searching for signs. Legends were quick to rise. 

Jack Bender was the latest of these Legends, and the nearest to proving what so many of those who lived life on the streets had for so very long believed.

He arrived the winter before last, near to its end. 

A bedroll was all that he was seen to be carrying at the time, and water in a slim jug at his side, which wasn’t entirely odd, and so ignored for the more part. But when Jack Bender settled in beneath the Seventh Street overpass, his camp, somehow, in the course of that first night, became furnished with a stove, night stand, clock, chair and a table, in which a plate and cutlery for two could be stored. 

As the weeks passed, Jack Bender came and went, ate and slept, just like anyone. But Jack Bender generated none of the refuse one associates with the activities of being alive. Nothing accumulated. No paper, no plastic, no shit. His camp was immaculate. All of the eight had visited, purposely leaving their empties to see what would become of the brown-bagged bottles, pissing in the brush of the embankment as near as they dared to Jack's camp. But not even on the hottest, most humid days of summer could even a hint of urine be smelled, and the trash they had left, they swore, vanished the minute they turned their backs on Jack Bender. 

Even Packy found it hard to argue further with Brooks on the matter. Perhaps Brooks was right. The man didn’t shit.

“I’m not saying he’s Christ,” Brooks said eventually, the fire crackling. “I just don’t think Jack Bender is entirely human,” and pitched into the pile growing alongside the camp, the bottle for which he had begged the day and now emptied.

Chips

The sandwich shop where Hank often got his lunch was set up in that sort of self-serve manner that left one holding his bag of chips and drink as he waited for the main course of his meal to be prepared. 

     At one time it had been a find, tucked into a neighborhood that required some part, if not all of your vehicle, as recompense for parking. But the undesirables had been driven out of the ‘hood’, as they say, by adventuresome homosexuals—god bless them—which paved the way for young business types—god damn their snobbery—and more often than not, Hank found himself to be the oldest patron in the shop, by what he guessed to be a good thirty years. 

   He enjoyed observing as he held his chips and unsweetened tea. Hipsters, techies, blue print shuffling contractors, musicians, suits who no longer wore suits, undeterminables. 

   While not one of those Armageddon, survivalist types, Hank did put a fair amount of stock in a human’s ability to accomplish the basic tasks of procuring food, potable water, and possibly creating fire from something other than a match or cigarette lighter, should, as some say, ‘the shit hit the fan’. 

     Not a single person he had seen in the shop had struck him as being able to last more than a month should the kale and kombucha cease being delivered to their doorstep. 

     For a time, Hank told himself to be more optimistic, to have a little faith in this future Generation. 

     But then he noticed the chips.   

    They would eat them before their sandwich arrived. Anyone under thirty. Plop down in a booth, or mount a stool at the live-edge bar, open the bag and one by one, eat until they were gone, the sandwich for which they had been intended to accompany yet to be made. 

     Perhaps they could have survived without their farm-to-table entrees and craft small-batch brews. But to eat your chips before your sandwich arrives. There was no hope for such a Generation. Of that, Hank was certain. 

     Doomed, Hank thought, his chicken salad on toast ready now at the counter, and not even a sip taken prematurely from his tea in the waiting. You are all doomed.  

     

Billboard on Briley

If Therese Winnington did not have witch in her blood, then she was most certainly one of those sanguivorous, imperishable types, renowned for the assortment of stupefying tricks they tend to pull in a skirmish from the sleeves of their usually velveteen jackets. Her smile said, quite simply, ‘Try me.’ 

A Rough Truth. (Journal Post)

The Aunt was on dope. All three of the women were. Had been all of their lives. In fact, of that particular generation and the generation to follow—eleven family members total—all but one did not have an addiction to an illegal substance. 

     The Aunt was not the first of them to die. The one clean family member, a girl named Jess, her father, the Aunt’s brother, had succumbed to dope three years ago. 

     It was Jess who had been with the Aunt when she passed. The other two women, the Aunt’s sister and her daughter, the Aunt’s niece, were too high to even know that the Aunt had been taken. But they found out. 

     When they did, for some reason—one would assume grief—the niece gathered a length of rope, went to the old maple in front of the women’s trailer and hung herself, not but twenty feet off the road. 

     Paul Rubert found the body. He and his wife and five year old daughter had been coming home from Wal-Mart, groceries piled into the back seat with their little girl, trying to keep things cool in the conditioned air, keep the ice cream from getting too soft. 

     It took a few seconds for it to register to Paul what he was seeing. Had he not talked with the niece earlier that morning and remembered what she had been wearing, the shorts and that glittering T, he would have figured it to be some sort of gag, kids goofing around, a dummy, clothes stuffed with shopping bags. 

     Had the nieces’ face not been nearly black, and shit and piss clearly running down her bared legs, Paul would have stopped then and there. But as it was, he directed his wife and daughter’s sight to the other side of the road, to what might have been deer along the fence row, and drove the remaining half mile to his own house. 

     Parked, Paul said that he had to pee quick. As his wife began to unload their daughter and the groceries, he went around the back of their house, dialed 911, and as he spoke to the responder, peed as he said he had to. 

     Paul came back to the car, gathered the remaining groceries and went inside. 

     It was twenty minutes before they heard the sirens. ‘That sounds close’, his wife had commented. But being accustomed to ambulances coming to the trailer every time the women ran out of dope and came down far enough into the real world to feel the pain of it, she said nothing more and went on preparing dinner. 

     ‘Ready for ice cream?’ Paul’s wife asked after they’d eaten. His daughter had let loose an exuberant ‘Yes!’ Paul had smiled. He took a big bowl, despite dairy giving him the shits. The things you do for family. 

                      

Replication

Bringing the gimmicks of the prosperous—blown plastic baubles and tinseled trinkets that in holiday aisles seduce the child’s mind—they cluttered the place where her soul took flight, made of the roadside cross and the cleft in which it stood, a Corvid’s nest, lined with chips of bright paint and penny-candy wrappers, which they hoped, to her, would feel like home.