Category: Stories To Read

Prologue: Being and Nothingness

Jean-Paul had no classes to teach on Thursdays. On those days he had coffee in the late morning at one or another of the cafés he frequented. He’d then read and write all afternoon, meeting with Simone and others in the evening for dinner. On that one November Thursday morning, the eighth, the café on Rue de Bretagne, as did all of Paris, had a thickened, ominous, atmosphere of imminent war. It was empty. Save for himself and the proprietor. Continue reading Prologue: Being and Nothingness

Fishman the Fool

Marvin Fishman and Darlene Meriwether broke up.  She called him a fool. A loser. A leech.

Actually she said, “You’re a forty-two year old loser, with no job, no money, no prospects, living in Malvern, Long Island, in a four-bedroom center hall colonial with his mother and a cat that lives in the basement and pees in her plants. What kind of a person does that? A loser fool.” Continue reading Fishman the Fool

The Prayer of St. Francis

The Prayer of St. Francis

Adapted from words attributed to St Francis of Assisi (c.1181-1226), in celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,

Where hatred is grown, May I sow love;

Where there are words of war, May I speak words of peace;

Where there is dispute, May I help find resolution

Where there is hunger, May I share sustenance;

Where there are threats of harm, May I offer protection;

Where there is injury, May I bring healing;

 

Lord, make us instruments of your peace,

Where there is inequality, May we share our gifts;

Where there is injustice; May we work for correction and justice;

Where there are lies, May we speak for truth;

Where there is oppression, May we step to remove the bonds

Where there are acts of war, May we commit acts peace

When we are lost, May we find our way

Amen

Little Men

On the evening of March 2, Youseff Ahmadi, in his nineteenth year on earth, and his second month in the United States, the fourth child and only son of Zaid and Hala Ahmadi, was struck in the back of the head with a baseball bat.

He lay bleeding from his wound, a severely fractured skull, on the gritty blacktop in the parking lot at the rear of Nathan’s Famous Hotdogs, his bloodied black hair matted in the deep rent in his skull and in his being. Continue reading Little Men

Boxing Day, New York, 1947

A young mother holds her son in her arms, snug against her hip. He’s in pajamas. It is snowing and her husband has his high-buckled, black snow boots on. His pea-green army overcoat buttoned around his chest and narrow waist, standing at the door.

“I don’t think you should chance it,” she tells him.

His back is already turned to her. It is winter-morning dark. He snaps down the brim of his hat. Continue reading Boxing Day, New York, 1947

The Pompitous of Love

I am out back raking leaves. Bagging them in the paper sacks we get at the hardware store. Much like the store where I worked in summers during college, selling tenpenny nails and ball-peen hammers.

I’m raking leaves with Ezra. My son. He’s home from school in DC for the winter break. Till he meets up with his girlfriend and they drive back down to school again. Together. I like her. I’m glad for him. He’s pretty crazy about her.

The Goodenoughs across the street have six kids. All moved away by now. They pronounce their name “Good-now’ and it’s just the two of them and the one cat they adopted from the shelter. They keep up with their house. The yard. Flowers that match the season.

It’s been wet for the last few weeks and the leaves are matted dark and pressed flat against the ground and when we rake them up the grass underneath is soft and tender green. Not dried up and thin like the faded color of rye bread on the other more exposed parts of the lawn.

“Why do you think that is?” he says.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s warmer under the leaves and dark and the grass grows and greens up a little like they do when they first sprout from the seeds underground,” I say.

“So why do we rake them?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why don’t we just leave them covered up like that all winter? Like if we weren’t around?”

I like the way he thinks. I like the things his mind turns to.

I don’t know what to tell him.

He is looking down at the grass by his feet. “So why do you do it? What’s it good for?”

“You mean is it good for the grass?”

“Yes,” he says. “Or is it aesthetics?” His voice has deepened over the year since he’s been away. His cadence has slowed.

I look around. The Goodenoughs had their lawn raked and blown clean before the first snow. Before they brought the softening, carved, pumpkins to the transfer station.

“Aesthetics, I guess.”

We hear a car and both look to follow its sound.

When his mother pulls up to the curb his eyes widen and a small curve comes to the corners of his mouth. His cheeks round. He is a beautiful boy.

He loves his mother. He loves her in a way that I cannot, nor can I know. I loved her first. But that has nothing to do with love.

He loved her the moment he took his first breath. As he was settled against her tired chest, feeling the rise and fall of her breathing. The first touch of her skin. Its redolence will be with him until his last day. A guide. A touchstone to his life.

Between them is a calibration that occurred in that instant. A setting or resetting of their biological reference points. The first shared recognition of an unshakable, wordless, similitude.

I love her too. Perhaps in many of the same ways he does. And then in different ways. Ways he will too, but with someone else. Maybe someone who smiles like she does. Perhaps not. But there will be something.

For me though it was a slower walk to love her. Slow but constant. Gravitational, almost.

A willing recalibration for each of us: of reliable habits, of a sense of self, a plumbing of personal depths.

We measured and adjusted our side-by-sidedness. Narrowing of the distance. Until being next to her was my only true place. Sharing a border, like two states, for which the only thing that separates them is an invisible understanding that they are separate but inseparable.

There was a brief introduction, ours. Confirming the names we had been told by others. A beginning. A lingua franca of friendship emerging at the copy machine. A need to see one another up close. A slow and hesitant certainty growing. A quickening when either entered the room. A pleasing recognition when you notice a strand of her hair on your shoulder.

Not enough is said about how two people come to love one another. To care for the other more than for oneself. To come to reach out for one another in the dark. To watch them as they grow and change. To ache when they ache.

Do we need to know the biochemistry of love? What good would that do? I don’t want to know. The neural pathways in the cingulate gyrus, or oxytocin receptors, or dopamine titers in synaptic junctions tell us nothing we don’t already know or need to know.

We, the three of us, walk together into the house. My fingers are numbed from the cold and wet. Ezra walks a bit ahead with his mother. I bring the rakes up to the back door. I think I will let the leaves stay where they have fallen until they are dried up and dispersed by the warming breezes we get here in April.

There is a picture of her I keep on my desk. In this one my head is down. I am wearing my black suit and she is in her white dress. My hair is not yet gray and hers is light and a few strands of it have blown across her forehead. Her cheek. She’s walking beside me. Looking at me, and her eyes are as bright and as clear as the July-blue sky behind her.

 

Robbie’s Roadside Drive-in Movie Theater

Marvin Blitzstein accepted the probate decision with a sense of equanimity.

Millie, his wife of twenty-two years, clutching a copy of Dickens’ Bleak House, saw this as just one more infuriating example of his intolerable passivity. His lassitude. His complete and consummate complaisance.

“Marvin,” she said as they had left earshot of the lawyers suite, “your brother, Melvin, who you don’t like and who you haven’t even talked to for the last eleven years, and who has unfailingly and unflinchingly screwed you out of everything you ever wanted in life, the long list of which I need not remind you of, walks away from yet another chance to make things right by you and he leaves you holding the bag of do-do once again, and you say what?” Continue reading Robbie’s Roadside Drive-in Movie Theater

The Golem on the X38 Bus

Simon Appelfeld was a good boy. He went to school each day. He obeyed the Sabbath. He did his homework. He brushed his teeth. He loved his parents and they loved him. He did not know how unusual he was.

One day on his way to school he saw that someone had left a book on the empty seat beside him on the bus. Continue reading The Golem on the X38 Bus

Most Mornings

Most mornings, but not all, after I heat the kettle to make coffee with the French press we picked up in Marshall’s for half the cost of a bodum in a store like Macy’s, where I’d sometimes shop but haven’t been in one in many years and I still have the wool duffel coat with a hood I bought there about thirty years ago and it’s still is in great condition except for the thin leather loops that hold the toggles in place and which I fix with a needle and thread from time to time, I steep the coffee for exactly four minutes and pour a cup for myself and one for my wife and we sit in bed for a while, maybe ten or fifteen minutes tops, before she has to get ready for work at the college, and I take the morning pills I need for blood pressure and cholesterol, and my prostate and then I shave, except in the winter when I let my beard grow but even then I shave around the edges so that it all looks neat, and it saves on the cost of new razors though now there are those cheaper plastic ones that work okay and last for maybe a month or so before they get a little rough on my skin and I need to take out a new one and feel bad because never really know if I should put the old one in the trash or in the recycling bin which I usually do but then I wonder if the people (if there are actual people) who go through the bottles and cans and clamshell boxes that the day-old doughnuts and blueberries they call bleuets come in, might cut their fingers on if they pick them off the conveyor belt the wrong way and that’s why I don’t put the tops of the baked bean or dogfood cans in the recycling anymore but I think a lot of people still do, which of course reminds me that there are lot’s of folks who don’t recycle anything and they just throw paper plates and cans and light bulbs and batteries, some of which you can recycle and some not (and I never can remember which) and leftover or moldy food in the same plastic bags and have them carted away or dropped off at the transfer station and I think that maybe they might not care about recycling so much or maybe they don’t know what should be recycled anyway or maybe they just think that recycling is a waste of time because it’s really the huge pig farms and cars and trucks on the highways and the deforestation of the Amazon and whatever goes on in China that we don’t know about that causes all of the air pollution with fossil fuels and greenhouse gases and so I can’t really blame them for the way they feel but then you see Greta Thunberg on TV and you know that you should really be doing more about the environment like turning down the thermostat in the winter same as I do but then it gets so cold in the house and it costs so much to have the old windows replaced and I keep telling the Pella window people who call me twice a year and ask me if I want to have them come out and give me an estimate on new windows and I tell them each time that I really can’t afford how much it costs for new windows and if I had all the windows in the house replaced it would cost as much as a used hybrid car, which I need more anyway, and if you don’t replace all of the windows at the same time the cold air just comes in through the ones you didn’t replace and if you try to put that plastic they sell in boxes in the hardware store which you tape up around the windows and then use a hairdryer to make the plastic sheets shrink up really tight and which works pretty good unless the window frame was not clean enough and the tape peels away and the cold air finds its way through anyway and makes the plastic flutter or the cats start to climb up the plastic and rip it down anyway only an hour after you had cut it to the right size and fit it just right around the window and used all that electricity with the blow dryer to get them up, which I just read in the Reader’s Digest, still sucks up electricity even when it’s turned off but you still keep it plugged in the outlet like the phone charger and the TV even when you don’t have a phone attached to the wire, costing you more money that you never considered before and that no one tells you about unless you happen to come across the article in the magazine which will probably go out of business when people my age die off and everyone is using their devices for everything like getting the news, most of which you can’t tell is real or made up by someone or even a by computer, and you can even use to see who is at your front door and tell them to get the hell away from your house or you’ll call the cops, or even turn on your lights and TV before you get home so it will be on when you get there or record the program for you if you get stuck in traffic and get home late and maybe even defrost the chicken ala king for you, so then I rinse the coffee cups and take a shower and I look for a job on the SimplyHired website which someone who also got let go back in 2008, told me about at a job fair, and says people like me need to work but nobody wants to hire a man as old as me to do things I know how to do pretty good but no one needs done anymore anyway, even for fifteen dollars an hour, which I would probably do in a New York minute, unless it requires heavy lifting or two years of experience with the use of excel spreadsheets which they didn’t have back at my old job.

Malachi and His Mother Deconstruct Good and Evil

“Malachi, you’re not eating. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Ma.”

“Don’t say ‘nothing,’ I know you. I know it’s something. You haven’t touched the tsimis and you love my tsimis. And you have that look on your face.”

“What look?”

“That ‘Ma, something is wrong but I’m afraid to tell you because you’ll be upset and maybe have a heart attack look on your face.’ That’s what look.” Continue reading Malachi and His Mother Deconstruct Good and Evil

The Death of a Friend

“The death of a friend,” thought Sedge, in the days after Adelaide had died, “was like a tenacious, frightful, early morning dream. One that holds you so tightly that you feel your lungs cry and you strain to pull yourself away and at the very same moment you feel so hopeless you want to give up and die.” Continue reading The Death of a Friend

After Adelaide

Sedgwick sits alone on the soft sand. The tide is receding. The sun stretches long shadows down the beach from behind the condos along A1A. The low-rise two-bedroom models suited to the needs and savings of the less-than-wealthy and less-well-connected winter people who couldn’t afford the tall, balconied, places fronting the intra-coastal. Single people mostly, women mostly, who come south when it gets too cold and too quiet up north. People he knows. Women he knows.

Adelaide was one of those women. Continue reading After Adelaide

Morty Silberman and the Quantum Uncertainty of Entangled Spirituality

Morty Silberman looked like shit. I told him so. Pale as a piece of pickled herring. Lines and probes around him like a trussed-up kosher chicken.

“I feel like shit,” he tells me.

“Everybody in here must feel like shit,” I say.

“Did I tell you,” he says, “when the nurse was prepping me for surgery, she said to me, ‘You know, you’re pretty lucky. You got that crease in your earlobe.’ So I say to her, ‘And…?’ And she says to me, ‘And… most people with an earlobe crease like that show up a little too late downstairs with tag on their toe.’ No joke.” Continue reading Morty Silberman and the Quantum Uncertainty of Entangled Spirituality

Chava Shapiro: The Fresh Air Interview

Welcome back. I’m Terry Gross and you are listening to Fresh Air. If you’re just joining us, we have been talking with the remarkable Chava Shapiro. She was recently featured in a series of short stories published on an online journal website. She is here to talk with us about those stories, writing, and being a lesser-known female author working on the edges of the publishing industry.

 For those of you unfamiliar with her most recent story, it is called The Good Life of Avrum and Chava.

Ms. Shapiro, let me ask you, in the story, the central character, Chava, is seen as sort of a ‘Good Wife.’ Why did you pick that kind of a character to write about and how close is it to your own life? And why do you call it the ‘good life?’ Continue reading Chava Shapiro: The Fresh Air Interview

My Dearest Malachi, This Is Me, Your Mother

My Dearest Malachi, This is me, your mother. This is a joke. Right? Your brother Myron has told me about your new, and you should pardon the expression, ferkakte, adventure. Why are you doing this to me? You think I don’t have enough to worry about? Why didn’t you tell us? Your father is a wreck. Me? Not so much. He is going to plotz. He’s sitting on the living room floor this very minute watching CNN for news about you and pulling his hair out. But you shouldn’t let that bother you. Continue reading My Dearest Malachi, This Is Me, Your Mother

Thinking Now of Other Things

Your dog is old. You look at her. Her clouded brown eyes. Fourteen. Fourteen is old for a dog. This dog. This whiskered Scotty, mixed with West Highland terrier and who knows what else. This dog. Your dog, with her black hair knitted with untidy strands of grey. Her hair now looking like the color yours was when you took her in. Continue reading Thinking Now of Other Things

Adelaide On the Beach

When Sedgwick saw the body on the beach, in the evening, he didn’t believe it was Adelaide, the woman he had been seeing for a few months, earlier, until they had wordlessly drifted away from one another, having never, he thought, made any sort of commitment to one another, save for the general assumption that they’d spend an evening or two together, sometimes during the week, when she was in town, Continue reading Adelaide On the Beach

The Double

Yakov awakes in a hospital bed. He does not remember being brought here. He does not recall a fall or feeling ill in any way. He has simply found himself in a hospital bed, wearing a cotton gown tied loosely behind him and an ID band secured around his wrist. On it is his birth date and his name: Goldman, Yakov P. What on earth? he wonders. What has happened to me?

His bed is in a double room. His glasses are on the tray table. His own folded newspaper. His cell phone. A card to him from his co-workers at the firm. ‘Get well soon.’ A menu with his choices for lunch and dinner circled. Continue reading The Double

Two Rooms With A View

Max lived at home. He was a junior at a small liberal arts school in the city on 68th Street, near Central Park. It had no dorms. Students commuted to school. Every single one of them. Walking down Madison or Park from high rises on the East Side or taking taxis or cross-town buses or subway trains from different parts of the city.

A few, like Max, lived outside the city, in slow moving suburbs with driveways, no sidewalks, lots of grass and azalea bushes, and golden retrievers that wandered along streets with names like Oak Lane or Spruce Street, until it was time for dinner.

He lived in a house with his parents.

A house they bought in the mid-fifties. A house built on what he thought must have once been a farm since all the houses were new and looked alike and the land was flat and the only trees that grew in the neighborhood were small maples the builder planted along the roads and which one day were expected to grow to be thick-trunked and tall with branches full of leaves arching over and shading the streets like in a Doris Day movie.

But when Max looked out of the window from his bedroom on the second floor with the windows facing the street, the trees look puny. Like tiny fake trees in a diorama or in a scene you’d make around a model train set which looked real only if you lay your head down on the green-painted plywood table so that you could watch the locomotive coming toward you around the curve with the faint puffs of smoke coming out of the smoke stack and the piston rods driving wheels with a clicking sound on the track joints like real trains and the smell of the electric engine inside it as it passed by your face.

His father had built the bedroom for him in the unfinished attic. He worked at night after dinner and on the weekends, framing the room with fresh-cut two-by-fours, and nailing the sheetrock against them along the walls and up on the ceiling joists and then laying tiles on the subfloor. He did the wiring and the outlets. He plastered and sanded and painted.

Max hated the room. The color of the walls. The door that didn’t lock. The built-in drawers that stuck. The lone light in the center of the ceiling. No chair to sit on. The empty feeling he had sitting on the bed, flipping the pages of Introduction to General Biology, the floor strewn with clothes he had worn and dropped where he taken them off, the dust in the corners.

He hated living in the house with his parents. The isolation he felt. The scrutiny. The questioning. They way they had of making every conversation seem like an inquest of some sort. ‘Where were you?’ and ‘Where are you going?’

The way words were twisted like the frayed prickly wire wound around the little hooks on the back of a thick picture frame. He hated himself for hating it all.

He looked once for another place to live. One closer to the school. In the city. A place of his own where he could read and study. Come and go when he wanted to. A place where he had his own key and the door would lock and where he could keep his things.

The place he found was on Nagle Avenue up near Dykman Street and the number 2 train. It was advertised in the counseling center. A rooming house. He took the paper down.

The woman who owned the place showed him the room. She walked up the stairs ahead of him. Her large wide hips swayed. Her legs struck each step hard. She smelled of cigarette smoke, sweat, and unwashed feet. She said he could share the kitchen on the first floor with the others. He needed to bring his own dishes and towels. Clean up after himself.

She tried the door to the bathroom down the hall from his room and someone said, “I’m in here.”

In the room, there was a bed by the window facing the side alley. A chair and a table with a lamp with a pull chain. A wooden dresser. A waste basket.

He told her he would take it.

She left him to get the paperwork. She said it was one hundred a month. She needed one month up front in cash today. No checks. No trouble.

He sat on the bed, put his book bag on the floor and looked around the room. The screen in the window. The brick wall across the alley. City noises.

Before she came back, before she saw him, he picked up his bag, walked into the hall and closed the door. He walked down the stairs and out onto the street.

In his pocket was a token for the subway and the only three dollars he owned. He had no bank account. No job. He had an exam in the morning.

He walked up Nagle Avenue past the rows of two-story brick buildings. Past trashcans at the sidewalk edge. Past parked cars with the brown dust of time and the city on them.

He took a seat on the uptown number 2 and then transferred to the bus up through the Bronx and past Mount Vernon.

To the room on the second floor that his father built with his own hands, with the grey-blue walls, and the door that did not lock, and the bathroom down the hall with little pink tiles on the floor that he hated but did not have to share with anyone.

Molly Jacobs and Sarah Phipps (aka Sally Jacobs)

Molly and Sarah, two girls who in their youth

“may have given their end of town a swinging

reputation,” Garland says, “but if they hastened its

decline, they at least broke the cheerlessness of it.” (p.63)

Grown up, grown old, they would while away

their time, playing cards. “Sarah would get mad

at Molly, and say: ‘I shan’t tell you where I hid

the kerds. I hid them behind the old chest,

but I shan’t tell you.’” (Mann, p.55)

 

Grown up, grown old, having played

the hand they were dealt—they lay together

(Molly and Sally Jacobs) in tattered rags

pulled up over their chins—they lay together

 

in their bed through the cold winter

days and nights—the snow fallen and

falling through what was once a roof—

lying there in each others’ arms—

 

barely moving, only slightly disturbing

the smooth white blanket

that covered them.

— James R. Scrimgeour

From Voices of Dogtown: Poems Arising Out of a Ghost Town Landscape, Loom Press, 2019

 

 

What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Race

Frank Littleton looked at the men around the table. Six of them, all wearing shirts they’d once worn in jobs in the city or for going to funerals or fundraisers. Collars spread open. Sleeves rolled to the elbows. Men he’d known and liked for years, some since they were boys sucking on summer peach pits and laying pennies on railroad tracks.

He felt care-worn. Knew they could read it on his face. As he looked up at each of them, quick as cats, they looked away. Their furtive eyes on one another but none on him. Continue reading What We Talk About When We Don’t Talk About Race

Watching Nadal on TV

Paul, a slim man, in his fifties, not much of a talker, is sitting in a chair beside a hospital bed in a cramped bedroom in a mid-priced condo on the east coast of Florida. The room seems dark to him. The chair is utilitarian and uncomfortable. Cold-chromed steel tubing with a flat fake-wood seat and a straight back. No place for a person’s arms to come to rest. Not a chair meant for sitting in for long.

His shoulders are slumped forward. He is looking at the bone-frail woman in the bed. Continue reading Watching Nadal on TV

The Man in the Mirror

There were some men that Bertrand could not stomach. Tommy Bahama was one of them. Bertrand could see him down in the back yard, in his lemon yellow Polo shirt, collar up, maroon sweater, draped over his fey, weak-looking shoulders, and loosely knotted in front. The sight of the man was enough to raise his gorge.

Bertrand carefully drew the bathroom curtain closed and stepped back from the window. The movement caused barely a ruffle, just enough to coax a breath of Cape Cod Fog from the air freshener on the sill. He was sure he had gone unnoticed. Continue reading The Man in the Mirror