"The Gauntlet"

Four sprinklers sat in a row ahead of Gus, guarding the edge where sidewalk met lawn. The neighbors had arranged them so that the areas they sprinkled overlapped, but just barely, leaving no grass ungreened. Their spray tubes spat water in arcs that swept the ground like pendulums.

Gus rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt. He studied each sprinkler's motion in turn. When he was finished, he removed his glasses and tucked them into his breast pocket. Two teenage girls riding their bicycles in the street glanced at him while they cycled past.

He ducked his head and ran.

"My House"

 

Michael has been just as careful stacking the boxes next to the curb as he had been peeling back layers of newspapers from the dishes or sliding the new refrigerator out of its enormous crate. All of their belongings are unpacked, yet the house now feels empty without walls of boxes to trap their echoes. All of their belongings are unpacked, yet something is missing; something is not where it's supposed to be. A glance outside shows Michael that his son has dragged the refrigerator crate away from the curb to the middle of the front lawn and is drawing on it with a crayon. 

"Hey, big guy," Michael says when he approaches Calvin in the yard, "what do you got going there?"

"This is my house," Calvin informs him while continuing to color. "It's got a blue door, and two windows, and red flowers."

Michael studies his work. "Buddy, that's our old house," he says. "Why don't you give it a brown door? Make it look like what we've got now."

"This is my house," Calvin says again. He is beginning to lose against his tears. "I don't want you to throw away my house." He hits the top of the crate twice, striking the words that end his sentence. Inside the crate, the sound echoes.

"Music Takes Time"

What a crappy photo. I promise, that squash is not swarmed with bugs. That's just my phone's camera adding specks.

Lucas came back to check on the seedling two days after the seed was planted.

"It's not ready yet," Old Man Bones, who watched over things that grow, told him. "Go home and practice. Da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM. That's right." Lucas frowned but marched home, tapping out a simple rhythm on his belly.

Lucas waited a month before he marched back to visit Bones, beating the same simple rhythm that the old man had given him to work with the last time. "Still not ready for you yet," Bones said, "but come here, look at this." He turned the fruit over for Lucas to see. "See this little groove right here? This little notch?" Lucas nodded and pretended that he did. "That's going to be important. You've got to be ready to play it. So try it with some extra notes. Da-DUM, da-da-DA-dum." Lucas practiced for weeks without understanding the point of it, until one day, when, tapping the rhythm against his arm, his finger twitched and struck the bone of his wrist instead. The feeling was completely different. That's all that music was, he realized: paying attention to how the slightest changes felt.

He and Old Man Bones continued like that over the following weeks, the old man giving him new steps in his rhythm each time. Finally, summer ended, and the time for harvest came. Old Man Bones gave Lucas a beautiful drum, plucked straight from the vine. "Now it's ready for you," he told the boy, who ran off and began to play. And you're ready for it, Bones' inner voice added as they both enjoyed the fruits of their labor.

"Fire"

 

He rarely thought about the trees in any of the lands their army crossed, but this one he liked. The way the thin, curved fingers of its trunk curled toward the sky made him think of fire, and fire he liked as well. He took his striking stones from his breast pocket and reached into the pouch at his hip for one of the wax-dipped wads of cotton he carried with him. Grinning, he broke from the line of freeriders and went to kneel beside the tree. It was almost as if its lines were meant to lead the flames.

"The Tooth Fairy Pillow"

 

When I was younger, I had a small pillow, pink with lace trim and a pocket about as wide as the diameter of a quarter sewn onto the front, where I kept the baby teeth that I lost. The night after a tooth had fallen out, I would slip the dead little bit of enamel into the pocket. In the morning, the pocket would hold a coin. My tooth fairy was somewhat lax in her duties, though; often, she left the teeth tucked inside along with the quarter. As more and more teeth fell out of my mouth and ended up in the pillow, I swore that I could hear them clacking together at night, as if someone were talking very quickly, or shivering in the cold.

I hadn't thought much about the tooth fairy pillow until the other day, when I was cleaning the hair out of my brush. I'm used to imagining the tangled bunches that I pull out as tumbleweeds as they drift down toward the garbage can. This time, as it was falling, the mass of hair sprouted tiny legs and feet from its bottom side, landed on the can with its toes curled over the rim, and leaped onto the floor, where it dashed toward a crack in the wall. I thought I had been hallucinating until this morning, when some of my fingernail clippings joined together and grew a hand out of nothing, and afterwards proceeded to run out the front door like the Thing.

Sometimes I've thought about the parts of me that I've lost over the years, and the other lives that I or some other version of me might have gone on to live. Now there's a knocking on my door downstairs, and I find myself wondering, What about all the thoughts I used to have? The stories I once dreamed and the terrors I used to fear? What might have become of them?

"The Pepper Plant"

 

Eddi was twelve weeks into the pregnancy when she bought the pepper plant.

"I feel like I need the practice," she told the clerk at the garden center.

She actually felt that she needed some kind of distraction, something that wasn't a baby book or a question about her child-rearing plans from an eager co-worker that would leave her worrying away the rest of the afternoon. And she had always loved the taste and the color of hot peppers. She took the plant home, gave it new soil, and applied an Epsom salt solution to its leaves.

Once the plant, a cayenne, had produced several fruit, Eddi snipped one of the peppers and sliced off the tip. She was well into the second trimester by that point. She brought the piece to her mouth and began to nibble on it. Immediately she wanted to cry.

The burn of it was horrible, nothing like she remembered or had expected. Her stomach had felt like a minefield flooded with acid throughout the previous months, but she had still hoped to be able to enjoy some of what she had worked so hard to grow.

She called her mother.

"I can't do this," Eddi wailed into the phone, "I don't know what I was thinking. I can't do this."

"Do what?" her mother said. "Honey, is this about the baby?"

"I just wanted to eat a pepper," Eddi said.

She couldn't stand to look at the pepper plant the next morning, and she was hardly able to look at it the day after that. She did, however, check on it three days later. Its leaves were drooping. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she whispered as she silently urged the water to fill the watering can. It didn't matter that she couldn't eat the peppers; it was still her plant. Yet she wasn't as worried as she thought she should've been. Somewhere deep inside of her, a voice was saying, It's all right, it's all right.

"Old"

 

As he pushed the sealcoat across the surface of the parking lot, he became aware of an elderly woman watching him from the balcony of her second-floor condo. She was seated close to the railing, her hands folded over the top bar. The skin covering her fingers was dark brown. He imagined that it would look like splintered wood if he saw it up close, and that her fingers were curling over the railing like withered grape vines. He didn't know why it bothered him. He continued the sweep the liquid seal over the cracks in the exhausted asphalt that had been filled, telling himself that the sun was just getting to him.

"Sometimes on Those Summer Nights"

 

Sometimes on those summer nights, among all the shouts from the neighbors playing bag toss games in their driveways and the songs that fell in pitch as cars drove past the house, he would catch the sound of someone crying. He checked out the window a few times and once in the held-breath stillness of night even stepped barefoot on the lawn, but he never saw anybody. The only figure of any note was that of the tree, which stood in the middle of the yard, sticky with the sap that had built up inside it over the course of the spring and that was now escaping through cracks in the bark, unable to be contained any longer.

"What Are You Afraid Of?"

 

"It's the weirdest thing," said the oldest of the three rabbits. "They make these hard ground pathways for themselves, and they never step off of them, just follow them everywhere. When they're younger, they'll play in the grass, but the older ones--you almost never see that."

"Maybe they go blind as they grow up," said the youngest through the blades of grass that he had stuffed into his mouth. "Need the hard ground to know where to go."

"Or maybe they're afraid of what's out there," whispered the middle rabbit. The oldest turned to see him and would've sworn that he was just sitting still, listening to what the wind had to say for the evening, except that he follow the middle one's sideways stare and saw at the end of it a human, standing not five rabbits' length away, at the edge where the grass met solid ground.

"I don't like it," the middle rabbit said.

The oldest held still for a moment. Then he wrinkled his nose. "Why not?" he asked. "It's on the pavement. It won't come any closer." He lowered his head and joined the youngest in the task of eating.

"It's trying to hide its eyes now," the middle rabbit said in more urgent tones.

The oldest and the youngest glanced up. The human was holding a small rectangle in front of its face."Weird," said the youngest.

"It's still not coming any closer," the oldest said.

Later, the oldest rabbit figured that the human must have been able to hear him. That was why it put its foot on the grass.

"Run!" the oldest rabbit squeaked. The three dashed for the nearest bushes, scared to wonder what else the evening held in store.

"Snugglewood"

 

Person 1: "Hey, you want some wood?"

Person 2: "..."

1: "Look, Snugglewood's on sale."

2: "Sugar plum, it's always on sale. It's just not legal to pay for it outside of certain parts of Nevada."

1: "Why do I have the feeling that 'Snugglewood' was someone's euphemistic pet name for part of the body?"

2: "I don't know. Possibly because we already implied something like that just two seconds ago? Possibly because your mind thinks in weird euphemisms all the time? I don't know."

1: "What? Weird euphemisms?"

2: "I told you I was going to run to the corner and grab some eggs and you, like, died laughing for a half hour."

1: "I was just wondering whose you were going to grab."

[pause]

1: "I think a product name like 'Fucksticks' would help them sell a lot more firewood."

2: "Okay, going inside the store now. And I'm going to check the price of milk, too, if you think you can handle it."

1: [snicker]

2: "Yep. Definitely not getting any wood tonight, that's for sure."

"Dear as Pepper"

Today's post is based on an old Italian folktale called "Dear as Salt."

The wise woman left her cabin in the heart of the deep, living forest and traveled to the castle. There she found the prince, seated at a long table on top of a dais, celebrating his wedding feast.

She gave him a cloth bag full of black and red peppercorns.

"Pepper?" the prince asked, holding the bag open, sniffing. He tugged the bag's drawstrings and gave woman the most graceful smile that his confusion would let him manage. "To be honest, I would have expected mushrooms, or some other forest delicacy. Or at least salt. That has some value. We use that in everything."

The wise woman nodded. "Salt is simple and practical, a good foundation," she said. "But pepper. Pepper adds depth. Bite. Salt stands in agreement with each ingredient and makes each dish what it's meant to be. Pepper makes the whole dish something more." The wise woman bowed and turned to take her leave; the party was no place for her. "Go a year without pepper, and your bride there will say everything is seasoned pleasantly enough," she called out as she walked through the long hall. "But how long can a person look forward to dining on food that's merely pleasant?"

She didn't have to turn around to know that the prince's young bride was watching her leave, and that both her meal and the prince's remained untouched.

"5:21"

 

There was an old woman in the back of the electronics department, moving along the shelves of clock radios like a cursor moving along lines of text. When Frank got there, he saw that she was changing the time on all the clocks to 5:21 p.m.

He brought his careful shuffle to a standstill a few feet away from her and cleared his throat. "Ma'am?" he asked. "Can I help you with anything?"

"No," she said with a quick smile before continuing to the next clock, "I'm quite fine, thanks."

Frank nodded. He started to turn away but then swiveled back around on his heels. "If I can ask," he began.

"I'm dealing with something," the old woman told him. This time she didn't look up.

"Right," said Frank. He watched her work at her task. The finger that held down each clock's buttons seemed to tremble under the weight of whatever was motivating her to do this. 

"Ten-ten," he murmured to her when she was at the last clock on the wall. That made her stop. "That's the magic time," he said while she stared at him. "Whenever you see clocks in a store or in a catalog or whatever, they're usually going to be set to ten-ten. I guess it looks more natural or something, I don't know."

"Well. Never noticed that," the woman said. She returned her attention to the clock and pressed one of its buttons until its glowing red lines aligned in the shapes of the digits 5, 2, and 1.

"My manager's probably going to make me change that," Frank said, even though he doubted Shawn would notice.

"Probably," the woman said. Her task complete, she faced Frank with her hands folded in front of her belly and a smile fighting to take hold on her lips, which confused Frank, as the tears swelling in her eyes suggested that that smile had no business even trying. "Still," she said. "I'd like to see how long we can keep these like this, if that's all right."

"Doesn't bother me any," said Frank.

The old woman nodded and patted Frank on the shoulder as she moved to walk past him. "Maybe I'll go home and set my clocks to ten-ten," she told him. "See if there's any magic in that magic time of yours after all." She left Frank lingering in that instant. Even years later, Frank thought back to that night at the store when an old woman came in and locked the clocks on the shelves at 5:21 p.m. The moment seemed, at least in memory, to last forever.

"The Wind"

 

I heard kids' voices come through the window on the back of the summer-day wind. When I got up, though, and pushed back the curtain, I saw no one outside.

Then I heard one of the voices again. "Shit," a boy said, "did you see that?"

"See what?" asked another boy. Still no faces appeared.

There was a pause before the first boy's voice returned with an answer. "Nothing," he said. "I swear I saw the old man's ghost," he added, speaking more quietly.

"You saw the wind move the curtain," said yet another boy I wasn't able to see. "Come on. I hate this place." The voices disappeared then as they always did, cut away by the wind that moved between us, as thin as a razor, separating the world into two.

"Blueberries"

 

[A double post for the day--making up for missing Wednesday's entry.]

After sweeping all the shards and dust from the floor, Ian hurried the ceramic angel and the wing he had broken off of its back into the forest behind the house, where the dirt near a low-growing cluster of blueberry bushes was still soft and bare, untouched by moss or grass. With the wing as his shovel, Ian dug a hole. The pale cast of the figure's material clawed like a scream, a sharp white next to the dirt's darkness when he laid the angel down, but he didn't know what else to do.

When he finished, he looked at the blueberries. Handful by small handful, he filled the pockets of his jackets. He didn't want any; he just needed the excuse. One of the blueberries burst. He glanced at the crevice between his forefinger and his thumb, at the skin where the purple mark was beginning to spread.

A shout split the air like a crack of thunder. Ian turned around. His father was home.

"Flashlight"

 

When the storm knocked out the power, Edna found herself thinking how glad she was that she had remembered to place the flashlight on the side table, which she happened to be sitting by at the time. Then, as soon she turned the flashlight on, she heard the tapping start inside the wall at her back. She was suddenly less glad. 

She swung the beam around until it landed on the wall. "Hey! Turn that thing off!" squeaked a voice somewhere behind the plaster.

Edna panicked and did what she was told.

"Seriously, what's the point of us fixing the lights, now, if you've already got a light to shine?" The voice was so small and light that Edna thought it would echo inside a teacup.

"Who's there?" she whispered.

"Oh, no one," came the voice. "Just give us a second, and..." Instantly, the power returned; the room was flooded with lamplight that drowned the flashlight's beam. 

"Hello?" Edna called, her own voice trembling. But no one replied. She turned in her chair and knocked on the wall, but no answer came. She sat for a bit after that, pondering what to do.

And then she unplugged the lamp.

"The Nut House"

 

He came into the kitchen while she was seated at the table and said, "I've got to know."

She closed her book on her lap. "Are you sure?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I've just--I want us to be excited about this together."

"You're sure?"

He nodded again.

"Okay," she said, letting her smile come out of hiding. She eased herself up from the chair. "I got you something that I actually bought to give you whenever you asked. Or, if you didn't ask," she added, tiptoeing toward the closet, "I was just going to give it to you after." She took a bag from the lowest shelf, reached inside for its contents, and passed him his gift.

He studied the antique metal sign.

"I don't get it," he eventually admitted. "Are you telling me it's furry? Or crazy? Or..."

"Use your sense of humor," she told him.

He looked at the sign a while longer, until she finally saw the light break across his face. "Oh," he said, and then, "Oh," with a smile. "A boy," he whispered. "It's a boy."

"Sour Times"

 

"I often wonder," he said to the bartender, who looked young, even in the bar light, "who it was that first came up with the idea to put lemons in water."

"Really? Do you really often wonder that?" she asked. Her eyebrows were doing as much of the asking as her voice and her words were.

"I'm very drunk," he said, sipping the water. 

"I know," she said. She smiled at him. "What I like to think," she said, tapping the bar counter, "and this is by no means historically true, but what I like to think is that someone decided to take all the goodness of water and add something sour to it, so that whenever someone drank it, the water tasted so much better whenever you got a taste of it through all that sourness." She dropped her bar rag onto the counter with a sodden slap and wiped away a pool of nearly melted ice. "Sounds like I'm a romantic or something, huh," she said. "But I think that sounds better than saying people did it so they wouldn't get scurvy, don't you think?"

He looked down at his glass. He wanted to ask what she could possibly know. But by the time he looked up again, she was at the other end of the bar, pouring whiskey for someone with a face even older than his.

"Discovery"

 

I sat next to an old woman at the bus stop. She had a book in her lap but was holding it there with the back cover facing up and the spine turned toward the street, so I couldn't see what she was reading. A bookmark was keeping its vigil about two-thirds of the way through.

"Must be a good book," I said to her, pointing. "Looks like you're almost done with it."

The woman smiled and said, "Oh, it's unbelievable. Very informative. Some books just, I don't know, wake you up, make you realize how much more you have to learn about the world, you know?" She turned her book over and showed me a dictionary's front cover. When the bus finally came, I let her board first.

"The Echo Tree"

 

[A note about this post: When I began writing it, I had an idea of how the story would end. As I continued writing, I liked that ending less. I might be able to fix this, but I couldn't in the time I had today. So below is what I was able to get down of this story.]

The Saturday night before classes were set to start, everyone else on our floor left for a party at one of the nearby apartments, which meant that it was just Lori and I who went out to see the echo tree.

The echo tree was on the west side of campus, near the intersection of Howard and Taylor. It looked like an ordinary tree, except for one abruptly terminated growth about five feet up the trunk. That looked like the remaining nub of a severed branch, except that it was hollow at its core, leading a cavity within the trunk and giving the impression that the tree was whistling, or puckering up for a kiss.

Lori tilted her head as she examined it. "'I'm a little teapot, short and stout,'" she sang.

"Oh, please don't let this tip over and-or pour anything out," I said. "I don't care if it really is empty inside. It's still pretty big."

Lori snickered. "Hey, thanks again for coming out to see this with me."

"No problem. Like I said, I was curious, too. And parties--not so much my thing." Which was true, and which made my assignment to a roommate like Lori, a stranger until yesterday who seemed to feel the same way that I did about what the resident director had labeled "social endeavors," all the more surprising.

"I know," she told me. "I mean, I know shouldn't be shocked, but I am, I can't believe how many people are spending their first weekend at school doing who knows what stupid things that they won't even remember. I mean, new-found freedom and all, I guess, but...."

"Freedom, and learning who you are," I said, "not to mention the fact that we're about to spend our Saturday night talking to a tree, so if anyone's wandering the realm of stupid...."

The story behind the echo tree was that whenever someone spoke into its hollow branch, the tree spoke back--made sense, given the tree's name. The thing about the echo tree, though, was that what it said back was never the same as what had been said to it moments before. There were all sorts of theories as to what was actually happening: that there were pipes that ran underground between the tree and apartments across the street; that one of the frat delegations had slipped some kind of device inside and passed down the secret from one batch of conscripts to the next; that some of the city's homeless, known to shelter in the underpasses, were having some fun at the students' expense. The only one with any answers to share was the tree, and the tree offered only what it had been given to say.

"When Your Petals Fall Away"

 

[Finally started reading A Game of Thrones not too long ago, and was reading it before making tonight's post. I think it put me in a certain mindset...] 

The girl behind the flower stall, who smelled as sweet as honey and smiled like a summer day, watched the old woman in the brown robe edge through the crowd, basket swinging from her arm like a chain, and head straight for the dark-haired man in velvet, the one the flower girl had thought was walking toward the tulips. "Care for something exotic for your kitchen, good sir?" the woman asked when she was in front of him.

The flower girl watched as the man peered first into the basket and then at the crone, his smile thin, his eyes narrowed in confusion. "Good woman," he said, "forgive me for being so frank, but those are the ugliest old roots I've ever seen."

"Not the first time I've heard that," said the crone, smiling, "but if you'll allow me a second, you'll see that those ugly old outsides hide a lovely inside." While the man looked on, she reached for a root and broke off one of its swollen branches. From behind her baskets, the flower girl saw the color of the root's flesh--a keen yellow, like that of autumn leaves--and caught its peppery scent. "A lovely inside," the woman repeated, "not to mention--absolutely delicious." She angled her smile at the man with a knowing nod. "If I may be so frank."

The man offered a chuckle and a large brass coin in exchange for one of the roots and departed without a second glance at the flower stall. "You must do well at the market with your wares," the flower girl said curtly to the old woman once the man was gone.

The woman turned to her with a smile so toothy that the plainness of it was hard to behold. "I do fair at market, yes," said the crone with a shrug. "But I do better afterward, with the men who want to know what else those ugly old outsides are hiding." She tossed the broken root at the flower girl, who caught it just before it struck her face. "Something to remember later, child, when your petals there all fall away." And with that, the old woman left, calling out to another man, "Care for something exotic, good sir?" while the flower girl cast her eyes downward and studied her roses.