Short Stories

the future that was and might be again

[a short story about everyday life on Mars]

         The bradberries were ripe again. Twice a year is more than enough, don’t you think? But if I let them rot on the vine, they’ll bring the fruit flies and those buggers will infiltrate the house and because Milei never saw a piece of fruit she could pass without buying a few, they’ll infest the kitchen again and then she’ll complain to me for letting it happen and we’ll have to spend the next month with the smell of sweet vinegar in the air from the traps. It’s a real problem. Even the kids complain. And in the end, it’s another good reason not to let a woman think you are better than you are. They expect too much.

         It’s all about the consequences, you know.

          I was still in the army when I met her. I could have used some sound advice from an elder right then. Not that I would have listened. Just a precaution. She’s too beautiful to be resisted. But an enlisted man is also too easily swayed. Deprivations hollow the mind. On a dark night in a pod during a storm you overthink some things and totally ignore others.

         I met her while on leave from Titan station. There’d already been twelve months of resisting right there. I was working with a sergeant named Palmer who was working off a felony charge and she was bound and determined to enjoy every minute of it. But I resisted, as I said. And then I came home and head over to the hardware store on my own dime to pick up some ‘C’ brackets which the Army never gives you enough of, and there she is, wearing her older brother’s work clothes to get her planting done after a fertilizer spill—all overalls and pony tail. I didn’t have a chance in hell.

         First off, she is ordering the parts to fix her own fertilizing rig. Something about all those edgy words in a woman’s mouth that make you think new thoughts. But she smiles. Then she tells me that I have a spot on my uniform. Very rude, I’m thinking. But she’s put one of those price tags from a regulator on my back when we were waiting in line. I couldn’t see it and I had to take my jacket off. At least the clerk gets a laugh.

She just smiles again and says, “Actually, I thought you’d be worth more.”

         So, I tell her, “The army will take just about anything these days. You should give it a shot. Better than fixing fertilizer regulators.”

         And she says, “You ain’t smelled liquid Paragreen Fertilizer first thing in the morning, or you wouldn’t say that.”

         Then a guy who looks like he could lift a pod all by himself leans in the door and calls her away. That was her brother, but I didn’t know that at the time.

         A year after that I’m back home again waiting for my decommission. This little black-haired girl in overalls has been in my head the whole time. So, I go looking for her. No plan. She may be married to a fellow that lifts up pods for sport. But I knew her name then because her brother had called to her. It’s a popular name, but there are not that many working farms on that side of Elon. Maybe half a dozen, and I went to every single one. But the Milei I was looking for wasn’t there.

         So, I go back to the hardware store. Of course, you would tell me, that I should have done that thing first. But I’m not that smart. And the clerk who helped us isn’t there anymore, anyway. But, after a lot of hemming and hawing, the new clerk says, “Does she have black hair and pony tails?” Affirmative. “That would be Milei Adams. She’s from out in the Boon Docks—over by the ridges. But she seems to come in here every chance she gets. Seems like something is always broken.”

         So, I am out of there to the Docks, straight away, as soon as I can borrow my Dad’s car.

         Now, here is the joke.

         Milei came in that hardware store again the same day that I am out scouting for her in the ridges. There are farms buried down in every one of those furrows. and it’s a three hour drive just to get to one. But now, the clerk has told her that a soldier has been in asking for her. And she says, ‘Son of a gun. Took him long enough!”

         Glen, the clerk, told me that himself, later on.

         Well, she passes me on the road back home after my first couple of inquiries came up empty. But I had a lead, then, so I am whistling. There is a ‘Milei’ out in dock three. But now I’m running out of day light too, so I’m heading back to try another day. And then this car passes me going too fast, and on the screen I can see it raise a crop of dust and stop to turn around behind me. So, I stop too. Right there. There was no room to pull over. Just the sun-pink cut in the crust at either side.  It’s that time of day and there is traffic. And she comes up just behind and stops. I’m still fumbling with the closure on my suit and she is already out and standing there at my door. Somebody honked. She smiles. And then she says, ‘“Follow me.”

         And I’m not even hooked into my system yet, but I say ‘okay,’ anyway.

         Now, that’s consequences for you.

         This was, she said, a skip of time. She called it that, as if I would understand, which I did not. I was sixteen then and dumb as a knuckle. I had come in from the heat outside and found her in the shadows of the living room, staring oddly out the window.

         “What are you thinking?”

         “About a day like this.”

         “What do you remember about that day?

         Sitting in the rocker, her head tilted to the side, she combed a part of her hair into a single darkened flow of black and gray and silver, down below the seat of the rocker, all the way to the runners; and the comb was silver and caught at the light and looked as if it had left some of its color behind with each stroke.

         “I walked up onto the mountain,” she said,” above the corn field, where the land turned up beneath the pine. It was a hot day then and the sweat tickled me and I wanted the shade.”

         I knew that the hair had reached the floor when she stood, but she had finished with that, and already turned a part of it into a thick rope, and twisted that much behind her head with several pearl headed pins to hold it in place. Now she sat and braided what remained.

         I asked her what it smelled like. This caught her attention, and she stopped the comb mid-way and looked at me with surprise. She was given to the importance of smells—cooked by smell and judged what the day would be by its smell, the first thing in the morning.

         “There was okra in the field there beside,” she said, “and that was what I smelled all the way up to the pine. Sweet in the sun. I remember that pretty well too. And then I could smell that dog but I didn’t know it was him yet because I had never smelled him before. And that was when I heard the shot, and the echo off the mountain, and saw my Daddy striding for me from the house. He still had his white shirt on because he had been to the bank and I’d seen his truck come back but not him until then and that shirt was a terrible white in the sun and he was not wearing his Sunday pants so those were the dun brown ones and stained from field work. I smiled at him, mostly I think because he looked so serious. He reached where I stood and stopped to hold my shoulders but he had no words just yet. His eyes were black and serious. His hands were big and his fingers bent in around the bone. And he finally said, ‘Did he touch you?’ and I said, ‘Who?’ and he said, ‘That dog’ and pointed back into the pine and there the body of the dog lay with his eyes still open but he was dead. I could see the black of the blood on his shoulder and his head was to the side. Daddy had kilt him with the one shot which would have been a brass casing and cost ten cents so he wouldn’t want to waste another.”

         She started combing again, and braiding parts of it divided by arthritic fingers, She hadn’t answered her father’s question yet so I asked it again.

         “Had he touched you?”

         “No. But I found out later that he did bite another dog at a house up the road, and that boy, his name was Struther, he cried like he had been belt-whipped when his daddy had to shoot that dog too. Never saw Struther again after that day. He was a good boy all in all. Cute as a button and I already had my eye on him, but Momma and Daddy put me on the train that very Monday to stay in Canton with my Aunt Jean…But then she never got the letter and she was already down to Gaffney to work at the mill there so I took a room with Mr. and Mrs. Burk and you know all of what happened then.”

         “Did they send you away on the train because of the mad dog?”

         “No. No. It was because they had to sell the property to the bank. They were going to move up to my uncle’s house in Chimney Rock, and those folks had the room for my sisters but not for me. Those girls was too young anyways. I was already fifteen and big for my age. I already knew everything I could about sewing by that time and I had even run my mother’s Singer machine for a while before she sold that and so they took me on down at the mill in Canton to sew the  flour sacks and that was what I did until they needed someone to work on pants and shirts and by the time I was sixteen I was a full-on seamstress and getting a dollar and a half a week where my Aunt Jean had never earned more than a dollar.”

         My mind was still on that dog.

         “So that dog was rabid and coming down at you and you never heard him but you smelled him?”

         “I smelt him like he was right next to me. I remember it. One minute it was the okra and then pine-shade like cool water in that heat and the next it was spoilt meat.”

         “That is some memory.”

         “Just a skip of time.”

In ancient times, using a pen name, I wrote a series of short-short stories for use as one-page advertisements, under the heading ‘An annotated browser,’ to promote the shop. These are a few examples.

Counterpane

         It is an established fact in the used book trade that a healthy shop cat will lose one and a half times its body weight in fur every 28 days. On bright winter mornings, with the sun reaching through the front windows to steal the reds and greens from the dust jackets of books displayed there, the cat hair floats, illuminated, on invisible currents.

read more…

A friend was recently reading the revised version of John Finn that appears to be making its way into print sooner than later and suggested that a particular chapter might stand on its own. It happens to be one of those I posted first about eight years ago when John Finn was newly minted apart from its origins in the Henry Sullivan Hound novels. Long absent from view, I was happy to oblige. read more…