Then, death paused—an unwise decision because the sparrow dove, aimed itself arrow-straight and pierced through the cloud of evil. When it emerged on the other side, the black mass in the center was gone, and the nebulous thing around it dissipated. The bird landed on my couch, opposite the television and as I watched, it lifted its head and gobbled the slimy thing as if it had been an earthworm pulled from the soil. Then, it ruffled its wings and shook its little head. With a flap and a hop, it landed on the table and looked at me. I looked back, astonished and out of breath, in awe of the creature that had given me an extension on my loan. He nodded to me in almost human fashion, like an actor exiting the stage. I should have applauded—did on the inside—but I was too shocked to speak. With a flutter, George left out the same window.
I don’t know why the sparrow chose me, if it chose me, or if it was an instinct, a compulsion to do a job most didn’t know about and science would never observe…but I was given more time. For that I am thankful, and from now on, I will always feed the birds.
SUICIDE SOLUTION
Edwin Charles had blown his brains out. He was a doctor—a gynecologist. He was brilliant, often accused of having a photographic memory and unnatural skill. He could have named all the different bits of brain and each of the teeth that were stuck in the drying muck on the wall behind his nearly headless body. He could have pointed out the different muscle tissues of the face that were left burnt and exposed. He could have been a neurosurgeon or a Nobel Prize winner, but he chose to deliver babies.
He was also thorough in everything he did and prided himself in completing those things he had started. Proof of that existed in the room where a police detective, two uniforms and a handful of forensics team members took photographs and samples of his once dazzling mind, sprayed on the wall like a work by Jackson Pollock.
"Christ, what a mess," Detective Ralph Cobb said. "Twenty-six years on the force, ya never get used to this." He flipped over a chunk of something bloody with his pen. "Where's the family?" Cobb asked.
"They're at the widow's parents' home. She called this in about four hours ago, said they couldn't stay in the house. She's got three kids—can't blame her," the other uniform said.
"Suicide?" the first uniform asked.
"Looks cut and dry from where I'm standin'," Cobb said. "Anyone find a note?"
"Yeah, boss. Over here."
One of the forensics team waved him over. They had a blood-spattered letter, written in long hand, sealed in a plastic Ziploc bag. He held it up for Cobb to retrieve. The detective did so and pulled a pair of reading glasses from the front pocket of his grey suit jacket. Placing them on his long nose made him look his age.
"Sure this guy was a doctor? Excellent penmanship," he said.
"Penmanship? That's kinda like texting, right?" another younger member of the forensics team asked with a chuckle.
"Funny. I can see why they give you the important jobs," Cobb said, looking at the young man over his glasses.
The texter continued bagging up loose pieces of skull and other miscellaneous parts. Cleanup work—bottom of the totem pole. Cobb went back to the letter, holding it up, into the dim light of the ceiling fixture.
To my loving wife Jewel, it began.
Let me first apologize. I don't know what to say to our children.
Tell them I was weak. This all has to do with a patient, Mrs. Kelly Albers, who came in my office sixteen months ago. She said her husband wanted children, then asked me to "sterilize" her, to prevent it. Such a strange word for a young woman to use. She said she was not fit to be a mother, and begged me, in tears, to help her. She was twenty-four years old at the time.
"Kelly Albers," Cobb said. "Anybody recognize that name? Sounds so familiar."
He was met with several blank stares and heads shaking left and right.
I, of course, told her to think about it. "You're a young woman," I said. "You may change your mind." I gave her the number of Bob Cranston, my counselor friend. I told her to go and see him. She protested at first, but did in fact, go to see him. He told me so. He said they had a good session, although he wouldn't give details.
Three months later, she came back to see me, and she was pregnant. She seemed happy. When we found out she was carrying twins, she seemed overjoyed. There was no more talk of 'sterilization.'
We delivered the babies successfully, identical twin boys. Each was healthy. She named them Marcus and Maxwell and they were just over five pounds each. She recovered well and took her boys home without a hitch. I marked it on my calendar. I keep track of all the babies I deliver that way. I don't know why.
Then, two weeks ago, she called my office and left a message in my voicemail. She sounded distraught. Said something about monsters and how she wasn't fit to raise them. I called back, but it was too late. I wanted to tell her again about postpartum depression, and remind her she could get counseling, but it was too late.
Her husband told me what happened. He cursed at me, and my God, Jewel, he was right to do so....
It was then that Cobb remembered where he'd heard the story of Kelly Albers, and he put the note down. He couldn't read about how she'd grabbed little Maxwell by the ankles and beaten Marcus to death with his own brother. He couldn't have that in his head anymore. It wasn't on the news in that detail. The news showed a young woman with a crazed expression being questioned in her prison jumper. Showed her going to trial. The news predicted she would end up in a mental hospital, but no details were given.
Cops had a way of finding out those confidential and horrifying details—of overhearing them. They had ways of keeping things bottled up until they drank or smoked themselves to death. Cobb knew the detective who visited that crime scene, found him crying hysterically in the locker room. He wished he hadn't asked the questions, hadn't heard the answers.
He understood Edwin Charles' pain—just knowing was enough. But this man felt responsible. He knew if he'd read the last few paragraphs of the letter, it would apologize again and again. He knew the writing would show signs that the man's hand was shaking. He knew it would say that he loved them in the end, but just couldn't live with that knowledge.
"Hey, boss? You want me to question the wife? See if there might be something else going on here?" one uniform asked.
"No," Cobb said. "No. This one's just what it looks like."
THE BEACH
Wintertime always brought her bitching. The colder it got, the more she ranted. Audrey was a beach girl at heart. Calvin knew that when he met her, when he married her, when they had children, and when he moved her to the Midwest.
He never meant to pull her away from the sunshine and the ocean. It was just the way life rolled. He followed the money, which was something he hadn’t intended to do. He didn’t really care about money, but when push came to shove and he had three mouths to feed, clothe and shelter, there wasn’t much choice in the matter. Plus, Calvin had served twenty years in the Navy and he’d seen all the blue water he could stomach for one lifetime.
“I’ve seen enough water,” he told her often.
“You miss it,” she joked.
He didn’t.
That year brought a particularly cold winter with loads of snow. He shoveled the driveway while she watched from the front window with that sour look on her face. It was the look he’d come to recognize as her relaxed face. She’d worn it so long it just naturally settled there like dust on a high shelf. He went inside and tried to be cordial.
“Brisk out there,” Calvin said, pulling off his gloves and kicking snow from his boots.
“Bah,” she replied. “I’ve no use for it.”
“Snow is beautiful. Look how it coats the pine branches, Aud.”
“Damned cold is all I need to know.”
Calvin poured himself a cup of coffee and warmed his hands with the steaming, ceramic mug. Then he ate two pieces of toast, customary before work.
“Well, looks like I should get going. Might take a mi
nute or two for that old truck to start.”
Audrey nodded and looked at him. It was another of her looks, one he knew meant something was on her mind. He knew what that something was.
“When are you gonna retire, Cal?” she asked.
“What?” he said.
The question wasn’t what he expected.
“Well, the kids are grown and moved out. They’re both married and have decent jobs. We don’t need this big ol’ place. We could sell it and pack up, move to the beach...Someplace warm. Open a little shop of some sort.”
And there it was: move to the beach. Those were the words he was looking for. The big ol’ place was a run-down eighteen-hundred square foot colonial in an equally run-down subdivision. It had been quaint when they moved in twenty-two years before.
“Move to the damn beach. Izzat all you ever talk about?” Calvin said.
“I don’t like the cold.”
“No shit?”
She frowned at his sarcasm.
“Go on then. Go to work. Enjoy yourself while I sit here and freeze.”
“Don’t be so damned dramatic. You’ll thaw out and spring’ll be here in just a few weeks. Then you can smile for a minute.”
“Three months of summer ain’t long enough, Cal. I just miss the ocean air and I miss the sun.”
“Well, when we get these bills paid off, maybe I can retire. We’re still paying on the loans for their college, the loans for their weddings, and my truck ain’t gonna last forever.”
“I know, I know. I was just sayin’ is all,” she said.
Cal ruffled. “I know you’re just sayin’. But that’s pressure on my shoulders every time you just say. As if I might forget…could forget? It’s like another stone in the sack on my back each time.”
“Cal,” she said with a sigh. “Who’s bein’ dramatic now?”
He shrugged before kissing her on the forehead.
“Have a good day, Aud. I love you.”
She offered him a strained smile and he walked out the door. It had been that way for twenty-two years.
When he first lost his job on the coast, he looked for work high and low. Low is where he found it. It was low on the pay scale and eight hundred miles from the nearest salt water, and because of that, low on her list of places to live. There were tears and daily arguments back then, which he chalked up to homesickness. Lately, the tears were gone, at least that he saw. The arguments came and went. And she’d developed her relaxed face which reminded him the rest of the time.
Day by day, he plundered through work just for the paycheck while their bills piled up. There were still bills for medical procedures paid without insurance and credit card bills still coming for clothes the girls hadn’t worn in years…braces for their teeth that had long since come off, and constant repairs to that old house. Everything fell apart at once it seemed, but Calvin hung in there. He did the best he knew how to do.
Audrey hung in there, too, in her own stoic way. She cleaned the house and cared for the children. She even worked part time when she could, but her wish to go back to the coast—any coast, to be on the sand at the ocean never waned. Even when they were talking about happy things on good nights when the stars were out and the air was warm, she brought it up.
“Remember when the girls were tiny and we used to chase the crabs on the shore with a flashlight?” she’d said.
It hurt his heart that they were having a good time in their land-locked home, and yet she still brought up the ocean. He fumed when she did that.
“Shut up about the damned beach,” Cal had replied. “Just shut up.”
She did. For a while, she did actually shut up about it, but he still saw it on her face whenever the leaves fell from the trees and the temperature fell from the eighties into the teens. He still saw it in her attitude when they couldn’t afford to take a vacation yet another year while all their neighbors were coming back from Mexico with fresh tans and satisfied grins. He saw it when the snow fell, when they put up their small above-ground pool for the children to swim in before they up and moved away. He saw it when they packed that pool away. He saw it every day when he came home, tired from work.
Her comment about retiring to the beach and opening up a little shop had been the end of it. That day had been the final straw for Calvin.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Somehow I’ll make this work and I’ll take her back there.”
He meant it. He had to think on it for a while…had to figure it out, but he meant those words.
Calvin put in his notice with the boss.
“Sorry to see you go, Cal,” the boss said. “You’re one of the good ones.”
Cal nodded and gave him a wry smile. Inside, he already felt lighter. As he worked those last two weeks, his plan came together, lingering in his mind like a black cloud. And on his last day of work, when he pulled into the snow-dusted driveway, he saw Audrey watching out the window.
“Whatever makes you happy,” he said as he got out of the truck and went inside.
She was sitting in her chair, just getting back to her sewing when he walked in.
“Good day?” she asked.
“’Bout the same,” he said. “I have got some good news, though.”
She looked up at him and something like hope danced in her eyes. He saw it there and smiled as broadly as he could, tobacco stained dentures and all. Calvin nodded, knowing she would understand what he meant. Audrey jumped from her chair—amazing at her age—and hugged his neck.
“There’s just one thing I need to take care of first,” he said. “Then you and I will leave in the morning.”
She didn’t argue. Not a single word.
#
Calvin giggled as he drove down the highway. A feeling of freedom like he hadn’t felt in decades washed over him. He pulled into a gas station to fill up and thought about asking if she needed anything, but decided against it. He shut the door and swiped his card through the pump.
“In about ten hours, Aud, you’ll finally get your wish.”
He chuckled as he filled the tank up. Minutes later, they were back on the road heading southeast toward the Carolinas. The trip was quiet and went on through the day and well into the evening. By the time he saw the sign for beaches, it was after 10:00 pm. Another smile spread over his face.
“Almost there, Aud.”
Calvin laughed aloud as he pulled into the public access. When he rolled his window down, he heard the waves crashing on the other side of the sand dunes. Sea oats swayed in the ever-present breeze and the sweet smell of salt air filled the car.
“Smell that,” he said.
He took Audrey out to the beach in the moonlight. The cooler she was stuffed in left a wide flat trail behind it that covered his labored, backwards foot prints. When he got beyond the dunes, he dropped the cooler handle and went back to the car for a folding chair. Once he was back next to the cooler, he opened the lid.
He pulled out a bloodied bottle of whiskey first, and poured himself two fingers in a plastic cup.
“Here we go, Aud. Breathe it in,” he said.
Then, he retrieved her severed head from the cooler and plopped it into the sand, twisting its bloody stump to face the surf. Her eyes were shut, but he pulled a toothpick from his pocket, leaving red smudges on his shirt that looked black in the moonlight. It was a toothpick like you get from a restaurant—still wrapped in plastic. He peeled off the wrapper and smelled it.
“Mint,” Cal said and snapped the pick in half.
He opened her left eyelid and propped it there with one-half of the toothpick, then did the same with her right. The tide was on its way in, and the moon was near full.
“Now you can see. It’s a perfect night and perfect timing,” he said.
Cal tossed back the two fingers of liquor and poured a second. He settled into his chair and pulled a chunk of wife-meat from the cooler, examining it for a few seconds as it dangled, dripping blood on the sand.
“Here?
??s to memories,” he said.
He flipped it out over the strand like he was skipping stones on a lake. Then he pulled out his flashlight and sent the beam toward the water, finding the chunk of meat. His lips curled into a smile as the ghost crabs came out of their holes and scurried after the tiny treat. He flipped another piece, then another…and another.
"Good stuff, boys. Get your fill. Back to the beach, Audrey! You finally made it!"
He punctuated his statement with a cackle and a snort of whiskey.
It took over an hour to throw all the pieces of Audrey out onto the sand, each one dragged back to a damp hole that those crabs carved in between high tides. Cal was pleased to see the tide already washing some of the missed pieces out into the depths where fish and other creatures would find them. He’d stopped along the route and dumped the bones and organs in various trash cans across the eight hundred mile trip. Now, all he had remaining was her head. He dragged the cooler down to the surf and let the sea rinse it out, then he tossed it into the water and let it float so someone could find it.
Then he walked back to his wife’s head, sat in his chair and poured another drink of whiskey into the plastic cup.
"Cheers," he said.
THE COURTING RITUAL
Pa-chunk. Pa-chunk.
Then a pause.
The world was coming into view...slow... blurry.
Pa-chunk. That stung. His whole body stung, almost numb, but pinched as he tried to take a deep breath. He felt drunk, but didn’t remember drinking. He remembered going through the door, paying the cover, and ordering a bottle of water. Then he coughed and everything was white and sparkly. He felt faint, then he slipped into darkness until...
Pa-chunk.
He lifted his head, ever so slowly. Ever so little. Pain. It was dull, but it was there. Where was the pain coming from? It was everywhere.
Was I drugged? he thought.
Pa-chunk.
He opened one sticky eyelid and saw the silhouette of a person come gradually into focus. A dark shape, that moved, then stopped, then, Pa-chunk. His knee screamed and he sat up straight. A huge mistake. He howled. His body felt as if it was on fire when he did. His eyes were wide open, burning in the seemingly bright light. As his heartbeat pounded, he found clarity in his vision. A bedroom. There was a closet door open, clothes and shoes inside. Women’s shoes. She was to his right, sitting on her knees with her legs tucked underneath, smiling and admiring her work. Dina. He remembered the lovely, dark-haired Dina. She was at the club last week. He’d admired her, approached her, almost sealed the deal that night, but...