{by She Was}

Cylence Gray was 12 years old when she stopped believing in god and started believing in love. Standing alone, and to the side, slender pale arms wrapped around her black waist, Cylence watched the magpie, head cocked, watching her. Cylence liked that her face was turned to the sky. It meant that she didn’t have to look at the spring wet hole they were slowly lowering him into.

Cylence had been cracked open by grief and from that opening faith flew. Many years later she remembered. The tugging was the worst part. Being forced to look, to acknowledge, to know. As if somehow she could unknow. The tubes and the rattle rattle death breath, the corridors, closing in on her, as she waited, as they all waited. The mashed potato and gravy portrait her mother painted on the white wall. Her mother’s anger, at her, at her, for being there, for having held his hand and for having heard his heart beat when it stopped. She would never not know. Never unknow.

{by Joe Flood}

That morning, Ted got dressed, picked up his clubs and headed for the links. At the club-house, he had a drink, a Bloody Mary reeking of vodka and Tabasco. The TV played CNBC, news of the financial storm overturning all boats. Ted ordered another drink, handing over his credit card to the bartender.

“Charge it while it still works,” he said.

The first golfers were heading out into the humid dawn air. A group of vacationing orthodontists were looking for a fourth. Ted fell in with their group, a little tipsy from the vodka.

Ted sent his first shot racing into a drainage ditch, a line drive that sent up a big splash in the early morning mist.

“I’m taking a mulligan,” Ted said.

“Yea, it’s practice!” the shortest of the lot said. He was the oldest, the richest, and was the leader of the group. His name was Danny.

Ted’s second swing wasn’t much better. He seemed to slip on the dew-wet grass, his left leg jerking out, as if it had been yanked like a marionette. The ball overflew the drainage ditch and bounced over the neighboring fairway.

“I should’ve hit the driving range,” he explained.

“Hey, it’s early,” Danny said.

Ted took another mulligan and, on his third try, sent a decent drive down the middle of the fairway. Danny then launched a ball high over his, by a good fifty yards. His colleagues congratulated him.

“It’s the Bertha’s!” Danny exclaimed, holding the oversized driver in his hand. The club was nearly as tall as he was.

Ted scooped his ball out with a nine iron and sent it arcing onto the green. Danny did likewise.

The men lined up for their putts. The orange sun was just over the palm trees, starting to heat up the day.

“Did I tell you?” Danny said. “Winner buys drinks.”

“Got it,” Ted said, aligning himself with the hole. He was short by a good ten feet. Danny sunk his ball, a smile alighting on his face.

Originally published at Storytellersunplugged.

Richard Dansky’s short story, besides being an intriguing story about monsters and possibilities and what hides in the dark, challenges the reader to think about our preconceptions and how they affect what we see.

He introduces the story with this tidbit:

There are a lot of lakes and ponds in the Triangle, many of them man-made. There’s one I pass driving to work every day, and another that sits across the street from my office. You can go there on your lunch break and see people fishing or sailing or throwing frisbees into the water for their dogs to chase. I’ve even availed myself of the facilities a few times, and am pleased to report I’ve only fallen out of a rented canoe once, and briefly.

An admittedly unscientific sample suggests that most of those folks have no idea that Lake Crabtree (and the “lake” part is purely an honorific; it’s about as deep as a Bret Michaels interview and covers only slightly more territory) was dug out with backhoes and bulldozers in the not-too-distant past. Even the signs posted at various semi-prominent points don’t get the point across. Maybe they’re ugly signs. Maybe people have come up with their own stories about where the lake came from and how long it’s been around, and if things are otherwise, they don’t want to know. Either way, it works for them.

Which, I suppose, is the point of the story.

Enjoy.

***

THE DEEP END OF THE SHALLOW WATER

We got out of the car just before sunset, a half-mile down a gravel service road that we shouldn’t have been able to access. The spot where we’d stopped was a pretty one, a clearing in the second-growth pine woods that ran up the edge of the body of water we’d come to investigate.

{Originally posted on Slouching Past 40.}

Carol was prissy.

Years of living alone had cemented the fact. Without Charlie around to raise his eyebrows, a bit mockingly but largely affectionately, she’d begun to give in to some of her more obsessive tendencies — like taking Charlie’s shirts to the dry cleaners every so often so that they wouldn’t smell dusty. She could not abide that smell of disuse. Or washing the car once a week, even if she’d used it only once, when she’d had to take Penfield to the vet for his shots.

Charlie had brought levity to her table, that’s why she had married him, and without him, she’d grown rigid. A prankster, Charlie had been, and though now and then his immaturity had caused her to throw up her hands, secretly she adored it. He’d always made her feel young, and light.

Until that evening in September when he’d groaned at the dinner table. Thinking he was joking — he always was! — Carol rolled her eyes and issued her standard, “Oh, Charlie.” But for once he wasn’t fooling around. He died right there, still in the middle of eating his pie, and only fifty-six years old. When Carol flashed on the scene, she didn’t see Charlie. She saw his pie, and the forlorn way Mrs. Smith’s apples sat on the plate never failed to make her weep, even now, almost a decade after Charlie’s passing.

She was in the supermarket inspecting eggs for cracks when Charlie’s unfinished pie came to mind. The image, unbidden, unwelcome, still so vivid, flustered her. With trembling hands she picked up egg carton after egg carton but couldn’t find one that had twelve perfect eggs, eggs without fissures or breaks, eggs that didn’t look half-eaten like Charlie’s pie — damn him, couldn’t he have just finished that pie? She was breathless and red in the face when she felt someone behind her. She turned to find a seventy-something man, his beard and hair salt-and-pepper, his eyes bright and mischievous, his physique not trim, exactly, but no worse than her own.