Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 15 Read online

  The thief checked the time on his PDA, then sighed.

  "Sir,” said the waiter on his return.

  "Cafe au lait—no, make that Latour, 1990."

  The waiter's eyes grew wide. “It's you. You're the thief."

  Somewhere a large bird squawked.

  "I beg your pardon,” said the thief.

  People all around had begun whispering, staring, a few even pointing.

  "I mean, you're the one who was here with Madame Lejune."

  "Yes.” The thief scowled. “Is she here?"

  The waiter looked puzzled.

  "Pardon me,” said a young woman, one of the professionals from the adjacent table. “Are you here to meet the poet Lejune?"

  "Yes, that's correct. Is she here or isn't she?"

  "You don't know?” She turned to her companions. “He doesn't know."

  The news spread through the crowd. The thief saw several people capturing it all on video. He straightened, running a hand through his hair.

  "I've been out of touch this past year. What's happened?"

  "You are the thief, the one in the song."

  "The poem,” said the waiter.

  "I don't understand,” said the thief.

  "Tell him,” called someone in the crowd. They were all staring at him now.

  "She's ... famous?” ventured the thief.

  A round of laughter spread like a wave across a pool.

  The young woman pointed to his PDA. “Try any search engine."

  The thief entered her full name, and found more than a million and a half hits.

  "How is this possible? In only a year..."

  "Well, last fall she wrote hundreds of poems in a creative outburst."

  "Not all of them were good—” said the waiter.

  "Yes they were,” said someone else, starting a cascade of discussions about the quality of her work.

  "But anyway,” said the young woman, her voice raised above the mutters of the crowd. “No one knew about that, she being such a recluse and all. But one of them, an unfinished piece, ended up on the old Internet—"

  "Where a folk singer found it and made a song out of it,” said the waiter, excitedly.

  "Yes,” said the young woman, scowling at the interruption, “but it was another performer who made the song famous. Meanwhile, people were adding their own stanzas to the original poem. There are a couple of versions online that have thousands of stanzas. It became a kind of party game—"

  "Celebrity verses are being collected in a book,” said the waiter.

  "Incredible,” said the thief, reaching for a cigarette. “The princess has bested Rumpelstiltskin."

  "And you're the thief. The one in the song."

  "The poem,” added the waiter. “Several poems, in fact."

  "All these people are here to meet the thief, the man who started it all. The song said you'd be here today—"

  "No, it was in one of her other poems—"

  The general discussion resumed, arguments even broke out.

  "People, people.” The thief stood on the stool to rise above the growing crowd. “I am honored. Tell me, where is this most famous poetess. I would thank her for the immortality."

  The crowd hushed, except for the squawk of a large bird.

  "She died earlier this summer,” said a round, hairless man.

  "Did she?” said the thief.

  "Never knowing what she had created,” said the young woman.

  "So she doesn't know she prevailed.” The thief smiled to himself, then spotted the little girl in pigtails weeping in the crowd.

  "How did it happen?” he asked.

  "Struck by a passing bus,” said the waiter, “while she waited at the corner."

  "She was pushed,” called someone.

  "No one knows that for certain,” said another.

  "Oh, the irony!” The thief laughed despite the scowls and puzzled looks.

  "Who are you?” shouted someone.

  "Yeah!” Others picked up the call. “What's your name? Who is the thief?"

  "I am no one important. I assure you,” he said, unnerved by the surging of the crowd. “Just a metaphor."

  "Seriously, who are you? Her mentor? Her lover. A rival?"

  The stool wobbled as the people pressed closer. The thief fell over the fence, losing his PDA and his cigarettes. As he stood, patrons of the cafe began to stream over the fence and out the cafe. The thief ran for the Rue des Boulangers bridge.

  "Wait, come back!"

  Among the clamor behind him, the thief swore he could hear the sound of broomsticks clattering together.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Collaborations by Well-Known Twentieth-Century Authors Which Were Rejected By Their Publishers and Are Now Collected By Benjamin Rosenbaum & Paul Melko

  Gertrude Stein & Dr. Seuss:

  Green Eggs and Ham and Ham and Eggs and Eggs and Ham So Green So Green

  William S. Burroughs & Truman Capote:

  Naked Lunch at Tiffany's

  Louisa May Alcott & Edgar Rice Burrough:

  Little Women of Mars

  Walt Disney & Arthur Miller:

  Steamboat Willie Lohman

  John Steinbeck & Gene Roddenberry:

  The Grapes of Wrath of Khan

  Anais Nin & Carolyn Keene:

  Nancy Drew and the Secret Touches

  John Updike & John Norman:

  Rabbit of Gor

  Ayn Rand & Arnold Schwarzenegger:

  Atlas Shrugged: Great Deltoids in Six Minutes a Day

  Ogden Nash & Mao Tse Tung:

  Candy is Dandy, but Religion is the Opiate of the People

  A.A. Milne & Anne Rice's trilogy:

  Treehouse of a Vampire, The Vampire Eeyore, & Piglet of the Damned

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  FAQ

  Mary A. Turzillo

  Is death contagious?

  Death is transmitted by a spirochete endemic to fresh peaches, phytoplankton, and dreams of empty houses.

  Does death wear a disguise?

  Death has a splendid set of polished pewter teeth, worn only at the decease of royal infants.

  Is it true that a new dessert incorporates sugar, creme fraiche, and crystallized death? What is the calorie count per hundred grams?

  You would find that fatiguing.

  Is it polite to hum along if the bereaved bursts into flames? Should one intervene before the etheric stage?

  Yes, and never.

  I have seen skeins of gray linen draped on bare trees. Are these sacs of freshly laid death eggs?

  One should not offend the modesty of mothers.

  Might one dance with death at an afternoon tea and still call oneself holy?

  If decorously clad.

  What is death's favorite beverage? Should bottles of absinthe be concealed when death visits?

  Absinthe is entirely correct, garnished with fresh thujone.

  Can death estivate in the shells of the fighting conch?

  In temperate zones.

  Does death preen before mirrors staged in infinite regression?

  Wouldn't you?

  If death is seen walking on an interstate carrying a leaking gas can, should one offer assistance?

  How could you resist?

  Is it true that if you draw four deuces in a row, or if you fail to promote an eligible pawn, death will slash your hamstrings?

  This is a superstition promoted by Borges cultists and the Penitentes.

  Does death experience orgasm?

  Only if you like.

  Am I going to die?

  No.

  Is anybody I know going to die?

  Only persons you know very remotely. Your touch confers immunity.

  Does the thicket conceal death better at dawn or dusk?

  Both.

  Does death have a favorite number?

  Yes.

  Does death have a home town? A native language? A weakness for leibfraumilch?

>   Yes.

  Will I know to close my eyes?

  Yes.

  Yes.

  Yes

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Beard of God

  Michael Northrop

  Fog has laid siege to this little island, smothering it in a gauze of hushed vapor. It is a fog so thick that it seems to blot out not only sight but also sound and even meaning. It is a slate too blank to be written on.

  There is a tree, stunted by salt-air, that leans into our rented clapboard cottage. One of its sharp brown branches juts off and brushes the window with its dark green leaves, just about there, where I am pointing. Even at the point of contact, you can not see the leaves now. Even when the wind shoulders numbly through the fog, you can not hear the familiar scraping of wood on glass. The pane frames a white silence. I stare out at it in the way that you might watch a tiger at the zoo, or perhaps, in the way that the tiger might gaze wearily out.

  All across Deep Pine Island, people peer out at the fog, this odd phenomenon that has eaten away their vacation, delayed their return home, and, if the rumors are true, has begun to do much more than that. No one ventures out alone or for long. The crowded share-houses stay crowded. The young play Scrabble or cards and listen to the radio or the voices of loved ones on the other end of the phone. The rich pace the floors of their summer houses and check in with their offices in New York or Boston. Those who have satellite TVs watch them. Outside, the walkways are empty and the beaches full of nothing save mist.

  It is early afternoon on a Monday and every light in the place is burning.

  "No, his name was Richard,” Tina is saying. “He said he was a lifeguard. He was ripped, remember?"

  "Was this the guy from Virginia?” Ritu asks.

  "That was the other guy,” says Tina, “but he said he was a lifeguard, too."

  "I don't think he was, though,” offers Anne. “Not the second one. He swam like a moose."

  They are three young women, sitting around a light-blue table and talking to keep each other company. Professionally, they run the gamut from public relations to public health to what Anne liked to call “wholesale fishmongery.” Oliver is studying for a real estate licensing test at the rolltop desk in the corner, and I am folded onto the couch, using a beach towel as a blanket.

  The cottage consists of this one main room, a small kitchen, and three tiny bedrooms, each containing two cot-sized beds, a lamp, and a few kitschy decorations. The place is supposed to sleep seven, including one on the couch, but depending on the weekend, there are as many as ten people here. I generally avoided the busiest weekends, though, and there are just the five of us here this go ‘round.

  We call the cottage “the Wigwam,” because some drunken jackass down at The Albatross had asked Ritu “what are you?” and when she'd said she was Indian, he'd asked if she lived in a wigwam. Extending the metaphor, we call ourselves the “Five Little Indians,” gallows humor based on a nursery rhyme that begins with ten little Indians and ends with none.

  We are rationing our food and, to a lesser extent, our alcohol. None of us have been sleeping well and I doze off, despite the chatter and the urgent drone of the radio. I do not remember in dreams, not in any literal way. That's not really how it works. I escape in dreams, though I don't always like the places to which I escape. This time, I am in the house where I grew up. There is a large, unexplained hole in the roof, and fallen leaves have blown in and drifted here and there in the corners. My mom is telling my brother and I to get into the car. We are going somewhere and have generic cream soda in cans.

  I am disoriented when I wake up. I look out at the mist, and that is when I remember. I slam my clenched hand down on the arm of the couch, hard enough so it hurts. I do it either out of anger or to distract myself, like a soldier in a movie, biting down on his hand while they saw off his leg. The others continue talking quietly. We are becoming resigned to each other's outbursts. There is still no sign of the ferry, they are saying, no word from anyone onboard. Oliver mentions the Bermuda Triangle episode of In Search Of ... It was a good one.

  The fog first descended on Deep Pine two days ago, on Saturday. Something like forty people—no one knows the exact number—made their way to the ferry that morning, stumbling along walkways and feeling their way from gateway to clothesline to fence. They boarded the strong-bowed, radar-equipped vessel and sailed off into nothingness.

  There were no distress signals and no panicked cellphone calls, but the ferry never arrived in Wellfleet. If it had sunk, the emergency beacons should have activated as soon as they came in contact with water, but there was nothing. It was a mystery and there were, obviously, no witnesses. The announcement went out over the radio: No more ferries would leave until the “unusual, persistent fog” cleared, and no boats, helicopters, or vehicles of any sort would arrive.

  Panic crept onto the island. You couldn't hear it, but you knew it was there. People swarmed to Deep Pine's few markets like blind crabs and carried off all they could. Phone lines lit up over distances that could probably have been spanned by cups attached to either end of a length of twine. What had been neighborly friendships or beachfront hookups became lifelines: Did you hear, Sara didn't come back from The Landing? Has anyone seen Andy? Is he over there with you guys? People were simply vanishing into the mist, gone without a ripple, like bones dropped into a bottomless well.

  Those left behind clung to the belief that the missing had simply lost their way. The ferry was idling just off shore. Sara had, understandably, taken a few wrong turns. I knew it wasn't true. I knew that they wouldn't be coming back. I alone had given up hope in the pale face of what I knew to be bloodless carnage. I'd seen it before.

  It was the summer of 1985, and I was one of nine Cub Scouts on a camping trip on a small mountain in the foothills of the Berkshires. We were cooking sausages for breakfast on folding Sterno stoves. Mr. Windham, our scoutmaster, was prowling around, supervising the lighting of the gelatinous fuel. The bluish, chemical flame was a thrill for young boys, but he wanted us to know about the dangers of fire in the woods and that a Sterno can was not a thing to be lit lightly.

  The sausages themselves were less of a thrill. The low-grade meat was little more than half-cooked when Windham came back around to make us smother the flames under the pop-on metal lids. We cut the damp, lukewarm links with our pocketknives and chewed indignantly.

  "Tastes like a turd,” Bart Weaver said to me under his breath.

  "Turds are warmer,” I said, as if I was a connoisseur.

  "Ten minutes and we break down the tents!” bellowed Windham from a fallen tree trunk on which he was perched in his odd, old man's angularity. “Finish your food!"

  "Finish your turd,” Bart said, louder this time, but Windham either didn't hear or didn't acknowledge it. Conspiratorial laughter licked the cool, gray morning air. When it subsided, the woods were placid. A lone bird trilled somewhere down the mountain then stopped.

  "It's not even...” I began. I was going to say something about the unfairness of being woken up so early just to walk all day, but I halted when I heard how my voice carried, almost echoed. The mountain should have been layered with the comforting sounds of insects and birds, of wind in the trees and acorns bouncing onto the forest floor. Instead, it had become utterly quiet.

  We were smalltown kids, born to the woods, and the silence broke over us like a wave. The fog followed after. We saw it tumbling down the mountain like a cloud that had lost its way. Mr. Windham had moved to our town from New York to help raise his family. Having done that, he now shepherded Cub Scouts in what we imagined to be the same fussy, judgmental way. He was just now picking up on the fact that something was wrong. He looked up, down, and to either side, everywhere but at the fog bank, which was directly behind him.

  "It's sneaking up on Mr. Wind-bag,” whispered Connor Dietz, not exactly as a joke, but his whisper carried.

  When Windham turned around, his nose was almost touching the
advancing wall of mist. He stumbled backward through the semi-circle we'd formed in the sloping clearing. We rose from our haunches and he looked around at us in astonishment.

  "It's as white as the beard of God,” he said a moment before the fog overtook him. He said it as if it were an expression we'd know, but I'd never heard it before and it made no immediate sense to me. I understand now that it implies the extreme age of God, in the same way in which you might say that something was as fiery as the top of God's birthday cake. If you were to send God a humorous birthday card, it would say that. It was, in any case, the last clear human voice I remember hearing that day.

  The fog washed over us in one smooth gulp. Everything was white and wet and cold. I tried to call Connor or Bart or even Mr. Windham, but nothing came out, nothing really. It was as if I was calling out from the bottom of a tub filled with foul bathwater. I had the sensation of falling upward, though my legs told me that I was, in fact, running headlong down the mountain.

  I knew I was going too fast. I could see nothing and I was not surprised when I fell. Wood and stone and the edges of things cut at me. The ground pressed into me as I rolled. I heard only internal sounds, my heartbeat and my brain bouncing inside my skull. I got up and fell again. My cheek rolled against a softness I knew to be moss. The crown of my head came around and thumped against a hardness I knew to be rock. I scrambled upright and repeated the process. I was chilled through and constantly short of breath. I sensed but could not see that I was bleeding.

  Things seemed to level out after lord knows how long, twenty minutes or a half an hour. And then I could hear something: a low, primal sound, a massive broken rhythm. With nothing else to guide me, I headed for it as best I could, tripping, crawling, walking, running, and tripping. The ground was either getting softer or the mist was getting harder, I could not tell which. I got up again, what I thought was up, took three steps and toppled into the river's powerful current.

  Two hikers found me a day later, three miles downstream, my lungs half full of water and my head full of nonsense. My version of the events was written off as the product of shock and trauma, but it is the only version that exists. No one else from that camping trip was ever found. Whole towns out beating the underbrush and all they found were our tents and goddamned Sterno stoves.