Gary Moshimer

Reduced

There I was at the OPEN HOUSE. It was easy, three doors down. The sign on the lawn said, PRICE REDUCED.

The real estate lady said, “Back again? Thinking of buying”?

I laughed.

There were several couples there. People have short memories.

I was nervous this time. I kept tapping walls, touching everything twice. People looked at me.  

When they headed upstairs I hung back. I opened the basement door and crept down. Everything was new – the concrete floor, bright fluorescent lighting; cinder block walls scrubbed. I walked to the corner where the previous owner had kept her, the girl of ten, for a year, in a little room he’d bricked himself. Padlocks, steel door; dirty mattress. Here in the nice neighborhood.

I was on the crew that demolished the room with sledge hammers. It was an act of violence. We hauled the bricks to a guy that ground them to dust, like someone’s ashes. The door was melted in the steel man’s hell furnace. Every couple days the crew chipped in to send flowers to the girl, safe with her mother.  

I remember what we found scratched into the brick: Susan Peterson born 2003, died -----. She did it with her fingernails.

The footsteps were above. Someone ran water and I listened to the pipes. I thought about focusing on one sound to stay alive.

When the basement door opened, I hid under the steps. The men came halfway down to take a peek. There wasn’t anything to see; it was spotless. They climbed back up and shut the door. Then she locked it, which I knew was something she did automatically, because it was a terrible place.

I listened to them leave. She probably thought I was gone.

***

There was a new casement window. The old one had been painted black. We had smashed that with our hammers as well.

I jumped and flipped the lock. The window swung down, sharp edge cutting my arm. I popped the screen with my pocket tool and dove out.  My blood ran down the cinderblocks, already soaking in. I jammed the screen and rolled across the lawn to the line of spruce trees, crawling through them to the street.

 A car rolled by me slowly – a couple from the open house, getting a sense of the neighborhood. I smiled and waved with my bloody arm, but they didn’t wave back.

I went in my back door, but my wife was there in the kitchen. “Now what?” she said.

“Trimming accident.”

I went to the bathroom and locked the door. I cleaned up. Out the window I saw my eight-year-old, Holly, riding her bike on the street. I yelled at her, “Get off the street! Stay in the driveway!”

Looking at my face, she started to cry. I always scared her. I wouldn’t let her do anything.

My wife pounded the door. In the mirror, my face was ugly.

CP

Gary Moshimer has stories in Pank, Smokelong Quarterly, Frigg, and many other places.

Gary Moshimer

Dr. Doug

When I got that brain tumor I hallucinated this crazy doctor. Dr. Doug. He came into my hospital room after the other doctors had left for the day. He was a fireplug, bald, said he’d played football. He spoke around a fat unlit cigar. “We’re gonna kick the shit out of this fucker,” he said. 

He had a ray gun that he held to my head. He pulled the trigger and it buzzed. “I’m radiating!” he said. “Die, you mother!”

Then I’d climb onto his back and he’d run down the hallways with me, past nurses that never saw us, out the front door to his Porsche. He put the top down and drove fast. We stopped and got soft ice cream. He said, “Watch this,” and pulled a hairpiece from the glove box. He drove ninety, and the hair flew off into a field.

He drove into the mountains and carried me on his back up through the trees. We sat on a ledge and watched the sun set.

Then he drove me to his house. We lounged around his pool with the torches going. His daughters swam and they flirted with me. 

We did this every day. 

Eventually I fell in love with the older girl, Mary. She had long black hair and strange gray eyes that were almost silver. The secret kisses were best when she came out of the water. She said we all return to water. I took to sinking, not breathing, and she would pull me out. It went on for hours that seemed like years. I told her when I was better I would marry her.

But when my tumor shrank, Dr. Doug went away. I asked about him, and was told they had no such doctor. I looked for his car out the window. 

My mother took me home, and I brooded.

“Aren’t you happy?” she said. “You’re going to live.”

I wasn’t happy. There were people I missed. People I loved. And the impossible speed, the sunsets. The pool by night, the cool hot kisses. The sinking, breathless; the revival. I wanted it to go on forever.

I wasn’t supposed to drive, but I took the car and cruised the rich neighborhoods, looking for them. I called out to many black-haired girls, but none were her. I fell into many pools, but the wrong people saved me.

Somewhere she waited. Until then I wouldn’t start to live.

CP

Gary Moshimer has stories in Smokelong Quarterly, Frigg, Word Riot, and many other places.

Gary Moshimer

 

Dead Letters

He glanced again at the stack of letters from the attic. He’d only gone up there because Ruth was dying, to get affairs in order. Now he laughed bitterly about that: affairs in order, because the letters were chronological. The box had been locked, but he found the key under the curled paper lining her nightie drawer, because now he changed her nightgowns. And now that her mind was gone he would get no explanation.  He could not confront her; she could not defend herself.

The letters were from a man named Paul, starting the year after Carl and Ruth were married. Carl couldn’t remember any Pauls. In every one Paul loved Ruth forever. He was fruity, used words like “blazing comet…” In every one he said, “What will we do with that husband of yours?” Carl had stayed in the attic reading, sitting on a box until his legs were numb. It took him an hour to get up, and then he fell and knocked over a bookcase.

Eventually he brought the letters down, intending to read them out loud to hurt her, but he didn’t. He stayed away from her. He sat in the corner where her flicking eyes couldn’t find him. He sat on the porch and smoked one after another, branding the railing with the tips and even his own hairless legs. He burned letter edges and blew them out so they looked like maps of unsolved mysteries. The last letter was recent, five years old. I’m going now, but I’m not suffering. I’ll meet you. How could the bastard not be suffering, that blazing comet of unrequited love?

He stayed away until he heard her cry out. When he finally touched her, after so many hours, she arched her back. Cold sweat beaded on her brow. Her eyes opened wide on the window. In the dusk a fog settled over the pond and the light was strange, slanting horizontally, as if a well lit doorway had opened in the woods. There was a long shadow, a tree or a man. Carl felt her pulse slowing.  She pulled her hand away and her body stiffened and seemed alert. He almost expected her to sit up. The shadow moved, and Carl knew it was him, waiting.

At the end she was looking for Carl’s hand, fingers crawling along the sheet, but he kept it from her until she was gone, and it was too late, and then he reached.

CP

Gary Moshimer works in a hospital. He has stuff in DecomP and Night Train, among others.

Gary Moshimer

During the Games

I was out of work and my wife was at her sister’s–a trial separation. I’d been watching the Olympics, and didn’t like the way the planets were lining up. First the luge guy dies. Then the doll-like figure skater spins so fast her nose bleeds. And Boner dies, tears on Chekhov's face. It was all too much.

I hadn’t bothered shoveling. My little house was caked in, the willows drooping with ice, sad. Snowplows beeped and flashed out there.

In the city there was an Amber alert. Girl of eight, blond and smiling. Maybe taken by her stepbrother. But when I went to the basement for some more beer she was there, sitting against a stack of boxes my wife had packed. I recognized her face even with her hood yanked tight. Her eyes were closed, lids bluish. I thought she was dead, but then heard her breath whistle though the tiny, blood-crusted nose. She wore a suit of snow, packed like a mummy. Parts of her bled through and made a red slushy.

Later the state police said I shouldn’t have moved her, thawed her, given her chicken soup. I should have called them first. I just wanted to make a difference in the world, was what I told them.

It didn’t take long for my wife to call. She’d seen my face under lights and camera, tongue tied. “Look,” I told her. “They found the cellar door open, and her footprints. She came over the hill from the highway.” She sounded like she didn’t believe me. “Can’t you come home?” I said.

Later I walked to the bar. I was a celebrity. Shots came my way. “I’m ready for winter to end,” I said. I was on the big screen for a while, then someone flipped back to the games, fed up. There was more skating. The Korean girl spun and I spun with her, picking up speed. There was no stopping, and I felt my face, waiting.

CP

Gary Moshimer works in a hospital and has stories in Word Riot, Smokelong Quarterly and other places.