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From the Far Reaches

Dan Leonidas

The Ohio State University

Eight o’clock that morning—a good hour before aliens from the Andromeda galaxy abducted me—I stopped at the Koala Bear Express to grab a cup of coffee.  At the register, I asked Irma, the skinny, blue-haired old lady who worked the early shift, if she had any gossip for me.

She shook her head and worked her lips the way old people do—like she’d just woken up after a night of boozing and had a fierce case of cotton mouth. “No news, Steve.  But I will tell you this: I called the cops two o’clock this morning.”

“Damn, Irma,” I said, handing her a couple of bucks for my joe.  “You’re telling me that you calling the cops at two in the a.m. doesn’t count as news?”  I whistled.  “That’s bull.”

She shrugged as she smoothed out my bills.  “You know—if it involves a lonely old woman, who cares, right?”

At this point, she expected me to tell her that elderly women were just as interesting as anybody else, and that their stories deserved to be told.  Instead, I made like I was playing a tiny violin.  

“Forget it,” Irma said, waving a liver-spotted, thick-knuckled hand at me.  She popped the register open with a bing! and put the money in...

...“Closing the house up this early?”

“It’s almost Halloween, brother man.  The snow starts flying in a few weeks, and if I don’t do the roof, it’s not gonna hold through the end of year.  I should’ve been out here weeks ago.”

“Well, look,” Jamie said, sounding irritated, “I need you at ten instead of noon.  So don’t get too comfortable up there, all right?  The last thing I need is you snoozing on a roof when there’s meat needs cutting.”

“Ten?  What—”

“Hold up a second,” Jamie said, and I heard a rustling sound, like he was covering the phone with one of his fat, callused hands.  “What can I do for you, ma’am?” I heard him say in a muffled voice.  A woman said something I couldn’t make out, and Jamie told her that yeah, he could fill the order.  The woman spoke again and Jamie said, “Okay, so send him on his way with forty dollars and we’ll call it a deal.”  I heard the rustling sound again and Jamie was back on the line.  “Sorry about that.”

“You just move a little merchandise?” I asked, grinning at myself in the rearview.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.  “That was Mrs. Perrault.  Her nephew’s in town and he’s looking for a good time.  Didn’t realize how little there is to do here and didn’t bring enough entertainment of his own—same old story. But we don’t talk about this on the phone, remember?”

By merchandise, I hadn’t meant meat.  I also hadn’t meant anything reprehensible, like drugs, or stolen stereo equipment, or even prostitutes.  I’d meant bootlegged DVDs.  Moon Peak didn’t have a theater, and the closest one was an hour’s drive, so my brother and I—entrepreneurs that we were—had decided two years back to fill the gaping cinematic void. I’d gone to school in Manhattan—Hunter College—and I’d done a little freelance bootlegging while I was there.  I’d made connections, and now, once a month, I received a package, via UPS, containing fifty hand-shot DVDs of films currently in wide release.  The entertainment-starved folks of Moon Peak could buy one for twenty bucks or rent one for two bucks a night.  The Moon Peak police—of which my cousin Tommy was a member, if you recall—looked the other way, and everyone enjoyed themselves...

Prompt Two

Prompt Final | Overall Semifinal

Anna

Alexander Yates

Syracuse University

My wife can see again.  She can see again.  After the surgery, after she tells the doctor how many fingers he’s holding up, after she reads a newspaper headline from across the room, I rush home.  I don’t tell her I’m going—just wait till she falls asleep.  She needs her rest.  And I need to clean.  Because she can see again.

First thing I hit is the picture frame on the bed stand.  My fingers shake so bad I almost break the little twisty-knobs on the back as I open it.  I shove the 5X7 of Katherine and me into my back pocket.  There’s another in the living room, blown up to fit the frame my wedding photo used to be in.  And one in the bathroom—a shot I took of Katherine last summer.  Her brittle blonde hair is all mussed around her head.  She’s nude from the belly up, her lower half covered with a threadbare hotel sheet.  We’d just had sex and she’s sleepy and smiley.  The photo hangs where anyone can see; right above the clean toilet.  But we never get any visitors.  And my wife… well, obviously.

I fold all the pictures into tight little squares, take the originals out of the closet and refill the frames.  My wife and I at Skaneateles Lake.  Her eating cake in a funny hat when she got her GED.  The two of us surrounded by friends at First Lutheran.  Friends who’ve all moved south now, because each winter up here is worse than the one before and not half as bad as the one coming...

...“Tell me what it looks like,” Anna says, her face solid and determined.

“There’s lots of big trees,” Katherine says.  “We can see the canal from here.  And the bridges.”

“There’s a man juggling,” I say.  “There’s a bear cub on a leash.”

Anna snorts.  “Pah.  There’s no fucking bear.  There’s no fucking juggler.  I’m in a fucking dorm room.”

She tears up a handful of grass.  “This is cheap carpet.”

We all finish our ice cream quietly.  A Beatles song starts playing from inside Katherine’s purse.  Help! I need somebody.  Help!  Not just anybody.  Her assistant’s ring-tone.  She answers, apparently happy to have an excuse to get up and walk a few paces away.  Whatever the assistant tells her, she doesn’t like it.  She calls him Braniac, insincerely.  “Ah-ha. Ah-ha.  Ah-ha.  Oh?” she says.  “Okay.  So, send him on his way with forty dollars and we’ll call it a deal.”

Anna gropes about while Katherine talks.  She finds Katherine’s purse and dunks her hands inside.  She pulls out a ledger and opens it, working her thumbs into the inky Cyrillic lettering.  I recognize the ledger.  It’s the real one, the one that Katherine keeps on her always because Mikhail knows that someone’s stealing from him and regularly has the hotel searched for evidence.  Katherine finishes her call, turns back to us and freezes.  I give her a ‘calm down’ motion with my hand.

“Who on earth are you giving forty dollars to?” Anna asks.

“Nobody.”  Katherine stares at me as she speaks.  “Just a septic inspector.  He’s got a problem with the quality of our pipes.”

Anna leafs through pages she couldn’t read even if she still had her eyesight.  “Forty dollars aren’t enough to fix pipes.”

“Well, they’re enough to fix the inspector.”  She mouths to me that she is going to tell Anna, right now.  I mouth back that I’ll leave her if she does.  “It’s win-win.”

“It’s dishonest,” Anna says, snapping the ledger closed and plunking it into the grass a foot from the open purse.

“That’s true,” Katherine says...

Prompt Two Final.

"Anna" by Yates [80%]

"From the Far Reachers" by Leonidas [20%]

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