Collected Stories, Vol. 37
175-Word Stories (1-5) Presented Simply From Northeastern Pennsylvania
1.
He rocked gently by the fire, pipe in mouth, something by Greig playing on an old radio. So this is what it’s like to be old, he thought. To himself, because he’d been alone for days. Not out loud, because he clung to the illusion of self-respect.
William Harding was not respectful. His kids had sometimes called him old hard-ass, behind his back. But neither was he old, not really.
When his grandfather built the little cabin in the woods, overlooking neither lake nor village, his hair had already turned white, like snow.
His own father was ten years younger, when he too, made the long, lonely journey into the back country.
William was younger still, and not yet retired from his job at the foundry, which he’d quit abruptly, less than two weeks earlier.
From what he’d pieced together, of half remembered tales his father told, and the hearsay of hunters, his father and grandfather might still be out there, somewhere.
Each generation of Harding men must endure the change, and join the pack.
2.
The great house at 25th and Birch, collapsed suddenly on the evening of February 19th.
“It just up and fell down,” said old man Miller, who was never seen without a bottle between his lips.
“No, that old house has been cracking for years,” said the old parson, who could usually be found on the bar stool nearest to old man Miller. “Mrs. Atherton was never the same after Mr. Atherton went away, leaving her alone in that great big house with naught but his money and a servant or two for company. That was forty years ago now, come next May, I think.”
Had you been there those many years, on the bar stool between old man Miller and the parson, you might have noticed the long neglect of Mrs. Atherton’s prized gardens, or the way the ivy, growing up the walls at either wing of the great house, slowly wormed its tendrils into the masonry.
The great house at 25th and Birch, collapsed suddenly on the evening of February 19th.
It was to be expected.
3.
“Oh my god,” he said. The he in question was Douglas Fink, and he was very, very concerned about what he had just read in yesterday’s morning newspaper.
His wife Rita, and everyone else, was already over the shock, and had moved on to the latest scandalous, riveting, bad news, plus six other stories already half forgotten.
But Douglas was different. For Douglas, the world moved both slower and faster. Slower, because he was always just about the last person to hear about anything, and yet faster, because he was perpetually playing catch-up.
Douglas dropped the newspaper on his breakfast plate. A corner of the society section accidentally brushed not one, but three, smoldering, half-smoked cigarettes he’d lit, one after the other, and then immediately forgotten next to a half-eaten slice of white toast.
Rita stood three paces away, her back to Douglas, scrubbing that morning’s dirty dishes, and her own plate from the night before. “Let’s go out today,” she said.
The only response was the smoke of burning newsprint.
Douglas was fast asleep.
4.
The heat was stifling. Clayton untucked his shirt and loosened his tie. It was March 31st, 2036, and the jaundiced afternoon sun had simply never before been this punishing, so far north, this early in the year.
Headquarters stood out like an obelisk of glass and stucco in the middle of a field that, according to his coworkers, had formerly been a grassy airfield for bush pilots delivering supplies for hunters and separatists, looking for an ‘off-grid experience,’ in the great white north.
These days, it was simply ‘Headquarters,’ for ‘The Corporation,’ and after ten years of diligently entering a jumble of data, Clayton still didn’t have a fucking clue as to what any of them were really doing there.
All that he did know, was that the super-structure buried ten-stories beneath his sweaty feet, used a tremendous amount of dark energy, and that every couple of days, a few dozen more unidentified people, and several tons of cargo, took the long, slow ride down the access tunnel into ‘The Pit,’ never to return.
5.
Something moved in the pit of bodies. Caleb, white as a ghost, dusted with lye, waited for the bad men to leave, before squirming out from under Mr. Brown. Out of all the atrocities of recent memory, this one was different, according to his father. He’d called the killings indiscriminate, whatever that meant.
His belly growled. Balanced precariously atop a pile of bodies, he felt ashamed of his hunger, and pulled his belt tighter around his middle, a trick his older brother taught him after mealtimes in the camps became less regular. Mother, Father and James had taught him many such tricks.
To his immediate left, the bodies were piled higher than elsewhere in the pit. He fell twice, but on the third try, managed to pull himself up by a handful of slimy sod.
Pockets of smoke billowed in all directions, but so far as he could tell, nothing moved, not even the large, black carrion birds he’d become accustomed to seeing since The Unrest began.
The President didn’t approve of calling it The War.
-Brian