Winter’s Coming
A moonless night made maneuvering the gravel road more
challenging than he’d remembered. Jack had been driving for three hours,
heading north to the family cabin near the Minnesota Boundary Waters, only
there was no family this time. Not this trip. In the span of two weeks, he’d
been fired, gotten his second DUI and was being blackmailed by his mistress. He
needed some serious alone time.
The cabin suddenly loomed up in the white car lights. It was
as dark and lifeless as he was feeling. We make a perfect couple. Inside, he
snapped on lights and then poured a half-glass of scotch. It’s only me, the mosquitoes and Johnnie
Walker, he thought, lowering his body into a living room chair. His eyelids
fell shut. Only moments later, there was a knock on the cabin door.
“Who is it?” he called out.
A raspy, older man’s voice responded. “Hope we’re not
disturbing you. We’re the O’Malley’s from down the road. Saw your lights on and
brought a pie.”
They brought a pie? Great. I can’t just tell them to fuck
off. Getting a grasp on his emotions, Jack opened the door. The smiling couple standing
under the porch light looked like everybody’s grandma and grandpa, wrinkled,
rosy and wearing stretchy pastel clothes. The woman held out the pie with her
gnarly, arthritic hands.
“It’s mincemeat,” she said in a high, wispy song.
“I’m Henry,” said the man. “And this is Eva.”
Jack took the dessert. “Thank you so much. That’s very kind
of you. I was just…“ Henry and Eva stood expectantly. “Uh, please, come in.”
“Thank you,” responded Henry. “We’ll only stay a minute.”
Jack quickly made a pot of coffee, cut up and served the pie. “It’s funny,” he said. “My family and I have
been coming up here for years and we’ve never met before.”
“That’s because we don’t spend much time around here in the
summer,” noted Henry. “We have a motorhome.”
“We just got back from Montana,” chirped Eva.
“Time to prepare for winter,” added Henry. “It’s long and
cold up here. Where’s the family?”
“Back in Minneapolis. Just needed a little time to myself.”
“Too bad.”
“What?” Jack blinked. The room was turning fuzzy. How much
scotch did I drink, he wondered?
“Do you like the pie?” asked Eva. “It’s an old family
recipe.”
Jack was about to answer, but his tongue had gone numb. Eva smiled
at him, but the warm grandmotherly expression had turned to a sardonic grin. He
dropped his plate and squinted through a swirling haze as Henry picked up the
knife used to cut the pie and licked the blade.
“Why?” Jack managed to whisper.
“I told you,” Henry hissed. “Winter’s coming. It’s time to
stock the larder.”
Family Traditions
Cleaning out his father’s small house was a painful but
necessary task. The funeral had been yesterday, so Kirk Foster had a couple of
days to get everything moved before the house went up for sale. A lot of things
were going directly into the trash, but there were photos and other mementos
that had meaning and made his eyes glisten.
Working through the closet in his father’s bedroom, Kirk found
a shoebox at the back of a shelf. Hoping his old man might have hid away some
cash for a rainy day, Kirk sat on the bed and lifted the lid. It looked like the
kitchen junk drawer and he let out a disappointed sigh. A few old matchbooks
from local bars, a small pad with names and addresses, some rusty keys, but
beneath a layer of worthless crap was an actual treasure.
Kirk held up the legendary straight razor that had been
passed down to the men in his family from his great grandfather. His father had
told him about it, and said it would one day be his. He opened it and the clean, polished steel
blade was as sharp as the day it was made. It felt good in his hand, as if it
had been shaped specifically for him.
There was a knock at the door. Kirk inched open the blinds
and saw it was the realtor. His heart ticked up a notch. He closed the razor
and slipped it into his pants pocket. Some family traditions are worth
preserving, he thought.
It Happened in the ER
There was a brief moment of quiet in the ER and Dr. Sean
Stanley slipped out into a hallway and dialed his wife Beth’s number. They’d
had another argument about moving last night and he wanted to apologize. She
didn’t like the location, the neighborhood, the neighbors…just about
everything. They had only been there two years and he argued that they had to
give it more of a chance, but Beth was a determined woman. Kicked to voicemail
for the second time that evening, he guessed that she was still angry.
A nurse called him back to the ER. A patient with multiple
stab wounds was being wheeled in by the paramedics. The ER team lifted the
bloodied middle-aged man from the gurney to the operating table, and Sean
quickly prepped as the man’s clothes were cut away, exposing the punctures. A
nurse held up a driver’s license.
“Name is Donald Colvin,” she announced.
Sean turned to her. “Donald Colvin? I know a Donald Colvin.”
“Lives on Piedmont Street.”
Looking more closely at the bloodied face, he recognized his
neighbor. “He lives next door to me. I’ll be damned.”
A nurse was preparing the wounds for sutures when she
noticed the patient was holding something. She gently opened his fist and held
up a silver necklace with a small yin and yang symbol. Dr. Stanley looked up
from the body and his eyes widened. He took the necklace from the nurse and
held it in his gloved hand.
“Doctor, he’s regaining consciousness.”
Leaning down until his mouth was next to Colvin’s ear, he
whispered. “Where did you get this?”
Colvin managed a weak grimace. “She put up a good fight,
Sean. She was a tough bitch.”
“Doctor,” called a nurse. “Doctor, is everything okay?”
“No,” said Sean, rising slowly. “How could we miss this
puncture wound of the carotid artery?”
