Category Archives: Short Stories

The Fairy and the Sock Drawer

I think it was last Tuesday when I found the fairy in my sock drawer. I took out a pair of Gold Toes and he sprang up from his hiding place and hovered about six inches above my dresser. It freaked me out.

“Hi there,” he said in a little voice.

“Holy crap!” I responded. As you might imagine, it took me a few minutes to accept what I was seeing. People say “seeing is believing,” but when a fairy jumps out of your sock drawer, it puts that expression to the test.

He bowed theatrically, like magical creatures tend to do before granting wishes. “Where would you like to go?” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Where would you like to go? I can take you there.”

“You mean, like San Diego?” I asked.

“No.” He put his hands on his hips. “I’m a time fairy. I can take you to any moment of your own life.” He buzzed down to the top of the dresser and stopped flapping his wings. “Unless . . . Have you been to San Diego? I’ve always wanted to go there.”

I had been to San Diego. It was on a vacation with a girlfriend, but we broke up three days into the week, which made the whole thing kind of awkward. So I lied. “No.”

The fairy eyed me skeptically. “Fine, choose some other place, then.” He began picking dirt from under his fingernails.

I tried to think of some moment of my life I’d want to relive, but I was having trouble.

“Most people begin with their own birth. How “˜bout we start there?” he suggested.

I said, “Okay, let me just think about this for a minute,” but apparently, he only heard the okay part.

Suddenly, we were in a hospital room. A young version of my mother was lying on a table, screaming, “Jesus Christ!” My father was next to her, wincing in pain as my mother squeezed his hand. Doctors and nurses were swarming around, telling her to push, and saying things like, “Okay,” “Breathe,” “Almost there,” and “You’re doing good.”

The fairy flew around to the base of the table and said, “The view is better over here. Oh look, there’s your head.”

This one will come in five installments over the next five days.

Chain Link Fence

I had this friend in 8th or 9th grade, his name was Mike Vandershoot. He kinda marched to his own drum, you know? One day, I was out walking my dog. It must have been late winter. Rainy, 40 degrees, muddy. Crappy weather. I went by the tennis courts and I saw Mike walking toward me. He was carrying a racket, bouncing a tennis ball on it as he approached.

“Hey,” he said, when he got close enough.

“Hey,” I said back.

“Your dog wanna fetch this ball?”

“No,” I said. “She’s got bad hips. Can’t run.”

He stuffed the ball in his pocket and turned the racket around so that the handle was facing me. “You wanna try something?” he said.

You never knew what to expect with this guy. “Like what?” I asked.

“Check this out.” He jabbed the handle of the racket at the chain-link fence surrounding the tennis court. “Did you know that eight out of ten times, the handle doesn’t go through an opening in the fence?”

I gotta be honest. If anyone else had been there, I would have called him a freak. You know how things are when you’re just starting high school. Teenagers aren’t the nicest people.

He didn’t look at the handle as he jabbed it at the fence. He looked at me and counted off ten attempts. Two of them went through. “See?” he said.

I looked at the fence with all that space, wondering how the handle didn’t go through more often.

Mike guessed what I was thinking. He nodded at me. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

I admit it. I was curious. “Okay, let me try,” I said.

He passed the racket and I jabbed it through the fence. It went through. So did attempts two, three and five.

“You’re cheating,” Mike said. “You can’t look at it. You’re influencing the results.”

So I looked at him and continued. The first five attempts failed. In the next five, two went through the fence. Eight out of ten. “How do you know that?” I asked.

“I’ve done it a lot of times,” he said.

I kept looking at him while I made more attempts. “How many times?” I asked.

“About 850.”

“Eight hundred fifty?” I said. “You’re sick.”

He answered by quoting this guy named Krishnamurti: “”˜It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.'”

“Who the hell is Krishnamurti?” I asked.

“The Dalai Lama called him the greatest thinker of the 20th century.”

I still don’t know what jabbing a tennis racket handle through a chain link fence has to do with some Buddhist thinker. I kept at it, though. Mike’s estimate seemed to hold up.

After I walked the dog home, I didn’t think much about it. In fact, I forgot about it for years.

I hung out with Mike less and less as the next school year came and went. And then, in the summer of our freshman year, he died. He was out West, hiking some trail in the Rockies with his family. He fell off a scenic overlook. Part of me thinks he did it on purpose, like he wanted to know what it would feel like to fly through the air or something stupid.

I tell ya, recently, I can’t stop thinking about that guy. I’ll be standing in line for the urinal at a football game or sitting at my desk on a Monday morning or I’ll get home from work on a Friday excited to let loose for the weekend and I’ll plop on the couch with a beer and then I’ll get all depressed thinking about Mike.

Crazy, isn’t it? I mean, that was 25 years ago, for Christ’s sake.

And besides, what do I got to be sad about?

“Dad?” he said.

“Hello, son.”

“Is that really you?”

“After a fashion, yes.”

“Are you part of the software?”

He nodded.

Grenshaw studied the man before him. He wanted to hug him, but he was afraid he’d fall right through the apparition. “Can I visit you like this?”

His father inhaled a large breath. “No. We decided it wouldn’t be healthy.”

“Who’s we?”

“The committee,” he explained. “After the Revolution, I got called to help develop an educational initiative. They were impressed by my anti-plastics campaigns.”

“Is that why you were traveling so much before you died?”

“Yes. We had monthly meetings all over the world. It was ironic, actually. We could have easily met via virtual conferencing, thereby saving some of the resources we were attempting to conserve, but nothing can really compare to face-to-face interaction, you know?” His father’s gaze was forlorn.

“I never got to see our work come to fruition, son, but they said it would be truly revolutionary. The people I worked with were genuine, wise, intuitive. It took ten years to develop the software. I can see now, that it was worth it.” He was crying. “You’re the first subject, son.”

The first? “You mean no one else has had a GCF Computer?”

“No. But others will follow.” He wiped tears from his eyes.

The two stood in silence for a minute.

Eventually, Grenshaw spoke. “Why are you crying, Dad?”

His father sighed. “It was a difficult decision, son. Now I see it was the right one.”

“A difficult decision? What was?”

“I had to make a big sacrifice for the project.”

Grenshaw felt a sudden wave of fear and paranoia. Perhaps he was the sacrifice. Was he being manipulated again? He thought back to the monster, to the Marigold café with the out-of-business sign, to Tommy. And then he remembered the chef’s comments and the brothers in the alley. “Dad,” he said, “did your sacrifice have anything to do with my brother?”

His father looked surprised. “What?” he chuckled. “No. You don’t have a brother.” He smiled. A peace-filled smile. “You have billions of brothers. And billions of sisters.”

Grenshaw exhaled a relieved breath of air.

“My sacrifice,” his father explained, “was a self-sacrifice.” And as the words escaped his lips, he began to flicker, like a weak hologram.

Grenshaw’s eyes widened at the sight of his fading father. “No!” He wasn’t ready yet. He had so much more to say, so much more to ask. “Wait!” he shouted. “Don’t go.”

His father held out his hand. Grenshaw reached for it, and in that last flickering second, felt his father’s touch one last time.

At the Marigold, Grenshaw took a seat on a sidewalk stool. The diner was alive. No “out of business” sign, no chairs tipped over and piled in a corner, and no lack of customers. Once he caught the chef’s eye, he smiled.

“Hey there, chief. How’s it goin’?”

“Great,” Grenshaw said. “How are you?”

“Can’t complain. Can’t complain.” He set a glass of orange juice down on the countertop.

“Hey, you know what? The other day, I had the strangest dream and you were in it.”

“Is that so?” The chef leaned on the countertop. “Tell me about it.”

Grenshaw took a sip of his orange juice. “Well,” he began, “I was looking down this alley at these glowing eyes and I asked you if you saw them.”

The chief nodded.

“They seemed like a scary set of eyes to me, but you were really casual about it. You said it was a mirror.”

“And was it?”

“Yeah. That’s all it was. It was just a mirror. I was looking at myself.” Grenshaw shrugged. “Kind of anti-climactic,” he added, but the chef didn’t seem to hear him.

“See?” he said to a passing waitress. “I’m always right. Even in other people’s dreams.” He laughed and served Grenshaw a plate with bacon and eggs, and said, “It’s on the house, chief.”

Grenshaw was astounded.

The chef laughed. “Hey, you know, chief, with that dumb look on your face, we kinda look alike – speaking of mirrors. We could pass as brothers.”

“You think?” Grenshaw said. As he ate his bacon and eggs, he glanced at the chef and toyed with this new possibility. Could it be? Did he have a long-lost brother he never knew about?

Nowadays, anything seemed possible.

Still, it would be mind-boggling. All these years walking this city alone, past throngs of people heading to work, past shopkeepers arranging window displays, past children chasing each other, making up the rules to their games as they go, past street vendors hawking discounted merchandise, past nighttime apartment windows glowing with life – and just to think, one of those anonymous faces might have been his brother. Crazy.

Grenshaw turned on his stool and looked at the people passing by. He felt oddly connected to them all. That woman approaching him now, the one with her head hanging down – was she a sister? Or that young man in the suit carrying the brief case and weaving through the pedestrian traffic skillfully – another brother? A cousin?

In that moment, Grenshaw felt an odd affinity for the entire city, even the mice scurrying down the alleys and the flying advertisements zooming overhead.

He left a hefty tip for the chef, who was occupied on the other side of the kitchen, and headed towards his bike. He called the office.

Mary answered.

“Mary, Grenshaw here.”

“How are you feeling?” She seemed concerned.

“Better. Much better.” As he spoke, Grenshaw paced absent-mindedly down the sidewalk. He looked like a man talking with a friend. “Listen, Mary, I’d like to lower the price on orange juice for all of our small business customers.”

“Yes, sir. Any particular reason?”

“They’ll be surprised, won’t they?” He paused, looked up from his feet, and found he was facing an empty alley. “Tell them it’s a Christmas present.”

“A Christmas present. Okay. So this isn’t a permanent thing?”

“Oh, no, it’s permanent. That can be a surprise too.”

“Very well, sir. Will that be all?”

“Yes, Mary. Thank you.” He paused before hanging up, perhaps sensing there was more to be said.

“Sir?” Mary offered.

“Yes?”

“Take care of yourself, sir.”

“Thank you, Mary,” he said. “You’re too good to me.” After Mary hung up, Grenshaw considered the scene before him. The alley was dark, but not so dark that he couldn’t see to its end. “And thank you, Tommy,” he said to no one.

He turned to leave, but not before noticing a figure in the distance, slowly approaching. He squinted into the dark and saw the man’s face; he recognized it. It was his father.

to be continued . . .