Four Shorts

By Tom Stockwell

Four Shorts is a compilation of short stories that speak to the process of maturity and the struggle with introspection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tom Stockwell
• Release date: Mar 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452363202

Tom Stockwell

Tom Stockwell is a writer living and working in the vineyards of Napa Valley in California. He has more than twenty years working as a professional writer, primarily in the IT sector, and has published hundreds of articles about computing in a variety of magazines and websites.

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Four Shorts

Stories of Migration and Passages

By

Tom Stockwell

Smashwords Edition

Published at Twenty Thousand Feet

Copyright ©2010 Tom Stockwell, All Rights Reserved

FOUR SHORTS

Table of Contents

Migrations uncovers a young woman’s search for identity in through a connection to her family’s history. The objects of the family’s past must be disposed, yet they offer a link to her grandfather and the world which invisibly separates them.

Passage for Patrick is a communication between a small boy, his brother, and his father, and his mother. When the boy’s life is threatened by an unforeseen event, this communication reaches back through the forces that separate them, into a realm of unpredictable outcomes.

The feelings expressed in Landlocked – a story of a homesteader in rural Vermont in the 1980s – expose the disquieting changes that occur in close relationships when love is challenged.

The Most Important Part is a story of thresholds, when two people in love find they must face the consequences of infidelity.

Migrations

Beautiful, aren't they? said the old man. He carefully held the abdomen on the butterfly with the nickel-plated forceps, then brought the pin point down through the thorax and pushed the mounted insect onto the cork slab. The Maori Indians believe the butterfly soul returns to earth after death, you know. Interesting. Interesting.

Jesse watched his grandfather's gray hands move from the killing jar to the cork board, then back again, each time bringing one more scrap of orange to the mounting slab. The thick fingers trembled ever so slightly on the forceps and the heavy signet ring looked strangely out of place for all these delicate manipulations.

Now the Serbians, on the other hand, look upon the butterfly as the soul of a witch and believe that if they can only find her body and turn it around while she's asleep, the soul won't be able to find her mouth to reenter. And then the witch, of course, will die. The old man looked up to his grandson and smiled. His wire-rim glasses were perched on his nose and the light from the kerosene lamp made his face look flushed. Would you like to try this? he asked.

Jesse shook his head.

What are you telling this boy, old man? Wamaka burst into the living room from the kitchen with the two wicker grocery baskets and flung them down at their feet. First you go running down the beach and pile these bugs into my best hampers. Now you sit in the dark, sticking them with the last of my straight-pins, and filling his head with tales.

Jesse looked up to her dark, wide face and saw behind the scowl a bright glimmer of interest.

Now Wamaka, these things are important, his grandfather said. What do your people think of a butterfly's chances for an immortal soul?

She hissed through her teeth and pushed the lamp closer to his work. We think a bug is a bug and they belong outside. Not in the house. Jesse, you clean these out. And she kicked the baskets towards him with her foot.

But Wamaka...

Now!

Jesse slipped off his chair and flipped open the top of the first hamper. Inside were pieces of legs, scraps of wings, and a few twisted feelers.

Number nine, sighed the old man. Only ninety-one more to go. And he rolled up his sleeves and settled a bit on his stool.

The soul of a witch, Jesse thought, running a finger tip over the segments of an antenna. And then he looked up to the large bell-shaped jar filled with layers of winged-bodies glowing in the lamp-light. The wings were only gently pulsating now, up, down, up, down; the insects were dying, quietly, silently. And while his grandfather was shifting on his stool, reaching once more toward the jar, Jesse could hear Wamaka in the kitchen, humming.

As Barbara struggled with the MG behind the spray of tractor trailer wheels, she began to feel a certain resentment towards her mother. It was unlike Mom to forget details, to put off until the last minute something as important as meeting Grandpa's plane. And yet, with less than an hour to drive to the airport she'd suddenly delegated the job to Barbara. And now there was no question but that Barbara would be late -- terribly late with this rain and traffic -- and poor Grandpa would be sitting there by himself with his baggage and his flight tickets and that horribly lonely frown on his face, an open target for every Evangelistic panhandler at O'Hare.

Barbara pressed the clutch, threw into third, and cut around the truck. Then she power-shifted into fourth gear, and for an instant the windshield was completely awash and the MG shook and skittered. But then she was clear of it, like breaking through up into the upper atmosphere, and she could see a good three hundred yards to the next car.

Now she wondered if Mom had really forgotten Grandpa, or it was one more little obstacle to make his visit uncomfortable. Did she do it consciously or instinctively? Grandpa must have felt it -- that hostility -- because it had been two years since he'd come back. Not since Grandma died. Two years of weekend telephone conversations which always ended with Mom feeling depressed and Grandpa's voice sounding more and more distant, like a stranger, or maybe even a little like an old friend who'd just up and moved out of their lives. It wasn't right. Barbara knew it wasn't right. But there it was. She didn't want to think about it.

She switched the radio on, pressed the buttons back and forth, and landed on some scratchy jazz station. She didn't like jazz normally, but for some reason she stopped there. The music spilled out in clarinets and vibraphones, and she listened, oblivious, as the wipers wiped, the engine whined, and the rain hummed beneath the radials.

Grandpa, she knew, loved jazz, and she'd found all sorts of old 78's up in the cottage, scratched and cracked with the labels all faded and peeling. When she had put the records on the Victrola there was hardly any music left in the grooves, and the voices burbled out and bounced through the old house and then disappeared into the woodwork. The melodies were as brief and as transparent as ghosts, and for the life of her Barbara couldn't remember a single tune. But the feelings they'd given her were unforgettable; it was like peering down a long pipe and seeing another place where faces in peculiar hats drifted before her while old-fashioned cars stood in the background, black and white and hazy. It was a good sort of feeling, really, listening to those old records. But weird, definitely weird.

That's where she'd been this afternoon when her mother had called, up in the cottage with her new kitten, Amantha. The kitten had seemed determined to undo all Barbara's efforts to clean up the old house, and so she'd shoved him into the closet just to keep him out of mischief. And of course, that's where she'd found the 78's.

Barbara's mother and father were going to tear it down, the cottage, and throw up some modern apartments for the summer people. So last February her mother, who could not bear the moldy smell of the place, had made Barbara an offer: three hundred dollars to clean out all the antiques, bric-a-brac, garbage, and keepsakes before June. And half of any money she got from the furniture. Since you have the short schedule this semester, her mother had said. You can do it in the afternoons after school. But, her mother had added. You'll have to do it yourself. I don't have the time and I don't want you kids digging through all our family skeletons and leaving an even bigger mess to clean up. And that definitely means no Roy Barnett!"

But of course she and Roy had already broken up, so Barbara