Short Stories

By Nick Lenoir

This book is a collection of twenty bold, bizarre and beautiful short stories. Each one is an open door into a new perception of our world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Lenoir
• Release date: Jun 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311130303

Nick Lenoir

Nick Lenoir was raised by wolves after being abandoned in a forest, in Romania. At the age of eight, he was found by a young girl named Emma and her grandmother.The boy would never know that his two older brothers had been abandoned in the same forest. Unlike him, they didn’t survive. A French priest found the children's remains. He insisted on having them buried in a proper cemetery and asked to have three words written on their grave: Les garçons sauvages.

Book preview

Short Stories

Published by Nick Lenoir @ Smashwords

© 2016 Nick Lenoir

Table of Contents

Gudrunheim

End of the Valley

Golden Age Marathon

A Platonic Lick

The Uneventful Life of Christopher Dias

Another Day at the Farm

Revenge of the Philistines

About Foxes

About Mice

F is for Francine

Mister Bunny

P is for Patricia

The New Nurse

Magic Mushrooms

Welcome Back

Real Men

Blackcurrant Magic

Alien Love

The Owl Keeper

End of Everything

Acknowledgements

Gudrunheim

The Skye family had returned home from a shopping spree. Alan was storing away groceries when his wife walked into the kitchen.

‘My mum called,’ Jane said. ‘She will pass by later this afternoon.’

‘The timing is really bad.’

‘She wants to drop off a pack of homemade cookies. It won’t take long.’

‘Did you tell her that Luke has lost his other arm?’

‘No,’ she said.

Alan paused.

‘Why not?’

‘I didn’t want to burden her with our calamities.’

‘You do realize that she will find out when she sees the child? The shock will only be greater.’

‘You know her. She’s a high-spirited woman with a good sense of humor. I’m sure she will take it well.’

‘Oh, yes, I know her, Jane,’ he chuckled. ‘If your mother cracks the no-arms-no-cookies joke, I swear I will kill her.’

Luke Skye was an extremely unlucky little boy. At the age of four, he lost an arm in a car accident while his parents and younger sister Julia came out without a scratch. Six months later, he fell off a skateboard. The kid could not protect his face given that he was missing an arm; he lost his left ear. The accidents went on and on. By the time the boy reached the age of ten, he benefited from round-the-clock family surveillance. One day, Luke slipped from his mother’s arms as she was carrying him upstairs, along with a pile of freshly laundered bed sheets. He tumbled down the stairway and crashed into an arrangement of potted plants on the ground floor. The noise was deafening. When Jane dared take a peek over the railing, she noticed that Luke had lost his head, which had rolled into a corner. On their way to the hospital, the Skye family believed that it would be the end of him this time. Defying all laws of science, he survived.

***

When Luke turned thirteen, all that remained of him was his belly, a square-shaped skin-colored piece of flesh, with his bellybutton in the middle. The child looked like a medium-sized pillow. On the bright side, his existence had taken a turn for the better since the accidents appeared to become fewer and milder. Over the past two years, Luke had suffered only minor misfortunes, such as falling off chairs or being sat on by relatives. Did the boy live happily ever after? His family would never know. Luke no longer had a mouth and therefore could not express any feelings. In fact, he no longer moved at all. His family knew that the boy was not dead; whenever they placed a hand on the pillow, they could feel the warmth of life emanate from within.

Luke’s parents debated much about a convenient way to carry their son around. They decided to transport him in a large hollow book. Alan was not an intellectual man but looked like one whenever he carried his leather-bound volume on the city streets. People assumed that he must be an extremely knowledgeable person and would not hesitate to walk up to him and ask when exactly the dodo had become extinct or whether the space-time continuum could truly be distorted. Some would even ask for advice regarding their personal lives. It amazed him how easily one could acquire an aura of omniscience. The false book was soberly titled Life, in beautiful gold letters. One day, while checking out at a supermarket, Alan had no choice but to put it down so that he could fill his shopping bags with groceries. The cashier woman grabbed the book and was about to open it. Alan dropped everything and rushed over to stop her but, unfortunately, it was too late.

‘Oh, is this what life is all about?’ she asked, while plucking her finger in the boy’s bellybutton. ‘A pink and plump pin cushion.’

Friends provided little help or compassion to the Skye family. The situation was too bizarre to trigger an emotional response from outsiders. In their brains, the dots had not connected. Most people pretended the boy didn’t exist. On rare occasions, a guest would tickle his skin and ask playfully:

‘What’s up, Luke?’

Julia dug out one of her old doll prams from the cellar. In her memories, it looked like a real one. Now that she was twelve, the mauve child-size item looked desperately like a toy. For a moment, she thought that people would be touched to see a young girl walking around with a pram. Julia recollected how elderly women used to smile at her when she did so at the age of five. The problem was that she was now too old, or too young, to walk the streets with any object linked to maternity. Once again, she became the center of attention. People stared and could not refrain from asking embarrassing questions, while children pointed and laughed at her. Someone walked up to her and, articulating carefully, told her it was high time she gave up her baby toys and behaved her age. When Julia saw her reflection in a shop window, stooped over this minuscule pram, carting around her pillow-shaped brother, she realized how dim-witted she must appear to others. A pair of centimeter-thick spectacles and a large pink ribbon in her hair would have perfectly completed her moronic looks. As she stood there, staring at herself, a couple of women passed by.

‘Look at that kid. Isn’t she a little young to have a baby? She must have been abused,’ one of them said.

‘How disgusting to do that to a child,’ the other one answered. ‘And a retarded one, on top of it.’

It was too much for her. She ran back home with Luke under her arm, abandoning the pram in the middle of the street.

The Skye family decided to carry Luke around in a standard pillowcase. It was definitely a more discreet option. People believed that Alan had a hard time getting out of bed, especially when he waited for his commuter train in the early morning. Walking around with a pillow at night was a little spookier; it made them look like sleepwalkers.

***

Holidays with Luke used to be an ordeal. Back when he was only missing few body parts and could still be more or less identified as a little boy, people intervened. Sometimes, they called the police, to report an ill-treated child. On a couple of occasions, bystanders told the parents how incredibly irresponsible it was to let such a young boy practice extreme sports. One would think that by now the Skye family had grown used to rude stares and inane questions. It was quite the contrary. They could no longer stand being constantly obliged to justify themselves. Julia and her parents were sick of being coerced into making up stories and telling lies to total strangers who should be minding their own business anyway. Why were people so cruelly intolerant with the disabled? The one thing that the Skye family craved most was a short respite, a moment of peace while in public. They were being denied a right that everyone else took for granted. Over time, they had become totally allergic to being approached by anyone. For example, if someone walked up to them for street directions, they reacted defensively and rather disproportionately.

‘Why the hell do you need to go there?’ they would shout. ‘What’s wrong with this street?’

As a result, they got used to spending all their holidays in very remote places. Now that they traveled with a pillow, the Skye family could have easily gone back to standard vacation destinations. It was normal to travel with a pillow. You could drop it onto the backseat of a car or take it with you on a plane. However, the out-of-reach destination habit had stuck. One bright summer Friday, they agreed to spend the weekend at an abandoned German mining site called Gudrunheim.

***

At the airport, while waiting to walk through the metal detectors, the Skye family was informed that the pillow needed to go through the X-ray machine. Julia and her parents had not expected this. Very slowly, Jane placed Luke in a plastic tray, on top of her keys and cell phone. All three of them discretely craned their necks to watch the monitor. What was inside that pillow? They had been wondering for quite some time. The doctors remained frustratingly elusive and simply stated that all that really mattered was that the boy was alive, which was miraculous enough. At long last, their questions would be answered. Alan expected to see a clutter of mutated organs. When Julia was younger, she used to think that it was full of cotton candy. Now, she did not really know. The girl would sometimes press and prod the pillow; it did not feel very different from her own belly. Jane liked to imagine that it contained a miniature universe. They distinctively recognized Luke by his square shape as he glided sideways on the screen. The Skye family was stunned to discover that he looked exactly like all the other items being X-rayed: a mess of odd-colored items. No machine beeped and no reaction came from the woman in uniform checking the contents. Under shock, they walked up to their terminal and did not speak until they were all seated on the plane.

‘Jane, can you please open the pillowcase so that Luke can breathe?’ Alan asked.

‘Breathe how?’ she replied curtly. ‘Through his bellybutton?’

Nevertheless, the woman unzipped it halfway.

‘Why did you not use the pillowcase my mum crocheted for him?’

‘Because Luke did not fit inside.’

The air suddenly turned very cold. Julia tried to warm herself with the flimsy blanket provided by the airline company.

***

Shortly before lunchtime, the Skye family reached their destination by rented car. Only one building was still standing: a massive ten-floor high structure made from dark grey bricks. Rows of tiny windows went up halfway while the upper floors appeared to receive no daylight at all. On the top-right corner, the word Gudrunheim had been painted in two-meter high letters. A couple of black birds were staring at them from the collapsed roof. As the family looked around, they noticed that, in every direction, expanses of shrubbery and overgrown grass led to large forests. Between the vegetation, remnants of wooden houses could still be seen. It must have been quite a large settlement. A hundred meters off, a huge pile of rusty metal parts indicated where the mine itself used to be. The ground around it had caved in, thus creating a tiny lake in which the clutter of metal stuck out like an artificial island, shaped like an iceberg. It was not as grim as one might imagine. Anyone who could appreciate end-of-the-world aesthetics would have described it as beautiful. For those who enjoyed being out in the wilderness, the location was a touching demonstration of nature’s ability to regain lost territory. This was exactly the kind of place that the Skye family loved.

‘All right, let’s pitch our tent,’ Alan said. ‘Then, we will go exploring.’

Julia pushed open the brick building’s entrance door. It was very dark inside.

‘We should have brought a flashlight. Let me check our luggage and see whether we packed one,’ Jane said.

‘Or we could open the shutters,’ Julia suggested. ‘It’s a bright and sunny day.’

While doing so, she cut her thumb on a piece of broken window. Julia was neither especially lucky nor unlucky. Like most children, her luck in life was quite average. For example, at her school’s end-of-year tombola, she had received the seventeenth prize, which was a pink pencil with a fluffy end. A few months prior, Julia had ruined her dress while painting.

‘It was old and I was about to throw it away. It’s not as though you had destroyed something expensive,’ her mother had said.

‘I don’t own any fancy clothes,’ Julia had pointed out.

‘Well, you know what I mean. It would have been much worse had you been wearing your Sunday’s best.’

Julia pushed open the shutters to let the sun in, then paused to watch the line of blood that ran down her hand.

‘Don’t worry, a little disinfectant and a Band-Aid will do the trick,’ Alan said. ‘Fortunately, it didn’t happen to —’

The man stopped midsentence but Julia knew exactly what her father was about to say. Had this happened to Luke, all family members would have screamed their heads off. Alan would have called for a helicopter and Jane would have pored copious amounts of every liquid she found in the first aid kit over the wound, which would have become infected anyway. The hand would most certainly have required an amputation.

‘Look, a bathroom!’ Julia said.

‘I doubt it’s still functioning, but we can have a look.’

It was not a very welcoming place. A few toilets were grouped in a square while a huge sink occupied the right-side wall. A metal plaque showed the illustration of a smiling blond woman with an upturned finger. A text below said:

Gudrun sagt: Wasche deine Hände!

‘Gudrun says: Wash your hands,’ Julia translated.

‘Very good.’

‘They didn’t have much privacy,’ the girl noted.

‘Many years ago, before Luke

Reviews for Short Stories

[Sebastian Christmas · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved this book! Hilarious and very clever. A true mind opener.