The Purgatory Donut Shop

By Bob Wakulich

This collection explores the many applications of donuts and pastries to the human condition.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bob Wakulich
• Release date: Jul 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370435029

Bob Wakulich

Bob Wakulich received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia in 1999. He also holds a BFA in Writing with a Film Studies Minor from the University of Victoria (1996), a BA in Sociology from Lakehead University (1977), and he attended the Banff School of Fine Arts Summer Writing Workshop in 1979 and 1980.His short stories, poems, and commentaries have appeared in a number of journals, magazines, newspapers, and anthologies in Canada, the US, and Europe, as well as on CBC Radio and in cyberspace. He currently lives in Cranbrook, British Columbia.

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The Purgatory Donut Shop

Copyright 2016 Bob Wakulich

Published by Bob Wakulich at Smashwords

ISBN: 9781370435029

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Thanks again to GP Greenwood.

Cover Image by Booboo.

Publications interested in reprinting any of these stories should contact the author.

Acknowledgments:

Love Me, Love My Varenyky originally appeared in Yamarok (CIUS, Edmonton, AB) in 1987.

Here and There won third prize in the 2005 Columbia Writers Studio United by the River Writing Contest.

Hockey Games and Naked Ladies originally appeared in Ice: New Writing on Hockey (Spotted Cow Press, Edmonton, AB) in 1999.

Getting Things Done in Wallow Springs aired on CBC’s Alberta Anthology in 1986.

The Blue People Report originally appeared in Homeless, Not Helpless (Canterbury Press, Berkeley, CA) in 1991.

How to Be Famous won the Dark and Mysterious Short Story Competition, (Australia – on-line) in 1996.

The Jellymen originally appeared in Another Realm (on-line) in 2000.

Dido won the first Human Potential Writing Competition in fiction (INHOUSEPRESS – on-line) in 2009.

The Poet Returns a Toaster originally appeared as a column in The Cranbrook Daily Townsman (BC)

in 2010.

CONTENTS:

The Nights India Kept Leaving

Late Night Vigil

Love Me, Love My Varenyky

Without Benefit of Clergy

Here And There

A Personal Testimonial

How Sweet Is Sweet Dick?

Hockey Games and Naked Ladies

Getting Things Done in Wallow Springs

The Island

The Poem Reader

Tickets and Tire Chalk: The Confessions of a Traffic Commissionaire

The Blue People Report

The Jellymen

Sleeping with the Buzzards

Doom with a View

History

How to Be Famous

The Life in a Day of Vasilli Sunobavich

Pink Slips

Old Samba and Stinky Jim

Dido

The Poet Returns a Toaster

The Dumb Guy Surmises

The Nights India Kept Leaving

India wrapped an arm around my head and pulled it tightly to one of her breasts. She assured me that as far as THIS meal was concerned, the last course had been served. I’ll be gone in the morning, I’m afraid.

We were standing on the sidewalk in front of the flat she was sharing with a one-armed meter maid and a telephone psychic. Her favourite white cotton dress had become a contradiction, laundered to the point of grey translucence.

Do you really have to go? I asked her breast.

She let me go. Of course not. Why would that matter?

Well, you know. I’m going to miss you.

She waved her arm at nothing in particular. Well, I’m sure you’ll find your way to some other buffets eventually.

I took a step back and tried to lock on her eyes, but wisps of her hair were conspiring against me. Where are you going?

She sighed. Details like that aren’t really important until you get there.

Let me come with you, I said. I’m pretty good with maps.

She pursed her lips a little. No. She looked up at the CCTV camera across the street. If we started snogging and ripping each other’s clothes off right here, do you think anyone would care?

I went through the motions of sizing up the situation. Well, the lighting in this particular spot is a bit dodgy. We could move over a couple of steps.

But they have infra-red filters on those things, don’t they? She turned and headed for her front door. It might overload the circuitry if we were doing it right.

Before I could reply, the door swung shut.

I was feeling extremely sad when I walked by her place the following evening. Then I heard the front door open and turned. She was still wearing the same dress. She smiled.

You haven’t left, then?

Yes, I have. I was out of here first thing.

So you’ve already come back?

Don’t be silly. I’m nowhere near here right now."

I rubbed at my forehead. So how’s the trip going so far?

Well, the seating was a little cramped at first, but once my legs fell asleep, it was fairly comfortable, and I found the selection of pastries on the snack cart to be very comprehensive. She pawed at her hair a little. I did some checking about those cameras.

I looked up. Oh. What about them?

They can enhance the picture as much as they want, so it really doesn’t matter where you’re standing.

That’s good to know.

Yes, especially if you’re going to go to all that trouble.

Still, it’s not the kind of thing you’d normally pencil in for a Wednesday night.

Heavens, no. I imagine the magistrate would think that was rather callous.

I nodded. India, will you still be gone if I come back tomorrow?

Who can say, really? You might want to check, which I did for the next three weeks.

Late Night Vigil

Seagulls start to cry at about four in the morning after the traffic has finally stopped rattling over potholes in the alleys and the last of the homeless have passed out in door wells leading to triple-locked doors.

Gus had observed this progression for the past three nights from Randy's second floor apartment patio. Wrapped in a comforter covered with blue unicorns, he peered for signs of the next sunrise and began to wonder if he would ever sleep again.

There was some rustling in the apartment, something more than the soft paddings of Gandalf the Wonder Cat. The bathroom door closed, followed by the whirr of the exhaust fan and Randy’s familiar hack-and-spit. Bloody clockwork, thought Gus: get up, shuffle, whiz, expectorate, flush, expectorate again, shuffle, and back to bed every night at about the same time.

The sound of the toilet tank hissed into silence.

Randy hadn't gone back to bed. He was standing unobserved on the living room side of the patio window screen in his grey flannel nightshirt, looking at Gus looking out at the city. He cupped his hands around his mouth and launched into his best approximation of a cop with a bullhorn. YOU ARE COMPLETELY SURROUNDED.

Gus, properly spooked, made an attempt to jump up and stand at attention, but part of the quilt was tucked in under his feet, and without the needed slack, his upward motion was abruptly stopped. The leftover momentum started him falling forward, and in a brief moment of total clarity, he realized that his trajectory would put him face-down in Gandalf's litter box.

Understandably, he raged against this, which sent him falling back into the lawn chair. The lawn chair was old, a relic that Randy had carted from hovel to hovel for the past ten years, and when Gus slammed back down on the seat, the tubular aluminum frame succumbed to the fatigue of continuous use, bending at its cross-joints and eventually depositing Gus on a flat of empty beer cans.

When the last of the cans finally rolled to a stop, Randy opened the patio screen. That was incredible, man.

They both heard the sound of a window slide open above them. Hey, a voice half-whispered, some people are trying to SLEEP!

A seagull cried.

Gus sat up and forcefully unquilted himself. What the hell did you do that for?

Randy was on the verge of a snicker, but he suppressed it.

Gus rubbed at his naked arms and snapped the elastic waistband of his blue gym shorts. I'm twelve hours out of sync, man. The sun goes down and I wake up. I feel like some kind of bloody vampire.

What do you think it is, too much sex?

Gus smiled and shook his head. This happens every bloody time I come into town.

Oh, diss place, said Randy, pointing out over the verandah, diss eez an EE-VILL place!

Shhhh! hissed the window above them.

Gus gathered himself together and stood up. Some of the beer cans rearranged themselves. I need a drink.

I've got some vodka.

That sounds great, said the window.

Join us, said Randy.

Now you're talking, The window slid shut.

That's Werner, said Randy. He plays the harmonica.

Is he any good?

Bloody horrible. Everything he plays sounds like The Streets of Laredo.

Perfect. They draped themselves over two threadbare loveseats in the living room. Gandalf meowed as if he was asking a question.

Damn straight, said Gus.

Love Me, Love My Varenyky

It's all right if you want to watch, but I don't want to stop until I'm done, so you'd better grab yourself a beer and get comfy.

This is not the kind of thing I do very often. I only ever make these things once a year now, and I suppose that's because it takes the better part of a day to make them, but it takes just as long to make twelve dozen as it does six, so that's why I make twenty-four and really go to town on them. That was probably a normal batch for my mom if you consider the fact that you can down about a dozen in one sitting without much thought, even if you're not Ukrainian. Besides, you can freeze them, or fry them up for breakfast. I can eat these things for days.

My mother has never bothered with measuring cups and spoons. She reckons it out in the palms of her hands, but I don't have faith in my own hands, and I need the calibrations. When I asked her for the recipe, she just shrugged and said you needed some of this and some of that, boil some potatoes, and so on. What I had to do was sit and watch her, taking notes like it was some kind of applied science lab. Even after that, I had to guess at the amounts, and it took me three batches before they stopped exploding in the water.

You know, to really understand my mother, you have to understand a few things about baba, her mother. It might even help you to understand me, so I'll just talk for a while, and after that, we'll eat some of these and then go to bed and tell each other silly lovers' things by the light of my no-drip candle, okay?

You have to be able to see baba sweeping a dirt floor and insulating her shoes for the winter with straw. You have to try and imagine her as a young girl getting scared when the soldiers came expecting to be fed. Being a peasant never saved anybody from anything, she told me once, and if you didn't have enough, you were either an enemy of the people or an enemy of the czar, depending on which soldiers showed up. She would make these things for them, and they usually slaughtered some livestock too, and it would upset her that they stared at her like she was something to eat.

A lot of babas grew up that way. It was something they learned to cope with, like heavy rains or drought, and she managed to grow up, become a young woman and marry a soldier.

Her husband, dido, was a captain in the militia, and this was good because there was money, and a doctor when you needed one, something she was glad of when she had diadko, my uncle, and mom. Baba showed me a picture of him in his uniform, and he had lots of medals and shiny buttons, a sash across his chest and good black leather boots on his feet, really duzhe dobrii.

The only problem was that the governments kept changing, and there were always men coming to take him away. They were always wearing long coats and caps, but never the same colour, and every time dido came home, he would look very tired and be wearing a different sash. It was a very unstable time, with Stalin over here and Hitler over there. Baba didn’t really like to talk about it much, and all my mother can remember is the mean in long coats.

Baba Mary's Varenyky Dough

This will provide enough shells for six to eight dozen, depending on