Five Unexpected Days: A Collection of Short Stories

By Jessica Baverstock

The surprise occurrence of February 30th.

The loss of a favorite umbrella.

The sudden arrival of a tiny circus runaway.

Each of these unexpected events propel a different character into their own sweet, gentle tale, which finds its heartwarming conclusion in less than twenty-four hours.

This short story collection features a total of five moving tales, each revealing the moments that make us human and how our interactions with those around us can enhance and enrich our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jessica Baverstock
• Release date: Jun 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463943878

Jessica Baverstock

Jessica Baverstock has been a storyteller since she learned how to talk, and dreamed of becoming a writer from the day she first saw a typewriter at age 3. She writes an eclectic mix of endearing stories, crossing from science-fiction to historical fiction and everything in between.She is an Australian author and blogger. In her early twenties she moved to China. Now she lives in the South West of Australia with her husband and a modest book collection. When she's not busy working on her next story or globetrotting across oceans, she's usually curled up watching a good movie.

Book preview

Five Unexpected Days:

A Collection of Short Stories

Copyright 2018 Jessica Baverstock

Published by Jessica Baverstock at Smashwords

Cover design © Jessica Baverstock

Cover art © Masson/Shutterstock

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Mrs. Merkle’s Cats

The Runaway

The Unexpected Day

Teppanyaki for One

The Red Umbrella

Sneak Peek: Neville and the Arabian Luncheon

About the Author

Other books by Jessica Baverstock

Dear reader,

When I first proposed the title for this collection to my husband, he furrowed his brow and said, But aren’t all stories basically unexpected days?

When I started looking over my stories to choose which I would place in this collection, I began to see his point.

There were two stories that I knew absolutely had to be in this collection.

The Unexpected Day is the most obvious one. The main character, a father of six grown boys, makes a discovery just after the stroke of midnight on the last day of February. That story covers merely an hour or so of time as he tries to verify his discovery.

But it wasn’t until I was re-reading the story Mrs. Merkle’s Cats while preparing the second volume of my short story collection series Baverstock’s Allsorts that I began to see a trend. Mrs. Merkle is a woman of habit. In her forty-seven years of marriage she has repeated the same cycle every day until, one particular day, she decides to make a simple change to her routine. How that day is different and how that change will revolutionise her marriage is what the story is all about.

At one point in the story Mrs. Merkle wonders to herself why today is such an unexpected day.

And suddenly I had my theme.

Unexpected days.

But where should I draw the line in choosing stories since, as my husband pointed out, just about every story spins around an unexpected day?

I have written somewhere around sixty short stories as of publishing this book. How could I choose which unexpected days to include?

I couldn’t strictly keep to stories that happened during daylight hours, since The Unexpected Day happens in the hour just after midnight.

But I could limit it to stories that happened in less than twenty-four hours, which could be considered the definition of a day.

Then I looked to tone.

I wanted stories that matched the gentle, family aspect of those first two stories.

That led me to choose The Runaway, which also happens at night. It is a gentle tale about a clown who meets a little girl who is running away to the circus for a very unique reason. This story tugs at the heartstrings, but ends with hope, and so I felt it was a good fit.

Teppanyaki for One also matched the tone, though this story is about a woman learning how to become a family of one again after a divorce.

And then, to finish, I chose a reader favourite: The Red Umbrella. It’s a sweet of tale of an Australian twenty-something expat who loses her beloved umbrella and in the process of searching discovers something far more valuable.

Now that I have chosen my five days, I pass this volume on to you. I do hope you enjoy these stories.

—Jessica Baverstock

Muswellbrook, Australia

June 2018

Mrs. Merkle’s Cats

MRS. MERKLE HAD three cats: Tinnitus, Reflux, and Mange.

Tinnitus, a Siamese, was plagued with a head twitch which kept his rusted silver bell tinkling constantly, making Mrs. Merkle yearn for the day when her hearing would eventually dim. The little black kitten, Reflux, had the irritating habit of bringing up half of his dinner ten minutes after eating, examining it intently, and then re-ingesting the concoction. And the tabby, Mange, well her complaint was self-explanatory.

Each had been a stray, and each had adopted Mrs. Merkle as their owner even though she had little interest in them. She wasn’t a doting pet owner. She didn’t put down saucers of warm milk or stroke her companions until they purred. If they didn’t like dry biscuits and water then there were plenty of other homeowners on the estate who could take them in.

Mrs. Merkle was a take-it-or-leave-it kind of person. She started each morning by tying her straggly hair up into a firm bun, watching the work of her knobbly, age-speckled hands in the age-speckled bathroom mirror. She would change from her moth-eaten flannel nightgown into a plain, brown calico dress which swished and swayed about her like a potato sack. She liked potato sacks. Sturdy things they were. No nonsense about them.

Then she would wander into the cold cottage kitchen, her thick hand-knitted socks not making a sound on the chipped terracotta tiles, and stoke the fire within the old, heavy, cast iron stove, feeding it with a new log to encourage it back to a flame.

Then she’d wander past the ancient dark wood table and chairs patiently waiting for their role in the morning, shove her feet into her beaten up wellington boots and head out into the fresh air of her overgrown garden to collect the eggs.

Mrs. Merkle didn’t believe in garden fences, or pretty flower borders, or neatly trimmed hedges. Too fussy. No, nature made its way where it wished and who was she to tell it otherwise? In her garden tomato bushes leaned against blueberry bushes which generously made way for the odd carrot here and there. Cabbages ran wild among strawberry plants, providing plenty of food for the little animal visitors welcome in her garden, but never any for her own table. Ivy and bougainvillea laid claim to the whitewashed stones of the two-story cottage, and a friendly apple tree shaded the sitting room window from the few hot days that may or may not announce the height of the English summer each year.

The only exception Mrs. Merkle made to her rule about garden fences was the chicken pen. With three cats roaming the grounds, she couldn’t afford to allow the felines and poultry to mingle. Reflux may have been too young to know what to do with a chicken, and Tinnitus couldn’t sneak up on anyone, but Mange had a savage side when it came to birds and small animals. So Mrs. Merkle had nagged Mr. Merkle into building a pen with chicken wire and pieces of wood she had salvaged from a garden shed their neighbour was discarding.

Mrs. Merkle admired chickens. She liked the way they strode about with purpose, even though they had nothing more to do with their time than scratch the ground, eat, and lay eggs. She liked the way they clucked, sometimes energetically and sometimes meditatively. But most of all she liked the way they provided a good breakfast.

She loved the taste of eggs. Scrambled, poached, or fried. She did not care. Give her an egg, a piece of toast, and a hot cup of tea and she would be a contented woman. Contented, that is, if it hadn’t been for her husband.

Mr. Merkle was not a morning person, and he did not abide alarm clocks, though goodness knows Mrs. Merkle had tried. She woke with the birds, to the muted sound of the chickens in their pen and the singing of larks on the roof drifting through the closed windows, when the dark sky was turning the faintest hint of blue. Mr. Merkle woke to the smell of bacon and the whistle of the kettle, and to nothing else.

Mrs. Merkle often wondered what would happen if she didn’t cook his breakfast, if she ate her egg and toast alone and forewent her cup of hot tea—if the bacon never crackled and the kettle never whistled. Would he continue sleeping through the whole day? Would she have an entire day to herself—just her and her three cats?

In forty-seven years