Pulphouse Fiction Magazine Issue #36, page 3
"Bastards!"
"She lost her voice, so she wanted me to talk to them."
"She makes me sick."
"She said she invited them because they're family."
"Unbelievable!"
"They're ghosts!" After one last whack at the lock, Matt whirled, annoyed at the old man's sarcasm. "Excuse me if I don't like being haunted."
"Excuse you, indeed." The old man chuckled.
Glaring, Matt retreated to the door. Maybe, if he kept his head down and didn't stop, he could make it out of there without being waylaid by the spirits.
"Listen." The old man resumed his rocking. "A very close family member of mine once told me that nothing matters without money."
The words were so familiar, Matt wrenched his head around to stare. "What did you just…"
The old man cut him off. "This guy had been laid off from the mill, and money was tight. I, on the other hand, hated working for Mrs. Hearsay. I didn't care what she paid, I just wanted out. Sound familiar?"
Matt couldn't believe what he was hearing. Until now, the old man's identity had been unknown to him… but now it was coming into focus, as incredible as it seemed.
"The guy was my father," said the old man. "When he told me that nothing matters without money, it was based on his own life experience and immediate concerns.
"Well, he was wrong." The old man snapped his fingers. "If I had it all to do over again, I'd tell him that right to his face. The truth is, nothing matters without people."
Matt just kept staring. It couldn't be, could it? What he was thinking?
What the old man had said about nothing mattering without money was exactly what Matt's own father had told him just a few short hours ago.
If the old man's father and Matt's father had both lost their jobs and said the same thing about working for Mrs. Hearsay, how could it not be possible that the old man and Matt were one and the same person at different ages?
"Do you know what else is true?" asked the old man. "Karma. What goes around, comes around. Meaning, if you're good and kind to others, then others will treat you the same way. But if you're not, the road you travel will be dark indeed."
He got up from the chair then, leaving it to rock a few more times behind him. He limped forward, arms outstretched, a sad expression on his features.
"One day, if you stay on that dark road, you'll end up an old blind man with no one to talk to, desperately lonely. And you'll wonder if you got that way because you didn't try harder to listen to others, like Mrs. Hearsay… or even your own father. You'll wonder, if only you'd taken the time to really talk to him when he was struggling, to help him with his pain, then maybe he wouldn't have drunk himself into an early grave.
"And you'll wish, one Christmas Eve, that you could go back and change what went before… talk your younger self into being the kind of person who deserves better in life." Reaching out, he placed a hand atop Matt's head. "Talk you into being better for everyone… therefore being better for me, too.
"For us."
Matt felt dizzy. The old man was starting to fade, turning to snowflakes fluttering in a hazy pillar of golden light.
"That's why I came back to this place where the walls between life and death are thin and the spirits gather." As the old man dissolved, his voice turned faint and crackly, like a station breaking into static on a radio. "To help you not to become me… even if it meant I would cease to be." Smiling sadly, he lifted his hand from Matt's head.
"Wait, please…" Matt reached for him, but the snow that was barely holding the outline of his shape only whirled around his fingers. "There's so much I want to ask you…"
"You already know everything I came here to tell you." The ghost from the future grew dimmer by the second, the contours of his face and body blending into the golden glow of the pillar of light.
Matt's eyes welled with tears. Impulsively, he threw his arms around the pillar… and for the briefest instant, he thought he could feel the form of his future self hugging him back from across the decades.
But then, that feeling was gone, his arms left combing through snowflakes and light.
"You got this," the old man whispered before he fell silent.
And the snow kept falling where he'd stood, swirling and glittering in the pillar of light that now shone only on Matt's tear-streaked face.
Later, Matt walked home through the quiet, snow-covered streets, thinking about the bizarre night he'd just experienced.
His encounter with the old man had changed him, convinced him to make a new resolution. From that night on, he was going to try harder to listen to those who needed it most, even if it inconvenienced him.
His first challenge had come when he'd walked out of the guest room and been ambushed by the mob of lonely ghosts… but he'd gotten through it. It had taken him hours to listen to the stories from Harvey and Gloria and Oscar the Fuller Brush Man and all the rest. (There were dozens in the house by then.) He'd even spent some time with Mrs. Hearsay, who'd jotted a few notes to hold up her end of the conversation.
Now, finally, he had just one more person to listen to for the night, one more person he thought could use a shoulder to cry on.
As soon as Matt walked in the back door, he saw him sipping a beer at the kitchen table. He didn't look like he was in good spirits at all. How could he be, after being out of work for months, with no immediate prospects of another job to pay the bills?
Still, he managed a smile when he looked up and saw his son walk toward him. "Hey, Matt. How did things go at Mrs. Hearsay's?"
"Never mind that." Matt pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from him. "Let's talk about you, Dad."
MIKE ZIMMERMAN
Mike Zimmerman returns for a fourth appearance in these pages with the original featured story “Eaten.” This might be the most perfect Pulphouse holiday story I have run across. Stunningly well-written and a clear holiday story using standard holiday fixings, only Mike makes this really disturbing in so many, many ways.
Mike is a full-time bestselling writer, editor, and brand storyteller who specializes in finding and honing a person/place/product’s unique voice. He has done that across a multitude of divergent brands—from publicly-traded companies to national magazines to B2B mavens to household-name authors.
He uses journalism, research, analytics, good prose chops, razor-sharp copywriting, a bent brain, and a sense of humor to create world-class content for any audience. With far over 50 books in print, including 35 novels, you can find out more about Mike at zimwrites.com.
EATEN
MIKE ZIMMERMAN
Cynthia uses the rubber spatula to push the last of the little men off the rim of the stainless-steel mixing bowl into the cookie batter. He is one of the naked ones. They aren’t all naked; some still wear pieces of uniform.
She turns the hand mixer on high and churns it all up and the batter turns color but not an unappetizing color. Still a cookie color. Or cookie enough.
Cyn’s experience making tollhouse cookies for herself is deep for age 16, so she begins with a 350-degree oven. After one overdone batch she thinks she needs more precision to get the right consistency. 334 degrees. 7:33 on the timer. Six large cookies per baking sheet.
Perfection.
So is the recipe. That hint of allspice, adding so little of it she might as well have brushed the batter bowl up against the word “allspice” on the label for the same effect.
Could one be addicted to one’s own cookie recipe?
Cynthia supposes one could.
She cleans the kitchen, crumpling up the paper towel full of little helmets and guns she’d plucked out of the batter with tweezers.
She’s in an elevated mood. That night she leaves out a plate of six cookies with some milk for the hypothetical shits and giggles.
Cookie night of the soul. That’s what he calls Christmas Eve.
To be fair, the creative folks out there sometimes leave Buffalo wings, fettuccini alfredo, and the occasional arugula salad. Sushi is always welcome as long as they leave wasabi.
But cookies and milk rule them all, as much a staple of life as the sugar and wheat the cookies come from. And like the man who always wins the hot dog eating contest out on Coney Island by wetting the buns, cookies in milk makes them fit better in the ol’ belly.
Lotta cookies, kids. Lotta work for lotta reward.
He wasn’t sure he’d even be stopping by this particular home tonight. It had been a close call. But here he is, and here are some sugar cookies. Yeah, if there’s a signature cookie on cookie night of the soul, it’s the holiday sugar cookie with red or green sugar on top. Maybe icing. These, however, are bare. Meh. He prepares for stale and bland as he finishes his other work.
But then he tastes and his mouth floods and eyes bug and he lets off a sexual sound.
He is not prone to profanity or blasphemy, but this is different and he blurts out both through his food. The cookie melting in his mouth is the most delicious he’d ever tasted. Almost otherworldly in its combination of flavor, sweetness, and mouthfeel.
He doesn’t know why. What is that flavor…? Can’t place it.
They’re so good, he stays long and eats four out of six. He wants to scarf but goes slow. He eyes the last two on the plate, then the addict’s instinct kicks in and he looks for more before they’re all gone. Would he steal cookies? Yes, these cookies he would. None in the kitchen. Who makes only six cookies?
He feels the pull from above, it’s time, the sleigh, the rest of his rounds. Checks the dining room, which is more of a garbage dumping ground, nothing there. Finally, he can hold off no longer. Dammit. He pockets the last two cookies and finishes them before he hits New England.
There are other cookies. Cynthia had made three dozen. She hides them in her bed covered in wax paper inside an airtight plastic container. She holds it close as she sleeps.
In the morning she is surprised to find gifts waiting for her.
Nothing she really wants. But the feeling feels good.
She eats nothing but cookies all day. Might be time for another batch, she thinks.
The new batch is just as good as the first. The army men screaming and trying to escape the batter as they are sucked into the whirring beaters feels even more satisfying this time.
Cookies never occurred to her at first. Why would they?
The whole thing was accidental. School was out for the holidays. Cynthia had been rummaging in the garage for nothing in particular. There was so much nothing in particular in their garage, their cellar, their closets, their dining room. She wasn’t bored so much as occupying time and fending off thoughts. But when she pulled back the flaps on an old cardboard box among old cardboard boxes, she was stung by what she saw. Stung to tears that she was just able to hold back. She started breathing again and allowed the muscles in her face to uncurl.
A batch of army men. The little green guys with the base they could stand on. Army guy crouched aiming the M16, the other guy holding the rifle above his head with a bayonet, the officer with the pistol and binocs, all of them.
Cynthia was fully clothed in the cold garage and still moved to cover herself.
Then she let loose, not roaring exactly, a final utterance of anger and she jammed her hand into the pile of men and grabbed a bunch and stuffed them in a coat pocket and then some more and stuffed the other pocket and she went back to her bedroom.
She had a collection of lighters in her room for her smoking needs, but she did not smoke now. She sure did use a lighter, though. One of the disposable ones. She used it ‘til it was dead and her room stank and her thumbtip blistered.
At some point about midway through her activity, the inert plastic army men began screaming.
They were small; the screaming would alert no one.
But they were now alive and looking very familiar to Cynthia. She knew she should be surprised but she wasn’t because, of course, this is exactly what she’d been playing in her mind. She wanted it to happen. She was so huge compared to them that she felt no need to be afraid. She could just be her rage and channel all her dreamed-of cruelty and vengeance into her work. They pleaded with her and eventually remembered what they were and tried to reassemble formation and some dove for cover in the folds of her blanket and opened fire. She felt the little thumbtack tips of their bullets bouncing off her.
They weren’t fast enough to get away. She pulled off arms and twisted legs and crushed some between her fingers and oh God, oh God, how good that felt, life leaving them while in abject terror. She held some up and burned them. So good. She threw some in a jar and screwed the lid tight. She did all this seeing their familiar faces, the four faces, it was them, over and over it was them.
When they were all dead, the last of them suffocating in the sealed jar, pawing at the sides, seeing her face at the final blue gasp, Cynthia returned to the garage and grabbed the remaining army men, perhaps twenty of them.
That’s when she began baking. She does not to this day know why it occurred to her to do it. She is only happy she did.
Who isn’t happy for cookies?
Christmas night, as Cynthia sleeps, he returns.
He checks the family room where the cookies had been left out the previous eve, just in case. Nothing.
He sneaks to the kitchen. No cookies.
He knows the author of these delights is asleep upstairs. How could he get more?
He’d been prepared for this outcome. He slips his hand in a pocket and pulls out a sheet of parchment. He pulls a self-inking quill from his other pocket and leaves the following:
I know you may not believe.
But I do. I believe in you. Cynthia.
You left me a treat Christmas Eve unlike any I have ever had.
That is over many centuries. Unprecedented.
I reveal myself here. I tell you the truth here.
That is how much I value the kindness you showed me.
I would like more.
Please.
If you do not wish to make more, perhaps you could leave me the recipe tonight.
I will be happy to leave a gift for you in return.
All you have to do is tell me what you want.
I await your reply. Cynthia.
He signs it “S” and leaves the house in darkness.
Of course Cyn finds the note.
It adds to her emotional overflow, as she isn’t sure how she feels about anything that’s been happening. Sleep and rest mess with her response. She finds some of it gratifying. She finds some of it horrifying. She believes it is happening; she can see and touch and especially taste it all. But even though she’s in complete control of the acts, she feels so out of control.
Now this.
Well, what to do? She has plenty of cookies left from her last batch.
A recurring thought: What if she can never make another? What if it all stops? She doesn’t believe that will happen, but she has to assume it will. Cyn knows what hedging is. And this kind of stuff, this unexplainable stretch she’s riding, this could all end because doesn’t it have to?
That night, she leaves one cookie.
The new note says:
I am grateful for your generosity.
Cynthia. Again I tell the truth. I need more.
Would you not like something nice? A new bicycle, perhaps?
I know you are at a mysterious age. A new phone? The one with the cinema camera?
I would love your cookie recipe.
I have not felt desire like this in many years.
Please. Cynthia.
I can give you anything you desire.
He signed it “S.”
Cynthia opens the single bag of army men she was able to find at the bargain store and they fall to the bed in a tangle of inert, toxic-stinking plastic. She thinks about what happened that time, enters her rage fugue. Her face collapses, the men rise and scatter across her bed. Some are disciplined and take up formation. She scowls and sweeps and plucks them all screaming into a bucket. Tiny firecrackers go off as they shoot. She sees their little faces, faces of the four, the four faces, she doesn’t count how many of each man there are repeated in the writhing pile, she just knows they’re in there and feeling everything and that’s all that matters.
Cyn sets up the mixer again. Preps more batter. This time she drops each little man into the bowl one at a time so she can see their little faces. Some she crushes screaming and choking between her fingers before letting them drop. The bodies have weight.
She does not know if the big men feel what the little ones feel. Now that is a wish. Somewhere out there, they feel and know. Cyn can somehow tell that all four are still alive. Maybe at that fucking base, maybe deployed, maybe discharged.
Do they feel it?
Cynthia believes they do.
“You remember me,” she says as she churns the whirring mixer into them and again sees the special cookie color.
She leaves him a few cookies. He leaves another note.
I always tell you the truth. Cynthia.
I need more.
The recipe.
I have tried and cannot replicate what you can do.
Please.
I will give you anything you want.
There must be something.
Signed “S.”
That night she leaves him half a cookie and her own note.
I won’t give you the recipe.
I’m starting to believe …
that I already have everything I want.
She signs it “C.”
Cynthia doesn’t know how any of this happened. She only knows that she is so very ready to accept and enjoy that it is happening.
"She lost her voice, so she wanted me to talk to them."
"She makes me sick."
"She said she invited them because they're family."
"Unbelievable!"
"They're ghosts!" After one last whack at the lock, Matt whirled, annoyed at the old man's sarcasm. "Excuse me if I don't like being haunted."
"Excuse you, indeed." The old man chuckled.
Glaring, Matt retreated to the door. Maybe, if he kept his head down and didn't stop, he could make it out of there without being waylaid by the spirits.
"Listen." The old man resumed his rocking. "A very close family member of mine once told me that nothing matters without money."
The words were so familiar, Matt wrenched his head around to stare. "What did you just…"
The old man cut him off. "This guy had been laid off from the mill, and money was tight. I, on the other hand, hated working for Mrs. Hearsay. I didn't care what she paid, I just wanted out. Sound familiar?"
Matt couldn't believe what he was hearing. Until now, the old man's identity had been unknown to him… but now it was coming into focus, as incredible as it seemed.
"The guy was my father," said the old man. "When he told me that nothing matters without money, it was based on his own life experience and immediate concerns.
"Well, he was wrong." The old man snapped his fingers. "If I had it all to do over again, I'd tell him that right to his face. The truth is, nothing matters without people."
Matt just kept staring. It couldn't be, could it? What he was thinking?
What the old man had said about nothing mattering without money was exactly what Matt's own father had told him just a few short hours ago.
If the old man's father and Matt's father had both lost their jobs and said the same thing about working for Mrs. Hearsay, how could it not be possible that the old man and Matt were one and the same person at different ages?
"Do you know what else is true?" asked the old man. "Karma. What goes around, comes around. Meaning, if you're good and kind to others, then others will treat you the same way. But if you're not, the road you travel will be dark indeed."
He got up from the chair then, leaving it to rock a few more times behind him. He limped forward, arms outstretched, a sad expression on his features.
"One day, if you stay on that dark road, you'll end up an old blind man with no one to talk to, desperately lonely. And you'll wonder if you got that way because you didn't try harder to listen to others, like Mrs. Hearsay… or even your own father. You'll wonder, if only you'd taken the time to really talk to him when he was struggling, to help him with his pain, then maybe he wouldn't have drunk himself into an early grave.
"And you'll wish, one Christmas Eve, that you could go back and change what went before… talk your younger self into being the kind of person who deserves better in life." Reaching out, he placed a hand atop Matt's head. "Talk you into being better for everyone… therefore being better for me, too.
"For us."
Matt felt dizzy. The old man was starting to fade, turning to snowflakes fluttering in a hazy pillar of golden light.
"That's why I came back to this place where the walls between life and death are thin and the spirits gather." As the old man dissolved, his voice turned faint and crackly, like a station breaking into static on a radio. "To help you not to become me… even if it meant I would cease to be." Smiling sadly, he lifted his hand from Matt's head.
"Wait, please…" Matt reached for him, but the snow that was barely holding the outline of his shape only whirled around his fingers. "There's so much I want to ask you…"
"You already know everything I came here to tell you." The ghost from the future grew dimmer by the second, the contours of his face and body blending into the golden glow of the pillar of light.
Matt's eyes welled with tears. Impulsively, he threw his arms around the pillar… and for the briefest instant, he thought he could feel the form of his future self hugging him back from across the decades.
But then, that feeling was gone, his arms left combing through snowflakes and light.
"You got this," the old man whispered before he fell silent.
And the snow kept falling where he'd stood, swirling and glittering in the pillar of light that now shone only on Matt's tear-streaked face.
Later, Matt walked home through the quiet, snow-covered streets, thinking about the bizarre night he'd just experienced.
His encounter with the old man had changed him, convinced him to make a new resolution. From that night on, he was going to try harder to listen to those who needed it most, even if it inconvenienced him.
His first challenge had come when he'd walked out of the guest room and been ambushed by the mob of lonely ghosts… but he'd gotten through it. It had taken him hours to listen to the stories from Harvey and Gloria and Oscar the Fuller Brush Man and all the rest. (There were dozens in the house by then.) He'd even spent some time with Mrs. Hearsay, who'd jotted a few notes to hold up her end of the conversation.
Now, finally, he had just one more person to listen to for the night, one more person he thought could use a shoulder to cry on.
As soon as Matt walked in the back door, he saw him sipping a beer at the kitchen table. He didn't look like he was in good spirits at all. How could he be, after being out of work for months, with no immediate prospects of another job to pay the bills?
Still, he managed a smile when he looked up and saw his son walk toward him. "Hey, Matt. How did things go at Mrs. Hearsay's?"
"Never mind that." Matt pulled out a chair and sat down across the table from him. "Let's talk about you, Dad."
MIKE ZIMMERMAN
Mike Zimmerman returns for a fourth appearance in these pages with the original featured story “Eaten.” This might be the most perfect Pulphouse holiday story I have run across. Stunningly well-written and a clear holiday story using standard holiday fixings, only Mike makes this really disturbing in so many, many ways.
Mike is a full-time bestselling writer, editor, and brand storyteller who specializes in finding and honing a person/place/product’s unique voice. He has done that across a multitude of divergent brands—from publicly-traded companies to national magazines to B2B mavens to household-name authors.
He uses journalism, research, analytics, good prose chops, razor-sharp copywriting, a bent brain, and a sense of humor to create world-class content for any audience. With far over 50 books in print, including 35 novels, you can find out more about Mike at zimwrites.com.
EATEN
MIKE ZIMMERMAN
Cynthia uses the rubber spatula to push the last of the little men off the rim of the stainless-steel mixing bowl into the cookie batter. He is one of the naked ones. They aren’t all naked; some still wear pieces of uniform.
She turns the hand mixer on high and churns it all up and the batter turns color but not an unappetizing color. Still a cookie color. Or cookie enough.
Cyn’s experience making tollhouse cookies for herself is deep for age 16, so she begins with a 350-degree oven. After one overdone batch she thinks she needs more precision to get the right consistency. 334 degrees. 7:33 on the timer. Six large cookies per baking sheet.
Perfection.
So is the recipe. That hint of allspice, adding so little of it she might as well have brushed the batter bowl up against the word “allspice” on the label for the same effect.
Could one be addicted to one’s own cookie recipe?
Cynthia supposes one could.
She cleans the kitchen, crumpling up the paper towel full of little helmets and guns she’d plucked out of the batter with tweezers.
She’s in an elevated mood. That night she leaves out a plate of six cookies with some milk for the hypothetical shits and giggles.
Cookie night of the soul. That’s what he calls Christmas Eve.
To be fair, the creative folks out there sometimes leave Buffalo wings, fettuccini alfredo, and the occasional arugula salad. Sushi is always welcome as long as they leave wasabi.
But cookies and milk rule them all, as much a staple of life as the sugar and wheat the cookies come from. And like the man who always wins the hot dog eating contest out on Coney Island by wetting the buns, cookies in milk makes them fit better in the ol’ belly.
Lotta cookies, kids. Lotta work for lotta reward.
He wasn’t sure he’d even be stopping by this particular home tonight. It had been a close call. But here he is, and here are some sugar cookies. Yeah, if there’s a signature cookie on cookie night of the soul, it’s the holiday sugar cookie with red or green sugar on top. Maybe icing. These, however, are bare. Meh. He prepares for stale and bland as he finishes his other work.
But then he tastes and his mouth floods and eyes bug and he lets off a sexual sound.
He is not prone to profanity or blasphemy, but this is different and he blurts out both through his food. The cookie melting in his mouth is the most delicious he’d ever tasted. Almost otherworldly in its combination of flavor, sweetness, and mouthfeel.
He doesn’t know why. What is that flavor…? Can’t place it.
They’re so good, he stays long and eats four out of six. He wants to scarf but goes slow. He eyes the last two on the plate, then the addict’s instinct kicks in and he looks for more before they’re all gone. Would he steal cookies? Yes, these cookies he would. None in the kitchen. Who makes only six cookies?
He feels the pull from above, it’s time, the sleigh, the rest of his rounds. Checks the dining room, which is more of a garbage dumping ground, nothing there. Finally, he can hold off no longer. Dammit. He pockets the last two cookies and finishes them before he hits New England.
There are other cookies. Cynthia had made three dozen. She hides them in her bed covered in wax paper inside an airtight plastic container. She holds it close as she sleeps.
In the morning she is surprised to find gifts waiting for her.
Nothing she really wants. But the feeling feels good.
She eats nothing but cookies all day. Might be time for another batch, she thinks.
The new batch is just as good as the first. The army men screaming and trying to escape the batter as they are sucked into the whirring beaters feels even more satisfying this time.
Cookies never occurred to her at first. Why would they?
The whole thing was accidental. School was out for the holidays. Cynthia had been rummaging in the garage for nothing in particular. There was so much nothing in particular in their garage, their cellar, their closets, their dining room. She wasn’t bored so much as occupying time and fending off thoughts. But when she pulled back the flaps on an old cardboard box among old cardboard boxes, she was stung by what she saw. Stung to tears that she was just able to hold back. She started breathing again and allowed the muscles in her face to uncurl.
A batch of army men. The little green guys with the base they could stand on. Army guy crouched aiming the M16, the other guy holding the rifle above his head with a bayonet, the officer with the pistol and binocs, all of them.
Cynthia was fully clothed in the cold garage and still moved to cover herself.
Then she let loose, not roaring exactly, a final utterance of anger and she jammed her hand into the pile of men and grabbed a bunch and stuffed them in a coat pocket and then some more and stuffed the other pocket and she went back to her bedroom.
She had a collection of lighters in her room for her smoking needs, but she did not smoke now. She sure did use a lighter, though. One of the disposable ones. She used it ‘til it was dead and her room stank and her thumbtip blistered.
At some point about midway through her activity, the inert plastic army men began screaming.
They were small; the screaming would alert no one.
But they were now alive and looking very familiar to Cynthia. She knew she should be surprised but she wasn’t because, of course, this is exactly what she’d been playing in her mind. She wanted it to happen. She was so huge compared to them that she felt no need to be afraid. She could just be her rage and channel all her dreamed-of cruelty and vengeance into her work. They pleaded with her and eventually remembered what they were and tried to reassemble formation and some dove for cover in the folds of her blanket and opened fire. She felt the little thumbtack tips of their bullets bouncing off her.
They weren’t fast enough to get away. She pulled off arms and twisted legs and crushed some between her fingers and oh God, oh God, how good that felt, life leaving them while in abject terror. She held some up and burned them. So good. She threw some in a jar and screwed the lid tight. She did all this seeing their familiar faces, the four faces, it was them, over and over it was them.
When they were all dead, the last of them suffocating in the sealed jar, pawing at the sides, seeing her face at the final blue gasp, Cynthia returned to the garage and grabbed the remaining army men, perhaps twenty of them.
That’s when she began baking. She does not to this day know why it occurred to her to do it. She is only happy she did.
Who isn’t happy for cookies?
Christmas night, as Cynthia sleeps, he returns.
He checks the family room where the cookies had been left out the previous eve, just in case. Nothing.
He sneaks to the kitchen. No cookies.
He knows the author of these delights is asleep upstairs. How could he get more?
He’d been prepared for this outcome. He slips his hand in a pocket and pulls out a sheet of parchment. He pulls a self-inking quill from his other pocket and leaves the following:
I know you may not believe.
But I do. I believe in you. Cynthia.
You left me a treat Christmas Eve unlike any I have ever had.
That is over many centuries. Unprecedented.
I reveal myself here. I tell you the truth here.
That is how much I value the kindness you showed me.
I would like more.
Please.
If you do not wish to make more, perhaps you could leave me the recipe tonight.
I will be happy to leave a gift for you in return.
All you have to do is tell me what you want.
I await your reply. Cynthia.
He signs it “S” and leaves the house in darkness.
Of course Cyn finds the note.
It adds to her emotional overflow, as she isn’t sure how she feels about anything that’s been happening. Sleep and rest mess with her response. She finds some of it gratifying. She finds some of it horrifying. She believes it is happening; she can see and touch and especially taste it all. But even though she’s in complete control of the acts, she feels so out of control.
Now this.
Well, what to do? She has plenty of cookies left from her last batch.
A recurring thought: What if she can never make another? What if it all stops? She doesn’t believe that will happen, but she has to assume it will. Cyn knows what hedging is. And this kind of stuff, this unexplainable stretch she’s riding, this could all end because doesn’t it have to?
That night, she leaves one cookie.
The new note says:
I am grateful for your generosity.
Cynthia. Again I tell the truth. I need more.
Would you not like something nice? A new bicycle, perhaps?
I know you are at a mysterious age. A new phone? The one with the cinema camera?
I would love your cookie recipe.
I have not felt desire like this in many years.
Please. Cynthia.
I can give you anything you desire.
He signed it “S.”
Cynthia opens the single bag of army men she was able to find at the bargain store and they fall to the bed in a tangle of inert, toxic-stinking plastic. She thinks about what happened that time, enters her rage fugue. Her face collapses, the men rise and scatter across her bed. Some are disciplined and take up formation. She scowls and sweeps and plucks them all screaming into a bucket. Tiny firecrackers go off as they shoot. She sees their little faces, faces of the four, the four faces, she doesn’t count how many of each man there are repeated in the writhing pile, she just knows they’re in there and feeling everything and that’s all that matters.
Cyn sets up the mixer again. Preps more batter. This time she drops each little man into the bowl one at a time so she can see their little faces. Some she crushes screaming and choking between her fingers before letting them drop. The bodies have weight.
She does not know if the big men feel what the little ones feel. Now that is a wish. Somewhere out there, they feel and know. Cyn can somehow tell that all four are still alive. Maybe at that fucking base, maybe deployed, maybe discharged.
Do they feel it?
Cynthia believes they do.
“You remember me,” she says as she churns the whirring mixer into them and again sees the special cookie color.
She leaves him a few cookies. He leaves another note.
I always tell you the truth. Cynthia.
I need more.
The recipe.
I have tried and cannot replicate what you can do.
Please.
I will give you anything you want.
There must be something.
Signed “S.”
That night she leaves him half a cookie and her own note.
I won’t give you the recipe.
I’m starting to believe …
that I already have everything I want.
She signs it “C.”
Cynthia doesn’t know how any of this happened. She only knows that she is so very ready to accept and enjoy that it is happening.
