by Al
She turned on her heels and marched off.
When I walked back into the classroom the talking began again. By the end of the period they had all faced their desks toward the back of the classroom once more.
~ * ~
I took a different route home, the same I had ridden that morning. There had been no trouble then, but this time as I left the school behind me, turning my bicycle into a wide street with houses set well back on manicured lawns, a wall of hedges suddenly thrust up in front of me. I drew to a stop. The wall was rushing like a living wave toward me. I turned my bike only to see another behind me. To either side the houses began to disappear, sharp green buds pushing out from their trim fronts, doors and windows and shutters, devouring them. The hedge drew in on me from all sides. I felt cool wet green and smelled rich oxygen.
“No!” I shouted in panic.
There was a driveway to my right, still clear of obstruction, and I drove the bicycle that way, the hedges closing in on me as I did so. As the driveway reached the side of the house branches pushed out of the siding toward me. The house disappeared in a blanket of green. The hedges pushed the bike to the right, where another wall of green awaited me. I felt the caress of soft buds and a whisper in my ear.
Yesss…
I screamed, driving the bicycle forward. There was a free-standing garage in front of me bursting into green before my eyes, the hedge closing in from both sides in front of it. But there was a slim opening to the left leading to the backyard and I peddled fiercely at it, pushing through as the branches like cold hands sought to pull me in—
And then I was through the suffocating hedge, the bike shooting forward into the clear backyard and toward a well-separated line of forsythia bushes that marked the backyard boundary between houses.
I stopped, skidding on the grass, and turned around.
The house was as it had been—neat, trim, unblemished by green limbs and tiny leaves.
The hedge was gone from the driveway, from the far street.
I turned and dismounted the bicycle, rolling it through a gap between forsythias and into the abutting backyard and then to a new street and eventually home.
~ * ~
I tried one more time.
“I just don’t fit in.”
Jacqueline laughed. “You’ve never fit in,” she said, her voice slurred, and then she laughed shortly again. “And I do mean that in every way.”
She was disheveled, the front of her dress buttoned incorrectly. She had obviously had much more to drink than the vodka in front of her. Her lipstick was smeared and her eyes unfocused as she bobbed her head around to regard me.
She smiled.
“I’ll need the car tomor—”
“Have you ever felt physically smothered?” I asked, ignoring her.
She looked at her vodka tonic. “All the time.”
“No, I mean physically. For real. Like everything, everything you’ve tried and failed at, your whole life, all your unhappiness, was literally closing in on you. As if…hedges, actual green hedges, were pushing you in from all sides and wanted to swallow you whole—”
It was her turn to interrupt. She laughed and then hiccupped, then brought her drink to her lips before putting it down again.
“Harold, you are a moron.” She got unsteadily to her feet, forgot the drink, pushing it aside. It tipped over and fell from the kitchen table, breaking in a pool of clear liquid and glass shards.
She moved past me unsteadily, pointing languidly at the refrigerator.
“TV. Dinner,” she said. “I’m…out. Need the car…tomorrow. Ride your bike again…”
She walked to the front door, leaving it open behind her, and in a few moments I heard the car door slam and then the engine start.
In the empty house I looked out through the kitchen window at the backyard, overgrown with weeds and bushes and what looked for a moment like a rising tide of hedges, which abruptly vanished.
~ * ~
I took a third route the next morning. After Jacqueline had left the night before, the Assistant Principal had called and told me the school had decided it wasn’t working out and that I should not continue teaching. Would I please come in the next morning to sign some papers and pick up a check for two day’s work.
The new route was out of the way but clear. In effect, I was riding in a wide circle to get to the school. As I turned onto an unfamiliar street that would bring me back in the right direction, the boy with the cranberry colored baseball cap was crossing the street in front of me.
He leered at me as I went by and shouted, “So long!”
I put my head down and rode faster.
When I brought my head up, I gasped.
“No!”
Hedges were pushing in at me from all sides, and the sky was quickly blacking out from a lowering cloud of green.
Buds burst from the street below me, snarling the spokes of the bicycle and then stopping it dead.
Branches twined around the handlebars, the seat, yanking the bike out of my grasp.
I felt a cold wet touch slide across my fingers, my face.
Yessss.
When I tried to scream, hedge shoots snaked over and up my body and deep into my mouth.
I was pushed onto my back and lifted in a cocoon of branches and leaves.
I gagged, and then the voice sounded close by my ear.
You don’t understand.
I continued to thrash, to fight, watching the last glimmer of the world, a tiny hole of blue sky, blotted out above me by a tiny green wet leaf.
Think…
“No—!”
And then, suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown in my head, I did understand, and I stopped fighting.
“Yes!” I cried.
The hedge enclosed me, into itself.
Yesss.
My fingers are cold and wet, with green fresh buds at the ends.
I belong.
The Silly Stuff
By Al Sarrantonio
“No, I tell you I’m on to something, Bill. You have to keep printing them!”
The voice on the other end of the line said something nasty.
“Oh, yeah? And the same to you!” Nathan Halpern slammed the wall phone back into its cradle. Instinctively he checked the coin return to see if anything had dropped into it. “Damn,” he said, and walked back to the bar.
The bartender smiled. “Almost never works.”
Halpern waved him off, taking a sip of his beer. “That’s not what I’m mad about,” he said. He pulled a crumpled newspaper clipping from the pocket of his equally rumpled sports jacket and pushed it across the bar. “Here,” he said, “look at this.”
It was a slow Wednesday afternoon in the Golden Spoon Tavern, in the dead center of a killing August heat wave. The lunch crowd, what little there was of it, had long gone, and besides Nathan Halpern the only other customers the bartender had to worry about were two regulars at the other end of the bar, each of whom, like clockwork, drank one scotch on the rocks every half-hour; and since it was nearly twenty minutes until the next round was due, the bartender could afford to socialize. He took the clipping and read:
~ * ~
FISH FALL FROM SKY
Copanah, NY (Aug. 12)—Residents of the small town of Copanah, ten miles northeast of Albany, reported a rain of dead fish yesterday. The creatures, which allegedly resembled cod in appearance, were scattered over an area two miles square, and local residents insist that they dropped from the heavens.
One elderly resident of the town, Sam Driller, whose integrity was vouched for by several neighbors including Copanah’s mayor, stated that he had gone out to move some trash cans to the street for pickup when “a whole barrelful of fish dropped right on top of me. I looked up, and the sky’s full of ‘em—they was dropping right out of the clouds. It ain’t natural, but I swear I saw it.”
Two local policemen and the daughter of the town librarian also witnessed the event, and local authorities
could offer no explanation. A spokesman for Margolies Air Force Base, thirty miles away, reports that none of its aircraft were in the air at that time.
~ * ~
The bartender folded the clipping and handed it back to Halpern. “So?” he said. “Silly stuff like that turns up in the papers every summer.” He cocked his head toward the telephone on the wall. “I heard part of your conversation. You wrote this?”
“Yeah.” Halpern nodded glumly. “And you don’t think there’s anything to it either?”
The bartender drew Halpern another beer, setting it down in front of him. “That one’s on the house. To tell you the truth, no.”
Halpern leaned across the bar and tapped his finger against the wood. “I checked every one of those witnesses myself.”
The bartender shrugged. “Doesn’t mean a thing. All those people could easily have been lying.”
Halpern nearly knocked his beer over. “No way!” he said excitedly. “I know it’s supposed to be the dog days and all that, but this stuff is for real. I’ve checked it out. It goes on all the time, all over the place. Little clusters of reports here, little clusters there. The only reason you see more stuff in the paper in July and August is because there’s nothing else to print. But these things actually happen all the time, since before newspapers existed. And this time they’re happening here in Albany County.”
The bartender still looked skeptical.
“Look—” Halpern took a sip of beer and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “—have you ever heard of Charles Fort?”
The bartender scratched his head. “Wrote a bunch of paperbacks, right?”
Halpern nodded. “Something like that. Fort was a kind of journalist. Spent over twenty-five years in the New York Public Library and the British Museum collecting stories from newspapers and scientific journals—stories like the one I showed you. He had thousands and thousands of clippings and articles, and he put them into books like Lo! and The Book of the Damned. He documented all kinds of weird things—wolf children, devil sightings, flying saucers, volcanic eruptions spewing out human limbs instead of lava—you name it. He didn’t take all of it seriously, but he was convinced that everything that happens is somehow connected; that there is only one unified reality that everything is tied to. One of his favorite quotes was, ‘I think we’re all property.’”
The bartender laughed. “We are,” he said. “We’re all owned by the IRS.”
Halpern didn’t smile. “Charles Fort was no nut. Hell, after he died back in the thirties, a bunch of people like Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, and Alexander Woollcott got together and started the Fortean Society to continue the work he was doing. It still exists.”
The half-hour chime sounded on the cuckoo clock over the cash register, and the bartender mixed and delivered two more scotches to the regulars. When he came back, he looked thoughtful.
“So you really think there’s something behind it?”
Halpern nodded. “I’ve checked out too many of these stories to think they’re all baloney. I swear there’s a pattern to it all, just like Fort believed.”
“Well, I’m still unconvinced. From what I’ve seen behind this bar, you can find patterns wherever you want to.”
Halpern leaned close, and a conspiratorial tone came into his voice. “Do you know someone named Rita Gartenburg?”
“Sure,” the bartender replied. “I’ve lived down the block from her for twenty years.”
“She a drunk? Or a nut?”
“No way!” said the bartender. “Never seen her in here or any other gin mill in town. And she’s no kook. She’s a nice, steady lady who grows prize roses in her backyard.”
“Well,” said Halpern, “prize-winning or not, she told me she saw a bunch of those same rosebushes get up off the ground and walk around.”
The bartender’s jaw dropped. “You must be kidding.”
“That’s what she told me,” said Halpern, “and that’s the way I’m going to report it. She even took a couple of pictures, but the damn things didn’t come out.”
The bartender shrugged. “I don’t know what to think.”
Halpern downed his beer and prepared to leave. “You know,” he said, “I used to be a hotshot columnist, weekdays and in the Sunday supplement. Political reporter.” He shook his head. “But I never believed anything as strongly as I believe this stuff. I’ve been at it two months now, ever since the Fourth of July, when a bunch of kids near my house said they saw a skyrocket land back on the ground and run away.” He gave a short laugh and held two fingers a quarter-inch apart as he backed through the door. “I’m telling you, there’s something there, and I’m getting closer to it all the time.”
~ * ~
SKY GOES BLACK AT NOON
ON SUNNY DAY
~ * ~
Sumptersville, NY (Aug. 20)—According to residents of Sagerstown, four miles east of Sumptersville, the sky suddenly turned black at twelve noon yesterday. Local weather charts showed that the day was cloudless and sunny, with north-northwest winds at six to eight miles per hour, but an affidavit signed by nearly all of the seventy-six residents of the tiny community, known statewide for its annual cornbread festival each September, swore that at exactly twelve o’clock “the sky went completely dark, as if God Himself had pulled a light switch off.”
There were no stars visible during the occurrence, which lasted approximately five minutes, and an eerie silence seemed to come over the town. Then suddenly, according to the statement, it was bright daylight again.
Witnesses and signers of the affidavit included six members of the local town council, as well as retired weatherman Jed Burns, who worked for local TV station WWWM for twenty-three years. Reached for comment, Burns said that he was “still in a stunned condition” and had no idea what had happened. He said he has tried to get the U.S. Weather Bureau involved in the matter, but that so far they have shown no interest.
~ * ~
“I tell you, Bill,” Halpern yelled into the phone, “I’m real close.”
There was silence on the other end for a moment, and then a squawking sound that lasted for a minute and a half.
At the end of it Halpern waited a few seconds. “No, Bill,” he said calmly, “I have not been out in the sun too long. I’ve told you from the beginning of this thing that you should just let me run with it, and I’m telling you again. When I break it open, I’ll come back to Albany and be a good boy.”
There was another short squawk on the other end.
“That’s right, a good boy. Cover the state legislature and everything. I promise. But you have to let me follow this through.”
Another squawk.
“That’s right. Six-headed chickens and all. But that was yesterday, editor mine. Today it was ball-point pens dropping through the ceiling of a supermarket.”
Another squawk—actually, more of a screech this time, louder and more insistent.
“Didn’t you hear me at all? I said I’m beginning to see a pattern to all this. This could be my chance to be Woodward and Bernstein, Bill.”
Squawk.
“No, I haven’t actually seen any of it. I always seem to be one town behind, and when I guess where the next thing will occur, I always guess wrong. But I’ll break the code. And yes, the chicken could have been fake, but it wasn’t. Believe me, it’s beginning to click.”
Silence on the other end; then a low, rasping sound.
“That’s right, Bill—Woodward and Bernstein. Sure you got that whole story? Okay, call you tomorrow.”
~ * ~
COW GIVES BIRTH TO
TWO DOGS
Pokerton, NY (Aug. 23)—Bill Gainesborough, a small farmer in this dairy farming community, swears that one of his cows gave birth to two puppies earlier this week. Gainesborough, who was upset by the event and hesitant to talk about it to reporters, stated that his cow Ilse, one of thirty milk cows on the farm, gave birth to two dogs “right in front of my eyes.”
The puppies
are cocker spaniels, and there are no cocker spaniel owners within ten miles of the Gainesborough property. Neighbors, who urged the farmer to talk about what had happened, swore that Gainesborough was not the kind of man to pull a hoax. The puppies were given to a local foundling home.
~ * ~
Halpern didn’t call his editor back the next day. On Wednesday the twenty-fifth he found himself in Lolarkin, where a group of schoolboys claimed to have seen three moons in the sky. Thursday the twenty-sixth found him in Crater, where two grandmothers and twelve of their kin swore that their house had lifted itself off its foundation, turned around 180 degrees, and set itself back down again. On Friday he was in Peach Hollow, just missing a rain of black tar. Saturday he spent in Cooperville, arriving a scant three minutes after two hamsters had talked in a crowded pet store; he’d guessed right on that location, but had miscalculated as to time. Sunday morning the twenty-ninth he sat in a diner in Reseda, staring at a horribly creased map of the state, when suddenly the pattern rose before his blurry eyes.
He shoved the map under his arm as he dialed the phone. His hands were shaking. He stared back across the room at his eggs getting cold while the phone rang.
“Bill, it’s me.”
This time there wasn’t squawking, but rather a high and steady whine.
“I know it’s Sunday morning. No, I didn’t know it was six o’clock. I’ve been up all night.”
His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Shut up, Bill,” he said into the phone as the whining started up again. He fumbled the map up to his eyes. “It’s simple as hell. Crisscross, crisscross. These things have been making little x’s all over the county. And you know what that means? Something, some single source, is behind it all.”
Silence.
“Did you hear me?”
Silence again. Then a carefully phrased question.
“No, I won’t tell you where I am. Wait for me to phone in my story. But I’ll bet you even money that I’m in the place where the next thing happens. Just another day or two, Bill. That’s all I need.”
Silence. Then a sigh.
“Thanks, Bill. If you were here I’d kiss your ugly face.”
