Old Farts

by Vera Nazarian

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.

  OLD FARTS

  Vera Nazarian

  Copyright © 2005 by Vera Nazarian

  Cover Design Copyright © 2012 by Vera Nazarian

  All Rights Reserved. Except for use in reviews, reproduction of this work in any form is prohibited without the permission of the publisher.

  Kindle Ebook Reprint Edition

  January 15, 2012

  A Publication of

  Norilana Books

  P. O. Box 209

  Highgate Center, VT 05459-0209

  http://www.norilana.com/

  Published in the United States of America

  OLD FARTS

  by Vera Nazarian

  As usual we kidnapped him from the one spot in the back of the store that was just out of sight of the pesky security camera. Few would complain that our la méthode—pardon my French—wasn’t sufficient for the task at hand.

  We tied his wrists with a lethal braided combination of expensive dress shoe mulberry shoelaces and the elastic sports shoe kind, and wadded up his mouth with James’s knitted tie. It was that or Walter’s woolly vest, and frankly the vest was too big even for this one’s mouth.

  Next, we took him to the conveniently adjacent, poorly-lit, stuffy and malodorous facility that passed for the men’s lavatory in the back of the bookstore café. There we placed him on a tall borrowed barstool chair, precisely in the middle of the checkerboard tile floor, while he continued to fidget and pop out his eyes at us since that was all he could do, being all wadded up as he was.

  And in silent anticipation we crowded around him, hungry literary vultures.

  “I suggest he’s mine,” James said, breaking the momentous silence punctuated only by the mild waterfall tinkle of a running toilet in the background. “Seeing as he’s got my Finnegan tie, well, in there.” And he pointed to the squirming mouth, then touched his unbuttoned shirt with its messed up collar for reference.

  Walter granted him a thoughtful glance full of exponential wisdom and philosophical calculation.

  Sam—who, to make our existences even more confusing, claimed that his other moniker was Mark—just continued to slurp the bookstore mocha triple latteccino, an iced coffee drink confiscated from the kidnapped victim. There was a Cheshire cat expression on Sam’s face. Periodically he scratched behind his ear or patted down his wiry graying hair in an attempt to keep himself from using his restless index finger as a lady’s hair roller, or—what is it they say—that newfangled contraption, the curling iron. Ah, such antique bad habits we keep, such unique nervous ticks. . . .

  This, of course left me to be the proactive one.

  I cleared my throat. “Let’s consider,” I said. “The young fellow was in my section. Well enough? What does it matter that he was monologuing loudly—and inaccurately, I must add—about Civil War field maneuvers and laughable military tactics, as gleaned through MGM musicals on celluloid? Or that he is currently chewing your Irish-knitted tie, James? He is mine because he just stood for about ten minutes in front of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror stacks, doing absolutely nothing even remotely smacking of bibliophile consumerism. To the contrary, you might say he was blocking the shelves for that nice young lady in spectacles who was trying to access several Star-prefixed volumes of Trek and Wars there. And yes, he inconvenienced at least three other people who were trying to browse that particular area while meaning business. If I had a measuring rule handy, I’d say he was a good five inches away from my mass-market edition paperback. And if I had a chronometer, it might have been at least three solid minutes of puerile inaction in regard to my paperback. Granted, the volume itself was somewhat misfiled, since it really belongs in the literature section . . .”

  “So?” said Sam, tearing himself from the addictive spigot of the straw and the beckoning icy mocha. “He was next to my trade paperbacks five minutes ago, sucking up air in literature, and I didn’t grab him then.”

  “Too bad, Mark—I mean, Sam,” I said. “You really should have. He was running off the mouth with that underdressed, underage female far too long. This is a bookstore, not a coffee dating joint. At least not until you turn the corner near the magazine racks and begin hearing galloping sounds of that—what you call it—Lady Kah—”

  “Gaga.” Sam corrected me.

  “Next fellow’s mine,” said Walter. “I’ll take him even if he’s just passing by the historical romance and adventure classics section.”

  “Fine,” I said, thinking with fond amusement that once again Walter had forgotten that these days romance and adventure were no longer filed together, and what passed for such was neither particularly romantic nor adventurous. “You do that, my good Sir. But this one belongs to me. Now, enough banter, let’s be charitable and release his mouth.”

  Walter’s left brow came up in slow uncertainty, but he merely leaned forward and stared at the victim seated on the barstool. “You won’t scream, will you, my man?” he asked after some time in a comforting old-man voice.

  In response came muffled noises.

  “Relax, we won’t harm you, I promise; you have my word—a word that carries weight, a ponderous galleon boat anchor, you might say—of a true Dublin gentleman’s gaming wager, regardless of actual blue blood quotient in the veins. Which, in a nutshell, means that you must absolutely trust me, or else dire circumstances ensue; baffling woo-woo and shady events come to haunt slippery gray-sky daydreams, and for good measure you get stream-of-consciousness verbosity from yours truly; none of which is intended to frighten you any further, to be sure. Now then: we are only here to make certain that you buy at least one book—a fine, worthy book that is acknowledged by expert opinion to represent the upper-echelon of quality, be it genre or mainstream fiction or literature, or what have you—before you leave the store. And it doesn’t have to be my book, by any means,” James said, as he leaned forward also, and then proceeded to take back his saliva-soaked tie, holding it up with one pinkie sticking out in disgust, in a perversely drawn-out parody of a dental extraction procedure. “Not unless you like quirky intricate stuff that rambles quite a bit and at times gets rather diarrhetic and logorrheic in equal measure: intimate with psychological examination of humanity’s foibles while your naked behind is firmly perched on the porcelain throne,” he added.

  Whatever else he might have muttered was unverifiable. I admit I often have trouble following James when he starts on those long tirades of complex compound sentences. Cheeky peculiar fellow he is, our James.

  Meanwhile, the unfortunate casualty of our caper, seated in the high chair, must have shared my confusion, because his reaction to the good Irishman’s intricate words amounted to well-chewed, poorly digested, and then up-chucked monosyllables and gorilla grunts.

  “Awwwa-haw-wa-what?”

  And then, “!#@$%^&*! Who are you people? What do you want? And what in piss-awful, flaming-sheep-ass-stinking hell did you stick in my mouth?” said the victim, an eighteen year old kid, his mouth now freed and in full command of young unfettered speech.

  “We’re writers, son,” replied Walter gently. “And no need to get excited. You were out there jabbering in the cafe, flirting with the young ladies, taking up space, breathing up literary air, and you haven’t actually purchased anything from the bookstore besides that cup of joe. You don’t like to read, do you? Not really?”

  “Huh?” said the victim. “What are you talking about? Are you people psychos? And are you going to untie me, or what? Look, I am gonna yell and call security—”

  “You do that and the tie g
oes right back in your mouth,” I said. “Enjoy sucking wool? Now then, here is the deal. Very simple, if I may say so myself. We are going to let you go, and we’ll accompany you back in there to the shelves where you will browse diligently for a reasonable quarter of an hour and then pick up a slim classic horror paperback with my name on the cover, and you will take it to the checkout and pay for it. Cash or credit is fine these days, I hear—though, debit is likely more prudent in this economy, seeing as you are going to have to take care of that scholastic loan eventually. Then, once you are paid up at the register, you are free to go, and we promise never to bother you again. In fact, we will give you a pass-card, a voucher of sorts, in case you are, uhm . . . detained in a similar fashion in the future. Of course, chances of it happening again to you are infinitely slim. Nothing to be concerned about.”

  “What the—” said the victim. “What kind of freaks are you? What if I don’t want to buy any book, okay? I have no money, okay? I got my own books, okay? Look, I have class tomorrow and I just came in here to study. Don’t believe me? My backpack is still out there in the store—”

  “Okay, okay, and okay. That’s fine and dandy,” I said, beginning to untie the kid’s hands from behind. Those famous shoelaces made some tricky Gordian knots, it must be noted. “Glad to hear that you own books and are familiar with the general principle of it, really I am. But you will buy this one more book. Just one. ‘Poe’ on the cover.”

  I stopped and then stared at him with my coldest, most unblinking out-of-the-crypt glare normally reserved for special occasions and imbued with a writer’s unique blend of solitude.

  “Don’t make me upset,” I said, while a bitter world of intensity and yearning was churning inside, all the pent-up agonized nights of pondering and writing in the dark silence, with only an astringent drink in a glass on the table and the weak candlelight illuminating the despair in my face, the decaying wistfulness of memories, of the many a long ago in a kingdom by the sea. . . . “You don’t want to do that. Be a good kid and buy the book, and all will be well.”

  “Uh—” said the kid, seeing only the smallest extent of my intensity, just that tip of the iceberg—but it was enough. “Okay.”

  “Good,” I said with a triumphant symphonic up-swell of a smile, adjusted my spectacles, and then finished untying him.

  As usual, the end was the same. After the initial burst of passion and the protestations, the anger and the fear and the general puzzlement at the oddity—and who could blame them?—it always worked out like this: accommodation and complacence.

  We always ended up with Pavlovian trained puppies. Had we been evil in the true sense of the bottomless abyss, we could have raised a consumer army and told them to go forth and buy pounds of manure and Acme widgets at random.

  Good thing we were merely old windbags with a personal agenda.

  For the record, it’s not as if we threatened these kids with anything specific, just the general suggestion of woo-woo and weirdness. Could it really be that the nebulous unknown we barely hinted at, was the worst imaginable thing for them? This I pondered at such moments, every single damn time; the vast terror inherent in the unknown. . . .

  “Don’t try to run, kid,” said Mark also known as Sam—or was it the other way around? Frankly, I give up—taking a long pull of the coffee drink. “Just walk forward at a steady pace. Steady as a steamboat. Remember, we are right beside you.”

  “And behind you, sirrah!” Walter added.

  We all started to move in a rambling, elderly—ahem, distinguished—cavalcade as soon as James gently prodded the kid off the barstool.

  He staggered a bit, rubbing his wrists and stared at us with rounded eyes. As always there was that barrier of time and comprehension between us, a fine translucent film separating the nature of the look of his eyes and ours—never the twain shall meet.

  Then, after arranging our motley troupe of literary comedians, with him leading, we left the restroom and returned to the front of the store, walking as might a casual group of harmless, middle-aged, slightly funny-dressed book club members-cum-belletrists who get together here in the bookstore on a regular basis; who discuss the latest page-turner with ardent disdain and critique each other’s memoirs and other authorial messes with eternally hopeful aspirations.

  In a sense, that’s who we were. But we were also terrifying, secret enforcers, holders of universes, makers of worlds, blah, blah, and so on; you know all that.

  And we made damn sure our so-called immortal works would always sell.

  “Old Farts” was originally published as an Amazon Short, October 25, 2005.

  If you enjoyed reading this story, please consider buying other books by this author, so that she can continue to write, illustrate, publish, pay the rent, eat, and feed the cats so as not to be eaten in turn.

  OTHER BOOKS BY VERA NAZARIAN

  Lords of Rainbow

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005WZZGUM/?tag=veranazariafantaA

  Dreams of the Compass Rose

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00439GNH8/?tag=veranazariafantaA

  Salt of the Air

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003I84MQO/?tag=veranazariafantaA

  The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005R2IQGQ/?tag=veranazariafantaA

  The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CIHAYE/?tag=veranazariafantaA

  Mayhem at Grant-Williams High (YA)

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004K1EULU/?tag=veranazariafantaA

  The Duke in His Castle

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003HKRHGK/?tag=veranazariafantaA

  After the Sundial

  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003YH9IUO/?tag=veranazariafantaA

  Mansfield Park and Mummies

  http://www.norilana.com/mpam.htm

  Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons

  http://www.norilana.com/naad.htm

  (Forthcoming)

  Pride and Platypus: Mr. Darcy’s Dreadful Secret

  * * *

  Please see Vera Nazarian’s Amazon Author Central page for more:

  http://www.amazon.com/Vera-Nazarian/e/B001K8E7DC/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

  Thank you for your support!

  About the Author

  Vera Nazarian is a two-time Nebula Award® Finalist and a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She immigrated to the USA from the former USSR as a kid, sold her first story at 17, and has been published in numerous anthologies and magazines, honorably mentioned in Year’s Best volumes, and translated into eight languages.

  Vera made her novelist debut with the critically acclaimed Dreams of the Compass Rose, followed by Lords of Rainbow. Her novella The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass made the 2005 Locus Recommended Reading List. Her debut collection Salt of the Air contains the 2007 Nebula Award-nominated “The Story of Love.”

  Recent work includes the 2008 Nebula Finalist novella The Duke in His Castle, science fiction collection After the Sundial (2010), The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration (2010), and three Jane Austen parodies, Mansfield Park and Mummies (2009), Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons (2010), and Pride and Platypus: Mr. Darcy’s Dreadful Secret (forthcoming), all part of her Supernatural Jane Austen Series.

  After many years in Los Angeles, Vera now lives in a small town in Vermont. She uses her Armenian sense of humor and her Russian sense of suffering to bake conflicted pirozhki and make art. In addition to being a writer, philosopher, and award-winning artist, she is also the publisher of Norilana Books.

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  Cover Art - Image Details

  “Inside a bookstore, Eugene, Oregon,” by Visitor7, December 17, 2011; “Quill pen” by Baselmans, July 12, 2007; “A photograph of a daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe 1848,” first published 1880, taken by W.S. Hartshorn, Providence, RI, on November 9th, 1848, photo taken in 1904 by C.T. Tatman, image modified by DIREKTOR and Beao; “Portrait of Walter Scott” by Henry Raeburn, 1822; “James Joyce,” photo by C. Ruf, Zurich, ca. 1918, image by Chick Bowen (Modra), July 10, 2007; “Mark Twain” taken by A. F. Bradley in New York, 1907, image by Beao, July 20, 2011.