Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection

by Max Florschutz

  “I would have had to pay them more,” Rick said, crossing his arms.

  Casey blinked in surprise. “Really? You didn’t want to pay more money, so you hired someone completely new, and then get all prissy when the inexperienced new guy you saved money on doesn’t know what they’re doing?” He shook his head. “You’re not just a dick, you’re a prima donna.”

  “And what about you?” Rick asked, his voice finally rising. “You think you just get to waltz in here and do whatever you want? You don’t want to work. You hate the job! You’re just some lazy teen who wanted some money.”

  Something snapped inside his head. “Of course I hate this job!” he shouted. “How could I like it if my boss was going to spend every day giving me nothing but reasons to hate it? You criticize everything I try to do, you criticize me asking you for help when I don’t know what to do, and you make it clear that it’s some sin against life in your eyes that I don’t know how to gut a fish or tie the right knots. Well guess what!? In the rest of the world, no one knows how to gut a halibut or tie a knot! We buy things in stores! And you being super smug about knowing all this stuff and putting down anyone who even tries to learn so they can do their job right doesn’t do anything but make you a jerk! A jerk who’s going to make everyone he works with either be a jerk back or hate things.”

  He was panting. He hadn’t even realized how loud his voice had gotten until he’d stopped speaking. “I mean, why would you expect anyone to like it if you keep reminding them how terrible they are at it and what a disappointment they are to your superior eyes? Maybe in your world you and all your friends know this stuff. But I don’t. Nobody I know does. And if you’re going to be super passive-aggressive about it and put me down every time I try to learn, then I guess you’re just going to stay a part of that super-exclusive, oh-so-special club, because I can’t think of many who’d want to be a part of that, even if the money’s good.”

  “The money’s good,” Rick said, the comment coming so quick it was almost offhand.

  “Yeah, but is it worth it?” Casey retorted. “As of right now, without even knowing what it is, I’d say no. You’re a dick.”

  The wheelhouse went silent again. Well, Casey thought as he watched Rick’s expression darken, waiting for the inevitable explosion. It was an interesting if sucktacular two days while it lasted. Kind of a bummer too. Some of this was pretty neat. Even if was buried under some crap.

  “Kid,” Rick said. “I have half a mind to turn this boat around and kick you off at the dock for talking back to me like that. The other half wants to kick you out right here and tell your ungrateful little butt to swim for it.”

  Great. He couldn’t help but swallow. Could I even make it to shore? Or is the water too cold for that?

  “But …” Rick said, letting out a sigh. “You’re kind of right.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, you little buttwipe,” Rick said, pointing at him. “You’re right. Not entirely, but you made a fair point. I have been unfair to you. I’m not going to apologize, but you’re right, I’ve been a jerk. Especially when you’ve asked me to lend a hand or teach you how to do something.” He scowled. “I shouldn’t expect you to magically know everything there is to know about fishing. And I should be a little more willing to help you out, seeing as you are asking rather than just doing something stupid.”

  “At the same time, however,” he said, his finger jabbing out. “You need to drop the surly attitude you came in here with. I’ll admit I’ve not made it the best or been the easiest or nicest to you, but you showed up here with an attitude.”

  “You never gave me any reason to drop it,” Casey said.

  “Yeah, well you weren’t looking for a reason to, were you?” Rick countered. “You started out gloomy and you just got gloomier and more surly. And yes,” he said, nodding. “I’ll admit, I was being an unreasonable jerk. Maybe I need to remind myself that I get what I pay for—”

  “Thanks,” Casey said, his voice flat. “Real nice.”

  “Surly attitude again,” Rick said, his eyes narrowing. “You want to quit this job?”

  “I …” A moment ago he would have said yes, but now … “Are you going to stop treating me like one of those weird little shark things—”

  “Dog fish.”

  “Yeah, one of those—all the time?” he asked.

  “Are you going to stop being surly?”

  Casey let out a sigh. “I’ll try. I mean, this is kind of neat, even if it is really out there.”

  Rick nodded. “Well then, if you’re willing to try that, I guess I can stop being such a jerk. I mean, you’re not doing that bad out there, kid. We got done an hour earlier today, even though we caught another five hundred pounds more. That’s pretty good. You’re learning.”

  “Yeah,” Casey said, nodding and then letting out a short, concise laugh. “Yeah, I guess we did.”

  “So,” Rick said, holding out his hand. “I stop being such a jerk, you stop being all surly about it. And,” he said as Casey reached out to shake. “You never, ever speak to me again the way you just did or I’m throwing your butt overboard.”

  “Prima donna comment stung?”

  “I said never again, kid,” Rick said, his eyes narrowing. “That doesn’t mean in five seconds.”

  “Fine,” he said, reaching out and shaking on it. “You’re the captain. Let’s give this another shot. But can I make one more request?”

  “No.”

  He went for it anyway. “Can we change up the channel every so often?”

  “What?” Rick asked, his eyes widening in surprise.

  “Yeah.” Casey jerked his head at the speakers. “We listened to Roll On Down the Highway thirty-seven times today.”

  “We did?”

  “Yeah. It’s getting a little old.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Rick said, frowning as he let go of Casey’s hand. “Now get out of here before I get pissed off again.”

  He didn’t need to be told twice. He could eat dinner in his bunk.

  6:50 AM – Day 3

  “Snap.”

  “Sorry.” Casey tugged the hook free just in time. “They keep getting tangled.”

  “Yeah, well—” Whatever Rick was going to say died off, an oddly calm look coming over the man’s face. “No, they do,” he said, “but there’s a trick to it.” He snapped on the hook he’d been holding and then stepped over to the tub. “Try and grab them from this end,” he said, reaching down inside the tub and grasping a hook with his fingertips. “If they do tangle it’s usually from the hook, so that works best. If they’re still tangled after that, it’s usually a snap, and you can pop them apart with a quick tug. Try it.” He stepped back to the line with the cord he’d plucked up.

  “Okay.” Casey reached further into the tub and picked out one of the cords by the base of the hook. It slid out easily.

  “There you go,” Rick said, nodding as he took it. “Nice and easy.” He watched as the next cord tangled, and then nodded when Casey tugged it free. “Nice,” he said. “Keep it up.” The next bit of bait dropped into the water with a soft plop.

  “Thanks,” Casey said. Rick just grunted, his eyes on the line as Casey passed him another snap.

  It wasn’t raining anymore. In fact, it wasn’t grey, either. The sky had cleared, and as Casey passed the man another snap, he took a quick look at the rising sun, just coming over the crest of the horizon.

  Day three, he thought as he undid another tangle before Rick could say anything. I’m tired, and I’m sore. But … at least I’m not wet. And his stomach hadn’t done the usual flip-flops while he’d chopped bait. Maybe he was getting used to it.

  “Sna—” It was in Rick’s hands before he’d even finished asking for it.

  I am getting better, Casey thought. And after only three days. Only two weeks or so of this to go. He handed Rick another snap.

  I’m tired. And I’m sore. But you know … He looked out over the oce
an, faint whitecaps rolling atop the waves. I’m getting used to it. The speakers kicked on, but rather than the familiar opening chords of Roll On Down the Highway, a different song came on.

  “Back in Black. AC DC,” Rick said, grinning. “Thought you might appreciate something a little more modern.

  Casey laughed. “I like it,” he said. “I can work with this.”

  And maybe, he thought as he passed over another hook. Maybe this isn’t so bad.

  Other Stories

  SUPER MODEL

  Where to begin with this one? I guess to start, I should say that it’s not a genre I’ve ever written before. Technically, I guess it isn’t that different, but all the same, I’d never actually sat down and written a superhero story prior to this point (that little detail should make the title a whole lot clearer).

  Suffice to say, I’m really happy with how it turned out. In fact, SUPER MODEL remains one of my favorite stories in the entire book. Not only that, but I feel it’s a fairly unique story because of the way it … Well, hold on, I can’t tell you that, that’d be like giving away narrative spoilers.

  Sure, you’re about to read a superhero story. But it’s probably not going to be a superhero story the way you think … and that’s all I’ll say.

  Fair warning, it’s also the longest story in this collection, and part of the reason Unusual Events is a “short” story collection. So gear up, it’s going to take you a while to get to the end.

  But if I did my job right, you won’t mind at all.

  ONE

  I was six when I first saw him. Not in person, no. That didn’t come until much later. The first time I saw him was on the television; our old, beat-up, projection TV. One of the big ones with the screen that made a fun zip noise if you pulled your fingernail across it? Nowadays such a large screen doesn’t seem like much, but at the time it was my father’s pride and joy.

  Anyway, I was six when it happened. I was sitting in the living room of our small apartment, my toys scattered across the floor as I played with them. I was acting out a superhero rescue of some kind, saving of one of my toys from a burning building or a wrecked car or something else like that. Even as a young girl I was always fascinated by the idea of heroes.

  That was when the news report my father was watching switched, and my world changed. At that age, a television was just so much mindless droning most of the time unless there was something I wanted to watch on it. But for once, for the first time in my little world, the newscaster had said something I’d wanted to hear. She’d said the word absolutely guaranteed to get my six-year old self’s attention.

  Superhero.

  Looking back, I don’t honestly remember much. I’ve seen the video dozens if not hundreds of times since that breaking story, memorized every frame and every detail. I can tell you exactly what was going on and what was stolen—or at least what the investigative reports concluded. But at the time, to my six-year old self? That didn’t matter. Words were words. Boring, grown-up stuff.

  No, what mattered—and what I remember—was that shining grey figure striding across the street. I remember pressing my hands up to the screen in excitement, my father chiding me to get away from it before I ruined my eyes. I remember watching in awestruck amazement as this armored figure, this … superhero … took down a whole contingent of black marketeers. At the time, I didn’t even know what “black marketeers” meant, only that it had to be bad because a superhero—a genuine, honest, real superhero—was going up against them, right there in my home city. I watched with childlike glee, cheering as he casually took down each one of the “bad guys” with quick, almost-impossible-to-see strikes, bullets bouncing off of his armor—a fact that one of the newscasters kept coming back to.

  I didn’t care. All I cared about was that our city—my city—was home to something amazing. An honest, genuine super hero.

  I talked about it for days. Looking back, I’m fairly certain I must have driven my parents nearly mad with my constant babble. As a six-year old, I’d already been heavily invested in the global phenomena of superheroes: I had their posters, their action figures, even the little children’s books talking about who they were and what they did. I could already recite most of the origin stories from memory—or at least the ones we knew. I could tell you how many pounds-per-square-inch Acrobat’s fists could hit with, or how many annual crimes per year Magma was associated with stopping … not that I honestly understood what some of that meant at the time. But it was cool, and to a six-year old, when something is cool, it’s everything.

  And all of the sudden, here was this new addition to the collection. There was a new superhero for me to be obsessed with. And he was in my city. My toys took on new identities, new personas, one of them always “The Hero in Grey,” as the city had started to call him (after a particularly lengthy civil lawsuit involving a newscaster’s poorly chosen temporary superhero moniker, news agencies had wisely decided to ask heroes what their names were rather than assigning them one, and so “Hero in Grey” was as close as we got for the next year or two).

  My parents, bless them both, just rolled with it. I seem to recall there was some discussion about my newfound fascination, but it didn’t matter much to me at that age. Plus, I don’t think my parents saw any harm in it. The Hero in Grey had done something good, after all. He’d interrupted a heavily-armed heist of expensive, hard-to-find scientific equipment and helped capture most of the criminals involved, though some of them had still gotten away with a selection of valuable devices. But he’d done his best. He was a hero.

  But to me, most of all, he was our hero. And even at a young age, I knew we needed it.

  Life moved on, and eventually for most the furor died off. The news found new stories, new events of interest to fixate on. There was this thing called the internet that promised to be the next big step in business. There were cute animals to report on. Weather.

  But every so often, our hero would show up again, and every time he did my little heart would soar.

  It wasn’t until I was nine that things started to switch for me. Up until then, the Hero in Grey—or Wanderer, as he’d called himself during some lucky, five-second shot someone had gotten with a video camcorder—had just been a hero, someone I could look up to. Someone that was out there, trying to make our city a better place, even if we rarely saw him do it.

  But I still remember that day vividly. I was in school when it happened—the almighty fourth grade—and my birthday had been the weekend prior, so I was wearing my new Wanderer t-shirt. I’d been so excited to get it for my birthday, and I’d known it had been a stretch. Looking back, my family was probably worse off than I remember it being. To me, a little girl, money was stuff that adults usually worried about. I knew that my father had been laid off, and that both he and my mother were working hard to make up for it, but I didn’t understand. Looking back, asking for an expensive, branded item like a Wanderer t-shirt had probably been rough on my parents, who were struggling to keep our rent up and keep food on the table.

  But they’d done it anyway. I never found out how. Between the payments to the landlord, the utility companies, the “insurance,” and everything else, they still managed to save up enough money for me to have that t-shirt.

  That t-shirt was what drove the whole switch.

  It was lunch. I was sitting with a few of my friends, eating the meal I’d brought from home—jerk beef patties, one of my mother’s specialties—when one of the other girls came and stood next to my table. I don’t remember her name, but she was one of those girls who was always on top of everything. The kind that always had the newest shoes, the nicest hair, and her own little group of followers who supported her with everything.

  We got tense immediately. We were young, but we weren’t stupid, and we could see that she’d come over to make trouble. She looked around the table, making sure that she’d gotten everyone’s attention before she spoke. Then she looked right at me.

  “You’re wearin
g a Wanderer t-shirt?” she asked, a mocking tone in her voice. Had I been smart, I probably wouldn’t have said anything. This girl was the type who’d say anything just to get a rise out someone. She probably went into politics or talk radio later … I’ve honestly never checked. The conversation is what stuck with me.

  “Yeah, so?” I asked, half a beef patty still in my hand. “He protects the city.”

  “No he doesn’t,” the girl replied, giving me that matter-of-fact-you’re-an-idiot look that nine and ten year olds can manage so well. “He doesn’t do anything.”

  “Yes he does,” I said, the patty still in my hands. “He saves people. Stops robberies.”

  “Oh?” the girl asked, cocking her head to one side and twirling her long, brown hair around one finger. “Really? When was the last time he saved someone?”

  She had me there. “I don’t know,” I muttered, taking a bite out of my patty.

  “That’s because he doesn’t,” she said with a sneer. “He’s not a hero. He’s just some guy in a dumb suit.”

  She’d touched a nerve. “No he’s not!” I said, speaking through a half-full mouth. “He came here because he wants to protect us!” At this point I should have sensed that the tables near us were starting to get quiet, the other kids sensing a powder-keg situation. “And his suit’s not dumb. It’s cool.”

  “No, it’s stupid,” she said, making a face at me. “And so’s Wanderer. And so are you if you’re going to wear a t-shirt with—”

  That was when I jumped up and hit her. Right in the mouth. Everything after that was just chaos and shouting teachers as I went after her.

  I got suspended. Starting a fight is bullying, after all. Or so my teachers told me. Whatever-her-name-was played it for all she was worth, too, and I got into big trouble. She got off scot free. I remember wishing for few weeks afterwards that every time she gave me a smug look the real Wanderer would show up, just to tell her she was wrong.