Collected Short Stories: Volume V

by Barry Rachin

  "I don't know." Lyuba replied. "Hard liquor is bad for your stomach. She wants you to -"

  "My only pleasures in life are pelmeni and vodka." A messy scattering, remnants of the spicy, meat-stuffed dumplings, littered the kitchen table and surrounding floor. He glanced at the nurse and cracked an ingratiating, gap-toothed smile. "Ask the old hen if her bowel movements are firm or loose."

  Lyuba cringed.

  "What did he say?" the visiting nurse demanded, sensing that a joke was being played at her expense.

  "Find out," Mr. Grushko bellowed, "if her hemorrhoids swell up to the size of golf balls after a particularly hard -"

  "He says his stools are normal lately… no problem." Lyuba was growing weary of the verbal sparring. Mr. Grushko would never stop swilling liquor, just as on her deathbed the visiting nurse would still be an officious prig.

  A cell phone twittered and the blonde woman reached for her purse. "Excuse me a moment." Pressing the phone to her ear, she rushed out into the hallway.

  "I'm going to the ethnic market later. I'll pick up an Izvestia, some chopped herring in white wine sauce, a chunk of sesame halva and those buckwheat blinis you like."

  For the first time since Lyuba entered the apartment, Mr. Grushko's stoic features eased. "How did you know to come here?"

  "Mitchell… the maintenance worker."

  "Nice man."

  "He's got no personality."

  Mr. Grushko rubbed the back of his neck with an arthritic hand. For thirty years he worked as a welder at a factory in Smolensk. Stalin toured the facility. Mr. Grushko spent thirteen days at the infamous Lubyanka Prison for talking back to a supervisor. They beat him with a rubber hose, but it could have been worse. A coworker was sent to the Gulag for a lesser offense.

  Lubyanka - in Soviet Russian jokes it was referred to as ‘the tallest building in Moscow, since Siberia could be seen from its basement’. Another joke referred to the building as ‘Adult's World’ as compared to ‘Children's World,’ the name of the popular toy store across the street.

  "No, you're wrong," the old man cautioned. "Last Thursday, Mitchell went and got Mrs. Brodsky's groceries when her legs swelled like tree stumps, and she couldn't leave the apartment. The maintenance worker went after work on his own time." The old man cleared his throat, making a series of retching sounds. "And when the exterminators sprayed for roaches in December, he moved my furniture out into the hallway - even the heavy bureau - and wouldn't take a penny for his troubles."

  "So what's his problem?"

  Mr. Grushko stared pensively out the window, where the muddy earth was flecked with the remnants of late-winter snow. He shrugged and rubbed his unshaven cheeks. "No great mystery... he's just damaged good like the rest of us."

  Damaged goods. Lyuba sensed something to that effect early on. The maintenance man smiled easily enough but the expression was tinged with a covert sadness, a melancholy she felt in her bones. It was an entrenched misery that could only be kissed or petted away - and even that with great difficulty. Strangely, that bleak sorrow only intensified her attraction for the man who never looked her full in the face.

  Suddenly the front door burst open and the nurse reappeared. "So, where were we?"

  *****

  Lyuba went back down stairs. Mitchell was washing windows in the recreation room. She watched as a shiny streak of ammoniated cleaner evaporated on the glass. "When you're done with the windows, come to my apartment." The ethnic Russian woman from Bysk in central Siberia had a chronically hoarse voice, and her thick Russian accent heightened the guttural inflection.

  "Okay."

  Back upstairs, Lyuba removed a container with a reddish liquid from the refrigerator. Transferring the food into a smaller bowl, she heated it in a microwave.

  “Borscht... beet soup," She said when the maintenance man arrived. She sat him down at the kitchen table. "Everyone in Russia eats borscht.” She spooned a dollop of sour cream in the center of the bowl and placed it in front of him. "For flavoring we use meaty bone-in beef shank, diced onion, carrots, russet potatoes, fresh dill and a tablespoon of red wine vinegar."

  Mitchell stirred the sour cream toward the edge of the bowl mixing it with the vegetables then watched wistfully as the sour cream absorbed the broth and darkened to a pinkish hue before tasting the soup. “This is damn good!” He emptied the bowl.

  Reaching out, she rested a hand on his forearm. "Want to spend time together?"

  "A date?"

  "Yes, something of the sort," Lyuba replied.

  "All this time," Mitchell mumbled sheepishly, "I've been trying to get up the courage..."

  "More soup?" Lyuba placed the ladle back in the bowl and stirred the vegetables in the sweet broth.

  back to Table of Contents

  Thyroids, a Love Story

  “Nock. Nock. Nock. Aram noks but nobody seams home.”

  Beatrice Monahan, the writing instructor, read from the wrinkled manuscript in a flat monotone then waved the half dozen pages over her head like a moral indictment at the disheveled young man sitting three rows back near the water cooler. "The verb, knock, begins with the letter 'k' and seams are stitches used to bind fabric." Her hazel eyes drifted off at an oblique angle, as though addressing the student directly might push the writing instructor beyond her emotional limits.

  Dressed in steel-toed work boots and a blue shirt with the Firestone Tire emblem stitched above the left pocket, Abi Petrosyan ran a thumb and index finger over a bearded chin in a repetitive, soothing gesture. A wild outcropping of curly black hair cascaded down over his ears. “Story is goot... yes, no?”

  “I appreciate the fact that that English is a second language," The barrel-chested woman observed, "but, perhaps on rare occasion you could consult a dictionary?”

  “Computer hab spell check,” he offered. “Is same thing.”

  Sage, who sat near the front, wondered if the writing instructor went out of her way to foster the image of a physical grotesque. The frumpy woman stood five foot three and weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. Like some displaced time traveler from the psychedelic sixties, she favored flowery, moo moos and wire-framed granny glasses. Under the best of circumstances, the woman with the orangey hair would never be a fashion plate. Sage wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to discover that Ms. Monahan never shaved her armpits or bothered with feminine deodorants.

  At the previous meeting of the writers' group, Abi told a funny story.

  Over the winter he traveled back to his homeland to visit relatives. As the Beechcraft King Air twin-prop landed in Baku, the plane badly overshot the runway by several hundred feet, caroming off the asphalt into an open field of barley. The Caspian Sea was visible out the grimy passenger window a short distance to the east. "Was not so good the brakes," the Armenian immigrant noted with a goofy smile that belied his somber tone recounting the ordeal.

  As Abi explained it, the region was desperately poverty stricken, the government feudal and corrupt. When a domestic plane experienced mechanical problems or needed routine maintenance, spare parts were often purchased on the black market. They were third rate, the substandard metal either too soft or brittle. It's just the way things were. The provincial country was one of six independent Turkish states with Russia to the north and Iran due south.

  Abi desperately wanted to get it all down on paper, to chronicle his bizarre experiences. "I go home for Christmas to visit family, not for to swim in Caspian Sea." He chuckled and rubbed good-naturedly at his hairy chin. Abi was just Abi - a grease monkey, heartbroken over the immutable loss of his spiritual homeland. So he joked in fractured English and, as best he could, jotted down his life story. Nock. Nock.Nock.

  Eight students signed up for the creative writing workshop. Two dropped out before the first class. Among the participants, there was Carl, a sixteen year-old high school junior with a twitchy eye. Phyllis, the menopausal housewife, admittedly hadn’t written anything more challenging than a
grocery list in years. A chubby girl, Sage Ostrowski, waitressed at Ryan’s Diner. Abi, the Armenian who emigrated from Azerbaijan in central Asia, worked as a mechanic at the tire shop.

  The first session, Ms Monahan inquired about the mechanic's name.

  “Is short for Abimelki,” he explained. Abi meant father and melik king. The Assyrian variant was Abimelki, a name which was common in biblical times but not so anymore. The Armenian mechanic's short stories contained a veritable junk heap of dangling participles, split infinitives, ill-chosen adjectives and other syntactical abominations. But everyone in the writing group was grammatically challenged. Phyllis, the grocery list lady, favored absurdly prolonged sentences that gobbled up entire paragraphs before a period ever materialized to bring the verbal chaos to a thudding halt. Wearing his anal-compulsive angst like a badge of honor, Carl, the child prodigy, suffered autobiographical diarrhea, and Sage wrote exclusively in short, choppy sentences. Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! Abi, whose name meant 'father-king' in a defunct, thoroughly moribund language, was still grappling with the proper spelling of one-syllable words.

  “I liked Abi’s story just fine,” Sage blurted.

  Beatrice lowered her head and stared at the girl over the top of her bifocals. “How so?”

  “Faulty grammar taken aside, he did well describing the tension between local the Christian villagers and their Moslems neighbors.”

  "Unfortunately, editors wading through a slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts at the Yale Review are looking for something a bit more polished." The instructor’s rebuttal was accompanied by a glacial smile. Retreating to the safe haven of the oak desk at the front of the room, the teacher set the class to work on an impromptu, flash fiction assignment.

  Abi, who was unfamiliar with the Yale Review, grinned proudly and continued to stroke his lush beard. Nothing fazed the middle-aged man. His people had been massacred by the Turks, routed from their ancestral homeland and dispersed to an unsympathetic Diaspora. What more could a mean-spirited Beatrice Monahan do to deepen the hurt?

  “Screw the Yale Review!” As if on cue, everyone in the class ceased writing and shifted their attention to the rear of the class, where Carl was seated with his head down and legs splayed out at a perverse angle beneath the desk. “Dickens wrote in run-on sentences. Nobody gave him grief for the endless wordiness.”

  “Excuse me?” Beatrice compressed her lips together in a tight, bloodless line and eyed the youth with mild annoyance. “What was that?”

  “Jane Austen was addicted to double negatives. William Faulkner frequently started sentences with conjunctions.” Carl waved a slender wrist fitfully in the air, carving the space into manageable chunks. When he spoke again, there was a shrill, neurasthenic intensity to his tone that was offsetting, almost unnerving. The boy’s eyes flitted about the room as though searching for moral support.

  “Your point?” The instructor could sense her iron-fisted control over the class ebbing away.

  “Maybe Abi’s grammatical gaffes aren’t so terrible.”

  “It’s true that not all grammar violations are created equally.” Beatrice Monahan was clearly on the defensive, “but then, some blunders indicate a blatant disregard for what’s commonly accepted. These are the result of laziness, cluelessness, or lousy editing, and they’re not okay.”

  Carl shook his head violently and began karate chopping the air with renewed vigor. “Cummings refused to capitalize,… H. L. Mencken wrote incomplete sentences. Arthur Conan Doyle favored the passive tense.”

  Beatrice waited a good ten seconds before addressing the agitated student. “Are you done?”

  Whatever elicited the verbal eruption had run its treacherous course. Carl retreated into his insular, ever-so-private universe. “Just trying to make a point,” he added meekly.

  * * * * *

  An hour later toward the end of the class, Beatrice asked, “As writers, who would you want to emulate?”

  The minute hand on the clock over the chalkboard was edging up on nine p.m.. Everyone was tired, their creative juices played out. Carl announced that Raymond Carver was the best contemporary American writer.

  “He’s dead,” Beatrice interjected, “which makes him less than contemporary.”

  “Yes,…” Carl blushed and his eyelid twittered an impromptu ballet, “but he’s still quite popular.”

  Phyllis was a diehard Alice Monroe addict, having slogged through most everything the Canadian writer had written. Sage was partial to Hemingway and J.D. Salinger.

  Beatrice smiled frigidly. “And who do you read, Mr. Petrosyan?” The reptilian expression deepened, grew more intractable. “Of all the great literary figures, who’s your favorite?”

  “Greatest writer is Saroyan… William Saroyan!”

  “Saroyan,” Beatrice repeated. Abi’s response caught her off guard but only momentarily. “Some people have accused him of excessive sentimentality.”

  Sage cringed. Why couldn’t she just let Abi alone? Give him his space?

  “What have you read by Saroyan?” she pressed.

  “I dunno.” Abi’s eyes fogged over. After an uncomfortable pause he mumbled, “The Human Comedy.”

  “Anything else?”

  “My Name is Aram.”

  Beatrice Monahan drummed her pudgy fingers on the Formica desktop. Her mannish jaw screwed to one side, deep in thought. “And what did you learn from Saroyan?”

  “I dunno,” he returned dully. “Was Armenian like me.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t answer my question. You mentioned a specific author so you must remember some plot, narrative… denouement.” Drawing the last word out with a decidedly French accent, she was clearly baiting the mechanic with the Goodyear Tire logo emblazoned on his chest.

  “Last chance to redeem yourself,” Beatrice chirped,” and offer your classmates some personal insight into the writer’s weltanschauung.”

  Abi cracked his knuckles noisily then rubbed his somber face with calloused, grease stained hands. “Saroyan… is greatest writer whole universe!”

  * * * * *

  “Want to grab a coffee?” Sage was waiting outside the community college center when Abi emerged.

  “Would be nice,” Abi watched as the other students filtered out into the parking lot. A Honey Dew just up the street stayed open until eleven. At the donut shop they ordered hot drinks. "Something to eat with that?" the waitress asked.

  Sage shook her head self-consciously. "I'm watching my weight."

  When they were seated, Abi sipped at his coffee and glanced out the front window. The last of the dusky, late summer light had bled out of the sky wrapping the town in wooly darkness. From his wallet he withdrew a tattered picture postcard folded in quarters. “Is mine country. Murovdag… is the highest mountain range in the Lesser Caucasus.”

  He handed her the picture, which showed a rugged, hilly country with grassy valleys and snowcapped mountains in the far distance. A stone structure constructed in a combination of Byzantine or Roman styles – she couldn’t be sure – stood in the foreground. A dozen arched columns rose thirty feet in the air creating an outdoor portico. “Is beautiful…no?”

  “Yes, quite lovely.”

  She returned the card, which he refolded with infinite care like a family heirloom.

  “Key, kitten, kite, kilo, kiss, kick, kangaroo is begin with k,”, Abi sputtered bitterly, remembering Beatrice Monahan’s snide indignities. Is no ‘k’ sound with knock.”

  Sage suddenly felt a surge of homicidal rage toward the florid, red-haired teacher with her effete predilections. “The ‘k’ is also silent,” Sage explained almost apologetically, “in the verb ‘to kill’.”

  “Silent letter,” Abi repeated wearily. “Is stupid… makes no sense.”

  “For what it’s worth, Beatrice hasn’t had a nice thing to say about anyone’s writing.”

  The previous week the instructor trashed one of her stories, insisting the main chara
cters were unsympathetically drawn - little more than one-dimensional stick figures and talking heads. The expository prose was tedious, dialogue stiff. “I thought your story rather touching,” Sage noted. “What Beatrice said earlier was a cheap shot.”

  “I spell,” Abi observed glumly, “like second grader.”

  “Getting published in the Yale Review isn't the point,” Sage shook her head emphatically. “Never was.” “Maybe you’re lonely... homesick, so you write about a mountain village ten thousand mile away in the Lesser Caucasus and, in pouring your heart out, comes to terms with the loss.”

  A mother with two freckle-faced children entered the doughnut shop. They bought an assortment of donuts and disappeared back out into the street. “How’s your thyroid condition?”

  The odd question caught Abi totally off guard. In response to his baffled expression, Sage added, “When I got to class, you were shaking one of those distinctive, butterfly-shaped pills from a plastic prescription container into your palm.” She blew on the coffee before raising the Styrofoam cup to her lips. “I took Synthroid for six month. Gave me the goddamn heebie-jeebies... almost had a nervous breakdown.”

  “You don’t take medicine now?”

  “Not that crap!” Sage shook her head violently then leaned closer over the table and continued in a confidential tone. "We belong to an exclusive club… more like a carnival freak show," the fleshy girl added almost as an afterthought.

  "What is?"

  "People with thyroid conditions… we're always looking for something better, comparing notes."

  "You have funny way of putting things."

  A black man with dreadlocks and a guitar case slung over his shoulder entered the donut shop. He ordered a coffee with a glazed donut and headed back out into the evening stillness. "Brain fog… ever get it?"