Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Drummer Hodge by Thoms Hardy

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined -- just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around:
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the drummer never knew --
Fresh from his Wessex home --
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.

Hap by Thomas Hardy

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
--Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan....
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

Between Us Now by Thomas Hardy

Between us now and here -
Two thrown together
Who are not wont to wear
Life's flushest feather -
Who see the scenes slide past,
The daytimes dimming fast,
Let there be truth at last,
Even if despair.

So thoroughly and long
Have you now known me,
So real in faith and strong
Have I now shown me,
That nothing needs disguise
Further in any wise,
Or asks or justifies
A guarded tongue.

Face unto face, then, say,
Eyes mine own meeting,
Is your heart far away,
Or with mine beating?
When false things are brought low,
And swift things have grown slow,
Feigning like froth shall go,
Faith be for aye.

A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell

When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away--it was probably further from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving: her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.

She hated to see things half done; but she had been at that when the team from town stopped to get Mr. Hale, and then the sheriff came running in to say his wife wished Mrs. Hale would come too--adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scared and wanted another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was.

"Martha!" now came her husband's impatient voice. "Don't keep folks waiting out here in the cold."

She again opened the storm-door, and this time joined the three men and the one woman waiting for her in the big two-seated buggy.

After she had the robes tucked around her she took another look at the woman who sat beside her on the back seat. She had met Mrs. Peters the year before at the county fair, and the thing she remembered about her was that she didn't seem like a sheriff's wife. She was small and thin and didn't have a strong voice. Mrs. Gorman, sheriff's wife before Gorman went out and Peters came in, had a voice that somehow seemed to be backing up the law with every word. But if Mrs. Peters didn't look like a sheriff's wife, Peters made it up in looking like a sheriff. He was to a dot the kind of man who could get himself elected sheriff--a heavy man with a big voice, who was particularly genial with the law-abiding, as if to make it plain that he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals. And right there it came into Mrs. Hale's mind, with a stab, that this man who was so pleasant and lively with all of them was going to the Wrights' now as a sheriff.

"The country's not very pleasant this time of year," Mrs. Peters at last ventured, as if she felt they ought to be talking as well as the men.

Mrs. Hale scarcely finished her reply, for they had gone up a little hill and could see the Wright place now, and seeing it did not make her feel like talking. It looked very lonesome this cold March morning. It had always been a lonesome-looking place. It was down in a hollow, and the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees. The men were looking at it and talking about what had happened. The county attorney was bending to one side of the buggy, and kept looking steadily at the place as they drew up to it.

"I'm glad you came with me," Mrs. Peters said nervously, as the two women were about to follow the men in through the kitchen door.

Even after she had her foot on the door-step, her hand on the knob, Martha Hale had a moment of feeling she could not cross that threshold. And the reason it seemed she couldn't cross it now was simply because she hadn't crossed it before. Time and time again it had been in her mind, "I ought to go over and see Minnie Foster"--she still thought of her as Minnie Foster, though for twenty years she had been Mrs. Wright. And then there was always something to do and Minnie Foster would go from her mind. But now she could come.

The men went over to the stove. The women stood close together by the door. Young Henderson, the county attorney, turned around and said, "Come up to the fire, ladies."

Mrs. Peters took a step forward, then stopped. "I'm not--cold," she said.

And so the two women stood by the door, at first not even so much as looking around the kitchen.

The men talked for a minute about what a good thing it was the sheriff had sent his deputy out that morning to make a fire for them, and then Sheriff Peters stepped back from the stove, unbuttoned his outer coat, and leaned his hands on the kitchen table in a way that seemed to mark the beginning of official business. "Now, Mr. Hale," he said in a sort of semi-official voice, "before we move things about, you tell Mr. Henderson just what it was you saw when you came here yesterday morning."

The county attorney was looking around the kitchen.

"By the way," he said, "has anything been moved?" He turned to the sheriff. "Are things just as you left them yesterday?"

Peters looked from cupboard to sink; from that to a small worn rocker a little to one side of the kitchen table.

"It's just the same."

"Somebody should have been left here yesterday," said the county attorney.

"Oh--yesterday," returned the sheriff, with a little gesture as of yesterday having been more than he could bear to think of. "When I had to send Frank to Morris Center for that man who went crazy--let me tell you. I had my hands full yesterday. I knew you could get back from Omaha by today, George, and as long as I went over everything here myself."

"Well, Mr. Hale," said the county attorney, in a way of letting what was past and gone go, "tell just what happened when you came here yesterday morning."

Mrs. Hale, still leaning against the door, had that sinking feeling of the mother whose child is about to speak a piece. Lewis often wandered along and got things mixed up in a story. She hoped he would tell this straight and plain, and not say unnecessary things that would just make things harder for Minnie Foster. He didn't begin at once, and she noticed that he looked queer--as if standing in that kitchen and having to tell what he had seen there yesterday morning made him almost sick.

"Yes, Mr. Hale?" the county attorney reminded.

"Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes," Mrs. Hale's husband began.

Harry was Mrs. Hale's oldest boy. He wasn't with them now, for the very good reason that those potatoes never got to town yesterday and he was taking them this morning, so he hadn't been home when the sheriff stopped to say he wanted Mr. Hale to come over to the Wright place and tell the county attorney his story there, where he could point it all out. With all Mrs. Hale's other emotions came the fear now that maybe Harry wasn't dressed warm enough--they hadn't any of them realized how that north wind did bite.

"We come along this road," Hale was going on, with a motion of his hand to the road over which they had just come, "and as we got in sight of the house I says to Harry, 'I'm goin' to see if I can't get John Wright to take a telephone.' You see," he explained to Henderson, "unless I can get somebody to go in with me they won't come out this branch road except for a price I can't pay. I'd spoke to Wright about it once before; but he put me off, saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and quiet--guess you know about how much he talked himself. But I thought maybe if I went to the house and talked about it before his wife, and said all the women-folks liked the telephones, and that in this lonesome stretch of road it would be a good thing--well, I said to Harry that that was what I was going to say--though I said at the same time that I didn't know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John--"

Now there he was!--saying things he didn't need to say. Mrs. Hale tried to catch her husband's eye, but fortunately the county attorney interrupted with:

"Let's talk about that a little later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that but, I'm anxious now to get along to just what happened when you got here."

When he began this time, it was very deliberately and carefully:

"I didn't see or hear anything. I knocked at the door. And still it was all quiet inside. I knew they must be up--it was past eight o'clock. So I knocked again, louder, and I thought I heard somebody say, 'Come in.' I wasn't sure--I'm not sure yet. But I opened the door--this door," jerking a hand toward the door by which the two women stood. "and there, in that rocker"--pointing to it--"sat Mrs. Wright."

Everyone in the kitchen looked at the rocker. It came into Mrs. Hale's mind that that rocker didn't look in the least like Minnie Foster--the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung was gone, and the chair sagged to one side.

"How did she--look?" the county attorney was inquiring.

"Well," said Hale, "she looked--queer."

"How do you mean--queer?"

As he asked it he took out a note-book and pencil. Mrs. Hale did not like the sight of that pencil. She kept her eye fixed on her husband, as if to keep him from saying unnecessary things that would go into that note-book and make trouble.

Hale did speak guardedly, as if the pencil had affected him too.

"Well, as if she didn't know what she was going to do next. And kind of--done up."

"How did she seem to feel about your coming?"

"Why, I don't think she minded--one way or other. She didn't pay much attention. I said, 'Ho' do, Mrs. Wright? It's cold, ain't it?' And she said. 'Is it?'--and went on pleatin' at her apron.

"Well, I was surprised. She didn't ask me to come up to the stove, or to sit down, but just set there, not even lookin' at me. And so I said: 'I want to see John.'

"And then she--laughed. I guess you would call it a laugh.

"I thought of Harry and the team outside, so I said, a little sharp, 'Can I see John?' 'No,' says she--kind of dull like. 'Ain't he home?' says I. Then she looked at me. 'Yes,' says she, 'he's home.' 'Then why can't I see him?' I asked her, out of patience with her now. 'Cause he's dead' says she, just as quiet and dull--and fell to pleatin' her apron. 'Dead?' says, I, like you do when you can't take in what you've heard.

"She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin' back and forth.

"'Why--where is he?' says I, not knowing what to say.

"She just pointed upstairs--like this"--pointing to the room above.

"I got up, with the idea of going up there myself. By this time I--didn't know what to do. I walked from there to here; then I says: 'Why, what did he die of?'

"'He died of a rope around his neck,' says she; and just went on pleatin' at her apron."

Hale stopped speaking, and stood staring at the rocker, as if he were still seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before. Nobody spoke; it was as if every one were seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before.

"And what did you do then?" the county attorney at last broke the silence.

"I went out and called Harry. I thought I might--need help. I got Harry in, and we went upstairs." His voice fell almost to a whisper. "There he was--lying over the--"

"I think I'd rather have you go into that upstairs," the county attorney interrupted, "where you can point it all out. Just go on now with the rest of the story."

"Well, my first thought was to get that rope off. It looked--"

He stopped, his face twitching.

"But Harry, he went up to him, and he said. 'No, he's dead all right, and we'd better not touch anything.' So we went downstairs.

"She was still sitting that same way. 'Has anybody been notified?' I asked. 'No, says she, unconcerned.

"'Who did this, Mrs. Wright?' said Harry. He said it businesslike, and she stopped pleatin' at her apron. 'I don't know,' she says. 'You don't know?' says Harry. 'Weren't you sleepin' in the bed with him?' 'Yes,' says she, 'but I was on the inside. 'Somebody slipped a rope round his neck and strangled him, and you didn't wake up?' says Harry. 'I didn't wake up,' she said after him.

"We may have looked as if we didn't see how that could be, for after a minute she said, 'I sleep sound.'

"Harry was going to ask her more questions, but I said maybe that weren't our business; maybe we ought to let her tell her story first to the coroner or the sheriff. So Harry went fast as he could over to High Road--the Rivers' place, where there's a telephone."

"And what did she do when she knew you had gone for the coroner?" The attorney got his pencil in his hand all ready for writing.

"She moved from that chair to this one over here"--Hale pointed to a small chair in the corner--"and just sat there with her hands held together and lookin' down. I got a feeling that I ought to make some conversation, so I said I had come in to see if John wanted to put in a telephone; and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me--scared."

At the sound of a moving pencil the man who was telling the story looked up.

"I dunno--maybe it wasn't scared," he hastened: "I wouldn't like to say it was. Soon Harry got back, and then Dr. Lloyd came, and you, Mr. Peters, and so I guess that's all I know that you don't."

He said that last with relief, and moved a little, as if relaxing. Everyone moved a little. The county attorney walked toward the stair door.

"I guess we'll go upstairs first--then out to the barn and around there."

He paused and looked around the kitchen.

"You're convinced there was nothing important here?" he asked the sheriff. "Nothing that would--point to any motive?"

The sheriff too looked all around, as if to re-convince himself.

"Nothing here but kitchen things," he said, with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things.

The county attorney was looking at the cupboard--a peculiar, ungainly structure, half closet and half cupboard, the upper part of it being built in the wall, and the lower part just the old-fashioned kitchen cupboard. As if its queerness attracted him, he got a chair and opened the upper part and looked in. After a moment he drew his hand away sticky.

"Here's a nice mess," he said resentfully.

The two women had drawn nearer, and now the sheriff's wife spoke.

"Oh--her fruit," she said, looking to Mrs. Hale for sympathetic understanding.

She turned back to the county attorney and explained: "She worried about that when it turned so cold last night. She said the fire would go out and her jars might burst."

Mrs. Peters' husband broke into a laugh.

"Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder, and worrying about her preserves!"

The young attorney set his lips.

"I guess before we're through with her she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about."

"Oh, well," said Mrs. Hale's husband, with good-natured superiority, "women are used to worrying over trifles."

The two women moved a little closer together. Neither of them spoke. The county attorney seemed suddenly to remember his manners--and think of his future.

"And yet," said he, with the gallantry of a young politician. "for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?"

The women did not speak, did not unbend. He went to the sink and began washing his hands. He turned to wipe them on the roller towel--whirled it for a cleaner place.

"Dirty towelsl Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?"

He kicked his foot against some dirty pans under the sink.

"There's a great deal of work to be done on a farm," said Mrs. Hale stiffly.

"To be sure. And yet"--with a little bow to her--'I know there are some Dickson County farm-houses that do not have such roller towels." He gave it a pull to expose its full length again.

"Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men's hands aren't always as clean as they might be.

"Ah, loyal to your sex, I see," he laughed. He stopped and gave her a keen look, "But you and Mrs. Wright were neighbors. I suppose you were friends, too."

Martha Hale shook her head.

"I've seen little enough of her of late years. I've not been in this house--it's more than a year."

"And why was that? You didn't like her?"

"I liked her well enough," she replied with spirit. "Farmers' wives have their hands full, Mr. Henderson. And then--" She looked around the kitchen.

"Yes?" he encouraged.

"It never seemed a very cheerful place," said she, more to herself than to him.

"No," he agreed; "I don't think anyone would call it cheerful. I shouldn't say she had the home-making instinct."

"Well, I don't know as Wright had, either," she muttered.

"You mean they didn't get on very well?" he was quick to ask.

"No; I don't mean anything," she answered, with decision. As she turned a lit- tle away from him, she added: "But I don't think a place would be any the cheerfuller for John Wright's bein' in it."

"I'd like to talk to you about that a little later, Mrs. Hale," he said. "I'm anxious to get the lay of things upstairs now."

He moved toward the stair door, followed by the two men.

"I suppose anything Mrs. Peters does'll be all right?" the sheriff inquired. "She was to take in some clothes for her, you know--and a few little things. We left in such a hurry yesterday."

The county attorney looked at the two women they were leaving alone there among the kitchen things.

"Yes--Mrs. Peters," he said, his glance resting on the woman who was not Mrs. Peters, the big farmer woman who stood behind the sheriff's wife. "Of course Mrs. Peters is one of us," he said, in a manner of entrusting responsibility. "And keep your eye out, Mrs. Peters, for anything that might be of use. No telling; you women might come upon a clue to the motive--and that's the thing we need."

Mr. Hale rubbed his face after the fashion of a showman getting ready for a pleasantry.

"But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?" he said; and, having delivered himself of this, he followed the others through the stair door.

The women stood motionless and silent, listening to the footsteps, first upon the stairs, then in the room above them.

Then, as if releasing herself from something strange. Mrs. Hale began to arrange the dirty pans under the sink, which the county attorney's disdainful push of the foot had deranged.

"I'd hate to have men comin' into my kitchen," she said testily--"snoopin' round and criticizin'."

"Of course it's no more than their duty," said the sheriff's wife, in her manner of timid acquiescence.

"Duty's all right," replied Mrs. Hale bluffly; "but I guess that deputy sheriff that come out to make the fire might have got a little of this on his own." She gave the roller towel a pull. 'Wish I'd thought of that sooner! Seems mean to talk about her for not having things slicked up, when she had to come away in such a hurry."

She looked around the kitchen. Certainly it was not "slicked up." Her eye was held by a bucket of sugar on a low shelf. The cover was off the wooden bucket, and beside it was a paper bag--half full.

Mrs. HaIe moved toward it.

"She was putting this in there," she said to herself--slowly.

She thought of the flour in her kitchen at home--half sifted, half not sifted. She had been interrupted, and had left things half done. What had interrupted Minnie Foster? Why had that work been left half done? She made a move as if to finish it,--unfinished things always bothered her,--and then she glanced around and saw that Mrs. Peters was watching her--and she didn't want Mrs. Peters to get that feeling she had got of work begun and then--for some reason--not finished.

"It's a shame about her fruit," she said, and walked toward the cupboard that the county attorney had opened, and got on the chair, murmuring: "I wonder if it's all gone."

It was a sorry enough looking sight, but "Here's one that's all right," she said at last. She held it toward the light. "This is cherries, too." She looked again. "I declare I believe that's the only one."

With a sigh, she got down from the chair, went to the sink, and wiped off the bottle.

"She'Il feel awful bad, after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer.

She set the bottle on the table, and, with another sigh, started to sit down in the rocker. But she did not sit down. Something kept her from sitting down in that chair. She straightened--stepped back, and, half turned away, stood looking at it, seeing the woman who had sat there "pleatin' at her apron."

The thin voice of the sheriff's wife broke in upon her: "I must be getting those things from the front-room closet." She opened the door into the other room, started in, stepped back. "You coming with me, Mrs. Hale?" she asked nervously. "You--you could help me get them."

They were soon back--the stark coldness of that shut-up room was not a thing to linger in.

"My!" said Mrs. Peters, dropping the things on the table and hurrying to the stove.

Mrs. Hale stood examining the clothes the woman who was being detained in town had said she wanted.

"Wright was close!" she exclaimed, holding up a shabby black skirt that bore the marks of much making over. "I think maybe that's why she kept so much to herself. I s'pose she felt she couldn't do her part; and then, you don't enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively--when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls, singing in the choir. But that--oh, that was twenty years ago."

With a carefulness in which there was something tender, she folded the shabby clothes and piled them at one corner of the table. She looked up at Mrs. Peters, and there was something in the other woman's look that irritated her.

"She don't care," she said to herself. "Much difference it makes to her whether Minnie Foster had pretty clothes when she was a girl."

Then she looked again, and she wasn't so sure; in fact, she hadn't at any time been perfectly sure about Mrs. Peters. She had that shrinking manner, and yet her eyes looked as if they could see a long way into things.

"This all you was to take in?" asked Mrs. Hale.

"No," said the sheriffs wife; "she said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want, " she ventured in her nervous little way, "for there's not much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. If you're used to wearing an apron--. She said they were in the bottom drawer of this cupboard. Yes--here they are. And then her little shawl that always hung on the stair door."

She took the small gray shawl from behind the door leading upstairs, and stood a minute looking at it.

Suddenly Mrs. Hale took a quick step toward the other woman, "Mrs. Peters!"

"Yes, Mrs. Hale?"

"Do you think she--did it?'

A frightened look blurred the other thing in Mrs. Peters' eyes.

"Oh, I don't know," she said, in a voice that seemed to shrink away from the subject.

"Well, I don't think she did," affirmed Mrs. Hale stoutly. "Asking for an apron, and her little shawl. Worryin' about her fruit."

"Mr. Peters says--." Footsteps were heard in the room above; she stopped, looked up, then went on in a lowered voice: "Mr. Peters says--it looks bad for her. Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in speech, and he's going to make fun of her saying she didn't--wake up."

For a moment Mrs. Hale had no answer. Then, "Well, I guess John Wright didn't wake up--when they was slippin' that rope under his neck," she muttered.

"No, it's strange," breathed Mrs. Peters. "They think it was such a--funny way to kill a man."

She began to laugh; at the sound of the laugh, abruptly stopped.

"That's just what Mr. Hale said," said Mrs. Hale, in a resolutely natural voice. "There was a gun in the house. He says that's what he can't understand."

"Mr. Henderson said, coming out, that what was needed for the case was a motive. Something to show anger--or sudden feeling."

'Well, I don't see any signs of anger around here," said Mrs. Hale, "I don't--" She stopped. It was as if her mind tripped on something. Her eye was caught by a dish-towel in the middle of the kitchen table. Slowly she moved toward the table. One half of it was wiped clean, the other half messy. Her eyes made a slow, almost unwilling turn to the bucket of sugar and the half empty bag beside it. Things begun--and not finished.

After a moment she stepped back, and said, in that manner of releasing herself:

"Wonder how they're finding things upstairs? I hope she had it a little more red up up there. You know,"--she paused, and feeling gathered,--"it seems kind of sneaking: locking her up in town and coming out here to get her own house to turn against her!"

"But, Mrs. Hale," said the sheriff's wife, "the law is the law."

"I s'pose 'tis," answered Mrs. Hale shortly.

She turned to the stove, saying something about that fire not being much to brag of. She worked with it a minute, and when she straightened up she said aggressively:

"The law is the law--and a bad stove is a bad stove. How'd you like to cook on this?"--pointing with the poker to the broken lining. She opened the oven door and started to express her opinion of the oven; but she was swept into her own thoughts, thinking of what it would mean, year after year, to have that stove to wrestle with. The thought of Minnie Foster trying to bake in that oven--and the thought of her never going over to see Minnie Foster--.

She was startled by hearing Mrs. Peters say: "A person gets discouraged--and loses heart."

The sheriff's wife had looked from the stove to the sink--to the pail of water which had been carried in from outside. The two women stood there silent, above them the footsteps of the men who were looking for evidence against the woman who had worked in that kitchen. That look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else, was in the eyes of the sheriff's wife now. When Mrs. Hale next spoke to her, it was gently:

"Better loosen up your things, Mrs. Peters. We'll not feel them when we go out."

Mrs. Peters went to the back of the room to hang up the fur tippet she was wearing. A moment later she exclaimed, "Why, she was piecing a quilt," and held up a large sewing basket piled high with quilt pieces.

Mrs. Hale spread some of the blocks on the table.

"It's log-cabin pattern," she said, putting several of them together, "Pretty, isn't it?"

They were so engaged with the quilt that they did not hear the footsteps on the stairs. Just as the stair door opened Mrs. Hale was saying:

"Do you suppose she was going to quilt it or just knot it?"

The sheriff threw up his hands.

"They wonder whether she was going to quilt it or just knot it!"

There was a laugh for the ways of women, a warming of hands over the stove, and then the county attorney said briskly:

"Well, let's go right out to the barn and get that cleared up."

"I don't see as there's anything so strange," Mrs. Hale said resentfully, after the outside door had closed on the three men--"our taking up our time with little things while we're waiting for them to get the evidence. I don't see as it's anything to laugh about."

"Of course they've got awful important things on their minds," said the sheriff's wife apologetically.

They returned to an inspection of the block for the quilt. Mrs. Hale was looking at the fine, even sewing, and preoccupied with thoughts of the woman who had done that sewing, when she heard the sheriff's wife say, in a queer tone:

"Why, look at this one."

She turned to take the block held out to her.

"The sewing," said Mrs. Peters, in a troubled way, "All the rest of them have been so nice and even--but--this one. Why, it looks as if she didn't know what she was about!"

Their eyes met--something flashed to life, passed between them; then, as if with an effort, they seemed to pull away from each other. A moment Mrs. Hale sat there, her hands folded over that sewing which was so unlike all the rest of the sewing. Then she had pulled a knot and drawn the threads.

"Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?" asked the sheriff's wife, startled.

"Just pulling out a stitch or two that's not sewed very good," said Mrs. Hale mildly.

"I don't think we ought to touch things," Mrs. Peters said, a little helplessly.

"I'll just finish up this end," answered Mrs. Hale, still in that mild, matter-of-fact fashion.

She threaded a needle and started to replace bad sewing with good. For a little while she sewed in silence. Then, in that thin, timid voice, she heard:

"Mrs. Hale!"

"Yes, Mrs. Peters?"

'What do you suppose she was so--nervous about?"

"Oh, I don't know," said Mrs. Hale, as if dismissing a thing not important enough to spend much time on. "I don't know as she was--nervous. I sew awful queer sometimes when I'm just tired."

She cut a thread, and out of the corner of her eye looked up at Mrs. Peters. The small, lean face of the sheriff's wife seemed to have tightened up. Her eyes had that look of peering into something. But next moment she moved, and said in her thin, indecisive way:

'Well, I must get those clothes wrapped. They may be through sooner than we think. I wonder where I could find a piece of paper--and string."

"In that cupboard, maybe," suggested to Mrs. Hale, after a glance around.

One piece of the crazy sewing remained unripped. Mrs. Peter's back turned, Martha Hale now scrutinized that piece, compared it with the dainty, accurate sewing of the other blocks. The difference was startling. Holding this block made her feel queer, as if the distracted thoughts of the woman who had perhaps turned to it to try and quiet herself were communicating themselves to her.

Mrs. Peters' voice roused her.

"Here's a bird-cage," she said. "Did she have a bird, Mrs. Hale?"

'Why, I don't know whether she did or not." She turned to look at the cage Mrs. Peters was holding up. "I've not been here in so long." She sighed. "There was a man round last year selling canaries cheap--but I don't know as she took one. Maybe she did. She used to sing real pretty herself."

Mrs. Peters looked around the kitchen.

"Seems kind of funny to think of a bird here." She half laughed--an attempt to put up a barrier. "But she must have had one--or why would she have a cage? I wonder what happened to it."

"I suppose maybe the cat got it," suggested Mrs. Hale, resuming her sewing.

"No; she didn't have a cat. She's got that feeling some people have about cats--being afraid of them. When they brought her to our house yesterday, my cat got in the room, and she was real upset and asked me to take it out."

"My sister Bessie was like that," laughed Mrs. Hale.

The sheriff's wife did not reply. The silence made Mrs. Hale turn round. Mrs. Peters was examining the bird-cage.

"Look at this door," she said slowly. "It's broke. One hinge has been pulled apart."

Mrs. Hale came nearer.

"Looks as if someone must have been--rough with it."

Again their eyes met--startled, questioning, apprehensive. For a moment neither spoke nor stirred. Then Mrs. Hale, turning away, said brusquely:

"If they're going to find any evidence, I wish they'd be about it. I don't like this place."

"But I'm awful glad you came with me, Mrs. Hale." Mrs. Peters put the bird-cage on the table and sat down. "It would be lonesome for me--sitting here alone."

"Yes, it would, wouldn't it?" agreed Mrs. Hale, a certain determined naturalness in her voice. She had picked up the sewing, but now it dropped in her lap, and she murmured in a different voice: "But I tell you what I do wish, Mrs. Peters. I wish I had come over sometimes when she was here. I wish--I had."

"But of course you were awful busy, Mrs. Hale. Your house--and your children."

"I could've come," retorted Mrs. Hale shortly. "I stayed away because it weren't cheerful--and that's why I ought to have come. I"--she looked around--"I've never liked this place. Maybe because it's down in a hollow and you don't see the road. I don't know what it is, but it's a lonesome place, and always was. I wish I had come over to see Minnie Foster sometimes. I can see now--" She did not put it into words.

"Well, you mustn't reproach yourself," counseled Mrs. Peters. "Somehow, we just don't see how it is with other folks till--something comes up."

"Not having children makes less work," mused Mrs. Hale, after a silence, "but it makes a quiet house--and Wright out to work all day--and no company when he did come in. Did you know John Wright, Mrs. Peters?"

"Not to know him. I've seen him in town. They say he was a good man."

"Yes--good," conceded John Wright's neighbor grimly. "He didn't drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him--." She stopped, shivered a little. "Like a raw wind that gets to the bone." Her eye fell upon the cage on the table before her, and she added, almost bitterly: "I should think she would've wanted a bird!"

Suddenly she leaned forward, looking intently at the cage. "But what do you s'pose went wrong with it?"

"I don't know," returned Mrs. Peters; "unless it got sick and died."

But after she said it she reached over and swung the broken door. Both women watched it as if somehow held by it.

"You didn't know--her?" Mrs. Hale asked, a gentler note in her voice.

"Not till they brought her yesterday," said the sheriff's wife.

"She--come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and--fluttery. How--she--did--change."

That held her for a long time. Finally, as if struck with a happy thought and relieved to get back to everyday things, she exclaimed:

"Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don't you take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind."

"Why, I think that's a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale," agreed the sheriff's wife, as if she too were glad to come into the atmosphere of a simple kindness. "There couldn't possibly be any objection to that, could there? Now, just what will I take? I wonder if her patches are in here--and her things?"

They turned to the sewing basket.

"Here's some red," said Mrs. Hale, bringing out a roll of cloth. Underneath that was a box. "Here, maybe her scissors are in here--and her things." She held it up. "What a pretty box! I'll warrant that was something she had a long time ago--when she was a girl."

She held it in her hand a moment; then, with a little sigh, opened it.

Instantly her hand went to her nose.

"Why--!"

Mrs. Peters drew nearer--then turned away.

"There's something wrapped up in this piece of silk," faltered Mrs. Hale.

"This isn't her scissors," said Mrs. Peters, in a shrinking voice.

Her hand not steady, Mrs. Hale raised the piece of silk. "Oh, Mrs. Peters!" she cried. "It's--"

Mrs. Peters bent closer.

"It's the bird," she whispered.

"But, Mrs. Peters!" cried Mrs. Hale. "Look at it! Its neck--look at its neck! It's all--other side to."

She held the box away from her.

The sheriff's wife again bent closer.

"Somebody wrung its neck," said she, in a voice that was slow and deep.

And then again the eyes of the two women met--this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror. Mrs. Peters looked from the dead bird to the broken door of the cage. Again their eyes met. And just then there was a sound at the outside door. Mrs. Hale slipped the box under the quilt pieces in the basket, and sank into the chair before it. Mrs. Peters stood holding to the table. The county attorney and the sheriff came in from outside.

"Well, ladies," said the county attorney, as one turning from serious things to little pleasantries, "have you decided whether she was going to quilt it or knot it?"

"We think," began the sheriff's wife in a flurried voice, "that she was going to--knot it."

He was too preoccupied to notice the change that came in her voice on that last.

"Well, that's very interesting, I'm sure," he said tolerantly. He caught sight of the bird-cage.

"Has the bird flown?"

"We think the cat got it," said Mrs. Hale in a voice curiously even.

He was walking up and down, as if thinking something out.

"Is there a cat?" he asked absently.

Mrs. Hale shot a look up at the sheriff's wife.

"Well, not now," said Mrs. Peters. "They're superstitious, you know; they leave."

She sank into her chair.

The county attorney did not heed her. "No sign at all of anyone having come in from the outside," he said to Peters, in the manner of continuing an interrupted conversation. "Their own rope. Now let's go upstairs again and go over it, piece by piece. It would have to have been someone who knew just the--"

The stair door closed behind them and their voices were lost.

The two women sat motionless, not looking at each other, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. When they spoke now it was as if they were afraid of what they were saying, but as if they could not help saying it.

"She liked the bird," said Martha Hale, low and slowly. "She was going to bury it in that pretty box."

When I was a girl," said Mrs. Peters, under her breath, "my kitten--there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes--before I could get there--" She covered her face an instant. "If they hadn't held me back I would have"--she caught herself, looked upstairs where footsteps were heard, and finished weakly--"hurt him."

Then they sat without speaking or moving.

"I wonder how it would seem," Mrs. Hale at last began, as if feeling her way over strange ground--"never to have had any children around?" Her eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen, as if seeing what that kitchen had meant through all the years "No, Wright wouldn't like the bird," she said after that--"a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too." Her voice tightened.

Mrs. Peters moved uneasily.

"Of course we don't know who killed the bird."

"I knew John Wright," was Mrs. Hale's answer.

"It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale," said the sheriff's wife. "Killing a man while he slept--slipping a thing round his neck that choked the life out of him."

Mrs. Hale's hand went out to the bird cage.

"We don't know who killed him," whispered Mrs. Peters wildly. "We don't know."

Mrs. Hale had not moved. "If there had been years and years of--nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful--still--after the bird was still."

It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself.

"I know what stillness is," she said, in a queer, monotonous voice. "When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died--after he was two years old--and me with no other then--"

Mrs. Hale stirred.

"How soon do you suppose they'll be through looking for the evidence?"

"I know what stillness is," repeated Mrs. Peters, in just that same way. Then she too pulled back. "The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale," she said in her tight little way.

"I wish you'd seen Minnie Foster," was the answer, "when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons, and stood up there in the choir and sang."

The picture of that girl, the fact that she had lived as neighbor to that girl for twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was suddenly more than she could bear.

"Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while!" she cried. "That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?"

"We mustn't take on," said Mrs. Peters, with a frightened look toward the stairs.

"I might 'a' known she needed help! I tell you, it's queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things--it's all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren't--why do you and I understand? Why do we know--what we know this minute?"

She dashed her hand across her eyes. Then, seeing the jar of fruit on the table she reached for it and choked out:

"If I was you I wouldn't tell her her fruit was gone! Tell her it ain't. Tell her it's all right--all of it. Here--take this in to prove it to her! She--she may never know whether it was broke or not."

She turned away.

Mrs. Peters reached out for the bottle of fruit as if she were glad to take it--as if touching a familiar thing, having something to do, could keep her from something else. She got up, looked about for something to wrap the fruit in, took a petticoat from the pile of clothes she had brought from the front room, and nervously started winding that round the bottle.

"My!" she began, in a high, false voice, "it's a good thing the men couldn't hear us! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a--dead canary." She hurried over that. "As if that could have anything to do with--with--My, wouldn't they laugh?"

Footsteps were heard on the stairs.

"Maybe they would," muttered Mrs. Hale--"maybe they wouldn't."

"No, Peters," said the county attorney incisively; "it's all perfectly clear, except the reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing--something to show. Something to make a story about. A thing that would connect up with this clumsy way of doing it."

In a covert way Mrs. Hale looked at Mrs. Peters. Mrs. Peters was looking at her. Quickly they looked away from each other. The outer door opened and Mr. Hale came in.

"I've got the team round now," he said. "Pretty cold out there."

"I'm going to stay here awhile by myself," the county attorney suddenly announced. "You can send Frank out for me, can't you?" he asked the sheriff. "I want to go over everything. I'm not satisfied we can't do better."

Again, for one brief moment, the two women's eyes found one another.

The sheriff came up to the table.

"Did you want to see what Mrs. Peters was going to take in?"

The county attorney picked up the apron. He laughed.

"Oh, I guess they're not very dangerous things the ladies have picked out."

Mrs. Hale's hand was on the sewing basket in which the box was concealed. She felt that she ought to take her hand off the basket. She did not seem able to. He picked up one of the quilt blocks which she had piled on to cover the box. Her eyes felt like fire. She had a feeling that if he took up the basket she would snatch it from him.

But he did not take it up. With another little laugh, he turned away, saying:

"No; Mrs. Peters doesn't need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff's wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters?"

Mrs. Peters was standing beside the table. Mrs. Hale shot a look up at her; but she could not see her face. Mrs. Peters had turned away. When she spoke, her voice was muffled.

"Not--just that way," she said.

"Married to the law!" chuckled Mrs. Peters' husband. He moved toward the door into the front room, and said to the county attorney:

"I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows."

"Oh--windows," said the county attorney scoffingly.

"We'll be right out, Mr. Hale," said the sheriff to the farmer, who was still waiting by the door.

Hale went to look after the horses. The sheriff followed the county attorney into the other room. Again--for one final moment--the two women were alone in that kitchen.

Martha Hale sprang up, her hands tight together, looking at that other woman, with whom it rested. At first she could not see her eyes, for the sheriff's wife had not turned back since she turned away at that suggestion of being married to the law. But now Mrs. Hale made her turn back. Her eyes made her turn back. Slowly, unwillingly, Mrs. Peters turned her head until her eyes met the eyes of the other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion or flinching. Then Martha Hale's eyes pointed the way to the basket in which was hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman--that woman who was not there and yet who had been there with them all through that hour.

For a moment Mrs. Peters did not move. And then she did it. With a rush forward, she threw back the quilt pieces, got the box, tried to put it in her handbag. It was too big. Desperately she opened it, started to take the bird out. But there she broke--she could not touch the bird. She stood there helpless, foolish.

There was the sound of a knob turning in the inner door. Martha Hale snatched the box from the sheriff's wife, and got it in the pocket of her big coat just as the sheriff and the county attorney came back into the kitchen.

"Well, Henry," said the county attorney facetiously, "at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to--what is it you call it, ladies?"

Mrs. Hale's hand was against the pocket of her coat.

"We call it--knot it, Mr. Henderson."

A Domestic Dilemma by Carson McCullers

On Thursday Martin Meadows left the office early enough to make the first express bus home. It was the hour when the evening lilac glow was fading in the slushy streets, but by the time the bus had left the Mid-town terminal the bright city night had come. On Thursdays the maid had a half-day off and Martin liked to get home as soon as possible, since for the past year his wife had not been well. This Thursday he was very tired and hoping that no regular commuter would single him out for conversation, he fastened his attention to the newspaper until the bus had crossed the George Washington Bridge. Once on 9-W Highway, Martin always felt that the trip was halfway done, he breathed deeply, even in cold weather when only ribbons of draught cut through the smoky air of the bus, confident that he was breathing country air. It used to be that at this point he would relax and begin to think with pleasure of his home. But in this last year nearness brought only a sense of tension and he did not anticipate the journey's end. This evening Martin kept his face close to the window and watched the barren fields and lonely lights of the passing townships. There was a moon, pale on the dark earth and areas of late, porous snow; to Martin the countryside seemed vast and somehow desolate that evening. He took his hat from the rack and put his folded newspaper in the pocket of his overcoat a few minutes before time to pull the cord.

The cottage was a block from the bus stop, near the river but not directly on the shore; from the living-room window you could look across the street and opposite yard and see the Hudson. The cottage was modern, almost too white and new on the narrow plot of yard. In summer the grass was soft and bright and Martin carefully tended a flower border and a rose trellis. But during the cold, fallow months the yard was bleak and the cottage seemed naked. Lights were on that evening in all the rooms in the little house and Martin hurried up the front walk. Before the steps he stopped to move a wagon out of the way.

The children were in the living room, so intent on play that the opening of the front door was at first unnoticd. Martin stood looking at his safe, lovely children. They had opened the bottom drawer of the secretary and taken out the Christmas decorations. Andy had managed to plug in the Christmas tree lights and the green and red bulbs glowed with out-of-season festivity on the rug of the living room. At the moment he was trying to trail the bright cord over Marianne's rocking horse. Marianne sat on the floor pulling off an angel's wings. The children wailed a startling welcome. Martin swung the fat little baby girl up to his shoulder and Andy threw himself against his father's legs.

"Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!"

Martin set down the little girl carefully and swung Andy a few times like a pendulum. Then he picked up the Christmas tree cord.

"What's all this stuff doing out? Help me put it back in the drawer. You're not to fool with the light socket. Remember I told you that before. I mean it, Andy."

The six-year-old child nodded and shut the secretary drawer. Martin stroked his fair soft hair and his hand lingered tenderly on the nape of the child's frail neck.

"Had supper yet, Bumpkin?"

"It hurt. The toast was hot."

The baby girl stumbled on the rug and, after the first surprise of the fall, began to cry; Martin picked her up and carried her in his arms back to the kitchen.

"See, Daddy," said Andy. "The toast --"

Emily had laid the children's supper on the uncovered porcelain table. There were two plates with the remains of cream-of-wheat and eggs and silver mugs that had held milk. There was also a platter of cinnamon toast, untouched except for one tooth-marked bite. Martin sniffed the bitten piece and nibbled gingerly. Then he put the toast into the garbage pail.

"Hoo -- phui -- What on earth!"

Emily had mistaken the tin of cayenne for the cinnamon.

"I like to have burnt up," Andy said. "Drank water and ran outdoors and opened my mouth. Marianne didn't eat none."

"Any," corrected Martin. He stood helpless, looking around the walls of the kitchen. "Well, that's that, I guess," he said finally. "Where is your mother now?"

"She's up in you all's room."

Martin left the children in the kitchen and went up to his wife. Outside the door he waited for a moment to still his anger. He did not knock and once inside the room he closed the door behind him.

Emily sat in the rocking chair by the window of the pleasant room. She had been drinking something from a tumbler and as he entered she put the glass hurriedly on the floor behind the chair. In her attitude there was confusion and guilt which she tried to hide by a show of spurious vivacity.

"Oh, Marty! You home already? The time slipped up on me. I was just going down --" She lurched to him and her kiss was strong with sherry. When he stood unresponsive she stepped back a pace and giggled nervously.

"What's the matter with you? Standing there like a barber pole. Is anything wrong with you?"

"Wrong with me?" Martin bent over the rocking chair and picked up the tumbler from the floor. "If you could only realize how sick I am -- how bad it is for all of us."

Emily spoke in a false, airy voice that had become too familar to him. Often at such times she affected a slight English accent, copying perhaps some actress she admired. "I haven't the vaguest idea what you mean. Unless you are referring to the glass I used for a spot of sherry. I had a finger of sherry -- maybe two. But what is the crime in that, pray tell me? I'm quite all right. Quite all right."

"So anyone can see."

As she went into the bathroom Emily walked with careful gravity. She turned on the cold water and dashed some on her face with her cupped hands, then patted herself dry with the corner of the bath towel. Her face was delicately featured and young, unblemished.

"I was just going down to make dinner." She tottered and balanced herself by holding to the door frame.

"I'll take care of dinner. You stay up here. I'll bring it up."

"I'll do nothing of the sort. Why, whoever heard of such a thing?"

"Please," Martin said.

"Leave me alone. I'm quite all right. I was just on the way down --"

"Mind what I say."

"Mind your grandmother."

She lurched toward the door, but Martin caught her by the arm. "I don't want the children to see you in this condition. Be reasonable."

"Condition!" Emily jerked her arm. Her voice rose angrily. "Why, because I drink a couple of sherries in the afternoon you're trying to make me out a drunkard. Condition! Why, I don't even touch whiskey. As well you know, I don't swill liquor at bars. And that's more than you can say. I don't even have a cocktail at dinnertime. I only sometimes have a glass of sherry. What, I ask you, is the disgrace of that? Condition!"

Martin sought words to calm his wife. "We'll have a quiet supper by ourselves up here. That's a good girl." Emily sat on the side of the bed and he opened the door for a quick departure.

"I'll be back in a jiffy."

As he busied himself with the dinner downstairs he was lost in the familiar question as to how this problem had come upon his home. He himself had always enjoyed a good drink. When they were still living in Alabama they had served long drinks or cocktails as a matter of course. For years they had drunk one or two -- possibly three drinks before dinner, and at bedtime a long nightcap. Evenings before holidays they might get a buzz on, might even become a little tight. But alcohol had never seemed a problem to him, only a bothersome expense that with the increase in the family they could scarcely afford.. It was only after his company had transferred him to New York that Martin was aware that certainly his wife was drinking too much. She was tippling, he noticed, during the day.

The problem acknowledged, he tried to analyze the source. The change from Alabama to New York had somehow disturbed her; accustomed to the idle warmth of a small Southern town, the matrix of the family and cousinship and childhood friends, she had failed to accommodate herself to the stricter, lonelier mores of the North. The duties of motherhood and housekeeping were onerous to her. Homesick for Paris City, she had made no friends in the suburban town. She read only magazines and murder books. Her interior life was insufficient without the artifice of alcohol.

The revelations of incontinence insidiously undermined his previous conceptions of his wife. There were times of unexplainable malevolence, times when the alcoholic fuse caused an explosion of unseemly anger. He encountered a latent coarseness in Emily, inconsistent with her natural simplicity. She lied about drinking and deceived him with unsuspected stratagems.

Then there was an accident. Coming home from work one evening about a year ago, he was greeted with screams from the children's room. He found Emily holding the baby, wet and naked from her bath. The baby had been dropped, her frail, frail skull striking the table edge, so that a thread of blood was soaking into the gossamer hair. Emily was sobbing and intoxicated. As Martin cradled the hurt child, so infinitely precious at that moment, he had an affrighted vision of the future.

The next day Marianne was all right. Emily vowed that never again would she touch liquor, and for a few weeks she was sober, cold and downcast. Then gradually she began -- not whiskey or gin -- but quantities of beer, or sherry, or outlandish liqueurs; once he had come across a hatbox of empty créme de menthe bottles. Martin found a dependable maid who managed the household competently. Virgie was also from Alabama and Martin had never dared tell Emily the wage scale customary in New York. Emily's drinking was entirely secret now, done before he reached the house. Usually the effects were almost imperceptible -- a looseness of movement or the heavy-lidded eyes. The times of irresponsibilities, such as the cayenne-pepper toast, were rare, and Martin could dismiss his worries when Virgie was at the house. But, nevertheless, anxiety was always latent, a threat of undefined disaster that underlaid his days.

"Marianne!" Martin called, for even the recollection of that time brought the need for reassurance. The baby girl, no longer hurt, but no less precious to her father, came into the kitchen with her brother. Martin went on with the preparations for the meal. He opened a can of soup and put two chops in the frying pan. Then he sat down by the table and took his Marianne on his knees for a pony ride. Andy watched them, his fingers wobbling the tooth that had been loose all that week.

"Andy-the-candyman!" Martin said. "Is that old critter still in your mouth? Come closer, let Daddy have a look."

"I got a string to pull it with." The child brought from his pocket a tangled thread. "Virgie said to tie it to the tooth and tie the other end to the doorknob and shut the door real suddenly."

Martin took out a clean handkerchief and felt the loose tooth carefully. "That tooth is coming out of my Andy's mouth tonight. Otherwise I'm awfully afraid we'll have a tooth tree in the family."

"A what?"

"A tooth tree," Martin said. "You'll bite into something and swallow that tooth. And the tooth will take root in poor Andy's stomach and grow into a tooth tree with sharp little teeth instead of leaves."

"Shoo, Daddy," Andy said. But he held the tooth firmly between his grimy little thumb and forefinger. "There ain't any tree like that. I never seen one."

"There isn't any tree like that and I never saw one."

Martin tensed suddenly. Emily was coming down the stairs. He listened to the fumbling footsteps, his arm embracing the little boy with dread. When Emily came into the room he saw from her movements and her sullen face that she had again been at the sherry bottle. She began to yank open drawers and set the table.

"Condition!" she said in a fury voice. "You talk to me like that. Don't think I'll forget. I remember every dirty lie you say to me. Don't you think for a minute that I forget."

"Emily!" he begged. "The children --"

"The children -- yes! Don't think I don't see through your dirty plots and schemes. Down here trying to turn my own children against me. Don't think I don't see and understand."

"Emily! I beg you -- please go upstairs."

"So you can turn my children -- my very own children --" Two large tears coursed rapidly down her cheeks. "Trying to turn my little boy, my Andy, against his own mother."

With drunken impulsiveness Emily knelt on the floor before the startled child. Her hands on his shoulders balanced her. "Listen, my Andy, -- you wouldn't listen to any lies you father tells you? You wouldn't believe what he says? Listen, Andy, what was your father telling you before I came downstairs?" Uncertain, the child sought his father's face. "Tell me. Mama wants to know."

"About the tooth tree."

"What?"

The child repeated the words and she echoed them with unbelieving terror. "The tooth tree!" She swayed and renewed her grasp on the child's shoulder. "I don't know what you're talking about. But listen, Andy, Mama is all right, isn't she?" The tears were spilling down her face and Andy drew back from her, for he was afraid. Grasping the table edge, Emily stood up.

"See! You have turned my child against me."

Marianne began to cry, and Martin took her in his arms.

"That's all right, you can take your child. You have always shown partiality from the very first. I don't mind, but at least you can leave me my little boy."

Andy edged close to his father and touched his leg. "Daddy," he wailed.

Martin took the children to the foot of the stairs. "Andy, you take up Marianne and Daddy will follow you in a minute."

"But Mama?" the child asked, whispering.

"Mama will be all right. Don't worry."

Emily was sobbing at the kitchen table, her face buried in the crook of her arm. Martin poured a cup of soup and set it before her. Her rasping sobs unnerved him; the vehemence of her emotion, irrespective of the source, touched in him a strain of tenderness. Unwillingly he laid his hand on her dark hair. "Sit up and drink the soup." Her face as she looked up at him was chastened and imploring. The boy's withdrawal or the touch of Martin's hand had turned the tenor of her mood.

"Ma-Martin," she sobbed. "I'm so ashamed."

"Drink the soup."

Obeying him, she drank between gasping breaths. After a second cup she allowed him to lead her up to their room. She was docile now and more restrained. He laid her nightgown on the bed and was about to leave the room when a fresh round of grief, the alcoholic tumult, came again.

"He turned away. My Andy looked at me and turned away."

Impatience and fatigue hardened his voice, but he spoke warily. "You forget that Andy is still a little child -- he can't comprehend the meaning of such scenes."

"Did I make a scene? Oh, Martin, did I make a scene before the children?"

Her horrified face touched and amused him against his will. "Forget it. Put on your nightgown and go to sleep."

"My child turned away from me. Andy looked at his mother and turned away. The children --"

She was caught in the rhythmic sorrow of alcohol. Martin withdrew from the room saying: "For God's sake go to sleep. The children will forget by tomorrow."

As he said this he wondered if it was true. Would the scene glide so easily from memory -- or would it root in the unconscious to fester in the after-years? Martin did not know, and the last alternative sickened him. He thought of Emily, foresaw the morning-after humiliation: the shards of memory, the lucidities that glared from the obliterating darkness of shame. She would call the New York office twice -- possibly three or four times. Martin anticipated his own embarrassment, wondering if the others at the office could possibly suspect. He felt that his secretary had divined the trouble long ago and that she pitied him. He suffered a moment of rebellion against his fate; he hated his wife.

Once in the children's room he closed the door and felt secure for the first time that evening. Marianne fell down on the floor, picked herself up and calling: "Daddy, watch me," fell again, got up, and continued the falling-calling routine. Andy sat in the child's low chair, wobbling the tooth. Martin ran the water in the tub, washed his own hands in the lavatory, and called the boy into the bathroom.

"Let's have another look at that tooth." Martin sat on the toilet, holding Andy between his knees. The child's mouth gaped and Martin grasped the tooth. A wobble, a quick twist and the nacreous milk tooth was free. Andy's face was for the first moment split between terror, astonishment, and delight. He mouthed a swallow of water and spat into the lavatory.

"Look, Daddy! It's blood. Marianne!"

Martin loved to bathe his children, loved inexpressibly the tender, naked bodies as they stood in the water so exposed. It was not fair of Emily to say that he showed partiality. As Martin soaped the delicate boy-body of his son he felt that further love would be impossible. Yet he admitted the difference in the quality of his emotions for the two children. His love for his daughter was graver, touched with a strain of melancholy, a gentleness that was akin to pain. His pet names for the little boy were the absurdities of daily inspiration -- he called the little girl always Marianne, and his voice as he spoke it was a caress. Martin patted dry the fat baby stomach and the sweet little genital fold. The washed child faces were radiant as flower petals, equally loved.

"I'm putting my tooth under my pillow. I'm supposed to get a quarter."

"What for?"

"You know, Daddy. Johnny got a quarter for his tooth."

"Who puts the quarter there?" asked Martin. "I used to think the fairies left it in the night. It was a dime in my day, though."

"That's what they say in kindergarten."

"Who does put it there?"

"Your parents," Andy said. "You!"

Martin was pinning the cover on Marianne's bed. His daughter was already asleep. Scarely breathing, Martin bent over and kissed her forehead, kissed again the tiny hand that lay palm-upward, flung in slumber beside her head.

"Good night, Andy-man."

The answer was only a drowsy murmur. After a minute Martin took out his change and slid a quarter underneath the pillow. He left a night light in the room.

As Martin prowled about the kitchen making a late meal, it occurred to him that the children had not once mentioned their mother or the scene that must have seemed to them incomprehensible. Absorbed in the instant -- the tooth, the bath, the quarter -- the fluid passage of child-time had borne these weightless episodes like leaves in the swift current of a shallow stream while the adult enigma was beached and forgotten on the shore. Martin thanked the Lord for that.

But his own anger, repressed and lurking, arose again. His youth was being frittered by a drunkard's waste, his very manhood subtly undermined. And the children, once the immunity of incomprehension passed -- what would it be like in a year or so? With his elbows on the table he ate his food brutishly, untasting. There was no hiding the truth -- soon there would be gossip in the office and in the town; his wife was a dissolute woman. Dissolute. And he and his children were bound to a future of degradation and slow ruin.

Martin pushed away from the table and stalked into the living room. He followed the lines of a book with his eyes but his mind conjured miserable images: he saw his children drowned in the river, his wife a disgrace on the public street. By bedtime the dull, hard anger was like a weight upon his chest and his feet dragged as he climbed the stairs.

The room was dark except for the shafting light from the half-opened bathroom door. Martin undressed quietly. Little by little, mysteriously, there came in him a change. His wife was asleep, her peaceful respiration sounding gently in the room. Her high-heeled shoes with the carelessly dropped stockings made to him a mute appeal. Her underclothes were flung in disorder on the chair. Martin picked up the girdle and the soft, silk brassiére and stood for a moment with them in his hands. For the first time that evening he looked at his wife. His eyes rested on the sweet forehead, the arch of the fine brow. The brow had descended to Marianne, and the tilt at the end of the delicate nose. In his son he could trace the high cheekbones and pointed chin. Her body was full-bosomed, slender and undulant. As Martin watched the tranquil slumber of his wife the ghost of the old anger vanished. All thoughts of blame or blemish were distant from him now. Martin put out the bathroom light and raised the window. Careful not to awaken Emily he slid into the bed. By moonlight he watched his wife for the last time. His hand sought the adjacent flesh and sorrow paralleled desire in the immense complexity of love.

Audio Selections On Line

Salon magazine has made their archive of short stories read by well known actors available for free at their site or you can click here. I love to have someone read me a story personally. I'm just a kid really. Enjoy.

Til Death Do Us Part by Danny Coleiro

from the Candlewick Stories

A solitary snowflake spirals its lazy way down towards the town of Candlewick, a harbinger of the blizzard that will very soon blanket the streets with white, wet powder. It lands gracefully on the pavement outside the Browns’ residence, and, with nobody around to marvel at its unique pattern and delicate features, it sulks for a bit before melting away into nothingness. It is Monday morning, and the first day of a December that is promising to be so cold that it could freeze the snowballs off a snowman.

The kitchen of the Brown house is an interior designer’s nightmare of blue and white gingham and ceramic ducks, brightly coloured fridge magnets and plastic fruit. The kind of kitchen that could only be loved by two kinds of people – those often referred to as ‘bubbly’, and those known, in hushed tones, as ‘clinically insane’.

The woman sitting at the kitchen table, on the other hand, could be loved, at least on a visual level, by anyone in possession of a pair of eyes in their head. Imagine, if you will, that every beauty product, face cream and figure-enhancing treatment advertised on TV actually does what they promise. And now imagine that Vinaigrette Brown uses them all. Often. And all over.

The rather dull-sounding name is deceptive. Vinaigrette’s father is a lover of French cuisine who has no knowledge whatsoever of either cuisine or French. He had named his three children after his favourite dishes. Hence, Vinaigrette had a sister named Lorraine, after the quiche, and a brother named Caesar, after the salad. Which was invented by an Italian chef in Mexico. To this day, Vinaigrette still feels that she drew the short straw on the whole names thing.

As for ‘Brown’, she has her lumbering oaf of a husband to blame for that. But not for much longer.

Vinaigrette looks impatiently through sapphire-blue eyes at the cat-shaped clock on the kitchen wall. It is exactly thirteen minutes past eight. Which means that in exactly two minutes, her husband Bill will bounce downstairs in an attempt at cheerfulness, stoop over to plant a cutesy kiss on her nose that never fails to make her cringe, and then give her a hurt kicked-puppy look when she shoots him down with her daily withering glance and spiteful remark. And then he’ll shuffle out to work, shoulders bowed and face downcast, trying to figure out why his wife hates him and how to come up with new ways of making her happy.

Of course she hates him – his taste in kitchen design is just the tip of the iceberg. The minute he’s pushing up daisies, she’s going to use the first chunk of his hard-earned money – her hard-earned money – to redo the kitchen in tasteful and ultra-modern black and white. And she’ll set fire to that fucking cat-shaped clock herself.

Who would have thought that marrying a door-to-door salesman would be so lucrative? He must be selling a hell of a lot of cleaning products.

And if all goes well, she thinks to herself, glancing for the hundredth time at the telephone number scrawled on the crumpled scrap of paper palmed in her hand, the boring old fart will be pushing up daisies by this time next week.

Vinaigrette’s ruby-red lips curve upwards into a nasty little smile. Despite the description given earlier, it is not a pretty sight.

***

It is half past eight. You’ve just missed Bill, who, as predicted, has just trudged out of the house heavy of heart and hunched of shoulder. Nevertheless, Vinaigrette is having an interesting telephone conversation that you might want to stick around for. After weeks of careful practice, her voice is both as hard and as cold as diamonds. Never, in any conversation, have so many euphemisms for the word ‘kill’ been used.

“I want somebody… removed”, says Vinaigrette.

“You what?” says the gravely male voice on the other end. It’s the kind of voice that belongs to the kind of person who has been using the last puff of his cigarette to light the next since he was seven years old.

“I said… I want somebody… ‘taken care of””, she hisses, the inverted commas falling into place as obviously as the two-handed finger gesture that normally accompanies them.

“Look, lady, I have no idea what you’re talking about…”

“No, you look. I was told that you… dispose of…” Vinaigrette pauses, then her face lights up. “Oh yes. Sorry. Hang on a second”. She consults the piece of paper. Under the telephone number are two sentences, the first of which she recites into the telephone in the affected monotone of a class dunce who has been allowed to take part in the school play out of pity.

“Give a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a day”.

“Set the man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life”, comes the solemn reply.

“If you love someone, let them go. If they come back, they’re yours”, she reads.

“And if they don’t, hunt ‘em down an’ kill ‘em”.

There is a pause. Then Gravel-voice says, “so, who d’you want hit?”

Vinaigrette clears her throat. “My husband”.

“Right. Stay by the phone. I’ll get back to you within the hour”.

“Okay. The number is 82…”

“I have Caller ID”, snaps Gravel-voice impatiently, and there is a click as he hangs up.

“I have Caller ID”, Vinaigrette mimics into the dead receiver, rather taken aback. She is not accustomed to people being rude to her. She gently replaces the handset in its cradle, and decides to kill the next sixty minutes by practising her ‘grieving widow’ expressions in the shiny reflection of the kitchen toaster.

***

As it turns out, Vinaigrette only has thirty-two minutes in which to contort her face into a number of sorrowful and suffering countenances before the telephone rings again. Heart fluttering nervously, she takes a deep breath to compose herself. When she answers the phone three seconds later, she speaks in the cold, steely tones of a professional who has large numbers of people killed on a daily basis.

“Yes?”

There is a pause that gives the impression that it’s never going to end. Vinaigrette is just about to speak again when suddenly the caller breaks the silence.

“Give me details”.

This is not the same gravely voice as before. This voice sounds smooth – the kind of voice that comes out of a mouth that contains teeth which catch the light with a glint and a ‘ting’. The kind of mouth that belongs on a face consisting of a strong jaw and chiselled good looks. The kind of face that belongs to a man who has the same effect on women that Vinaigrette has on men…

“Details?” snaps the voice, cutting into Vinaigrette’s fantasy like a chainsaw through a bag of spanners. She picks up the hint of an accent in that one word, possibly French – the stress is on the second syllable rather than the first.

“Oh yes… yes. It’s my husband”.

“Ah… ‘ow many torments lie in ze small circle of a wedding ring!”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your ‘usband. Oui. My associate ‘as already informed me of zis. When?”

“As soon as possible”.

Another pause, then, “I am free tonight”.

Vinaigrette smiles. It is at this point in the conversation that a less gold-digging cold-hearted bitch might have second thoughts. Might think something along the lines of ‘oh no, this is happening too fast, what am I doing, I can’t go through with this’ and change her mind.

“Perfect!”, says Vinaigrette smartly, without a moment’s hesitation. “Dinnertime?”

“Dinnertime. Ah… hat what time is ze dinnertime?”

“Half past seven”.

“Be seated hat the table. Make sure zat your ‘usband sits wiz ‘is back to ze hentrance to ze room. And zen leave ze rest to me”.

Vinaigrette mentally replaces all the Z’s with th’s, switches a couple of aitches around accordingly, and smiles to herself. Then, curiosity gets the better of her.

“What should I call you?” she blurts out. She just has to have a name to go with that voice.

“You should not call me hat hall, mademoiselle”. Yet another pause, then, “I ham known has ‘Le Petrinel’”.

“Le Petrinel”, she murmurs, copying the stress pattern, enjoying the way the word rolls off her tongue.

“Oui. And now I must go”.

And without any further ado, the line goes dead.

“Le Petrinel”, Vinaigrette says again, dreamily. And at this point, a little warning light in her head should spark off a train of thought that might actually lead somewhere useful, that may in turn cause a rather puzzling question to pop into her head and save everybody a lot of aggro in the long run. But her head is full of echoes of that smooth and sensual voice instead.

The warning light, the spark, the train and the question eventually show up later.

Just seconds before the aggro.

***
And now, it’s just seconds before the aggro…

Vinaigrette is not really used to cooking. She is the kind of lady of leisure who goes out for lunch at The Meatball, Candlewick’s poshest restaurant, before stopping off at the supermarket on her way to the gym to buy a can of spaghetti hoops in tomato sauce for her husband’s dinner. But, for tonight, she has painstakingly prepared what page twenty-seven of the ‘Family Cookbook’ describes as ‘Herbed Chicken en Papilotte’. Given that Vinaigrette’s cooking skills are on par with those of Bai Yun, a giant panda currently residing in San Diego Zoo, California, the similarity between the grey gooey mess in the dish and the full-colour photograph in the book could be compared to the similarities between a stick figure scratched into a school desk, and the Mona Lisa.

As Vinaigrette sits and waits for her husband to arrive from work, it crosses her mind that it may seem cruel to give him false hope and optimism in the form of his first home-made dinner since he had said ‘I do’. And she giggles.

The giggle abruptly turns into a gasp of surprise as the young man with the gun suddenly steps silently into the kitchen.

“So this is where gingham goes to die”, he says calmly, glancing around the kitchen with obvious distaste. His baby blue eyes land on Vinaigrette and he flashes her a cheesy grin.

“Good evening, Mrs Brown”, says he, cheerfully, with a distinct lack of French accent.

Vinaigrette is mildly disappointed. She takes in the scruffy jeans, the black T-shirt, the mop of unruly blonde hair and the baby face. Not at all what she had imagined.

“You’re early”, she says. “Bill isn’t home yet, but…” her voice tails off as she realises that the gun is aimed in her general direction. If she knew the first thing about guns, she would recognise it as a 9mm Walther P99 semi-automatic, with an ambidextrous magazine release incorporated into the trigger guard, as used by James Bond. But since her knowledge of guns is second only to her expertise in cooking, she acknowledges it only as ‘gun’. With the hole in the end where the bullet comes out pointing at her forehead.

“Um… Le Petrinel?” she croaks, suddenly very scared. The warning light in her head finally kicks in, and she suddenly realises that in her telephone conversation with the French hitman, he hadn’t asked for her address. And she hadn’t given it to him.

“Um… nope”, says the man, and the grin vanishes and his eyes harden, the baby blue suddenly turning to steel, as his finger tightens on the trigger.

“There’s been a mistake”, Vinaigrette whispers. She closes her eyes tightly, and, instinctively, covers her ears with her hands.

“What the hell is going on?” says Bill, who has just wandered through the front door and into the kitchen only to be greeted by a gunman and the smell of burnt chicken.

“He’s the one!” Vinaigrette screeches, leaping up suddenly, stabbing a finger at her husband. The sudden movement saves her life. The gunman jerks the gun in reaction to the screech, and the cat-shaped clock behind her explodes into a shower of springs and cartoon eye-balls. The kitchen suddenly looks a little less hideous.

“He’s the one you’re meant to kill!” Vinaigrette yells frantically over the dying echo of the gun, “Do it! Kill him!”

The gunman looks bemusedly at Bill.

“Mr Brown, I presume?”

Bill gives him a distracted nod, and fixes Vinaigrette with a gaze that seems to sear right through her soul and out the other side.

“You don’t really mean that, do you Greta?” he says quietly.

She ignores him, and glares at the gunman.

“What are you waiting for?” she demands.

Bill sighs.

“How many torments lie in the small circle of a wedding ring?” he says sadly, almost to himself.

Vinaigrette’s mouth drops open as her husband seems to change before her eyes. Gone are the customary stooped shoulders, the gormless face, the puppy-dog eyes. Bill stands tall - looks, somehow, leaner. Tougher. In control. And infinitely more dangerous.

“You’re… you’re Le Petrinel?” she stammers, her reeling head now full to bursting with warning lights, alarm bells, flashing beacons and sirens. And one hundred percent pure mind-boggling amazement.

Bill smiles. A small miserable smile, almost a grimace. The kitchen light glints off his teeth and goes ‘ting’.

“Oui, ma cherie. Did you honestly believe zat I could afford an ‘ouse like zis on ze wage of a door-to-door salesman?”

The French accent washes over her astonishment like a wave of warm water.

“Oh. Darling… I…”

He interrupts her. His voice is granite.

“You hired me, Greta. You hired me to kill me. I loved you. I love you. I couldn’t believe it when I was given the contact number. When I saw it was my own. You hired me, Greta”.

She looks into his eyes. There is no emotion there. They are the flat calm of a motionless sea. But there are sharks gliding beneath the surface.

“Yes. Yes, I did. But…” she starts, and she hurries round the table, arms outstretched, offering him a golden smile and wide sapphire eyes full of admiration. “I never knew… I…”

The look he gives her freezes her as efficiently as the pause button on a DVD remote control. Bill points at the gunman.

“And so I hired him for you”.

Husband and wife turn to look at the gunman, who has momentarily been forgotten and is leaning on the kitchen counter and wondering whether or not it would be considered rude to interrupt. Now the centre of attention, he stands up and, once again, aims the gun at Vinaigrette’s head.

“Ah yes”, he says. He throws a sidelong glance towards Bill. “And may I say, Mr Petrinel, sir, that this is an honour…my wife Aimee will be thrilled when I tell her that I met the great Petrinel…” His hand steady as a rock, his finger curls around the trigger…

“Bill?” whimpers Greta, the waver of hysteria creeping into her voice as she looks down the barrel of the gun and sees eternity.

A couple of seconds tick by.

The finger tightens around the trigger. The hitman grins.

“Bill”, Vinaigrette screams the name now. It barely sounds like a word.

Bill suddenly opens his mouth to speak, then realises that he won’t have time. Hand a blur, moving almost inhumanly fast, he reaches for his own gun…

Outside, snowflakes spiral down towards the town of Candlewick, the beginning of the blizzard that will very soon blanket the streets with white, wet powder. They pile up gracefully on the pavement outside the Browns’ residence.

Inside the Brown house, there is a flash and a gunshot.

Then silence.

Thrill of the Chase by Danny Coleiro

from the Candlewick Stories

It started, as most storms do, with a single raindrop. By one o’ clock in the afternoon, it had turned into a downpour. And by five, it had developed into a meteorological onslaught of biblical proportion, battering the city of Candlewick with a vengeance that made Noah’s Ark look like the work of a hysterical paranoid schizophrenic. A ceiling of impenetrable black cloud had turned day into night, and the rain would only be called ‘rain’ by the same kind of person who would refer to World War 2 as ‘a spot of bother’. The wind shrieked through the city like a tortured demon, dragging anything that got caught in its wake behind it, and thunder crashed in the sky with all the enthusiasm of a deaf gorilla with a new set of hi-hat cymbals.

Standing on the corner of Kaffeeklatsch Street and McDougal Avenue in the deluge, Detective Inspector Gill Winchime of the CCPD suddenly realized that he was not half as pissed off as he somehow felt he had every right to be. This fact in itself would normally have pissed him off even further, launching him into a ferocious fanfaronade of four-lettered words mainly beginning with letters such as F, C and S, accompanied with a wild pacing up and down from one end to the other of whichever area he was currently occupying and a succession of highly emphatic hand gestures usually exclusive to those of a Mediterranean persuasion. DI Winchime was, by nature, one of those people who seem to be permanently hacked off. The kind of person who, upon being born, hits the doctor back.

And yet, as he watched the ambulance fight its way through the flooded street towards what was left of Balconi’s car, he absent-mindedly patted the pockets of his raincoat until he found a crumpled packet of Camels, extracted a cigarette, and lit it.

Despite the wind, the lighter flame barely flickered. Despite the rain, the cigarette remained dry.

“What tha hell jus’ happened?”

Winchime took a long drag of the cigarette and threw a sidelong glance at his companion. Exhaling slowly, he replied quietly,

“I think we kind of happened to each other”.

Balconi frowned and raised a huge tattooed hand to slowly rub his huge, bald tattooed head as he tried to digest this information. Since Balconi owned the kind of brain that required a depth charge in order to get his solitary neuron to spark, this took a while. Finally, he lowered his huge tattooed arm, looked down at Winchime, and said,

“Huh?”

Winchime ignored him. He watched impassively as the ambulance drew to a halt a few metres from the bright red Fiat Panda. A stream of petrol was trickling steadily out of the bottom before mixing with the rainwater into a shadow of a rainbow. Having, mere minutes earlier, wrapped itself around a deceptively sturdy lamppost, the car seemed to writhe and distort in a purple dance as the revolving beacon atop the ambulance swept over it, making it look somehow ethereal and ghost-like. Winchime knew that this was not the case – he had been standing between the bloody thing and the lamppost when it had hit. And it had hurt like buggery. For a few eternal seconds, anyway.

He flicked away the cigarette, watching it as it neatly faded slowly into thin air before hitting the ground, and looked up at Balconi.

“What kind of moron tries to get away in a Fiat Panda?” he muttered.

Balconi was close to seven feet tall and was built like a brick wall, or would have been, provided that the builder had thrown in a sackful of muscle while in the throes of artistic rebellion and a cocaine high. He was also covered in garishly-coloured tattoos from head to foot - a teenage statement which had grown with him until it had become an obsession. What was odd about these tattoos, however, was that none of them were pictures. Instead, Balconi had opted to label each part of his colossal body accordingly. Hence, the word ‘arse’ was tattooed on his buttocks, and the word ‘left elbow’ was tattooed on his left elbow, presumably so that he wouldn’t confuse the two. And so on. Naked, Balconi looked like a walking, talking anatomical chart, neatly divided into sections by black dotted lines. Perhaps appropriately, the word ‘brain’ was nowhere to be found.

Needless to say, looking the way he did, Balconi was not used to being called a moron. Scowling, he prodded Winchime on the shoulder with a stubby finger, upon which the word ‘index’ had been scarred in green ink.

“I said ‘huh?’”

Winchime noticed, with a lazy feeling of detachment, that Balconi appeared to be slightly transparent. He could see the rain hitting the pavement behind him.

“Don’t you remember anything?” he asked, clamping another cigarette between his lips. He shook the packet, and noticed, with a mild feeling of annoyance, that there were only six left. He tried to imagine an eternity of wandering the earth without a cigarette, and failed. He sighed resignedly, and lit up.

“Course I do”, frowned Balconi, his forehead so creased in concentration that the tattoo there read ‘fred’. “I wuz lying low. Went inta hiding after tha Dellestate job. Waiting for tha heat ta die down. Had bin holed up in Anguila Frito fra coupla mumfs…”

“Mumfs?”

“Yeah. October an’ November. Anyways, figured I’d got away wiv it. Then, tonight, your lot suddenly come kickin’ fru tha door, all guns an’ flashlights…” He paused for a second as a new idea popped into his head. He glared at Winchime. “How’d ya find me, anyways?”

“Destiny”.

Balconi gave him a menacing look.

“Are ya callin’ me stoopid?” he growled.

Winchime paused, cigarette frozen halfway in its arc towards his lips as he replayed the conversation so far, translating into Balconi-thugspeak as he went. Then he groaned.

“Destiny. Not density”.

Balconi blinked as whatever passed for a brain in his skull sorted out the consonant clusters.

“Oh”, he said, eventually. Then he sneered, “I don’ believe in destiny”.

“No… I mean your girlfriend Destiny. She ratted you out”.

“Oh”, said Balconi, then, as an afterthought, added, “tha bitch”.

Winchime’s eyes wandered idly over to the ambulance, where a trio of paramedics had leapt out of the back and were now taking in the scene with the wagging of heads which indicated that the scene they were taking in was of the kind normally described using words such as ‘hopeless’ and ‘holy shit’. He watched as one of them wriggled his torso into the driver’s seat and reached over what had once been Balconi.

Balconi shrugged and continued.

“Anyways, I snuck out the back. Got into tha car and drove outta there as fast as I could. Couldn’ see shit. But neitha could they. Fort I wuz getting’ away”.

Winchime nodded. He wasn’t really listening – he knew the story, and his question had been purely rhetorical. Rather than waste his entire afterlife attempting to explain to Balconi what ‘rhetorical’ meant, he let him go on.

“Next fing I know, you jump out inta tha middle of tha road, pointin’ a gun, yellin’ for me ta stop…”

“I’ve got a pulse!” yelled the paramedic in the car over the roar of the rain. “This one’s still alive!”

Winchime glanced up at Balconi. The guy was fading fast, was barely an outline covered in scribble. Then he looked down at his own hand. Damn. Solid. He obviously belonged on this side of the veil.

“Hey!” Balconi said suddenly, stabbing an accusatory finger in the general direction of Winchime’s face as the memory returned, “you shot me!”

“You didn’t stop”.

“But you shot me!”

“And you rammed me with your car”, Winchime snapped back. “So I guess we’re even”.

But he knew that they weren’t even. As the paramedics splashed their way back to the ambulance with a renewed sense of urgency, undoubtedly in order to retrieve the hydraulic rescue tool known, rather over-dramatically, as the Jaws of Life, Winchime thought bitterly - No Jaws of Life for me. They’ll have to clean up what’s left of me in that mess with a sponge.

Life just wasn’t fair.

Death just wasn’t fair.

He had no idea what he was going to do next. He was going to miss the job. He was going to miss being… being him. It had all come to an end in one swift, bone-crunching crash. And he wasn’t ready for it.

In his twenty-three year career as a law enforcer, Winchime had come up against all kind of criminal – masterminds and maniacs, madmen and murderers, terrorists and traveling salesmen, fanatics, fiends and freaks, – and he had taken them all down, every single one of them, one at a time, using his infamous anger as the fuel which drove him forward. He was famous for it. Now, his anger had deserted him. And he was going to be defeated by… the one who was going to get away… was this absolute pillock with the word ‘beard’ tattooed on his naked chin.

And he only had six fucking cigarettes left.

Balconi had all but disappeared by now. Winchime watched as the soaked paramedics lugged a large Y-shaped contraption out of the back of the ambulance, and sighed.

No doubt, Balconi would recover in hospital and then be whisked off to prison, where he belonged. But sometimes, thought Winchime morosely, sometimes the chase was far more important than the eventual arrest. The thrill of the chase had always made him feel so…

… it had made him feel so alive.

And, suddenly, he grinned.

“Here” he said, holding out his hand. “Hold this a second, would you?”

Balconi reached out and took the cigarette, a puzzled look on his face. Or, at least, a more puzzled look than usual.

“Wh…” he started, and abruptly vanished.

“…at f…” Winchime heard him continue as he regained painful consciousness in the driver’s seat of his mangled Panda.

Just for a sliver of a second, the ghost of a cigarette appeared in his hand.

Just a sliver of a second, but it was long enough. The tip of the cigarette seemed to glow with otherworldly brightness as the supernatural and the natural collided. As it found petrol to play with.

Time froze for a heartbeat.

Then, there was a noise that sounded a little like ‘whumph’ would sound if it had chronic laryngitis. Only much louder. The paramedics scattered as bits of Fiat Panda and Balconi rained down on them.

“… or?” Balconi finished, reappearing at Winchime’s side.

“Welcome back”, said Winchime, plucking the remains of his cigarette from Balconi’s unresisting fingers. “I’ll take that. These things’ll kill you, you know”.

He took a deep drag, and blew a lungful of smoke into Balconi’s face.

“By the way”, he added conversationally, “you’re under arrest”.

Balconi stared at him incredulously for the space of a second, then turned on his heels and galloped off into the darkness.

Winchime watched him go. Carefully, he finished the cigarette and tossed it over his shoulder, where it vanished in mid-air. Then, with a self-satisfied smile on his face and with adrenaline coursing through his ghostly veins, he did what he did best.

Breaking into a leisurely trot, he chased after him.

He had, after all, all the time in the world.