Masker

by Rudi Dornemann

I don’t remember the stairs down, or grabbing my coat, or going out, but I’m part of the procession now. Masked and singing, we walk in a line through the snow. We sing the song that I’ve been hearing in my head since I first put on the mask a few weeks ago, the words that came clearer as the solstice approached.

Repeated for hours, the words become nonsense, then seem to mean something else. My fellow marchers are blurred as if by tears, no matter how much I blink, and there are no tracks in the snow but my own and the drummer’s. After a mile or two, I realize I’ve forgotten my name, and every other memory that isn’t about the mask or the procession is a distant as a dream lost on waking. The wind blowing the drummer’s clothes shows he’s skeleton thin. He grins with all his teeth.

I keep singing, even though I don’t know how much sound makes it past my scarf, which is pulled up over my freezing nose. The ghost-wind stings my eyes and there are frozen clumps of tears along the bottom of my mask. If I don’t keep singing, I know they’ll find me in a snowbank when the spring melt comes, and I wonder if that’s who the rest of the marchers are–recipients of the same mask, who sang and marched until the winter overcame them, and can’t help but come back to walk the longest night.

I can’t stop singing the words that are pulled out of me in an unending thread. And I’m running because I can see the sun’s glow, and I keep running, because the procession will end when it’s up, but the sun gets halfway over the horizon, then I swear it’s going down again, and there are hills, each valley a pocket of night, but we charge up the next incline hoping the sun will be higher, and I can’t tell, it should be up by now, I keep running, and then, at the crest of one hill, it’s the moon, not the sun, and I don’t know how many hours we still have to go. The beat of my heart, and the beat of the drum in time with it, slows back to marching. My feet are stumps of ice.

The drummer drums. I march.

The drummer grins. I sing.

Continued tomorrow with “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

Mission

by David

A homeless guy panhandling downstairs had told me this was where the old lady lived. The one eating all the livestock. The one who might be my missing grandmother. If this was her, and I thought it was, she needed help. I knocked again. Sometimes old people took a long time to get to the door. I was just finally turning away when the cover slid away from the peephole.

“Yeah?!” A voice roughened by hard use.

I had not decided what to say. “Um.” My mind was empty.

“Three seconds.”

“Ms. Johnson,” I said desperately, “I think I’m your grandson.”

Silence. Then the door swung open. There she stood, Granny from the Beverly Hillbillies. Instead of a corn cob pipe she had a can of Bud.

“No,” she said and moved to slam the door.

“I’m pretty sure. My mother was…”

“I believe you; don’t want to talk.” She bounced the door off the hand I put out to stop it.

“And I heard about the cow. I’m curious. How…”

She rolled her eyes and took a swig, stepping aside to give me room. As soon as I was in she slammed the door hard enough to shake dust off the knickknacks on the shelves, if there had been any. There weren’t. A battered wooden table with a couple of chairs was all the furniture in the front room. The only thing on the table was a 4-inch ceramic horse, which was, frankly, hideous. She set the beer can down beside it.

I cleared my throat.

“I don’t know how to say this, Grandma. I hear you’ve been eating animals. Raw, whole, live. Is this true?”

For a moment she just stared. My eyes flicked to the doorway as I measured my chances of escape. Then she laughed, a true belly laugh, improbably loud coming from her. It went on and on. Gradually she subsided. She wiped her eyes.

“Raw, sure. Whole? No. Live? No. I did eat a dead fly. The spider might have been in a coma. The rest of them were ceramic, and good riddance to the lot. The cat was pink, nuff said. The dog had Heartfelt-Moments eyes. The cow was an abomination. People make the most disgusting crap imaginable. I dispose of it.” She pointed at the center of the table.

“And tomorrow? Tomorrow I’m going to take care of that obnoxious horse. You watch me.”

End