I’ve been thinking of ways to thank my faithful readers and
fans and came up with Short Story Sunday. I’ll post a free short story on my
blog on Sundays, Probably random Sundays, if I know myself.
This was my first one ever published, in the July-August
issue of Future Mystery Anthology
Magazine, with the title of “Flash.” Later, the next February, it places
2nd in their “Fire to Fly” contest among their own published stories.
I really got my money’s worth out of this one. In the form below,
it appeared in April in Web Mystery
Magazine. It was slightly edited by Rosalie Stafford, the editor.
Then, in 2007, it was reprinted in B.J. Bourg’s Mouthful of Bullets magazine. As you’ll
see it’s a bit dated now, since electronics are involved, but I still like the
way it reads. I hope you will too.
**After the end, I posted an awesome review it received in
2007.
FLASH MOB by Kaye George
Two hundred beepers woke up and
chirped their signals to their keepers.
The ones being paged read the scrolling messages, smiled, stuck the
devices in their pockets and purses, and headed out.
*****
Melissa breathed a barely
perceptible sigh of relief. Can’t relax
too much yet. In two hours it will all
be over.
*****
Last week he called her at work.
“We should go out to dinner
tonight. I made a big sale. Got the check in my hand.”
“That’s great, Matt! What time?”
“Sure you’re up to it, Mel?”
Not that again! Yes, she had cancer. Yes, she was weak from her treatment day
before yesterday. But please, Matt, don’t treat me like one of your porcelain dolls. She ignored his question and asked her own.
“What did you sell?”
“That Currier and Ives print – the
one you always hated.”
“Ah yes. The one that has brown all around the edges
and people that look out of proportion.
How much?”
“Hang on to your wig.”
She gritted her teeth. How many times had she told him not to joke
about her wig?
“I got three hundred. And it’s been a very good week.”
Her jaw relaxed and she pictured
his proud, shining eyes, the color of melting dark chocolate. “That’s great, hon. Let’s go to the new place in Dover. Lisa said the food was good, atmosphere
great, and the prices not too awful.”
“I’ll be home around six. Leave around seven?”
She remembered that as their last
good night.
*****
Two hundred email flags popped up
with their various dings, chimes and whirrs.
Two hundred users clicked on the latest notice, grinned, and got up. Time to go!
*****
The restaurant was even better than
Lisa had led Melissa to believe. The
food was excellent. And the ambiance was
positively romantic.
Matt’s eyes were dark pools in the
dancing candlelight. And Melissa knew
she looked better here than in a brightly lit place. Her pale skin had grown papery thin and even
sagged a bit at the jaw line. Cancer
treatment was not for the faint hearted.
The salads had just been cleared
and the table crumbed when Mel caught a whiff of strong perfume. She felt almost dizzy from the nausea that
rose in her throat. Intolerance to
strong odors was another not-fun side effect.
The wearer of the offensive stench
paused at their table.
“Matt, darling!” she effused and leaned over to smooch him on
the cheek, her mink dripping onto the tablecloth. The woman, forty-ish, slim, and overly
jeweled, looked at Melissa.
“Is this the little woman?” Her smile, stiff with what was probably
Botox, was aimed at Matt. Good
thing. She missed the daggers coming from
Mel.
*****
One hundred cell phones rang,
cawed, tweedled, and sang. One hundred
people pressed buttons and watched messages go by. All right!
Fun time.
*****
“Who was that?” spat Mel after the
clanking, furred socialite drifted off to her table in the rear of the
restaurant.
“Shh! Not so loud,” whispered Matt. “She’s the rich bitch who bought the Currier
and Ives.”
“Oh, so she’s stupid, too.”
Matt frowned as the waitress slid
their entrees onto the creamy white of the linen tablecloth and asked if they
would like their drinks freshened.
“What do you mean ‘too’”? Matt asked when they were alone again.
“Huh?”
“You said she’s stupid, too.”
“Oh, I meant besides being
generally annoying. I mean – kissing my
husband in front of me. How gauche!”
Matt bent his head to his food and
his nostrils flared in that way that said he was pissed.
“What?” she demanded. “Why are you upset with me? Because I don’t personally like one of your
customers? No big deal. I’ll probably never see her again and
certainly won’t tell her what I think.”
His look softened. “I know you won’t, Mel. Sorry.”
Melissa wasn’t really looking for
it, but couldn’t help noticing how touchy he was the rest of the evening. She also noticed the society babe give Matt a
wink as she left a few minutes before they did.
*****
Dozens of grocery stores, marts,
and drug stores experienced a run on red balloons. Disappointed shoppers, arriving after the red
ones were sold out, settled for pink and orange. They were all in a big hurry.
*****
The next night Matt was late again,
but brought roses home. She’d had a
tough time staying at work all day. Her
boss had given her permission to leave whenever she couldn’t make it through
the day, but she rarely missed more than two days for her treatments. It was getting harder, though.
Matt, looking extremely pleased
with himself, found a vase under the sink, filled it with water, and stuck the
fragrant blooms on the table beside the couch where Melissa had collapsed a
half hour earlier.
Melissa, drained, couldn’t summon
the energy to move the roses. “Matt,
honey, could you please put them across the room? The smell is bothering me.”
“Sure thing.” He swooped the vase up, set it on the shelf
near the window, and strode with enviably healthy legs back to the couch. “Rough day?”
He smoothed her forehead and gave her a chaste peck.
Mel swallowed. There it was!
That horrid perfume. She lurched
up and made it to the toilet before losing her lunch.
“You okay?” Matt called from the hallway outside the
bathroom.
“I’m fine. Just go ahead and have dinner without
me.” She sat on the floor, leaning
against the cool gray tiles of the wall, too tired to cry.
*****
The next day she called in sick to
work, then phoned the doctor’s office and said she had to see him that
day. When she got there she only had to
wait fifteen minutes in the outer waiting room and five in the examining room.
Dr. Leigh bustled in, shut the
door, and took a seat on his stool, shuffling the papers he was holding and
avoiding her eyes.
“I’m not doing too well,” she
started.
He held up his hand. “I don’t doubt it.” He raised his gaze from the floor and concern
filled his eyes with pain. “I got your
last test results early this morning.
They’re not good.”
“Not good,” she echoed, the chill
of the room entering her spine.
“The tumors are growing. Your treatments aren’t working.” His voice was gentle, kindly. “I’m sorry, Melissa. I think it’s time to stop treatment and make
you comfortable.”
So that was it. She had the death sentence. Tried, convicted, and no appeals
allowed. Melissa had intended to confide
in Dr. Leigh that she suspected her husband was having an affair with one of
his rich customers. On her way to the
office she had pictured his soothing presence convincing her that she was
wrong. She had pictured leaving with her
heart lighter. Instead, her heart
weighed so much it felt like it was sitting on her stomach as she drove slowly
home.
Maybe this would be the last
session with the toilet bowl, she thought as she wobbled to her feet after
vomiting for a good ten minutes. Without
treatment, she should at least feel better.
That’s what Dr. Leigh has intimated.
But how could she feel better when
she knew – okay she admitted that she did know – that Matt was getting
something more out of that client that her money? She tried to look at their life from his
point of view. She had been extremely hard to live with since her
cancer was diagnosed. One treatment
option after another had not panned out and now the last resort had been
declared a failure. She was given a few
months at the most.
Matt would be home in a couple of
hours. Unless he called again and said
he would be late.
How
could you abandon me when I’ve never needed you more?
She called him some choice names
out loud. That felt good. Maybe she would let him have it when he came
through the door. She paced, energized
by her bitter hatred, rehearsing the coming scene.
Then she stopped. Wait.
If she told him she was dying, what would he do then? Would he just leave her completely? God knows things had been rocky since her
diagnosis. Matt had never dealt well
with illness, his own or others, and hadn’t displayed many moments of
graciousness lately. Mostly just
impatience and exasperation.
No, she wouldn’t tell him. But she would have to do something.
*****
Five hundred people got into cars,
onto buses and bicycles, or just started walking toward the antique district.
*****
She called in the next day, Friday,
and quit her job. Her boss said she had
five days of vacation pay coming, and he’d see if they could keep her on the
payroll for two more weeks.
After she hung up she thought how
odd it was that she had told her boss she was terminal, and not her husband.
The weekend was pleasant. She could tell Matt sensed that something was
drastically different, some line had been crossed, but he had no way of knowing
what it was. Maybe he suspected she knew
of his affair. She didn’t tell him she
had quit her job, but pondered how she was going to keep him from knowing. And why she wanted to.
As she watched him flip the burgers
on the stove Sunday night she wondered if she had been too hasty. Maybe he wasn’t having an affair. Her overwrought state could be making her
imagine things. Maybe the client had
merely been in the shop and that overpowering smell stayed with Matt after she
left.
She seemed to have more energy than
she’d had in a long time and jumped up to get the salads as he pushed the
patties onto the plates she had set on the dining room table. The meal was restful and they watched out the
window in a companionable silence as the winter sun sparked its radiance into
the sky just before it died for the day.
*****
Some people arrived a little too
soon and found ways to loiter until the appointed time. Others circled the block looking for parking
spaces. The four-tiered garage at the
corner filled up and cars started entering the one two blocks away.
*****
It was a relief to quit her job,
but she missed the people after just two days.
Two busy days, though. There was
an urgency to her life, now, since she knew if was finite. The first thing she did was clean the house
from top to bottom. Amazing how much
better she felt without the deadly treatments.
Dr. Leigh’s prescribed pain relievers gave her a sense of floating above
the world, but didn’t seem to prevent her energy from flowing.
By the time Matt got home she made
sure she was dressed in her regular working clothes so he would think she went
to work. She tried to act tired from
work, but he noticed how bubbly she was and attributed it, rightly, to her
condition. Wrong condition, though.
“You’re bouncing back from this
last treatment, Mel. Maybe something’s
finally working.”
“I hope so,” she murmured, sipping
the wine he had so gallantly poured. She
rested her head on his shoulder as they watched a movie on television, smiling
when he started snoring softly halfway through the picture.
*****
Nearly five hundred people blew up
their balloons, mostly red, ready to for the next step.
*****
Now that Mel knew exactly what to
expect, a weight was lifted. It was
wonderful to know that her last days on earth wouldn’t be lived in the torment
she’d undergone for months. She didn’t have
to worry about how many pain pills she took because the end was so near. And she didn’t have to dread an unknown
future. Somehow, she didn’t really dread
her end.
The next day, Wednesday, Melissa
decided to go through her closet and dispose of her clothing and jewelry. She pulled a box out of the closet and
discovered a cache of old photographs she’d forgotten all about. It was great fun to go through them. Sort of a summing up of her life. She wondered vaguely what would happen to her
photographs, her books, her favorite set of china. Maybe it was the painkiller, but she couldn’t
get too worked up about it.
As she drew a picture of Matt on
the beach out of the bottom of the box she heard his voice downstairs. A glance at the clock showed it to be
noon. He didn’t usually come home from
his antique shop in the middle of the day, usually ate in the store and gave
the employees a lunch hour.
She was about to call to him when
she heard another voice. A female
voice. A chuckle, then a grating
laugh. Footfalls sounded on the stairs
and Melissa smoothly shoved the box into the closet and followed it in, pulling
the door shut behind her.
The next hour was torture. She hunkered in the dark and listened to her
husband confirm her fears, the ones she had dismissed as irrational. She recognized the society dame’s harsh
smoker’s voice and heard the clank of her bracelets as the mattress – the
mattress to her bed -- gave creaking noises and the headboard whacked
the wall in a way Melissa didn’t recall it ever doing.
After some sickening sweet talk
they took an interminable amount of time getting reclothed and leaving. As Melissa heard the front door slam she
burst out of the closet and looked at the bed in horror. One of them, probably not Matt, had made it
up so neatly she would never have known.
She knew she wouldn’t sleep there again.
She would feign nausea and take up residency on the den couch.
*****
Almost five hundred people gathered
outside the shop, Matt’s antiques, their balloons swaying in the slight breeze,
strings becoming tangled. Some of them
began to laugh.
*****
She had read about flash mobs in
the paper. The first one she heard of,
at Grand Central Station, was a gathering of people who burst into applause at the Hyatt Hotel for
fifteen seconds. Others consisted of
people all going to a certain store and asking to see the same rug or pair of
shoes. According to one report, the
appeal of the flash mob was its lack of agenda.
Folks got the message on their pagers, their computers, or their cell
phones, then willingly, eagerly, convened at the appointed place and time and
followed the instructions given on their various electronic devices.
The gatherings were mostly
innocuous, with a few exceptions, one being a photographer who was beaten by the event organizer. The report in today’s paper, hinting that the
fad was likely to die out soon, spurred her to make up her mind quickly. The idea she’d hatched seemed perfect. The cover it would afford was ideal. She knew Matt’s gun would be in the drawer at
work where he always kept it. There was
one at home and one in the shop. They
had both taken the course required by the licensing people when they bought the
guns. Matt’s valuable inventory had
decided him to get the first one, then it seemed only right to have one to
defend the house also.
Melissa looked at her watch. Time to go.
The note was written which would explain everything. She tucked it into the bottom of the desk
drawer, next to her insurance policy which named Matt as the beneficiary, put
on her coat, and left.
*****
Matt looked out the front window. The street was full of people carrying
balloons. They started into the
shop. One balloon caught on the ceiling
fan and popped. The mob twittered.
“No!” shouted Matt.
“You can’t come in here. Get
out!” He flapped his hands and even
pushed a couple of them, but some of the crowd forced their way in. Dozens of mobbers filled the shop and the
ones that didn’t fit pressed up against the window, all getting as close
together as they could.
“Hi Matt.” He whirled around. Melissa had come in the back way. She smiled.
“What is going on?” he called to
her, fighting his way to her side. He
grabbed her arm.
“Come into the office with me,
Matt,” she said, putting her lips next to his ear.
Puzzled, he followed her.
The crowd grew eerily silent. Matt closed the door. Mel went behind his desk, drew the gun from
the drawer and brought it slowly up in front of her. Matt froze.
The mobbers checked their watches.
Melissa checked hers. She pointed the gun at Matt with her gloved
hand, just to see what he would do.
“Mel,” he breathed,
hyperventilating. “What are you doing?”
“Saying goodbye, Matt.” She knew his were the only fingerprints on
the gun. As five hundred balloons
popped, Melissa pulled the trigger.
Those nearest the office noticed
the sound, in spite of the noise.
Melissa had calculated correctly.
The first ones into the room drew the conclusion she had planned. Matt was standing over her body. His prints were on the gun. Five different cell phones were used to call
Nine One One and the response was instantaneous, since the police, suspicious
of the mob, had converged outside.
The note was found in a search of
the house. It instructed the authorities
to question Matt if anything happened to her.
Matt was convicted within a year and sentenced to life in prison.
THE END
This review appeared a blog called Speakeasy, which, like
the magazines that published this piece, is bygone.
Friday, November 2, 2007
This well-told tale has such a
clever device I'm envious that I didn't think of it. The intercuts of people
answering their cell phones and checking their palm pilots is so intriguing
that you keep reading just to find out what that's all about, to heck with the
crime. The characters are beautifully drawn, especially the viewpoint
character. You feel sorry for her without having your tears jerked. Keep your
hands off my tears, thanks anyway. That George doesn't dissolve into maudlin
sentimentalism in order to suck you in makes this a vastly better story than it
would have been otherwise. The story is taut and believable. Check it out over
at Mouth Full of
Bullets.
Posted by Susan Brassfield Cogan at 12:26 PM
*****AUTHOR’S NOTE: I, of course, see edits I would love to
make now, but I have refrained. You will, no doubt, especially after I’ve
pointed it out, notice my inexplicable but persistent penchant for names
beginning with the letter M. Also, the double-spacing between sentences, which
is how we used to do it.
