Three Stories

ANY DAY NOW

Everybody in town loved to talk about my special powers. They said I got struck by a lightning bug or bit by an anteater and one day when I needed them most the powers would emerge. I never felt anything. I had a hard time in high school, got bullied a lot. Dropped out of college after one semester. Then I started as a clerk at the grocery store. Every other Friday I got a check for $283.67 and went to cash it at the bank. One Friday I was waiting in line and a man walked in with a gun. “Gabe,” yelled the tellers. “Help us! Use your powers!” I clenched every muscle in my body but nothing happened. The guy got away with the money and all I managed to do was pull my hamstring. People were disappointed but they still insisted I had powers. Their faith was a beautiful thing. When I rang up their white bread and their frozen peas and their TV dinners they’d force a smile and say “Any day now” or “Don’t forget us when you’re rich and famous.” Meanwhile, days slipped by. Weeks, months, years. The factory moved to China and our entire town went to hell. I got laid off at the grocery store and I couldn’t make rent so I started living in a shed in a field full of crabgrass. Now it’s just me, my tin cup and a couple of dirty magazines. Every morning I cook myself some oatmeal and stare out at the road through the mist, waiting for a car to pass. That, I guess, is my power.

BOOK CLUB

Last month at Book Club, Ed and Kristina told us they were getting a divorce. Then we got an email from Yaz and Anne. They were splitting up too. That just left Suzy and me. I shook her awake in the middle of the night and said, “We don’t have to go through with this, you know. We can just join a new book club.” But Suze shrugged me off, said we were probably about due for a divorce anyway. A couple weeks later my phone rang at the Best Western. It was Yaz, who was staying a few rooms over. “We already read the book,” he said. “Might as well have our meeting.” So Yaz and Ed and I got together in the lobby with some takeout and tried to pretend like everything was hunky-dory. Yaz even brought this new woman who looked sort of like Anne, except you could tell she’d gotten a lot of work done. She sat at the head of the table and went on and on about celebrities. Who’d lost weight, who'd gained weight, who’d been seen with who. When she went up to her room for her cigarettes the three of us went out to the parking lot and piled into Ed's Honda, went looking for our ex-wives. They were over at Kristina’s, discussing the book. We pulled up some chairs, made ourselves plates from the pots in the kitchen. Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes, brisket. Yaz tried to describe how people were never really happy in the book. How they started off with good intentions and ended up with no intentions at all. Kristina said the prose was nothing to write home about but the end was satisfying in a strange kind of way. Suzy shook her head and said the end wasn’t any good at all. She thought the whole book pretty much escalated into nothing, which she then admitted wasn’t too far off from the real thing. By ‘the real thing,’ she meant life. At least, I think that’s what she meant. I’m not really sure. To be honest, I hadn’t even read the book.

DEAD BODY NUMBER SEVEN

One of the overhead lights came crashing down on Suzanne so they subbed me in as Dead Body Number Seven. The director laughed when he gave me the news, said the falling light only would’ve made Suzanne more convincing. She isn’t actually dead, but she’s a hell of a lot closer to dead than she was before that light fell. I visit her in the hospital once we’ve wrapped for the day. She’s just like an angel, lying there in her baby blue gown, the artificial respirator pumping her chest up and down, up and down . . . I swear, if she ever pulls out of this thing . . . No, no . . . no time to think about that now. I’ve got to put all my energy into what’s important: being dead. There’ll be plenty of time to worry about Suzanne once I’m finished being dead.