Stories in the Key of Me Read online

  Stories

  in the Key of Me

  New and Selected

  Michael C. Keith

  Regal House Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 Michael Keith. All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  Raleigh, NC 27612

  All rights reserve.

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781947548534

  ISBN -13 (epub): 9781947548541

  ISBN -13 (mobi): 9781947548350

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931628

  All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.

  Interior and cover design by Lafayette & Greene

  lafayetteandgreene.com

  Cover images © by Shutterstock/Monash

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  https://regalhousepublishing.com

  The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Acknowledgements

  The selected works in this volume first appeared in the following collections: Everything is Epic (Silver Birch Press), And Through the Trembling Air and Of Night and Light (Blue Mustang Press), The Collector of Tears (Underground Voices Press), Hoag’s Object (Whiskey Creek Press), If Things Were Made to Last Forever and Sad Boy (Big Table Publishing), The Next Better Place (Algonquin Books), The Near Enough (Cold River Press), Bits, Specks, Crumbs, Flecks (Vraeyda Press), Slow Transit (Cervena Barva Press), Perspective Drifts Like a Log on a River (PalmArt Press), and Let Us Now Speak of Extinction (MadHat Press).

  Imagination is more important than knowledge.

  –– Albert Einstein

  Introduction

  If someone reads one of my books and tells me how funny I am, I feel as though I have found the golden ticket. I also feel as if I’ve made a friend. I would rather be funny than smart. Maybe this is good because I am probably funnier than I am smart.

  When I read Michael C. Keith, I also feel as though I have made a friend. His stories are quirky, original, slightly surreal, often moving, and immaculately written. He playfully blurs the line between fiction and memoir. And, he’s very funny.

  One of his micro-fictions begins, “He’s devastated to learn that his thoughts are not original. He’s had such a high opinion of them his whole life...” It’s a writer’s incubus succinctly placed on the page like a welcome mat to a personal hell. This is how fiction functions, advance scout for life itself.

  Another begins, “I’m in another country, maybe not even of this Earth, and I don’t know what to say or how to act.” This feeling of otherness, even if in the friendly confines of one’s own bathroom, pervades this selection. It is the eeriness of the everyday and it’s an eeriness that I can relate to. I guess that’s at the heart of what I want to say about Michael: I can relate to him. But I won’t be alone in this. You will relate, too. Sometimes you may feel that this uniquely original author has been visiting your personal woolgathering and walking away with some of your wool.

  Let this preamble be a gate to the manifold pleasures of Michael C. Keith’s gardens. Enjoy…you will.

  — Corey Mesler

  Tony Bennett Sits on a Bench. . .

  Two over from where I’m sitting in Central Park. It’s when I rise to leave that I notice him. He’s with an attractive blonde woman many decades his junior. I walk over and smile at the legendary crooner. He returns my smile, and I say, “Hello, Mr. Bennett. How are you?” He looks away without replying, his expression suddenly wooden…detached. I’m at a loss for what to do next. Perhaps repeat my question? Ask something else? His companion glares at me, and I realize I’ve encroached upon their public privacy. I feel rebuffed and embarrassed and slink away, berating myself for my audacity.

  Going the Distance

  There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.

  –– Aldous Huxley

  Miranda loved the coastline of New England, while her husband, Charlie, preferred the wide-open spaces of western Nebraska. After a relatively short discussion about where they’d spend their retirement years, an agreement was reached: Half of the year would be spent on the New England shoreline, and the other half of the year would also be spent on the New England shoreline.

  After three years of quiet repose, listening to the sound of seagulls and surf, Miranda passed away. A week after her funeral, Charlie booked a flight to Omaha and then rented a car. Six hours later he reached Alliance, a small town located on the high plains of the far Midwest.

  Shortly after arriving, he bought a modest house some miles from the town’s center. He felt he had finally fulfilled a long-time dream as he sat on his porch, watching the sun set on the unobstructed horizon.

  In time, Charlie joined the senior center in town, and during a bean supper on a Friday evening, he met Sandra, a fellow septuagenarian. He fell in love with her and proposed. To his great satisfaction, she accepted, and they began life together in her larger house on the outskirts of the business district.

  Life was better than Charlie ever thought it could be, until a revelation by his new wife on their first month anniversary caught him off guard.

  “I’ve always dreamed of living close to the ocean. Maybe right on the beach,” confided Sandra. “I’m not sure I’ll ever feel fulfilled unless I do.”

  Realizing that her deep-seated yearning would most likely have a negative impact on their life together, Charlie decided to take action.

  “Darling, you know I want us to be happy, so I bought you something I think will guarantee that,” said Charlie, handing his wife an envelope.

  Sandra opened it excitedly, but when she saw what was inside, she was confused.

  “It’s a single one-way ticket to the East Coast.”

  “Exactly,” said Charlie.

  Dark Things Rise from the Senior Body

  The dull morning light seeps through the motel window. My wife does her stretches as I stagger to the bathroom to relieve myself. I catch my image in the mirror and discover that somehow in the course of the night a foot-long hair has sprung from my ear. I wrap it around my drooping lobe to show my wife. After I’ve emptied my bladder, I start to walk from the bathroom but am yanked backward and end up on my ass, a stabbing pain in my ear. When I stand, I see the wispy follicle slither across the floor, wend its way up to the sink, and slip down the drain. This is not the first time this has happened, and I think that getting old is an alien thing.

  Rest in Peace

  Renowned writer John Cheever has homosexual relationships and thinks he shouldn’t because he’s married to a woman and has two children. Overwhelmed by guilt, not long before Cheever dies he decides to avoid future gay encounters but falls in love with a young man called Rip. The irony of the letters comprising his new paramour’s name is not lost on hi
s family and friends.

  Acceptance

  We live in a rainbow of chaos.

  –– Paul Cezanne

  My girlfriend and I rented a tiny bungalow at the end of the boardwalk in Atlantic City. The outside needed a coat of paint and the shutters were hanging at different angles than they should, but the inside wasn’t bad. The floors were uneven and there was a slight leak in the bathroom ceiling. But on the plus side, there was a small wood-burning fireplace in the kitchen and a built-in bookshelf in the front room where we put our collection of seashells and used paperbacks. Unfortunately, the bedroom window looked out onto the neighboring wall of a cement high-rise inches away.

  We spent what was left of the first day at our new place sitting on the sagging front porch that overlooked the ocean and then turned in. Not long after, things started crashing down on the roof. The initial loud thuds shocked us out of our sleep. It was followed at measured intervals by several more jarring booms that caused us to run outside to see what was happening. As we stood on the sidewalk and looked up, another object was hurled from a window of the building that towered over ours.

  “Shoes!” shouted my girlfriend. “They’re dropping fucking shoes on our house!”

  As soon as the words rolled from her mouth, another pair descended onto the top of our squat digs.

  Stunned and perturbed, I called the police to report what was happening.

  “Shoes?” asked the officer.

  “Yes, shoes,” I answered.

  “What type?” he inquired.

  “Does it matter?” I replied.

  “Maybe not…hold on,” he said.

  After a few moments, he spoke again, ”Well, I checked, and there’s no law against that.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Dropping footwear from a tall building onto a smaller one constitutes no legal offense, regardless of the type of shoes,” he offered.

  We returned to the front porch and mulled over the officer’s response to our complaint. Then, we re-entered our new rental and slipped under the covers of our double bed. It took only a short while before we became accustomed to the crashing sounds and went back to sleep.

  Making a Decision Near Tuscumbia

  “What we do ’bout dat Reb body out in da field?” asked Jim.

  “Dem be da boys fightin’ to keep us slaves,” said Hany.

  “Yeah, I knows dat, but he be dead and layin’ dere. Don’t seem right…do it?”

  “It be right you workin fo da master fo nothin and git beat ifs ya looks da wrong ways?”

  “We all gots ta answer to da Lord for what we duz, so maybe we do better than he do and git in Heaven.”

  “Okay…git da shovel.”

  When the Best Action is No Action

  I’m in another country, maybe not even of this Earth, and I don’t know what to say or how to act. Everything looks strange to me. So, I’m just going to sit where I am and do nothing. I think that’s the sensible thing to do. Besides, I don’t have any shoes on and there’s something that looks like razors all over the ground.

  When Change is Mistaken for Improvement

  Chloe Aubin was charged with restoring a painting by Northern Renaissance artist Jan van Eyck––not one of his more familiar works but one of inestimable value nonetheless. This work, like so many of his creations, depicted the Virgin Mary with her child. It was badly in need of reclamation, having suffered water damage to its poplar wood panels. The process of restoration was painstaking, and after eighteen months of labor, Chloe felt exhausted. She remained concerned, however, that she’d failed to do van Eyck’s Madonna justice. It was the eyes she felt she’d altered. They differed ever-so-slightly from the photograph she’d been using as her main reference. Yet to Chloe’s surprise, her colleagues hadn’t appeared to notice. I know it’s not my imagination, she thought. I’ve done something to change the Madonna’s eyes. Each day it became more apparent to her that she’d somehow defiled the classic work of the Netherlandish artist. Just finish what you need to do and move on. If your mistake goes undetected, then perhaps it’s so subtle you’ll get away with it, she told herself. After her final reparation, she informed her supervisor she was ready for a new assignment. “Good,” he said, looking closely at the rehabilitated portrait and smiling. “We need you on another van Eyck. We love how you’ve improvised on the eyes.”

  Ever Ready

  But there’s nothing to equal, from what I hear tell,

  that moment of mystery.

  –– George Eliot

  My father fiddles with the on/off switch on his flashlight.

  “Crap!” he grumbles, tapping it against the palm of his hand. “Damn batteries are new, too.”

  The flashlight flickers on, its beam bright. “Good!”

  He owns numerous flashlights. There is one within arm’s reach everywhere in his house. They’re very important to him, and I’ve never been quite sure why.

  “What are you looking for?” I ask him as he casts the flashlight’s brilliant shaft out of his bedroom window like he’s done a thousand times before.

  “Just checking to make sure it works.”

  It’s his standard rejoinder to the question I’ve been posing since I was a kid.

  “You’re always checking them, Dad. How come?” I ask reflexively.

  “The batteries can die much sooner than you might think, so you got to check them pretty often.”

  “But you check them constantly.”

  “You can never check them enough, because when you need them, they damn sure better work.”

  “A jealous husband after you?” I joke. My father ignores me––he’s heard that line before.

  When I was a kid, I was convinced that gangsters were tracking him. Maybe he had double-crossed a ruthless mob and they wanted to come break his legs. When I told him my theory, he dismissed it as ridiculous. I wasn’t convinced, and the question of why he spent so much time shining his flashlight out into the night continued to intrigue, if not haunt, me.

  “It’s pretty weird doing that. A really strange habit,” I remark.

  “You don’t know anything,” he snaps––and I’ve heard that line before, too.

  “Dad, c’mon, I’m going to head back to my apartment. Walk me to the door.”

  “Hold on!” he says, shooshing me.

  “What?” I ask, and he waves me to the window.

  He has caught something in the beam of his flashlight. When it moves, the air empties out of my lungs.

  “Jesus! What the—?”

  “No problem,” he says, holding the beam steady on the most grotesque creature I have ever seen.

  And then suddenly the grotesquery vanishes, as if it’s been struck by a ray gun.

  “There,” says my father, turning to me with a look of triumph.

  I steady myself against the wall, my knees weak, attempting to regain my breath.

  “That’s why I always check the batteries,” he says, matter of factly.

  Forthcoming Past

  The SS Ericisson anchors at Pier 84 in Manhattan on the Hudson. It carries thousands of smiling and cheering troops just returned from the battlefields of Europe. It is 1946 and from where I sit gazing at this grainy black and white photograph, seventy years later, it occurs to me that all of these young men so eager to get on with their lives have by now spent them.

  Growing Fame

  That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and

  applause, transform ourselves into beasts.

  –– Shakespeare

  It’s a good morning when your ass isn’t bleeding, thought Barry Suskind as he checked the toilet tissue. It had been six months since he’d received experimental radiation treatment for a gastric tumor, and the bleeding was not entirely gone, as his doctor had promised. Compounding his concern was a gro
wth he’d recently discovered on the rim of his anus. At first it felt like a pimple, but with each passing day it grew to where it began to feel like his boxers were knotted between his hirsute buttocks.

  Barry returned to his doctor and was prescribed a thick salve to be applied to “the problem area” three times a day. After several weeks, the growth had shrunk and Barry no longer walked like a bronco rider. He located another growth, however, in his left armpit. Figuring the prescribed butt ointment would help shrink this newly discovered lump, he applied it to the trouble spot several times a day. After a week, the growth was twice the size. He requested an appointment with his doctor, fearing the worst.

  “Don’t really know what you got growing there. Better see a skin specialist,” advised his primary care physician.

  “Is it cancer?” Barry asked with trepidation.

  “Doesn’t look like it, but you better get it checked out by a dermatologist. It might be some kind of fungus. Have you visited the tropics since I saw you last?” asked the doctor, his nose inches from Barry’s vexing gob.

  His appointment with the dermatologist had been scheduled for the following Monday, by which time the accruing growth forced Barry to make adjustments. While the nodule was not painful, he was squeamish about making contact with it and fearful that it might suddenly burst, covering him with whatever pus might be contained within.