A Light in the Window

I was trudging along through a cold marsh. It was almost night, and I was straining my eyes and sweeping my hands out in front of me to find my way. I came to a clearing where there was a small cabin. There was a kerosene lamp in the window. As I approached, I almost stumbled over a huddled figure sitting on a tree stump a few yards away from the cabin. I caught the figure by the shoulder to break my fall and I felt the trembling under my hand. I came in close. It was a man with the hood of his filthy brown coat pulled up over his head. I couldn't make out the man's face, but I could see the mud and debris matted in his beard. I could see the mud on his hands and the dirt crusted around his fingernails as he balled one hand into a fist and crushed it with the other and then switched and crushed the other fist in his other hand, both of the hands shaking wildly until he brought them to his face and bit down on the knuckle of his thumb, the teeth showing in the dark.

The man didn't even seem to notice my hand resting on his shoulder. He didn't seem to notice me huddled in close to him, my breath steaming in the cold after the long slog through the marsh. I could hear him whimpering and gnashing and gnawing, and then his jaw would clench and he would go quiet and I could feel the tremors in his shoulder under my hand. Finally, he took a deep breath and sat up straighter, like he had resolved something and cleared his mind. He got up from the stump and started towards the door of the cabin. I slipped in behind him as he entered, still unnoticed. It was darker inside and the kerosene lamp provided the only light. The man's wife sat in a rocking chair across the room. The man grabbed the lamp off the window sill and brought it to the middle of the room and held it high. His wife didn't like the glare from the light and she turned away her head. There was an old shoebox lying on the floor under the shadow cast by the man's arm holding the lamp.

Then, from some unseen corner of the room, a doctor wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope came over and knelt there on the floor in front of the shoebox. He pulled back the lid, and I could see that there was a baby lying inside the shoebox on a blue quilt that had been folded and laid down beneath it. The baby's eyes were open and it didn't move, and I could see that it was dead, but the doctor proceeded to examine it and he placed the stethoscope against its chest to be sure. Everyone was quiet as the doctor worked, but the wife kept rocking her chair with a maddening regularity and she kept her head turned away and her face hard and her jaw set, as though she refused to see the truth of what was laid out in front of her.

The man explained to the doctor that the baby had been making this constant whining noise, like a whistling in the back of its throat. He said that his wife couldn't stand the noise. She couldn't eat. She couldn't sleep. Her hair was prematurely turning grey, and she was pulling at the knots, and clumps of it were coming loose in her hands. They didn't know what was wrong with the baby. They couldn't get it to stop making this noise. Every breath the baby took, there was that noise, like a hard wind driving through the cracks in the walls. Finally, the man had made the bed for the baby in the shoebox, and he had laid the baby in the box, and then he had held his hand over the baby's mouth and nose and he had kept it there until the noise was gone.

The doctor lifted his head and he stared off at a nail in the wall that was level with his line of sight. He let out a long breath. He looked back down at the baby, and he opened the baby's mouth and reached two fingers down the baby's throat. He did all this as gently as he could, even though the baby was gone. He felt around carefully, turning his head slightly, like he was listening for something. He pulled back his hand and wiped his fingers on a handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. He explained to the couple that the baby had only had a small defect, a deviation at the back of the throat that had caused the whistling noise that they had heard. It could have been easily fixed with surgery. The doctor wiped the handkerchief across his forehead and slipped it back into his pocket. 

The Pillowcase

I was climbing up to the sixth floor of this decrepit old apartment building in the city. I had to trudge up the stairs that spiraled around the large open stairwell in the center of the building. I had received some sort of mysterious summons to meet someone, and when I reached the landing on the sixth floor, I saw that the door to the first apartment at the top of the stairs was wide open. I crept into the apartment, and I saw that the place was empty. There was no furniture, just a few boxes and other discarded items left behind on the hardwood floors. Across the room, the double doors to the balcony were standing open, and out on the balcony I saw a woman with black hair standing at the railing. She stood with her back to me, and I could see the view beyond her as she stood looking out at the bay that the city had been build around, watching all the little boats with their white sails as they drifted into the harbor or sailed back out to the open water on the horizon.

I raised a finger, and I was just about to call out to her, but then I heard the sound of a car alarm going off down in the parking lot below. I knew it was my car. I knew someone was messing with it. This was a bad neighborhood, and I had taken a risk coming here. I wanted to get down there quickly and catch the person in the act of breaking into my car, but I knew I'd never get back down all those flights of stairs in time. But then I noticed a pillowcase sitting on a stack of boxes just beside the door to the apartment. The pillowcase was decorated with cartoon cows and sheep and other farm animals grazing in the rainbows and the clouds. I grabbed the pillowcase, and before giving the idea any real thought, I ran back out into the stairwell and jumped over the railing, holding the pillowcase over my head and hoping to use it as a makeshift parachute.

Luckily, the pillowcase popped open with a snap and it eased my descent as I dropped down the shaft in the middle of the spiraling flights of stairs. But I looked up and I saw that there was a small rip in the stitching along the seam of the pillowcase, just big enough to poke a finger through. The pillowcase deflated a little as some of the air escaped though this hole, and I felt myself dropping a little faster, but the pillowcase was still doing a pretty good job of catching the air. And I figured this would be even better. The landing might be kind of rough, but I would be alright, and I would get down to the parking lot even sooner, with even better hopes of catching the person breaking into my car.

I did a tumble and a roll to break my fall as I hit the ground, and then I flipped back onto my feet and I ran for the back door that led out to the parking lot. But I was too late. The thieves had already disassembled my car and they were scattering in all directions, carrying off different pieces of it, tires and fenders and rims and taillights. One of them hooted and hollered as he ran off waving the radio in the air, the wires hanging from it, music from the classic rock station still playing from the speakers that someone else was carrying off in the other direction. Another one was giggling hysterically as he made off with my steering wheel, holding it out in front of him and weaving in a zigzag pattern across the parking lot as he pretended to steer himself one way and then the other. There was nothing but a dented bumper and a few greasy nuts and bolts left sitting in the space where my car had been.

My shoulders slumped and my arms dropped to my sides, the deflated pillowcase still gripped in my fist. There was a little boy standing there next to me on the sidewalk. He had been watching the whole thing and just shaking his head. He turned to me and pointed at something on my shirt, and I looked down and noticed that there was a silver badge pinned there. I touched the badge with my finger and he nodded and looked away back out at the parking lot. He asked me why I never did anything about the crime in his neighborhood, why I just stood there and let things like this happen right in front of me. I started to say something, but I stopped and my shoulders slumped again. I had no idea what to tell him.