elimae

A Few Grim Tales
Norman Lock

They would not have been surprised had it been birds. They had for a long time expected birds. More than harbingers, birds would be their doom itself. But that moths should have clung to their eyes and tongues and filled their mouths with their soft wings -- this none of them could have imagined!

They were at their breakfast when the airplane took off from the field at the edge of town. They could hear its motor's angry whine as it left the runway, rose, and turned above the trees. The motor drowsed now as the plane came towards them, dragging its black shadows through the kitchen, across the table set with coffee cups and plates and silverware whose reflected light extinguished as the plane passed before the sun. They could see its shape duplicated in shadow -- wings, tail, a body elongated by a property of light and distance. They had just time enough to wonder how that shadow could have fallen a thousand feet from the sky (like that of clouds herding across the valley), to slice through the house's windows and remain a moment miraculously intact inside the kitchen, before they, all of them -- mother, father, and child -- were smitten, mortally.

Slender ladders were let down out of the fog, their lowest rungs visible above the field. The rungs were lit by an uncanny light difficult to describe but reminding many of us who saw it of the sea, at dusk, when the waves lie down as if to rest and the suddenly flattened sea grows luminous until the setting of the sun. And, too, there was that song which made most of us uneasy but which a few found irresistibly sweet. They were the ones who climbed the ladders into the fog; after which the ladders were, one by one, drawn up into the sky, never to reappear in their lifetime. Believe me no one could have stopped them from climbing!

She brought a small round white stone from the seaside because it pleased her -- its touch and that it had come from the ocean floor (from how many miles distant, over how many years?). She placed it carefully on her windowsill, in the sun, between the African violet and the cedar box containing threads from her mother's sewing basket she had once taken "in remembrance." During the night, she drowned in her bed. The man in the apartment below hers said that he had heard a noise "like the crashing of waves."

He would not have kept a gun in the house. He hated them "on principle." And his children were there with him in the house. He would not for a moment have considered possessing any sort of weapon. He was, in fact, afraid of them. That night when he came home from the office, he found a revolver waiting for him on the desk, behind the locked door of his study. No one knew how it had come to be there, or why he should have shot himself in the head with it.

He brought home a stone from Pompeii -- a fragment of igneous rock. In the evening, he would hold it in his hand, dreaming always of the same lovely woman whose eyes searched the harbor for her husband's ship and whose sandaled feet walked the footpaths, from the flower stalls to the villa of the Mysteries. One night his house burned. They found him kneeling in the ruin -- his arms embracing empty air, his body untouched by the fire. In his hand, a stone.

That winter morning, the boy went out into the snow and brought back a snowball. He had packed it tightly, in his ungloved hands -- packed it and smoothed it until it was like glass. The day was cold -- a chill came off the snow. Snakes of snow writhed along the ground in the wind. Even inside the house, there was a chill to make the bones ache. He carried the snowball upstairs and set it on his dresser, on a saucer decorated along its rim with holly leaves and berries. The snowball remained there undisturbed and undiminished through the long, cold winter. And even through the spring, though no one could explain how. In July when the house felt like an oven, the boy's room was pleasantly cool. His mother liked to sit there in the hot afternoon and evening before the wind rose up and blew away the heat -- liked to sit and read a book in the boy's attic room. No one thought any longer about the snowball lying in the saucer like an extinguished crystal ball. The family had long since ceased advancing possible theories to one another about the enduring ice. In August the boy's father came home -- "sick to death" of the woman he had run away with in the fall of the previous year. The boy now sat waiting for his father to come upstairs to say whatever he would say to him, turning his hat in his hands the way he did when he was uneasy in his mind. The man knocked once at his son's door, then entered. Before he could open his mouth to remark on the freezing room (in the dog days, look -- frost on the windowpanes!), he was struck dead. It took only minutes for the ice to melt.

In the yard outside the man's house, a swamp maple grew "overnight," at least this is the impression those who lived in the neighborhood had. (There were some others, of course, who claimed it had always been there -- but that could not be. It would have been noticed before then, certainly.) A little later -- quicker than anyone could have believed possible, a vine grew up the side of the tree, climbed out over the lowest branch, and now hung down, lolling -- its thick stem twisted into a kind of loop. The milkman was the first to see him -- his body hanging from the tree, the vine around his neck. None knew his crime.