She clenched her jaw, looked away.
“Then Donny is diagnosed. Bad timing all around, I suppose. You feel bad about what you’ve done and volunteer at Providence as your way of making amends, at least in your own mind. On top of all that, Calico ends up with Rex. You still can’t have her.”
She flicked her cigarette to the sidewalk. Orange sparks exploded.
“But why hurt Gamera? He’s just a poor defenseless animal.”
She lowered her head. Her shoulders jerked up and down as she began to sob.
“I don’t know… I wanted to hurt Donny… It’s because of him… and Calico… the band doesn’t want me around…”
“No, hon. It’s because of you the band doesn’t want you around.”
Tears fell from her face, sparkling in the passing headlights before splatting to the dark sidewalk.
Her words coughed between hitching sobs, “I… I’m sorry but… it’s just a… just a turtle…”
“He’s a tortoise.”
A few weeks later, I scarfed down a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast, running behind schedule. I was planning on giving Donny a ride home after his treatment and saying hi to Karen and Gamera. Rinsing my bowl in the sink, I caught sight of Thumper scampering by the open door and down the hall. The rabbit only moves that fast when he’s spooked, and one thing spooks him more than any other.
I found it on the floor near the stereo, hiding behind a cabinet leg; a big juicy brown one, ugly as sin. I nudged it with the toe of my boot and it unfurled its many legs, creeping out across the rug where I could nail it with a good stomp, raising my booted foot to do the deed.
Then I paused, the thought flicking through my mind that what if Karen’s theory about reincarnation was right? What if I come back as a creepy-crawly?
Hauling across the shag, the spider tried to reach a crack in the wall, the dark spot under the easy chair, any hiding place to let it live another day.
From a pile of junk mail I grabbed that old War Kittens flyer. I set the edge of it on the rug in front of the spider, leaving him no choice but to crawl up onto it.
Holding the flyer as far from my body as possible, I held it out an open window to dump the spider out. He didn’t want to go, too stupid to know I was saving his life. I shook the flyer and the thing dropped off, dangling from a glowing filament. I yelped, feeling somehow attached to the spider; it to its web, the web to the flyer, the flyer to my fingers.
I swung the spider to the wall of the houseboat where it clung above the cold, lapping Willamette.
Before closing the window I watched. The spider appeared to accept its new surroundings, turning and stepping spindly legs in some direction only it had reason to, in slow arachnid symmetry, one foot in front of the other, in front of the other, in front of the other…
Like any other survivor.
The Changelings: a Very Grim Fairytale (But for Our Times)
by Carol Biederman
Carol Biederman is the author of a number of published short stories and of a volume of related tales entitled The Oldest Inhabitant (Trafford, 2006), in which the narrator, the first person buried in a California Gold Rush cemetery, uses his unique position to tell stories of the hardships of some of those buried after him. The kind of originality of concept displayed in Ms. Biederman’s book is also evident in her debut story for us. When she isn’t writing, she does Ghost Tours for tourists in the little Gold Rush town she calls home.
Once upon a time, about twenty-seven years ago, a wicked witch switched babies in the delivery room of a small hospital.
(Those among you who are of a pedestrian and pedantic turn of mind would argue she was simply a tired obstetrics nurse, having already worked a sixteen-hour shift with six babies born in that time, this being the nine-month mark of a massive and long power outage when people — unable to cook a meal or watch television — had nothing to do but add an extra blanket and retire to bed for whatever entertainment that might offer, and her mistake was merely due to her fatigue. However, those of us who find a grain of truth in all fairytales will stick with the theory of the wicked witch.)
It happened thus. The hospital, already a small institution, was in the process of remodeling one of its delivery rooms, hence, only one was available on this particular day.
(Any hospital administrator with a whit of foresight would have calculated the nine-month phenomenon, which has been documented in cities throughout the world for decades, and put off the remodeling project until the crucial date had passed.)
The two mothers in question, Margaret Miller and Anita Singleton, while in separate labor rooms, were rushed by attendants to Delivery at the same moment, very nearly colliding in the hallway outside the door. In the delivery room, their shared obstetrician, also stressed from an extremely trying day of births, wiped his arm across his sweating forehead, washed his hands yet another time, and held them up as the nurse (the aforementioned wicked witch) pulled on yet another set of plastic gloves for him and looked with dismay at the sight of two tiny heads crowning simultaneously.
(For the faint of heart, we will skip the subsequent details of the births and turn our minds to the much more pleasant picture of rosy, chubby babies.)
The wicked witch, with two newborns in her arms (and all thought of transfer of bodily fluids put aside), cleaned and dried the new infants, and carried them (in the opposite direction — and this is significant), both bald, red-faced, wrinkled, and screaming (forget the rosy, chubby picture), to their unrespective mothers and only then attached the plastic bracelets to their wrists (the wrong wrists, you will understand).
Thus it was in stone.
(Those of you with kind intentions may still put down to fatigue her failure to attach those bracelets the second the babies were born. But what about the merry little twinkle in the nurse’s beautiful green eyes? — her sole beautiful feature. However, we will say nothing more of the wicked witch. For now.)
Margaret Miller gathered her infant to her breast and whispered, “Natasha,” and so the child was named.
(Yes, a good Russian name for the child — Mr. Gorbachev having made Russian ancestry a fine and exotic thing — although this particular thread to Russian ancestry was thin, and unspooled through many generations and across many continents before it came to rest in the determined fist of Margaret Miller. A boy would have been Dimitri.)
Anita Singleton, too, gathered her infant to her breast, and whispered, “We’ll talk it over with Daddy when we see him.”
(And where are these fathers? you may well ask. Robert Miller, a CEO for a major food distributor, who spent as much time on the road as possible, was on the road. Johnny Singleton was in the fathers’ lounge, having — wisely — opted out of attending the actual birth due to a propensity for fainting.)
We will skip about six months in our story now (Anita and Johnny having agreed to name their — except not really theirs — little girl Holly), to a scene in the supermarket, where Johnny, running errands for Anita, happened upon Margaret and Natasha.
“She’s very beautiful,” Johnny said, stopping to admire the admittedly beautiful child in her carry seat. “I have one at home just about the same age.”