15 from "Grim Tales"

by Norman G. Lock

Each morning the fog appeared, as if from out of the ground. And after the sun had risen sufficiently to burn it off, always new dangers were revealed. Once, a field of knives flashing in the midday sun. Another time, deep wells down which children disappeared. And not too long ago—mirrors in which those who gazed saw themselves as others did and were destroyed. * She came into the room, carrying two Tom Collins on a silver tray—one for her husband, the other for her. She saw herself momentarily in the mirror as she passed and could not say what it was that affected her so strangely. (It was the utter blankness of her face, as if the features had been erased; but the moment was too slight, too fugitive for her to tell herself the cause of her dismay.) For some reason, her husband turned off the table lamp; and the room was suddenly emptied of furniture, walls, a seascape done in oil, which hung above the sofa covered in stripes of maroon-and-cream damask. When he turned the light on again, his wife was gone and there was only one cocktail on the silver tray, which he held in his hands—hands that did not in the least tremble. * A man stood at the railing and watched his child ride the carrousel. The child would disappear momentarily into the darkness at the outermost limits of the carrousel's turning, before rushing back into the light. The light draped over the midway pinched by shadows that folded over the crowd "like black wings." The man dropped his cigarette. He looked down to crush it underfoot, then looked up again as his child's horse swung into the light. The horse was riderless. * Death was in the water. It wrapped them in its wet folds. It drew them down into its dark embrace. They passed into it. It carried them to the sea and out—the man and woman both. Or so one thought who had put his hand into the water, after their boat had gone out of sight, and felt its terrible cold. * She was about to step into the bathtub when the wall opened and a hand—large and grotesquely misshapen—reached out and pulled her inside. Her husband hurried to her; but the crack had, in an instant, closed "like a wound that has healed." * By the time he reached the ground after having jumped from the tenth floor, he had regretted his decision, which was based—he now saw clearly—on a rash and altogether unwarranted presumption. His wife—he knew with certainty—had meant nothing by the kiss she had given her co-worker the night before, when he had stepped away from the table to use the phone. He ought not to have jumped to conclusions—he told himself—and in the future would not be so quick to do so. * The falling man did not stop until he had left the ground behind him. * He had been dreaming of flying and, waking, found himself on a rooftop high above the city with a woman who had been dreaming of flying when she woke to find herself on a rooftop with a man who had been dreaming. Their eyes sought each other, desiring; but they were afraid of flying into one another's arms for fear they might fall asleep and be lost to one another. * Believing his time had come, he avenged himself on all those who had shown him contempt, then took his own life. But he had been mistaken in this belief just as he had mistaken the intentions towards him of those he murdered, which were always friendly, even affectionate. * The flowering peach tree was not the first place he had thought to hang himself. But it was the most picturesque. That it should be so was important for his own pleasure, when his eyes closed for the last time on earth, and for the shock he hoped the incongruity would cause his wife when she found his body. In this way her pain would be increased—a thing that made him glad as he stood on the ladder and prepared to jump. * For a rope to become a snake, a snake a rope—there is nothing marvelous in these. But for a man to become a rope or snake—it is truly a marvel. There was a man with this gift. While a rope, he strangled his friend. While a snake, he poisoned his wife. The two were lovers and happy to die together in one another's arms. Did they not tell him they could not live a moment longer without each other? * Her completely innocent remark to her husband at breakfast, that he was not himself today, severed the slender attachment he had not only to her but also to himself—his identity. If not himself, then who? He left the house that same morning, never to return. It was only natural that, in a barroom close by the docks, he should take the first identity that came to hand and kill the sailor who had given him offense. After having assumed in the most casual way this new and homicidal self, it was inevitable that he became, for a time, the most hunted criminal in the city in which once he had lived so peaceably. He was sentenced to death in the presence of witnesses who were able to verify with the slightest doubt his identity as a murderer. * I loved one man and married another, she confessed to her husband as she watched him close his eyes for the last time—the cord knotted at his neck. * She said he ought to have his head examined. The shoemaker's was not the first place he took it, but there he was at least made welcome. The shoemaker had little to do these days and was glad of any work. The shop smelled of leather and cabbage. Cabbage was always, for him, a powerful evocation of childhood. He liked the shoemaker's hands. They were large and the blue veins twisted on the backs of them interestingly. He liked, too, the old man's wife, who brought him coffee after her husband had shouted something foreign into a back room where she was presiding, presumably, over a cauldron of cabbage leaves and meats. As the man fell back into childhood, the shoemaker examined his head. After a time, he grunted and, spitting one nail after another into his palm, began to hammer. * In another version of this story, the man had to leave his head overnight at a small appliance shop because the repairman was too busy with a toaster to examine it while he waited. The repairman thought it more than likely that "a screw was loose somewhere" in his head and finding it would not take long. The man came back the next morning, but the shop had burned down in the night.