Issue 26 November 2015 Flash Fiction Online November 2015

SHE HAD MY TEETH. I hadn’t expected to recognize myself in her, but when she greeted me, her maroon lips parting into a crescent, there they were. My teeth. White, flat, and surprisingly human.

I forced myself to look into her too large eyes as her warm, seven-fingered hand wrapped around mine. Black with purple specks, like a neon vision of the night sky, the almond-shaped organs took up the greater part of her face and were irrevocably her father’s.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t make it,” she breathed, her voice sing-song like the rest of her species.

“Got lost after the second exit on ninety-five,” I lied. I didn’t want her to know that I’d spent half an hour with my face over the toilet, retching with nerves at the prospect of finally meeting her. My daughter.

“Shall we sit?” She gestured with elongated limbs toward the cushiony, ornate table and chairs of the meeting room.

Silence.

I tried not to stare at her taut maroon skin, her too long fingers, her high cheek bones. She watched me fiddle with my wedding rings.

“You don’t have to stay.” Her voice was reluctant as she continued, “If this is making you uncomfortable, I mean.”

With threadbare resolve, I looked into her eyes, “No, I’m glad to see you…” I cleared my throat. “Your father told me that it wouldn’t be possible to see you after the birth. I thought I’d never know what became of you.” I added, “I’m glad to see you well.” I surprised myself at the sincerity.

She smiled with my teeth again. It wasn’t as unnerving this time.

I ventured, “How old are you now?” I corrected myself, “I mean, I know how old you are, but how close are you to being, um, an adult? You’d be old enough to vote now if you were human–” The word choked in my throat. I didn’t mean to make it sound like she wasn’t my child. Like I thought she was some stranger.

She didn’t seem to notice. “I’m old enough to breed, but I haven’t chosen a mate.” She smirked, “I have a whole colony to choose from.”

I nodded that I understood.

Her father had explained. How his species explored and colonized star systems far from their home world. They incorporated worthy qualities found in other species into those colonies. They were interested in experimenting with the male/female dichotomy. I was the model they used to build the new, female aspect of their species. The ability to recombine their forms would allow the mate the first female selected to accommodate her reproductive biology.

Why then? I had asked. Why do you need me at all? Just have one of your underlings turn into a woman and leave me alone. But there was something that they needed. Some inscrutable quality that couldn’t be faked with transmogrification and cellular plasticity.

I felt the old conflict playing across my face. My gaze wandered to her hands again, resting on the table between us. She had the human number of joints, even if she had too many fingers. I wondered what other qualities of mine lurked beneath the surface.

I spoke from the depth of my brooding. “Did your father tell you how, uh, you came to be?”

She nodded but said nothing.

I said, around the lump in my throat, “Please, try to understand. It’s not that I didn’t want you. It’s not that I wouldn’t have–“

She interrupted. “I have your memories.”

I stumbled, “What do you mean? Which memories?”

She hedged. “Most of them.”

“Memories of what?” I tried to sound less alarmed than I was rapidly becoming.

“All kinds of things. Your first day of school. Wedding. The day you met my father. I remember what you lived until the moment I was born. Then it goes blank for a few years, and my own memories start to coalesce.”

My mouth hung open.

She seemed to surrender in some private war, her shoulders sagged, and her face lowered, “I requested this meeting with you today because there is a memory of yours that is precious to me.”

When her star-filled eyes turned back to me I was frozen, jaw clenched, eyes forward. Inside I raged at the violation.

With a stone set of her own my daughter confessed, “When my father arrived at your door you refused his bribes, ignored his coercions. Eventually, he would make the threat–to my human brother–that would force you to agree. Yet, for all the excuses you made, you never gave the real reason you so desperately didn’t want to make me.

“You refused because the thought of him taking me away when I was born, of handing your child to a stranger, cut you even before I was conceived. Even though you knew I wouldn’t be human.”

The silence stretched between us again, inviting me to deny her claims.

“That memory has always made me feel… loved. Thank you.” After a moment she stood; the sound of her chair skidding across the hardwood jarred me out of the moment her father had taken her from me.

“Wait.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know if it’s possible, but, I would really like to see you again.” My vision blurred.

“I would like that too.” She turned to leave but stopped short. “You know, it’s why he picked you.”

The tears moved down my cheeks, chill when they reached my neck. “What?”

She only smiled.

Previously published in Daily Science Fiction, 2012, and Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, 2014. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

WELCOME TO NOVEMBER!

What? Already? Where did the year go?

Yes, children. It’s November. And here in the United States what do we think of when November arrives?

Yes. Food. We think of food. Lots of food. Big foody things. Like turkeys. Do you know how big a turkey is? A newborn baby could fit inside an adult turkey without hardly giving the bird indigestion.

Personally, I think of food all the time. Not just November. So when “The Brownies of Death” by Chuck Rothman hit my desk back in July, my eyes glazed over, and I thought ‘Brownies! Must publish brownie story!’ Okay. I admit. I liked the story. So did my staff.

Make sure, after you’ve read his story, to click over to an interview with Chuck by our staffer, Stanley Lee.

What else does November remind Americans of? Football of course! (For our international readers, I’m talking about big helmet and pad, weird shaped ball kind of football. Not that other sport that the entire rest of the world plays and that we call, for some unfathomable reason, ‘soccer.’) The pro season is just getting started. College football is in full swing. High school football is in its death throes, hurtling toward those exciting state finals!

To tone the excitement down a little, we bring you a sweet story about the unsung hero of the football world–the mascot. Please enjoy “Vaquera” by Kim Henderson.

Next up, a sci-fi offering, “Rewind” by Scott Baker in which the author examines the question, “What if you could rewind your life a mere ten seconds?” We thought Scott came up with a pretty good answer.

Finally, in our ‘Previously Published’ box, a sweet sci-fi story by Krystal Claxton, “Sapience and Maternal Instincts.” Lovely. Grab a tissue. This story originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction in 2012.

Enjoy!

The summer Tabby is nineteen and tired of being the girl whose college instructors forget her name, she spots an ad for mascot tryouts in the community college newspaper and finds herself at the audition doing cartwheels and strutting like Yosemite Sam in front of a scowling cheerleading coach and her squad. She gets the job, savors a rare instance of being handpicked, and prepares to become Valo the Vaquero—actually one of three Valos who rotate, costumed in chaps and giant cowboy hat, thick handlebar mustache, bushy unibrow and jutting cleft chin.

When her father finds out, he drags her to the shed and sifts through a box for spurs from his bull riding days.

“I don’t need those,” she says, batting at the swirling dust. “My costume came with spurs.”

“But mine will be authentic—I wore them to ride Maverick Mudslinger when I was your age. So, when can I come watch you?”

She rolls her eyes, her heart racing. “There’s nothing to see.” She hangs out the shed door to suck in slightly less stifling air and watches a dust devil whip through the neighbor’s field of creosote bush. “I’ll just be entertaining little kids. You don’t want to watch me babysit.”

He pulls a worn spur out of the box, flakes of ancient manure floating onto his shirt, and grins. “I want to see my little spitfire wowing the crowd.”

On the first day of practice, the cheerleading coach paces in front of the three Vaqueros and says, “The most important thing is never to break character.” She pauses in front of Tabby. “When you aren’t performing with the cheerleaders or setting up for a contest or entertaining crying babies, you don’t just sit on your chaps. You strut through the stands, or practice with your lasso, or rubberneck pretty ladies. You think cheerleaders get tired? You don’t know tired until you are the Vaquero.”

Tabby discovers, slipping into canvas pants and buttery chaps, that maybe she has always been a vaquero and didn’t know it—maybe she just needed a mask. She revels in the humid sweat trapped in her big plastic man-face, accepting the inevitable acne and sore shoulders as she lassoes child after child to reel them in for hugs and photos. Between innings, she sprints onto the field to host contests where women race to rope their partners and children hop to the finish line in gunnysacks. Someone tells her she is the liveliest mascot they’ve seen, and she tucks her thumbs into her belt loops and kicks the ground with a pointed boot.

Her father is relentless: he wants to see her perform. When can he see her perform?

“Fine,” she says, but she knows that if he is watching, this character who is not her but who is her and who can only be her when no one knows who she really is, will seem transparent, inconsistent, unbelievable. She sends her parents to a game on her night off, and while her plan is to hide in the library and meet them outside afterward, she can’t resist sneaking in to watch them watch her.

She sits near third base and spots them behind home plate, her mother curled like a shrimp against her father, her father looking chunky rather than burly, middle-aged. His teeth flash as Valo struts nearby—tonight a muscled, acrobatic girl named Holly. She doesn’t interact with spectators as much as Tabby, but she does great round offs and handsprings during the seventh-inning stretch, which Tabby now realizes may seem more than a little surprising to her parents.

As ballplayers take the field, her father catches the Vaquero’s attention and spins an imaginary rope above his head. She lets him reel her in, but after posing for a snapshot, she moves on, though he continues to wave and holler. It reminds Tabby of when she was little and would look out at the audience during school plays to see those beaming teeth, his sparkling eyes waiting for recognition. No matter how well she’d done in rehearsals, she’d inevitably break character to give him a smile or wave. This Valo, though, gives no nod or knowing signal, and instead starts to ignore the fanatic in the stands.

When, after the fifth inning, the Vaquero doesn’t launch a t-shirt his way, her father struts down the steps and snatches one from the bag at her side, smiling red-faced at the crowd. Holly storms to security with a confidence Tabby could never muster. It is then that Tabby sees him realize, as he buries his teeth behind his lips, grabs her mother by the arm and leaves.

After spending most of the night in the library, Tabby tiptoes home and waits for morning, which finds him splayed beneath his truck, banging on something with the head of a screwdriver and cussing over the wail of a country song. She twists her early shadow and clears her throat until he scoots out and flatly asks what she wants. When she opens her mouth to spill the truth, to reveal how deep her cowardice actually runs, their eyes meet and what comes out instead is, “Why do you always have to embarrass me?” and once it is in the air she realizes this is also true, and that no matter how things might have gone at the game, the night would have ended the same.

He says nothing and glides back under the truck, where he will pretty much remain for the rest of summer. In less than a year, he will be dead, his head smashed at work by a truck a lot like this one, and while their relationship will have been mostly patched up, for a long time this is the memory that will wake her: him flashing those little white teeth and waving, waving, waving at a girl he adored who neither could admit wasn’t her.

Stanley Lee: How did you get started as a writer?

Chuck Rothman: Wow, that’s a long story. I liked reading science fiction, and I made a few attempts at writing as a teen. At a certain point, I read “Titan” by John Varley, and well, I just started writing after that. The book was good, but I can’t remember anything particularly inspirational about it. I gave it a shot after reading that, and soon I found myself finishing a story every two weeks.

SL: That’s quite a pace! What kind of stories were you writing?

CR: At the time, Asimov’s was publishing and their editor, George Scithers, gave a nice critique on every story sent to him. Even if he rejected you, he’d have a check-off sheet to see what was wrong and what you needed to fix. After a few rejections, he invited me to show him more of my work. And I can’t describe how that made me feel back then. It took a year, maybe more, submitting every few weeks before he said he was interested in publishing the work.

SL: Your first story?

CR: It was “The Munij Deserters.” It was about aliens that looked like Lime Jell-O and came out in Asimov’s in ’82.

SL: 1982?

CR: 1982.

SL: That is quite literally older than me. That is before little bits of my parents came together and gestated and formed a unique organism that came to be me. Too much information perhaps, but amazing. How has the landscape of the science fiction field changed since that time?

CR: Wow, where do I begin? There’s more stuff online and e-publishing right now. There was no Internet back then, so all the magazines were print magazines. Many of the top magazines are now online. The digests are not what they were when I was younger. Changes? I don’t know. In some ways, not much has changed. People still want a good story, a great story. I suppose that now you have to pay a little more attention to characterization, the social situation. When I began writing, no one seemed to pay much attention to minorities or sexuality or such. But today, you have to pay attention to those issues. But generally, it’s more open, more literary-oriented.

SL: And what makes a good story?

CR: Interesting characters. Good dialogue. A plot that doesn’t go where the reader expects it to. They see the setup, and they’re along for the ride, but it doesn’t end up where they expect, where they’ve been to a thousand times before.

SL: In your story this month, the neighbor is one Mrs. Rodriguez. Is that an example of what you mean by the social situation?

CR: Yes, a social situation like this, a reader would have seen it decades ago, but what’s different now is that Mrs. Rodriguez is in the story, and it has nothing to do with her ethnicity. She’s just part of the universe. Years ago, if you had a Hispanic character, that would often be the whole story. A writer can now put people of different races in stories without having the story revolve around their identity. Years ago, if a writer did that, it would usually be for a plot reason, or readers would be asking why something so unusual appeared. Now it’s something that is …  I don’t know if there’s a good phrase for it, but readers just look at it as so ordinary that I, as a writer, don’t have to call attention to it.

SL: As a writer of color, that means a great deal to me. My lived experience growing up has been watching my entire heritage and history reduced to thin caricatures: nerds and victims, green-skinned, skinny-armed sorcerers awaiting defeat by the square-jawed hero. You cannot believe how important to see another “minority” treated as just a normal part of the societal fabric. Let’s move on to the process of creation. What do you struggle with the most?

CR: There’s a saying that the longer and longer you write, the harder it is. Now that I’m getting older, I see how true it is. As a young writer, I just wrote things, and now I look back and say to myself, “Oh God, I’d never write that this way.” For me, I write the story, and then things occur to me, and by the end of the story, I’ve figured out how to resolve it. I previously wrote stories with my ideas all nailed down at the beginning, and I had this determined path the narrative would take, but now I don’t operate that way. It’s different with each story.

SL: What writers do you take inspiration from?

CR: The writers who impress me have a very different style and feel than I do. I don’t feel that I write particularly much like them. Off the top of my head Samuel Delany and Isaac Asimov are the two who stick out in my mind. Alfred Bester, that’s a third. I used to read pretty regularly in the field. Larry Niven, as well.

More recently, Terry Pratchett is an author I’ve taken to. I started reading it at the very beginning and read each book as it came out. And he kept producing, and his work kept getting better and better.

Nowadays, the writers I most like are very Pratchett-like: Jasper fforde, Christopher Moore, A. Lee Martinez. Jasper fforde wrote this wonderful novel a few years ago with the most unfortunately timed title: Shades of Grey. It was this novel where social structures depended on a person’s color perception, their ability to see color. He came up with a sci-fi background for it, and it was wonderful. I’m quite attracted to humor in fantasy.

SL: And do we see that with Death’s seagull tie in this story?

CR: Sure. I like the incongruous. My favorite types of stories are goofy stories filled with goofy ideas. “Brownies of Death” was very similar to “Curse of the Undead,” an early story of mine. The title sounded so portentous that I knew it was going to be funny. When I see something that’s silly or nutty, I will go with it and do it. I have a very low tolerance for repetition. Well, I’ve done many vampire stories, but each time there’s something different. But generally, I write a few things in one genre and then move on.

Most of us need inspiration. Especially beginners. Moments to motivate, uplift, steady and shape the course of our efforts when we meet resistance, fatigue, or other shitballs tossed our way. When I teach writing classes online and for The Writing Salon, many folks say I’ve inspired them. It’s nice to hear.  

Beyond that minor pick-me-up, though, if you’ve kicked the inkwell for more than a decade, inspiration becomes a crutch. A drug you think you need to work. I have to wait for the muse. I have to take one more class. I must attend the annual WE-CAN-DO-IT-CLUB JAMBOREE!

Soon, the crutch becomes a fix. You only work when inspired (which gets in the way of writing being labor: do you only go to work when inspired? The gym? Craziness!).

Most writing books, seminars, and gurus thrive on inspiration as part of their business model. Which makes some of them pushers, to stretch this analogy. Feeling uninspired? I’ve got what you need. 300 bucks a pop. Just take one more class. One more seminar. One more anything. You’ll feel like you can do anything . . . until it fades. Then buy my methadone, ur, quick-step-inspiration-set-of-lists to get you going!

Just like the war on drugs, the inspiration business (drugs!) can never lose.

Suspense and crime writer Lawrence Block once ran a touring seminar, WRITE FOR YOUR LIFE. It’s also a neat book. There was wisdom in it, but less than his best, and there was also a lot about getting inspired. Those parts stunk, but were redeemed when, in another book, Block noted he stopped the workshop when he tired of being a “guru.” That’s probably when I started to view inspiration as a drug tied to cultish behavior (see the GET MOTIVATED movement, critiqued in THE ANTIDOTE). Inspiration is sold to you. It’s an outside force that generates a FEELING of accomplishment . . . when you haven’t done anything. But you feel great! You feel like you can do it! Sometimes in a room full of strangers chanting mantras (sorry, affirmations)! And it feels so good! All of you believing you’re DOING SOMETHING!

POP!

Then you leave. And the kibble of life drowns the feeling. Three paths open for most: you stop writing, start writing, or wait for the next inspirational hit.

And for some, the hit becomes the point. And it isn’t. The hit should be THE WORK. The one you haven’t done yet.

For a teacher, the greatest validation, the greatest high, is when students succeed outside of their classroom. I’m a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and the Royal Military College of Canada, and I bug my former mentors when I’ve sold stories, won fellowships, or continued to achieve things within my fields. I make them look good the better I do. That’s fun! Why did it happen? Because I DID THINGS instead of waiting to be inspired!

When my students leave class and sell flash fiction or articles or finish major works, I’m thrilled. They’ve shown that they don’t need a hit of Ridler.

I’ve also met what I call lifers. People who claim they want to write and publish, but are in fact professional amateurs. They can’t make the leap. They need another shot of inspiration. They finish nothing, submit nothing, they publish nothing, etc. Some have major challenges that require more effort to break out and may do so over time. Others need someone to fill the inspiration well. Constantly. And that can destroy their own agency.

Now, is being perpetually inspired and accomplishing little a bad thing? Is it hurting anyone, like real drug addiction?

Not really. It’s just sad. Like drug addiction. And like drug addicts, until they kick, they can’t do what they want. Also sad. Unless what they want is the high of writing without writing. Which is crazy-banana-pants sad. But let’s assume they do want to write. Here’s what fifteen years and a thousand rejections have taught me. And it’s good to remind oneself when the career goals burp into memories and you wonder why you work so hard for so little in the eyes of everyone, when fifteen years and a thousand rejections may be the only reason anyone knows you write.  

Inspiration finishes nothing. It’s served most often from something external. Which is why you need something internal. And not inspiration. Desire. Not for mad cash, fans, or acclaim (remember to KILL YOUR PORN DREAMS!). The desire for your own content.

Write about what you most desire, whatever the hell it is. Desire in the form of hates and loves and fears, desires for vengeance, desires for justice, desire for laughter, desire for a scream in silence. Desire to go ten rounds with Tolstoy, as Hemingway said. Desire to improve as an artist. Desire to add your voice to a dialog with literature, and do it so well that it might be heard and remembered. Unless you don’t believe in getting better, because that would mean some writing IS better, and not just taste, in which case, enjoy what you enjoy and leave quietly. Desire trumps fatigue, concerns for time, and drives you to finish that which you started.

Unlike inspiration, desire will not leave you alone. Desire is a call to action, even if it makes you sweaty and pushes you into the dark of morning. Desire tells the rest of the world to vanish, you’re doing something that obliterates time, and you don’t care if no one sees or everyone sees. You’re in the zone. Nothing else is intruding, and if it does, it’s going to get bit.

Inspiration will have you chasing others for permission to do that which is already at your command. You’ll keep chasing the high of doing anything while accomplishing nothing. It will kill the person in you that wants to get work done, the one who enjoy work getting done.

Desire finds a way to get what it wants: words on pages, submissions out to publishers, revisions that make a good story great. It wants the hard work. It wants the toil, friction, challenge. It likes it that way. And when sated, it will find something else to devour. Desire grows, and will not rest until it is acknowledged.

When you’re in the game for the long run, desires may change. This will scare the piss and excite the hell out of you. If you find the familiar is dimming in your sights, check out unchartered waters where it may be darker, but the light shines brighter. Fuck inspiration. Follow desire. Get off the drug of others and into the drug of you.

Are you inspired?

JSR

“Garion, we need to talk.”

Garion spread his arms, his Xbox controller in the crook of one hand, freshly opened beer in the other. “Now? I’ve been logged in for three whole seconds. Can I just–”  But Lora’s blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail, and she had her gray sweatpants on. Gray sweatpants talks never let him _just_ anything.   He dropped the controller onto the over-plush couch cushion and slid his hand into his left pocket.

Pop.

“Garion, we need to talk.”

Garion set his beer on top of a bridal magazine on the coffee table and prodded the television remote.   The forty-six-inch screen went dark.   “Of course, baby. What is it?”

Lora’s brow furrowed. “Don’t call me baby. You know how I hate that.”

Pop.

“Garion, we need to talk.”

Beer on a bridal mag, prod remote, screen dark. “Of course, Lora. You know I’m always here for you.”

Lora’s eyes flicked from his face to the blank screen, then to four empty beer bottles on the floor beside the couch. Her lips curled in the way they always did when there was something she didn’t want to say. That reluctance could go either way for him.

“I’m worried about you,” she said. Her voice cracked as she said it. “I’m worried about us. We’re not like we used to be.”

Used to be? What they used to be was a couple that bickered and tossed around insults like they were tissues. But they’d turned a corner. The last real fight they’d had was over his Kickstarter failure – the Velcro wallet one three months ago, not the reversible underwear one, though she’d taken extra shifts after that one too so they could make rent. Three months wasn’t a streak he intended to break today. He thought a moment before answering her, a rarity for him.

“Was what we used to be so great?” He laid the game controller on the table. “I think even your mother’s finally starting to warm up to me. And weren’t we ring shopping last week?”

“It’s not real, Gar. None of it’s real, and you know it.”

He didn’t pop this time. He felt like he should have, but he wasn’t sure how to make that one any better. “How I feel about you is real. It always–“

She winced and waved a palm as if she was cleaning a window she couldn’t stand to look at. “I found them, Gar. When I was doing laundry. You left them in your pants.” She held up a streamer of square plastic packets. For half a second Garion thought they were condoms, but he knew better. What she held was a strand of popped bubbles, their tiny doses of anti-time already expended. She knew he had been using Rewind.

“Baby, I can explain.” Oops.

Pop.

“Lora, I can explain.”

“Those were the pants you wore ring shopping.” Her eyes flooded. “Was that whole day a lie?”

“Not the whole day.” Pop. “No, baby.” Pop. “Of course not. I would never lie to you.”

“Garion, Rewind is a lie! You and me fighting all the time, that was the truth. Not popping a Rewind every time I don’t like what you say.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?”

Pop.

“Sometimes I do and say stupid things. More than sometimes. And those things hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you, Lora. Not ever.”

“Oh my God, you’re using them right now!”

Pop.

“Lora, I don’t know what to say.”

Her eyes narrowed, driving the tears to the corners and down her cheeks. “What to say? Why don’t you just try different things until one of them works? That’s what you do, isn’t it?”

“Until I can’t find anything that works.” Pop.

“It’s not like that.” Oh yeah, he already tried that one.Pop.

“Look, you deserve a guy that makes you happy. I want to be that guy. I wasn’t him, now I am. Maybe it’s not the best way, but I’m working on it. I love you, Lora.”

“You think ‘I love you’ is going to make all of this better?”

Garion probed deeper into his pocket, but all he found were expended packages. Why now! He couldn’t navigate this minefield on his own. No Rewind, no Lora; it was that simple. How many breakups had those little bubbles helped him dodge already?

“What’s the matter, Gar? Did you run out?” She shook the streamer, sending a taunting wave down the length of empty pouches.

His fingers itched for them. Too much time had already passed to fix anything he’d already said, but the next dumb comment was always poised just behind his teeth. So Garion did what desperate men do — he faked a cough.

It was a small cough at first, but it grew in melodrama as he scrambled off the couch and into the kitchen. She followed, hands on hips. He jerked open the refrigerator and pretended to reach for a bottled water. A rotten acting performance if there ever was one, but he could make most of it disappear with one squeeze of what was hiding inside the box of baking soda. Or, it should have been in the baking soda. His coughing stopped without opening the decoy bottle.

“Yeah, Garion, I found that one too.”

“Baby, please. I get it. I need help.”

“What you need is to leave. We’re over.”

“Give me another chance. Let me change your mind.”

“How many times have you changed my mind already? But not this time.” She pulled the second strand of Rewind from the waistband of her sweatpants. Baking soda still clung to some of the plastic. Half the bubbles had been popped, but not by him. “It’s over, Garion. And this time, no take-backs.”

The dark, delicious aroma of brownies filled the kitchen as they cooled. Betty Compton put the kettle on the stove. Cheryl had given her an electric one for Mother’s Day, but Betty preferred the old fashioned way.

The phone beeped. They don’t ring anymore. Betty wished they did. How did you know it was the phone without a good, solid ring?

It was Cheryl. No surprise — Betty got few phone calls. Most were people trying to sell timeshares as if she had a lot of time. But she liked talking to the salesmen, even though she never bought anything.

This call was pleasantries and reports on the grandchildren. Matthew was graduating; Kimberly scored 20 points in basketball. Cheryl and Todd went to see a play Betty had never heard of, though from Cheryl’s voice; it evidently was quite famous.

After a few minutes, Cheryl got to the point of her call.

“No,” said Betty.

“But, Mom, you’ve been alone since Dad died.”

“I’m not alone. There’s Mrs. Rodriguez next door. She’s by herself, too, and — “

“Mom, you know we only want the best for you.”

Betty sighed. She had heard those words before, and they were always an inadvertent lie. “I’m not going to a home,” she said. “And I’m not moving in with you, either. You have your own life and don’t need me to be a burden.”

“Mom, you’re not — “

“Oh, that’s the doorbell,” Betty said. “I’m expecting someone. We can talk later. Love you.” She hung up.

The doorbell rang a second time. Betty was glad of the relief.

She looked out the peephole. It was Death.

Betty smiled and opened the door.

“Hello, again,” she said. “You just can’t keep away, can you?”

Death smiled back. He looked very little like his pictures. His face was far from gaunt, maybe even a little bit chubby, and he didn’t wear a ridiculous black robe and hood, just a regular business suit. Today, his tie had seagulls on it. “You know I can’t keep away from your brownies, Betty.”

“I have a fresh batch just for you. And the water should be hot for tea. Make yourself at home.” She went into the kitchen just as the kettle began to whistle. In the cupboard were the tea bags. Lipton? No, not today. She found some Assam in the back of the cupboard.

Death had turned on the TV when she returned. “It’s not the same since they took off The Edge of Night,” he said.

Betty agreed. “It’s all talk shows now. I get tired of them.” She placed the brownies and tea on the coffee table in front of him. “How’s your day been going?”

Death shrugged. “The usual. That plane crash in Argentina kept me busy.”

“Was there a crash?” Betty asked. “You know I never watch the news. That’s what old people do.”

Death bit into a brownie. “I’ll tell you. These are the best. How do you get it so fudgy?”

“Trade secret.”

“Were you on the phone when I rang?”

Betty nodded. “Cheryl again. She doesn’t like me living alone. Afraid I’d fall and won’t be able to get up. She’s been watching too much TV.”

“She’s your daughter. She cares about you.”

“I’m sure she does. But she’s hinting I go into a home. And the last thing I want to do is hang around with old people.”

Death laughed. “You’re 85.”

“Old is a state of mind, not body.”

Death finished the last of the brownie and licked the crumbs off his fingers. “That was delightful, Betty. And is this Assam tea?”

“Is that good? I can barely taste the difference.”

“It is, Betty. It’s very good.” Death got up and then put his hand on Betty’s shoulder. “Thanks for all this. I need to get back to work.”

It was the moment that always made her feel low. “Can’t you stay for another cup? I mean, I’m sure people will be happy to wait a bit.”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?”

Death rarely got into the details of his work. Sometimes Betty wondered what it was like. But she had a feeling that if she asked, Death would go quietly and never come back. She had to make do with hints and implications.

“Betty, can I ask a question?”

“That was a question right there,” said Betty, smiling. She loved to use that joke with Tom.

Death gave a slight smile. “Why are you so kind to me? You know it’s not going to change anything. When it’s your time, I will have to come for you.”

“I know,” Betty said. How to explain? “When Tom died, I was there for him.”

“So? You have your family.”

“Cheryl is out in Denver. It would take hours to get to me. No one wants to die alone,” said Betty.

“Don’t I know it.”

She took his hand from her shoulder and kissed it. Then she looked into his dark eyes. “I know that, whenever I go, I will see the face of my best friend.”

Betty never knew that Death could blush.

“I need to go, Betty,” he said, mumbling like a teenage boy after a girl said she liked him. “Keep in touch. Text me.”

She got up and led him to the door. “You know I don’t have a cell phone.”

Death smiled. “Next Wednesday, then?”

Betty nodded. “See you next Wednesday.” She watched as he turned down the hallway.

The door in the apartment 3B across the hall opened, and Mrs. Rodriguez poked her head out. “Was that Death?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Betty. “Sometimes he visits. He likes my brownies.”

Mrs. Rodriguez thought for a moment. “Do you think he likes cheesecake?” she asked.