Issue September 2010 Flash Fiction Online September 2010

I was walking through the mall when I saw a kiosk that claimed to be selling time. And I don’t mean in a “buy some labor-saving device” kind of way. I mean, little white boxes each labeled 10 minutes.

I stopped and picked one up. The act of holding the box made me feel strange. I couldn’t tell if I were suddenly relaxed or impatient.

“Hey, what is this?” To my right, a couple of teenagers addressed the kiosk attendant, a bored-looking goth girl who sat on a tall stool. A book was open and lying face-down on her thigh.

“10 minutes,” she said tonelessly. A steel ring glimmered in her unsmiling lip. “If you ever need an extra 10 minutes sometime.”

The kids looked at each other and snickered. The girl picked up her book (Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus) and the boys were dead to her.

“Yeah?” said one. He picked up a box and opened it.

From where I stood, I tried to discretely peer inside. As far as I could tell, the box was empty.

“There isn’t anything in here,” the kid said. “You’re ripping people off, lady.”

She turned the page and sighed. “So you’re going to spend it bitching?”

“You can’t just sell people empty boxes.”

“What do you care?” she said. “You didn’t even buy it. You stole it.”

“I didn’t steal anything!”

She held out a hand. “Not if you pay for it now.”

“What?”

“$4.95.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“The price isn’t negotiable.”

The kid made a noise of disgust and dropped the box onto the floor. He stomped it beneath a pristine sneaker. “Screw your little boxes. This is bullcrap.”

His friend laughed. But the kiosk attendant said, “Fine. If you think it’s okay to take anyone’s time, I’ll just take some of yours.”

A ringtone chirped from the kid’s back pocket, and he pulled out a phone and answered it. “Yeah? No, I’m at the mall. What? But Mom — we just — Mom! Get Dad to do it. Well, get him to do it later. But it’s two hours away!”

The girl raised her book higher and bent her head, a smile finally curling around her lip ring.

The kids stomped away. The crushed box remained on the floor like a wounded pigeon. I picked it up and held it out to her. “Do you, uh, want this back?”

She stared at me. I realized that I was still holding the box I had picked up originally. “Oh!” I set that one down on the kiosk, atop another box just like it. “Sorry. I’m not going to do anything to it.”

She didn’t say anything.

“And anyway… how much of that kid’s day did you just take?”

The attendant almost smiled again. She reached for the box I had just set down and swiveled it around. The label now read 12 minutes. “Two times the number of boxes here,” she said.

“So that would come to…”

Her eyes moved over me — the head-to-toe assessment of a woman considering. With one hand, she set Rilke on the kiosk, and with another, she picked up a box and flipped the lid open.

“You’ve got some time to work it out now. And to ask me questions, if you’ve got any.”

I smiled. I gave her my own once-over, and though she did look young, there were fine lines on her hands. She was probably my age.

Actually, I had all the time in the world.

This month, I want to take a break from examining the forms of flash fiction and consider another aspect of flash entirely: the career aspect. What would it mean to have a successful career in flash fiction?

As readers of my essays in Word Work will know, I’m wary of any definition of success that makes money the sole measure. There are many different ways to be a successful artist, and certainly one standard is to have created some work that feels to the artist like a good, durable legacy. By this measure, Harper Lee was a successful novelist even though she wrote only one novel. To Kill a Mockingbird will go on being read and treasured far into the future. On a more modest scale, I feel that some of my short-short stories already constitute a good, durable legacy. “The Dead Boy at Your Window,” “Tiny Bells,” “Dinosaur,”  “The Frog Prince,” “Halcyon Night” and others are stories that I think will continue to speak for me, will continue be read and valued, long after Bruce Holland Rogers is so much ash and vapor. Readers for those stories may not number in the thousands, but this sort of success is measured one reader at a time.

It is also true that I crave the trappings of success as more conventionally defined. I’d like more money. I’d like more fame. To me, money translates into the freedom to write more, read more, and wander the world looking for stories. As for fame, I do have an ego. It doesn’t happen often, but feels great when a stranger recognizes my byline. And when I’m wandering the world looking for stories, even a little bit of fame helps to open doors. I can more easily snoop in whatever odd corner I suspect might contain a story idea if the guardian of that corner has heard of me.

For novelists, the path to conventional success is familiar enough. In short, the successful novelist writes book after book, amasses a large and growing base of readers, whose book purchases through conventional publishers bring the writer a steady stream of royalties. Simple enough to describe, this sort of success is hard to achieve. It used to be that a great many midlist writers made careers by producing one modestly selling novel after another. In an era when even the best-known publishing houses were small — often owned by the same family for generations — some publishers counted their profits in a combination of money, prestige, and the satisfaction of bringing worthy books to readers.

At the best of times, the money for midlist novelists wasn’t great. They struggled while a few bestselling novelists feasted. James Michener once observed, “You can’t make a living [writing fiction], but you can make a killing.” But when Michener said this, he was exaggerating. A good number of novelists did make a living without ever cracking the bestseller lists. Then thirty years ago, the publishing world began to change. Publishing houses grew by buying up other publishing houses. Mass media conglomerates gobbled up these consolidated publishers, and eventually most of the book trade was in the hands of six or seven massive companies. Each company might publish books under a dozen different imprints, but the editors of each imprint were steered toward a profit-maximizing business model. Since bestsellers were the most profitable titles, the directive from the corporate leadership was this: Publish only bestsellers.

If the Michener quote exaggerated the plight of most novelists twenty or thirty years ago, it has become brutally accurate. Publishers see first and second novels as opportunities for writers to demonstrate that they can write bestsellers. If in two books the writer doesn’t show sales numbers that at least show a trend in the direction of an eventual blockbuster, the publisher won’t be likely to pick up the writer’s third book. Novel writing is an “up or out” business these days, and with vanishingly rare exceptions, there isn’t room for a midlist career.

This model of the big first novel and the bigger second novel drives the talk you’ll hear from agents and editors about publicity, self-promotion, and “platform.” When decision makers consider a manuscript, they also consider the writer as a commodity. Will she be able to get press coverage? Is she at least as good at self-promotion as she is at writing? Does she have an existing platform from which to reach potential book buyers? The ideal first-time author has both a good book and the platform that comes with already being famous for something else. A writer who isn’t already well-known at least in her home city has no platform and will have a harder time getting the attention of book buyers.

A successful novel career is hard to launch, and getting harder. So what hope is there for a writer who specializes in short-short stories? The only obvious advantage for writers of short fiction is that we get to sell our work twice, first to magazines and then collected in a book. However, selling twice is no real advantage when the payment each time is a pittance.

I once sold a short-short story to Good Housekeeping for $1,500. I have sold fewer than a dozen short-shorts to The Sun for $300 or so apiece. If my pay rate were always in that range, I’d make a modest living from magazine sales. I could have something like the income of the dying breed of midlist novelists. However, those rates are exceptional. My stories in the Vestal Review have earned about $15 each, and I sometimes publish in good literary magazines that pay me only in copies. At least the publication credit helps me sell the story collection.

Not that the story collection is going to pay the rent. Almost all collections are printed by small presses. Large publishers avoid story collections because, compared to novels, they don’t sell. Even the story collections of best-selling novelists perform poorly, comparatively. So my collections have been brought out by small presses with modest distribution. The advance for The Keyhole Opera, a collection that won the World Fantasy Award, brought me less than a thousand dollars. Some of my other collections received no advance at all and thin trickles of royalties.

If the foregoing were the end of the story, then it would be hard to see how I could make much of a career out of flash fiction. However, I think my prospects are bright and getting brighter by the day. That’s because alternative models for publishing have been springing up all over. Writers can publish their own e-books inexpensively on Amazon, and more opportunities like that are coming. Amazon lets writers keep a much larger portion of sales than writers would see in royalties for a conventional book. Writers who establish their own small presses can self-publish physical books using print-on-demand. As many readers of this column will know, I’ve also been distributing my short-short stories by email subscription for eight years, an enterprise in which I keep all the proceeds less the cost of my web site and internet connection.

Technology is making it possible for writers to control much more of their publishing destiny. It’s true that getting print-on-demand books into bookstores is difficult. It’s true that the self-publishing e-book writer has to find a way to tell readers that his book exists. And it’s true that self-published books have a high hurdle of reader skepticism to overcome since so many self-published books are, let’s face it, terrible. But increasingly, writers would have to do the work of publicity, self-promotion and platform-building even if they were working with traditional publishers. At least when arranging a book tour, writing a blog, podcasting free samples or performing a public reading, the self-publishing writer gets immediate feedback about how the efforts are resulting in sales. Publicity and hand-selling efforts reward the self-publishing author more handsomely per sale since the profit may be six to eight times what it would have been for each book in normal royalties.

Above all, this kind of selling is easier to do with flash fiction than with a novel. If you give a public reading from a novel, the potential buyer might be intrigued by what you read, but still doesn’t know if the whole reading experience will be worthwhile. If you perform some great flash fiction, though, the potential buyer has had a complete experience that buying the book will enable her to experience again. It’s true that she still doesn’t know whether your other stories — the ones you didn’t choose to read — are good. But at least your sample has been complete.

And flash fiction fits into all sorts of reading spaces. Here I don’t just mean small screens. Flash is suitable for classroom use, for public display as broadsides, for podcasting, for methods of distribution that no one has thought of yet, but that take advantage of the narrow spaces in busy lives.

So it is with my own work. Increasingly, I am choosing to control the distribution of my stories, to hang onto rights and pursue reprint sales in unusual places, places that needed especially brief fiction. Stories that first earned me fifty dollars to appear in webzines have sold to textbook publishers for ten and twenty times that much. I have sold story reprint rights for use in state-wide standardized tests of reading comprehension.

In time, I think that models for successful literary careers will be more and more diverse. With cheaper copying and distribution of texts, it should be possible to survive on the support of fewer readers closer to home. If I get out more, perform my stories more often, I should be able to make a living from email subscriptions sold to readers who have met me and heard me read in person. A readership of a couple thousand could keep me going. For me and for other writers of flash, it won’t take a national reputation to make living.

Of course, a writer needs some reputation. Starting out is going to be as difficult as ever. The stories will have to be good, and readers will want to see a goodly number of excellent samples before buying the book or paying for the podcast. But I do think that this century will see full-time successful writers of flash fiction.

I’m suggesting an approach that will lead to a local reputation and local sales, but as I’ve already said, flash fiction finds its way into all kinds of narrow spaces. Concentrating on selling to readers you can meet in person doesn’t preclude seeing your work spread far and wide.

A common fantasy for novelists goes like this: You’re on a plane. The passenger in the seat next to yours opens her carry-on and takes out a book. It’s your book. You wrote it.

That hasn’t happened to me, but when I was in Budapest on a Fulbright, I volunteered to visit some high schools and talk to students in English classes. The director of the Budapest American Corner called one teacher to say that I was available. “Bruce Holland Rogers?” said the teacher. “Really? Of course, yes, we want him to come. The students would love to meet him. We just read one of his stories this week in their textbook.”

Flash fiction. Micro payments that add up. Surprising little bursts of fame far from home.

I’ll take it.

Amy never relaxes until the third song, imagining everyone’s staring at her hands. But when she sings Styx and Stones, the music takes her places where, even if they are, she doesn’t care. So large as to be almost grotesque, her hands allow her to play a Martin Dreadnaught and to hold a man so he feels held. She wrote that song for freaks like herself:

It’s the weird boy who makes novels And the gimp whose music soars The odd girl paints in visions That opens secret doors The stutterer writes speeches in diamond words and true The dark child set his heart on fire till he warmed himself and grew into another one of us, another one like you.

It’s the scars that make us holy Wholly sacred and alive.

The applause swells beyond the complement of the dozen people in the parlor of Portia’s farmhouse. Amy likes house concerts because she can hear the audience, their appreciative murmurs, watch them close their eyes when they’re moved. Feels like making love sometimes. She strokes her guitar and offers smiles all around, pausing at the latecomer, a frail looking guy, a Pacific Islander maybe, or Filipino, half his face crosshatched with pale scars, poor bastard. She smiles on an extra beat, then finishes her set.

He’s on top of her at intermission, holding out his left hand, keeping the artificial one at his side. “Joel. Terrific tunes.”

She takes his hand, for once not thinking about her own. “Amy.”

“Stand you a drink, after?” Joel tugs a flask from his jacket pocket. “I’m kind of broke. Small disclaimer.”

Amy laughs. “Why not?”

He sits in the back for the second set. She wonders if his ballsiness is natural or a result of listening to her song. No other guy in the room attracts her, so she’s willing to find out. Although Portia will be ticked if Amy winds up complaining about one more broken creature she can’t get quit of. “It’s your own fault,” Portia says. “You’re not the blasted Salvation Army.” But. There’s something about the wounded that gets Amy every time. Their lack of illusion, maybe. Or the naked gratitude for having survived. Amy stumbles over a chord change. Focus! She still misses Vernon, who used to kiss the port wine birthmark inside her thigh, and wrap his fingers around her outsized hands. The surgery left a ladder of keloid scars behind his neck, and a crescent on his hip where they harvested bone to fuse his cervical spine. He’s the one who told her she makes a man feel held. And he made her feel… everything important. But his bones kept crumbling until he welcomed death, and because she loved him, Amy did, too.

She finishes with Vernon’s song, Down to the Marrow.

It’s where I felt you, How I loved you, What took you away from me — Down to the marrow.

Not in my brain, Or port wine stain, Nor heart run through by Cupid’s arrow.

But in my bones — A fragile cage To hold the promise straight and narrow.

It’s how you loved me, Knew me, Thrilled me, Why I miss you Down to the marrow.

Joel hangs back until everyone is gone. They settle on the porch steps so they can see the sliver of moon. The flask is still warm from his body heat. She savors the mouthful of Cointreau, then swallows. “So what happened?”

“When? Something happened?”

She won’t play this game, although she knows he’s trying for charm.

“Bike accident. Sideswiped by a Bronco. My Harley flipped, pinned me underneath.” He waggles his prosthetic. “I was a decent keyboardist, had a band. A wife, too, before.” He grins. “Country Western song, huh? I can still sing, though.”

“Go ahead.”

Joel doesn’t hesitate. He belts out Dancing in the Dark, head thrown back, serenading the fingernail moon.

“Why do I feel you had that ready?” Amy laughs. “You’re very good, though. And it beats ‘What’s your sign?’ by an order of magnitude.”

“You married?”

She shakes her head.

“Divorced?”

“Widowed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, we’re all sorry creatures, aren’t we?” Man, she’s melancholy tonight. Maybe it’s Joel. He feels real and present. A real and present danger to her equilibrium.

By the time they finish the flask, she knows he hates Bush, loves the Philadelphia Eagles and was a sporting goods rep but is now on disability.

She sings Four Strong Winds and he joins her on the chorus. “Very nice,” she says, feeling a bit giddy. She drifts awhile on her post-gig high before realizing he’s been awfully quiet, that his eyes look filmy. She taps his good wrist. “You okay?”

“I’d be better if the Eagles make the play-offs.”

Yeah, right. Four Strong Winds, what was she thinking? Our good times are all gone…

“Look, Joel, I’ll be back in a few weeks. We could get together, sing some tunes?”

“Would give me something to look forward to.” He swipes at his eyes with his sleeve. “I’m not used to that.”

“Got email?”

On the back of an old business card he prints wreck@gmail.com.

Wow. Why does he keep those cards if that life has been erased? “When?” she says.

“Whenever you say, I’ll be there.”

“No. The accident. When?”

“Four years in April.”

Four years. The scars you can’t see are the worst. Amy stands, slips the card in her pocket. “I’m beat, Joel. Let’s call it a night.”

He stands close to her and before he can make an overture, she kisses him on his scarred cheek. “I’ll be in touch,” she says.

“Good. Great.”

By his tone of voice, she knows he knows she won’t. She waits in the kitchen until he drives away before tossing his card in the trash. She’s beat but she scribbles on a napkin. Invisible Scars. Four Strong Winds. Four years. Tucks it in pocket and drags herself to bed. She’ll work on the lyrics tomorrow.

“Dini went three minutes thirty-two seconds before she couldn’t take it anymore,” Mel said, staring at me. “You think you can beat her, April?”

It wasn’t a question; it was a challenge. Mel was my best friend. But last week she’d uploaded a vidbit of her brother snorking milk out his nose, and it went viral. Fifty thousand hits a day, and suddenly she was all stuck up and bossy. Even the tag that hovered to the left of her head said that she was now taking bids on corporate sponsorship.

I stared back. “No problem.”

“Tabitha told me it has a kind of Zendo effect.”

I glanceblinked the definition of “Zendo:” a hall for meditation. It didn’t quite fit, but it made me think of serene quiet and white walls. Mel saw my momentary pause and gave me a condescending-looking smile.

That smirk made me want to beat Dini’s time even more, just to prove that I could. “Any time you’re ready,” I said, touching a finger to the earpiece of my glasses. A black-and-white cube appeared, twirling slowly in the upper left corner of my vision, below the timestamp and my current geo-coords. A download confirmation chimed in my ear.

“You’ll have to do a hard boot afterwards. It completely crashes your glasses.” Mel gave me another one of those smiles. “Any time you’re ready,” she said, her tone mocking me.

Bitch. I wouldn’t be that snotty if I was the one that was famous. I looked at the door to my room, and the tag told me it was locked. The Mom-watcher program I’d secretly bought online said that she was still blocks away, stuck in traffic. Here we go. Jaws clenched, I looked at the black and white cube, then blinked twice to run it.

It was like being naked in public. All of a sudden there wasn’t a single tag anywhere in the room. No content and number-of-item info when I looked at my dresser. No outside temperature when I looked at the windowpane. The posters on the wall were mute. No friendlist. No newsfeed. No inbox. Nothing. I gasped, suffocating — drowning in silent blankness.

“How you doing, April?”

Weird. When I looked at Mel, I could actually see the glasses perched on her face, light from the window making blobs on the lenses. My heart felt like a hummingbird and my hands were sweating, but I had no biofeed, and there wasn’t even a timestamp when I looked up and left. I swallowed hard. “Fine. How long have I been offline?”

“One minute seventeen — eighteen — nineteen.”

An eternity already, but I wasn’t about to tell Mel how scared I was. Instead, I turned towards my dresser. Maybe if I looked at the things on top and concentrated on each one in turn, the time would go faster.

I went over. Scattered across the brown wood were a bunch of souvenirs. On the far left was a paper-thin seashell. I picked it up. It was fan-shaped and shiny inside; on the back, bone white with scattered pale purple spots.

I concentrated and tried to remember why it was there. No geo-coords to give me the location, but the place had been called something-something Beach. It had been hot when I picked it up, but it wasn’t in the past couple of months. So it must have been last year. Mel had been there. Dad had taken me and Mel to something-something Beach last summer. Why this particular shell, though, I couldn’t remember. At the time it had seemed important, though. Then I remembered — Mel had picked it up for me. Best Friends Forever. After something-something Beach, Dad had taken us — to a restaurant to eat. There had been ice cream after that, but with no tags, I couldn’t look up the details — the beach name, the restaurant, the flavor of the ice cream — and I couldn’t remember on my own. Drowning in silent blankness. Suddenly everything, including my vision, became all fuzzy.

“Jesus, she’s crying!” Mel said, sounding excited.

I looked up and over. Mel had come up beside me while I was staring at the shell. Her head was tilted slightly, the way she did whenever she was recording.

My heart stopped. “You’re live-feeding me?” I whispered.

Mel laughed. “Do you all see this? Those are tears running down her face.” She was talking to someone else, and in a flash I realized who — her new audience. She had been recording me the whole time, and I hadn’t known because my glasses were down.

Anger exploded inside me. I slashed at her face with clawed fingers, trying to hook her glasses off. She hit me back, but I managed to slap her hard enough to knock her glasses off and onto the floor.

There was more fighting and a lot of shouting; and in the end Mel picked up her glasses and went home, saying that she didn’t ever want to see me again — she didn’t hang out with crybaby losers who’d never be famous.

As soon as she was gone, I sat on my bed and hard-booted my glasses. The world came back like it had been before — timestamp, geo-coords. The dresser told me a bunch of stuff I really didn’t care about. So did the windowpane. My inbox pinged with a stream of messages — ten times more than I normally got, mostly from people I didn’t know. Instead of answering, I wiped half-dried tears from my cheeks and deleted Mel from my friendlist forever. On the carpet lay a dozen or so eggshell fragments, mottled white and purple. One of us must have stepped on the seashell while we fought.

I scraped the pieces up off the carpet. But when I looked at them, they told me nothing.

I’ve said before that themes seem to suggest themselves with many issues. In this case, it’s the authors who are similar rather than the stories: They’ve all been published in Flash Fiction Online before.

In March, we published Andrew Gudgel’s “On Green Hills”. This month, he brings you “Tags”. The only way I can think of to describe this story is that it will probably be utterly mundane in about twenty years.

The first story we published by Alan Grayce was a near-future science fiction story called “A Delivery of Cheesesteaks.” This month’s story, “No Show,” has no science-fiction elements in it, but, interestingly, both stories are excerpts from Grayce’s novel-in-progress, Fraught. Both stories reveal a deft touch with moody subjects.

KJ Kabza seems to have a gift for light fantasy. His first story with us was “Billions of Stars,” which involved tiny planets and an easily exasperated fairy. This month he provided us with “Now Open,” which — well, just take the time to read it. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your time back.

Our Classic Flash this month is “A Tobacco Plant” from Punch, the British humor magazine. After you get your chuckle from it, please consider praying for and materially supporting our troops overseas. (As of August 27, your care packages can even include tobacco products again. Yes, I know your doctor wouldn’t recommend it, but sometimes it’s exactly what the doctor ordered.)

Bruce Holland Rogers’s column this month shifts emphasis from particular writing techniques and flash fiction forms to making a living as a short fiction writer. It’s an inspiring read, and I’ll even say it’s essential if you’re feeling down or wondering why to keep writing.

On an administrative note, we’ve closed to submissions for a while in order to get caught up on the slush. I apologize for those of you who’ve had a long wait. Please feel free to query, and be just a little forgiving if the response takes a few days — but not too forgiving, because I don’t want anything to fall through the cracks. Our policy is to respond to every submission.

As always, please comment (comments are like gold to an author), tip the authors (money is like gold to an author, too), and tell your friends. Also follow us on Twitter, if you’re into that sort of thing. See you next month!

Punch, November 11, 1941

I had done the second hole (from the vegetable-marrow frame to the mulberry-tree) in two, and was about to proceed to the third hole by the potting-shed when I thought I would go in and convey the glad news to Joan. I found her seated at the table in the breakfast-room with what appeared to be a heap of tea spread out upon a newspaper in front of her. Little slips of torn tissue-paper littered the floor, and on a chair by her side were several empty cardboard boxes. The sight was so novel that I forgot the object of my errand.

“What’s all that tea for, and what are you doing with it?” I asked.

“It isn’t tea; it’s tobacco,” Joan replied, “and I’m making cigarettes for the soldiers at the front.”

“Where on earth did you get that tobacco from, if it is tobacco?” I went on.

“Let me see now,” mused Joan, pausing to lick a cigarette-paper — “was it from the greengrocer’s or the butcher’s? Ah! I remember. It was from the tobacconist’s.”

Joan gets like that sometimes, but I do not encourage her.

“But what made you choose this Hottentot stuff?” I enquired.

“The soldiers like it strong,” Joan replied, “and this looked about the strongest he’d got.”

“What does it call itself?”

“It was anonymous when I bought it, but you’ll no doubt see its name on the bill when it comes in.”

“Thanks very much,” I said. “That’s what I should call forcible fleecing. Not that I mind in a good cause — ”

“Isn’t it ingenious?” interrupted Joan. “You just put the tobacco in between the rollers, and twiddle this button round until — until you’ve twiddled it round enough; then you slip in a cigarette-paper — like that — moisten the edge of it — twiddle the button round once more — open the lid — and shake out the finished article — comme ça!”

An imperfect cylindrical object fell on to the floor. I stooped to pick it up and the inside fell out. I collected the débris in the palm of my hand.

“How many of these have you made?” I asked.

“Only three thoroughly reliable ones, including that one,” she replied. “I’ve rolled ever so many more, but the tobacco will fall out.”

“Here, let me give you a hand,” I suggested. “I’ll roll and you lick.”

“No,” said Joan kindly but firmly. “You don’t quite grasp the situation. I want to do something. I can’t make shirts or knit comforters. I’ve tried and failed. My shirts look like pillow-cases, and anything more comfortless than my comforters I couldn’t imagine. I wouldn’t ask a beggar to wear an article I had made, much less an Absent-Minded Beggar.”

“What about that tie you knitted for me last Christmas?” I said.

“Yes,” said Joan, “what about it? That’s what I want to know. You haven’t worn it once.”

It was true, I hadn’t. The tie in question was an attempt to hybridise the respective colour-schemes of a tartan plaid and a Neapolitan ice.

“That,” I explained, “is because I’ve never had a suit which would set it off as it deserves to be set off. However, if I can’t help I won’t hinder you. I only came in to say that I had done the second hole in two. I thought you would like to know I had beaten bogey.” And I retired, taking with me the little heap of tobacco and the hollow tube of paper.

When I reached the seclusion of the mulberry-tree I found that the paper had become ungummed, so I placed the tobacco in it and succeeded after a while in rolling it up. The result, though somewhat attenuated, was recognisably a cigarette. I lit it, and when I had finished coughing I came to the conclusion that if only I could induce Joan to present her gift to the German troops instead of to our Tommies it would precipitate our ultimate triumph. I had to eat several mulberries before I felt capable of proceeding to the third hole. When I got there (in two) I found it occupied by a squadron of wasps while reinforcements were rapidly coming up from a hole beneath the shed. Being hopelessly outnumbered I contented myself with a strategical movement necessitating several stiff rearguard actions.

Joan, growing a little more proficient, had in a couple of days made 500 cigarettes. I had undertaken to dispatch them, and one morning she came to me with a neatly-tied-up parcel.

“Here they are,” she said; “but you must ask at the Post Office how they should be addressed. I’ve stuck on a label.”

I went out, taking the parcel with me, and walked straight to the tobacconist’s.

“Please pack up 1,000 Hareems,” I said, “and post them to the British Expeditionary Force. Mark the label ‘Cigarettes for the use of the troops.’ And look here, I owe you for a pound of tobacco my wife bought the other day. I’ll square up for that at the same time. By-the-by, what tobacco was it?”

“Well, sir,” the man replied, “I hardly like to admit it in these times, but it was a tobacco grown in German East Africa. It really isn’t fit to smoke, and is only good for destroying wasps’ nests or fumigating greenhouses, which I thought your lady wanted it for, seeing as how she picked it out for herself. Some ladies nowadays know as much about tobacco as what we do.”

I left the shop hurriedly. The problem of the disposal of Joan’s well-meaning gift was now solved. I returned home and furtively stole up the side path into the garden. Under cover of the summer-house I undid the parcel and proceeded rapidly to strip the paper from those of the cigarettes that had not already become hollow mockeries. When I had collected all the tobacco I went in search of the gardener, and encountered him returning from one of his numerous meals.

“Wilkins,” I said, “there is a wasps’ nest on the third green, and here is some special wasp-eradicator. Will you conduct the fumigation?”

As Joan and I were walking round the garden that evening before dinner Joan said —

“I don’t want to blush to find it fame, but — do you know — I prefer doing good by stealth.”

A faint but unmistakable odour was borne on the air from the direction of the third green.

“So do I,” I said.

Punch, or “The London Charivari,” was a British humor (sorry, ‘humour’) magazine that ran from 1841 until 2002. It still has a Web site and cartoon library.

We were not able to find information about the authors of individual stories, so this author will have to remain anonymous. Project Gutenberg has the complete text of many Punch magazines, and you can find this issue here.