Argument, Summa Cum Laude

In honor of the more than ten friends who graduated college this past weekend comes a slightly different piece of flash fiction. Conversation inspired by them, location inspired by my cousin's wedding rehearsal dinner. I find it interesting and a good exercise to write from two perspectives - neither of which particularly hold. It's a good way to keep one's mind broad - to try to write convincingly from a side that doesn't have you fully convinced. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!

Argument, Summa Cum Laude

by Rachel Heffington

From this angle the girl who had escaped to the shrubbery as I had – presumably to quit the hot crush of the crowded party room – appeared to be my height or a little taller. Instinctively, I glanced down at her feet. She wore shoes with a small heel. Were she barefoot, I would have the edge in height and this pleased me. I am not a man who can spare many inches to the advantage of others.

I stepped off the moss-grown walk onto the gravel circle, gave it a deliberate crunch under my heel. She turned, startled, then smiled. Dusk bloomed around her, blending the edges of her gray dress softly into the drawing night.

I raised a hand in greeting toward this charcoal-sketch of a stranger and wandered to fountain in the center of the gravel circle. No water in the fountain. Nor had there been for some time if the collection of cigarette ashes and dead leaves were an indication. I took careful note of these things in an effort to ignore the presence of the girl. I'd gone to the shrubbery to be alone, of course, and wished to remain that way. But soon the smallness, the ridiculousness of we two sharing the same neat-lawned, hedged-about patch of yard without speaking bore down on me.

“Rather a crowd in there, huh?” I ventured.

She, who had drawn off a few paces, turned to me. “Yes, well, graduations are a thing worth celebrating, I suppose.”

I drew a cigar from my pocket. “Do you mind?”

She shrugged. “Only if the wind turns my direction.”

Cigar clenched between my teeth, I cupped my hands and touched a match to its end. This business done, I drew on it and considered the girl. “You a graduate of the grand old Class of '39?”

She smiled a funny smile. Almost an angry smile. “I'm not.”

“Ah, so you're a student then?”

Another smile tinged with a diluted shade of fury. “Actually, no. I'm not a student at all. I don't learn anything. Never.” She hugged herself with a petulant toss of her head. “I've actually given up learning. Stupid to learn anything these days.” Her hair, cut in a blunt-edged bob, sat sharply dark against her heart-shaped face. Defiance incarnate and a dimple in her chin.

I smoked hard, processing what she had said and whether it was strictly sarcasm or whether she might, on the outside chance, believe her own words.

“If you're not a student or a graduate,” I finally asked, “do you mind me asking why you are here?”

She scoffed. “Oh, so it's only graduates or students who may attend the ceremony of a good friend?”

“Look, if you think that's what I meant...”

“Isn't it what you meant?”

“I only meant – ”

“Yes, what did you mean? You'd think a student would have enough brains to know there must be a motive behind asking a question. Now speak plain or I'll go inside. I'd much rather not be bothered by impertinent young men just now, if it's all the same to you.”

She made my mind whirl with the rapidity of her insults. How we'd gone from demure, dusk-sketched dryad to seething shrew in a few sentences bewildered me. Where'd it gone off? A fellow would never have done it. I wished madly for the seclusion I'd left the party to seek. This was why I referred gals to my older and younger brothers. This was why I'd made it into manhood without so much as a second date with any one of them. Women were such complex creatures.

Heaven-sent, I'm sure.

Beautiful, undoubtedly.

Perfection in human form.

But not something you wanted to go trawling through just for fun, you know. They were much too apt to land on you, claws out.

“Forgive me, ma'am,” I said with a cold, polite bow. I flicked my cigar into the empty fountain and watched it smolder against the skeleton of a maple leaf. “It was not my intention to offend.”

“And who offers his apologies?”

Her distinctly different tone of voice jerked my gaze to her laughing face. She'd dropped the shawl somewhat from her shoulders which were now bare to the purple evening. Proud, aristocratic shoulders as if the dignity of the world – and its riches – belonged to her.

“Don't you have a name?” she asked.

Blood rush to the tips of my ears, turning them scarlet. “Alexander Britton.”

“Madeleine Vincent.”

How small her hand felt in my big paw! Yet her grip was stronger than many fellows' and the eyes that fastened on mine were a sensible, affable blue. Not forget-me-not or violet or gray blue. Just blue, tending toward green at the outer rim.

“You're Vince's sister?” I asked, trying to reconcile she of the gray dress with Roland Vincent, currently up to his crumpled necktie in a bottle of bourbon.

“His cousin, actually. And yes, I'm here because he got it into his head to try for a tightly-rolled piece of paper which will henceforth allow him to think himself cleverer than the rest of the family.”

“College hater, I take it?”

“Not particularly.”

Somehow, in that way peculiar to strangers in a strange place, we came together and started walking; we had now reached the far edge of the gravel circle and had to turn back or cross the lawn to go on. Unhesitating, she stepped onto the grass and we sauntered through the hedge via an arched opening. Beyond the hedge lay a damp, meadow-like acre. We made in the general direction of an enormous, many-limbed oak growing in the left corner, nearest the party-house. Madeleine sat on an board-swing hanging from the tree branch unfurling like an elephant's trunk from the tree's heart.

“What's your game?” she asked, suddenly.

I cleared my throat. “I'm fair at baseball.”

“I meant now, here. Why are you talking to me?”

“Because one of you is much less terrifying to my nerves than three hundred of them.” I jerked my head toward the house as a torrent of raucous voices poured out an open window.

“And why don't you walk on, alone?” she asked.

“Why didn't you?”

“And ignore someone speaking to me?” she marveled.

“Women have done harsher things in the name of privacy.”

She sat on that swing without swinging at all, which seemed equal parts nonsensical and practical. I think it would have spoiled the effect if she'd gone cavorting through the sky. Madeleine Vincent seemed, above all, to relish her composure and balanced her girlhood (could she be older than nineteen?) with the carriage of a Parisienne.

“I suppose you're getting a degree?” she asked.

I nodded. “My second, actually.”

“Ughhhh.” A shiver.

“You do yourself no credit acting like an idiot,” I cautioned. “I'm sorry to use the term, but you don't even sound like a thinking adult when you speak that way. If you so despise the educational system, you might keep that opinion to yourself. If you choose to spout it for all the world to hear, be prepared to be laughed at.”

She chewed her bottom lip.

“There is nothing,” I said, waxing hot as I familiarized myself with the subject, “more laughable than an uneducated person beating the educated man over the head with her lack of education. There are forms to be observed in lodging complaints against the system. I'd be happy to instruct you in them if you so choose.”

“Look at him! I've made the little toffee-nose angry!” she wobbled on the swing, settling herself into it with a dangerous glint in her eyes.

“I only intend to help.” Whatever slight interest her svelte figure had brightened in me when I first saw her faded now to a weary sensation of having to calm a petulant child before she set off the hue and cry.

“Is Vince...is he all right?” she asked at length.

I shrugged. “Not the worst in the lot.”

She looked off toward the house. “He drinks too much.”

“Not more than most.”

“He doesn't study,” she said, pinning me with those blue eyes.

“Not many do.”

“He doesn't apply himself at all, does he?”

I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “We-ellll...not terribly much. But nobody does.”

“And he skips classes often.”

“Everyone skips classes, Miss Vincent. It's part of survival.”

“But he still graduates? Acting like that he still graduates!”

Somewhere I recognized I'd lost another battle. “Look, it's not like that.”

“Isn't it?” Madeleine shook her head and the sharp black bob swept her chin. “That's what I hate. A person might work his whole life. A person might read every book he could get his hands on. A person might splay himself wide open for the sake of self-improvement but if he didn't go to college and get a cap and tassels and a piece of paper that says he's spent four years of his life skipping classes and boozing himself, the world won't take him seriously.”

I stared, slack-jawed at her. “You little minx! It isn't like that at all. Most students work very hard for their degrees.”

“You just say most people don't apply themselves.”

“That was hyperbole.”

“You are hyperbole.” Madeleine breathed very fast and a certain expression flitted across her face as if she realized the flawed logic in her comment.

“You want to misunderstand me,” I said. “You do your very best to misinterpret what I mean.”

“Oh, just shut up, Mr. Alexander Britton.”

It was the first time she had used my name and again that curious self-consciousness filtered into her eyes. She banished it and the hardness returned.

“I'm not interested in discussing it further. Look, we're here to congratulate my cousin and his friends and...and you for achieving what you all set out to achieve. I don't have to admire your pretension to congratulate you, do I? Basic civility allows me to recognize that four years devoted to any pursuit are, at any rate, four years of devotion.” She stood and the swing banged against the back of her knees. She took both my hands in hers. “Congratulations, Mr. Britton. Use your education well. Now leave me, please. I'm not ready to go in just yet.”

Nor was I but the grand oak stooped over us, forbidding me to stay. A keen wind riffled through the hedge-leaves and I shivered. “You're not cold?”

“No.” She sat on the swing again.

“Well.” I squinted at the party-house, pretending to concentrate on something, though I barely noticed at what I was squinting. Anything to avoid her gaze. “Goodbye, then.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Britton.”

“Will I see you later – at the party?”

She squared her chin. “I think not. I don't belong among those people. I'll only have this conversation with every other person in that room.” Great weariness weighted her voice to a murmur. “I don't think I have perspective to spare.”

Listening to her, I felt myself becoming more and more depressed. I didn't want her to despise me and the fifty-eight other people in the house behind, but I could not see her angle.

I sighed. “Goodbye.”

“So you said. Please go away now. I'm tired.”

I did as she commanded and once inside the hot, over-crowded house a feeling of great moroseness fell upon me. Even the Manhattan a friend shoved in my hand couldn't cheer me. I wandered to the back of the house where the clamor seemed loudest.

“Hey, Vince.”

He didn't hear me over the shrill chatter of three girls in thin dresses wearing stolen graduation caps. I waved him down instead and Vince, red in the face and shouting with laughter, squeezed through the crowd to my side.

“Alex, enjoying yourself?”

“Fine party. Fine,” I lied.

“Great! Never seen a crowd happier to be done with it all. To hell with studying! To hell with finals!” Vince raised a brimming shot filled by one of the girls, and the people nearest commended his toast with a rowdy cheer.

I licked my dry lips and tugged on his sleeve. “Met your cousin in the garden.”

“Oh, fine girl,” he yelled. “Bit dramatic, but fine.”

“Funny bird, seems to me,” I confided.

Vince's roving eyes settled briefly on me with a look of extreme amusement. “One of the funniest. Has funny ideas about society. Pretends to think college is bull.”

“Yes. She, umm...said so.”

He laughed rather harder than necessary at this. “Look at your face! Bet she told you she despises being kissed and she'd never travel abroad, not even if someone else paid for it three times over. Little Maddy. Silly girl, but sweet when she's in the mood.”

“Does she mean any of it?”

The three girls crowded once again around Vince; I could barely see his polished head above the other party-goers.

“What?” he roared.

“Does your cousin really mean it – about kissing and college and travel and all?”

“Ha!” he laughed, and even though I couldn't see him for all the arms embracing him, his intoxicated voice rose above the clamor: “Girl doesn't mean a word of it! She tried for ten colleges and they all turned her down. Silly little pigeon. Likes to spit in their eye, now, every chance she gets.”

So that was it. The irrational anger and the defiance and the childlike shame. I looked down at my hand and realized I had rolled my cocktail napkin like a diploma. I tapped it against my palm a few times, smiling. Then, still smiling, I tossed it away and stalked back outside.

With any luck, there'd still be a furious, blue-eyed girl sitting on the old board swing.

"Eu de Lil" - A Partially True Telling Of Things

Hello, Friends!
    Many of you saw the April Fool's prank I played on social media the other day. To pull that off, I walked up to a random stranger in a coffee shop and asked him to take an engagement selfie with me so I could prank some of my friends on April Fool's Day. He obliged, and I spent all of April Fool's in the highest of good humors. This event collided with having finished another J.D. Salinger book and begun yet another. I returned this evening to that coffee shop and sat down to write a short story. The piece of fiction which came out of that writing session is this: my partially-autobiographical thank-you to J.D. Salinger and that coffee-shop stranger. Enjoy!

"Eau de Lil"

by Rachel Heffington

I knew something was adrift when she changed her perfume. Her scent had always been an interesting and none-too-common Pandora's box affair of verbena, rose, lily-of-the-valley, and sandalwood. No chemist had every compounded that scent. Lillian had made it herself out of the ends of castaway bottles of more respectable perfumes, in my opinion. I had always been able to tell when my sister was home, though I never called for her. It was quite enough of a certainty to force the unyielding lock of our front door to open, to shove in the heavy wooden doors, and smell that eau de Lil.

I tossed my keys into the ugly pottery bowl on the credenza. “What's the deal?” There was a new smell of citrus and spice. It was complex. It was seductive. For a crazed moment I panicked that I had somehow entered the wrong flat in our brownstone and a half-clothed French woman would come sauntering out of her bathroom to behold me, the intruder. What a Frenchwoman would be up to in our neighborhood of Ghent was beyond me.

But no other family would suffer that hideous hand-thrown pottery crater to remain in the public line of vision. It possessed, according to family legend, the indentation of a famous potters thumb – a sometime friend of our father's before he'd quite the artistic circle for academics – and therefore the horrible thing was left quite out of the reach of those of us less discerning. I had often wished Abe, our oldest brother, would smash it in one of his drunken brawls, but did he? He hadn't the decency, I suspected. Scar the furniture, beat the stuffing out of mother's sofa. Crash half the heirloom china under one of your weighty fists but don't, by heaven, do anything merciful to the Benini Bowl. You will likely understand my position. It is a firmly held belief of mine that every family possesses its variety of Benini Bowl.

“Lil? Lillian, where the deuces are you, you overgrown kitty-cat?”

Not even the use of her familiar and much-despised nickname brought a response from my sister. I wandered down the hall to the doorway of Lillian's room and here paused. In our childhood we used to have sort of Company Meetings, so to speak, in Lil's room. We would sprawl on her queen bed which, at that time, seemed massive, and discuss the world at large. Abe and I enjoyed relatively unusual welcome from our sister; but for all these memories, I had yet to ever enter the Abode of Lillian without the strict permission and approval of its inhabitant. Today was no different.

“Lil?” My adolescent vocal changes had never thoroughly come to and end and at nineteen, I was quite the same sort of graceful parrot-throated boy I had been five years ago. I knocked two knuckles against the door-frame and leaned halfway in.

There was Lillian, not crying her eyes out as you might expect, or asleep, but sprawled across the width of her bed with her heels kicking in the air as if she were a mere girl of thirteen, not ten years past that forgiving age.

“What the heck, Lillian? Why the funny smell?”

She turned her head to give me a withering gaze. “Oh, do shut up, Sassparilla.”

My name was Samuel, but people seemed incapable of remembering that particular fact about yours truly. All sorts referred to me by this name which name had come about due to my uncommon devotion to sarsaparilla the full duration of my childhood.

I would not, however, be put out by this indignity. “Hey, Lillian?”

“Yeah?” She was scribbling something in her journal.

“Why are you wearing a new perfume?”

She didn't answer.

“Did you run out?”

No reply.

“Did you lose the bottle?”

Still no answer. Lillian was never short on words. Her new reluctance to speak haunted me. I crossed into the room and felt the sacred seal break. I'm not sure it really happened, but it seemed to me that Lillian's shoulders stiffened when I silently passed the threshold. I'm not sure. But her heels came down. She suddenly seemed very much twenty-three again. Still, if I'd gone through the trouble of coming this far, it was only the dignified thing to see it through. In one wild moment of courage, I plopped onto the bed beside Lillian. I even shoved her left elbow over to try to see what she was writing. Didn't get very far, but that didn't bother me. I had Lillian's attention now. She had really noticed me. She capped her pen and positioned her chin on her arms.

“Sassparilla, you know something?”

“What?” Her window was open and the smell of baking pizza twirled into the room from the pizzeria down the street. I was suddenly inexpressibly hungry. Starving in fact.

“You need a haircut,” she said.

“I need food. What's up, Lillian?” I asked again. “I know something happened to you.”

“Okay.” Lillian sat upright and started picking at her cuticles. “Something did happen.”

I almost gave tongue to my satisfaction at being right, but I didn't want to shut down the confessional factory. I made the most encouraging, “Go on. Please do,” face in my repertoire and waited.

Lillian continued picking at the beds of her nails with a funny smile. It was a smile I saw infrequently. A smile that meant something – and this was rare – had gone well beyond Lillian's powerful imagination. The first occasion had been when she'd got free lipstick from a beauty counter at a drugstore just for happening to be the five-hundredth customer that day. Another time she had successfully sneaked into a stranger's wedding reception at a fancy hotel, signed the guest-book, and taken away a piece of cake while I watched from a service elevator. The third time the smile had lasted a full week and had, according to reports, much to do with the acquaintance of one Robert Cavendish. The Robert Cavendish affair had died down pretty rapidly and it had been months, come to think of it, since I'd seen that smile.

And now here it was, devilishly red and amused. Finished picking the right hand, Lillian began on the cuticles of her left. Her nails needed re-painting, I noticed. Lillian hated the whole process of nail-painting but she did it religiously every Friday night. It was Thursday. The manicure had survived the week about on-average.

“You remember the new bank on Llewellyn?”

“Which new one?” I brought up my mental file of our wedge of Norfolk and considered each bank in my knowledge.

“The one on Llewellyn!”

“Ah – hate to tell ya, Lil, but it's not new. Been open three years at least.”

“New to me.”

“Everything's new to you.”

“I like to be impressed,” Lillian replied with an arch smile. “It's quite satisfying.”

“You're crazy.”

Lillian's eyes suddenly became serious. She nodded. “I know. I am. Totally nuts.”

Here we came, creeping closer to the disclosure of whatever secret was eating at Lillian, doing things to her...changing her perfume. I deepened the “Please, do,” face and rolled over on my back.

“Well,” her voice felt for the edge of the topic like when you're at the beach in springtime and you're quite certain the ocean's still frigid but you feel compelled to put your foot in anyway. “I was at the bank and...you know tomorrow's April Fool's?”

I wriggled. I'd forgot. And I needed a good prank to pull on dumb old Abe for not smashing the Bellini Bowl. “Uh, yeah.”

“Yeah.” Lillian had finished picking her nails. Now she started on peak of her top lip – a nervous habit leftover from a traumatic teething period during toddlerhood. “Well, I thought what a joke it'd be to pretend I was engaged. You know, just for the heck of it.”

“Who pretends they're engaged for the heck of it?” I asked.

Lillian shrugged. “I don't know. I told you I was crazy.”

“What'd you do? Propose to a stranger?”

“Noooooo...” Lillian quit picking at her lip. “You know my Polaroid camera?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I thought I'd get somebody to take a photo with me. I had my class ring in my pocketbook – just got it cleaned at the jeweler's. So what I figured is, if I could get some man to take a picture with me...”

“What man?” I put in.

“I don't know. Some man.”

“Lillian – you didn't.”

“Of course I did!” My sister glared at me, then the smile came back. She shrugged. Picked at her lip again. “I mean, nobody would believe me unless there was photographic proof. You can't prank people by telling them anything. Everyone's a doubting Thomas in these progressive days. I needed a picture so what I did is – ”

I sat up and shook my head. “You're absolutely crazy.”

“Didn't I agree? Now shut up, Sassparilla, or I won't finish telling you.”

I hated people who didn't finish telling things. “What'd you do? Pick the handsomest one?”

That smile came back. “Well look, if I'm going to fake a fiance, why not choose someone I'd actually marry, for heaven's sake? I mean, you can't just pull this trick a few times. It's a one-shot game, Sass. You're done, you're done.”

“I get it, Lillian. Don't have to convince me!”

She settled back down on the bed and hugged herself. I thought how she looked thirteen again. Funny how a person can go back and forth ten years like that.

“Well,” she said. “I had a guy all picked out. A teller. You know. I'd gotten used to him, sorta. I went through the scenario at least five times in my head and had it all worked out. And then...well, I started thinking about how it would would be if I went through all the trouble of asking him and he wouldn't pose with me and how embarrassed I'd feel, and then I saw his eyes.”

“What was wrong with his eyes?” She had me curious now.

Lillian shook her head. “No sense of humor. Not a twinkle of a sense of humor. He was awfully nice-looking. Just my style. But I bet there wasn't an atom in his body that'd let him laugh at me, let alone allow him to stoop to taking a photo with a strange girl. I mean, don't get me wrong. He was terribly nice-looking. Probably smart too. But I bet he wouldn't laugh even if Harpo Marx came in there.”

“I wouldn't laugh if Harpo Marx came over to me,” I said.

My sister made an exasperated sound. “Yeah but you don't like comedy. You're just like That Man, Sassparilla, darling. You're very intellectual.”

I didn't much like how that sounded when Lillian said it like that. I didn't much like what I'd heard of That Man, as she called him, and being told I was just like him wasn't my idea of a clear compliment. I said so. Lillian said that I was being sensitive. I said, would she just hurry up and finish her story so I could go get a snack. She said I was free to go. I said if she didn't finish, I wouldn't make Bananas Foster. She loves my Bananas Foster and, because she's the most awful cook in the world, her hands were tied.

Lillian bounced on the bed, so I bounced too. We bounced together, she and I, and she might've even looked a couple months younger than thirteen at this point.

“Well, I'd just about screwed my courage to the sticking point. I was going to do it, by Holyrood. I'd loitered forever, filled out deposit slips with false names, reapplied lipstick, put on this new perfume sample rolling around in the bottom of my pocket-book – ”

“AHA!” I squawked, rather more violently than necessary.

“My word, Sassparilla!”

I blushed. “It's just, you were finally getting to the perfume.”

She ruffled. “And I'll go on getting to it if you'd just shut up for five seconds.”

“Okay. I'm shutting up. I'm shutting up.”

“Anyway, just as soon as I'd gotten myself all ready and riled, do you know what happened? He up and left. He left! A teller! As if he had permission to leave right as I got brave. I'd got used to him, you know. It had taken an hour to get that far. And he left.”

“Wasn't there a – ”

“Sassparilla Martin. Shut up. I looked for another man but I didn't like their noses.”

“Their noses...”

“I'm not particular about much but when it comes to noses, I have standards.” This wasn't news to me – Lillian had a very nice nose herself and wanted to be sure her children got it. “They were handsome enough and stylish enough and men enough in the place but they just didn't have a good nose on them.”

The story seemed to be drawing to a climaxless close. Her teller left and she hadn't been crazy enough to ask a stranger for a photograph in the bank. All this seemed a relief to me, though it was a little too bad for her, you know. With her impressed little smirk and sparkling eyes.

“I was furious with myself, Sassparilla.” She kicked her bedroom slipper across the room. “How would you feel if you'd stuck around a whole darn hour getting your courage up and the thing you were hunting just skipped town?”

“I'd feel relieved Fate had got me out of an embarrassing position I'd never put myself in to begin with.”

She sighed. “Well, I actually stomped my foot I was so crazy mad. And then I saw him.”

“Whom?”

“Listen to the educated young owl.” Lillian shook back her brown hair, smiling. “I saw another man. With blue eyes.”

“Adequate nose?”

“Very adequate. He was tall and broad-shouldered. Not quite what I'd call my style, but attractive all the same. And he had good teeth! Do you know, Sass, how hard it is to find a man with a nice smile?”

“Do I have a nice smile?”

“Don't flatter yourself, darling. You know your teeth are crooked. Oh, don't look at me like that! It isn't your fault you lost your retainer on vacation.”

I mentally cursed Abe, who had thrown my retainer into Lake Champlain three Augusts ago. My teeth were a sore point with me. “So you saw this man.”

“Yes, I saw him and I don't know what came over me. I felt perfectly calm and cool and collected and I just slipped that ring on and took my Polaroid camera out of my pocketbook and marched right up to him. He had one of those faces that looked ready for a laugh. He might never teach at Harvard, but he certainly would know a joke when he saw one.

'Excuse me,' I said, smiling my brightest. 'I realize this is a strange request, but I wondered if you might be willing to help a girl out with pulling an April Fool's trick on a friend?'

He sort of smiled.

Then I said, 'All I need is a snapshot of you and me and this ring.' And I held up my left hand with my class ring. The guy was really grinning now, like he thought it was the best idea he'd heard all day. Never-mind I was a total stranger in a bank lobby and I'd just asked for his photograph. He just sort of grinned at me, put his arm out to embrace me, and said,

'Let's do it!'” Lillian leaned back on her hands and laughed. That's another thing I liked about her. She never giggled or tittered, for heaven's sake.

I let out an appreciative whistle, just for her. “I hate to say this, Kitty-Cat, but your brain is one in a million. Even if you are certifiably nuts. Who'd you get to take the photo?”

“That's just it! This fellow was kind enough to flag down the bank manager. We took our photo and I thanked him and that was that. He even waited around till I'd shaken it to see if it came out all right.”

“Did it?”

That smile again. Lillian turned, reached into her journal, and brought out a fresh Polaroid. There was my sister all right: womanly and vivacious, smiling so hard you worried her face might shatter with gladness. Her class ring shone on her left hand which she held up between herself and the strange man. To tell you the truth, a big lump formed in my throat when I looked at the picture. She looked so happy. Like it was real. Like she'd actually got engaged to a man she really loved. He looked happy too. Thrilled, in fact. Funny thing is, they looked like a couple of kids. Lillian wasn't even twelve in that photo. She looked hardly eleven. The lump bobbed in my throat. I worked around it to say,

“Wow, that's nice, Lil. Picked a good one.” I quickly put the Polaroid photo face-down on the bedspread. I couldn't stand to look at it anymore. “What was his name?”

She shrugged and picked up the photo, cradling it in her palm. “Funny thing is, I was so excited to have been that brave, I forgot to introduce myself.”

“Lillian.”

“Well?”

I couldn't take it any more. I stood up and plunged my hands into my pockets. “Do you see your face in that picture?”

“What's wrong with it?”

My stomach growled like three caged lions. “Look at it! You're grinning like he actually proposed or something!”

“I was over the moon!” she said defensively. “All a person needs is one wild, crazy moment of bravery to touch off unspeakably interesting things. And after failing to nab the first guy, I was doubly satisfied with myself.”

“You're too easily pleased.”

She rolled her eyes. “What was I supposed to do? Ask him to the movies? He was a good sport, darling, but I'm no femme fatale. I don't ask men for Polaroids just to lure them in.”

“I know you don't. That's just the trouble with you.”

“The trouble with me?”

“Yeah! You're too darned nice. You're too genuine for anyone. You ought to try ulterior motives sometime, Lillian Martin. They're good for things like catching men. They're good for getting what you want in life. You act like yourself, you act normal, you're not going to get anywhere. That's the matter with you, Kitty-Cat. You're too apt to think the best of people, or act all the way like yourself. You've got to go into the world arms akimbo or it'll never make space for you. That's what I think.” I flapped my elbows, fists still in my pockets. “Gotta try some complexity. Some duplicity for gosh sake.”

Lillian's face went quiet. She still had the Polaroid in her hand and traced the man's features absently with one fingertip. “I don't believe that, Samuel.”

My blood positively clinked with ice cubes. I couldn't remember the last time she'd looked that old. She looked almost ancient. Probably nearly thirty. Neither could I remember the last time she'd used my real name.

I breathed heavily through my nose. “You gonna see him again?”

She shrugged. “Probably not.”

“Think he'd remember you if you saw him again?”

Another shrug.

Because she didn't, I said what I knew my sister was thinking: “Probably not.”

I sneaked another look at the snapshot. The tonnage of senseless joy in that photo killed me. I took a deep breath. The unfamiliar, new smell of her perfume did nothing to dissipate that blockage in my throat.

“Hey, Lil?” I squeaked.

“Yeah?”

I cleared my throat. “Why're you still wearing that perfume?”

I didn't expect her to answer and she didn't. She just stood up and retrieved her bedroom slipper, came back to the bed, and jammed it on.

“Why not use the old stuff?” I pressed. “You've never changed it up before. You make such a thing of having a 'signature scent,' you know. It's not like you to start wearing something new.”

Of course she didn't say anything. She just sat there looking embarrassingly thirteen. But despite it all that rare, fortified smile drifted back onto her face. I almost didn't want to look at her. She was such a ridiculous, hopeful little thing sitting there smiling like that when we both knew the joke was up. My stomach roared again. Gosh, I loved Lillian.

I stalked to her bedroom door, then wheeled about. “You two look great together. I'm just saying.” I took a step into the hall, then poked my head back in. “And he's a damned fool if he doesn't realize a once in a lifetime girl when he sees her.”

“Don't swear, Sassparilla.”

“Sorry, but I'm only saying...”

Lillian started to pick at her lip again but I watched her age rack back up: fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-three. “Hey, Sass?”

“Yeah?”

She looked pretty much back to normal now. “The perfume.”

“Yeah.”

“How else is he supposed to recognize me? I'm just saying, maybe...” Pink, pink color ran into Lillian's face and that smile beamed in full strength. “...maybe the scent...maybe it'll trigger memory. You know, if we ever meet again.”

I just looked at her, marveling. Then I smacked the door frame with the flat of my palm and stalked off into the kitchen. I had Bananas Foster to make for a girl who damn well deserved them.

"The Leopard Clause:" A Snap of Short-Story

I stand upon the brink of the eighth month of this year and think of how patient all of you are. I've not had a good schedule with my writing and I freely admit that. Work has gobbled me and since I can't write in the middle of life, the choice to write when I reach home of an evening means choosing to ignore my family, and I've just not been ready to make that choice. So my word-count has suffered miserably. It's not dead, however, and while I intend to start August with a month-long goal of 10,000 words added to Scotch'd the Snakes, I have scribbled in little things here and there in the interim. Below, I'm sharing the start of a short-story for my brother. Meet "The Leopard Clause."

“The Leopard Clause”

by Rachel Heffington

Lord of the Earth.

The category sat well with him, so Banistre Cleveland tried it aloud: “I am a Lord a’ the Earth.” Not too loudly of course, because it wasn’t quite the sort of thing a suitably grief-ravished nephew said upon coming into a sizable inheritance. But this was Middleburg. This was Eden-pure air and grass greener than envy. This was plump, pedigreed horseflesh going more per ounce than gold, and long, low stables rife with barn-swallows. No one would hear him, and if they did, no one would care.

“Lord a’ the Earth,” Banistre repeated. He spread his palms along the rail fence and collected several splinters.

“Enjoying the view?”

The intrusion of a fellow human jarred Banistre’s heady mood. He turned, nursing his injured hand to face the offender. Silhouetted like one of Satan’s finest, all angles and intelligent movement, stood the Hon. Phillip Dean Wicks, attorney at law. This Wicks, Banister’s late uncle’s solicitor, specialized in adding his presence unannounced. Banistre felt an immediate weakening of his lordliness. What was he after all but a half-baked law student with a palmful of splinters and a recently acquired estate? But there was an estate, and the positive implication of that word buoyed him. Mr. Wicks couldn’t frighten a Lord a’ the Earth. Banistre shifted to allow for Mr. Wicks’s joining him at the fence and nodded down-pasture to where a fat mare cropped turf.

“She’s ready to pop,” he offered.

Mr. Wicks squinted. “I believe ‘foaling’ is the official term.”

“Ah, yes. Foaling. It’s got to be hell, bringing one of those kick-boxers into the world.”

Mr. Wicks said nothing.

“I mean,” Banistre fumbled with a piece of fence-rail under his skin, “it’s purely marvelous, how all them arms and legs are all jumbled up so neat and quiet inside. Like a Jacob’s Ladder, I’d imagine. And then a bit of a struggle later and you’ve got a foal racing around like the Triple Crown was his natural right. Fascinating.”

Mr. Wicks turned a dark, intelligent eye to him with that smile that always made Banistre recall how bad his Latin was.

“Indeed,” the lawyer said, “Is animal husbandry an interest of yours?”

“Animal...husband...” Banistre fell into a cold sweat. “What...I mean, oh! Of course. Yes, well, I do go in for a bit of it. Just enough to feel my way around the paddock, so to speak.” When nervous, and he found Mr. Wicks particularly inspirational in this respect, Banistre got chatty. “I don’t want to be one of those heirs who can’t hold his liquor and flirts with ruin and plays the dames.”

If Mr. Wicks thought well of him for this rare bit of philosophy, he kept well away from outward applause.

Banistre pulled out the first splinter triumphantly. “I will be a wise land-owner and know what crop per acre my land is bringing, and who’s bred with whom and what a bad drought we’ve been having lately, don’t you know.”

“Just so.” Mr. Wicks put a hand into his breast pocket. If he had suddenly brought out a mother o’ pearl-handled revolver, it would have suited his elegant style of darkness, but he did not. A sheaf of papers appeared, which Mr. Wicks undid with a refined snap and put into Banistre’s hands.

“Before you begin your wise reign, O, Jehoshaphat, you might find these of interest.”

Being a law student, Banistre ought to have made sense of the legal jargon; being a simple man, he could not.

“I see,” he said, and handed the papers back with a tepid smile.

“Unusual clause, isn’t it?” Mr. Wicks had obnoxiously virtuous hair, as if it dared not defy the style in which he set it of a morning. “My client favored what I call ‘creativity’ in his dealings. Bad luck for you, though, my man.”

Under his shirt, Banistre felt his body go a startled shade of boiled crayfish. “Just to be really sure I’ve got it down, d’you mind explaining it in laymen’s terms? My people will want to know,” he hastily added.

A sharp-eyed grin from the solicitor. “In the simplest words: you’re out of an inheritance.”

Banistre choked, presumably on an inhaled may-fly. “Oh. Well....drat. Just like that, huh?” Something had gone wrong with his breathing. “And who’s the lucky fellow to take my place?”

“Uncle Sam. The Government. That is, unless you are able to defy death and answer the Leopard Clause.”

“The...?”

“Surely you noticed?” Mr. Wicks unsnapped the papers again and pointed to a section of print circled several times in red pencil. Anyone ought to have seen it. “In this clause, your romantic-minded uncle detailed the conditions of your inheritance.”

“That he die?”

“That you kill (and have attractively taxidermied) the Leopard of Harbaryaband.”

Banistred laughed a great, booming “HA!” which startled the brood mare and sent a barn-swallow kiting away.

“Are you a big-game hunter, Mr. Cleveland?”

“I’ve never shot anything larger than a woodchuck,” Banistre confessed.

The spirited eye of Philip Dean Wicks seemed to declare things about its owner: “Lions,” it cried. “Panthers.” And in the left-hand corner, if one could stand the exposure for so long, a sort of glint hinted at “Rhinoceros.”

“But I’m terrified of large animals," Banistre babbled. "And diseases like Malaria. I’m not rich and I’m not English and I’ve never been to Africa, let alone had any desire to go!”

Mr. Wicks refolded his papers. He clamped a resolute palm on Banistre’s shoulder before sauntering off. “It’s a good thing for you, then, this particular leopard hails from India.”

Banistre’s mind had gone spinny. “But...all those idols!”

“Staying?” Mr. Wicks called back, his nose, hair, chin, limbs all sharpened by the back-light. “I’d come along if I were you. You’d best get yourself outfitted.”

The Fox Went Out: Part Five

// Part Five: here at the end of all things //

The Fox Went Out

by Rachel Heffington

Part Five:

Rest of that week, the air was sweeter between us. We both knew John would come and that he would come before the snow. We both knew that soon I would go. Not all the wishin’ in the world could keep the Fox and me side by side. Also, I was no longer a’feared of the Fox: I understood him. I was able to enjoy his company as Duck did: as the friendship of a creature innocent as the finches in the willow-wand cages.

And so the days passed, each finer than the last. The Fox slipped into his happiest mood, his singing-mood, and sang to us in a sweet, clear voice while Duck and I danced. We helped him gather the last of the autumn harvest from the secret places he knowed. He only disappeared one night more and this time I let him be, let him have his dignity.

“Will we never have to go back to see Pa?” Duck asked me, right in the middle of dinner one afternoon.

Reynard shot me a “We don’t mention that here” look so I only smiled at Duck. “What on earth are you troublin’ your pretty little head about that for?”

“Cuz I wanna stay with the Fox forever an’ ever, Mama.” She flung her arms around Reynard’s neck. “He’s nice and he smells good.”

The Fox picked her up. “You will stay for as long as I need you.”

We’d never spoken again of his forcing me to stay. We both knew my time was coming to an end, so there was no use in it. But the way he said it today made me turn to him with cheeks burning. His bright eyes took their time looking me over, then nodded.

That night, when Reynard had tucked Duck into her fleeces and draped another over my shoulders, he settled down behind me and wrapped me in his arms. It was the same as the first night, only this time I did not mind the feel of his hug or the way he rested his chin on my head. It was odd, but it was him. He was happy and it made me so.

“I went out last night,” he said finally.

“Don’t see any new bruises.”

His jaw pressed into my hair as he spoke: “I went back to where I found you. To the Man’s place.”

My blood prickled.

“He’s not there. He’s looking for you. I found his trail...it was headed strongly this way.”

I swallowed. “John’s a good tracker.”

“I won’t let him have you. Anise. He made you bleed. I can’t let you go back to someone who hurts you for fun.”

“Only when he was angry.”

Tears slid down my face before I could wriggle my arm out to wipe them away. The Fox wiped them for me.

“My sweet gray-goose,” he said, “you won’t go back.”

“He’s comin’ to kill you and take me. I know you don’t wanna hear that but that is what he’s comin’ to do. He’ll come here and find me and—”

“He won’t find you.”

“He will.”

“You won’t be here.” Reynard released me, creakily moved to a shelf cut in the wall where he kept all his clay pots and jars. He sorted through them and brought one back. It was heavy. It clinked.

“This is money.” He smiled at it funny. “Don’t need much of that back here, do we?”

“What’re you—”

“Anise, you’re to wake the Duckling up and take her with you. Quietly now. Take the money and the sheepskins too. Nights are getting colder.”

I stared at him across the table. “Are you sayin’ we can leave?”

“I am saying that...you are no longer my companion.” He shrugged loosely. “So you do not have to belong here.”

My heart cracked. Suddenly I wanted more than anything to be his companion.

“You are a clever woman no matter what they say. Get away. Be safe. Be merry and gentle like you are when you think no one can see.”

He shoved the money jar roughly at me. I knew it upset him past reason to let me go. He just sat there, starin’ at me with a world of pain in his eyes. I wrapped his big, cold hands in my rough, smaller ones and looked at him. So many things needed sayin’ and there were no words to say ‘em with. Instead I picked up his clenched hands and kissed them, pressin’ into that kiss all my fears for his safety and my wishes that things went different with us.

“I’ve left your breeches mended,” I choked through the tears. “And don’t you forget to put salve on your hurts.”

I let go of his hands because if I stayed a second longer, I might never make it out. Half of me felt relief, half scaldin’ guilt. How could I leave the Fox, more child than man, to handle John O’Grady?

“Can’t you come with us?”

He snapped out of whatever sad dream he’d fallen into and shook his head. “If I come with you, you’ll never be safe. I will stay and I will take care of the Man. Hurry, now.” His voice sharpened on the end and I jumped to action.

I scooped my sleeping Duckling out of her warm nest, wrapped her round with the skins. The Fox took strips of rawhide and tied her to my waist, indian-fashion.

“Can you manage?”

“Just fine.”

He threw a satchel of food over my neck and tucked a blanket around my shoulders. “Well...goodbye then, Gray Goose.”

I couldn’t say goodbye. No words.

He walked with me to the ridge, and the fox kits, up for a nighttime romp, rolled about his feet. Couldn’t afford to draggle-tail time. John might be someplace close by now. I took the Fox’s hands again, kissed them hard once more, and prayed that God might strike John O’Grady dead before he could touch my fiercely-gentle friend.

“God bless you, companion,” I said, using his own terms.

He rustled his fingers in my hair and I heard the smile in his voice, felt the kindness in his touch. “Companions...we were, weren’t we?”

He put me from him and I took to the hillside.

“Godspeed, beautiful friend. Christ watch over you.”

“And you,” I called as I gained the ridge. And when I turned back, I saw my Fox among the foxes and he waved his silly, trusting hand. And then I ran hard, tryin’ to outstrip the terrible thought that I’d nevermore see him this side of heaven.

Foxpiece IV

She dropped over the ridge and the Fox lost her scent. All the goodness, all the grace, all the gentle things of his spirit stumbled and brought out a trembling all over him. Tears would come if he wanted them, but he did not. He picked up a fox-kit and ran its ears through his fingers. He prayed that the Duckling might grow to be like her mother, all silver-kind and wide-eyed truth. Then he put down the foxling and said goodbye.

The moon, he noticed, had grown shy and smiled only with her lips: a thin-lipped moon, three-quarters dark. A ways down the breeze came the scent of the Man.

Calmly, the Fox entered his cave and gathered his willow-bound friends: the red-headed finch, the others. He took the cages outside, opened them, and watched the feathered things wing into the darkness. Goodbye, friends. Godspeed.

Then, because words-on-page soothed his soul, the Fox waited for the Man and wrote in his book all the things he could remember about the Gray Goose, her Duckling, the way they’d helped him live. Little marks on the page spoke the bleeding furrows in his heart.

Companions. They had been companions. And the Fox smiled because, as far as dying went, this was a rich way to go. A way to care for the Gray Goose, a way to love her. And above all, a way to die that did not involve falling prey to his mind, to the sickness that pillaged and paralyzed. This would be clean, violent, human.

A very rich way to go.

The Man’s scent came strong.

The Fox put up his story-things.

He smiled, he stretched, and prepared for a fight.

From the ridge of the wood came a fox’s song and he felt comforted and called back to them, to the foxlings who trusted too freely. They would be well. All would be well. For there was a Being that watched over all innocent things and let no harm come to them. No real harm. No harm that lasted beyond the rim of this world.

So he would see the Gray Goose again, and pray God her Duckling too. And he’d call her name when he saw her in Heaven’s fields:

Anise, my love. My companion.

And the scent of the Man came upon him. The other side of that door.