Michael Harris Cohen
Two Short Fictions
The Dead Eat
(Exposition)
The Ghostwriter looks comfortable in the teeny visitor’s room. Straight black hair and cherry-lipsticked, of course she does. She visits two hours a day then returns to her hotel or idles on a park bench. When she’s not here she could be doing anything, anywhere.
The Ghostwriter is not a ghost, unlike me, who’s nearly a ghost.
That’s why she comes. To question and listen and type. Her long nails clack the keys. “Lovely,” she says. “Tell me more about your childhood. For the opening chapters.”
She asks about everything. My parents. Hobbies and pets. First crushes. My husband, of course. How we met in high school. If we were truly in love. I tell her he played drums in a band called Hungry, a Duran Duran cover band. I was their lone groupie. We share a laugh over that.
It’s been ages since I had an ear to bend, outside the mechanics of my crime. I unroll the past like a carpet pulled from storage. I skip around, hopscotching from aborted dreams of college, to summer camp, to my grandmother’s bingo obsession, to the murder.
The Ghostwriter interrupts. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We have plenty of time.”
I laugh like she’s poked me in the ribs. She swivels her head apologetically.
“Sorry. I meant narratively. How you killed your husband, that comes later.”
(Inciting Incident)
On her very first visit the Ghostwriter drew a triangle in her notebook. She traced up one slope and down the other, as if I was a three year-old learning my shapes. She explained, “Lives are stories,” and labeled parts of the triangle inside parentheses. We began at the bottom left corner.
Though we’re past that now. We’re climbing, inching up to the triangle’s peak.
“The reader already knows the end,” the Ghostwriter says, “but they want to know, I want to know, why’d your story go there?”
I explain how my husband drowned me in silence. Chinese water torture. Plop, plop, went the hours and days. I tell her nine years of death row time is easy by comparison. Others' midnight sobs and hoarse declarations of innocence, these sounds are a burbling stream. A consolation. I tell her about dancing. How he wouldn’t and didn’t except at our wedding. I tell her I’ve always wondered: what kind of drummer doesn’t dance?
The Ghostwriter taps her keys but she’s not typing. She stares at the cracks on the wall of the visitor’s room. I’ve studied them too, when my lawyer visits to discuss appeals. Sometimes the cracks are lightening bolts. Other times leafless trees. I wonder what she sees?
She smells of fruity shampoo. Her skin looks softer than anything in this prison. I want to impress her.
For her, my husband smashes heirloom china. He shouts obscenities at the TV. He kicks a homeless dog. Though these are lies. He was a lukewarm man. Even his rage was tepid. But that’s not what she wants.
For the Ghostwriter, my husband brands my arm with a cigarette. I show her a scar that’s really from a mishandled casserole. For her, he drags me by the hair. A caveman with barren eyes.
She nods and types and checks her tape recorder. Her teeth gleam like wet eggshells. I don’t know anything about her. Only that she ghostwrote books for a hockey player and an astronaut.
She smiles and smiles. She likes the hair-dragging bit.
(Rising Action)
It’s not a very interesting murder. I’m no Aileen Wuornos. One day, no different than the thousands before, I put monkshood in his soup. My husband didn’t utter a word when the poison hit. He simply keeled over and soiled himself. His hands and feet jerked the air like a child pitching a tantrum. I finally made him dance.
“A tantrum. A dance. Readers will love that,” the Ghostwriter says.
I sometimes forget people will read this. When I remember, I imagine housewives drowning in silence and boredom. They skim me, munching snacks. They read me in bathtubs and coffee shops, perhaps wondering if they have what it takes to end their spouse. They’ll shut me, finished or not, put me on a shelf.
One day I ask her, “Why me?”
“It’s the ordinariness of it,” she says. “You’re so very ordinary. Millions of women are just like you. Yet you killed your husband. That’s what make you interesting.”
She smiles and I smile back. I try not to be shy about my own teeth. They’ve always been crooked and never white. I spent my life hiding them. I try not to see my flaws in the mirror of her perfect face. I keep smiling, as I work to fashion “ordinary” into a compliment. I suppose I am. Unimaginative. Plain. Ordinary.
(Climax)
“Your execution is the denouement, not the climax.” The Ghostwriter says. “There’s no surprise in it, unless you’re innocent.”
I’m not. She knows it better than anyone, except my dead husband. She points to the top of the triangle in her notebook.
“Here,” she says, “some understanding or insight would be ideal. It’ll make your story tragic, not pathetic.”
I shift my gaze to the cracks on the wall. Lightening bolts. But nothing comes.
I fill the silence with a riddle one of the guards told me: “The dead eat it. But if you eat it, you’ll be dead.”
The Ghostwriter shrugs. She shakes her head.
“Nothing,” I say.
Silence. At last, she makes an aha face, then returns her attention to her computer.
She talks and types. “How about: ‘I’ve always held life sacred but I knew…. no… I understood, saving my own life was the most sacred thing I could do.’”
She looks up. I nod. It sounds great, even if I’ve never thought of it that way. I like how unordinary she makes me sound.
(Falling Action)
The Ghostwriter asks what I’ll most miss.
I list random things: Ice cream. Kung Fu movies. My garden.
“And dancing,” I say. “I’ve always missed that.”
The Ghostwriter smiles. Suddenly she stands, bows, and reaches for me. In the visitor’s room, silent but for the scrapes of our shoes, we dance. I’m taller by a head so I lead. Her fingers brush my neck like feathers. Her breath is a May breeze at my ear. Something is happening. I squeeze her hips tighter. We spin.
I want to tell her I’ll miss her. Her visits. Her questions. As if I meant something. As if my life, my lies, mattered.
But I’m dizzy when we stop. The wall cracks wobble, trees about to fall. I lose my words.
The Ghostwriter steps back and smiles. She winks. Her teeth are a perfect picket fence.
(Denouement)
Before, she explained denouement is French for “tying up loose ends.” She held my hands when she told me. She holds them now, before they take me.
When she asks, I lie. I tell her death doesn’t frighten me. I tell her I’ve spent hours imagining myself as not-me, at peace, hushed in a coffin.
Now I think of our book as my coffin, I tell her. A casket one holds in their hands. She scribbles that down. She smiles and I smile back, unashamed of my teeth, proud of my line. I’ve gotten good at this, I think.
“When it happens, imagine I’m right there,” she says. “Holding your hand.”
Then the call comes, straight from the governor’s office. A stay. I’ve been granted the right to stay.
My lawyer hugs me as the Ghostwriter steps back. She closes her laptop and stuffs it into her leather case. I think we might dance again, this time for joy, but she “has to run.” She has “things to do.” Her perfect teeth are put away too, closed in their box of tight, cherry lips. She leaves without a backwards glance. Back to hotels and park benches and restaurants. Back to other ghosts, maybe. She could be going anywhere to do anything.
We were nearly friends, I think, as the guards lead me back to my cell. If I’d had a good friend, my life could have had another shape. Lives must come in so many. Not just triangles or the cramped squares of cells. I could have been a circle. A diamond.
They’re fine last words, I think. Unordinary ones. If and when the men strap me to that cross-shaped table, tying up my loose ends, I’ll share them with the world, with the Ghostwriter, and she’ll smile.
I might still die. She might come back. She’ll type my last words. They’ll live forever in ink. The end of my story.
What Hands Are For
A perfect square except for the bed bolted to the wall.
Again, he paces the distance. End to End. Cold from the stone floor passes the shoes, enters the feet. No socks, no belt, no shoelaces, they took these things and now the shoes slip at the heels, the pants ride low on hipbones.
There is a door within a door; only the smaller one opens. Daily, a metal tray scrapes the stone. A glimpse of fingers, a hand, then the door shuts with a noise that feels like part of him. He stretches on the floor to look past the hand, though his sight travels only as far as the man’s watch.
He sometimes allows himself a conviction: that there is no more to any man than hands.
Hands are the most prominent things in his vision. He regards them working at meals or roaming over each other. They scratch a sore above his ankle.
Sometime, his hands infuriate him with their indolence, their dumb simian aspect as they await task. When this happens he punishes them: he digs the jagged nails of one into the palm of the other, or hurtles them against walls.
He knows his hands have done things, countless things, but what? He recalls he had a watch. A silver border dividing hand and arm. He remembers the feel of it but not how it looked. He can’t remember checking the time on it or where it came from.
On the man that hands the tray the watch always reads 11:30.
Muttering, he holds the time so he might have a sense of what time means. He senses it is a thing that passes, knowing some moments after he begins counting 11:30 it is no longer 11:30. Then he loses sense of why he keeps this number.
He stares at the ceiling, the one wall he cannot touch.
Sometimes he speaks. Words creep from his mouth, each syllable separated by quiet. His mouth feels odd forming sounds, the ears unsettled as locution dies against stone.
A suspended bulb serves as his sun. He orbits it. He assumed, at first, it must turn off at night and on in the day. Later, he questioned this. Lights dim in the day where there is day, do they not? Later still, it does not matter. Perhaps only The Sign matters.
The Sign could be a letter—a “V” or perhaps the beginnings of an “A.” He prefers to think of it as a “V,” as something carried through to completion. Though if it is the beginning of a word than it is, of course, incomplete. He can’t apprehend what the word might have been. He knows nothing of how old the room is, how many other men have lived here, how many pairs of hands stretched in the darkness, perhaps carving the mark. The mark his hands love to trace.
He apologizes to his hands. He kisses them. They often help. Perhaps they will carve a Sign someday or add to The Sign. And his hands connect his body to the room, the room to his body.
The nose creates problems. He’s forever aware of the nose in the inside corners of his vision. He’s tried to recall what kind of nose it is. Long, thick, perhaps broken in that spot on the ridge? He traces a finger over the bump there, the hill that might be a badly healed bone. He nearly forgets the nose when he looks at other things but it is not possible to forget it completely. He seals one eye to see a blurry image of a nostril’s hood, switches eyes, then closes both, trying to make a picture of the whole through addition.
He inspects his reflection in a cup of water, trying to behold the nose, resolve the color of the eyes, but the reflection is a featureless silhouette. The outline of a head, a jagged horizon of hair and beard, but he could feel that already. He didn’t waste any effort on that.
He sees letters on the bottom of the metal trays. He knows the trays vary because different letters are worn off. The eyes fumble over the letters, wondering are they important or merely unfinished like The Sign—if it is a letter at all.
Sometimes he thinks The Sign is only a chip, perhaps from the bed that breaks the perfect square. A mistake.
He imagines again:
Bony hands, sweaty hands, weary on thin soup, straining from the weight, dropping the bed before it is bolted to the wall. A sharp corner divots the floor.
Staring at The Sign, the nose distracts him. It stands between him and the truth of The Sign. Then, only the movement of the hands can divert him from the nose.
Sometimes he thinks he hears other voices far off, through the walls. A humming dull and distant, like the sound the bulb makes when he cannot ignore it. He imagines there are other men like him in rooms like this but he cannot really imagine anyone like himself. He cannot imagine himself.
But if there are other men and he could meet them perhaps they could explain what hands are for. What color his eyes are and what the nose looks like. If it’s broken. Or not.
Michael Harris Cohen’s fiction has won several awards and has been published in Conjunctions, Catapult’s Tiny Crimes, Pseudopod, F(r)iction, The Dark Magazine, and Fanzine, among other places. He lives with his wife and daughters in Sofia, and teaches Creative Writing and Literature at the American University in Bulgaria. Find him online at Michaelharriscohen.com.