MicroHorror

Every morning Helen Bobble emerged from her house and slowly made her way to her front walk. She proceeded to wash leaves and other debris off the stretch of concrete between her lawn and the street.

The kids showed up halfway through. John Barker, Andy Bumble, and Kelly Bobo. Five, six and seven years old. Like a tiny gang of candy-white spoiled brats.

“What’cha doing, Ms. Bobble?”

Helen had learned to ignore their taunts.

“Growin’ sidewalk flowers?”

The children’s faces and names altered. Their insults did not. In her seventies, Helen taunted back, “Can’t think of anything original to say?” This wit was lost on the little demons. Now, in her pragmatic eighties, she generally let them prattle on, like broken records, saying the same thing every day.

Then Andy Bumble said something she hadn’t heard before:

“Why are you too lazy to use a broom?”

Helen stopped, looked at her frail body, her tiny arms. Long after her friends had been placed in retirement homes, long after everyone she knew throughout her life had passed away, she still had the strength to take care of herself. How could this little brat not see that?

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said, then quickly stopped herself. She had broken her own rule.

Andy stuck his tongue out at her.

That was enough. Helen picked the hose up and showered all three of the children with water. They screamed and scattered in different directions, coming together once more across the street.

“I’m telling my mom!” John shouted.

Helen smiled and continued watering her sidewalk.

***The children decided old Ms. Bobble needed to be taught a lesson. They took turns making number two in a brown paper bag, rolled it up and stole a lighter from John’s father.

As soon as their parents went to sleep, all three snuck out and met across the street from Helen’s house. The only lights came from the lamps lining the sides of the road. They crept across it, opened Ms. Bobble’s creaky gate, and slipped inside her yard.

All three failed to notice a quiet rumbling rising from the sidewalk in front of her house.

John placed the bag in front of Helen’s door. Andy got the lighter going, held it to the bag. As soon as it caught on fire, Kelly rang the bell. The kids ran as fast as possible for cover by a tree across the way.

As they approached the sidewalk, Kelly saw that the patch Ms. Bobble watered every morning was opening, like a giant mouth.

“Jump!” she cried.

Kelly and John managed to hurtle the sidewalk. By the time Andy got there, a claw had formed from the concrete. As he jumped, the claw reached up and grabbed him.

“Help!” he screamed.

Ms. Bobble’s front door opened and the old woman quietly poked her head out to see who had the indecency to ring her bell at ten o’clock at night.

Andy put his hands out to her, cried her name, “Ms. Bobble! Help me!”

Ms. Bobble’s eyes glowed from the flames bouncing off the burning bag on her porch. She made no effort to help the child being devoured by her sidewalk or even extinguish the fire before her.

John and Kelly saw nothing. They had gotten home before Helen had even opened her door.

***The next morning Kelly and John went to inquire about their friend Andy. They turned away as soon as they saw two police cars in the Bumble driveway. “She probably caught him and turned him in,” Kelly suggested.

The kids decided to make their morning rounds, beginning with testing Ms. Bobble while she watered her sidewalk.

“What’cha doing?”

The old woman had a tiny smile on her face.

“Growin’ sidewalk flowers?”

Helen chuckled to herself. The children didn’t even notice how the water turned slightly red as it brushed debris into the grass and dirt.

• Copyright: © 2008 Alec Cizak

Liz kicked her shoes off as soon as she walked in the door. The boss had her running all over downtown L.A. She hadn’t thought about Donald all day.

That ended as soon as she stepped up to her answering machine, on a small table by the front door. It took a few seconds for the realization that she had stubbed her toe on the steel ax by the table to reach her brain and then inform her that she was in extreme pain.

“Dammit!”

She jumped up and down on the foot that was not throbbing, rubbing the afflicted one with her hands. The damn ax. Donald’s idea of joking about something serious. Someone had broken in last summer while she was at work. Instead of offering to move in, Donald bought her an ax and told her to keep it by the door. Idiot.

Before Liz could lock the front door the phone rang.

“Good grief,” she said as she picked it up. “Yes?”

“You sound pissed.”

“Hey,” she cradled the phone between her shoulder and chin and unwrapped the chord to carry it into the kitchen. “Rough day.”

“Donald?”

“Are you kidding?”

Her friend Kara laughed.

“Work and then I stubbed my damn toe on this stupid ax…”

“The one he got you last summer?”

“Right.”

“For your protection?”

“Right.”

Both women laughed.

“How’s he taking the breakup?”

Liz opened the refrigerator. There were two half-empty barrels of yogurt and a rotting hunk of cheese. She broke off a piece and munched on it while she spoke. “Who cares?”

“Come on.”

“Come on, what? You should have heard him yelling at the TV just because they stopped showing Star Trek on Saturday nights.”

“Guys are like that.”

“Not like this.” She ate the rest of the cheese in her hand. “There was something in his eyes. Scared the hell out of me.”

“All right, then. Need to talk any?”

“I’m good for now.”

“You know how to reach me.”

“Thanks, really.”

Liz returned the phone to the table by the door. Both feet went back to protesting the day at work.

“I hear you,” she said to them.

She walked to the bathroom and flipped the water on. The urge to listen to Billie Holiday washed over her. She went to her bedroom. The disc was already in the player.

“You don’t know what love is…” Lady Day set the record straight. Her voice felt like tiny, strong hands, holding Liz up.

She slid into the bath, the music playing from the other room at full blast. Liz thought about the breakup. It had been rough, to say the least. At Marino’s, on Melrose. In a crowded place. That was by design. She had seen exactly how crazy Donald could get. No need to risk being alone with him when she dropped the bombshell that their first anniversary would never arrive.

Donald spent the rest of dinner in absolute silence. Said nothing on the ride home. Refused to engage in conversation of any sort.

“Oh, well,” Liz spoke underneath the booming, if silk-surfaced, anger of Billie Holiday, “My man don’t treat me no good…”

Suddenly the CD player hit a scratch in the disc and began skipping. Liz jumped out of the bath and ran, naked, to her room to shut it off before the annoying sound drove her insane. She looked down the hall and saw that she had never locked the door.

“Dummy,” she quietly said to herself.

She walked to the door, made sure it was shut, and locked it. She was careful not to run her toe into the ax a second time on her way back to the bath tub.

It wasn’t until she was in the water again that she made the horrific realization that she could never have stubbed her toe a second time as the ax was no longer there.

• Copyright: © 2008 Alec Cizak

“To the baker’s,” said Senior Kunze.

Milton lifted the cart and walked. It’s only a matter of time, he thought, before my posture illustrates the burden of this lazy system.

The baker, who ran the great farm responsible for the bread in the village, cried to the Senior: “I belted an ox with a large wooden cane. The beast charged a field worker. The boy was trampled.”

“Only repent that you became angry.”

“Must I go to the camp?” the baker asked.

Senior Kunze shook his head, “The death was no direct fault of yours.” Then the Senior absolved the baker. “Perhaps twelve loaves of bread will see this tragedy through.”

As they returned to the Senior’s house, they passed Camp Motivation, a mammoth brick-made cylinder. Milton had never been told by those sent there what exactly it entailed. “You learn your lessons well,” was all he whittled from the reluctant workers.

And so Milton pulled the Senior back home. As he entered the heart of the village, he felt his spine scream in agony. His position in society prevented him from asking the Senior to trade places for the rest of the ride.

“I am a slave,” he mumbled.

“Did you say ‘slave?’”

Milton bowed his head slightly. “Yes.”

The Senior scowled. “Move along,” he said, waving his hand as he might at a dog.

***

At the house, Milton and his sister continued work on a shelter for the cart. The trade had been drawn like this:

“In winter, work is required to clear the wheels and seat of ice and snow,” the Senior bargained. “Too often I’m in a hurry and demand you pull the cart while the handles are frozen. The summer makes the fine material on my seat unbearably hot, and the metal pieces in the grips no doubt burn your skin.”

Minor irritations did not concern Milton. Neither, by then, did the Senior’s comfort. “So?” he had said.

“A shelter would protect the wagon at all times. Thus, you and I would always travel in comfort.”

It was another task to benefit the Senior more than Milton. He wanted to tell him no. His sister, as always, talked him out of it.

“If you disrupt the system,” she pleaded, “you’ll be sent to camp.”

And so they hammered nails into wood. Milton did not mention the incident on the road. There was no such thing as slavery. Suggesting otherwise was intolerable.

A Motivator came to watch them work. Motivators wore black tunics and said nothing.

“What have you done?” his sister whispered.

Milton saw the thin man standing on the road. The anemic figure rested his hands behind his back.

“You haven’t been complaining by the fountain again, have you?”

“No,” he lied.

Milton put his hammer down and walked over to the Motivator. “Can I help you?” he asked, with a smirk on his face.

His sister passed out in disbelief.

***

Milton was taken to Camp Motivation that evening. “This is the third time I have heard you speak in such a manner,” the Senior scolded, as his servant was dragged from bed. “It’s for your own good.”

He was rushed through the empty, silent village to the outskirts, to the camp. Once there he was pushed into the court room. There was no one else there but a judge and the Motivator Milton had confronted earlier.

The judge spoke: “A year in the gravity chamber should help you.”

Milton was led through a dark tunnel that opened to the huge courtyard in the center of the construction. There, in the middle of everything, was a stone cube the size of four great buildings merged. The slab rotated with unnerving quickness, due to the prisoners supporting it with their bare hands.

It wasn’t more than five rotations after Milton had been assigned a position beneath the rock that he realized how simple carrying the cart had been, in contrast to the twenty-ton block coming down on his back.

• Copyright: © 1993, 2008 Alec Cizak