The Comedian
Flash Fiction Story
by Kenneth M. Kapp
The stagehand stared at the door. The three stars weren’t in a straight line. Nor were they in line yesterday, or last week. He scratched his head. He’d been working at the theater for thirty-three years come Christmas. He couldn’t recall if they were ever in line. He knocked.
“Fifteen minutes, Mr. C, fifteen minutes.”
“Thank you.”
Mr. C closed his eyes, breathing slowly out and in. He felt the pressure and wiped the sticky sweat from his brow. It seems like years. He remembered the letter from his agent. …I’ve booked your show at the Olum Theatre for April 13th. You’ll get the star dressing room with the warm-water chair… He turned down his fingers, counting. I had 270 days to pull my act together, new material. I didn’t know if I should cry for joy or fear. He started counting. “Fourteen.”
He shifted around in the warm-water chair, wishing he could somehow stay forever. “Thirteen. The first three months were easy; I didn’t do anything.” He looked up at the ceiling, and, feeling the pressure mounting, put his head between his knees. I guess it’s too late to back out. Besides, like my agent said, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
“Hey!” Mr. C popped out of the chair. I could swear that chair just kicked me in the butt. He rushed to the mirror, turning his face to the right and left, confirming that his cheeks were red, as if he had rushed through a full weight circuit.
“Ten minutes, Mr. C, ten minutes. You OK?”
Lost track of time. “Yeh, OK, thanks.”
He started his warmup, vocalizations alternating with breathing – blowing air out through his curled tongue.
“Five minutes, five minutes.” The stagehand frowned and adjusted the stars, shaking his finger. “Least they could do is have them all pointing the same way!”
Mr. C reviewed his first lines for the umpteenth time, telling himself that mother jokes were coming back into vogue. No sense waiting in here. I can tell when it’s time.
The door seemed to be stuck. He banged around the frame and then remembered he had forgotten to turn the doorknob. Nerves.
He stepped into the hall and waved the stagehand away. “I’ve got this.”
Mr. C quickly made his way down the hall to the stage and stood five feet behind the heavy maroon curtains. He nodded to Mr. Hugo, the house manager, who was standing stage right. Thumbs up.
Curtain up.
Mr. C knew he had this and rushed forward, stumbling as planned, crying like a newborn baby, squinting as the bright spotlights followed his progress.
He cried, “Waa – waa.”
Better Be Careful
Flash Fiction Story
by Kenneth M. Kapp
There’s always truth in adages and proverbs. Often the underlying message needs little explanation. “Don’t walk under ladders” is clearly a warning to avoid the unnecessary exposure to objects falling should you pass underneath – be it a bucket of paint, a bride in the process of eloping, or a piano being moved the hard way.
“A stitch in time” is motherly advice to mend a garment before it gets worse. It’s not to be confused with stich which refers to a verse in poetry or even a whole stanza. Hickory-dickory-dock is a case in point since it goes on to discuss a clock. However, there are some scholars who think that dick points to the son of Oliver Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, who was Lord Protector of England for (less than) one year in 1659. Other scholars advance the theory that dock is a reference to the Roundhead hairstyle. But we digress.
“Be careful of what you wish for” is another well-known proverb, a warning that one should carefully consider the consequences if their wish is granted. There are numerous stories of bargains made with the devil with catastrophic results.
Frequently these stories start with an innocent person finding an urn or lantern and as the result of polishing the magical vessel freeing a genie who grants them a wish each time the urn is polished. Three’s usually the limit but often the genie doesn’t say.
This then is the story of a young boy who finds such a magical urn. He’s to be pitied for his mistake because children are often impetuous, especially overactive boys.
His mother divorced when he was three and had to work full-time. Luckily, Elizabeth, a neighborhood girl, was able to babysit. She and Jonathan got on splendidly, so much so, that he always said when asked, that when he grew up he wished to be Elizabeth or a train.
Jonathan found the urn on one of his many treasure hunts where he’d ride his bike behind the old residential hotels downtown. Frequently he’d find “booty” placed alongside the dumpsters in back. He’d report to his mother when she came home from work and if she were interested, they would drive back together in their old station wagon.
The urn was small enough for him to carry but he was hungry, as young boys always are, and since it was small enough for him to carry on his bike, he thought he’d see what it looked like cleaned up. “I’m no dummy, this thing’s sitting on a rag just begging to be cleaned.”
And so, he got off his bike, picked up the urn, and rubbed it with the rag, watching with an open mouth as it turned bright yellow. And then a Genie popped the cork and made a quick bow.
“Thank you, Jonathan, for freeing me from these cramped quarters where I’ve been captive…” he glanced at his Rolex, “five days, 14 hours, and thirty-two minutes. There are a few seconds too, but what are seconds between friends.”
The genie bowed again. “And you, my lucky boy, are granted three wishes. You need only rub the urn one time for each wish.”
Jonathan was flabbergasted without even knowing what the word meant. He’d always liked the fairy tales that Elizabeth read to him when he was small and, wanting to be grown up a soon as possible so he could help his mother earn a living, he blurted, “I want to be Elizabeth.”
There was no puff of smoke or waving of a magic wand but in an instant Jonathan was standing next to the dumpster dressed as twenty-year-old Elizabeth. “Jeepers,” he exclaimed in a high-pitched unfamiliar voice, “this will never work.”
He rubbed the urn again, and since the change had been so confusing, he could only think back to when he was a little boy and whined, “Then I want to be a train.”
And suddenly, a toy train appeared on the rag next to the dumpster. Since trains cannot rub urns, Jonathan was stuck. He was modeled on Big Boy; a 4-8-8-4 articulated steam locomotive built for the Union Pacific in 1941. If you look carefully, you can see Jonathan standing behind the engineer wearing a blue hat and red bandana.
Jonathan’s mother was worried when he didn’t come home for supper. She called a neighbor and asked if she had seen Jonathan that afternoon. When told he was on his bike riding in the direction of downtown she got in her car and drove to their favorite dumpster alley hoping that he’d found something so good that he was afraid to leave it lest someone else lay claim and was waiting there for her as they had arranged.
She parked and walked up and down the alley twice, finally spotting the toy train sparkling on an old rag. Jonathan will love that, I’ll bring it home and surprise him, hiding it under his bed.
Jonathan was never found, and the train remained under his bed until his mother remarried and moved away. The fate of the train and Jonathan remains unknown but whenever his mother hears the long, lonely whistle of a freight train late at night she sighs.
It’s Another Day
Flash Fiction Story
by Kenneth M. Kapp
Old man Kent spit it out. “Cowards. Bastards are all gone!” He bounced the tip of his walking stick off the broken sidewalk, pointing it at a boarded house two down on his right. “Mr. Schmidt, Schmidt my ass. German right enough,” then corrected himself: “wrong enough, anonymous Mr. Smith. No one gave their own name at the end. Mr. Smith, like he was going to go to Washington, probably crawled out from under some park bench when things got bad. I was living high on the hog in some warehouse. He got here first, grant him that, picked the biggest house on the block and sat on the porch with a shotgun across his lap, smoking some hand-rolled crap cigarettes with butt tobacco he must have kept in a coffee can for more than a year.”
He continued walking, remembering his mother saying how his great-granddad was a block captain when the Krauts were bombing London. Schmidt, my ass! “Ain’t none of the others any better. Come for a day, stay for a week, and then flee – or maybe they’re all sleeping the sleep of the righteous on the living room couch. Don’t give a flying fuck and I ain’t going in to check. Nobody gave me black bunting to tack to the door recently!”
He nodded as he passed the corner house. “Jones was in that one. Probably a year. Wore a funny three-pointed hat, red button on top. Big shit-eating grin for me every time I passed. Waved, ‘Happy hunting, Captain.’ At that time I was wearing a coat with epaulettes I found behind a fancy hotel downtown. Probably the doorman’s. Ain’t anybody going in and out and no more cabs either. I liked the cut and feel of the shiny fabric. Someone must have beaten me to the hat. Can’t have everything though. Especially now.
“Jones, now there was a study. Don’t think he washed the whole year he was here. Wind right and I could smell him half a block away when he was outside. We all collect water when it rains. One of the reasons to chance being in a house. Downspouts. You can run them all into the basement. Yeh, gentleman rules too. Rabbits and squirrels on your property are yours for the killing. Too bad it didn’t take long for those geese in the park to catch on that they were fair game. Guess they’re migrating now. Ain’t no old ladies giving them bread crumbs for a long while – wasn’t allowed then either.”
Kent was on a roll, too busy cussing the abandoned homes to execrate the turned-up sidewalks, downed branches, and wind-blown trash. He banged his stick against the last fence panel standing. “Damned thing had a better twang when it was up. But I’d call that progress. How does that nursery rhyme go, ‘And we all fall down!’ Guess you can say that for sure.”
He felt a coughing fit coming and rushed ahead to the remains of a lamppost. He dropped his stick and lunged the last steps. Leaning over like a question mark, the hacking cough started with a vengeance. Sweat rolled down his face and his eyeballs bulged behind closed lids. Dry waves rolled up from his belly and he felt as if his throat were serving as a channel for a river of gravel and broken glass. His spittle, mottled with red spots, coated the side of the post. By the time the coughing was over, there was a smelly puddle at his feet.
Kent laughed. “Mostly beat it this time. Kept my fly open just in case – just in case, bullshit. Happens almost every walk now. Practiced at home: drop the stick, pull it out, and let it hang. First time almost knocked my own balls off with the stick. One looked like the eight-ball for a month. Ain’t no one here to look. Used to be signs up: ‘Restricted Area – Danger, Keep Out.’ Yeh, right. So was there any place that wasn’t dangerous? And they sure as hell didn’t post any directions or leave a ticket on the kitchen table.”
He zipped his fly and retrieved his walking stick. Pointing the stick up at the sky he chanted:
Skip to the Loo – there’s not much else you can do!
OK to cry – there’s nothing left to buy.
Smile, smile, smile – you’ve got to walk a mile.
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