A Pair of Tales

The Crayon and the Tattoo

      The glass bowl fell at her feet and shattered in pieces. She ignored the thick shards and ran over and yanked the red crayon out of her young son’s hand. He stood up to about her knees and was stout in his little sneakers and jeans. Shirtless, he followed his mothers gaze to the wall, now marked with red lines and zigzags and circles. She looked down at him horrified. There was a place among the nonsensical drawings where a zigzag was met with a straight line and around one of the spiking points was a circle. Though each was part of a larger pattern, the boy’s mother narrowed in on this one spot where the zigzag, line and circle met. He followed her gaze, not sure what had gone wrong.
         “No.” she whispered to herself.
         Her feet pounded down the hard wood of the staircase. She returned, dashing up two steps at a time, with her mop bucket and sponge in hand. She scrubbed quickly.
         “No. No. No. No. No.”
         She scrubbed only for a few moments before she heard a pair of loud knocks at the front door. She froze, then after a moment, returned to scrubbing in the spot where the circle and the line and the zigzag met.
         “No, no, no.”
         Then it was three bangs on the door, jarring the house, like thunder clapping.
         She continued to scrub, harder now than before, but the crayon dimmed only slightly by her effort. There was a loud crash and the sound of boots on the steps. A pair of men in black and blue uniforms pulled her away from the wall. One examined the markings, taking photographs, while the other attempted to point at her wrist with what, to the boy, appeared to be a futuristic pistol. He implored her to stop resisting, ma’am. Stop resisting ma’am, was all he said.
         The other man put his camera into his chest pocket and rose from his kneeling position by the wall.
         “Ma’am,” he directed, “you need to stop resisting. Let him scan your tattoo. We need to scan your tattoo.”
         Finally, the gun shaped object found her wrist. It made a vibrating noise that caused the on-looking child to flinch a moment; he looked down at his own tattoo. A woman approached from the stairs, clad in the same black and blue uniform. She picked up the shirtless child, his feet dangling just below her belt, and walked back down the stairs.
         “Ma’am. You are being detained for the display of the Mark of the Beast. Under Title 4 of U.S.C. 11172 of 2084, sub-section 2 paragraph 1: There shall not be displayed, in public or private, symbols representing or thought to represent the following; Any symbolic representation of…”
         The boy was gone before he heard any more, the nice woman in the black and blue uniform carried him out the broken front door and buckled him gently in the back seat of a shiny black and blue car giving him two pieces of soft red candy that stretched when bitten. He looked back only once, and saw standing in the threshold, the front door shattered in pieces.



The Olsen's
         
      The town had my name. Or I had the town’s name, either way. I am Olsen, and this place, it is Olsen too. I am the only one here, and him, of course. Olsen was the name that my Granddad had given this big square of dirt and dust. Just a road now, and my house with the little shed out back with the slant roof. Used to be a town here when I was young; grocery, barber, even a doctor and a bar, all gone now. I guess after so long people figured there was no more gold here. It was my granddad that found gold in the first place, and when word got around back east about it, some of them 49ers thought they might be better served here than out in California, but disappointed and broke, everyone of them has either died or left out.
         I am here in the same house that my granddad built with the gold that he found right here in this very spot. It was a blessed place he said, and they built the road right through here. It lies not far from that original path today. It has been near 100 years since he was young. But now it’s just me. Me, and him of course, the horrid thing out there- the man I shot, still bothering my old bones all through the night. I never could make heads or tails of that horrid racket he makes into the first hours of the cracking day. Just because I killed a man, that doesn’t mean I did wrong. I heard about thousands slain in the fields of Gettysburg and Yorktown, and now two more wars that damn near sucked the whole world in. How can I be so wrong in shooting a man in a fair duel that I deserve to listen to his ghost moaning through the night, every night, for damn near 50 years?
         Can the ghost not see that I am old?
         I can see the shed out the back window. I thought years ago I’d lose my mind and I’ve fought hard to resist the slipping. Never a silent night has gone by since my wife died. Her death came less than a year after I shot that man in the road out front of Olsen’s bar. Only man I ever knew to be cut down like that, by the time I was old enough to shoot the war had been over sometime, maybe 25 years, duels were outlawed by the state by then. I owed my freedom to the good people of Olsen for not turning me into the authorities. Few were left, even then. After I killed that man they let me be to hide the body. I took it and put it in the crawlspace under the shed. They let me be that day, knowing what the situation was with my wife. See, he’d gone and slept with my beautiful bride and I imagine I let my anger get the best of me when i heard about it. I called him out in the street that day, where I shot him dead. I dragged him up on my horse and threw his stinking body to rot in the dirt under the trap in the shed floor.
         She was with child. And in many ways, I felt he killed her. Well over a half year later, she died giving birth to his child. The thing came out bloody and screaming like a devil. I was red as a hot poker when I saw her body layin there on the floor in the shed, and what was I to think with that evil thing that done it right there in my hands? I was so revolted by it, I couldn’t bare to look at it and I threw it with her and her lover’s now decayed body under the trap, and I locked it with a chain and key.
         But that’s when the ghost of that old bastard came for me. I could hear it, soft at first, finding it’s phantom voice, now grown strong and loud over the years. I hear the ghost every night, moaning revenge at me, never letting me sleep. It’s just me here, just me and him. Fifty years gone by and the ghost hasn’t let me sleep a night.






{/lines