The Story

Genre: don't know
Length: 2900 words
Tense: past
POV: 1^st

     Here it is: the last story, and the answers. I'm afraid it started out fairly normal, but kept getting weirder. Still, it's a story. Read it through. See what you think. And that'll be a quarter.
     P.S. - got it in just before midnight!

The Story

Let’s get one thing straight. Mr. K— never touched a hair on Ben’s head. It was the story that moved him, that excited him, stole his heart, and killed him. The pedophile is not to blame. Nor is the madman. Nor is the father.

     Ben shuffled down the street, keeping his eyes low. Voices floated over his head, through empty ears.
     Always knew she was cracked, that one. Don’t surprise me.
     I heard it was purposeful, maybe.
     Heard she was drunk, or stoned, or high on some grand idea of life. She had purpose, goddammit. It’s always the ones with purpose.
     It was purposeless, and stupid.
     It’s the husband’s fault, I tell you.
     I think it was the son’s.
     Ben crouched in the corner where the baker’s shop met Mr. Wu’s, listening. He had a can in front of him. A stack of lined paper was tucked askew into a shallow cardboard box a size too small. Balled scraps of crumpled words littered the line between window and sidewalk, strewed along Mr. Wu’s storefront. In front of Benny was a small sign, black marker on white-faced cardboard:

Storys: 25¢

     Ben crouched in the shade of the tattered awning, his legs folded under himself. He chewed the end of a dwindling pencil. People walked by, ignoring him like Jordan who sprawled across the street, pale and red in the glistening sun, propped behind a similar sign. Free prophecy by W’xh’u, a higher being from a distant star! Lost a loved one? There is redemption. Come, hear, and be consoled!
     Ben stared at the sign across the street, dancing between the silhouettes of legs rushing quickly by, and the occasional car, fleeing more quickly. The wind stole words from mouths and carried them past the storefront.
     Such a pity. Such a waste. She was so young. So innocent. So naïve.

     Ben looked up, expecting a customer. It was a grown man, well-groomed and dressed impeccably in a tight suit. Ben had a wild, fleeting notion that it was Mr. Wu, come to scold him – but he could see, even while the halo of the sun cloaked the face in shadow, that this man was taller, more confident, and more friendly.
     “Ben Douglas, is it?”
     Ben looked with wide eyes into the smiling face. He knew Mr. K—, at least by hearsay. He was a friend to children.
     “You want a story?”
     Mr. K— smiled, taking one of the scraps of paper and unfolding it.
     We a by the on story story. A the story I the story. Story the a the of but a why the story. And so on.
    “What does this say?”
     Ben squinted. “Um, I don’t— it was, I think, ‘There was once a bunny. He hopped and hopped and fell over the side of the road. A starving hawk carried off his body and was revived.’ That was, um, that was one of them.” He shuffled nervously through the other scraps of discarded paper, looking down.
     “Would you like to learn how to read, Ben?”
     Ben’s wide eyes circled the scene. He lowered his voice, and whispered softly, “What’s Jordan’s sign say?”
     Mr. K— smiled lightly, and Ben clutched his shame closer to his heart. But the kind voice said, “Don’t worry, son, everyone must start somewhere. Here, copy it down onto one of your papers. Let’s go to my house and we’ll decipher it.”

     It was nighttime, and Ben’s father was reading to him, slowly. “And then the prince let her go, and watched with sad eyes as she melted into the river. Her face became the moon’s reflection, and her arms the swaying branches, dancing in the water. The current carried her body away into eternity.”
     The father stopped, and turned the last page, but started, as if he had forgotten. He resumed.
     “But the prince made a boat out of his love. He got into it, and sailed up the endless river. He met many obstacles, but he defeated all the monsters and dragons. After many years he came to the shores of eternity, and he got out of the boat. The princess was waiting. They built a house there, in eternity, and together they lived happily ever after.”
     Ben took his eyes off the book, and glared, unblinkingly, into his father’s. “It’s blank.”
     “Yeah,” Johnny complained. “Where’s the picture?”
     The father frowned. “The story’s waiting for you to draw the picture, Johnny. Here, take the book – fill it in!” Johnny’s eyes lit up, and he ran off to the coffee table and pulled out the crayons. He started to draw the island of eternity, and the prince, and the house.
     Ben and his father were alone together. Ben watched, silently, through the open door, seeing the princess’s hair begin to fall beside her shoulders, long wavy gold, like his mother’s.
     The father said, quietly, “Reading is a mysterious thing.”
     “The page was blank.” He wasn’t talking about the picture.
     “The words were all on the page before. I turned it too early. But it’s okay. I knew the story ion my heart.”
     Johnny came back with the book, and proceeded to show his father what he had drawn. And through it all the father’s eyes found Ben’s, and absorbed his deep stare. The book lay open before them, to nothingness and a wanton scribbling of blue and yellow crayon.
     Ben nodded.

     In the morning, the book went missing, just for a day. Ben’s father didn’t notice, and neither did Johnny. It slipped out, secretively from the forbidden shelf, where the mountains of indecipherable woes lay in heaps: a wall of story.
     The book migrated to the street. Ben set up his shop. He adjusted his box of lined paper, straightened the sign, and opened the book to its last page, appearing to read.
     A customer came, a young girl he had known from school. “Ben, ma, it’s Ben!”
     Ben tried to smile, but his professionalism won. “Jessica. Would you like a story?”
     “Ma, can I have a story?”
     The mother smiled and handed her a quarter.
     Ben took the money, rubbing it between his fingers, and pretended to think. He took a piece of lined paper and laid it against the hard surface of the back cover of his book. Then he began to write. Carefully, meticulously, copying the last sentence of the story, glyph by glyph, onto his own fresh page.
     He handed it to Jessica.
     The mother glanced at it, briefly, and snatched it away. “Here, Jessie, I think Ben wants to be alone. He just lost—” And she hesitated, holding her daughter’s hand, and walked away.

     Mr. K— came that afternoon, as he had said he would. Ben packed up his stuff, got up, and followed the gentleman into his house. They went over basic letters – the sounds they made, and the patterns they used. Cases where two letters made one sound.
     Ben was a fast learner. He read slowly, but he often managed to sound out simple words. He made his way through the book.
     Often Tom would come after school let out, and join them in the quest to read. For perhaps an hour, and sometimes more, they would sprawl together on the deep leather sofa, Ben diligently on Mr. K—’s left, Tom snuggled into his lap. Eventually Mr. K— would stir, when the sun reached the point where the first golden beams bounced off the top of the eastern hills, behind the bridge and the valley of the creek, and fell through the crease in the living-room shade.
     “Boys, have you learned much today?” Mr. K— would ask.
     “Very much,” Ben would say, and Tom would nod, though it was clear that Ben worked harder and learned more.
     “You’ve both done very well. You have much to be proud of.”
     Then Mr. K— would dismiss Ben and retreat into his study with the younger boy. Ben would return to his father, carrying the little black secret in his heart, peeping over his father’s shoulder as his father read each night, following the syllables where he could, questioning where he couldn’t.

     One day Jordan crossed the street, and planted himself before Ben’s booth. Ben crept a little close to the glassy wall, looking up. “Um, hi, do you want, um, a story.”
     “Certainly,” Jordan said.
     Ben hesitated. He pulled out a piece of paper and began scribbling. He was aware of W’hx’u’s alien eyes on him, probing. The letters became scribbles. The story finished with a flourish.
     Jordan took the paper, ruffled it slightly, and read, “There was once a house built on the edge of a bridge. This bridge connected two worlds. It was a magic bridge, of sorts, placed halfway between the spiritual world and the one we inhabit. There was a family living inside the house. The father and the younger son were afraid of the bridge, and what lay on the other side. But the mother and her son were adventurous. They believed the words of the ancient Xwi’hyg prophets. They knew that the other dimension was open. And they began to converse with that dimension, and cross the bridge. One day the mother went too far into the spirit realm, and she fell off the end of the bridge. She could not climb back up and rejoin the son in his dimension, but he still saw her every day. Though she no longer tucked him in at night, he always felt her presence. He always knew that he could head halfway across, balance there in the void, and hear her voice – and she could hear his. He could always return to his father and his younger brother, and bring them the good news. He had the best of both worlds.”
     Ben was silent through the whole thing. His eyes scanned the hills behind the unknown man. His face was still, but his bottom lip quivered with each word.
     “No,” he said simply. “That is not what it says. It says, ‘There was once a loving mother, and she loved to read and walk, and she fell, um, fell in love. The end.”
     “The fall must o’ been hard. Love can hurt somethin’ awful, son.”
     Ben froze, and stared diligently at the ground, scanning the lost scraps of paper, printed with forgotten stories.
     “She’s still around, Ben. Just another dimension, one you can’t see, yet. I can take you there, sometime, if you want.”
     Ben said nothing, and Jordan walked back across the street, and settled himself behind his own sign.

     The book that Ben stole migrated to Mr. K—’s house for a while. Arduously the two struggled through.
     “Your reading has much improved,” Mr. K— remarked as Ben turned to the last page. He turned a page to far, and saw the island Johnny had drawn, and the house, and the woman. Suddenly his fingers would move no further.
     Mr. K— smiled, and turned the page back with his own firm finger. “That is a nice drawing, Ben.”
     “It is my brother’s.”
     “Ah— I should have known. It was rather below your talent.”
     Ben tried to smile. He tried to look up into Mr. K—’s face. He tried to stop his eyes on their inevitable fall, first onto the curtain-rods, then the mantle, past a painting of a swollen creek between hills, past a bookshelf and a chest full of toys, finally, onto the couch, the table, the book in his hands. His eyes scanned the last sentence.

     I do not know how well Ben could read. It was probably slow. He must have started with the last word, and worked his way backward. Slowly comprehending, memory filling in the gaps. He remembered the moment that his father turned the last page. He recalls the heavy words, before that spark. He sees the sentence in its entirety:
     The current carried her body away into eternity.

     Ben began writing his own story the next day. He wrote it in the shade of the awning over Mr. Wu’s convenience store. He wrote it staring at his dark reflection in the glass of the storefront, and seeing the light shine off Jordan, the cars, the street and the people behind. He wrote it in big letters, on many wide-ruled pages.
     When he finished with a page he crumpled it up and threw it off behind him. His scraps littered Main Street.
     Occasionally a passerby picked up one of the scraps, and opened it. They said later that it was mostly indecipherable. It wasn’t that there were too many misspellings, only the words were arranged in some foreign order, or carried some other meanings.
     At the end of the day, when the sun reached the point where the first golden beams bounced off the top of the eastern hills, behind the bridge and the valley of the creek, and burned its reflection into Ben’s tired blue eyes, he got up and went home without a word.
     Jordan crossed the street, gathered the pieces, smoothed them out, and put them in order. He still has them.
     Ben’s father never saw him there. His father stayed in the house with Johnny, and read him stories.

     “Why does your heart carry you to these heartbreaking tales?” Mr. K— said. Ben had brought another of his father’s tales. The dead knight was cured by a magician, wise and powerful, who raised him out of the deep ocean, purged the water from the bloated body, rewound time and put life back into his blue water-heart. The knight married the princess and lived happily ever after.
     “They are my father’s,” Ben said.
     “Child, I shall procure more fitting material for the further course of our lessons.”
     “You don’t need to. I like my father’s stories well enough.”
     Mr. K— frowned.
     And Ben let his eyes glaze once more over the story’s ending. And his body sunk like a rock into the deep, dark sea, there to lie evermore.

     Ben stood on the edge of the bridge, remembering the wide and old tree in the backyard, now long dead. He remembered how his mother and his father had carved a secret reading-space into the nook between the old branches, and how they would read to him, from lunchtime until the sun reached the point where the first golden beams bounced off the top of the eastern hills, behind the bridge and the valley of the creek. It was an odd memory – a distant memory. Ben had not started kindergarten until he was almost nine. Before that, the stories had nourished him in its place.

     The day after Ben finished his story, Jordan came to him. The sign was back up, and Ben again faced the street and not its reflection. It was as though nothing had changed.
     “I can take you to the bridge,” Jordan said.
     They walked. They walked by the highwayside, ignoring the cars that zipped by at too fast a sped. They walked up, past the fields and into the hills, up toward the creek and the near end of the bridge.
     When they reached the middle, suspended over the fast, shallow water, the sun was setting. “Listen,” said W’hx’u. “She’s down there. You hear her?”
     “Not yet,” Ben said.
     “Then stay a while. You will hear.”

     But I have gotten this all mixed up, I think. As the moment nears, chronology shatters. Certainly, Jordan spoke first to Ben before Ben had ever met Mr. K—. And surely he wrote his story after Tom had died, and Mr. K— had fled the courts to Mexico. Jordan must have brought him to the bridge before he stared out and thought of his father and his mother and their secret reading-space. He must have read the last sentence before he read the book.

     Ben stood over the edge. Jordan had gone back into town, and he was alone. The cars behind ignored him. There was a veil between him and the world.
     He thought he heard his mother’s voice, in the wind, and the gurgle of the creek below.
     He lifted a rock from the edge of the bridge, and held it out like an offering. The wind stirred. He let it drop, and his eyes followed its trajectory.
     There was a small splash that no one heard. The cars on the highway never slackened their speed.

     Ben asked his father, one day, as the sun reached the point where the first golden beams bounced off the top of the eastern hills, behind the bridge and the valley of the creek, “Can you bring me to where mother died?”
     “Son, mother is not dead. She lives on, in heaven.”
     “What good is heaven?”
     “It’s like another dimension, where the dead go. They’re happy there, only we can’t see them, yet.”
     “I want to talk to her.”
     It was his eleventh birthday. His father drove them to the bridge, and pulled the car over in the middle, blocking the road. Ben got out.

     I wasn’t looking. I only imagine that he peered over the edge, whispered his few words of love, said his goodbyes and made his peace, and then he got back in the car and drove away. But that was Johnny’s story, and I have told it already. Johnny has more of my wife in him. Ben was more like me.