April, 2024. Part one of a collection of short stories based on original characters.

Wilt I.

A quaint pair of salt and pepper shakers found their new meadow on the dining room table. "Dining room" table was something of an overstatement; the rectangular, wooden table was located in a liminal space between the kitchen and the living room, not a "room" of its own. Sometimes, by scooting in his honey-brown chair, Lin would bump into the couch, an ugly, scratchy, brown-red-yellow plaid thing. "You'kin move your chair over to this side. An’ that way you’d see the television, too."

Pam would twirl the angel hair pasta on her fork, peering at her cousin under unruly blonde curls in need of hairdressing. Her gray eyes squinted, amused, her expression having been one of gaiety and affection, her drawl made more regional (how she’d put it) in familial comfort.

"No, thanks," he had said. "I like to see the window.” That was last year. He had since reasoned with Pam to move the couch over by a few inches, even though it meant she felt necessitated to adjust the television and a well-framed painting by the same few inches, too. And now, Lin sat still and watched a potted plant sway on the windowsill as Nikolai, Pam's husband, carefully set the new salt and pepper shakers over the baby-blue linen tablecloth, meticulously adjusting their positions while he whistled and hummed a tune.

Lin investigated closer: the pepper shaker was a staff-wielding rag-cloaked shepherd, and the salt was his faithful lamb, following. The shepherd, one foot in front of the other, his staff held firmly outwards, seemed to be searching. "Cute."

"You think I am cute?"

"You're an ugly bastard," said Lin, smiling and pressing his pointer finger onto the lamb's head; it was porcelain, white but a little worn in color, and should've been cold but had been warmed by Nikolai's fiddling grasp.

"Tsk. No, no, you get your mitts off. He does not like you."

Lin wondered aloud how Nikolai had come to bring home these charming, vaguely Christian figures, given his and Pam's more "Eastern" tastes. He recounted the tale: an elderly woman purchased the shepherd and his lamb early in the morning, near the beginning of his shift at the warehouse, pleased with her find, telling him the pair had been on a shelf near the back, searching for their lost pasture; after lunch, she was back, waving them in his face and hissing that they didn’t shake well, at all, just completely false, complete lies; Nikolai proposed a refund, but she wouldn't take it, just stomped and pointed and growled until finally, she left the little shepherd and lamb on his counter, and marched out the store, satisfaction wrought from her justice-seeking crusade. Nikolai, more merrily bewildered than perturbed, had stuffed them in his pocket and brought them to their sanctuary.

"So, we’ve got faulty salt-and-pepper shakers," Lin gathered.

Nikolai flicked him on the forehead, getting a hey! in response before he retreated to the kitchen, where he began to empty a paper grocery bag of its cans and grains and fruits. Although Pam usually did the shopping, she had been gone for a week and had two more to go, as her boss was in New York City for a business trip, and where he went, she was obligated to follow, carrying his waxed leather suitcases and taking his notes. Nikolai would joke that Mr. Stephen Bailey was Pam’s boyfriend; her displeased eyes would narrow and she would turn from him, unimpressed. Each time she announced a Bailey-sponsored holiday, as Nikolai termed it, Lin would admonish Pam’s subservience, questioning her commitment to feminism and socialism; she would be no more impressed and call him a little brat.

Pam, in all her Marxist intellect, was a good secretary. Each late afternoon, upon returning from the office, she would kick her heels and peel off her tights and Nikolai would throw her a loose blouse or a knit sweater. She worked long hours, longer than her husband—although he made a higher salary, stocking shelves of old cups and statuettes and woodwork and sorting dollar bills at the cash register—and you could see it in the lines under her eyes and by her mouth. Yet she was a good secretary; Mr. Bailey liked her too much; if offered the opportunity, he would’ve been glad indeed to call her a girlfriend. What he did not like was her marriage, but nobody in the office did, and they would lowly whisper, glancing her way, asking why she hadn't yet quit or why she wasn't yet with child. If they knew her husband's name, they would surely whisper louder and more severely, their hypotheticals turned to antagonisms, but she referred to him and herself as only Mr. and Mrs. Dugen.

Her father, George Fleck, was Lin's uncle: his father’s younger brother. Lin knew little about his Uncle George. At a certain age, a young one, visits to Uncle George's Dallas home became Pam’s lone visits to the Missourian Flecks. Her bi-annual sojourns were not received as lovingly by the older, taciturn Harold Fleck as they were by the younger, lonely Linton and the brothers' parents, Marged and Frank. Pam, eleven years older, adored her Linny; the two would sit together on one of those bench swings that hung by an aged oak branch not too far from the house, and the boy would look up into his sweet cousin's face as she spoke about Chicago, her studies at Mundelein, and Catholicism (her interim interest, the sort of interest you develop in your early maturity), he dreading her departure and the return of his solitude.

Older now, he did not terribly mind Pam's absences. Lin, wobbling the little lamb with his calloused, habitually bitten thumb, watched Nikolai. He sat there quite uselessly, following the man's wide shoulders and thick-skinned face and tracking his dance around the kitchen, the tiny, gray kitchen, decorated with wishful, floral hand towels and a village of painted wooden dolls saved from the antique shop, artifacts of Pam's optimistic home-making attempts. Nikolai hummed and whistled again, his eyes made slight in contentment and his lips puckered, quick, hefty hands stacking cans of soup and lentils and spinach neatly into the cupboard.

Later, the two would disregard any newly obtained produce and instead laze in front of the record player with two frozen dinners "fresh" from the oven. The recent Bill Evens would make their living room a deep-blue-painted church, a parish simultaneously upbeat and pensive; religiously content. Spring is here. A cool breeze tickled Lin's flushed cheek, and he looked over to the window again, seeing the orange-petalled ixora dance too, almost to the melodic rhythm of Nikolai’s song.