Twelve Stories

Janice D. Soderling

When I was six, and every year until I was ten, my parents sent me the first week in August to stay with my great-aunt Agnes while they vacationed at a gambling resort.

Every day of the sweltering weeks before my departure, I threw hysterical tantrums. My mother told Mrs. Hempel from next door that I was just trying to get attention. Mrs. Hempel nodded and said my parents deserved a week on their own in a cool place with no whiny kid to think about.

My mother told Mrs. Hempel, refilling two small glasses with cooking sherry, “I’ll bet she’s got a pile stashed away. We expect her to leave it all to David.”

“There are mosquitoes at Lake Drumhead and the frogs make noises all night long,” said my father, slapping shaving cream on his thick neck. “You’re such a scaredy cat, you wouldn’t like it there.”

“You are a naughty boy,” my mother said, pulling the Donald Duck suitcase off the closet shelf. I threw myself on the floor again, kicking and screaming. She went into the kitchen and turned up the radio.

August came, despite my tantrums. My parents warned me, singly and together, not to be naughty, and put me on the bus for the four-hour trip to Great-aunt Agnes. Pinned inside my shirt I had a manila envelope containing a card with my name and destination address. The envelope’s sharp corners pricked my skin like bee stings until my sweat softened it up. Then I hardly noticed it.

She met me at the bus terminal, her hair wispy under a hat of worn black velvet. We walked the five blocks to her small rented house with its unkempt yard, taking turns carrying my little suitcase. When she removed the long hatpin and took her hat off, she had a bald spot, just like my father.

We ate supper and then I threw up in the enameled wash basin. When I had my pajamas on, before climbing into bed in the scary room where the walls moved and shadowy branches fingered the window, Great-aunt Agnes flexed her arthritic hands and opened a concealed drawer in her writing desk. “I have something to show you, David.”

She took out a little box with a spring lid. It flew up to expose a glass eye staring at me from a purple velvet lining.

“This, David,” she whispered, “is the eye of God. No matter where you are in this house, it knows what you are doing. It can see through walls, it can see in the darkness. It sees what you do in bed. Do not ever, ever be naughty in bed while you are staying with me.”

“No, ma’m,” I said.

“No, Great-aunt Agnes,” she whispered.

“No, Great-aunt Agnes,” I whispered back.

Lying in the deep featherbed was like drowning. All around me, the old house creaked and squeaked and popped. I was so afraid of the noises that I couldn’t fall asleep. I thought about my parents at Lake Drumhead, and about the frogs which I was not afraid of at all, whole families of frogs, with friendly frog fathers that croaked in deep voices, and frog mothers that croaked happily when they won a lot of money gambling, and pale green baby frogs that were just learning to croak with small squeaky voices. I imagined a joyous choir of frogs all around Lake Drumhead until the ceiling light went click and I was startled to see Great-aunt Agnes at the foot of the bed smoothing her deformed hands, tangled as tree roots.

She whispered, “David, stop making those silly noises. Go to sleep.” Then the light clicked off and she padded down the hall. I stayed very quiet. All I could think of then was the glass eye glowering in the concealed drawer.

The week passed with me in a state of numbness, tiptoeing through musty rooms or sitting as still as possible in the porch swing, never sure if I was doing something the glass eye disapproved of. I pulled weeds in the flower bed. I dusted the lopsided venetian blinds. I threw up every evening after supper. The eye watched me day and night until Great-aunt Agnes whispered good-bye and I climbed on the bus again.

She died the winter of my tenth birthday. Before she went into the hospital, my parents received a parcel marked Not to be opened until my death.

The parcel contained her last will and testament, written in spidery longhand and not witnessed.  She left everything to the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, for winning the war against the Huns. We never had to contact him though, since it turned out that she had no money at all and was in fact behind on her rent. The parcel also contained a small box marked For David. When it was opened, to the surprise of everyone but me, a glass eye stared up from the velvet lining.

“What a strange thing to give a child,” said my mother.

“Throw it out,” said my father.

“We can’t throw away an eye,” my mother said. “It looks real. David can have it as a keepsake.”

“Strange keepsake,” said my father.

“Strange runs in your family,” said my mother.

“And what runs in your family?” asked my father who was already edging toward the door and divorce.

“Breast cancer and bad luck,” she replied prophetically. Before I finished high school, she had her full share of both.

I would like to go to Lake Drumhead just to listen to the frogs. The resort is gone though, destroyed in a tornado nearly twenty years ago. A lot of people said that was God’s judgment on an evil place, and I agree with them. I’ll bet the frogs are still there though, bellowing all night long, saying croak, croak. Some nights, when I am tempted, I open the box and look at the eye.

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Janice D. Soderling’s fiction and flash appears in Willows Wept Review, New Walk, Horizon Review, Montreal Review, Turtle Quarterly, Fiction at Work, Gloom Cupboard, JMWW, Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue, The Chimaera, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Boston Literary Magazine, Our Stories, 42opus, Glimmer Train Stories and other venues. She was nominated in 2009 to Sundress Best of the Net, Dzanc Best of the Web and Pushcart and received The Harold Witt Memorial Award from Blue Unicorn for best poem of volume 2010. She is Assistant Fiction Editor at Able Muse.