Selected Short Stories Featuring Cockfight Read online

Selected Short Stories

  featuring

  Cockfight

  by Nicolas Wilson

  Foreword

  Hi. I’m Nic. This is a short story collection of mine. Other stories and information about upcoming work can be found on my website: www.nicolaswilson.com. Interspersed with these short stories, you’ll find snippets of novels I’m working on. I’m calling them entertisements, because the word amuses me. Keep going to reach the fiction, or you can view the Table of Contents (including synopses of the stories in this collection).

  Conflict

  My wife is going to kill me. I haven’t unearthed clandestine documents or a dark co-conspirator. But it’s coming.

  Emily and I are newly-weds, married only 9 months. By most accounts, the honeymoon shouldn’t be over yet. But the ardent love of our foibles and failings is nonexistent. She doesn’t even watch the shows we used to watch together anymore.

  The other night, her ring brushed against my cheek, and I stirred. The diamond was red-brown. I tried to ignore it, but it got to me, and I tossed for twenty minutes. I tried to pull it from her finger. I got soap, and a little bit of that massage oil she used to love, but it wouldn’t budge. And I couldn’t sleep next to her, with that red diamond shimmering at me in the moonlight.

  She woke me the next morning on the couch. She seemed hurt that I’d left her all alone. I asked her about her ring, and she broke down.

  The day before, a co-worker, Martha Groom, from accounting, had confronted her. Emily’d been shaving money off the top of her budget, and placing it into a war chest, a discretionary account she planned to use to get her team the new project. Martha, a woman in her fifties who looked like a woman in her sixties, demanded ten percent off the top of the account, or she was going to report her.

  And my wife punched her in the eye. Her diamond cut a slice off the old woman's eyelid as she fell over, and she hadn’t noticed the blood. Emily scrubbed it away, but underneath, the stone had taken on a pink hue. I wanted to tell her, but I hadn’t slept well on the couch, and didn’t have the energy for another fight.

  Martha never told on her, and Emily used the money to put together a catered presentation that won her the project. I don’t know if they’d come to an understanding, or if women bond after a physical confrontation like men do, but she invited Martha onto the project, as well. Meanwhile, things at home became even more tense. She spent most of her days at work, and I started to wonder if she was having an affair.

  She bought a machete. I know I haven’t taken excellent care of our back yard, and it has taken on a jungle life of its own. But she didn’t put the machete in the garage, with the mower and the trimmer, the spades and hoes and shovels. She keeps it in her nightstand, beneath a copy of a Greg Campbell book.

  By now her ring has taken on a red ochre. I mentioned during a dinner I cooked that perhaps she’d spilled wine on it, and she stabbed me with her salad fork. I’m glad I didn’t tell her while we were eating steak, which she now demands rare.

  And all the while, my discomfort, and my anger remained focused on her ring. I don’t understand how I knew, but I knew. I checked on the statistics. Less than 1% of diamonds come from conflict regions, their purchase largely benefiting rebel and insurgent militants.

  Through a series of long distance communications and bribes, I tracked her diamond to a remote location in Darfur. The village had been decimated by the Janjaweed militants, and the villagers' bodies dumped in mass graves. The local people had believed in the power of their ancestors in their lives, to aid them if revered, or curse them if slighted.

  That’s why I’ve decided to cut off her finger. I love my wife. I love her enough to mutilate her. For a week she’s been whispering in her sleep, about violence, and murder, and every now and then, me. She only drinks Cabernet Sauvignon now, and I poured her an entire bottle before bed. But I’ll have to move quickly— she keeps her machete razor-sharp, and her hand on her night stand.

  Table of Contents

  Marvin’s Dead

  I’ve been married for 32 years- I mean, I had been. Marvin and I met in school, a junior college as it was known then. He was a funny little man, and I paid him little attention. I might never have spoken more than a few words to him, but one day going to class I spilled coffee all over him. He insisted on buying me another cup (as I said, he was a funny little man), and we talked as I drank it. We missed our class; we missed all our classes that day. We might have stayed and missed the rest of our lives, but the coffee place was closing, and they shooed us away. I wanted to go home with him, or to dinner- to prolong that moment together. He smiled, and said coolly, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And in class the next day he sat behind me, as he always did, and when class was over he slipped his hand in mine and I was his from that moment.

  We went through the usual stages, lust, puppy love, then a real love, a decade of being soul mates, to a point where we were simply the deepest of friends- which may not sound like progress, but if you manage not to divorce or die long enough, it will make sense to you. Between those markers, we moved in together and married, bought a house, and tried half-heartedly to have children. And now that man I shared my life with is dead.

  I brought another man to his funeral. I suppose Marvin wouldn’t mind- doesn’t mind, I guess. This man is so like Marvin, in his smile, his blue eyes, the sound of his voice, and even the way he holds my hand. My eyes tear up, and I look from this other man to my husband’s empty casket.

  Marvin had a severe stroke; it damaged his ability to feel. The funeral was his doctor’s idea; I was skeptical at first, but within a week I understood what he meant when he told me, “the man you loved is gone.” He remembers most things; sometimes he even remembers to say that he loves me, though we both can tell he wouldn’t know how anymore. The cruelty is that he knows what he’s lost, and even in the rare moments he smiles, he doesn’t know he’s happy.

  Table of Contents

  Jahannam

  I walk several blocks out of my way to pass down the street where my father was kidnapped at gunpoint. I sold the car we were riding in to pay his ransom, which is just as well; being on foot brings a safety born of anonymity.

  For a few blocks, I find myself traveling against a stream of people, excited and scared, but orderly; it’s not the first time most of them have evacuated a city street. I come upon the bombed-out corpse of a city bus, and try not to tread upon the remnants of its passengers.

  I open my phone and hit redial. It rings, and sends me straight to my father’s voicemail. I stopped leaving new messages a week ago. I pass the trash bin I left his ransom in, and peek discreetly inside, not knowing what I hope to find.

  In the side street I see an officer gunned down; he fires a pistol against two rifles, and falls. I don’t know if he is American or Iraqi, but no one comes out of hiding to help as his murderers drive away. I watch them until their dust-trail disappears, and I check my phone, to see if I’ve missed a call.

  It’s before ten, but there are already thirty coffins lining the street outside the Al-Tub al-Adli morgue. The guard at the checkpoint stops me, but remembers my face, and waves me through. The smell of bodies and antiseptics touches me as I walk past him, and he avoids my eyes.

  Women shrouded in black exit a bus, trying to muffle their grief. A police truck dumps the last of its bodies into the street; the overworked porter is a half-dozen corpses behind. I consider helping carry them in, but as I bend near one, a woman recognizes her husband, and leaps into the arms of another woman and wails.

  The building is made of yellowed stone, and the air is slightly colder than the ou
tside. The three storage rooms are full, and the bodies have started to take up residence in the halls, stacked and leaned against the walls to preserve the walkway.

  Every body has a story behind it: some of them Saddam’s Baathist allies and others their opposite numbers from the Dawa party, some merely Sunni and others merely Shia. Their bodies are stacked together in the same piles on the same cold ground.

  Many are bound or handcuffed, with cellophane tape over their eyes, and bullets in their heads. Some bear burns on their hands and feet, and others evidence of torture with electricity, acid, and drills.

  I enter another room, where family members watch a monitor as digital photos flash over the screen. Every few minutes, a body covered in lacerations or holes is claimed by a sobbing loved one, and the room forgets they’re strangers, and do what they can to offer comfort.

  After some time, I recognize the bodies, not as living souls, but simply because the pictures have started their cycle over. As I step back onto the street, I feel infected with death, and I start the walk back home.

  The signs all say Baghdad, but I know that's a lie.

  Table of Contents

  Font of Youth

  I came to live among the Calusa from La Navidad, Columbus’ doomed colony, built from the remains of the Santa Maria. My