Tag Archives: found art

Hank’s Troubles

Posted on April 14, 2010 | 4 comments

This story is based on a real postcard I found from 1949.  Make sure you read the actual postcard at the end of the story!  Enjoy!

Maxienne was cooking frantically in the kitchen, trying to watch all four burners at once, stirring, ladling, adding ingredients, chopping others, all with little Charlie crawling around her feet.  She tripped over him on the way to the counter to chop more onions.

“Really Charlie, I cannot wait until you’re napping again.  Tu est un menace!  At least your little sister sleeps during the day here and there,” she exclaimed in her heavy French accent.

Once chopped, Maxienne rushed back towards the frying pan, slipped on some sort of wet spot on the floor, regained her balance, and dropped all but three pieces of onion into the pan, the rest falling towards the floor.  Charlie looked up at the sound of the loud sizzle as they heated.  He smiled and started looking for whatever fell.

And at that, Charlie’s little sister, Mariette, started squealing from her crib, apparently awake from her nap.  Maxienne wiped her brow with a nearby towel, sweating from the heat of a New York City August.

“Hank?  HANK?  Mon dieu!  Could you please help in here, s’il vous plait?”  She waited, hearing no response.  “Hank?”  She turned the burner under the pan down and ran into one of the five rooms in their new apartment, looked around, and realized the room was empty.

“Ah!  This place is too big!”  She ran to the next room and picked Mariette up, running back towards the kitchen, causing her to sweat even more.  As she ran by the closed door she said, “Merci, Hank.  Thank you for all of the help!”  Not waiting for a response she headed right for the kitchen, where the pot full of sauce had started to boil over and splatter onto the kitchen wall.

“Damn!” She said, lunging for the knob on the oven.  Mariette squirmed in her hands, wanting to get down.  “Fine, you want down?  You can go down!”  She rushed the three feet to their living room and put Mariette on the couch, surrounding her with pillows.  At this, Charlie started crying.  “What now?”

Maxienne turned in time to see the onions were starting to burn, and quickly pulled the pan off the stove, a little oil jumping from the pan and onto her hand.  “MERDE!” she yelled.  Meanwhile, Charlie was still wailing as if in pain, so she lowered the sauce and ran to him, swiping him up in one fluid motion, spinning right back to the stove where she quickly stirred the pasta so it wouldn’t stick.  Then, her attention turned to Charlie, she tried to investigate why he’d suddenly started crying.

Something was lodged in his mouth, and as she fished it out, he bit her.  “Damn!” she yelled.  “Hank!  Would you PLEASE come in here?  Get out here and help!”  Still no answer, she went back into his mouth, fishing out one of the chunks of onion.  “That’s it, Charlie?  That?  It’s onion…it won’t kill you.”

Charlie, relieved to have the taste removed from his mouth, still frowned at her.  “Perhaps some milk,” she said, heading for the refrigerator.  She reached above it first, pulling down a package of French cigarettes, and quickly popped the package so one jumped into her mouth.  She pulled a glass and the bottle of milk out like someone who had done it a thousand times, and he had a sip of milk before she’d even put him back on the floor.  Charlie calmed, she leaned into the burner and lit the cigarette, the beads of sweat on her face reflecting the fire.  She turned her attention back to the stove, stirred the sauce, noticing it was a bit thick.  “Merde!” she said to herself.  “Hank!  I think I burned the sauce!”  She tasted it.  “I think I can save it,” she yelled again.  Still no response.

Maxienne checked the pasta, scooping a piece out on a wooden spoon and picking it up carefully between her freshly painted nails, and threw it against the wall.  It stuck for a second before falling off.  A few more minutes, she decided.

At that, a knock came at the door.  “Hank!  I do not suppose you could get that?”  She waited, expecting to hear the door of the bathroom open, but still nothing.  “Ah!” she growled to herself in anger, quickly drying her hands on the towel hanging from her apron.  She checked the onions, quickly threw the meatballs into the pan, jumped back from the sparks of oil that spurted from the pan, and ran towards the door, drying her hands yet again while watching the future meal over her shoulder.

She opened the door to find Pete, their door man.  “Hey there, Mrs. J!  Got your mail!  Sure smells good in there!  What are you making, meatballs?  Gravy smells great too!”

“Would you like one, Pete?  They’ll still be a few minutes at least…”

“No no, ma’am.  Thanks all the same though.  Let me grab these too for you!”  He picked up the empty milk bottles from the floor by the door.  “Can I help you with anything else?”

“Can you get my husband to give me a hand?” she asked with a sly smile.

He laughed.  “No can do, ma’am.  But if there’s anything else, let me know!”

“Merci, thanks Pete!  Maybe I’ll send some down for you when it’s done?”

“Thanks!” he said as he walked away.  She shut the door and ran back to the kitchen.  Flipped the meatballs.  Stirred the sauce.  Checked the pasta.  It was done, so she grabbed the potholders and emptied the hot water into the sink, watching some ashes fall from her cigarette into the pile of noodles.  She put down the pot, took out the ashen noodles, and threw them in the garbage.  Then she took a moment to tap her cigarette into a nearby ashtray on the kitchen table and wipe her brow of sweat yet again.

She put the sauce on low in time to notice the kids were quiet, checked on them, and found them asleep in the living room.  She sighed, relaxed for the first time all day, and dropped the meatballs one by one into the pot of sauce.  She put the lid on, dropped the pots into the sink, and sat at the table.

“Hank?”

“Hank?”

She pulled out a small box of post cards and the suitcase typewriter Hank had bought her for her last birthday and took the lid off.  Carefully putting the postcard under the plastic holder, she tapped her cigarette ashes into the tray again.

“Dinner will be ready in a few, if you’re hungry,” she yelled to Hank once more.  “I’m going to write a postcard to Lil.”  Still no answer.

She relaxed a bit more, sighed, and started typing.

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Spring Break (A Fictional Story)

Posted on April 12, 2010 | 1 comment

We’d just spent the whole day together, the four of us, me and Jimmy, Fern and Able, an entire day.  I remember it was warm, too warm for Spring, Easter around the corner, things were simpler then, when we still anxiously awaited the Easter Bunny, wondering what goodies we would find in our baskets.  No school for a few days.  The long trek to Scranton to see the relatives we only saw twice a year, once for a huge Easter brunch and their yearly summer visit in Sea Isle City.

The creek had been especially cold still, too cold really to put our feet in, but we did so anyway.  I shivered a bit, and Jimmy pointed out the goose pimples on my arms.  He started trying to warm them, and they only grew worse, not from the cold but from his touch.  I turned a bright red, which Able pointed out, and I just tried to explain away as part of the unusual heat.

We headed over to the swinging rope from there, the boys daring each other to swing farther out over the creek, then taking turns attempting other dares, trying to outdo each other for the sake of our affection.  It wasn’t until the rope started to break that they stopped, and Jimmy won, of course.

Fern and I sat and chatted while the boys played with a frog they found, listening to us giggle from afar.  They pushed each other a bit, back and forth, but playfully.  They weren’t fighting over us, everyone knew Able had a thing for Fern, and Jimmy, well Jimmy had already told me he was going to ask me to marry him one day.

It was Fern who pointed out the sun, guessing it was probably almost supper time when we started hearing all of the neighborhood moms yelling out children’s names, so we started the long hike back through the woods.  Birds sang, the boys hit saplings with walking sticks they found, and we just followed.

We emerged from behind old Mr. Sampson’s back yard, careful not to be seen since he was a notorious kid hater, and was known to call parents when kids cut through his yard.  But we didn’t care, it was a perfect day and we practically dared him to call our homes as we strolled through.

It was after we got to the street that Jimmy slowed down, allowing me to catch up, telling Fern that Able wanted to ask her something so that she would run ahead a bit.  He took my hand in his for the first time, and an excited chill ran through my body to my heart.  I smiled a crooked smile, trying to act normal and keep from him how he made me feel, and as Fern turned around, smiled, and waved her goodbye to me, I wiggled my free fingers at her in return and Jimmy walked me home, holding my hand all the way.

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The Lamentable Charles W. Berkhouse (A Story of Fiction)

Posted on January 5, 2010 | 1 comment

This is the story of Charles W. Berkhouse.  If you’re looking for a happy tale, one that will make you smile at the end with a fortunate feeling in your heart, you’re in the wrong place.  This is the tragic story of a man’s miserable life, one in which the tragedy starts from the day he was born.

An orphan left on the steps of a nunnery, newborn Charles was found one fall morning wrapped in a blanket with a note pinned to the his diaper, two simple words scribbled messily “Unwanted child” on the back of a coupon for five cents off steak.  The nuns sent him to their orphanage, a bare-walled, refurbished insane asylum rented out by the church for such events.  It was fourteen years before an unwanted Charles would use a different return address, when he would leave the orphanage and get a job in an up-and-coming five and dime store in the city.

Years would pass, small promotions would come, leading him to his career as an underpaid traveling salesman for the same company he’d worked for his whole life.

As an adult, Charles eventually had it all, a wife, a child on the way, a good job, car, house with the white picket fence, everything a man in the 1940s could possibly want.  Until that fateful day when Eunice, his wife, went into labor a few weeks earlier than expected.

They lost the baby; she would have been a beautiful little girl.  They’d prematurely named her Elizabeth if she was a girl, Robert if he was a boy, Betty or Bobby.  But little Betty never had even a minute outside of the womb.  Eunice was devastated.

It wasn’t even two months later that Eunice was hit by a car, driven by another traveling salesman, a competitor of Charles.  The driver was quoted in the daily paper as saying, “I was driving my route, I sell car brakes you know, best in the business, and I don’t even know where she came from.  One minute the road was clear, the next…”

Charles was devastated.  His life insurance company wanted to investigate the accident before they paid out, but Charles quickly told them to forget about it.  He sold the house and poured himself into his job, staying in fleabag motels and dirty boarding homes on the road, never looking back.  He carried his few belongings in a small suitcase he’d bought at a garage sale, which proclaimed visits to Paris, Madrid, Rome and a few other exotic places, none of which Charles would ever see for himself.  All he would know were the small dying towns on his sales route, places long forgotten as time passed.

Every year, at some point, his route would bring him back to Middletown, New York, where both Eunice and Betty were buried.  He would stop by a florists, pick up some cheap flowers, after all, his route wasn’t what it used to be, and stop by for a quiet visit.  He wouldn’t speak or cry, he would just stand for exactly five minutes, timing it on his watch, and then move on towards his next appointment.

It wasn’t until his fifth visit that he first saw the dog, a golden blur shooting by in the corner of his eye.  He spun, looking for it, and finally saw it standing directly behind a nearby tombstone.  It panted and walked up to him slowly, trying to get Charles to pet him.  Charles, being an orphan, never had a pet, even when Eunice begged him repeatedly for a cat every time a holiday came around.  He just didn’t see the point.

And so, he reacted the way he always did when a pet wanted attention from him.  He turned and walked away.  After all, his five minutes were up, and he had to meet Mr. Moskewitz in fifteen minutes.

The next year, once again he found the dog there, begging for attention, and again Charles shunned the poor beast, leaving it whining behind him.  As he left, he saw the caretaker and felt a need to complain.

“Sir, I find it extremely distracting and inappropriate that you allow your dog to just run around willy-nilly like that.  This is a serious, somber place.  Not somewhere for a dog to playfully run around and, ahem, do his business one can only assume.”  The caretaker looked at him curiously.

“We don’t got no dogs here, buddy.  Not allowed on the premises.  Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A year later, Charles once again found the dog near the grave, and once again ignored it.  But this time the dog walked up and started nuzzling his shin, and he kept trying to shoo it away with no luck.  Finally, he decided to look at the tag.  It had one simple letter in quotes, “E”.  He frowned and turned it over, looking for an address, but there wasn’t one.  The dog followed him out, only to get him a scolding from the caretaker, who reminded him that no dogs were allowed in the graveyard.

The following year, he expected to find the dog again, and was not disappointed when, as he approached the gravesite with his yearly small bouquet, the dog, E, once again jumped out from behind a nearby tree.  Charles walked up to it, let it sniff his hand and tried to pet it, at which E backed away from him.  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a dog bone he’d bought and tried feeding it to E, who just backed away more.  He left the treat on a small tombstone and went to his meeting with Mr. Meinheim.

Another year passed, and this time he was prepared with a leash, ready to capture this animal that was surely destined to be his companion in life.  He imagined the dog going on his route with him, visiting parks and fields, playing catch, having strangers take their photograph in each town, and even though he was awkward with animals, he liked the sound of it.  It was surely a sign that the dog was there every year, and that the caretaker didn’t recognize him as a common occurrence.  As Charles walked towards the spot excitedly, playing with the end of the leash in his pocket, he realized he’d forgotten the flowers.  He walked up and started looking for E, only to realize that the dog was nowhere to be found.

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Snow Days (A Story of Fiction)

Posted on December 19, 2009 | 2 comments

Found photograph from a yard sale.

We were out so long that our socks were soaked in the cold, icy water that had once been snow.  It snuck into our boots through tiny holes in our armor, somehow penetrating the elastic of our waterproof pants, our solar gloves that warmed our hands the longer we were out there, our fleece inner linings, even my polarized sunglasses seemed to be wet straight through.  I grabbed my coveted sled, the IceBreaker 3000 and told Madison it was time to go home.  She agreed.

As we walked home, lightweight titanium sleds folded up and placed on our backs, and the sun set, the world still glowed a whitish-blue and lights from houses and porch lights stood out in a yellowish tint, unless of course they were energy-savers, pronounced by a bluish-white.  As we approached home we could see our Mommom sitting in the bay window in her favorite chair, drinking tea.

We walked in the front door and began unloading our clothing, and after a quick shedding of layers we finally entered the living room where she sat.

“Have fun, kids?”

“Uh huh,” we answered in unison.

“Come on, I have some hot chocolate for you.”

“Is it low fat?” my little sister asked.

“Of course.”

“I like mine with soy milk,” I said.

“Of course,” she responded.

We ran over and picked up our respective glasses, and she leaned forward long enough for us to grab the fleece blanket that rested on the chair behind her, to snuggle up.

“Boy how things have changed,” she said, looking up at me and removing the sunglasses from my head, placing them on a nearby table.

Madison was the first to take the bait.  “How, Mommom Betty?”

She looked out, mesmerized by the slowly falling flakes, and smiled.

It was 1923, and the first snow day we’d had in years.  I waited impatiently for mom to finish cleaning the kitchen so she could approve of my snow clothing.  Finally she came in, drying her hands on her apron.

“Okay let’s see how you’ve done,” she said with a warm smile.

I stood at attention, ready for inspection.

“No, no, no Betty.  This is no good. Come on.”

She took me upstairs to the attic, pulled open the large, seldom-used bottom drawer and started rooting through it.  She pulled out pair after pair of long johns, and put them into a pile in front of me.  Finally, after four pairs of pants and two shirts she stopped.

“Okay get those snow pants off and put these on.”

“All of them?”

“Yes.  Do that while I go look for more shirts.”

I sighed and started taking off the pants, putting on pair after pair until I felt like I was twice my original size.  I ran down to her, looking around in other drawers in her room, anxious to go out and play.

Finally, mom gave up.  “I guess that’ll have to do.  Here are gloves and a hat.  Let me help you get those snow pants back on.”

I was struggling trying to put them on over the several pairs of long johns, unsuccessfully.  The pants just wouldn’t fit.

“Stand up,” mother said, smiling.  She held onto the pants as I jumped up and down, shoving my way into them.  “Okay that should do it.  Let’s get that coat on.  And next the gloves, okay hat, and now let’s put on your hood.”

I hated the hood.  I frowned at her.

“Frown all you want, young lady, I will not have you catching your death of cold out there.  That’s how people get sick.”

She tied the hood tight, too tight, and double-knotted it so I couldn’t possibly untie it, especially considering my mittens.

“Okay now for the socks,” she said handing me two more pairs of thick, heavy socks my great-grandmother had sent me. “Now boots!” as she shoved them on over the socks.  I was finally ready.

“Okay now go have fun.”

I ran outside to the garage, where dad had left my wooden sled for me against the big wooden door.  It was hard and tiring to walk with all of those layers, but well worth it.  Soon I would be sledding with my friends at the park.  I put the sled down into the snow, the metal rails scratching against the driveway underneath the snow a bit where father had shoveled.  I tried three times before successfully clutching the frayed twine that acted as a rope handle for it, finally grabbing it between the small and giant finger my mittens changed my hand into, and I was ready.

There was nothing like that moment walking to the playground as I could see small heads popping up at the top of the hill, then disappearing down into a snowy pit, screaming in happiness all the way down.  I could hear the fun from a block away, before I could even see it, and as I got closer I walked faster, anticipating the fun.

I made it.  I walked to the top of the hill, and saw all of my friends, unrecognizable in all those layers of clothing, at the bottom, waving me down.  They were making snow angels.  I brought my sled to the edge, sat down, grabbed the wooden handles that let me steer, and slowly pushed myself off of the top of the hill.

After a little over an hour, I knew I had to head home, and started the sad walk back.  Mother wouldn’t want me gone much longer, and certainly would be cross with me if I missed lunch.

I got home, placed the sled right where father had left it, and went to the back door, where I knew I had to go to take off layer upon layer of snowy, wet clothing.

And when I finally finished, mother had a hot chocolate sitting at the table, a real one made from milk and melted chocolate, and I sipped it, feeling the warmth flow through my shivering body.

At this point, she had fallen asleep, and I sipped my soy hot chocolate, finally warming up, and I, too felt that warmth from the drink.  As I got up to play Rock Band with Madison, I noticed something Mommom’s hand, and reached out, carefully taking it.

It was a photo, wrinkled and black and white, of my Mommom all bundled up, pulling her sled in front of our house.  She looked a lot like Madison.

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An Unlikely Start in Photography (A Story of Fiction)

Posted on December 11, 2009 | Leave a comment

I’ve been a photographer all my life.  No kidding.

It all started when I was six at my aunt’s wedding.  I don’t remember it perfectly, but pretend to remember it exactly how my dad tells it at every family event, be it Thanksgiving, Christmas, a birthday, or whatever.

I was sitting on the cold marble floor, squished between my father’s feet and the unpadded kneeler (we didn’t have it as nice as most churches do nowadays, the kneeler was little more than a piece of hardwood, a varnished board where we placed our knees whenever the priest told us to).  From my vantage point I had a limited view of the church itself, but a cornucopia of shoes to look at.  I could see my great grandmother’s old, wrinkly feet swelling out of a pair of old shoes.  I could see my Uncle Walter’s notoriously smelly feet that he chased me around with at our yearly summer vacations at the Jersey Shore.  I saw purses, umbrellas, tapping feet, bare feet taken out of painful shoes, and the general items you would see from down there.

“Pay attention!” my mom whispered every few minutes, as if I had any clue what was going on.  For a moment or two, so my dad says, I would climb back up into the pew, and feign listening to the music and the hundreds of quiet conversations between adults as they awaited the big moment.  And then I would be back down on the floor again, at this point trying to get out of the constrictive dress shirt I’d been forced into before we left.

And that was when I saw it. The bag, the big, black leather bag that dad took out for only special occasions.  It had his camera in it, this I knew, and I’d always been in love with his camera.  I was called a ham by my mother more than once, always smiling and changing my attitude as soon as it surfaced from it’s leather home.  I loved being in front of it, but especially loved the quick lessons dad had given me, even back then.  He loved talking about his electronics; he would have loved the digital age that he missed by a few decades.

So I wiggled over to it, through my father’s legs, and fought the button latch on the bag until it gave way.  Then I carefully took out the camera (he’d trained me well, and to this day I work gingerly with my equipment) and started by taking it out of the soft cloth he wrapped it in.  I saw the letters on it, spelling out B-R-O-W-N-I-E, and I ran my fingers over them, feeling the letters as I’d seen my dad do hundreds of times.  I looked up at him, and he was facing the pew behind him, along with my mother, apparently talking about the weather with my great-grandmother.  I unlocked the button I knew I had to push and started looking into the viewfinder at the world of people’s feet.  I took a few shots of feet in different directions, unnoticed by my father.

If I hadn’t stopped for a moment, I probably would have missed the hushing of the whole church, and it was the silence that caught my ears first.  Then the loud church music began, and everyone turned and looked towards the back of the church.  I wanted to know what was going on, but wasn’t ready to give up playing with the camera, so instead I peered around the side of the pew from the floor where I was sitting.

I could see my aunt, dressed in all white, walking down the aisle with my Poppop.  She had a see-through white cloth over her face, but I could tell it was her.  I thought she looked really pretty, and thought I should take a photograph so she could see how pretty she looked.  So I took a series of shots from where I was on the floor.

I realized as she passed that everyone was turning around, so I quickly put the camera back in its cloth and then returned it to its black leather home before my dad noticed.

Weeks later, my aunt visited.  She told us all about her honeymoon, whatever that was (back then I assumed it had to do with bees and the night sky) and thanked my dad for sending the film, which she had developed and could not stop talking about a few of the photographs.

My father beamed with pride, happy to hear how much she appreciated his work.  He was a bus driver by trade, but had always dreamed of being a professional photographer.  My aunt kept talking about a few of the pictures specifically, how they were so different and creative, and how none of her friends ever had photos like his to remember their wedding by.  Finally, she produced the album, and excitedly flipped to the photographs she had attributed to him, only to have him react with utter surprise.

“I didn’t take these.”

“But they came from your film!”

“I didn’t take them.  I didn’t even use my camera during the ceremony, the whole time it was right on the floor by…”

And then they all looked at me.  I smiled my biggest smile, as if they were taking my photograph.

Don’t forget to check back regularly as I continue the series of short fiction based on random old photos I find!

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