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JUST LIKE DIFF’RENT STROKES By: Paul Edmonds

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Tears spill down Frankie’s cheeks as the grainy video plays in choppy spurts underneath the thin sheet of dust dressing his computer screen.  A series of links has led him to YouTube and, specifically, the very special episode of Diff’rent Strokes where Arnold and his friend Dudley wander into the sights of a bicycle shop owner with a penchant for young boys and the well-oiled personality of a career seducer of the pubescent.  Frankie’s gut lurches in and out to the rhythm of the laugh track—still roaring as Dudley zombies out of the man’s bathroom, shirtless and rubbing his head—and he puts a hand out in front of him, pleading with the video to stop or else he’s going to piss himself.

The credits finally roll, drawing the curtain on the old sitcom and forcing Frankie’s heartbeat back towards its regular rate of ticking and tocking.  He rises from his chair and uses the wall to ease his exit from the room as his legs spasm from the last ghosts of laughter fizzing inside his body like a burned-up firework.

He walks into the kitchen and lights a cigarette.  The show replays in his mind as fragments of pictures and dialogue.  A stray chuckle darts up his throat and causes him to choke on the long drag he just pulled from his cigarette.  Through the smoke and tears he vaguely remembers that the actor who played the pedophile also played the part of a repairman in old television spots for Maytag washers and dryers.  Frankie smiles at this and tosses his spent butt into the sink.  “Quite a range,” he quips to the empty kitchen.  “Guy deserves an Emmy.”

#

Lloyd drives down the middle of the street grasping a limp, moist piece of paper.  The address that had been carefully transcribed on the top of the page has been smudged into an almost-unrecognizable mess by his thick, yellowing perspiration.  His tiny eyes look bloodshot and nervous.

A ball rolls into the street before him, followed by a pink-faced moppet of a girl sprinting after it.  Lloyd slams on the brakes and has his window rolled down before the screeching tires can finish sending their echo through the tall oaks that line the sidewalk.

“Look where you’re going, you little bitch!” he bellows, his head poking out of the window, his smoldering ferret eyes glossing-over with anger.  The girl abandons her ball and runs through a pricker bush and into her house.

Lloyd shakes his head, pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes and mumbling soft incantations.  Stop stop stop they’ll send you back dummy stop stop stop. He throws open the glove box, downs two aspirin dry, and stares at his paper with simmering frustration.

#

Convenient and questionable conclusions—random, but more often the result of some cosmic calculation—distribute themselves freely among the farcical land of television studios and canned laughter, and the banal, less saccharine places we call reality.  This is evident in the climax to this story, the culprit here being a house number worn faded from sunshine and rain to look more like a six than an eight.  Frankie answers his front door, takes one look at Lloyd in his repairman uniform, and falls to his knees.  His face turns the color of a Fuji apple.  Laughter rumbles in the hollows of his bones.

Lloyd, his delicate self-esteem collapsing into billowing folds of melted wax in the shadow of the young man laughing at him, three years of progress at the hospital popping and sparking into wisps of ash, brings his heavy boot into Frankie’s mouth and sends him sliding across the linoleum floor.

Frankie keeps laughing, his funny bone having hijacked the rest of his body, pushing back the fear and panic struggling to take the helm.  His mind spirals into a whirlwind, and as he chokes on blood and teeth, wet snorts sending sprays into Lloyd’s face, he thinks of Diff’rent Strokes, and how he’ll too be canceled like some old show, dropped from the airwaves summarily, remembered now and again as a relic of nostalgia and good humor.

—
©2009 Paul Edmonds

Paul Edmonds’ recent credits include fiction in Midnight Screaming, Macabre Cadaver, and The Monsters Next Door. He lives in Massachusetts.

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STRAWBERRY GELATO By: Paul Edmonds

Friday, April 24th, 2009

I’ve been roaming the streets all afternoon, and now ribbons of orange taffy stretch across the sky.  Night is closing in, quietly, hoping to lay low until it’s too late for protest, like a rapist creeping up behind you, all shallow breaths and quick heart beats, waiting for the split second your senses drift so he can pounce on you.

It was a routine eye exam.  I just needed new reading glasses.  “It’s still a few years off,” my doctor had said, “but it’s inevitable, and you need to make the appropriate preparations.”  The look on his face was a look I’d seen a thousand times on the faces of television doctors as they slinked into waiting rooms, their surgical masks pulled down past their chins. My body became the glowing end of a match while my eyes still throbbed from the bright green light of my doctor’s headset.

I pass an ice cream shop.  Gelato spans the length of a glass display case.  Colors of every persuasion spill from large metal tubs.  I’m reminded of the time Carol and I vacationed in Florence.  We sat side-by-side in metal chairs on the sidewalk eating strawberry gelato and waffle biscuits.  Wisps of her black hair brushed against my lips and returned to her shoulders all sticky and sweet.  Before long we witnessed a Vespa collide with a small car in front of the café. Carol had pressed her wet face into my shirt.  Trickles of people wandered over to the accident, tending to the young man, his busted limbs reconfigured in some unnatural fashion.  His blood collected in a small hole in the street where a stone had been dislodged.  The sun ripped through its shroud of charcoal clouds and cast a spray of brilliant light onto the blood.  The wind forced ripples through the swelling pool.  I don’t know if the young man lived, but I remembered the subtleties of his sun-splashed juices, and mixed up a few gallons of matching paint from memory when I redecorated my office later that year.

I sit on a bench next to a mailbox and stare at the park across the street.  I think of Carol.  I slam my eyes shut and run through every detail of her face, her naked body.  I need to be sure I’ll remember. Just like I remembered the color of that young man’s spent fluids. I’ll need to stockpile images to marry with tastes and textures, sounds and smells.  Maybe I’ll become one of those guys who gains some Pollyanna perspective on life once the switch behind my eyes is flicked off forever.  I could volunteer, give motivational speeches. Maybe I’ll get a dog.  A nice dog to fetch me beers and help me dress once Carol packs her belongings and steals away in the dead of night, leaving a hand-written note behind on a single sheet of flower-scented paper, explaining how she hates herself for what she’s doing and that I’ll be better off without her.  I’ll get someone to read it to me.

A blanket of stars snuffs the last of the sunlight.  I’m still on the bench.  My ass is numb.  I don’t want to go home.  Home is bright colors, sharp angles.  A study in modern design and taste.  Carol and I have made our house a museum.  Now one of its curators will have to resign.

The hours pass.  Everything looks ugly under the dull orange streetlights.  A boy stumbles past, staggering into the street.  He tips his baseball cap to me and slurs a few words.  His eyes are shimmering orbs of tears and moonlight.  He returns to the sidewalk and looks like half a gimp as his legs struggle to work in tandem with his brain.

I rise from the bench and follow the boy.  His shadow moves along the brick facades of the old buildings.  He passes the ice cream shop.  I stop walking and watch him enter the mouth of an alleyway.  He falls against a wall and slides slowly, almost gracefully to the dusty concrete.  He removes a bottle of something from the kangaroo pouch of his sweatshirt and takes a sip.  I walk into the ice cream shop and ask if they have strawberry gelato.  “Yeah,” the ice cream girl says, chewing on her nail polish.  I’ll have a small, I say.  She scoops the gelato into a plastic cup and spears it with a tiny red spoon.  I step outside and eat slowly, letting the gelato melt on my tongue and crawl down my throat.  The boy continues to take pulls from his bottle and eventually retreats deeper into the brown darkness of the alley.

An hour later and I’m sitting on the steps of my doctor’s office.  I’m so excited!  I’m just going to wait here all night.  Carol will understand.  She’ll be so thrilled when this is all over that she’ll wrap her arms around me, all weepy and pink-faced, happy that we dodged a nasty bullet.  I’ll greet the doctor when he gets in tomorrow morning.  I’ll explain what I did, and he’ll fix everything.  Then I’ll be on my way.  It’s still a while before he’ll be here, but that shouldn’t be a problem.  I didn’t eat all of my gelato, and what’s left should be enough to keep the boy’s beautiful brown eyes cool until the doctor can make the switch.

—
©2009 Paul Edmonds

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