Peter Cherches

Deux Contes

 

 

A Statement

 

I know cloth masks aren’t supposed to be as effective as surgical masks or N95, but I wanted to make a statement, so I wore my Kent State mask, featuring a silkscreen of that iconic photo of the shell-shocked young woman leaning over the body of a young man who had just been shot, purchased from the online pandemic pop-up shop of an organization that raises funds for social change initiatives. I had considered one of the other styles, the iconic Vietnam war photo by Eddie Adams of the Viet Cong prisoner of war being shot in the head by a general, the shutter capturing the point of the bullet’s impact, but I thought that was just too graphic, that it would upset my fellow pandemic maskers too much, so I chose the more genteel of the two. The Kent State photo was taken by a photojournalism major named John Filo. He won a Pulitzer Prize for it. 

 

 I don’t think too many people even noticed my mask, though I did see some telling eye action on a few people’s upper faces.

 

I did feel somewhat vindicated when I passed four guys standing on the corner, singing harmony behind coordinated blue surgical masks. They were doing “I Only Have Eyes for You,” in the Flamingos’ arrangement, shoo-bop shoo-bop, but when they saw me they quickly changed their tune. One guy, the lead tenor, sang, “How can you run when you know?” Then the others chimed in, in harmony, “Four dead in Ohio. Four dead in Ohio.”

 

 

 

Back to School

 

In my dream I was back in third grade. We were sitting at our wooden desks, with now-vestigial inkwells and palimpsests of graffiti from various years past, such as names and hearts and “Rocco loves Angie” and the occasional crudely drawn cock and balls, etched into the wood with pen knives, all of us wearing masks over our noses and mouths in response to the great pandemic of 1965. Miss Valentine, who would soon become Mrs. Day, stood in front of the class, telling us about all the great advances in immunology in recent years. Then she stopped and aimed her remarks at a kid in the back row, Scot, whom we all called Scot the Snot, not because he was snotty, but because he had a perennially runny nose as well as congealed mucus encrusting his nostrils. “Scot Merkin!” she shouted. “Where’s your mask.”

 

In a quivering voice, on the verge of tears, he said, “I’m sorry, Miss Valentine, but my mask has snot all over it.”

 

“Well,” she said, “you’ll just have to get another mask. And don’t say ‘snot,’ that’s vulgar; say ‘mucus.’”

 

“But every time I put a new mask on it gets full of snot, um, mucus.”

 

“Well, we can’t have you sitting here without a mask. Go to the nurse for the time being and we’ll see what we can do.”

 

Scot left the room in tears.

 

Then Johnny Involtini, one of the tough boys, both of whose parents had voted for Goldwater, took off his mask.

 

“What are you doing, Johnny?” Miss Valentine gasped.

 

“I got snot too,” he said. “I ain’t wearin’ no stupid mask.”

 

“I’m not wearing any stupid mask,” she corrected, just before I woke up with a runny nose.

 

 

 

Called “one of the innovators of the short short story” by Publishers Weekly, Peter Cherches is a writer, singer and lyricist. Over the past 40 years, his work, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in dozens of magazines, anthologies and websites, including Transatlantic Review, Bomb, North American Review, Semiotext(e), Poetry 180, and Danse Macabre. Poet Billy Collins wrote, “To Gödel, Escher, and Bach we might consider adding Peter Cherches.” Whistler’s Mother’s Son is his most recent collection from Pelekinesis.