Peter Cherches

Due Storie

 

The Kidney

 

When I was an undergraduate at Brooklyn College I used to hang out at a bar called The Jolly Bull Pub. The other regulars included a classmate of mine—a fellow English major—and a toothless old hag barfly. My friend would always flirt with the hag, as a joke, but one night he and the hag were both real drunk, and she ended up going home with him. And even more surprising, it wasn’t just a one-night stand—it turned into a hot and heavy affair. This guy had fallen madly in love with the hag, head over heels. They became inseparable. Until she went into the hospital, that is. It turns out she needed an operation, a kidney transplant, and my friend had agreed to be the donor.

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The operation was a success, and my friend visited the hag in her hospital room every day. Until one day, when she told him not to return, that she didn't want to see him anymore. It was over, she said, she had been leading him on all along, she only wanted him for his kidney.  

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Well, my friend was crushed when he heard this, and he just lost it, completely. He started drinking more and more and stopped going to classes. He’d sit at the Jolly Bull all day, cadging drinks from the other customers. He hardly ever spoke. And when he did speak, it was only to ask for another drink—except, every once in a while he’d begin to chant a single word, over and over and over, like a mantra. “Kidney. Kidney. Kidney.  Kidney....”

 

The Finger

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Patti was always finding money on the street. She told me that the secret was to always look down when walking, especially near parking meters. Patti found hundreds of dimes and quarters this way, and occasionally a twenty-dollar bill. Then, one day, she found a finger—a severed finger with a gold wedding band around it. It repulsed her, but she knew she had to pick it up and bring it to the police. So she wrapped it in a Kleenex and put it in her purse. She took a cab to the police station and handed the finger over to the officer at the desk, explaining where she had found it. The policeman assured her that there would be a thorough investigation and asked Patti for her address, in case there were any further questions. 

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For months Patti couldn’t get the finger out of her mind. Her dreams were peopled with severed fingers and fingerless men. She had one dream where, at her own wedding, as she was putting the ring on the groom’s finger, the finger fell off the groom’s hand onto the floor. She woke up screaming. 

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She stopped looking down when she was out walking. She didn’t want to know what was on the street, didn’t care how much money she was passing up. And eventually she forgot the finger. That is, until one day about a year later, when a policeman rang her doorbell and handed her a package. 

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Nobody had claimed the finger, so now it was hers.

 

An old friend of the Macabre, Peter Cherches' new short prose collection, Whistler's Mother's Son, is available now. He writes from New York City.

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