Trois Contes

M. Leona Godin ~ Peter McMillan ~ Dennis Roth

 

 

 

Dr. M. Leona Godin

The Buffoon of Saint-Ovide

 

[Hospice Quinze-Vingts, 1772]

 

When the first fat coin smacked my face, I had to admit Monsieur might have been right about his crazy money making venture! Of course that wasn’t my first thought. My first thought was, “Ow, what the hell?” And my second thought was, “Shit! Where’d it go?” I wanted to look for it, but I thought that if Monsieur saw me groping around in the dirt for it, he’d be on my ass yelling, “Get back to your banging and scraping blind man!”

 

The scoundrel had got us to agree to divide The take fifty-fifty, i.e., He would get half and the ten of us would have to split the rest. So I bet you’re thinking, “Well now, doesn’t that sound fair.” And of course we recognized the bamboozle. After all, we’d be doing all the work, making asses of ourselves etc.  But here’s the thing, it was his idea. I mean, how could we have known you people would be so easily entertained? The sighted have very strange taste!

 

Monsieur had also got us our costumes and instruments, such as they were. But he hadn’t warned us about coins being flung at our faces, so after the coin bounced off my face and into the dirt, I decided to do a subtle reconnaissance. It was a delicate operation considering the fact that I was supposed to be playing the fiddle with the stick or whatever it’s called, and all that scraping and banging and yelling and clapping made it pretty difficult to concentrate on the business of my big toe.

 

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m used to a tranquil or meditative lifestyle. I mean, I live with three hundred blind people who are constantly bashing around and messing with each other. It’s not the Paris madhouse, but it sure can get crazy in here! Still, you cannot imagine how damn loud it was at the Saint-Ovide Fair that night. There must have been a thousand people, all going crazy for our blind buffoonery!

 

Anyway, while my big toe was still looking around for my coin, I heard Jacques (who was next to me), go “Ooph!” I guessed that he’d been hit with a coin of his own.

 

Then I realized he was crawling around in the dirt for it. “Holy horse manure!” I said to myself, “So much for subtlety. That guy’s as subtle as an elephant in a tutu. As subtle as that skinny, syphilitic whore with the oozing boob who calls herself Jubilee. As subtle as the paper spectacles rimming my blind eyes and the dunce cap with ass’s ears sitting on my head. As subtle as Denis, who suddenly starts braying like an ass.  Seriously?! Does he think he’s singing? Amazing. The stupid crowd is eating it up. This is war!”

 

I was not about to be outdone by that clown, so I wagged my head a little and trotted in place like a dancing donkey. It worked! People banged their tankards and cheered. Encouraged, I wagged more vigorously and trotted with gusto, and yep, brayed out some bits of song too.

 

All of a sudden the coins came fast and furious, too many to count. For a few exhilarating moments I felt like I had found my calling. I would be an entertainer. Make a ton of money. Delusions of grandeur, as ridiculous as any of Jacques’s, who always comes home from a day’s begging, convinced that the grand lady who’d tossed him a penny would certainly adopt him as her blind pet project.

 

I don’t indulge in that kind of bullshit, and I’ll tell you why. Because just when you think you might be able to do something other than live with a bunch of disgusting blind guys who are so horny they rub against anything that breathes, and smell like piss and moldy cheese twenty four seven, just when you think you might be able to get a taste of some other life, that other life jumps up, smacks you on the forehead, and says, “Get real blind man. You will never amount to anything.”

 

Case in point: The coins were flying, high velocity, dropping all around. Excited and reckless, I bent over to do, I don’t know, some kind of spastic crouching jogging thing, and slammed my eyeball, such as it was, into the corner of the music stand in front of me.

 

The music stands had been set up in front of each of us with their sheets of music facing the spectators. Nice comic touch, eh?! But I’d forgotten it was there. Being blind is so marvelous.

 

Anyway, it really hurt. Started gushing. People laughed. But I couldn’t keep up the dancing donkey routine anymore. Besides, now all the guys were dancing. They’d realized it was solid gold. I heard later that Monsieur wanted more dancing as the crowd loved it, but by then I was feeling quite miserable, to say the least.

 

My mangled eyeball got infected, of course, and for the next six weeks I lay on my cot, certain I was dying. To add to my misery, the guys came back every night from the “Café of the Blind,” as it had been dubbed in our honor, with full pockets, whores, and massively inflated egos. They thought they were made, but I knew it wouldn’t last. And I was right.

 

After a month the crowds lost interest. Monsieur said thanks but he wouldn’t need their services anymore. He told them to run along back to their pathetic lives. (Our pathetic lives.) But at least they got that month. All I got was this stupid empty eye socket.

 

 

 

Dr. M. Leona Godin is a blind writer, performer and doctor of philosophy in New York City. She has written and produced two plays: The Star of Happiness and The Spectator & the Blind Man. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Newtown Literary, FLAPPERHOUSE and Quail Bell Magazine. You can read all things Godin at http://www.drmlgodin.com/ and follow her on Twitter @DrMLGodin

 

 

 

Peter McMillan

The Script

 

In the script, a young man makes his way through a desolate landscape of waist-high weeds and scrap metal to the towering city of steel and glass. It is a story of youth and quests and adversity and ultimately triumph.

 

The script needed a main character, so the author held auditions.

 

A, an experienced character, liked the script and said he would be committed to following it verbatim. This pleased the author. B, young and starry-eyed, recommended a different setting—a desert with the only prop being a parachute. The author politely dismissed B, having long ago failed in his own use a similar device in a short story. C suggested that an already successful character, like himself, who comes home to discover his vulnerability and his emptiness, would make the script more sophisticated and mature. The author advised that a different script might be more appropriate for him.

 

The author accepted A, and A maintained his pliable facade during the early going. Up to a point, A was very enthusiastic about the setting and the plot. Nevertheless, the setting which he re-described as a post-apocalyptic wasteland should be THE setting. In the distance, there could still be a magnificent, bright city on a hill, but it had to be unattainable and so always in the backdrop. The main character would endlessly seek to reach the city but would be prevented by one setback after another. Unable to leave the outer region, he would come to recognize that he was one of its denizens, forever imprisoned to live in the foreground of a future he would never enjoy.

 

Meanwhile, the author reluctantly gave in to the demands of A. He was resigned but insisted on preserving at least the outlines of his story. But the outlines blurred to extinction when A hooked up with a band of marauding outlaws. The author then entered into secret negotiations with C who called in a few favors and managed to get A removed. With the author's gratitude, C proceeded to make his way to the city, though by a more straightforward approach. Altered script in hand, C arrived in a private plane.

 

News of a stock market crash was reverberating through the city, but C, calm and unflappable, was not detoured from the parties, galas and fundraisers that were his obligation. However, it started coming unraveled when the district attorney filed fraud charges. That's when the author perked up and took notice. Then came the allegations of sexual debauchery, murder, and even human trafficking. That was it. The author took over the script and wrote C out, begging B to come to the rescue.

 

A substantial amount of re-work was required to accommodate B's script rewrites and scene changes. As a goodwill gesture, the author invited A and C to join in for the opening scene. It was staged on a mile-high mesa a hundred miles from the nearest town. With all three characters together, the author deleted the parachute.

 

 

Peter McMillan is a freelance writer and ESL instructor who lives on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario with his wife and two flat-coated retrievers.

 

 

 

Dennis Roth

I See You

 

A shot and a scream. Familiar whisperings of night creatures, dank smells of decaying leaves, crunches from the gravelly path, an evening’s walk in the woods disrupted. It came from high up towards the ridge. Her heart raced, not so much frightened as surprised. Feral cats often would cry out in the night and a falling limb could sound like an exploding shell. She did consider going home but, it was her anniversary, after all, she continued upward toward the noises. As she approached the faint outline of her favorite meditation site, the perfect out-cropping of rock, her calmness returned. She sat.

 

And there he was.

 

Below in the clearing was a man standing alone, facing away, the same height as her husband, dressed in clothes similar to his, a baseball cap like his, too. Holding something. A stick, a cane, a gun? An ordinary guy like one of her neighbors. Or her husband. 

 

She merged with the rocky seat under the dark trees. She reasoned that the thing the man carried must be a rifle. The one that made the gunshot, that caused the scream. If she moved, she would be found.  Like being pinned at chess: a queen and a rook; she and a rock.       

 

She waited.

 

She had arrived, Bill knew. He knew that she held motionless on the outcrop able to do no more than blink. She would not move until it was over.

 

She knew, too. “Another of Bill’s anniversary games.” A slight smile, “Not a bad prank; a shot and a scream. But his ball cap was too obvious. This year I’ll be the winner.”

 

The man turned, angled his rifle slightly forward, aimed the laser scope. He fired three rounds of blanks.

 

She jumped up laughing, pointing at him, “I saw you first. I win!”

 

Her words were still reaching the man in the clearing as she felt the cold metal on the back of her head. From the concealing bushes her husband had softly crept up, put a gun to her head, then whispered, “No, I win.”

 

 

 

Dennis Roth is an emerging writer having retired from his structural engineering firm, ocean sailing, and watercolor painting. He now turns his creative energies to words in both short stories and poetry. He and his wife live in Pittsburgh, PA.