One Penny

December 25, 2023January 16, 2024 ~ Richard Schulte ~ Leave a comment

Another day of work. Another day putting up another wall, wiping away sweat. Rummaging through his toolbox searching for drywall screws, Leo turned up a copper washer.

He regarded the shining thing.

What’s this for? Leo wondered.

The copper suggested plumbing. But he wasn’t sure.

Why had he kept this thing in his toolbox?

Very strangely, the thin washer reminded him of his childhood: the penny placed on railroad tracks that was squashed by a passing train.

Funny that he still remembered.

He had been three or four years old. He had stood near railroad tracks behind his great grandparents’ mountain cabin. Several times a day a huge freight train would rumble past.

Leo couldn’t recall the faces of his great grandparents or the cabin or anything else from that long ago time. All he could remember was the thrill of that moment when, encouraged by his father, he placed an ordinary penny on the rail. Then the sudden mighty roar of the freight train thundering dangerously past.

He remembered leaning over to pick up the transformed coin.

The penny’s one cent value had been obliterated. The copper, squashed paper thin. had become perfectly smooth and shiny. It had turned pure. A child’s penny had become infinitely more valuable.

So many years later, why did Leo still remember that penny and that train?

One was a small thing of little worth. The other, a juggernaut, almost here, quickly gone, was like the swift, inexorable passage of time.

Where was his penny now?

Leo stared at the shining copper washer in his hand.

Chuckling, he dropped it back into his toolbox.

Another Rain

April 25, 2023June 10, 2023 ~ Richard Schulte ~ Leave a comment

It never rains in Southern California?

Not true.

Jesse fought with his umbrella against the wind and rain. He jumped over a flooded gutter as he dashed toward the bus stop.

His shoes were wet, but he knew they would dry a little on the bus. And he did love the smell of rain.

Jesse noticed someone in a poncho walking down the other side of the boulevard and memories flashed to mind.

Twenty years ago, finally out of school and in the great big world on his own, Jesse had considered hiking the Appalachian Trail. The entire long trail: over two thousand miles from Georgia to Maine. He’d read several books. He’d made an exciting decision. He’d bought and organized hiking gear while refining ever more detailed plans. He had trained for weeks on neighborhood hills with a forty pound backpack. He’d booked a flight.

Hiking those first spring days in Georgia and North Carolina had been heaven. Deep green forests and that chill, sweet-smelling mountain air.

Two weeks later, as he neared the Great Smoky Mountains, the rain began.

The first rainy night he camped in mud and discovered his tent wasn’t watertight. He woke with his sleeping bag in a pool of water.

In a downpour the next day his boots became sloshy. The rain wouldn’t end. The contents of his backpack, including every stitch of clothing, became hopelessly soaked.

As he set up his tent for another night he began to shiver violently. He’d read about hypothermia and wondered what might happen. He was alone. He lay in his sleeping bag half the night before he became warm. Why am I doing this? he began to wonder.

For three straight days and nights it rained. Then, in the Great Smoky Mountains, it began to snow.

Freezing, slipping, slimy with mud, streaming with sweat, shivering when not hiking up and down the steep endless mountain ridges, exhausted, lonely, feet blistered, every bone and muscle painful, Jesse succombed to his life’s worst depression. Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this?

I don’t need this, he finally decided.

After conquering over two hundred miles of trail, Jesse had given up. Dejected, holding back tears, he’d hitched a ride on the highway at Newfound Gap, rode into the nearest town, and fled to sunny Southern California, the place he called home, where it never rained.

Jesse folded his wet umbrella as he stepped into the bus stop shelter. A tree outside the glass shelter had turned bright green. The rain smelled very good.

A man inside the shelter was gazing at passing cars. Suddenly the man turned to speak. “They told me when I moved here it wouldn’t rain. I bought these shoes yesterday and now they’re ruined. God, I hate it here.

“It’s really that bad?” Jesse asked.

The man glared at him miserably.

Mirrors

March 21, 2023June 15, 2023 ~ Richard Schulte ~ Leave a comment

“My mirrors make people go crazy,” laughed the bartender.

Stools at the bar looked upon a row of bottles and a large framed mirror. Reflected in the mirror was an identical mirror hanging on the opposite wall. I recognized the optical phenomenon. How reflections of my own face echoed infinitely and diminished.

I set my glass down and searched the distance.

I saw my face, repeated, strung out like drops of rain falling toward a silver lake. My endless faces fell away, receded, shrank, seemed to vanish. I was able to count eleven faces until I became a microscopic blur. No–I could barely see one face that squinted.

The face nearest me was also squinting.

I laughed.

I turned to the bartender.

“What if my eyes were as powerful as that new space telescope?” I wondered. “The one that can see all the way to the edge of the Universe.”

“Why go crazy looking? It’s the same you.”

Dale’s Tree

January 21, 2023February 28, 2023 ~ Richard Schulte ~ 2 Comments

Dale had planted a tree in a park. He had been a young boy on that Arbor Day.

Dale wanted to show his great grandson the tree he had planted.

The two walked through the park but Dale recognized nothing. All that he saw was strange.

Searching for his long-ago tree, Dale hopelessly regarded the immense oaks. They rose high above him, a confusion of furrowed trunks that cast spidery shadows. These trees, thought Dale, were very old. How could they possibly be so old?

Dale moved slowly and despaired he would never find the tree he had planted.

Sudden laughter made him spin around.

His great grandson had climbed up onto a nearby branch and was smiling down at him. “Is this your tree?”

“Well, maybe!”

Azima’s Birds

August 20, 2022August 21, 2022 ~ Richard Schulte ~ Leave a comment

Ten large bird feeders hung in Azima’s front yard.

The next-door neighbor hated it. Everyone else on the street loved it.

Hundreds of birds descended on Azima’s yard every morning when he refilled the feeders with bags of fresh seed. Mourning doves, pigeons, house finches, goldfinches, chickadees, cowbirds, dark-eyed juncos, bright grosbeaks, warblers, cardinals, blue jays, blackbirds, speckled starlings, meteor showers of sparrows . . . Children, walking to school past Azima’s house, turned to stare.

The next-door neighbor complained.

Azima didn’t care.

. . .

When Azima was a boy he watched his father sprinkle bird seed on the kitchen window sill. A tiny sparrow had been tapping on the window for days.

“It’s a sign,” his mother warned. “Just before Grandfather passed, a bird came tapping on the window. All day long it tapped on the glass. You hear stories about how that happens to other people, too. Before a loved one dies.”

Azima’s father hated bird droppings. So one morning Azima’s father brought Azima outside and showed him how to sprinkle bird seed laced with rat poison on the window sill.

The very next morning Azima sought the tiny sparrow. It lay on brown leaves near the honeysuckle under the kitchen window. He’d held the murdered thing in the palm of his hand. He looked at the once-living eyes. The sparrow was weightless. It was like a thing made of paper.

. . .

Using a cane, Azima hobbled outside to his small front yard. He carried a large bag of the very best seed. Children walking to school stopped to stare at the whirlwind of flying feathers and the crazy old man.

The next-door neighbor shouted over the hedge: “Those birds are shitting everywhere!”

Azima didn’t care.

The Snipe Hunt

August 6, 2022August 31, 2022 ~ Richard Schulte ~ 2 Comments

Fifty eight adventurers sat at folding tables in a building made of pine logs. It was summer. They were eating hamburgers.

“You have two choices,” explained a camp counselor while everyone guzzled. “After dinner you can either go with me on a snipe hunt, or you can follow Janine down to the lake. She’ll show you how to make paper sky lanterns. Does anyone want to go on the snipe hunt?”

Many hands shot up.

“You should probably know,” the counselor explained, “snipes aren’t real. There are no snipes. All we’ll do is hike up the hill behind the cabins and poke around in the dark. We won’t actually find anything.”

Blake continued to hold his hand up. Nobody else did.

. . .

Blake followed the counselor up the steep desert hill. Both carried flashlights. After nightfall the blazing heat had rapidly vanished. The air was already chilly.

Two small wavering circles of light fell upon cacti and broken rock. The counselor stopped to beat on a thorny bush beside the trail with his hiking stick. “Keep a sharp lookout!” he urged with enthusiasm. “It’s a well known fact that snipes hide around here!”

Blake moved past the counselor and plunged ahead into the night’s darkness. The rough trail, at times difficult to follow, cut back and forth up the rocky hill and the climb was slow.

“Don’t forget to hit the bushes with your stick,” the counselor prompted.

Blake ignored him. He continued up the trail. As he climbed away from the cabins and their dwindling light, the black sky deepened. Sprinkled stars appeared.

It would be ridiculous, Blake understood, to search for things that aren’t real. But there was strange mystery in the deepening night–there was freedom, the limitless air, the unknown–

He climbed eagerly. He wanted to see what starlight falling from unreachable distances might touch.

The night became colder. His flashlight wavered right and left. All signs of the trail had disappeared.

“Don’t get too far ahead of me!” the counselor shouted. “Don’t become lost!”

Then, Blake, turning to peer into even more darkness, saw them. A handful of sky lanterns. Small lights slowly rising among the stars.

They rose like tiny distant suns. As he stood, he watched them drift away, becoming fainter.

One after another they winked out.

Nothing was left above but those unreachable stars.

“Beautiful, weren’t they?” the counselor said coming up beside him. “It was worth climbing up here just to see that. But it’s getting late. We should turn back.”

“Why?”

Blake ignored the counselor and started climbing the steep hill again, more restless than before. The night breeze was increasing, becoming colder. The wavering circle of light offered by his flashlight discovered more of the same cacti and rocks. The counselor quietly followed.

What can a person up here actually find? Blake wondered. More prickly cacti, more of the same broken rock, and perhaps, eventually, the summit of this one barren desert hill, and a night sky with far horizons filled with even more stars. Things nobody else will see.

Perhaps it was the sharpening wind, or his adjusting eyes, but as he climbed toward the stars the night became more alive. He heard rustlings, saw shapes and shadows swaying slightly, moving on the ground around him. Certainly not snipes. But there was a thrilling, unexplainable something up here. Probably only the wind.

Blake was sure he could see the hill’s top. He was almost there. The stars were all around.

In the gentle starlight, he switched off his flashlight and looked all around with wonder.

But he could go higher.

Looking up, he thought he could see a thing moving on the dark hill’s summit. Something very small and glimmering.

He climbed toward it.

“I found a snipe!” shouted Blake.

The counselor came up, his light off, too.

And there it was.

A fragile living thing.

Sent by wishful hands toward the stars, a paper sky lantern had returned to Earth. It had tangled in a low cactus, where, extinguished, it shivered in the cold wind and faintly reflected starlight.

The Weed

March 26, 2022February 25, 2023 ~ Richard Schulte ~ 1 Comment

Jules sipped a rum and tonic by the rooftop pool. He regarded a weed in a flower box. He didn’t recall seeing it before.

The crooked, gangling weed must have grown quickly. It towered above the trimmed flowers. Its wild green had unfurled like a flag.

Jules relaxed in his chaise lounge and knew that if he carefully watched the weed for hours and hours he’d observe its ascent. He took another sip.

There was a sudden vision of Jack’s beanstalk.

He saw the green weed growing higher.

The weed rose from the rooftop pool and the surrounding rooftops up into blue sky, and the city streets below became very small. The weed penetrated a white cloud. It emerged above the cloud and continued to grow.

It passed a flying dragon.

It passed a witch on her broomstick.

It neared a castle.

From the castle an astonished giant watched the green weed shooting past.

The weed left Earth’s atmosphere and passed a cow jumping over the moon.

The weed, whose seed must have been blown to the rooftop on the wind, passed Martian canals, a whirling space ship, and peculiar stone heads on a desert island. It passed a mummy walking upon the rings of Saturn. It passed ghosts and angels.

It passed Hermes returning to Mount Olympus, a flaming Firebird, and the imagination of a young boy taking flight.

It passed through galaxies containing minute planets where civilizations rose and fell like dust and the stars were too numerous for any sane person to count.

Jules sipped his rum and tonic by the pool on the rooftop. Fairy tales.

The tall weed in the flower box disrupted his view of the city.

He sprang from his chaise lounge and pulled it.

A Small, Small World

February 20, 2022May 9, 2022 ~ Richard Schulte ~ Leave a comment

An ice cream truck was near.

…it’s a small world after all…

Zella waved goodbye to the school bus driver, turned around and sprinted down the sidewalk toward the cheerfully ringing chime.