Two Stories by Pamela Painter
The guy in the cherry picker wishes he could stay up here, opening up the sky, chopping down dead, diseased tree limbs, branch by branch, safely high and away from people pestering him for this and that, his wife a new vacuum cleaner, his son an off-road bike, his father wants his room moved closer to the common area with the widescreen TV.
The six-year old kid is raptly watching the cherry picker roar and chop from one of his home’s many decks where he’s hiding from his annoying babysitter. For sure he doesn’t want to be a lawyer like his pissy father, but maybe he’ll be like the guy high up in the cherry picker using levers and buttons and wands to maneuver his capsule around the gigantic swaying trees.
Two houses over the neighbor is pissed that the noise and power surges from the damn cherry picker are cancelling out his on-line prayer meeting, whose minister’s wife’s boobs keep his hand busy, though he’s appalled to find himself wishing the fucker manning the cherry picker would crash to earth like a bad angel.
Babysitting for whip-smart kids is exhausting, like just now being asked to look up the fucking hydraulic system for that damn truck before the kid disappeared onto one of the crazy decks. He calls it a cherry picker with a straight face—something guys in her tenth grade class would snicker at and grab their packs.
The wood pecker. The beetle. The blue jay. The cat. My tree. My tree.
In the first mystery novel he wrote after we met, he gave the cat my name. The owner of a sweet cat named Tibby is a lively, buxom girl who is poisoned by her partner with a slow-acting easily-disguised liquid that gives him time to be elsewhere, overcome with regret but unable to change the course of dire events he set in motion. “A cat?” I said, almost amused, but annoyed enough to question the word “buxom,” as if in a novel by Turgenev.
After a year, he must have found my address appealing,--the affected spelling of “Centre” and the sweetness of “Lane.” There, set in a different town and a backward state, an accident occurs that is in fact not an accident, but a double murder by an aggrieved wife who knew how to compromise the brakes on her husband’s lover’s BMW.
Two years later, I came across his draft of a novel about a character who works as an orderly at a nursing home, and utilizes my knowledge as a veterinarian to do away with a supervisor who suspects the orderly is showing up in too many wills.
These three—three what—appropriations give me pause, but our sex with its multiple orgasms rides over the pause, along with his knowledge of spices and wines. I begin to wonder what else he might use, and then my elegant old pot-bellied stove from an abandoned railroad station catches fire in another novel leaving a family dead, except for the derelict son who inherits the Arabian Horses, saved by their barn’s elaborate sprinkler system.
Months pass. I’m addicted to my orgasms, and therefore tolerant of his use of my neglected potting shed as a fateful setting, the kicking kangeroo windchimes, my collection of vintage doll furniture that belonged to my favorite aunt who committed suicide just like the uncle in his last story. These appropriations sent me back to his first story collection, titled Wanting. I determined his previous girlfriends were probably named Gretchen, Jody, and Millicent, that they lived on Broome Street, Century Vista, or Route 1, worked with petri dishes in a lab, ghostwrote cookbooks for celebrities, and did not enjoy enough going down on the various male characters who precipitated their demise.
This last isn’t one of my character flaws, but I was alarmed enough to think that I might be found wanting for some other misdemeanor. I did sometimes wonder where Gretchen, Jody, and Millicent are now? Are they alive. So I skipped to the last pages of our “story” and brought it to “the end.”
PAMELA PAINTER is the award-winning author of five story collections. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals including Cult, and in the anthologies Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, and recently in Flash Fiction America, Best Microfiction of 2023, and Best Small Fictions 2023.
Artwork by Frazer Robertson