Bananas: A Collection of Modern Short Stories

By Michael Cornwall

Good short stories should stay with us forever. Bananas offers insight into the every-day life of people like you and me . . . experiences that cause us to pause, while also gifting us with insight. The stories in this short collection are written to do just that, linked together by a unity of place and time . . . every day occurrences rendered like random snapshots hung by wooden clips along a weathered clothesline.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Cornwall
• Release date: Jul 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370373642

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Bananas

A Collection of Modern Short Stories

Michael Cornwall

Copyright © 2016

Michael Cornwall.

All rights reserved

ISBN: 9781370373642

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

First Edition

Table of Contents

Stolen

Bull

Criticism

Tattoos

Impulse Control

Social Media

Dependence

Invisible

Arrangements

Inferiority

My Special Education

A Boy from Honduras

Children with Character

Bananas

Mano Po Must Live

Making the Unconscious Conscious

Intelligence and Self-Esteem

All Behavior Has a Purpose

The Sack

Albert Ellis and Me

Smart

Mantra

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my family and friends (except some of them).

STOLEN

I stole my boy's Sting Ray bike last night.

In the middle of the night, while my boy was sleeping comfortably on my mother's couch, I was peddling his prize possession through the rain, headed, as it turned out, into town. I wasn't sure where I was going with it. I just knew I had to steal it. I had no other plans beyond the actual theft.

At the time, it all seemed like a reasonable thing for me to be doing, stealing my boy's bike. It was the one thing he loved most in the world. I leaned the bike against a fire hydrant and took shelter in a phone booth. I vaped and waited for the rain to stop.

My boy and I are staying with my mother on what I have cautiously termed, for the benefit of all, a temporary basis. My husband, my boy's father, took off a few nights ago without as much as a sayonara. I am told he was boosted into a Mayflower moving van by a burly truck driver. The man in question stopped in at the restaurant where my husband worked as a night manager and ordered coffee and a bear claw. As I understand it, sometime during the course of their conversation, which I am told was brief, he agreed to leave his job and his family and join this man on his trip to Des Moines. I'm not sure just exactly what went on that night, word for word, but I know he asked my husband three times to leave with him.

At this point, there are several different stories in circulation concerning the disappearance of my husband. The only consistency in the rumors is that he had to be asked three times. Three is my husband’s lucky number, apparently. I haven't come to any firm conclusions as to why he had to be asked exactly three times; but, for some reason, I consider this a consolation.

My boy knows nothing of this, of his father's disappearance with the burly man on the Mayflower. My son thinks his father is on an extended vacation.

I'm sitting at the kitchen table, leaning over a highball and a half-pack of Winston Lite 100s, nursing the scrapes on my elbows and face. I fell into a briar bush last night on my way home from town, after selling my boy’s bike. I have been drinking a little too much lately. My eyes feel cracked, like the broken windshield on my ’69 Plymouth Valiant. What sleep I have had in the last few days could not be in the purest sense of the word called restful.

My mother comes into the kitchen and fills her Keurig with water. She wears a sixties hair style, a beehive. Her hair looks like a well trussed, overcooked pot roast. She rarely leaves the house anymore. She hasn't changed in the least since I was a girl with freckles and skinned elbows. She has placed a bowl of Cheerios and a glass of tomato juice in front of me. She imagines that I will eat these things.

Each morning, my mother comes into the kitchen and tries to make me eat. After hearing my objections, she turns her back to me and pops a coffee pod into her Keurig. Her house coat is pink and hangs to the floor. I watch her elbow bend as she spoons sugar into her cup, and I count with her. I heard you go out last night, my mother says to me over her shoulder. When you're in my house, you'll tell me where you're going and when you'll be back. I have rules here. I won't have doors slammed in the middle of the night. It scares me. I don't know if someone's coming in or going out. She opens the top of her Kuerig and peeks into the water well. I thought you were a burglar.

I'm sorry, I say, forgive me.

You look like shit, you know. You're going to have to do something about yourself. You've got to snap out of this.

My mother's coffee is in her cup. The thick odor fills my nostrils and makes my temples pulse. She hugs the cup to her chest, as a junkie would a fix. Her hair is wrapped in toilet tissue. She begins to unroll it, stuffing the tissue into the pocket of her robe. Sit down, Ma, I say. Sit over here with me for a while.

You should have a cup yourself, my mother says. By the look of you, you'll need your own pot. Are you wet? You look like you're wet. Have a cup of coffee. You'll catch a cold.

I don't like coffee anymore.

My mother never minces words with me. She comes directly to the point. You're just like your father, you know. Just like him. Always have been. Get more like him all the time. I smile and put my glass to my lips. My mother has not seen nor heard from my father in thirty years. In his absence, I have had to take his abuse for him. Why I ever married that guy, I'll never know, she says. Not a good thing came from it.

My mother has a favorite story she likes to tell to friends and strangers alike. It goes like this: My father left her at three, four or five in the morning. It depends on who she's telling the story to and the kind of effect she wants to impose on it. Seems my father gave her a couple of nudges in the back and told her to get up out of bed and make him a BLT. She brought him one, and he told her he didn't like mayo anymore. Never truly did like mayo to begin with. This was in the middle of the night, by the way. Anyway, he needed her to make him another sandwich. She wouldn't, so he got up and got dressed and left.

Never came back.

Disappeared.

Finito.

No more.

Accordingly, he put us, his wife and her freckled five-year old on the steps of the Department of Public Welfare, where we all remain, today. The bastard just grinned and shut the door real hard, she always adds. He was just looking for a way out. He found it. Right through that door there.

My mother comes across to the table, leans her weight on the back of her chair and looks at me for a long minute. She walks back to the stove and turns to face me. She crosses her arms over her chest. You going to tell the boy today? she asks. He'll want to know. This can't go on. You're going to have to tell him eventually. Get your life out of the shitter. Tell him something, anything, and forget about it.

How can I tell him anything, I say, when there's nothing I can tell him, using the information I have? He could come back, you know. He might have been kidnapped. You ever think of that?

Sure, he'll come right back after he's finished being kidnapped, my mother says. Don't kid yourself. Just tell him something he'll understand and be done with it. You have to move on. Children have staying power.

My boy comes into the kitchen. He is dressed and ready for play. The knees of his overalls and his sneakers are spotted with yesterday’s mud. He sits across from me and waits to be served.

My boy reminds me of myself. He is freckled in much the same manner I was as a girl. All over my face and back, I had freckles. There are still traces of freckles around my nose. There are enough of them to be called Cute, Girlish; but my shoulders never recovered. In my opinion, my shoulders are still a sideshow at the beach.

I have recently begun telling my boy that his freckles are his father's fault, that this affliction can be directly traced to his father’s utter negligence. I tell my boy his father left him sitting in the sun, behind a screen window, when he was a baby, and this is how he got his freckles. My boy is too young to understand heredity, and his father is no longer around to protect himself.

My boy's new playmates, the ones he has made since our temporary move to my mother's place, call him Freckle Face. It is his nickname. I hear his friends call him Freckle Face from my seat at the kitchen window. I know how my boy feels about his freckles. He has asked me to buy him a cream to remove them. I know of a cream that is used by blacks to lighten their skin. I saw it advertised on TV. Although this is