Monkey's-Paw Patterson's Final Wish

 

I wish it weren't so dark in there-- no, wait!

Nope, nope, nope, thought Matthew "Matty-Patty" Patterson. I'm not falling for that, again. He frowned at his lucky monkey's paw - now 90 percent disintegrated - and dropped it into his ratty overcoat pocket. I'll take my chances with this dank old tunnel. "Not yet, paw..."

In December of 1934, after four years of unemployed, train-hopping hopelessness and near-starvation, Monkey's-Paw Patterson had only one wish remaining on his monkey paw. He had been about to waste his fifth and final* monkey paw wish in order to illuminate the interior of the Catoctin tunnel - which, if we're being honest (which we ARE), isn't long enough to require interior illumination - when he remembered the old fortune teller's admonition from three years prior. The rules were literally set in stone (somewhere): Thou shalt not wish for additional wishes, and thou shalt be wary of that for which thou wishes (wisheth?).

Monkey's-Paw Patterson's hobo-ing companion, Hell's Own Breath Hinkley stopped momentarily. "What?" he asked.

 "What what?" Patterson replied, hoping that he wasn't about to embark on an infinite feedback loop of "whats."

"Thought you said something - 'Not yet, pa?' Something like that?"

"Oh - yeah," Patterson laughed. "Sorry. Just thinking out loud again, I suppose. Almost used my monkey's paw to light up this tunnel, but I only got one wish left, and I ain't wasting it on that."

Hell's Own Breath Hinkley nodded in the semi-darkness. "Smart. Say - that thing ever really work?" He heard the sad sound of Matty Patterson's bum left foot as it dragged, zombie-style, across the railroad ties, occasionally sending a piece of ballast gravel skittering ahead of them - and he cringed.

"Well, yes and no, pal. It kind of works, but there's always some awful gotcha. First thing I did when I got it was wish for my parents to not be dead. They died of infected pigeon scratches, in the bird war..."

"No kidding? That's terrible," Hinkley said, laying a hand on his friend's shoulder.

Patterson continued. "Yeah, and I just wanted to say goodbye and tell 'em I loved 'em. So I took the paw to their grave and made my wish, and sure enough, the ground shook and split open and out they popped. They weren't dead - but they weren't really alive, either. They growled and lunged at me, and bit me on my foot as I struggled with them. I barely got away in one piece. My poor foot ain't been the same since."

"That's horrible," Hinkley said, inadvertently launching an invisible cloud of hell's own breath in the direction of Patterson.

Monkey's-Paw Matthew gagged. "Oh, God - Hinkley! You're killing me!"

"Sorry."

"Anyway," he coughed, "My second wish was so simple, I thought it was a sure bet. I was hung-over something awful, after a night of drinking hobo wine, and I had the kind of headache that makes you think dying might be better. I wished for that headache to go away, and POOF! Gone in an instant."

"...And?" prodded Hinkley, remembering to cup his hand in front of his mouth. "What was the catch?"

"My guts pretty much exploded out my backside - right then and there, and for the rest of the morning. I would have had to rally just to die."

"Good Lord!"

"Damn right," Monkey's-Paw growled. "So, my third wish was wished in the heat of the moment. Ol' Barb Stab-You-Quick was fixin' to stab me - quick - so I wished for her to, you know, not stab me."

"That musta turned out okay," Hinkley said. "I mean, you're still here, ain't ya?"

"Oh sure, pal. She didn't stab me, no siree. She hit me with a hammer, instead. I think she probably fractured my skull. Took a half-dozen other 'boes to get her off me."

"You sure have had it rough, my friend. It's hard enough being a hobo, these days. Maybe you should throw that paw away. Sounds like it's more curse than blessing."

Patterson sighed heavily. "I might, I might. The fourth one was insulting. I'm telling you - it was just plain mean."

"What was wish number four?"

"Well - you know about my bum foot, right - on account of my undead old man biting me?"

"Yeah..."

"Well, that's not the foot that got bit. He bit my right foot. That was the gimpy one. So, I wished for it to go back to normal, and boy, did it ever! And just as quick - the left one went bad. It might even be worse than the right one had been. So, yeah. I gotta be real careful with this last wish..."

"You're a little slow on the uptake, ain't ya?" Hell's Own Breath Hinkley said absently. 

"Watch it, bub."

"Oh don't get sore with me - it's almost Christmas. And besides, you really should've learned your lesson by the second wish. So, what are you thinking for number five?"

"I don't think I'm supposed to tell anyone," Patterson semi-lied, having not been given that specific instruction. "Come on - it's getting dark. We better get camped, and get a fire lit..."

Late that night, with Hell's Own Breath Hinkley snoring stinkily away by the fire, Matthew Patterson stepped quietly to the edge of the firelight, removed the decomposing monkey's paw from his coat pocket, rubbed it gently, and began to wish. I'm begging you, paw - please make this Depression better. I want to work. I want a roof over my head. I want to see a doctor when I need one. I want to eat real food. I want everyone else to have these things. Please, please, please fix our broken country. I don't need the twenties back - the twenties weren't great for regular folk like me, anyway - I just wish we could all get well, okay? Not great. We'll take care of great. Just... fixed. Please?

A few days later, trudging through Hagerstown, Maryland, Monkey's-Paw Patterson saw a discarded newspaper. Its top two headlines: "America's Recovery Making Steady Progress Under 'New Deal,' and "Nazi Party's Swift Rise Alarms European Leaders."

"Well, hell," Patterson muttered. "I tried."

 

*We are well aware of the fact that W.W. Jacobs said the monkey's paw would grant three wishes, but we think that's dumb, on account of monkeys having FIVE digits, and the number of wishes corresponds to the digits and that's that. End of discussion.

Rubbery Dmitry, the Mad Monk Holds Steady

Black Lightning Strikes The Trees - Photo by J. Scott, 1996

His life was preordained to be one of privilege, wealth, and luxury. He was conceived on March 2nd, 1918 in St. Petersburg, during a riot on the first anniversary of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication. Of course, not everything that's preordained actually comes to pass, and before he was born, Dmitry Kalashnik's parents had lost everything that they couldn't fit into two suitcases, fled the Russian revolution in the dead of night, and washed up on Ellis Island. He was born on Christmas Eve - over two weeks late, and "very large."

Things went a bit downhill, from there. Just before little Dmitry's fourth birthday, his father, whose only marketable skill had been investing and counting money, succumbed to being run over by a streetcar (as so many future hoboes' fathers were). His mother, who hadn't known a minute of work of any kind, back home, stretched her late husband's meager life insurance as far as it would go, but after two years, it was gone. She could bake, and her pirogi were the talk of their neighborhood, so she was able to find work in a bakery, and she followed the shop's owner when he relocated to Pittsburgh in 1928. She married him not long after that, and for her, life began to resemble life, again.

We all know what happened next. The global economy melted into the fire and burned into a stinky smoke, Dmitry's mother and step-father lost their home and moved into a tiny apartment, and focused all of their energy on keeping their sweets and pirogi shop alive. The boy rebounded for a while, but finally left home in 1930, barely eleven years old, and survived as best he could the competing ravages of homelessness and puberty. 

While he learned to live outside, eventually becoming a full-fledged hobo, albeit a terribly young one, his mother learned to live without him, relying on her faith to paint a mental picture of him that wasn't crushingly tragic. In St. Petersburg, she and her first husband had been among the last of the Russian Orthodox Buddhists, and she had spent Dmitry's formative years working to instill in him the values of the great teacher. As she absorbed the sermons of her new husband's American Catholic priests in Pittsburgh, she prayed that she had set her son upon a decent path.

A lifetime later (10 years), having rebounded a dozen times from a dozen different horrors that would have sent lesser men to their whimpering deaths, Rubbery Dmitry, The Mad Monk held steady. He had next to nothing of his own, and that suited him fine. His life was simple. He was walking and riding the rails of freedom and migrant labor, and he was relatively content. He remembered neither the scripture, nor the teachings of Buddha - save for the lessons of stillness, from the latter. "Be still," he heard his mother whisper, "be still."

Life screamed at him to run, or to fight, or to run, fighting into the abyss of the horrible nothing, but he forced himself, shaking, to be as motionless as possible. He mentally reread the headlines of the day - Jews being rounded up and sent to camps, where there were reports of mass slaughter. War machines. Troops here, talks there, fleets, riots, death tolls, more talks, rumors, smoke, blood... 

He practiced his Buddhist breathing. He realized that he hadn't paid nearly enough attention to the lessons on breathing. He shrugged and tried to fake it until he made it, and he breathed all wrong. The world had gone mad, and it was all over essentially nothing, and the opposing forces were sworn to keep fighting until well beyond death, because the other side was so deeply, ungodly WRONG, and that, as they say, was that. 

Rubbery Dmitry, The Mad Monk closed his eyes. He thought. You might say he prayed. You'd be wrong, but forgiven for saying that. He heard his mother again - be still. He snorted, for although he knew exactly what it meant to be still, he had yet to master - or even honestly attempt - the art of being still. 

He took a deep breath, told all of his personal woes - as well as those of the universe around him - to give him a minute, and searched for stillness.

And it stopped. All of it.

And he heard his mother say, "Good, good. Steady... Now what?"

The Return Of Hollering Martin Mandible

'Tis not the nightingale, but the lark...

Hollering Martin Mandible surveyed the alley, filled from edge to edge with mirth and celebratory boisterousness, and it pleased him to no end. 

"I can't believe you all came!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. "What a homecoming - I am truly overwhelmed. After all that I've been through, I wouldn't have been surprised to have been greeted by the songs of crickets, and the sad gurgle of the storm drain emptying into the creek."

Most of the assembled revelers let out a cheer of equal parts celebration and sympathy. One of the revelers - the one who was only eight - turned to her mother and asked, "Why is he yelling? Is he angry? And what's wrong with his mouth?"

The child's mother placed a silencing finger to her daughter's lips. "Quiet now, Margaret. He's happy. He's just so very happy to be home. It's been so many years since he's been with his kin - I don't blame him for being a little rowdy. And his bottom mandible hangs a half-inch lower than it ought to, resulting not only in his odd appearance, but also in a ten to twenty-decibel increase in the volume of his voice. Now, mind what your father taught you, and be kind, hospitable, and welcoming. This is a very, very good day."

"Okay, Mama," the girl said, skeptically. "I'll be nice."

The sounds of amorous crickets and the babbling brook carried on at the same volume they always had, but tonight they were overwhelmed by the happy cacophony of reunion, of story and song and drink and the making of merry. It was a rare thing indeed for a hobo to make his way home, but Hollering Martin Mandible had done it, and his friends couldn't help but rejoice. Twice, the celebrants had stopped gabbing, banged on their various drinking vessels, and demanded words from their guest of honor. Twice, their friend had given them mere platitudes, as in the opening quotation, above. By the third go-round, it was clear to Hollering Martin Mandible that they needed to hear more.

"My friends," he hollered, hands extended in surrender to popular demand, "my brothers and sisters in spirit, I stand before you in August of the year of our lord, nineteen forty... nineteen forty... um..."

"Seven!" One of his friends offered.

"Yes - in nineteen forty-seven, I stand before you to say that I have seen another world. It is fully two years since we all wept with joy at the end of the second World War. It is said that we are a nation reborn, and I cannot refute that notion. Now, now. I hear your boos. I hear your consternation. And your misgivings are not without foundation."

"Those of you who know me well will surely know that my jaw became deformed long before I joined the ranks of the hobo nation. I worked at a steel mill in Johnstown Pennsylvania, and I got clipped by a runaway ore car, on account of not looking both ways before crossing the ore car track that I had crossed without looking seven thousand times before. Blah blah blah - yes - sorry, I don't mean to bore you, Barb. Please don't stab me."

"And most of you know about the untimely deaths of my parents - my pop, choking on a soda fountain CO2 hose on a bet, and my mum, by firefly overdose, two weeks later. But what you might not know is that I tried to enter the World, not just this past year, what with all the postwar jobs and all - but also in 1939."

[Oohing and ahhing from the assembled party people]

"Yes, it's true. Twice now have I ventured into the office, suit on back and coffee cup in hand. And let me tell you, brothers and sisters, in 1947, as in 1939, it is entirely the same. I could describe for you at great length the intolerable physical conditions of torturous so-called air-conditioned comfort, the monotony, the degradation, the hopelessness, and the self-loathing, but for one thing - nothing I can say would do justice to the wretchedness of the modern electric office. And for the other, and more significant thing - there is no sky."

"I'm sure a lot of you are thinking, 'Gee, Marty - air-conditioning and ashtrays and a steady income - what's not to like?' And I hear you, loud and clear. But hear this, brethren: No. Sky. There is no sky, in there. There's also no dignity and no honor and nothing whatsoever to be proud of, but think no further than... no sky. That is why I have returned to you, today. It is not that I couldn't make a go of it in that world. It's not that I have something against suits or paychecks, or pretty secretaries or any of that sweet noise. It is simply that in their world, there is no sky."

"We get it, Martin," one of the revelers affirmed. "The life of the hobo is just plain better. We're just wondering why you yell so much."

Martin Mandible thought for a moment. "I... I don't know. I'm just naturally loud, I suppose. Joie de vivre, and all that. Anyway - it's really good to be back. I'll never forsake my stick and bindle for a suit and briefcase again. You have my word."

Tonight's missive was prompted by my friends at Studio 30 Plus, who asked for something with "boisterous" and/or "rowdy."

Cecelia Graveside and The Dead Hope

"It all turned on a dime," she said, shaking her head as if still trying to come to grips with it, fourteen years later.  "One minute, we were living high on the hog.  I had more dresses than I could count at age five, and it seemed my hair was never without a ribbon.  Mother and Father belonged to the country club, and they had martinis every night with Mr. and Mrs. Loy from across the street.  The next minute, Father was gone, having jumped to his death from the roof of the Stock Exchange, and Mother had transformed into a monster.  I was too young to understand much of it, of course, but I was told that something called a depression was on, and that it was the cause of Father's suicide, and that it was the reason for our moving from Manhattan to a tiny, smelly apartment in Queens."

"That's all well and good, ma'am, but like I said, you're gonna have to clear out of here," the policeman repeated, his patience straining.  "There's still a war on, and we've got a troop train due to stop here in the next half-hour, and there's a trainload of brand-new tanks coming out of the yard ahead of that."

"I understand," Cecelia Graveside said, careful not to meet the officer's eyes.

"So listen," he continued, "I got a heart, lady.  Really, I do.  You can come back here tonight, if this campsite is so important to you--"

"It is important," she insisted.

"But the Army don't want a bunch of hoboes hangin' around the tracks, you know?  And when the MPs show up, trust me, they ain't gonna be as nice about this as I am.  So I'm asking you one last time..."

"I'm going, I'm going," she said, slinging her stick and bindle over a shoulder, and patting the makeshift grave marker of her late hobo husband.  "I'll be back dear," she whispered to it.  She stepped past the officer and toward the town square, across the tracks.  Between her and the square, a couple of dozen newly-enlisted men gathered, worried wives and flag-waving children in tow.  Cecelia plotted a route that she hoped would help her avoid the whole scene.  She sighed heavily.

"Ma'am?" the cop called after her.  She stopped, but did not turn back.  "I know it's none of my business and all, but, well..."

"Yes?"

"I was just wondering if you've tried signing up for one of those jobs at the factory - you know, like Rosie the Riveter."

"I have not," she said flatly.  "That is to say, not at that particular factory."

"Well, I heard they're still at least two dozen hands short - even on the first shift.  I heard they're taking everybody.  They got free training.  They might even have some spots left in the workers' dormitory.  I know it's not my place - I'm just tryin' to help..."

Cecelia turned to face the earnest young peace officer, and a tear made a surprise exit from her eye and onto her cheek, where it was made to feel so profoundly unwelcome that it leapt off, fell to the ground and exploded.  "Mister, I know better than to get in line outside that factory.  Don't get me wrong - it's a swell idea, and I'm not sore at you for the suggestion.  But you see, since I lost my dear husband, I've tried twenty other factories, just like that one - from New York City to Chicago and back again.  Every time, I've gone in with a smile on my face, hope in my heart, and a firm handshake.  I still have my handshake, but that's about it.  I can't take another rejection.  Mother used to say that hope springs eternal, but I can tell you, it doesn't."

"I understand," the policeman said.  "I don't blame you."  A loud, throaty steam whistle echoed through the town.  "That'll be the tank train.  Time to move along.  Take care of yourself, okay?"

"I will."  Cecelia Graveside made her way around the gathering military conscripts and their loved ones, up Main Street to the town square.  

She stopped.  Hope hung in tatters above her.  

Her dreams, she had often said, were the stray dogs that ran around the rail yard, and sometimes followed her.  She looked to her right, at the road that led to the next town.  She turned to her left, where the smokestacks of the factory peeked above the low skyline.  She sighed, looked up at the sun, shook her head slowly, and started walking.

...eternal.  Photo by [Maris].

This one springs forth from yet another STUDIO 30 PLUS writing prompt.  This time, the goal was to use "hung in tatters above her," a phrase lifted from fellow blogger Tara at THIN SPIRAL NOTEBOOK.