Tim Scheidler

Abner's Story- Tim Scheidler

Summer Edition, 2021

I used to know a guy named Abner. He was a rawboned, hard-bitten, craggy-faced scarecrow of a man wrapped in layers of ragged shirts and clouds of cigarette smoke. He wore a beard that looked like it weighed about as much as he did, and he pulled his ball cap low over a pair of frosty, gunslinger's eyes.

He and I used to work with cement. Outdoor jobs, mostly, little things they wouldn't hire the big outfits onto. It was the kind of work you did without talking, but come midday we'd sit in the back of his truck to eat. I usually had a sandwich. Abner would gravely unscrew his thermos like a man defusing a bomb. He'd take a contemplative swig of whatever was inside. Then he'd tell me stories. He always had another story.

"Saw a badger the other day," he told me once. He had a high, rough voice like an old chainsaw, rising and falling and panting in between.

"Around here?" I said, fighting the urge to look.

"Nuh," he said. "Back at the house. I come out the truck, right. And I see him up there." He slid his hand along an invisible shelf in midair and eyed me to see if I followed. "On the porch?"

"Oh."

"Yeah. So I turn around for the rifle. Wasn't there." He cracked up at his own stupidity. "In the house. Had to be the day I forgot it."

"So he got away?" I said.

He wrinkled his big sunburned nose. "Nuh. Had an axe."

I blinked.

"Yeah, see, he was kind of all up in there," said Abner. He made an elaborate gesture with both hands. "Got him trapped up against the corner, you know, where the wood pile is. Then… " He made a swooping gesture.

"I've heard badgers can be mean," I said, feeling commentary was necessary.

"He got all to hissing and that," Abner said, ruminatively. I waited for him to go on, but instead he lapsed into silence, nodding his head. Curls of smoke trickled up along the rough topography of his features.

In the end, I broke the silence. "What did you use him for?"

He gave a twitchy, birdlike shrug. "Meat. Used to skin some, when Doreen'd take the furs."

It was the first time I'd ever heard him mention a woman. Abner functioned, so far as I could tell, in an entirely masculine world. Such men have a distinctive feel. They're laconic and unsubtle and often gentle in an undemonstrative way. So long as you're not a badger, anyway.

"Who's Doreen?" I asked.

"Don't know Doreen?" said Abner, but answered himself. "Guess you're too young." He shoved his hat a little back. His hair was slick with sweat and flecked with grey. "Eh, she used to like all that fur stuff. Not much use since she's been gone."

"Gone where?" I asked.

Abner shrugged again. He took a long pull from his thermos. "Gone," he said. His voice had become soft and abrupt, like the fall of a distant axe.

I said nothing. Abner was silent too, but not for long. He always had another story.

Michael Myers meets the Flintstones

Winter Edition- 2020

It was Halloween in Dublin, and I was Michael Myers. I felt awfully proud of myself, because generally speaking the Dubliners don't get Halloween. Half the costumes are awful and half are expensive, and all of them are niche. You wouldn't catch an Irishman over thirty-five walking around in a Halloween get-up. That's for the children, and even they don't seem to entirely understand the point of the thing. They just imitate the TV.

I was too proud for the bad costumes and too poor for the expensive ones, so my mask was enough of a coup that I was wearing it everywhere. That meant I had to take it slow and careful, as Halloween masks never seem designed for much in the way of seeing out. Or moving. Or breathing more than strictly necessary.

Amy was with me as a butterfly, and Siobhan as a cat. Claude had come too, as some mash-up of banker, lawyer, and secret agent. Claude put a lot of effort into being low-effort.

We'd started at the Ferryman, which was by then as familiar and unglamourous as a faded sweater. Claude had probably intended to stay there all night, barricaded in his favorite booth with two dozen no-nonsense Irish grandmothers between him and Halloween, but we overruled him. The girls had put a lot of elbow grease into making cats and butterflies look good, and they wanted to make an effect. As for me, well, I had the mask.

Now we followed the street toward the city center, following the Liffey. Streetlamps caught the water now and then, but for the most part the river drank light. It's a murky thing, that old Liffey, and smells in the summer. The Irish blame the government, or sometimes the Germans. Both sides agree that the last thing you want to do is fall in, and I was trying very hard to squint through my eye holes and avoid somehow doing that.

Claude was far ahead, maybe trying to put some distance between himself and me. He hates stares, and I was getting them. That much I could tell even through my little slits. It made me puff up a little, but I also started taking it even slower. A girl had just cooed appreciatively at me, and I didn't want to stumble and spoil the effect.

I didn't spoil it. Someone else did that for me. As I swaggered past a tattoo parlor, something hit me hard in the side of the head. I flinched away, or tried to, but came up short. Someone had hold of the mask, and it was twisted. I couldn't see. I shoved at empty air, missing, and we danced a little circular jig for a moment, him hauling one way and me the other. The mask was jammed tight against my throat.

I got my foot under me, hauled off, and swung against his arm. I heard a yelp, and the pressure on the mask vanished. I hauled it off with a wrench, hearing one of the girls - Siobhan, I think - shouting a belated curse.

The mask came off, and I faced down my attacker. Who was, for some reason, Fred Flintstone. Orange suit, puff-ball buttons, garish tie, the whole nine. I remember thinking, distantly, that he must be a lot richer than me. Fred looked about as startled to see me as I was to see him, and I honestly think he didn't expect an actual person's face to come out the other end of the mask. Or maybe I'd really smacked him one, who knows?

As we stood there staring at each other, Barney went for the sucker-punch. The little bugger could hit, and I staggered. When I turned around to him, I found a very small, very irate Irishman right up in my face, squawling about what he'd do to me for hitting his cousin. He had carrot-orange hair and an outfit even more ridiculous than Fred's, and couldn't have been more than eighteen.

I mumbled something about how Fred hit me first, and Barney gave a quick look sideways at his cousin. That was a good idea, as it turned out, because Fred had chosen that moment to start a swaying advance into traffic, and Barney and I had to combine forces to haul him back onto the curb.

By then the girls were back, and Claude. It was a mark of our friendship that he stood there and loomed in solidarity, because his horror at being part of this particular tableau was something to see. Barney looked furtively at the others and tugged Fred possessively from my grip. Fred swayed into him and chuckled.

"Get him home," I said.

Barney spat an obscene response, taking Fred by the shoulder. Then he paused, glancing over his shoulder. "Cheers then." They meandered away into the crowd, an awkward three-legged race.

I stuffed my mask into my pocket, laughing. I'd like to say it was a genuine laugh, but it wasn't. It was more or less a return of his parting shot.

"What was that?" Amy asked.

I laughed again for her, and it sounded better, cleaner. "Michael Myers Meets the Flintstones."