Short Story

Derek was tired of having nothing to do. Once or twice, he had logged into an online game. What is the use of a game with lousy animation and no music? he was thinking, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes scurried across and out past the left edge of his screen.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; but because Derek was so intensely bored, he became curious.

I know it wasn’t my imagination. The man held a large sickle with a long handle in his hand. The handle, a sturdy block of wood on which the iron implement was mounted, was longer and bulkier than the usual sickle seen in the hands of women who harvest wheat or rice. Not many people from this posh South Delhi colony would have seen a woman sitting on her haunches to gather the harvest or heard its swish and smelled the freshly cut paddy.

Fog hovers over the treeless valley and the loch. The view is murky through the waves of the old glass pane, like a filter on a camera lens, turning the edges of everything a hazy shade of silver. There’s little daylight remaining. Still, up here the light stays long, and the moon is already out, waxing. Whistling wind sneaks through the small space between the old oak door and the jamb; the fire snaps in the stone hearth, wood smoke mixes with the earthy smell of the room.

I got my first teaching job, of a sort, fifty years ago right after I finished my credentialing program. It was in a two-room schoolhouse on one of the small barrier islands off the Southeastern coast. About a hundred people lived there strewn across its eight square miles along narrow sand and oyster shell roads. Except for the woman who ran the general store/post office and drove the school van, the teacher couple, and me, all of the residents were descendants of escaped slaves.

When Tracy camped at the lake again the following summer, a zipped pocket of her jacket held a tiny silver pendant that was smaller than a dime and bore the whorled imprint of a baby-sized thumb.
Lola’s mother had explained this was a replica of her daughter’s thumbprint. Holding it, she had pressed her own thumb against the concentric ridges for a long moment.

I sat in an antiseptic, white-walled conference room off the main lobby of Sellers & Cross for twenty minutes, fingering the fabric of my charcoal grey suit. It had been a month and a half since I’d seen a paycheck, and I needed to nail this interview. And not just for the money. For a bit of self-respect.
Having to work for a living blows. I never had to work that hard in college.