Today's postcard, and Friday Four-minute Fiction

May 12, 2023

Yellow warbler in a cloud of serviceberry blossoms

Friday Four-minute Fiction

From the story When Murray met Helen, Chapter 11

Cinnamon

Murray Rierson Genault died on a rainy Thursday in mid-November.

He’d turned 88 three weeks earlier. The paramedics found him after Glenn, the postman, called 911 when he heard a repeating phrase of music coming from inside the house. The needle was bumping back from a new scratch on an old record: Wynton Kelly and Wes Montgomery's beautifully melancholic treatment of "Oh, You Crazy Moon." 1965.

The paramedics found him on his side. There was a cleanly cut fried egg on his plate between two pieces of rye toast. The edges of the toast had channeled the egg yolk into a small pile of corned beef hash. A glass of orange juice had been knocked over. Murray was wearing brown dress shoes and his best green sweater vest, as if he were planning to go out after breakfast.

Helen was two zip codes away, at her mother's home in Oshkosh, when the phone rang that afternoon. It was Rick, the paramedic she'd met when Murray had fallen off the roof months earlier. The two of them were becoming more than friends and one of the small secrets they shared was their plan to surprise Murray on Thanksgiving. She brightened when she heard Rick's voice, thinking he was about to share a detail for the dinner with Murray, and that this would open the way to a tender and humorous joust over whether to go with jellied or whole cranberries, or whether celery or mushrooms, or both, should go in the stuffing.

When Rick told her Helen lost her willingness to stand. She backed into the kitchen wall and slid to the floor, moaning and dissolving into tears. She'd been making the streusel topping for a Dutch apple pie and the mixture was all over both her hands. She rubbed it into her face, so that her grief at Murray's loss was coated with brown sugar, flour, and cinnamon. If there had been piles of dirt or ashes on the kitchen floor, she would have rubbed those in as well.

She was just days away from being able to try to undue the shock and deep sadness she'd seen in his eyes when she told him she was leaving her house next door. Delivering that news had been so painful she'd barely been able to get words out about the why part, about her mother's failing health. 

In the grim days of a darkening autumn that followed she would be left to wonder whether it was it the stroke, or whether it was a wounded heart that did him in. Helen being Helen, she blamed herself.

Among the gifts Murray left behind was enough evidence to release Helen of her feelings of guilt. He'd kept a journal, “for Helen” scrawled on the cover. It was wistful and funny, without a smidge of bitterness. He’d also ensured she would receive other valuables, even including the recording he was listening to when his end came. He'd written, with gentle bites of sarcasm, about the things he loved about her, about the small, daily things he missed about her friendship and neighborliness.

But what would surprise her the most is that she was only just beginning to get to know him.