Today's postcard and Friday Four-minute Fiction

June 23, 2023

The surf at Beach #4, Olympic National Park

Friday Four-minute Fiction

From the story “When Murray met Helen,” chapter 17

Artifacts

When Murray was recovering from the fall off his roof the previous June he sought Renard’s advice on the fate of the four wooden crates he kept in his basement. They were each the size of a long piano bench, pine boards with maple strapping. Three had been nailed shut, and one was open to collect the remainder of the papers and artifacts Murray would be selecting to preserve.

He’d put off the discussion for years, inasmuch as the whole point of it was to decide, finally, who would inherit this unusual collection. He was still enjoying life too much to squarely concede to his eventual demise, but the fall from the roof, the stay in the hospital, and what he sensed as the remorseless pull of gravity and time had finally focused his mind.

He invited Renard over on a Sunday afternoon and the two of them watched a Brewers game on the tube while drinking the recently-improved Schlitz and absorbing ample doses of an Irish stew featuring cobble-sized chunks of potato, pearl onions, carrots, and browned mutton, all bathed in a Guinness-based broth that played bagpipes to the taste buds.

The Brewers loaded the bases in the top of the eighth, with two outs, down by a run against the Padres, when Murray announced he was having trouble deciding what to do with his collection.

“Yeah,” Renard said, as a lazy fly ball was about to end the inning. “I wondered about that. I’m not getting any younger either.”

In the curious way that men can be at times, this was all that was said on the matter. Was Renard saying he didn’t want them? Was he saying it was pointless because he was facing his own mortality? One could press for clarification, but it risked stumbling into a crevice of unwelcome emotions between two old friends.

They both knew what was in the boxes and, by then, as did Harry Michaels. It was a poignant and epic capsule of the American century, or at least one unusual man’s path through it, concentrated in all the culture’s brass and contradictions. Still, it didn’t seem like the kind of thing you would offer a museum. It was too intimate on some levels, too goddamn painful on others.

It was the sort of compilation that you could only trust to a person who was strong enough to take custody of it. Someone who’d proven himself.

Or herself.

Someone like Helen.