Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I

  THE BOOK

  THE SWIMMING POOL

  THE TUNNEL

  THE CROWN

  THE MAN WHO WENT TO CHINA

  THE OCTOPUS

  THE PATH

  THE HUNTER’S HEAD

  THE DUCK

  THE WELL

  THE SHADOW

  THE TV AND WINSTON CHURCHILL

  DEATH AND THE FRUITS OF THE TREE

  II

  UFO: A LOVE STORY

  THE HAT

  THE MAGIC PIG

  BIGFOOT

  THE SHIELD

  THE MARTIAN

  THE LITTLE GIRL AND THE BALLOON

  THE POET

  THE ROPE AND THE SEA

  THE KNIFE ACT

  THE FISH IN THE TEAPOT

  THE GIRL IN THE STORM

  THE AFTERLIFE IS WHAT YOU LEAVE BEHIND

  III

  THE TREE

  THE SEA MONSTER

  THE MAN AND THE MOOSE

  THE END OF IT ALL

  ON THE WAY DOWN: A STORY FOR RAY BRADBURY

  THE HOUSE ON THE CLIFF AND THE SEA

  THE SNAKE IN THE THROAT

  THE GRAVEYARD

  THE FERRIS WHEEL

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  THE WALK THAT REPLACED UNDERSTANDING

  THE WOMAN AND THE BASEMENT

  HADLEY

  APPENDIX - THE FOLLOWING IS A LONGER STORY NOT PART OF THE SAME PROJECT ...

  Acknowledgements

  Additional praise for Ben Loory and STORIES FOR NIGHTTIME AND SOME FOR THE DAY

  “Some write like a dream, but each of these impressive stories reads like one (even those written ‘for day’). Disarmingly simple and startlingly profound, Ben Loory’s tales take readers through a wholly original universe of whimsy and pathos, moral darkness and brilliantly illuminated truths. Like the best dreams, they resonate, linger and haunt long after the Ambien wears off.”

  —JAMES P. OTHMER, AUTHOR OF THE FUTURIST

  “Quite unlike anything else I have read, a singular work that seems content to explore a universe all its own, in the manner of, say, ‘Kubla Khan’ or The Circus of Dr. Lao. The cumulative effect is not cloying but strangely exhilarating, both for its deadpan considerations of life and death and the things that happen in between, and for some unexpected revelations about the essence of storytelling that arise from its stripped-down style. It will be exciting to see what this quietly fearless writer publishes next.”

  —DENNIS ETCHISON, AUTHOR OF THE DARK COUNTRY

  “Ben Loory is a writer who makes me feel less alone in the world. He also makes me feel like the world is more—and not less—absurd than I had originally suspected, which always comes as a strange relief. All of this is another way of saying that Loory is an original, and a good one, and someone well worth reading. Funny, weird, insightful, and wry. A giver of wincing laughter. I recommend him highly and could easily see several cults forming around his work. Good cults, too. Not the staid, mediocre variety.”

  —BRAD LISTI, AUTHOR OF ATTENTION. DEFICIT. DISORDER.

  “Ben Loory is a master cosmologist waiting to be discovered, with a parabolic telescope that will allow you to see right to the living heart, not of the matter, but of matter itself, of what matters.”

  —ANDREW RAMER, AUTHOR OF Little Pictures: Fiction for a New Age

  “Ben Loory’s stories are small surprises of beauty and wonder—often tragic, sometimes comic, but always full of hope.”

  —MARY GUTERSON, AUTHOR OF WE ARE ALL FINE HERE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.;

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,

  Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd,

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Penguin Books 2011

  Copyright © Ben Loory, 2011

  All rights reserved

  The following stories were previously published, some in online publications:

  “The Book” and “Hadley” in The Bicycle Review; “The Swimming Pool” in Gargoyle

  Magazine; “The Crown” in Barrelhouse; “The Man Who Went to China” in The Antioch

  Review; “The Octopus” in Girls with Insurance; “The Path” in MicroHorror; “The Hunter’s

  Head” in Space and Time; “The Well” in JMWW; “The Shadow” in escarp; “Death and the

  Fruits of the Tree” in Leaf Garden; “The Hat” in The Collagist; “The Magic Pig” in Dogzplot;

  “The Shield” in Twelve Stories; “The Little Girl and the Balloon” in Niteblade; “The Poet”

  in Writers Bloc; “The Rope and the Sea” in Wigleaf; “The Knife Act” in Emprise Review;

  “The Fish in the Teapot” in Bartleby Snopes; “The Girl in the Storm” in Apparatus

  Magazine; “The Afterlife Is What You Leave Behind” and “On the Way Down: A Story for

  Ray Bradbury” in Moon Milk Review; “The Sea Monster” in Annalemma; “The End of It

  All” in Necessary Fiction; “The House on the Cliff and the Sea” in Thunderclap; “The Snake

  in the Throat” in A cappella Zoo; “The Graveyard” in Flashes in the Dark; “The Ferris

  Wheel” in Tuesday: An Arts Project; “The Woman in the Basement” in PANK;

  and “The TV” in The New Yorker.

  Publisher’s Note

  These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are

  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

  actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales

  is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Loory, Ben.

  Stories for nighttime and some for the day / Ben Loory.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-52928-7

  I. Title.

  PS3612.O57S76 2011

  813’.6—dc22

  2011012131

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other

  means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please

  purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage

  electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For

  Dennis Etchison,

  Maureen de Sousa,

  my parents, Mel and Barbara Loory,

  Andra Moldav,

  Sarah Funke Butler,

  and

  Aline
Xavier Mineiro Alvares

  Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes,

  as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.

  —EMERSON

  A halo is not a helmet.

  —JASON VINCZ

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Here are some stories. I hope you like them.

  —B.L.

  I

  THE BOOK

  THE WOMAN RETURNS FROM THE STORE WITH AN armload of books. She reads them quickly, one by one, over the course of the next few weeks. But when she opens the last one, the woman frowns in surprise.

  All the pages in the book are blank.

  Every single one.

  The woman takes the book back to the store, but the manager won’t let her return it.

  Right there on the cover, the manager says, This book has no words and is non-returnable.

  The woman is angry. She wouldn’t have bought the book if she’d known there were no words inside. But the manager simply will not relent.

  The woman leaves in a huff.

  She throws the book in the trash.

  A few days later, the woman sees a man reading the book on the subway. She gets mad; she screams across the crowded car—

  There are no words inside, you can’t read it! she says.

  But the man becomes defensive.

  You can pretend, he says. There’s no law against pretending.

  I think there might be words if you look at it under a special light, says a woman sitting nearby.

  This other woman is holding her own copy of the book.

  That’s so stupid! the woman yells. Don’t you see how stupid that is? Don’t you understand that’s crazy?

  At the next station, a policeman is called and has to break up the fight.

  A television crew arrives on the scene.

  The woman is interviewed. She appears on the news.

  She complains loudly about the book for some time.

  The next day, the book appears on the bestseller lists, under both fiction and nonfiction. The woman is furious, enraged, appalled. She calls into a radio show and starts to rant. She calls the next day, and the day after that, and then the day after that. She appears again on television, this time in debate with the author.

  Your book is a joke! the woman says.

  The author just sits there and smiles.

  The woman becomes famous for opposing the book. She even writes a book of her own. Her book cries out for the destruction of the first book.

  In answer, the first book’s sales jump.

  The woman is frantic. She doesn’t know what to do. She feels like she’s going insane.

  And then one day on the street a man comes up and spits in the woman’s face.

  The woman stands there—shocked, paralyzed. She hadn’t realized everyone hated her. She turns and runs sobbing all the way home. She locks the door and collapses on the floor.

  She crawls into the bedroom on her hands and knees and hides underneath the blankets.

  She huddles in the darkness all night long, her hands over her eyes, crying.

  The following morning, the woman unplugs her phone. She doesn’t want to be invited on TV anymore. She sits on the edge of the bed for a while, and then, slowly, she rises.

  The woman turns over a whole new leaf.

  She turns her attention to other things.

  She takes up hobbies. She goes scuba diving.

  She even makes some friends.

  Without the controversy the woman’s anger stirred up, the book starts to slip from the bestseller lists. It slips and slips for weeks and weeks, until one day it finally disappears.

  The woman’s own book disappears as well.

  The woman doesn’t even notice.

  The years go by. The woman meets a man. She falls in love and gets married. She has children and raises them and lets them go and watches them start families of their own.

  She and her husband go through some hard times, but in the end they stay together.

  And then one day, late in life, the woman’s husband dies.

  For months, the woman is unable to sleep. She wanders through the house, feeling lost. She turns on lights and turns them off. She sits down, gets up, sits.

  One evening in the attic, going through her husband’s things, the woman finds a copy of the book.

  She hasn’t thought of the book in years.

  She’s afraid to open it up.

  Instead, she takes the book back downstairs and puts it on the shelf. It sits there untouched for weeks and weeks, until one day her grandchildren come over.

  What’s this? one of them says, and lifts it up, and as she does something falls out.

  The woman reaches down and picks it up.

  It’s a single old photograph.

  It’s a picture taken of her and her husband on the very first day they met. They’re standing together on the beach; in the distance is a sunset.

  Oh, says the woman, look at that.

  And a smile spreads across her face.

  And then the book seems to open itself, and there’s her life on the page.

  THE SWIMMING POOL

  THE MAN STOPS BY THE PUBLIC POOL ON HIS WAY HOME from work. It’s something he does from time to time. He enjoys the laughter, the splashing, the sound of feet slapping concrete. He stands by the fence, taking it all in.

  That’s when he sees the shark.

  Shark! the man yells, waving his arms. Shark! Shark! Shark!

  Everyone turns and looks at him—children, parents, the lifeguard.

  That’s not very funny, says a woman nearby.

  It’s not supposed to be funny! yells the man. There’s a shark in the pool! See it—right there!

  But even then, he’s no longer sure. How could there be a shark in a public pool? It doesn’t make any sense. And now he can no longer see any sign of it.

  He watches awhile longer, then turns to head home.

  Everyone stares after him as he goes.

  That night the man cannot sleep. He keeps seeing the shark in his mind. Eventually he gets up and puts on his clothes. He walks back down to the pool.

  The overhead lights are out when he gets there, and he finds that the gates are locked. He climbs the fence—with a great deal of effort—and drops down to the other side.

  He pads silently around the water’s edge, staring down into the dark. A couple of times he thinks he sees something, but each time it’s just a ripple, a trick of the light.

  In the morning, the man goes by the pool on the way to work. The lifeguard is out, skimming leaves. Otherwise the pool is quiet, deserted.

  The man stops at the fence.

  You ever see anything in there? he asks the lifeguard.

  The lifeguard turns and looks at him.

  What do you mean, anything? he says suspiciously.

  I don’t know, the man says. Fish?

  The lifeguard tilts his head.

  You the guy from yesterday? he says.

  The man hesitates.

  Yes, he says.

  The lifeguard considers. He takes a step forward.

  It’s an odd thing, he says, glancing around, but sometimes I do seem to see things. Things that shouldn’t be there.

  Like what? says the man. Things like what?

  I don’t know, shrugs the lifeguard. Just things.

  Anyway, he says, suddenly snapping out of it, you don’t have to worry, it’s not your job.

  And the lifeguard turns and goes back to work.

  And the man continues on.

  But all day long the man thinks to himself: What kind of things did the lifeguard see? And what did he mean, it’s not my job? As though anyone could ignore a shark in a public pool.

  The man goes to the pool again that night. This time he climbs up on the diving board. He stretches out at the end, facedown on his belly, and stares into the darkness of the deep end.

  He stares down for hours, for hours and hours, searching, searching
, seeing nothing.

  And then, finally, just before dawn, he sees it.

  The man sees the monster.

  It is a tremendous thing, the monster below—so big the man missed it before. It is jet-black and featureless and lying stretched out, covering the entire bottom of the pool.

  And the worst thing is that it is staring at the man—staring right back up at him. Staring at him with black, unblinking eyes.

  It must have been staring the whole time.

  The man is seized by a terrible fear. If it should jump, he thinks, if it should leap for him! He’d be lost—lost completely—he’d be taken, he’d die.

  Slowly, he backs off the diving board.

  He climbs down to the pavement, then scrambles up the fence and jumps over and runs for his house. Overhead, the streetlights flicker and dim. The man closes his eyes and runs.

  He prays the trees will all just be trees, and the wind will just be the wind. He prays the ground will just be the ground.

  He prays just to make it home.

  Once in his house, the man turns on all the lights. Then he goes and sits in the kitchen. He sits at the table with the radio blaring until the sun finally rises in the morning.

  Only then does the man’s terror subside.

  Or, if not subside, at least lessen.