Davis Five Short Stories
Davis Five Short Stories
Davis Five Short Stories
My son’s Italian landlord in Brooklyn kept a shed out back in which he cured and
smoked salamis. One night, in the midst of a wave of petty vandalism and theft, the
shed was broken into and the salamis were taken. My son talked to his landlord about it
the next day, commiserating over the vanished sausages. The landlord was resigned
and philosophical, but corrected him: ‘They were not sausages. They were salamis.’
Then the incident was written up in one of the city’s more prominent magazines as
an amusing and colourful urban incident. In the article, the reporter called the
stolen goods ‘sausages’. My son showed the article to his landlord, who hadn’t seen
it. The landlord was interested and pleased that the magazine had seen fit to report the
incident, but he added: ‘They weren’t sausages. They were salamis.’
A friend of mine told me a sad story the other day about a neighbour of hers. He had
begun a correspondence with a stranger through an online dating service. The friend
lived hundreds of miles away, in North Carolina. The two men exchanged messages
and then photos and were soon having long conversations, at first in writing and then
by phone. They found that they had many interests in common, were emotionally and
intellectually compatible, were comfortable with each other and were physically
attracted to each other, as far as they could tell on the Internet. Their professional
interests, too, were close, my friend’s neighbour being an accountant and his new friend
down South an assistant professor of economics at a small college. After some months,
they seemed to be well and truly in love, and my friend’s neighbour was convinced that
‘this was it’, as he put it. When some vacation time came up, he arranged to fly down
south for a few days and meet his Internet love.
During the day of travel, he called his friend two or three times and they talked. Then
he was surprised to receive no answer. Nor was his friend at the airport to meet him.
After waiting there and calling several more times, my friend’s neighbour left the
airport and went to the address his friend had given him. No one answered when he
knocked and rang. Every possibility went through his mind.
2
Here, some parts of the story are missing, but my friend told me that what
her neighbour learned was that, on that very day, even as he was on his way south,
his Internet friend had died of a heart attack while on the phone with his doctor;
my friend’s neighbour, having learned this either from the man’s neighbour or from the
police, had made his way to the local morgue; he had been allowed to view his Internet
friend; and so it was here, face to face with a dead man, that he first laid eyes on the one
who, he had been convinced, was to have been his companion for life.
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On the Train
We are united, he and I, though strangers, against the two women in front of us talking
so steadily and audibly across the aisle to each other. Bad manners.
Later in the journey I look over at him (across the aisle) and he is picking his nose. As
for me, I am dripping tomato from my sandwich on to my newspaper. Bad habits.
As for the women, they are now sitting together side by side and quietly reading, clean
and tidy, one a magazine, one a book. Blameless.
Susie Brown will be in town. She will be in town to sell her things. Susie Brown is
moving far away. She would like to sell her queen mattress. Do we want her queen
mattress? Do we want her ottoman? Do we want her bath items?