This bit of fiction was prompted by Isabella Peralta, who must be making a lot of money, sending out prompts for short stories and asking people for twenty dollars to read them. No deal, Iz. Real writers don't pay readers.
1
It was a cold, wet day. Marisol was awakened early. Something was scrabbling about in the closet. Lowering the window immediately, to shut out the chilly wind, she opened the closet door and saw movement; her clothes rustled as if something ratlike were scrabbling up the wall. She picked up a reusable Walmart bag, reached in, and bagged a little fat bat. She raised the window again and threw it out. It flew.
Glad she hadn't injured the bat, Marisol decided she might as well stay up and get an early start on the day. The chilly kitchen needed to have a coffee cake baked in it. A nice long preheating of the oven felt so cozy. She brewed coffee and poured herself an extra cup with cream and sugar.
In came her mother-in-law. Marisol took a quick sip of coffee to hide any disappointment that might show on her face. Teresa, full of superstitions, wanted to know why she was up so early. "Not sleeping is bad, bad luck, bad for the baby."
The baby was due in June. Marisol really wished Gabriel hadn't told his mother. It was not as if the baby even showed, yet.
"A bat got into the closet," she said, "un murcielago. I let it out. Then I was awake."
"Un murcielago!" Teresa repeated, and began gabbling in Spanish. "They are the devil's animals! They bite, they carry diseases..."
Marisol listened patiently and was glad when it was time to dress for work. Gabriel came in, as usual, minutes before she went out. Umbrella, overcoat, pair of dry shoes in her bag, and six blocks to the bus.
Turning at the end of the second block, she almost stepped on a dead sparrow on the pavement. She was glad it was only an Engllish sparrow, an invasive nuisance species. She had a good idea what it was doing there. The landlord never fixed anything because he wanted people to leave; he'd been seen in the parking lot at night on nights before people woke up to unpleasant surprises. The bat might have been one of them, though Marisol didn't think the big ladron could have made the bat fly in through her window, specifically, instead of someone else's.
Maybe God, Whose eye was on the sparrow, had sent the bat into her window because she wouldn't be afraid of it. Marisol smiled to herself. Bats ate mosquitoes. If that little one stayed in the neighborhood, everyone would be better off next summer. Marisol ran for the bus and settled into the window seat beside a familiar stranger, another commuter.
She woke up again when the woman's knee bumped hers. "Seventeenth and K!" the woman said loudly, naming the end of the bus ride. Marisol stood up and walked two and a half more blocks to the building. She changed her shoes downstairs and wrapped the wet ones in three layers of plastic shopping bags.
Someone had the radio on. People were listening. The President's haters had found someone to claim the President had molested him when he was a little boy, Marisol had already heard. The case had seemed unlikely to go to court as of yesterday, when it was pointed out that the man said the President had molested him regularly when they lived in Chicago, and as a matter of record the President had never lived in Chicago. Marisol went to the lounge and made coffee again. The usual box of a dozen mixed doughnuts lay on the table. Marisol virtuously ignored them and carried her coffee mug to the office.
Eighteen of the first twenty e-mails were spam. She was batch-deleting her way down the list when she heard the screams. Only a few screams from the break room; footsteps, hurrying away.
She went to the doorway. In the corridor she saw Ryan from accounting. "There was a thumbtack in one of the doughnuts," he said. "It just plopped onto the table with a glob of jelly after Cho bit into the doughnut. Something's not right."
Marisol shivered. If she hadn't made that coffee cake, she would have had a doughnut with her coffee. She went back to the computer, giving thanks.
2
At lunch break she went with Caroline from layout to a restaurant they both liked. On the way a ginger cat walked up to them and meowed.
"We don't need any more bad luck!"Caroline said vehemently. Marisol always enjoyed her British accent; her "luck" sounded almost like "look."
"Go home, kitty," said Marisol.
"Meow," the cat insisted. He turned--the back view showed the cat was male--and walked a few steps away. He turned back to them. "Meow."
"I think it wants us to follow it," said Caroline. "It's a sign."
"You don't think that might be the bad luck?"
"Too late." Caroline tightened the belt of her raincoat, which had not been loose. "Might as well face it--whatever it is."
They followed the cat down an alley, to an open door, up a staircase. "Meow." The cat scratched at one of the doors. "Meow. Meow!"
Caroline knocked at the door. No one answered. The cat rubbed against her ankles, against the door frame, against her ankles again; it turned and clawed at the door. "Meow. Murr-row-w-w!"
Marisol knocked timidly at the door across the hallway. "Who is it?" someone said around the door.
"My name is Marisol..."
"Do you know anything about this cat?" Caroline said loudly.
The door opened. A young man looked out. "I don't really know the lady that owns it," he said. "Nice to meet you, Marisol. I'm Wayne. I can call the building manager to check on her for you. Do you know her?"
They both denied knowing anything about the person..
"I can feed her cat, anyway," Wayne decided. "Um, thanks for telling me. I think."
They hurried out. It was too late to enjoy lunch at the restaurant. They stopped at a convenience store instead. On the way back they saw an ambulance turning into the alley.
3
Back at the office the news was that someone had found evidence that the President had been in Chicago at least once, fifty years ago; however, the President had been twelve years old at the time, and his accuser had apparently not been born yet. Police had confiscated the doughnuts as evidence. "Don't go to the doughnut shop," Pierre the sales manager warned them.
The only place Marisol wanted to go was home. Not even to the apartment she shared with her husband and his mother-in-law; the home of her childhood, in New Jersey, where her parents took care of things and probably knew how to deal with days like this one. At five o'clock she pulled on her coat, went downstairs and changed back to the shoes she'd been able to air out during the day, and took the bus back to her apartment.
"It's the twenty-eighth of December," someone was saying on the bus. "It's been called the unluckiest day of the year for thoousands of years."
Walking back from the bus, she saw another cat, a small one, playing with the dead sparrow. She quickened her pace and didn't look back but, when she walked into the apartment building, the animal had followed her.
At least it hadn't brought the bird. It was a young cat, a kitten really, black with a white bib. When she paused to look at it, the cat looked at her with wide amber eyes, then closed its eyes in a long blink.
She hurried up the stairs, not looking at it. She hurried to let herself into her apartment.
"Santa Maria!" Teresa exclaimed. "No sooner did I see that we need a cat, than a cat comes in! How fortunate we are!" She said it in Spanish. She always spoke Spanish to Marisol, who preferred English, saying that they needed to remember Spanish.
Marisol looked at the shelves. Teresa made hand craft items all day. Sometimes she sold them online, sometimes at the Eastern Market. It always pleased her when Marisol noticed the newest pieces. "A sailing ship! How intricate," Marisol said.
"You like?" Teresa was in the kitchen. "Here, kitty..." She put down a dish. "I had just cleaned up where a mouse had been!"
"We'll need a litter box." Bowing to the inevitable, Marisol put her wet coat and shoes on again and went to the convenience store to be cheated out of ten dollars. She bought a bag of cat food, too. Maybe it would be good for Teresa to have a pet.
Maybe black cats were the ones who brought bad luck. Had the day's luck been really bad? The bat was unharmed; the thumbtack had dropped out of the doughnut, onto the table, with a blob of jelly; the ginger cat's owner had apparently been found in time to be taken to a hospital. Maybe the really bad luck had come in with the black cat, was waiting to pounce on her in the apartment...
But when she opened the door light, heat, and cheerful television noise surged out to meet her. Gabriel was awake; he kissed her and asked how the day had gone. Teresa had a chicken in the oven, rice and beans on the stove. The President's accuser had attempted suicide and was in a hospital. Things semed to be returning to normal.
4
As Gabriel walked out to the bus, a hooded figure sprang out at him with a knife. "Give me all you got!"
"I don't think so," said Gabriel. His left hand crushed the other man's wrist. He was lefthanded.With his right hand he pushed the man backward. Knife and man dropped, separately, to the pavement. Gabriel kicked the knife away, pinned the man's skinny arms under his knees, and beat his head against the pavement. Short and muscular, like his indigenous ancestors, Gabriel was used to surprising taller men by being stronger than they were. His preference was to surprise them on construction sites; but it was winter, and he'd been offered steady work as a nightwatchman for a reason. "What you need money for, anyway? Drugs?"
"Yeah. Drugs." The man coughed. "I give up, man."
"Where' you from? Why here?"
"Southeast," the man said. "This is a pretty nice neighborhood."
"It is," Gabriel agreed. The man had a wallet in his hoodie. Gabriel checked. He had another wallet in his pocket. "You already robbed somebody tonight."
"Yeah. I did."
Gabriel inspected the wallet from the hoodie pocket. There was not enough light to see the name on the cards but the cash was still in the wallet. "Who was it?"
"An older man."
Gabriel put the wallet in his left hip pocket. "Did somebody pay you to come here?"
"No."
"Dime la verdad. Tell the truth."
"He didn't pay me." The man sniffled. "Told me it'd be all right, that's all."
"Who was he?"
"I don't know." Gabriel waited. "I don't know! He's White, he's about forty or fifty years old, he wears glasses with black rims."
The landlord wore glasses with black rims.
"He was wrong," Gabriel said. "It's not all right. You want money, you find a job. Even if it's a night job like mine. See?"
"I see." The man shivered. "Can I go now? I'm poz, man. I'm about to catch pneumonia out here."
A car rolled up.
"Don't shoot, I'll go quietly." The man swore.
"Police." Gabriel saw a card in a hand in the dim light. He stood up, freeing the mugger. "We were just taking a report from a man who was robbed by..."
"It was me." The man stood up, unsteadily. "I was trying to rob him too. I got greedy. He's got the old guy's wallet."
Gabriel handed it over.
The officer examined the wallet under his flashlight. "That's his ID all right. Okay, bro. I need you to step into the car here." Instinctively, Gabriel moved toward the car, but another policeman was patting down the criminal. "Where's the knife?"
Gabriel pointed. The first policeman pulled his sleeve over his hand to pick up the knife.
"I'd like to talk to you, too," he said to Gabriel.
"Sure. No problem. Is there any way we could talk at my job site? I just missed the last bus. I'm the night watchman at..."
"No problem." The officer was imitating his voice. "If you don't mind getting in the car beside him, we can give you a lift." But nobody patted Gabriel down or helped him buckle his seat belt in the back of the car.
5
Marisol heard a police car out on the main street and gave thanks that Gabriel would surely have been on the bus by now. On television people were winning thousands of dollars for answering trivia questions. Teresa was making another lace doily. Marisol brushed paint onto wooden pieces for a puzzle game, helping her mother-in-law.
The kitten scampered in from the kitchen, playing with a mouse.
"What a lucky day this has been," Teresa said.
