ANIMAL CRACKERS - short story
I have lived next door to Mrs.
Abrams for as long as our
family lived in our house here in Huntingdon Dales. Now that the
pandemic is
over, scores of ads arrive in our mail boxes every single day.
What a waste.
Sam and I throw everything into our recyclable bin. Believe it or
not, park
benches will be made out of them. That’s the way it should work.
Mrs. Abrams
was a Holocaust survivor. A very old one. Sam and I kept track
of her when she
would walk down her driveway and pick up the Philadelphia
Inquirer. Her pace
got slower and slower and we wondered when she would pass away.
She had told us
she had no heirs – they had either died or moved away - and
everything would go
to her next door neighbor, Larry Sanders.
Mrs. Abrams
wasn’t sure how old she was. Her nineties, she thought.
Neighbors like Larry
would buy her groceries. She would often think of the Inuits who
would simply
walk out into the bitterly cold Arctic and freeze to death. Oh,
a horrid death,
for sure, but what death was not terrible?
Lewey Body Disease? Alzheimers? Gasping from Covid 19?
Mrs. Abrams lived inside her head. She had one of those toilets
like a child’s.
You would sit on the wooden chair, do your business, and then
pour the results
down the toilet or out the back door after dark. The
five-bedroom house was now
reduced to only two usable areas: Kitchen and bathroom.
She remembered their kitchen in
Berlin. It was white and glossy. Equipped with a stove, a sink with
hot and cold
running water, a refrigerator, and worktops and kitchen
cabinets.
Good Lord,
the things she remembered having.
“Purry,” her first kitten,
dead years later, all
embalmed like mummies in a top shelf in the kitchen – all in
attractive tins
like an old Rumsford baking powder tin.
Her first
television, before they moved to The Dales, was a DuMont. The
laboratories were
founded in 1931 by Dr. Allen B. DuMont. Between each and every
one of her
thoughts, all Mrs. Abrams could think about was, “What will
happen when I die? And
how will I know I am dead.”
These were
the times of hurricanes. On her color RCA television, blinking
on and off like
a stalled traffic light, she could hardly believe her eyes:
gusts of wind blew
down houses in the Caribbean as if they were birthday candles.
And everything
below disappeared. Look, Auschwitz and Buchenwald were nearly
forgotten. The blue
tattoos on the inside of her arm had faded and sagged from her
pitiful old
arms.
She thought about the food she had
eaten for all these
years. Her teeth had mostly fallen out. Fine. Nothing was worse
than visiting
the dentist, though she remembered as a child, sipping on
Lavoris, a
cherry-flavored breath concoction, at the end of every visit.
And the “prizes” in the bottom drawer.
She chose a
clipper ship with white sails, very tall – six inches high. She
still had it,
along with Animal Crackers. They weren’t so
good but the
package enumerated all the animals in the zoo. Black rhinos,
huge tortoises
whose backs were big enough to ride on, peacocks up in trees,
their claws
gripping the branches so as not to fall and crocodiles with
deadly spikes on
their backs.
What if she could choose the way to
die? Was that ever
permitted?
Terrible sounds emanated from the
outside. Airplanes?
Motorcycles? Gales? The Animal Crackers fell off the shelf. And
a huge straight-growing
oak tree fell right across the house. She was fairly sure she
was dead, but she
didn’t rightly know.
What if there was no difference between
the living and
the dead? They all joined hands and walked together. Himmler and
Rudolf Hess
among them. Strindberg, author of The Red Room, Miss Julie and
The Creditors
strolled along the Danube River, as it roiled in the hot sun. In
the background
they could hear murmurs and bands playing The Blue Danube Waltz
and Tannhauser
by the anti-Semite Wagner.
Did anyone care any more?
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