Official website of author

F. E. Mazur

Time on the pavement. I've always loved it, whether running the interstates in the car or winding through the turns of a country road on the bike. But the current fuel prices suggest it's time to kick back awhile and catch up on some reading. If you're thinking the same, here are links to 8 of my short stories you can read at your leisure. You can also link just ahead to my novels, SPINE and THE BUCKSELLER. Wish to get in touch? Make the two obvious changes to frankmazur at hughes dot net.

bUSEs

My friend Chance called me one morning while it was still dark out. He wanted to get hold of me before I was off to work. He was living in New York where, a year ago, he'd gone to be an actor. He shared a loft with a writer and a painter, but one was heading to Europe for a couple of months and the other to China.

"Take some time off and drive up," he said. "Think about the Fourth. You've never been to the Big Apple, right? We'll put away a few beers, and I'll show you the sights. I know some women, too."

The women sounded good because I hadn't been with the opposite sex for a while, and a measure of inferiority was becoming the real prick in my morning routine. But driving there, I didn't know about that.

"I heard you have to pay to get into the city," I said.

"Better than having to pay to get out," he said.

I hadn't had my coffee yet and couldn't tell what exactly he meant or if he was kidding around, but I'd already been down on my luck once in my early life when there wasn't enough money to buy a quart of milk, and I didn't know how a person could steal his way out of a city.

"I'm not used to driving in big cities," I said.

"So take a bus. We'll meet at Port Authority and catch a cab from there to my place. Don't think about it. Just do it."

For some reason, the bus idea intrigued me. I suppose it was because I'd never been on one, except for a school bus that had hauled my ass and trumpet around to football games and whose road rhythm often threatened a wet explosion down below. But the big cruisers, the kind that carried people all over the country, those I'd not set foot on.

I'd look at them, though. Every time one was near, including those that barreled past me on the highway, I couldn't help but glance up at it and try to see the people inside. There was something about their sitting high above me, like they had been selected to go to a special place, and their elevation and the speed of the bus seemed to prove it. (Read the entire story.)

CRUSHER RUN

It's a cold night to be riding a motorcycle on the interstate, and Ezra has three hundred miles ahead of him. The temperature will dip further because the bike is pointed north. The Impala would have been his choice, with its heater, but it sits in the shop because of a computer malfunction that was causing the loss of power--yet another item of modern life that, like the marriages of his son and daughter, favors whole replacement of the module as the method of repair. And while either of his neighbors and any of his friends would have been only too glad to lend him a car, he has never been a borrower of money, tools, implements, or anything. As for the old pickup, it is sunk on its rear axle because a ton of crusher run lies in the bed, hundreds of pounds above Detroit's rating for the vehicle. Shoveling the stone off into the potholes of his long dirt lane just wasn't an option; he'd worked all day like a penned-up wild dog. He was too tired.

Which was a concern when he'd left, one hour after learning the news. All the time it took to clean up a little, call the kids on the coast, and collect his leather jacket and gloves, favorite riding boots, helmet, a change of clothes, whiskey flask. (Read the entire story.)

OPERCULUM

Basteen didn't reach his cottage until two in the morning, and the lake was crashing. In the car's headlights he saw a familiar story: he'd paid good money for less than competent work. In this case he'd hired a crew to replace the breakwall during the winter months when the governmental authority dropped the lake, and he had instructed the crew leader to install a deadman every ten feet. Perhaps they had; he wouldn't know that for a fact until he stood in the water in daylight when he could inspect their exposed ends and count the number. But what he did see that should have been unavailable to his vision was the long rectangular side of the nearest deadman. Each receding wave scoured it back to front, washing out gravel and dirt. The thick wooden tie was barely three feet in length; it should have been at least six, preferably eight. If his wife had been along, he would have remarked, as he often had at the completion of a construction job performed by a contractor: "I should have done the work myself. I could have screwed things up for a lot less money." A self-deprecating sentiment, it was not meant to be taken in earnest, as he seldom executed a task improperly.

He was not a man to seek counsel and instruction from others, Basteen--a fantasy writer who abided poor sales and rejection with stoicism because he believed evolution of any form or matter had little if anything to do with the constancy of time. He believed new phenomena could occur spontaneously if the elements of experience and exigency combined. He trusted unwaveringly that all metaphysics could change in an instant, the same as he had faith that a future book of his would be an overnight bestseller.

With the hour being what it was and the lake in an uproar, Basteen was surprised, once he turned his attention away from the deadman under assault, to see a small boat braving the waves. He bumped the car's headlights to high beam and the shrinking distance between the boat's own lights, forward and aft, suggested the craft was making an immediate though difficult turn in his direction. He silenced the engine, but left the headlights on, then worked his sinewy figure from out behind the steering wheel. As he stretched, he thought he heard a voice coming off the boat, but it was impossible to say for certain because of the water's own voice, which was loud and overrode other sounds. (Read the entire story.)

SOMALIA

As became her habit, Crystal derided me. She said I could never understand our summer neighbor.

"What is there to understand?" I rejoined. "The man walks around with blinders on."

"Mr. Positive" was how I addressed Carl if I was feeling pleasantly nasty. Florence wasn't any different. I won't say she was like one of those irritatingly nutant reporters on everybody's local news, unconsciously yes-ing her silver-haired head to the ridiculous word or two her husband delivered as he responded to my criticism of the nation's deplorable social mores, or questions about a government policy doomed to fail; but her facial expressions, a mix of kindergarten optimism and Mother T beatitude, displayed too often the look of "All is well." Taking the poor woman seriously could exact a price.

Carl, who each summer wore a new baseball cap advertising some local business and whose dark fissures crisscrossed his face like more a map of a thousand hyperlinks than old leather, had three decades on me. It was half this amount of time that passed following our marriage before Crystal and I purchased the splendid log cabin, formerly owned by a state senator, which sat next to theirs. Before Crystal left, the four of us got together in the mountains each August, along with their two grandsons. Within that first year of ownership, a sinkhole developed on the boundary separating our properties and, following an all-day deluge, a pond formed. Inquiring of the people at Cooperative Extension, Carl learned that a thick stratum of clay lay underneath parts of the region, and I went along with getting a bulldozer in to widen and deepen the hole. Carl's pitch was we would all go swimming afterwards, plus if a couple buckets of panfish and some smallmouth bass (my vote was for the largemouth, just to be contrary) were stocked, we could become anglers and enjoy the tasty delights of a fresh catch well into the future. But he was thinking really of the boys, who soon would demonstrate they loved both water activities. And perhaps he was betting that Crystal and I still might have children one day who would appreciate a pond with dimensions larger than a kiddy pool. (Read the entire story.)

UNVISITED SPACES

Watching one of the morning news shows, Ritchie Lee Whelan burst out laughing.

"Alison, you got to hear this!"

Alison Keene appeared from the bedroom, in a hurry.

"I'm running late for work, and there's a deposition first thing. I have to go."

"That Dr. Emily? She said if we find a tick on Churchill, we should take it to Dr. Bernice. You know, to check for that fruity disease?"

"Oh, those crazy New Yorkers," said Alison. "But that disease hasn't a thing to do with fruit, Ritchie."

"Don't I know that. It's not even spelled the same."

Last evening, while sitting on the front porch, the pair had picked off more than thirty ticks buried in the long coat of Ritchie Lee's red-haired mutt and deposited them in a jar half-filled with bleach. Some were already dead from the poison squeezed days before into the nape of the dog's neck, but there were others still alive who, in Ritchie's words, were "mapping out the territory of ol' Churchill's hide." Ritchie Lee wished he could run up the Bluegrass Parkway to the airport and hop a flight to some New York City medical clinic where he would drop the jar of the now whitened bloodsuckers onto the doctor's desk with a note that read, "Compliments of Dr. Emily and CBS."

"What are your plans for today?" asked Alison as she hunted the car key inside her purse. "Do you have any water deliveries scheduled? Or anything?"

"With last week's rain, just one. Jarboe's Mexican Hotel," said Ritchie Lee. "Then, when I get back, I thought I might start on those bookshelves you want."

"Oh, Ritchie, no. Don't do that. I've been thinking of something a little different from what I told you. I'm thinking bookshelves, yes, but now with maybe a cabinet or two underneath for the DVD and the rest."

"So?'

"You'll need a router more than ever."

"I could buy one."

"And you're planning to do this with those saws in your pickup?"

"I'll look around for a used table or miter saw. Dudes buy them all the time, thinking they'll build houses and do remodeling. Afterwards, the things sit around and rust." (Read the entire story.)

A ROOT CELLAR MEMORY

How ironic it sometimes seems to me that my mother, who worked throughout her life with her mind, became afflicted with Parkinson's, while my father, who's worked his entire life with his hands, suffers from Alzheimer's.

Before Janet's death she insisted I see the doctor to learn if I had it, Alzheimer's. She'd worried because she thought I was exhibiting signs, despite I wasn't 50. But the doctor cautiously agreed with her after running tests and capturing several picturesãslices--of my brain. He said my father also might have had the early form of it, except the disease wasn't much recognized in past generations as it is today. He was a tanned, in-shape physician with a Pete Sampras-inscribed tennis racket and a snowboard at the ready in the corner of his office. His advice included keeping my mind active. He asked if I read much, messed with puzzles, and did similar things that challenged the mind and demanded mental exercise. I answered that I still managed to slog through a dozen or so books every year, although my vision up close was beginning to show problems. I said also that when I was a younger man, I enjoyed writing short stories.

"Well, if that's so, Mr. M., then I recommend you do like the oilmen in this country are currently doing. Get that rusty pump working again, there's profit to be made. In your case, that translates to a longer quality of life. Making up a story insists on an attention to detail and chronology, doesn't it? So that's just what the disease often robs its victim of. Plus who knows," he added, laughing, "perhaps you'll win a Pushcart."

I intended to heed his advice, although I would not be sending out my stories (the early ones weren't really all that made-up anyway, if truth be told) to magazines for possible publication. Revising, rewriting, these were not things I'd done in the past, and they held no interest now. The fact was, once I'd completed a story, then assigned it a title, into an accordion folder the typewritten manuscript had gone with others. Already tired of it, I didn't read my words even to myself. (Read the entire story.)

DOREEN'S SNOOZELEN

Pap comes home from work, carrying a bag. Mom is the first to ask.

"Feesh," says Pap.

"Fish? You hate fish. Every time I make it, you complain."

Pap holds the bag up to his craggy face, shakes it a tiny little, and grins.

My twin sister Doreen says, "What sort of fish worth eating fits into a bag that small?"

"Bingo!" says Pap. "These feesh aren't for eating. These feesh are for looking at. Find me one of those glass blocks I brought home from a gravesite," he says to Mom. "They need to get into something bigger with more water, else they'll die."

He opens the brown paper bag and slides out a clear plastic one bulging with air and three inches of water. At the bottom seam two little fish begin jerking about and climbing over each other's dorsal as though some celebrity of their own, like Charlie the Tuna, has just appeared outside their new window.

Ricky sees what I expect him to see and he pantomimes an explosion of the inflated bag between his small hands, like it's an empty potato chip one. Never too sure about Ricky, Pap draws the fish closer to himself, out of my son's reach. (Read the entire story.)

A BIGGER CASE

The black motorcycle with the double white pinstripe leaned on its side stand with the front wheel, headlight, and fairing angled longingly, almost pensively, to the left because Rip thought that was the pose at which all bikes look their best. He had bought the reliable BMW nearly fifteen years earlier from a middle-aged physician, who permanently garaged it before its first oil change following a deathly close call with a semi, and since then Rip had ridden aboard it through forty-nine of the fifty states and most of the Canadian provinces. Whenever the bike was parked and strangers gazed at it, he noticed how they soon checked the odometer, and they were always impressed by the mileage. (Entire story available only as a download from Amazon.)

Home Spine The Buckseller bUSEs Crusher Run Operculum Somalia Unvisited Spaces A Root Cellar Memory Doreen's Snoozelen A Bigger Case