Fiction by E.H. Jacobs
After some consideration, I decided to move from Town X, where I had dwelt for many peaceful, if uneventful, years, to Town Y, a neighboring municipality with which I had only a vague familiarity. I had been feeling for some time that my life had become stale and routine. I had many acquaintances but few, if any, friends, and social conversation always returned to the same topics, like a planet on a fixed orbit: that week’s golf game, the latest baseball trades, and who was meeting up with whom at which expensive restaurant. Nobody seemed interested in discussing, say, the audiobook of Hemingway stories I had been listening to. I heard that the citizens of Y were a livelier lot and that interesting things went on there.
I awoke the first morning in my new home after sleeping so deeply that my memory of the move seemed suspended in a hazy semi-conscious fog. I was surrounded by boxes neatly stacked with no markings to indicate their contents or the room in which each belonged. Perhaps the strangest thing of all: there were no flaps or openings. On top of the highest stacked box was a note that appeared to be in my mother’s handwriting, although my mother had been dead for some years, which simply said: “Don’t open anything you’re not sure of.”
I went outside to see if the newspaper had arrived and a gust of cold wind – quite unexpected in July – hit me in the face, freezing my nose and slamming shut the front door. In my pajamas, I hugged myself tightly to keep warm. The sky darkened and small, white objects began drifting lazily from above, like snowflakes. They soon multiplied and I was in the middle of what appeared to be a squall. As the objects got closer, it became clear that they were not snowflakes, but loose pages from a notebook. I grabbed a handful as they twisted and torqued around me. They were from stories that I had written. A dry, rustling sound, barely audible at first, rose in volume, morphing into laughter. It was the sound of my pages laughing at me. I was hit on the head by what felt like hailstones. After each hit, I saw fall to the ground a book. Each was written by an author whom I had grown to admire: Saroyan, Woolf and Styron. The books flipped themselves open and shook their pages in laughter.
Lying in the driveway was a black high heel shoe with the bottom of the heel roughly shorn off. I looked at my feet, as if the shoe were mine, and I marveled that I could be capable of switching identities so fluidly. Alongside the shoe was a book authored by my favorite workshop leader. The wind blew the book open to a page that read: “Lesson Five: Raise the Stakes.” At that moment, blood started dripping out of the shoe.
I walked into the house in some distress only to hear a knock at the door, commanding and insistent.
Standing with his back to me was a man, broad shouldered, in a gray turtleneck sweater. He turned, holding out two fishing rods and smiling broadly with a self-satisfied, I wouldn’t exactly call it a smirk, but with an expression that definitely showed that he knew who he was and was going to tell me who I was. He had a well-trimmed, salt and pepper beard framing a very familiar face. I opened the door.
I managed to squeak: “Ernest? Is that really you?”
Hemingway let out a hearty laugh. “I’ve come to teach you to fish!” He said a little too loudly, but with good cheer.
“F-fish?” I stammered.
“Well, it was either that or bullfighting, and I didn’t think you’d be up for that.”
“But why’d you–?”
“Somebody had to. Come on, you don’t want to end up like those pansies – Saroyan, Woolf and Styron. You’ve got to learn how to fish for yourself!”
I hesitated, not knowing if I should accept his invitation or invite him in for tea. After all, how often does one get to spend time with Ernest Hemingway?
Hemingway looked past me into the house.
“What’s with those boxes?” he asked.
“I don’t know how to open them.”
Hemingway pushed past me. “What’s in them?” he asked, as he leaned his fishing rods against the tallest stack.
“Secrets?” I said uncertainly.
“What kind of secrets, man!”
I shrugged. “Don’t know.”
Hemingway took out a fishing knife. “Well, let’s find out then. There are stories in there! Let’s get to work.”
Before he could start cutting the boxes, I blubbered: “But my mother—”
“Your mother? Do you always listen to your mother? I’m sure she was a lovely woman, but still, you know – fish for yourself!”
I nodded and, with shaking hands, pulled down the first box.
E.H. Jacobs is a psychologist and writer in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Coneflower Café, Santa Fe Literary Review, Permafrost Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Storgy Magazine, Streetlight Magazine, Aji Magazine, and Smoky Quartz. He has published two books on parenting and book reviews in the American Journal of Psychotherapy.
