Short Stories WR Woodbury

"Hello!  Ludmila Feodorovna?  Hello?" a man's voice called. "Is anyone home?  Ludmila Feodorovna?  Can we speak to you?" It was probably a man from the Kyiv Oblast Social Fund checking that Ludmila was still alive.  They'd be only too happy to stop her widow's pension and leave her son Vasya with just his tiny disability payment to live on.  She'd fought hard for that, but it was so meagre it would not be enough to feed him if she died.  She pushed aside the rolled-up rags that kept the cold wind from whistling under the plywood door and unbolted the top and bottom locks, opening it a crack but leaving the safety chain attached.  There were bandits around who could kick their way in, but if they started, she should have a chance to get out of the mud-room and back inside the stronger main door.  Through the crack of daylight, she could see a handsome young man with blonde hair and blue eyes, but Ludmila had learned in her long life not to be ...

While the rest of the group waited for the professor, Vladimir squeezed through a crack in the corner of the room and launched into his usual rant.  "Fleas of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but your chains!" "Give it a rest, Vladimir," Foo Chow said.  "We'd do something if we could." Foo Chow was right.  There was no way out of work.  When the professor was ready to open the show and send them onto the stage, they had no choice but to do as he wished.  The worst off were the newest members who were assigned to the orchestra because they wore copper collars, not the gold ones of the principal performers.  The orchestra members were attached to a metal plate that was connected to a power supply. As their tunes played, the hotter the plate got, the more energetically they gyrated, and the deeper the copper collars cut into their necks.  If they survived a month, they might be assigned a role in the main show.  At least the professor ...

    Like a sailboat tacking toward a harbour, my fingertip strayed through Texas, Arizona, California, and Colorado, before stopping on a resonant name.  "Here," I said.  "Here is where I want to go."        A week later, in an air-conditioned taxi heading for Moisant Airport, I confessed to last minute misgivings.        She stared out the window at the delta flatlands on which an uneven crop of factories, power poles, and eucalyptus, gasped under a sticky sun.  "Ain't nobody's life but your own," she said, implying that she still didn't agree with my decision.        "You got in your mind what you'll do when you get there?" she asked, being an habitual practitioner of foresight, never my strongest suit.        A whiff of sulphur dioxide penetrated the taxi's defences and provoked a familiar nausea that I willed down with worse thoughts.  "I imagine calling them foul names...

     Okotoks was originally a railway town divided into a grid of rectangular blocks, each the length of a stream train.  By the end of the century It had since burst its prairie-section boundaries and become a spruce and poplar filled bedroom community of identical curving streets and stubby cul-de-sacs built for Calgary commuters.  The town is far enough east of the Rockies that the mountains look like a frosty rumble strip across the western horizon.         Danny’s six year old son Luke sat up tall in the passenger’s seat.  “Dad!” He pointed to a sign for a trailer park that was squeezed between the original town-site along the river, and the newer industrial area that served the remnants of the oil and sulphur fields.   “You have to turn here for grandma’s place.”   Danny was always surprised by his son’s alertness and awareness. Like his father, Luke wasn’t very talkative but he didn’t miss much....

      I am where I ought to be.  Surrounded by windows, I sit in an upstairs room of a house that is not my home.  To my right is the sheltered bay of a Greek island.  The light has gone from the harbour, but further out the sun shines on open water.  I stayed here for a while ten years ago and used to walk to the rocks on the headland and ask myself questions from a Tahitian painting.  Sometimes I met Yiannis, the village drunk on his way to the bar.  His mother had died that year so he was worse than ever.  I didn’t speak enough Greek for a lucid conversation, so except for a passing nod and "hello", we had no way to exchange stories.  He drank to kill his pain.  For reasons of my own I did the same.         In those days I was friends with an English rose named Melissa who lived with her American lover, a laconic Vietnam veteran writing his book.  He jokingly called her by the nickname Hol...

The men shouted and whistled when Ernestine took the stage.   Her theatre of operations was a raised platform where the Corporal stood when he gave the daily orders.   The single permitted oil lamp, entrusted to the oldest inmate, had been allowed onto the edge of the stage if Ernestine swore she wouldn’t knock it over.   As she eased into a rendition of the partisan classic Goodbye Beautiful, there were shouts of “Fascists go to hell!” Not everyone there was in agreement with the sentiment because they were not strictly political prisoners, but no fights broke out.   Everyone’s eyes were on Ernestine.   As the song went on she strutted the limits of the platform and clapped her hands to give her audience a marching beat for the song. She flicked the defiant flounces of her makeshift skirt at the men closest to her feet, whose rapt faces could have been worshiping the Madonna.   To calm things down she started into O Sole Mio but a melancholy hush came ov...