Norman Lock

________

Grim Tales

Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night. His affairs were being put in order--no matter how he tried to resist it, this "settling of accounts." No matter that, in desperation one night, he burnt the papers, including his last will and testament, which was now being written in a hand he did not recognize, leaving everything to his estranged wife, a woman whom he despised. Last night, having resigned himself, he took an overdose of sleeping pills, sufficient to stop his heart.

*

The pebbles grew into stones, the stones into great rocks. The rocks reared up into mountains, which cast their shadows over the land--their cold shadows. Darkness fell on the fields and the town and on a woman pinning sheets onto the line, her mouth full of clothespins and her breasts taut and lifted against her blouse. When her husband looked out the window and saw her, desire rose up in him; and when she came into the house, he laid her down on the unmade bed and covered her body with his own just as the first boulders broke loose from the mountains and the avalanches began.

*

Because he had died under mysterious circumstances, an autopsy was performed. The coroner removed a bullet from the right ventricle; however, neither entrance nor exit wound could be found. The bullet was of a type used by snipers in the Second World War, during which the man's father had been lost and presumed dead. The man had never known his father, whom the man's mother hated still with a passion equal to her love for her son. The wound--the coroner observed--was perfect, as if the bullet had been "introduced into the heart by means other than a weapon."

*

He brought a door with him and placed it against the hillside. And then he went in and closed it. What happened to him next is not known, because the door was for him alone. And later when they heard him scream, there was nothing anyone could do.

*

The trees now grew without observing any longer the limits assigned them by nature. They reached into the sky until they looked out over "the floor of heaven." Recalling the old story, boys climbed them. Not only boys but men and even some old men who wished for gold. One by one they fell--the old men and the young, and the boys, too--not one of them having reached the top branches let alone the floor of heaven. Instead, they fell, all of them, earning for themselves neither wealth nor fame, only death at the foot of the unruly trees. And still the trees continued to grow without regard for the limitations of their kind until the roots tore from the ground and the earth was broken into pieces and destroyed.

*

There, where the grass was allowed to grow without let or hindrance, children liked to hide from those who might call them home to their lessons. This evening when their mothers went into the towering grass to bring home the fugitives, they found entrances to what appeared to be underground tunnels. Putting their ears to them, they could hear a distant sound like the gnashing of teeth.

*

It was the man who hit him over the head with a gaff. But she bound her husband's ankles and wrists with cord; and together, they dropped him over the side. They had met at the summer home of a mutual friend. A man "connected to the theater." Almost immediately, they had become lovers. Their affair was torrid, shameless, and indiscreet. Her husband, however, knew nothing. Plotting to kill him had become, for the lovers, a game. The more they played it, the less impossible it seemed. Soon they thought of nothing else: the desire to kill him "perfectly" replaced their desire for each other. The night they disposed of the body, she dreamed of a crab scuttling across the ocean floor. The second night, of a door on the bottom. On the third night, she dreamed of a whale. It spoke to her in a way she understood. It told her to drive--now, before night was ended--to the sea; to take off her clothes and swim out as far as she could swim. The moon lay among the black waves like broken plates. She swam until she could swim no more. And then she sank beneath the waves. Her husband was waiting for her the moment she woke.