Fiction

Yeah, mincemeat, and he had about ten kilograms of it. He couldn’t very well eat it all and he didn’t know what to do with it. And he didn’t know how he came by it either.

She recovers the stitch and keeps knitting. Despite her comment, she sings two bars from the Happy Days theme. “Sunday, Monday, Happy Days. Tuesday, Wednesday, Happy Days.” She puts down her knitting, “It’s Wednesday,” she remembers. “We have to attend the hangings.”

For months I led Victor Frankenstein on a mad chase, from Switzerland to Italy to Russia to the Arctic Ocean. Then a storm separated us and, in the distance, I watched a passing ship rescue my creator and leave me for dead.

The day is so hot the sky itself might be melting when the girl and her father meet at the outdoor table of the tacky beachside restaurant three minutes off Greenwood Lake Turnpike. It’s a Tuesday, late in the evening but still a long way from sunset. She twists at the stem of the headless sunflower, the top of it left carelessly on the table beside the empty plastic vase. He fiddles with the corner of where the label meets on a bottle of Yuengling.
“So,” she says.
He waits. She adds nothing. The strap of her white sundress slides off her shoulder, and goes ignored.
“So,” he says. “It’s been a long time.”

Papa?
Yeah?
People are looking at us.
Seema’s face was at the window, ten year old eyes surveying the world, button nose squashed against the tinted glass.
They’re not looking at us, honey. They’re looking at the car.