Collected Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction by Howard Fast

Author:Howard Fast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

3

A Matter of Size

Mrs. Herbert Cooke—Abigail Cooke—was a woman with a social conscience and a sense of justice. She came of five generations of New Englanders, all of whom had possessed social consciences and devotion to justice, qualities not uncommon in New England once the burning of witches was gotten over with. She lived in a lovely old Colonial house on fifteen acres of land in Redding, Connecticut; she forbade any spraying of her trees, and she gardened ecologically. She believed firmly in mulch, organic fertilizers, and the validity of the New Left; and while she herself lived quietly with her teen-age children—her husband practiced law in Danbury—her heart and small checks went out to a multitude of good causes. She was an attractive woman, still under forty, an occasional Congregationalist, and a firm advocate of civil rights. She was not given to hysterics.

She sat on her back porch—unscreened—on a fine summer morning and shelled peas and saw something move. Afterward she said that it appeared to be a fly, and she picked up a flyswatter and swatted it. It stuck to the fly-swatter, and she looked at it carefully; and then she began to have what amounted to hysterics, took hold of herself, thanked heaven that her children were at day camp, and, still unable to control her sobbing, telephoned her husband.

“I’ve killed a man,” she said to him.

“You what? Now wait a minute,” he replied. “Get hold of yourself. Are you all right?”

“I’m all right.”

“Are the children all right?”

“They’re at day camp.”

“Good. Good. You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Yes. I’m a little hysterical—”

“Did I hear you say that you killed a man?”

“Yes. Oh, my God—yes.”

“Now please get hold of yourself, do you hear me, Abby? I want you to get hold of yourself and tell me exactly what happened.”

“I can’t.”

“Who is this man you think you killed? A prowler?”

“No.”

“Did you call the police?”

“No. I can’t.”

“Why not? Abby, are you all right? We don’t have a gun. How on earth could you kill someone?”

“Please—please come home. Now. Please.”

In half an hour Herbert Cooke pulled into his driveway, leaped out of his car, and embraced his still shivering wife. “Now, what’s all this?” he demanded.

She shook her head dumbly, took him by the hand, led him to the back porch, and pointed to the flyswatter.

“It’s a flyswatter,” he said impatiently. “Abby, what on earth has gotten into you?”

“Will you look at it closely, please?” she begged him, beginning to sob again.

“Stop crying! Stop it!”

Convinced by now that his wife was having some kind of a nervous breakdown, he decided to humor her, and he picked up the flyswatter and stared at it. He stared at it for a long, long moment, and then he whispered, “Oh, my God—of all the damn things!” And then, still staring, he said to her, “Abby, dear, there’s a magnifying glass in the top drawer of my desk. Please bring it to me.”

She went into the house and came back with the magnifying glass. “Don’t ask me to look,” she said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.