Short Stories

The Blizzard and Mrs. Beard by Peg Herring

Published in the March/April issue of Crime and Suspense. This short story won the Reader's Choice award for best story

See Crime and Suspense for subscription information

Retiree Aversion by Peg Herring

If you're above a certain age, and like vintage private eye / police series on TV, you'll enjoy this one.

Retiree Aversion is available online at www.orchardpressmysteries.com

You've Got Mail! by Peg Herring

When the phone buzzed next to her ear, Catherine rolled over and groped blindly with one hand, unwilling to open awaken. After waiting for three rings she gave up and squinted one-eyed at the daylight streaming in through a single bedroom window. Shoving a "No kidding, Catherine, you've won $5000" aside, she located the cordless on the bed stand and punched the correct button.

"Hello." She tried to sound as if she'd been awake, but her voice was scratchy.

"Cate? It's Mony."

"Hey, what's up?"

"Want to come shopping today?"

"Let me see." Cate sat up and moved a "Sale on holiday items" and "A gift for you" out of the way to get her PDA to the correct screen. "How long do I have to get ready?"

"No hurry. Half an hour?" Mony, an early riser, could not stand to waste a morning. Cate could picture her: already dressed and booted, her spiky hair shiny with gel, bright orange acrylic fingernails drumming impatiently on the desktop. "It's already nine-thirty."

"Make it forty minutes. I'll meet you at the subway."

"Deal." Mony rang off and Cate stood upright, stretching her arms above her head and twisting her spine a few times to get herself started. As she did, "Shop on-line at Bates and Notel!" presented itself, but she pushed it off to the left and shoved her feet into shabby slippers beside the bed with practiced ease. Shuffling into the bathroom, she began her morning routine, flinching at an obviously misdirected "Girls, Girls, GIRLS: young and sexy!" that got in front of the mirror ahead of her.

In exactly forty-three minutes, Cate met Mony at the Bloor Street Station, where they boarded the train for Eaton Centre. Cate was now wide-awake and well-groomed. She wore a short jacket trimmed in fur over low-rise jeans and a red sweater, her feet encased in the same boots as her friend wore, since they’d bought them at the same place. It took a while to locate Mony because of the "World's Smallest Video Camera" message that blocked her face. With practiced ease she shoved it out of the way with her purse.

"Hey! You look great."

"Thanks. You, too. Now what are we shopping for?" They stepped lightly down the steps to the trains after showing their passes to the bored attendant on duty.

"I still have to get a gift for my brother," Mony replied, and immediately a "Gifts for that hard-to-buy-for man" popped up between them. Mony slapped it away and went on, moving far enough down the platform from other people to assure minimum hassle boarding the train. "I don't know what he'd like: something for his room, maybe, but I don't know what he’d consider cool. I'm thinking that as a last resort there are the sure-fire, man-pleasing tickets to a Raptors game."

Of course, "Ticketmeister: discounts and savings for you!" came up, and Mony moved it aside, more gently, for later consideration.

"What about DVDs?" Cate suggested, and several possibilities immediately arose before their eyes. Mony rejected each one with a touch after brief consideration. "He's either got them already or he's not interested. The kid is SO spoiled."

Cate led the way onto the train as the doors glided open with a characteristic sigh. Inside, other people perused their messages, and the floor of the car was littered with the rejected ones. Some, obviously Christmas shoppers, kept a few for later reference, and the brightly-colored words hung in the air behind them as they moved to the doors in preparation for arrival at the mall.

The two women stepped off the train at Eaton and made their way through the heavy glass doors. Here, too, the floor was littered with unread messages in various stages of disintegration. "I wish they'd shorten the time limit," Mony remarked. "They're so messy lying around everywhere."

"Maybe they hope people will reread them later."

"Who has time to reread?" Monica said with a snort. "I barely get through what's new."

"True."

They wandered through the men's departments of Eaton's and then on to several other stores. They looked at sweaters ("too ordinary"), underwear ("too weird"), and a game that reminded Cate of Rock’em/Sock’em Robots with a technological twist, (which Mony pronounced "Sick!"). Nothing struck Mony as the perfect "spoiled brother gift". After a cappuccino at a little deli in the lower level, she declared herself stumped. "There’s no sense in this fruitless searching. I’ll think about it some more." "Confused? Let Balisian Ginkoba sharpen your mind!" appeared before her, and the girls giggled.

"That’s it: a decision pill," Cate declared.

Heading toward the subway, the two entered the vestibule between the mall and the train station. Among the swiftly-moving shoppers and one barely stirring derelict sprawled just out of sight of the attendant, they saw a tiny lady watching the crowds that passed. She sat on one of those folding camp stools off to one side of the area, out of the way of those moving through the doors but shivering each time they opened and closed. Behind the woman a sign (a real, poster board sign) said, "Tired of spam? ‘De-mail’ can help". Mony, who had just shoved "At your wit's end for the right Christmas gift?" out of her line of vision, stopped, and Cate, who had a "Be a more healthful, youthful you" to deal with, almost ran into her.

Looking closely at the no-longer-young but quaintly attractive figure, Mony whispered to Cate, "Do you suppose she was around to buy that outfit when it was new?" The lady was dressed in clothing that might have come from a vintage shop: a long cotton mu-mu with soft sandals, a tie-dyed headband in her long gray hair, and honest-to-goodness love beads. Still, she had an intelligent glint in her eyes, and she smiled in welcome as the girls neared. Eccentric, maybe, but not insane, Cate decided.

"What about spam?" Mony asked, indicating the poster.

"I can see you have a real problem," the woman commented as Mony batted a "Win $$$$ by playing SLAATZ" to the ground.

"No worse than anyone else," Cate defended her friend.

"Do you see any b-mail around me?" the woman asked gently.

"No." Both glanced around, suddenly realizing that the woman’s personal space was completely free of advertising. "Have you got it coded somehow?" Cate asked.

"I don't get b-mail." It was said with pride.

"What do you mean?" Cate asked.

"Everyone gets b-mail. It can't be blocked," Mony insisted in almost the same breath.

"I don't, and you don't have to, either." The woman’s smile was at once kindly and a bit arch.

"How can you use the Net without getting b-mail? You do use the Net, right?"

"Of course." She waved a hand which Cate noticed was gnarled with arthritis. "I use it to find out things and to communicate with people, but only on my terms."

"That's not possible. If you have an account, you get b-mail."

"That's how it used to be." The woman settled more comfortably on her seat and glanced over their shoulders for a moment as if looking at her harried past. "You see, like everyone else, I wanted to be connected, and I liked surfing, so I put up with all the spam and the unsolicited email, even when it started getting annoying."

"My mom says she remembers getting her first emails, how great it was to get and send messages instantly."

"It was nice," the tiny woman agreed. "But then it started getting intrusive: pop-ups, spam, junk. At first you just had to delete them, but then advertisers got tricky. Some ads wouldn't delete, others were cleverly disguised as something else."

"Then they figured out how to bypass the computer screen entirely," Cate finished.

"Yes. Now by-pass email, or b-mail, comes up directly in front of the user's face as a holographic image." The woman shook her head sadly with the look of the aged who feel superior to those with fewer years. "You young people don't know what it's like not to have messages in front of your face all day long. I watch you calmly push them aside to look into a lover’s eyes or knock them to the ground to see where you're stepping without even thinking about what an annoyance it is."

"Well, sometimes I think about it," Cate admitted, "but what can you do? People who won't connect to the Net are so left out of the world."

"They usually have some weird religious reason for..." Mony began then thought better of it since the lady might be one of those. "I mean..."

"I have no belief that God doesn't want me on the Net," the lady said with a throaty laugh. "I’m just sick of b-mail interfering with my thought process and then littering the sidewalks while it fades away. At my age, one must concentrate to get through traffic," she said with amused self-deprecation, "I don’t need distractions like b-mail to confuse me."

"So what did you do to get rid of it?" Cate asked. "I mean, is it expensive?"

"Actually, that's the best part," smiled the woman. "It costs nothing. All you need is to know the secret."

Mony smiled ironically. "And you're going to tell us for a small fee."

The woman's eyebrows, still a bit darker than her white hair, rose indignantly. "Of course not. I'm going to tell you for free. If you would like to donate money for the information, you can put it in there."

Cate saw beside her a red Salvation Army pot in the traditional tripod. "You work for them?"

"I'm a volunteer, yes. The other I do on the side, sort of my own contribution to Christmas cheer."

Cate pulled a twenty from her wallet. "It's worth it to me to try it out," she said. "I'm sick of wading through the junk, too."

"What about messages we want?" Mony wanted to know.

"You'll get them." The lady handed Cate a piece of paper with instructions printed in Times New Roman, 14 point. Probably easier on old eyes, she thought as she skimmed through it. The process really was quite simple and ingenious. She wondered why no one else had thought of it.

"This is amazing," Cate told Mony after she had thanked the odd lady and walked on. "A few simple steps and I can jam the spam. Hey, I like that: 'Jam the spam!’" Immediately a message appeared in front of her "Dr. Seuss books on sale at amadon.com". She flicked it away jauntily with her finger and thumb.

"I don't know," Mony was thoughtful. "I mean, do you really want to be the only person we know walking around without any messages?"

"What are you saying? They're junk. We hate them!"

"Yeah, but everyone gets them except really strange types. What do we project if we have no b-mail? We're losers, people no one communicates with."

"Well, I won't demail you, and you won't demail me..." Cate argued.

"Yeah, so you and my mom each send me one a day. Aren’t I popular!" Mony’s pretty face darkened with scorn.

"Gee, I hadn't thought of that," Cate murmured thoughtfully. It would be tough to be different from everyone else, to have no b-mail to gripe about.

"It's like you're somebody when you've got b-mail. Email was okay, but now everyone sees what everyone else is getting, and how much stuff you've got coming in. If there wasn't b-mail, my life might seem...pathetic."

"Yeah, like people who don’t have a cell phone to use while they’re waiting in the checkout line."

"Pathetic, like I said."

Cate looked again at the piece of paper the kindly lady had given her. "It's probably too much work anyway, doing what it says here."

"Yeah, why bother when they just go away...like that?" Mony asked as she poked a "When did you graduate high school?" and watched it float to the concrete.

The train came to a whooshing halt before them. As they stepped into the car, Mony got a message about last-minute gifts from Beauty Wrights. Cate’s message concerned opportunities for easy loans with low interest. Reaching up to dispose of it, she let the piece of paper with "B-mail Killer" printed across the top drop onto the track. It remained there, the only real thing among hundreds of fading notices, as the train pulled away.