Originally published at Boston Literary Magazine. Read original here:

Death Row Hugger

by Nancy Stohlman

            For some reason it’s always at night. It’s always in the same room, the light is always jaundiced. The room smells musty, like wet clothes were shoved and left to die in all the corners.

I guess I was destined for this job. My parents weren’t the hugging type, so I’ve always had a malnourished craving for arms around me. I started out as a professional baby cuddler for the preemie babies in the NICU; each night after visiting hours, I settled into the wooden rocking chair with these miniature babies and their ancient, sculpted faces and whispered of a future when they would be strong and full sized.

But nothing could prepare me for being a Volunteer Hugger on Death Row. You enter that holding room, and there they are, trying to enjoy their steaks or lobsters or Cuban cigars or whatever. My job is to hug them just before they take that long walk. It’s not a sexual hug, though I have felt a few erections, and a few have tried to kiss me, but I politely turn my cheek and squeeze them harder. Because there’s this moment in the hug, you see, where it goes from something awkward and obligatory to when they melt into my arms, weeping with their bodies if not with their eyes. Every now and then I hear one of them whisper in my ear, and once one called me Mama.

(Published by Connotation Press, Dec 15, 2012. Read original here.)

What Happened in the Library by Nancy Stohlman

Discouraged by the shelves of unread classics in my extensive personal library, I made a phone call. The clone I ordered showed up at my doorstep carrying an old red Samsonite hardshell suitcase. Did you bring reading glasses as specified in my instructions? I asked. She nodded and cracked an eyeglass case as proof. I showed her to my library. This will be your room, I said. I put a cot out for you, but I don’t expect you’ll be sleeping much. I also put the armchair and my favorite lamp next to the fireplace.

But it’s 100 degrees out my clone objected.

I knew you would say that, I said, so I also strung up a hammock in the backyard. And eventually summer will be over and you’ll want to read by the fireplace. Drink all the coffee and water you want and I’ll bring you three meals a day. No need to ring me—just keep your focus on the books and I’ll slip you food quietly so as not to interrupt you.

I walked my clone over to the bookshelves. My collection is far from complete, I said, but this will get you started. You can go in any order you want; perhaps you work your way chronologically with Homer, Ovid, then Chaucer, Shakespeare, all the way up to Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc., or else you could go alphabetically by either title or author, beginning at Aesop or All Quiet on the Western Front. You could also go by themes, such as Dickens in the winter. You’ll get every other Sunday off.

What if it’s raining?

Well, if it’s raining on a Sunday then obviously I’m going to need you to stay here and read all day, so if the rainy day happens to fall on a Sunday, you’ll get Monday off instead.

I let my clone settle in and told her she didn’t have to start reading until tomorrow, and I commended myself on my own brilliance.

The first few weeks I was so happy to look in at mealtime and find her curled in the armchair, fuzzy socked feet tucked under her, glass of iced tea on the end table, sometimes the jazz station playing, sometimes just the crinkly sound of pages turning. Her profile was like my own but less weathered by daily stresses and worry lines, and I began to obsess about her and what she was doing as I lugged my lecture notes to and from the university each day, graded piles of essays from fledgling writers, and tried to muster up enough excess energy to sit in front of my own manuscript. My clone, on the other hand, spent whole days wearing the same silky nightgown, or reading in the nude on the hammock wearing just a cowboy hat. When I saw Moby Dick propped on her brown belly as I left to catch the Lightrail, I felt a true pang of jealousy.

I decided to spy on her. With all this time to read, she really should have finished more books. I pretended to leave one day but secretly cancelled all my classes and drove the car to the nearby Office Max and then took a cab home and hid in the bushes below my front window. My clone was just waking up, Moby Dick opened beside her on the bed. I noted that she had been reading that same book for quite some time now—months, even. She sat up and stretched, turned on the reading light, fluffed her pillows, reached for the coffee and chocolate croissant I had left her, pulled her red Samsonite suitcase from under the bed, popped open the lid and retrieved a book I hadn’t seen before. She settled into the pillows holding a chocolate croissant in one hand and the book, opened to the middle, in the other, and I could finally read the title: 50 Shades of Grey.

A quick informational search in my office later told me that this was not a classic nor did it have literary merit.

On the next non-rainy Sunday when my clone had the day off I broke into her red Samsonite suitcase and found piles of books with titles like: Twilight: New Moon, The Notebook, The Babysitters Club, The Nanny Diaries, Chicken Soup for the Girlfriend’s Soul, Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, and A Girl’s Guide to Getting a Husband. I opened the beautiful hardbound edition of Moby Dick she had been reading endlessly for months and instead found it gutted, a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban neatly tucked inside.

What is going on here? I asked her when she returned Monday morning.

What are you talking about?

How’s Moby Dick?

It’s good.

What’s happened so far?

Well, they’re chasing around this whale and stuff.

What else?

Um, they’re talking a lot about whales and stuff.

And?

I don’t know! Moby Dick sucks, okay! I hate it!

Her face blanched, but it was too late.

I contacted the cloning agency and had her returned immediately. I turned down their offer of a replacement—it was still too soon. But the library seemed big and empty, I thought, cleaning up her crumbs, putting her cowboy hat on the shelf.

 

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The Detritus

by Nancy Stohlman

She feared her husband’s death. Though perfectly healthy now, he was sixteen years her senior, and simple math made it apparent he was going to leave her well before she was ready. The idea was so terrifying that she secretly wished to die first. “When I die, will you name a park bench after me?” she would ask him on random occasions, or, “If I die first, will you marry again?” And he would look at her gently and say, “Baby, when you die, I’ll already be long gone.”

She became so obsessed with this preordained tragedy and the dreaded, empty future without him that she began to secretly collect pieces of him:—silvery hairs left tangled in the comforter, bits of skin left as dust on the mantle, the crusted toothpaste scraped from the toothbrush, the remnants of wadded up toilet paper from the garbage, stubble wiped from the razor. Each year her collection grew larger.

On the day it happened she was ready; using the surfeit of collected pieces from her dead husband she immediately constructed him again. In this way she was able to avoid even a single morning of the terror she had feared.

Her new husband was identical to the old; he fit so perfectly into the space left behind that she soon forgot there had ever been a breech. He came with all the idiosyncrasies of the other, all the habits good and bad. They were so identical, in fact, she began to wonder: Could I alter just a few tiny things? It would be just as easy to make him throw his yogurt containers in the garbage, for instance. Soon her new husband was doing things he’d never done in real life:—not falling asleep with all the lights on, spooning with her endlessly all night long, brushing out her hair, reading side by side with her in bed, vacuuming the stairs, ignoring his collection of spaghetti westerns. He was perfect, she thought one morning while he frothed a perfect cappuccino with perfect poached eggs. It was only then that the loneliness she had been avoiding finally found her.

Published in Flash 101: Surviving the Fiction Apocalypse, click here to learn more.