Fiction: Moreso, Series Three By Peter Cherches

By Peter Cherches

 

The elevator smelled of cheap perfume, broken dreams, and something vaguely ecclesiastical, but it took him where he wanted to go, so who was he to complain, even if he did have to share it with a floozy, a loser, and a priest?

 

* * *

 

Carter found a leather bi-fold wallet on the street. In the wallet were a man’s ID and credit cards, about $250 in cash, and photos of what appeared to be a wife and children. As he was a good Samaritan, Carter put the wallet in a padded envelope and sent it to the lost and found at the local precinct, though not before transferring the photos to his own wallet, since he did not have a wife and children of his own.

 

* * *

 

A man in a tuxedo was eating cereal on the subway, raisin bran. He had one of those little boxes, a fun pack, they’re called, where you pour milk directly into the box, which is lined with wax paper and when opened acts as a bowl. He very demurely opened the box, pulling the flaps aside, with a bottle of milk clamped between his legs. He grabbed the milk with one hand and with the other rested the box on his knee. Then, his other hand now free, he opened the bottle and poured some milk onto his cereal. He proceeded to eat the raisin bran with a little plastic spoon, smiling beatifically, like a little boy enjoying a special treat. Then the train made a sudden jolt, and the man’s cereal and milk went flying all over the shirt of the man sitting next to him, whose grim face I had already taken note of. Things only got worse from there. A side of me wanted to watch the whole thing play out, but, alas, it was my stop.

 

* * *

 

The dog was barking at the ceiling for what seemed like hours. Was there something upstairs? A sound, a smell, another dog? He didn’t hear or smell anything, but he was no dog. He decided to go upstairs and knock on the neighbors’ door. He didn’t know them; they had only moved in recently, after the death of Mrs. Moran, whose children had sold them the apartment. According to one of the other neighbors they were Lithuanian, though he didn’t think that was relevant to the problem at hand. He took the stairs, as it was only one flight up, and knocked on the door, which had a nameplate that said Kazlauskas. A man opened the door, holding a raw steak and baring his canines. “Yes, can I help you?” the man, whom he assumed to be Kazlauskas, barked in a gravelly voice.

 

* * *

 
            The funeral director gasped when Mrs. Fish requested her husband be wrapped in newspaper. “That would be highly irregular,” Mr. Gray told Mrs. Fish.
            “It’s not my idea,” she told him. “It was his wish. It’s in his will.”
            “Well, all right,” Gray said. “I’ve seen some pretty crazy requests, but this one takes the cake. Still, the customer’s always right, even in death. Will the Boston Globe do?”
 

* * *                                                                                                

 

When he was offstage, the mime wouldn’t shut up.

 

 

 

 

 

Peter Cherches' latest book, Everything Happens to Me, is winner of the 2025 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Humor/Comedy.