Stories: All-New Tales

“Caroleen,” said Amber’s voice, “nothing happened at the cemetery last night, and BeeVee isn’t answering my questions. She spelled stuff out, but it’s not for what I’m writing to her. All she’s written so far this morning is—just a sec—she wrote, uh, ‘You win—you’ll do—we’ve always been a team, right—’ Is she talking to you?”

Caroleen glanced toward the fireplace, where last night she had burned—or charred, at least—BeeVee’s toothbrush, razor, dentures, curlers, and several other things, including the hairbrush. And today she would call the headstone company and cancel the order. BeeVee ought not to have an easily locatable grave.

“Me?” Caroleen made a painful fist of her right hand. “Why would she talk to me?”

“You’re her twin sister, she might be—”

“BeeVee is dead, Amber, she died nine weeks ago.”

“But she’s coming back. She’s going to make me beautiful! She said—”

“She can’t do anything, child. We’re better off without her.”

Amber was talking then, protesting, but Caroleen’s thoughts were of the brothers she couldn’t even picture anymore, the nieces she’d never met and who probably had children of their own somewhere, and her mother who was almost certainly dead by now. And there was everybody else, too, and not a lot of time.

Caroleen was resolved to learn to write with her left hand, and, even though it would hurt, she hoped her right hand would go on and on writing uselessly in the air.

At last she stood up, still holding the phone, and she interrupted Amber: “Could you bring back my car keys? I have some errands to do.”

THE CULT OF THE NOSE

Al Sarrantonio

FIRST MENTION OF THE CULT in the literature is found in a tract of the Germanic heretic Jacobus Mesmus, which I have dated to somewhere near 1349 A.D.; it mentions, amidst an account of an outbreak of plague in the town of Breece, that “a band of townsfolk had spied this day two figures, a man and a woman, prancing gaily on the outskirts of the village, wearing the feared Nose. They were driven out with fire clubs and a hail of stones.” Mesmus goes on to say that the appearance of figures wearing the Nose continues—sometimes there are two figures mentioned, sometimes three: a man, woman and small child; the text is partly destroyed and confusing—throughout the reign of the plague, abruptly terminating with the last case of the disease, although there is one cloudy passage toward the end of the treatise (which, as a sidelight, deals mainly with weather) mentioning that a “nosed person” was spotted in the church bell tower intermittently for some time afterward.

There is, actually, a case for the Cult’s being traced to well before this time; scant evidence and brief mentions exist that might date it to the Egyptian dynastic era. There is a legend that one of the noses itself was found in the burial chamber of Ramses II, though there is no surviving physical evidence or corroborating testimony to support this.

After Jacobus Mesmus, accounts of the Cult become more frequent. A figure wearing the Nose appears in one of Brueghel’s triptychs; there are several appearances of Cult members in the work of Bosch, as might be expected. There is also, curiously, an appearance of a figure bearing the Nose in a little-known (and by reason of the appearance of the adornment, thought to be spurious) painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir: a tiny grinning figure, peeking out from behind a child holding a red parasol, is seen wearing a Nose utilizing a strap to keep it upon its face. The story is that the young girl in the painting was the daughter of M. Ebrezy, a prominent minister, and that the girl died mysteriously soon after posing for the artist.

There are mentions of the Nose in the works of Maupassant; Emily and Charlotte Brontë and, in the Americas, Hawthorne and, quite often, in the later works of Twain.

There is a false, and dangerously misleading, conception that the Nose is a modern concoction, that it was not only invented for the foolish pleasure of children and childlike adults, but that it was promoted for this use alone, and for the further and more arcane uses to which it is currently being put by the modern Cult. It must be understood that the Nose is not only an ancient instrument, but that its use can be traced back nearly to the dawn of recorded history (see my opening remarks). The Nose has doubtless gone through periods—it might be hypothesized that these periods were ones of relative calm and social and religious stability—where it has been relegated to the position of toy. It has been determined, though, that these times of tranquility have always been rather brief, and, further, that the Nose has always regained its position of mysterious authority—and of feared nebulosity.

Such a period is, of course, where we find ourselves at the moment.