The Last Supper
The precinct captain invited the ward heelers to his house for dinner, a big barbecue in the back yard, tubs of ice-cold bottled beer and bowls of fresh potato salad. Theirs was the marginal party, always losing and never giving up, they had no sense. Compensation they found in each other, clustering like a patch of weeds under a railroad bridge, half in shadow and half in light: a part-time substitute school teacher; a sex worker whose reputation preceded her wherever she went; a day laborer; others whose livings and identities were more marginal still.
One had too much beer to drink, took off his shirt and rubbed barbecued pork on his chest, stood on a picnic table and screamed, You are all forgiven! It’s not your fault you’re such a pack of losers! You, you, you, you, he pointed at each of his fellows in turn, and you, and you, and you! And stumbling, he half fell and half jumped from the table, collapsing in the grass and passing out, wetting his pants as he lay there.
The sex worker hated to see him like this, they had campaigned together, canvassing seemingly endless suburban streets the hot summer before the election. She had grown fond of him. She bent over him to make sure he was all right, pulling her long hair out of the way so it wouldn’t fall into the mess he had made of himself.
Someone help me with him, please, she said, and the substitute school teacher and the day laborer picked him up and carried him inside. Bathroom’s down the hall, the precinct captain said. There the sex worker took a large, soft washcloth, wet it with warm water and a gentle, fragrant soap, and set to cleaning the drunken one, who was now again awake.
Forgive me, he said, I don’t know what gets into me sometimes.
The Travailian Garden, Part 1
The soil was poor. There had once been a lawn, rolls of turf laid down on top of a sprinkler system set in what had been desert before the subdivision was built. Water became too expensive for the lawn, the sprinkler system was shut down, the turf dried and crumbled and blew away on the spring winds, all that was left was a desert yard with useless spray heads sticking out of it.
The tenant dug a garden his first year, turned in a little extra potting soil from his houseplants, watered and planted, seeds and seedlings, radishes, carrots, peppers, tomatoes and onions. The soil was pebbly, claylike and alkaline. He added chemical food to his waterings, precisely measured, he didn’t want to overfeed. He watered every morning before the sun got hot.
He could have fed and watered the garden with his own blood, the soil remained poor, it was a desert. When he watered, alkali foamed white on the surface of light brown pools. The water soaked barely as deep as his gnawed-down fingernails were long, the dirt any deeper than that as dry as sun-bleached bone, the sun and hot wind stripping the thin layer of moisture out of the soil before sunset every day.
The onions were impervious to death, but grew small, hard and hot. The tomatoes struggled, some died, one inexplicably flourished late in the season and bore green fruit. The peppers were caught out by a late freeze, their leaves curling black as they died. Few radishes came up among the pebbles, quickly bloomed, had no root bulbs filled with stored food. The desert carpenter ants came and carried off all the carrot seeds, taking bites out of the radish seedlings’ leaves along the way.
The Travailian Garden, Part 2
The carrots never came up, their seeds all carried off by the desert carpenter ants. The radishes grew no tuberous bulbs, only long thin roots in the pebbly alkaline soil. Around them and the small, hot onions and the lush vine that grew green tomatoes, sprouted silverleaf nightshade and wild spinach, a half-dozen different grasses, countless cottonwood seedlings and one tall green dicot, name unknown.
The tenant let everything grow that wanted to grow. The silverleaf nightshade, blue flowers with yellow stamens that would turn into hard round yellow seed pods come autumn, complemented the tomato vine. The wild spinach was alkaline, eating too much of it could bring on sickness, but a few leaves a day could be added to the diet. The grasses and cottonwoods and the one anonymous dicot simply grew, simply were, and the tenant contemplated them every morning at sunrise, squatting by the garden with his morning cup of whiskey in hand. The onions waited, buried in the desert garden, their tops seeking sun, their roots hunting water.
The Two Daughters
The youngest daughter of the ship’s doctor left home the day after she graduated from secondary school. She was a pretty, charming, quick-witted girl brimming with confidence but lacking in certain experiences. The night before she left, at a party after the school graduation ceremony, she told her best friend that what she wanted out of life, more than anything else, were certain experiences. The two friends drank a toast to their futures.
The best friend remained living at home over the next several years, her parents supporting her while she went to trade school to learn communications network programming. She never heard again from the youngest daughter of the ship’s doctor, never found out what any of her friend’s experiences had been, and could only guess at what may have led to the incidents she read about later in the news.
The Faithful and Wise Servants
The under assistant operations manager was on the spot. The assistant vice president for operational administration had just that morning received a memorandum from the general executive associate, informing as to irregularities found in the accounts receivable. Spreadsheets were attached. The proof was absolute. Twenty-one point three-five-seven percent of the projected gross receipts for the previous quarter could not be accounted for.
The assistant vice president for operational administration summoned the under assistant operations manager to his office, told him to close the door, showed him the general executive associate’s memorandum with attached spreadsheets, demanded an explanation. The under assistant operations manager spent the next three hours walking the assistant vice president for operational administration through the complex computations and formulae that neither of them, nor for that matter anyone else at the firm, fully understood, demonstrating in excruciating detail how the projected gross receipts were apriori estimates and not aposteriori summations. Once the full extent of the situation was clear to both of them, they transferred certain sums between selected accounts, cleared out their desks, left the premises, and slipped across the border after nightfall.
Tetman Callis is a writer who lives in Chicago. His work, "Howl," was published in COVER, Summer 2018. His work has recently appeared in NOON, Cagibi, Neon Literary Magazine (which published other selections of "The Parables" not included here), New York Tyrant, Queen Mob's Tea House, Unlikely Stories Mark V, The Gravity of the Thing, Another Chicago Magazine, Best Microfiction 2019, Atticus Review, The Writing Disorder, Angel City Review, Juked, and Cloudbank. He is the author of the memoir High Street: Lawyers, Guns & Money in a Stoner's New Mexico (Outpost 19, 2012), and the children's book Franny & Toby (Silky Oak Press, 2015).