"Heirlooms... A Love Story" © 2005 by Lee Adam Herold

One year, after I’d grown, Mother apologized profusely to me for the harshness of my upbringing, complete with much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Though I had not, to that point, ever witnessed firsthand the actual gnashing of teeth, I recognized the gesture for what it was and dutifully accepted her apology…

…with the business-end of a short-handled spade.

I knew of a conveniently remote field some miles away, wherein I laid Mother to rest. In the years that followed, I made my name in the competitive yet lucrative trade of door-to-door prosthetics sales. Mother, however, had never been one to leave well-enough alone. She came calling one dismal night, tracking gravedirt all over the stoop.

She was rather insistent that I now owed her an apology for the whole “short-handled spade” incident. Understandably, I was reticent. She pursued me into the backyard where I turned the element of surprise—and the notorious clumsiness of ambulatory corpses—to my advantage by knocking her into the woodchipper Grandfather had left me.

The machine did an altogether thorough job of mulching her to unrecognizable pulp, save for one fragment which emerged, entire and unscathed. Ordinarily not one to believe in signs and omens, I nonetheless felt strongly that the woodchipper’s oversight in this regard must surely be the result of someone out there trying to tell me something. My heart sang, and I leapt at the opportunity Fate had surely placed before me. In my excitement and haste, I failed to thoroughly consider the prudence of one small detail which I regarded as quaint, and thought would be embraced as endearing.

For when I went to knee and proposed marriage to my Dearest Bernice, she seemed to resent either the fact that I was offering her Grandmother’s ring, or that Mother’s finger was still wearing it. “I suppose,” I admonished her sternly, “if I’d bought you an expensive new ring, wrapped ‘round a fresher finger, you wouldn’t have screamed and tried to call the police.” She might have answered, had I not simultaneously been caving in her fair skull with the telephone receiver. I forgave her, of course, evidenced by the fact that I removed and set to waste some hundred and fifty pounds of perfectly delicious venison to make room for her in the basement deep freezer.

Mother’s finger, still wearing Grandmother’s ring, I placed in a mason jar on the kitchen counter, and went to bed feeling rejected but pleased to have given Bernice what every young bride-to-be desires: A marriage proposal not to be forgotten. I slept so soundly that I did not hear the mason jar break when Mother’s finger made its escape. From what I was able to gather it then wormed its way across the kitchen linoleum, down the basement stairs, and somehow mustered the strength (and height) to open the deep freezer and release dear, frozen Bernice. I woke to find my poor Love at my bedside, likely disoriented by the cold and the forcefulness of my prior admonishment, attempting to dial out on the very same telephone, now rendered quite unusable by the impressive hardness, before it succumbed, of her lovely cranium. Feeling fortunate that she’d gone for the phone instead of my throat, I led her by the hand out to the backyard, where the woodchipper this time left not one scrap un-mulched.