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A Funeral in Her Brain: Women on the Brink
A Funeral in Her Brain: Women on the Brink
A Funeral in Her Brain: Women on the Brink
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A Funeral in Her Brain: Women on the Brink

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Life was simple in the 50s and 60s – or was it? Not every woman lived the life of June Cleaver. Murder, suicide, mental illness, sexual abuse and rape were unfortunate realities even back then. With bold and shockingly graphic detail, these short stories enlighten us to the harsh realities some woman faced in the “good old days.” Entertaining, surprising and sometimes disturbing, these fictional stories will tug at your heartstrings.

“After she brought down to the basement some Heimat Gazettes from the three-foot pile of them in the corner of the living room, Marlene Nurnberg spread them out carefully, using them to absorb the blood gushing from Hans Nurnberg's neck. This was after Marlene had somehow managed to drag Hans Nurnberg's body by one leg down the basement stairs and over to the workbench. Far into that Saturday night she had labored, beginning with the use of a crosscut saw and hack saw to sever Hans Nurnberg's head, which afterwards old Marlene had put up on the shelf above the workbench to supervise her subsequent activities.”

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 7, 2014
ISBN9781311895592
A Funeral in Her Brain: Women on the Brink
Author

Doris Teresa Wight

Doris Teresa Wight has written an impressive collection of literary works. Over 400 of her poems have been printed in over 150 publications, and she has written novels, short stories, essays, children’s books, and scholarly works. She earned a PhD in comparative literature (with emphasis on experimental poetry) and then taught creative writing and other English courses at the college level. Along with her English professor husband she raised three sons and also conducted classes in ballet and modern dance (earlier she had studied dance professionally in New York, Chicago, Madison, and California).

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    Book preview

    A Funeral in Her Brain - Doris Teresa Wight

    A Funeral in Her Brain:

    Women on the Brink

    By Doris Teresa Wight

    Smashwords Edition

    Published by Bird-in-Hand ePublishing

    Copyright © 2014 by Doris Teresa Wight

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    * * *

    Table of Contents

    Hans Nurnberg’s Head

    The Other, Other Woman

    The Cat Lady

    The Man Who Told Lies

    Miss Minster’s Immaculate Conception

    My Friend Varvara

    Turbulent Dream-Trip

    The Great Christmas Search

    Hans Nurnberg’s Head

    First to be seen was a package. Outside, an ordinary tan sack, carefully cut open, folded snugly over certain contents and then tied with old-fashioned white string. Inside, several layers of the Heimat Gazette in their turn cut to size, folded, neatly tied with more string, and these too held by a double knot. The third layer, waxed paper, through which telltale liquid leaks. One has arrived at the unholy article itself, and the faces of the two first-graders grow pale. Mouths and eyes spring open wide. Although they have never seen one completely severed from its wrist before, the schoolboys cannot mistake the object, and they turn to race, screaming, across the playground.

    Thus at 12:02 p.m. on September 25, 1968, a Monday, in a pleasant town with elm-lined streets, the first package is opened. Actually, the parcel was first found at 9:15 a.m. by a black-skirted brother cutting grass at St. Veronica Church, separated from the school playground by a fence. The brother, reciting his morning devotions while he mowed, absent-mindedly picked up the parcel and threw it out over the fence into the children's playground. Later he told police that the package had felt funny, like something from Kropp's meat market, but that he had not really paid attention to the package.

    Two and a half hours have passed, and the alley adjoining the playground swarms with police, children, and curiosity seekers. Close by, four other identically wrapped packages have been discovered. Two lay on the southwest corner of the playground; a third nestled amid debris in a window well of the church; and a fourth parcel, around which flies were gathering, rested in a deep ravine north of the alley.

    An old woman in orthopedic shoes carrying an empty black cloth shopping bag stands with a detached air among the onlookers. Another hour has passed and the sense of thrill, with which some of the curiosity-seekers had converged on playground and alley, is changing to terror. Like a cloud of poison gas about to suffocate everyone, word of the gruesome finds spreads throughout Heimat. A housewife who had walked into the alley to get a glimpse of the already-famous ravine suddenly begins screaming, and while policemen rush to escort her out of the area, a third grade pupil at St. Veronica's panics too. Searching wildly for adult reassurance, he spots the old woman with the shopping bag, and he rushes up to her, grasping her free bony left hand with desperate fists. Startled by the sudden touch of hot live human fingers, the woman stares at the child as come from a completely alien era of her life. The child does not even glance at his savior's wrinkled face, however, for his own eyes are screwed shut in terror. He merely clings to the age-spotted, darkly stained hand for a moment, and then bolts away for home and greater safety than he knows.

    Tuesday morning. Hourly bulletins are issued on the Heimat radio station. Mothers and fathers repeatedly call principals to suggest that schools be closed until the maniac is caught! Everyone fears going out. And everyone fears staying inside, too. Anxiety grips Heimat as never before—even the flood twenty years ago, when people rowed boats down Main Street, was nothing like this! Early hopes that the packages are a prank, that the parts of graying flesh belong to some cadaver spirited from the state university's medical school, or from a funeral home, or even from a grave, have been abandoned. No embalming fluid was found in the tissues; no cadavers are missing. Relatives of missing-persons have become hysterical. False leads cry out everywhere. All possibilities are checked into by baffled police, who seek to conceal their own mystification and horror at what is unfolding.

    The crash of cymbals in a thundering symphony, word of the finding of two more packages, breaks the sound barrier in Heimat once again. This latest site was two blocks from St. Veronica's on Separation Street. Those packages were unearthed in dense shrubbery, outside an unoccupied and much vandalized house, after neighbors, hearing voices in the area during the night, called the authorities. This new development in the Heimat butcher case is instantly relayed to the state broadcasting station.

    The mayor cannot sleep nights, and the policemen have never been more short-tempered with their wives. Called into the case from the very first were the district attorney's office, appearing confused, and the state crime laboratory, which sent word that the full report on the package contents would take two or three days—both agencies are bitterly criticized. Where is the other seventy-five percent of the mutilated body? Where are the other organs of the dead man? For male—oh, that package—the victim was. Were the charred bones found at the city dump further remains of the hideously slaughtered victim? If so, why was part of the body burned and part of it cut and packaged? For the first time in their lives, many people regret living in this formerly peaceful, tree-lined town.

    Five blocks away from the Catholic school playground on Separation Street, and three blocks away from the unoccupied house where the latest packages was found, an old woman again stands working down in her basement at her husband's workbench. Hans Nurnberg's workbench is beautifully equipped, since this meticulous German had been a carpenter-contractor in his working years. A large roundish object, about the size of a basketball, sits smiling on the shelf above this worktable where the hard-working carpenter spent many of the happiest hours of his life. Naturally, the mouth gash cannot do anything but smile now, for Marlene Nurnberg has removed the false teeth from the opening two-thirds down the face, so an eternal grimace confronts work table, worker, familiar parts of anatomy and packaging supplies along with scissors, etc.; lying among the mess, the mouth gash's own missing dentures.

    The battered lips do not speak to Marlene Nurnberg to express pity for all her tiresome efforts. But expenditure of energy beyond the normal powers of a wasted body like hers has been the lot of Marlene Nurnberg for many years now. Once she had been a strong woman, but Hans seldom expressed the sympathy that would have been balm to his wife's soul. Especially has Marlene Nurnberg had to exert herself this past year when Hans, who kept up his spirits for a long time despite Marlene's growing anti-social qualities, finally took to drink. Hans Nurnberg's lips do not call to Marlene now. Before they had called so winningly, whispered so subtly, crooned love's phrases so irresistibly, that Marlene Blakely divorced good, dull, stuttering Rudolph Blakely, the father of their two children, giving up husband, reputation, and children for the blond, good-looking features of the head of Hans Nurnberg. But that was fifty years ago, in another city. Hans Nurnberg's once-handsome head is now 82 years old, and the frail old creature who found enough strength to wield a coal furnace poker lethally on her drunken husband's head is herself 80 years old.

    After she brought down to the basement some Heimat Gazettes from the three-foot pile of them in the corner of the living room, Marlene Nurnberg spread them out carefully, using them to absorb the blood gushing from Hans Nurnberg's neck. This was after Marlene had somehow managed to drag Hans Nurnberg's body by one leg down the basement stairs and over to the workbench. Far into that Saturday night she had labored, beginning with the use of a crosscut saw and hack saw to sever Hans Nurnberg's head, which afterwards old Marlene had put up on the shelf above the workbench to supervise her subsequent activities.

    Until Sunday morning church bells began to call the faithful of Heimat to worship, Marlene Nurnberg worked, hacking at the human frame as so many times she had hacked and whacked at chickens to be fried for Sunday dinner. Workmanlike, just as Hans had been, Marlene devised her wrapping procedures carefully, wrapping the pieces neatly and tying her parcels with adorable little double bows, the way she used to tie the laces on her children's shoes before she lost those babies forever through her passion for Hans Nurnberg's handsome face. Fortunately, the old woman had ample supplies of the Heimat Gazette and grocery bags, for beady-eyed Marlene always squirreled things away for possible future use. String she had wound into mammoth balls, spheres almost as large as Hans Nurnberg's head; these great string globes came in handy now.

    Hans' widow talked to her late husband's once-handsome head as she toiled. Of late Marlene and Hans had argued much, and now as she manipulated her materials and scolded her mate, Marlene would lose her temper with Hans' head—that sphere which had once been as the golden sun to her. She would stop her labors and, with bloodied hands, grasp by the hair the grotesque globe, flinging it to the cement floor of the basement. She would follow it around the basement for a while, kicking it with her heavy orthopedic shoes and then picking up various objects such as brooms with which to strike it, as if it were no longer a soccer ball but a hockey puck. Halting, listening to voices existing only within her own brainpan, she would remember how much effort lay before her, and she would stoop, retrieve Hans Nurnberg's crushed skull, and place it back again on the shelf above the workbench.

    All Saturday night the basement light had burned at the Nurnberg house on Separation Street, but neighbors on the south, the Kaltenborns, coming home from a party at 3:30 a.m., had thought nothing about it; they were well aware of the eccentricities of the wizened pair who never spoke to the other residents of Separation Street. These neighbors had also seen old Marlene going about with her bulging black cloth shopping bag on Sunday afternoon and had wondered idly where the crotchety creature could be shopping on a Sunday when stores were closed. Then the Kaltenborns thought no more of that, nor about the basement lights' continuing to burn again all night at the Nurnberg's. The Kaltenborns paid little attention to the Nurnbergs whom they considered harmless but having bats in their belfry! Besides, no one could think of anything but the butcher case. Who thought of the elderly at a time like this except to pity them, especially with a maniac-butcher running loose!

    Hans Nurnberg's head sat there on the shelf (on and off the shelf but always returning, or rather being returned), mute, as it had been ever since it first began existence away from Hans Nurnberg's body. It was looking less and less like Hans, becoming so shapeless and battered. Though the old woman spoke to it often, frequently muttering curses but sometimes crooning sweet love songs in a cracked voice, the old man's bruised and battered lips did not speak to reply to what the crushed and flattened ears heard. The lips did not bring up the issue of Marlene's calling the police two weeks ago to start proceedings to have Hans committed to the state mental hospital. (The proceedings had been halted anyway, for while a judge drew up the proper papers, Marlene had changed her mind and abruptly told the police, who had been obliging her, to get the hell out of my house!) Of course Hans Nurnberg's lips might have wanted to tease Marlene again that Hans was going to run away with the woman he claimed to have met in the park. Six thousand dollars in cash and coins lay hidden in a shoebox, and Marlene had snatched it out of the attic and buried it behind the furnace so that Hans (still as handsome in her mind as when he had first seduced her) could not run away with her rival.

    On Wednesday afternoon the old woman decided to change tactics—no more distributing packages. Now it was up and down the basement stairs to and from the back yard where, in the late September temperatures, she had already begun digging holes in her beloved garden patch, overturning the precious tomatoes and flowers. It is true that all along, especially when confronted by pieces that would not fit into her shopping bag, old Marlene had been disposing of problems in her back yard. She had carried out by moonlight various pail-loads of items for burial, some already wrapped and some unwrapped, and again and again she had dumped the bucket and covered the items with soil.

    Now, worn out by so many trips up and down stairs and so much work with the shovel, spade, and garden fork, Marlene Nurnberg begins to comprehend the scope of this job of waste disposal. Her troubles are compounded by the Kaltenborns' little dog, which she has long hated, that keeps coming up to her and sniffing at what she is burying. Several times she takes strikes at the mutt with her shovel, but although he runs away yelping, the little dog returns as soon as the crone leaves to go down the basement for a fresh load. And then while Marlene, getting a new idea, decides to wrap a final package, the coup de grâce, Hans Nurnberg's very head, and the old lady is down in the basement a long time, the little dog at last joyfully has his will in Marlene Nurnberg's garden.

    Great excitement grips the police station! The long-awaited breakthrough in the case has come! An acting-detective, late on Wednesday afternoon, has spotted a bone over a foot in a back yard garden on Separation Street…

    Judge James Halverson, who had not been in his office two weeks earlier to sign the order for commitment of Hans Nurnberg, and whose absence had given Marlene Nurnberg time to reconsider putting her husband away, is called at 10 p.m. The judge gets out of bed and goes to the courthouse; fifty minutes later he signs a legal document authorizing or directing a peace officer to search a specified person, premises, dwelling, etc., for stolen or contraband articles and items to be used in evidence, etc.

    At midnight, five detectives force entry into the house at 112 E. Separation Street when no one responds to banging. The stench inside the house and the newspaper-covered floor of the living room increase suspicions. The trail leads to steps descending to a basement, dark except for one small light near a coal bin. In the center—beside a noose in a rope that hangs from a rafter with a ladder standing nearby—on a straight wooden chair, someone sits. She cannot speak. There are revealing moments at the workbench: telltale newspapers, string, waxed paper, and pieces of meat being wrapped. But the victim's head—the terrible prize is nowhere in sight.

    The search extends to the back yard; digging begins.

    While Heimat sleeps, tortured by nightmares of fiendish acts of barbarity, more findings are unearthed. A dirt-covered piece of flesh wrapped in a yellowed Heimat Gazette appears first. Within two hours, seventeen policemen, stripped down to short-sleeves, have excavated in that unofficial Separation Street graveyard some twenty parts of a person. Shuddering beneath closed lids, Heimat dreams on. Within the first hour, almost every shovelful of dirt brought up evidence—coiled intestines; a section of ribs, partially sawn through; a lower part of leg, with foot intact… Studies in stupefied revulsion are the faces of officers in rubber gloves as they work under a sliver of moon with flashlights and stronger beams powered by generators that hum out across the back yard. One by one workers fall back into the darkness to vomit, and sweat on the lawmen's faces

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