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    Ordinary Sins: Stories
    Ordinary Sins: Stories
    Ordinary Sins: Stories
    Ebook114 pages44 minutes

    Ordinary Sins: Stories

    By Jim Heynen and Tom Pohrt

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    About this ebook

    From a bar hosting its nightly Sad Hour to the moonlit sandbox of a retired army general, Jim Heynen’s new collection of micro fiction presents character sketches of strange yet fascinating men and women.

    Modeled after Theophrastus' Characters—brief, verbal snapshots of people created by the Greek philosopher—Heynen captures not just the quirks and eccentricities of his characters, but also their humanity. Guilty of only ordinary and forgivable sins, these sketches reveal universal human idiosyncrasies as much as they do the individual characters.

    Paired with the wonderfully evocative illustrations of renowned illustrator Tom Pohrt, Ordinary Sins will appeal to story lovers and collectors of beautifully made books alike.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateOct 20, 2014
    ISBN9781571318800
    Ordinary Sins: Stories
    Author

    Jim Heynen

    Jim Heynen is a product of both religious, conservative Iowa, and the cutting edge Pacific Northwest. He makes his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has been a writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota and Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. His books include Cosmos Coyote and William the Nice and The One-Room Schoolhouse.

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      Book preview

      Ordinary Sins - Jim Heynen

      PART I

      Who Jingled His Change

      WHO JINGLED HIS CHANGE

      This man jingled the change in his pockets.

      It was not as if he were generally a fidgeter. He was not running for political office and afraid that his past would be revealed. It was not as if he were being audited by the IRS. He hadn’t just quit smoking. He didn’t have a bleeding ulcer or a bad stock portfolio. He had not forgotten to renew his driver’s license, or homeowners’ insurance, or health insurance, or life insurance, or disability insurance, or car insurance.

      Outward appearances said this man had a secure and balanced life. He was ahead in his mortgage payments, just had his teeth cleaned, his lawn fence was in good repair, basement cleaned up, laundry folded, garbage taken out, pets vaccinated, warranties on appliances in order, shingles on his house patched up after the storm, recycling set out on the street the night before the recycling truck would come by, birthdays of his friends and family circled on the calendar, flu shot gotten two weeks before the seasonal outbreak, shoes polished, light bulb in the closet replaced, windshield repaired, oil changed, radiator flushed before winter, crabgrass gotten out of his lawn, tulips planted before the big frost, photographs for the year put safely into an album, workouts at the gym strictly adhered to, thank-you notes sent to the last three dinner hosts, all disagreements with in-laws put to rest, fresh batteries in all the flashlights, toenails clipped and the clippings placed in the wastebasket—and these were just the beginning of what this man had right in his life.

      And still he jingled his change, constantly, just jingled and jingled, not even in a comforting rhythm, erratic but constant jingling of change.

      THE HOARDER

      And for years people thought she was simply a collector!

      That was before they started counting: 550 coffee cups, some in cupboards, some on tables, some on bookshelves, and some dangling on hooks. Bathrobes might be a great comfort on a chilly morning, but twenty-three of them? Eighteen ice cream scoops? And two little teddy bears on every step leading upstairs? Collecting knickknacks is not unusual, but a dozen shoeboxes bulging with tiny owls? And what’s in all the bigger boxes stacked along the walls? You can’t even see out the windows.

      By the time it was obvious the hoarder was more than a collector, no one knew what to say. The last person who visited found a narrow path from the front door into the other rooms. Then she stopped allowing visitors because there was no place for them to sit if they did manage to find the path from one room to the next.

      The hoarder had enclosed herself with stuff. Teetering stacks and mounting mounds. She was practically smothering herself.

      Or was she?

      She’s sort of like a caterpillar making a cocoon, someone said.

      Single-minded in her mission, she went on filling the remaining gaps bit by bit, knitting herself in tighter—eagerly, like one who was preparing for that glorious warm day when the world would burst open around her and she could fly into the unencumbering sky on wings of many colors.

      WHO LOVED HER DOG

      It was a little wiry dog. A yapper. With big bulging eyes. Not a purebred, just a tiny thing she picked up at the pound when it was the size of a rat. It was the only survivor of a litter of eight, and the mother had died at the pound after delivering. It would have been hard to imagine what the ones that didn’t survive looked like. The woman chose this leftover. She called it Pee-Wee then, and the name stuck.

      She took Pee-Wee home from the pound in a shoebox with tissue paper on the bottom. The dog was so small that she wasn’t sure of its sex until Pee-Wee lifted its leg over her two-inch high bronze fireplace cricket.

      So you’re my little boy, she said, though gender and size were never factors in this woman’s affection for

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