A Golden Ring

This was originally a Christmas thing, but it only got finished now. Eugene has a lovely and complicated back story, and this is about as candid as he ever gets about it–mostly because he’s in a room by himself. In any case, it’s rather melencholy, but I think it’s a lovely side of Springfield’s take-no-guff barber that may start appearing occasionally.

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Eugene Bud almost never went into his attic. For good reason, really. The place was dark and full of dust and boxes and old memories that he was more than happy to avoid. This was the first time in years he’d even swung open the heavy trap door and climbed up into the cramped little space to brave the stacks and piles of his former life. He’d only been looking for Christmas decorations to begin with—there was a box or two of garlands and colored lights buried somewhere in here that he hadn’t used in years.

Normally he wouldn’t have bothered at all, but the barber had promised himself that he was going to make the effort this year—to make Christmas actually be Christmas, instead of just another day. Instead of that day twenty years ago. It was the first time since he’d moved to Springfield fifteen years ago that Eugene could look forward to the holiday season without the old familiar pain of regret lingering in his chest. That called for garlands, and holly, and even a tree with those annoying permanently-tangled strings of lights.

He was feeling downright jolly; he decided to capitalize on the emotion before reality reasserted itself. And so Eugene found himself on his knees in the attic, Christmas only a week away, sneezing furiously every five seconds as the floating dust permeated his walrus mustache. He’d forgotten that half of these boxes were even up here. Some of them—the ones that had gone from house to house and storage facility to storage facility as he moved with the CIA—weren’t even labeled. It made looking for a specific item more like a life-history scavenger hunt than anything else.

Eugene was fairly sure that he was looking for two boxes labeled “Christmas” in his own handwriting. Or maybe “Holiday Stuff”? No, he was pretty sure it was “Christmas Stuff”. Or had he just labeled it “Decorations”, stupidly figuring that his older self would be able to figure it out if it was that important? To additionally complicate matters, there had been a couple moves back in his thirties when Eugene had intentionally mislabeled boxes to throw off whatever foreign country had been watching him at the time. Looking at the results of that deception now before him, he marveled at his own stupidity. The only person he’d managed to confuse was himself.

He grunted as he removed a small box labeled “pocket watches” from the middle of a leaning stack, and wondered what the heck that had been code for. On inspection, it turned out to be a box full of old cassette tapes that, if he remembered their contents correctly, weren’t supposed to exist at all. With a thoughtful noise, he closed the box again and put it behind him in the “already been examined” stack.

After a few moments of further shuffling, he finally caught sight of a box in the back corner with his handwriting on it. He couldn’t quite make out the label, but there was definitely a C in it. He yanked it out with more force than necessary—it turned out to be small, a shoebox, and the label was wrong. For a long second, Eugene stared at the thing in his hands, stunned at its reappearance after all this time.

Not Christmas.

Crista.

Of all the boxes that he’d relabeled, Eugene wondered for a moment why he hadn’t thought to rename this one. He knew the answer, of course. He couldn’t bear the thought. This was the only place—seeing her name like that—well. Of course he couldn’t relabel it.

Almost against his own volition, he gently eased open the box. The contents hadn’t changed, had barely shifted since their internment two decades ago. A passport. A theater program. An official report still in the CIA-stamped envelope, free of the blacked-out streaks of later versions. Two pictures, both faded, and both absolutely precious. He paused at the pictures, looking at his own younger face, next to one that he remembered much better, and loved rather more.

And a ring. A simple, understated, golden ring, still in its small burgundy case. It looked just like he remembered it, and nothing like it. There was so much history here, cupped gently and warmly in the palm of his hand. It was so small, and so impossibly big.

Too many thoughts. Too many memories. Too many things he tried not to think about when it got dark in the middle of the night.

Eugene reached out a gentle finger and traced her face, her familiar smile, the light in her eyes that no camera could quite catch. He smiled back at her, and there was a real relief in being able to do that in the daylight. He didn’t crack in half—he just ached a little, partly from sitting on the floor and partly from looking at his past, and that was alright.

“I miss you,” he murmured, daring to say it. He felt the ring in his hand for a few moments more, before finally putting it back into its box. He moved to return it to its resting place, but he aborted the motion halfway through. It ended up in his pocket instead, a warm and alien weight that was nevertheless comforting. Then he put everything else carefully back in the shoebox, closed it carefully, and returned it to its place in the back corner.

The Christmas spirit had completely deserted him, but it had been replaced by a kind of wholeness in his chest that was a different thing entirely. Different, but…good. The lights and the tinsel could wait another year. He had some memories to sort through properly.

Eugene creaked himself up to his feet and brushed the dust from his knees, his hair, huffed it from his mustache. It fell like snow on the towers of boxes, and for a moment he saw old gray close-stacked buildings arranged around a square, under the Christmas sky.

Then real life reasserted itself again. Eugene snorted softly at himself and went back downstairs.

His hand rested gently over the bulge in his pocket for the rest of the night, and he didn’t try to stop it.

Saturday Morning in the Park

From the writing prompt, “Destroying the world would probably be easier.” This one doesn’t need much explaining, except that these guys are two of my favorite characters ever.

It was nine o’clock on Saturday morning and the weather was beautiful, which meant that Eugene Bud was in the park. He strolled across the grass, dodged a group of kids playing Frisbee, and made his way over to the benches near the gazebo.

The old barber took a deep breath of the early summer air and let it out in a sigh of satisfaction. It was one of those clichéd perfect summer days, with the chirping birds and the light breeze and the sweet smell of grass on the air. And, because it was nine o’clock on a Saturday morning and the weather was beautiful, Oliver Meeps was waiting for him on their normal bench at the northwest corner of the gazebo. The sunlight was cooler here, deflected by the fluttering leaves of a huge old oak tree that was probably as old as Springfield itself.

Eugene lowered himself down across from his friend onto the worn white stone of the bench. “Morning, Oliver.”

The other man tipped his hat cordially, and the sunlight glinted off the rims of his glasses. “Morning, Eugene.” He reached down into the worn satchel at his feet and pulled out a wooden box: chestnut, still glossy and smooth even after years of wear. The well-oiled bronze hinges barely made a sound as the box opened onto the bench between them to reveal a hand-crafted chess set.

The two men looked at the jumble of checkerboard, black-and-white horsemen, chipped castle towers, slender kings and queens. After a long moment of consideration, Oliver looked up expectantly. “It’s the third Saturday, you know.”

Eugene blinked and raised his blue eyes from their scrutiny. “Is it? I could’ve sworn it was only the second.” He shook his head ruefully; the leaf-shaped patterns of light on his hair shifted with the movement. “Alright then. No use letting you get any more of an upper hand. I’ll take the white.”

Oliver smiled and shook his head. “You always do. Going first isn’t always best, you know.” He reached for the black pieces anyway and began to put them in their places with elegant fingers.

Eugene waved him off with the hand not busy arranging his own forces on the board. “If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. It’s a matter of principle. Who doesn’t want to be the white knight in shining armor?” He picked up one of his knights with a grin and twirled it between his fingers. “Besides,” he continued as he replaced the piece with care back into its alloted square at B-1, “It’s good strategy. Never let the opponent have the first move.”

Their banter was easy and well-rehearsed, really just a verbal precursor to the ensuing game. They both settled in, staring at the board intently. When nothing happened for several minutes, Oliver cleared his throat. “About that first move…”

“I know, I know.” Eugene was already fingering his walrus mustache, a sure sign of intense thought. Finally, he reached out for the horseman he’d displaced earlier and moved it. “Knight to A-3.”

His friend looked impressed. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you lead with the knight before. Feeling the need to change your strategy?”

“Sick of getting beat,” Bud chuckled. “You can only rely on your pawns so long before you’ve gotta accept that just because some moves are traditional doesn’t mean you have to use them.”

“Good advice,” Oliver said with a smile. “They should have you speak up at the school to motivate the kids.” He reached to his own line of pieces. “Still, sometimes traditional is best. Pawn to G-6.”

Oliver’s gaze stayed on the board, already planning two or three moves ahead in anticipation of his friend’s next move. He and Eugene had played this game more than enough to know each other’s strategies and rhythms. It was a challenge to find new attacks that wouldn’t be anticipated. It took Oliver a while to notice that once again, the other man hadn’t moved. He looked over to Bud again to see him still staring into space, and for the first time concern creased his brow, deepening the divot between his eyes. “Gene?”

Eugene’s eyes looked up in surprise at the nickname, rarely used. His bushy white eyebrows raised expectantly. “Yeah?”

“Your turn,” Oliver prompted softly.

“Ah, I’m sorry.” The barber gave a long sigh and rubbed his forehead with two fingers. “Don’t know what’s gotten into me today. I was somewhere else.”

“I could tell,” Meeps said with a soft grin. “Care to share?”

Eugene looked down at the board. His hand reached out and gently touched the top of his G-square knight. “I was just thinking,” he said slowly, in a voice much gentler than the one Oliver was used to hearing from him, “that there’s more pressure on the man that picks the white pieces.”

Philosophy wasn’t an uncommon subject for them, but it normally didn’t appear in conversation until at least the fifth turn. Oliver focused his full attention on the man across from him, the board temporarily forgotten. “How do you mean?”

Bud shrugged, eyes still on the pieces in front of him, though Oliver suspected that his mind’s eye was focused a long way off. “Well, the white knight has a lot to do, doesn’t he? Save the world, rescue the damsel in distress, slay the dragon, defeat the evil king. Seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it?” He paused a moment, then moved the knight into symmetry with its twin. “Knight to H-3.” He pointed to Oliver’s end of the board. “The black knight, though, what’s his job? All he has to do is stop the white knight from doing all that good-guy hero stuff. It’s simpler. Cleaner.”

Oliver weighed his response carefully as he returned his attention to the game. His next move would be predictable, if reliable. He sat back in his seat a bit and looked out over the park. “You’re right, you know,” he remarked thoughtfully. “Destroying the world would probably be easier. Saving it is so much work. Pawn to B-5.”

“I never said ‘easier’, just ‘simpler’,” Eugene noted. “Pawn to B-4. You really think it’d be easier?”

This time it was Oliver who looked away from the game for a long moment. At last, his brown eyes rested on the two pawns, now deadlocked in the middle of the board. He reached out and brushed an imaginary speck of dust off the white one. “It would have to be, wouldn’t it? To save the world, you have to care enough about the people in it to think it’s worth it.”

There was a long moment of silence after that. Both men were pulled in their minds to far-off places: one to a marketplace in Serbia, with a gun in his hand, and the other to a long-gone kitchen table, and the sound of children laughing.

“Harder,” Eugene finally agreed. His voice was a little gruff. “But still right.”

Oliver nodded slowly in agreement, and the two men shared a moment of understanding despite all the things that would never be known or said between them.

Then Eugene cleared his throat and leaned forward. “Alright, enough of that. It’s time for me to kick your scrawny historian behind at chess. Pawn to C-2!”

“It’s my move, you barbarian barber!”

It was nine thirty on Saturday morning and the weather was beautiful. And so Eugene Bud, former CIA agent, and Oliver Meeps, former superhero, were playing chess in the park. Two white knights, chipped and worn around the edges, but still standing firmly in their squares, looking out at the far-off black kings on the horizon.

Midnight Visitor

From the writing prompt, “Why was it always the curtains?” This story introduces Eugene Bud, Springfield’s accomplished barber, who used to be a CIA agent.

—

The knife sliced through the air with an utter lack of sound.

Knives never made much noise in real life, until they made contact and it was too late for you to care. Silent knives were wielded by good assassins, who made so little noise themselves that they could actually be said to produce an absence of sound so complete that people actually couldn’t hear it, even if they wanted to.

Still, silent knives (even those wielded by the very best assassins) did sometimes catch a bare sliver of moonlight that glinted from between the gingham curtains a second before they made contact with their target.

Fortunately for Eugene Bud, skilled barber and former CIA agent, this knife was the moonlight-catching type. He moved faster than he’d had to in nearly fifteen years and tumbled rather gracelessly to his bedroom floor, just managing to avoid getting caught in his blankets on the way down. He heard a dull ripping noise as the knife embedded itself in his pillow, where his head had rested a bare two second before.

He’d liked that pillow. It had just flattened to fit his head.

Working on muscle memory entirely, his body flattened momentarily on the floor while his hand reached under the bed for the gun he kept there. Above him, the dark shape of the assassin loomed in the shadowed bedroom, balancing lightly on the balls of its feet in the middle of the dipping mattress. From what little could be seen, he seemed to be wearing a black mask, and he held himself like someone who was so good at what he didn’t that he didn’t need to look like he was good at what he did.

Eugene felt a little flattered, despite the early hour and the creaking joints and the ripped pillow. It was good to know that someone still thought he was dangerous enough to send a real ninja after him.

Even if he’d been retired from the agency for fifteen years, it was hard to take the agency out of the guy. Still, it was a heckuva inconvenience. He’d retired for a whole host of reasons, and a full night of assassin-free sleep had been one of them.

Eugene’s scrabbling fingers came up empty, and he realized too late that the gun was under the other side of the bed. His attacker seemed to realize his helpless state at nearly the same time, and Eugene barely had time to roll sideways and lurch to his feet before the ninja came at him silently, knife glinting again.

It was never wise to attack an armed opponent bare-handed. Especially when you were bare-handed, tired, and very much feeling all sixty eight of your long years. There was only one way to deal with this kind of situation, and it was a tactic that old Mr. B knew well.

When all else fails, he heard his old instructor say clearly, Cheat.

And if there was one thing a ninja couldn’t handle during a late-night ambush attack on a supposedly honorable target, it was dishonorable conduct. So, Eugene gave his biggest smile. “Evening!”

The other man paused in his attack, momentarily stymied by this utter breach of the sacred tradition of silent mortal combat.

“Nice night, isn’t it? You’re a bit late, though. And your entrance needs work; don’t they teach you to blacken your blades any more?” Eugene smiled wider and reached behind him into the gingham curtains, hoping to find something to use as a weapon. His fingers just brushed the end of his old metal ruler, resting where he’d left it on the window seat from sketching earlier that day.

His opponent got over his apparent mental distress and lunged again just as Eugene grabbed the ruler firmly in hand and ducked to avoid the knife’s glittering arc. Above him, he could hear the curtain rip.

Why was it always the curtains? Eugene had been in countless fights for his life over the years, and yet no matter where they were staged: in hotel rooms, parlors, secret lairs, sun rooms, verandas, even pool houses, at some point someone would duck, and the curtain would get ripped.

It was like some kind of universal law of mortal combat. Darkness, blood, only one man walks away, a curtain always gets ripped. Eugene found that he hadn’t missed this kind of thing; not one whit, even though he always told himself that he did.

With the ease of long experience in dirty fighting, he thwapped the other man soundly across the knee cap with his metal ruler. Hardly a debilitating blow (though twenty years ago it would have been), but certainly one painful enough to convince the ninja to take a surprised step backwards, which was all Eugene needed.

He moved with a sudden speed and power that no one in Springfield would imagine possible for Old Mr. B. Before his attacker knew what hit him, Eugene had landed a solid upper cut to his chin, followed by a quick, precise smack of the ruler edge along his hand. The knife dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers to the carpet and lay there, glowing dimly in the moonlight from the now uncovered window.

Eugene knew better than to give his opponent time to regroup, and so his aggressive blows were as quick and accurate as he could make them these days.

Unsurprisingly, he ended up with a fair amount of bruises and a black eye in return. A good ninja (just like a good CIA agent) hated being backed into a corner. Still, it was only a matter of time. With a move that was part judo and part sheer dumb luck, Eugene blocked the other man’s spinning kick, grabbed him by his airborn leg, and used his own momentum to toss the startled ninja right out of his bedroom window.

The sound of breaking glass shattered the silence of the neighborhood with the intensity of a gunshot. Eugene retrieved the discarded knife and hopped out onto the dark lawn, carefully avoiding the broken glass in the window frame, to stand above the defeated and slightly shredded assassin, who was just sitting up in the grass.

“You’re lucky that was a ground floor window,” the old barber told him calmly, spinning the blade in his hand. “Otherwise, you’d have more than some scrapes and bruises to deal with.” He leaned down and pressed the blade very lightly at the junction between shoulder and neck.

The other man lay deathly still on the lawn, aware that he was beaten. His breath hissed from behind his mask, the only words that a true ninja was allowed to speak in combat. “Kill me then.”

Eugene looked down into dark eyes that glittered with a vehemence and hardness that he had once felt with his own bones. There was something of himself in this poor assassin, this misguided man who ran about at night killing for what he thought was a better cause.

All at once, Eugene Bud felt very, very tired, and very old…and much wiser than he used to be. Darkness, blood, and a ripped curtain, he thought. But why can’t both men walk away every once in a while?

With creaking joints and a little groan, he stood. “Go,” he said simply. “And may your ancestors be honored by your brave combat.”

The man stared at him incredulously for a brief instant. Then the sound of waking neighbors and the spill of lights onto the lawn chased him off into the darkness with his life intact, and Eugene watched him go with a faraway feeling in his bones and a little smile on his face.

He waved at the neighbors popping out of their doors. “Just a break-in! Scared the idiot off. I’m fine! Go back to bed!” Before anyone could respond, he turned and went back into his room through the window.

He’d need new curtains, and a new picture window, and a new alarm system.

That could all wait until the morning. With a slow shake of his head, Mr. B went to get a new pillow to get some ninja-free sleep on the sofa. He looked at the ruined gingham remains on his carpet and heaved a sigh.

Maybe, this time, he’d just get blinds.