Two Hearts

Prologue

Prologue

The Beatles had appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show just two months prior. The country was still on edge, over a year and a half after the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy. NASA was promising a manned launch into space in the spring, and race and politics were on everyone’s mind. America was entering a new modern age amidst a feeling of civil unrest.

Frank Stone felt unsettled as well. The world he saw on TV and read about in the daily paper seemed far removed from his day-to-day existence. He fancied himself more like a character plucked out of a five-hundred- page gothic novel and dropped into the 1960s rather than a twenty-four-year-old man raised in upstate New York. He even spoke that way at times, and often shunned the rest of the world for the woods.

Loneliness enveloped Frank like the late-evening summer fog. A house long gone used to occupy the spot where he sat in his work pants, an undershirt, and bare feet. The woods had taken the Stone family property back over time. Where there once was mowed grass and spring and summer flowers, now there were thorny, twisted brambles, uncontrolled brush, and exposed roots. Where several single trees once stood, now there were a dozen more crowded between them, trying to catch up to the older ones’ height and girth.

Frank still owned the once-cleared acre, though now neither he nor anyone else could tell where it ended and the woods began. The small red-and-silver trailer he currently called home—and had since he’d burned down the family house at age nine—would look to strangers as if it had been dropped in the middle of nowhere, perhaps by a twister, like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz.

Frank looked skyward, pushing his black-framed glasses up his pointy nose. “Ash, Maple, Oak…” Long legs outstretched, his lanky torso lounged against a large root. His white cotton shirt, damp and dirty from a hard day, lay in a ball beside him as he pointed up, identifying aloud each genus comprising the canopy above for anyone who may have been listening.

No one was.

Frank’s mother had left the family long before the fire, back when Frank was only four. His father, Franklin Stone, Sr., had perished from cancer bit by bit, then completely and for good the first year Frank had been away at college, back in 1959. Six years later, Frank still missed him terribly. Frank had no children, no spouse or loving partner.

“Of course I have no one.” He touched his cheek. “Who would be so blind as to want me?”

He had always dreamed of becoming a teacher, a hope that was virtually dashed by one of his whilst still in grade school.

“I have been asked to send some volunteers over to the second grade classes to tutor.” Mrs. Bollow chose three, passing over Frank, even though he had the best grades among his peers and his hand had shot up first.

“I’m afraid the children would be frightened by your appearance.” Mrs. Bollow had held him after the bell to tell him so. Perhaps she had always been put off herself.

So some days Frank playacted the fauna were his pupils, but that day every branch, every dangling leaf was dead still. The creatures were gone—fled. There were no chirping birds, no squirrels bounding like acrobats from limb to limb, not even a mosquito to swat at. It was eerily quiet. “Some might say…ominous.”

Frank was used to talking to himself, often in character. He was a coinsurer of music and the printed word. Most evenings, he would rush home, turn on the portable radio or record player, and listen to current hits from Smokey Robinson, Martha and the Vandellas, and The Four Tops while reading obscure stage plays set in days long gone by. He loved novels about evil scientists or mad genius doctors too, as well as classic literature, like Hemmingway and Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray was an all-time favorite, given to him at age thirteen by the town mortician, Vaughn Hellier.

Vaughn had given Frank most everything he read, though at times he regretted it. “I shall stop bringing you the stories from the library and book stores, Franklin, if you cannot separate fiction from real life.”

“You talk funny too, sometimes,” Frank would protest.

“I am old and foreign. When I do it, it’s eccentric, possibly even endearing. You do not even sound like yourself.”

“There is a reason for that, Vaughn. Being anyone else is often preferable.”

Frank had given up caring if people thought he was strange. Still, when conversing aloud when no one else was about, he felt it better to pretend he was talking to the creatures of the woods. “Where has everyone gone?” he asked the emptiness of the forest. He had a pretty good idea why, if not where.

Thunder boomed in the distance. Frank wondered if he should hurry up and get inside before the rain came. He decided not to bother. Buzzed short, his black hair dried rather quickly, and since the day was done, sodden work clothes would hardly matter.

“With the temperature so abysmally hot, I can only believe getting caught in a downpour might feel rather pleasant.” Frank spoke to an ant that searched about at his elbow now. He questioned why there weren’t more. “I know why I’m by myself,” he said to the single scout. “Look at me. But why are you? Don’t you normally travel with mates? Dozens? Hundreds?” The tiny black creature skittered across Frank’s palm, between his fingers, and partway up his wrist. “Have you upset them somehow, or are you just so bold?” He actually stroked it, using only one finger, as if the bug was a tiny cat. “I pray, if ants have feelings, you were not shunned, like me.”

Frank let the ant go free, then took an orange from the paper bag he’d taken his lunch in to work. He had joined Hellier’s Mortuary as an apprentice the summer he’d turned thirteen, because Frank Sr. no longer trusted his son home alone and they had run out of townsfolk willing to babysit. Eventually, Frank had worked every day after school, then whenever he was home from college. Vaughn Hellier had generously provided the costly education that had turned out quite pointless. Frank had known from the start he would likely never get to be what he truly wanted. He now worked full time as a mortician’s assistant, and that was all he would ever be. Dead people never judged.

Frank peeled the orange and sucked from the first segment broken off the round. The little hairs on his arms and those at the back of his neck stood up. The juice of the orange was both sweet and tart on his tongue, really good—but not that good. The reaction came from something else.

“You want some?” The ant had not gone far. Most creatures, human or otherwise, were more than a little wary of Frank. “Here you go.”

Frank squeezed a few drops of citrus onto the dirt and then brought the plump segment back up to his lips, sucking in hard to draw in its flavor. Another shiver followed. The act reminded Frank of something. It reminded him of someone.

It was a rather large orange, and as he worked the one wedge in and out of his mouth, a part of him much lower down started to tingle like his spine. Frank put his hand in his pocket. He touched himself through it, and then looked up again.

“Not a creature was stirring, little ant…Wrong season, I realize.” Frank smiled at his clever pun with the side of his face that still could. “Dig this,” he added, in a vernacular more befitting his age and the decade. “If you come back in winter, at Christmastime, I will tell you that tale.”

Confident in the fact that he couldn’t be seen, Frank took his hand from his pocket and put it down the front of his undershorts, allowing himself to get lost in supposed sinful pleasures. He rubbed himself hard, fantasizing about someone from his past. “Renny.” Frank exhaled the name as he stroked his rigid appendage.

“I was in love once with a man named Renny.” It was not the first time Frank had whispered his feelings to the trees or the creatures who lived and frolicked just behind the mortuary. They knew the whole story and could share it amongst each other. “Kiss me, Renny. Put your hardness ins—Oh!” The shiver came again. Frank had only a moment to realize its true cause, only a moment to think before his entire body went rigid, not due to lustful thoughts or s****l self-gratification, but rather nature’s tumult, her raging power.

Crack!

Frank fell over, partially conscious but not totally. He heard a second clap of thunder and smelled an odd aroma, one that brought back the memory of his childhood calico rescued from the burning house just in the nick of time. The leaves above him rustled now, disturbed by a gust that teased at the start and then a gale that attacked. Some foliage fell to the forest floor where it would die, while greenery in all shapes directly above Frank began to dance. It was a happier image to conjure, as huge droplets of rain worked them like a marionette master’s hand.

Some of Frank’s senses were still in tune—still alive. He could see, hear, and smell. He could think, about the dying leaves and the happier ones, giggling, perhaps, as leaves could only do amongst each other.

The orange had left Frank’s open hand and now lay in the dirt beside him. The little ant crawled upon it, pausing to look at Frank as if ready to be shooed, or asking, perchance, if Frank was near death. Frank wondered himself. He could not move, not any part of his body, nor could he feel the rain or the hard ground beneath him. He had no voice to call out for help, because it, like his sense of touch, had left him too.

What good would it have done to scream out, anyway? What difference would it have made? No one was there. No one would come. Frank was alone—like always. If the end was imminent, would that be so bad?