We have always lived at the pen shop -- even before it was a pen shop -
when it was an apothecary, owned by handsome Horace Hunt, who lived upstairs, alone. Horace was everything in those days, compounder of nostrums for whatever ailed one, friendly shoulder to cry on when a loved one died despite those nostrums. And somewhere along the way, Horace began to collect pens.
It began the day Lydia Richards, Ansel Richards’ widow, brought in Ansel’s fountain pen. She didn’t seem all that distraught, really; a little shy, perhaps.
“Horace,” she said, I’ve just come from the reading of Ansel’s will, and it’s the strangest thing…he wanted you to have this.”
She placed the pen in Horace’s hand, letting hers rest there a little longer than you might have expected.
“Did he say anything about why?” Horace asked, sounding a lot more nervous than grateful.
“Not really. He just said, ‘I want Horace Hunt to have my Waterman’s
eyedropper. He deserves it.’”
Horace strode to his safe, opened it, nearly threw the pen in, closed the door and spun the combination lock. Lydia was right behind him; her arms encircled his waist. “Horace, he died so peacefully. Now it’s just you and me.” Horace twisted round as if he had been shocked. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Lydie.
Maybe soon, but right now we’ve got to be careful.” Lydia started to disagree, shook her head sadly, then walked slowly toward the door.
“Lydie, come back a moment. Here, take these. They’ll help you get to sleep until, well, until I can help you sleep without medication.” She blushed, took the little vial of tablets, and left the store. The townspeople thought it sad, but romantic, that Lydia followed Ansel so soon. “And she was so young and pretty,” they said.
The next pen Horace acquired was from another new widow, not quite so young.
She brought it to him saying that she had “heard it talking to me, telling me it wanted to come be with you, just like I do.” As soon as he had locked the pen in his safe, he gave her a little something to help her stop hearing things. And sure enough it did.
The years passed, Horace’s collection grew, each time in the company of an adoring widow, but each with a slightly different twist – a note that seemed to have written itself, a pen that just appeared in a purse, and one that was under a bed sheet that was pulled back during an inappropriately celebratory moment. But it was always as if the pens wanted to be with Horace.
He began to behave strangely. He’d be waiting on a customer, then turn abruptly toward the safe, then turn back, embarrassed. Soon thereafter, he began to shout at the safe, “Shut up!” His hands would shake as he tried to prepare medications. Eventually, they made him stop being a druggist. They took away everything but the display cases, the safe and his collection of pens, pens that
despite the thick walls of his safe, called out to him. Pens to which he answered, crying, “Be quiet!”
He decided to sell them. He arranged the best-looking of them in his emptied display cases, added a few blotters and some ink, and replaced the mortar and pestle over the door with “The Little Pen Shop of Horace.”
But hardly a soul came into that store. The occasional stranger, asking for directions, bill collectors when things became really bad, but the townspeople knew better. Too many of Horace’s customers had died. No one wanted to see him in his steady soliloquy with those pens. It wasn’t long before barber across the street started to call it “The Little Pen Shop of Horrors.”
It was, in the end, a bill collector who found Horace. Somehow he had pulled that enormous Mosler safe over on himself. Before running to look for help, the bill collector took the best looking of the pens in the display case with him, since there wasn’t much else to take and he felt he deserved them. But he, too, died soon thereafter, and only recently have his grandchildren begun to sell some of Horace’s collection over something called “eBay.” The advertisements always
seem to read “Found in an estate.” “Found in an old desk.” “I don’t know anything about pens.”
But that safe is still in that shop, with the ugly pens in it, with the windows boarded up all these years. And in the long evenings when the town’s old-timers recount for each other the town lore, they inevitably get to Horace and how he died, and someone always asks, “Who knows how long he spent under all that weight? Who knows how much of that time he was alive? Who knows how long he cried out for help?”
Who knows? We do. We have always lived at the pen shop, since the days it was an apothecary.
In the dark, we ugly pens, we with the silver snakes and spiders wrapped around us, and one of us who looks like he just walked off an Indian reservation, we read each other poems and tell each other stories. Here are a few.
BG (with gratitude to Shirley Jackson)
more to follow....or add one of your own right here
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