The Homeless Knitter
A creative woman was evicted from her small apartment for not paying rent. She’d once had a large bank balance until her husband’s health declined. His slow death wiped out their accounts.
Because she was ambitious and resourceful, the woman planted herself in a coffee shop and got to work with her two knitting needles. Her hands moved so quickly and skillfully that people stopped to watch.
“What are you making?” customer after customer asked while waiting on the long line for morning coffee.
She smiled, looked up from her task and said, “I need a place to live, so I’m knitting one. The problem is that I’m almost out of yarn.”
Customers with remnants of dreams still fresh in their heads fondly remembered aunts and grandmothers knitting scarves and hats for them as children. When the scent of rich coffee merged with nostalgia, they returned with offerings of skeins of yarn for the homeless stranger.
After two weeks of knitting, the woman’s needles shaped a tiny home composed of all colors of the rainbow. The coffee shop owner let her set up her living quarters behind his shop. There she lived for the rest of her very long life.
~
The Doctor Visit
The middle-aged woman went to her gynecologist’s office because she felt odd bumps in her female area. Her mother had died from cervical cancer, so she had reason for concern. The woman tried holding up a mirror to her genitalia, but had bad vision and couldn’t figure out the issue.
When she spread her legs on the raised table in Dr. Goldstein’s examining room, he gasped. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
If she died, who would take care of her three cats? “Is it cancer?” she asked. Her legs wobbled and it became hard to remain in this odd position.
“No,” he said. “There’s a tiny village in there. A coffee shop, a few boutiques, restaurants. There’s even a train station.”
She set her legs down and breathed a sigh of relief. “That makes so much sense,” she said. “I’ve been hearing a faint train whistle every evening and I’ve also been smelling fresh coffee. I’m a tea drinker, so this puzzled me.”
“Do you want to remove the village?” Dr. Goldstein asked, his entire face turned sad.
She shook her head, “No, let’s keep it. I’m just relieved it’s not cancer.”
~
Spud-cat Leaves the Lab
Scientists in a lab were experimenting with creating hybrid animals merged with tubers. A day after they combined a cat with a potato, the creature escaped from its unlocked cage. It hissed and meowed all the way down the stairs and out of the building.
The first night in the wild there was trouble. The potato section sought warmth in the soil, instinctively desiring to return to its roots. But the cat tail refused to be covered in dirt. A compromise was reached by digging a hole for the tail so it could wag freely in the breeze.
*
A young girl out for a walk heard a soft purring sound. She’d been sent to the market with three dollars in her pocket to purchase a potato for her mother’s stew. Awake now, the spud-cat rolled in front of her.
“I’ll take you home and keep the money for candy,” the girl smiled.
The girl carried the odd potato back home. Her mother eagerly awaited the potato’s arrival. She already had a simmering pot on the stove filled with all ingredients except the potato.
When the mother tried to drop spud-cat into the concoction, claws came out and scratched the devil out of the mother’s arm; this caused her to scream. She dropped the creature on the kitchen floor. It scurried out of the house and back to the safety of the lab.
~
Maureen Sherbondy’s work has appeared in Stone Canoe, Litro, Louisiana Literature, and other journals. Maureen lives in Durham, NC. www.maureensherbondy.com