Short Stories ... these go back a few years ... © 2026, however

CHANGE

By Richard Compson Sater

Word gets out. Always does. Party. Tonight it’s over on North Chauncey, left at the four-way and follow your noise.

The house looks tired and beat up from the outside. Inside is hard-packed with students blowing off steam after mid-terms. At the door a guy collects three dollars from each of us and gives us plastic cups for the keg in the kitchen that was full twenty minutes ago, the guy says. But no guarantees, he says.

A band threshes away in the dining room. The bass drum says “Bent Moped” in day-glo green and orange. The band’s name, I guess, which makes about as much sense as most. It takes me a minute to recognize the bass player because she has shaved her head since I last saw her. Can’t remember her name. Over and over, she’s shrieking something at the microphone that sounds like “I crucify your milkshake.”

My companions this night are named Mitch and Dan and Sherry and Barbara. Otherwise, there isn’t a whole lot I know about them – or want to, with the possible exception of Dan. There isn’t a whole lot they know about me, either, which might be why they let me hang around with them. Not quite belonging, but since it’s difficult to have a social life without some other people being involved, I take what I can get and tell myself to shut up.

Sherry’s chasing after Mitch, and he’s mostly letting her catch him. Barbara’s trying to rope Dan, only he’s not about to be caught. She does what she can. Which is mostly bed down with him anytime he wants, anywhere, often, and she lets everyone know it too. Sex is a beautiful thing, she says, loud (the volume she uses most often), for the benefit of anyone listening. That being the primary basis for their relationship (or what have you), it’s is not likely to last, but she hasn’t figured that out yet.

Barbara is pretty determined. But Dan is careless with people, so he will win out in the end. I watch him. He seems to need some looking after, but I don’t know anyone with the requisite patience and money and lack of need for self-respect to qualify for the job.

I wrestle my way into the kitchen for beer and then back again, without spilling. Dan sits on the couch, pushed back against the living room curtains, and I squeeze myself in beside him. He takes my beer and swallows half of it, eyeing me over the rim of the cup. The band plays loud enough that the windows hum, each song indistinguishable from the next except for the stops and starts, bouts of furious, pissed-off guitar and breakneck drums with screaming over the top of it.

Somebody hollers “couching!” and I just have time to set my cup down before everybody piles on, Mitch and Sherry and Dan and me and Barbara and five or six people I don’t know. A pointless stunt, like cramming people in a phone booth or Volkswagen, and who knows where it came from? It’s hard on furniture, but there’s no springs left in the couch anyway. After a second Mitch crawls out and topples the rest of the pile. He takes Sherry to see if there’s any beer left. Dan finishes the rest of mine and hands the empty cup to Barbara and she heads for the kitchen too. I guess love is reason enough to make you run errands for someone else.

Barbara talks to me only when she knows Dan is watching. “He’s such a jerk,” she’ll say, loud. He’s a funny guy sometimes. Once when Barbara made him angry, he gave me her phone number on a card with “for a good time, call” written next to it. I’d like to know what makes him tick. Maybe he’d tell me if I ever had the nerve to ask.

After Barbara disappears, we have the couch to ourselves, and we stretch out at opposite ends. I discover some loose coins behind the cushions and fish them out. “We’re rich,” I yell at Dan above the noise. He is usually interested in money because he rarely has any himself. “Ninety-six cents,” I yell, and show it to him, three quarters, two dimes, a penny. “I knew change was going to come,” I yell. He winces. “You want it?”

“What do I have to do for it?”

“Just give me one night,” I say. It’s either meant to be a joke or I’m very obviously not thinking clearly.

Maybe he doesn’t hear me, with the noise and everything. Or maybe he does. Either way, I guess it’s all the same. His eyes narrow and he stands up and comes over to me and cups a hand around my ear. “You disgust me,” he says.

He walks away. If he asks me about this tomorrow, I can blame beer and claim no memory. It doesn’t matter that I meant what I said. Just one night. Please? I would bring him back safely at the end of it, wiser and shining brightly.

I dump the coins back into the couch and see that Dan has found Barbara again and he’s towing her toward the door. She’s hanging onto his arm and crying. The singer in the band is shrieking “my first date in Sodom” or something like it into the microphone, and everything in the world turns to salt.

Cops arrive. Noise complaint. Party breaks up fast. I leave by myself, not drunk but wishing I were.

* * *

A couple weeks or months after that, Dan and are out by ourselves, just us two for some reason, at this topless bar. His idea. He knows I don’t like that kind of entertainment. He’s broke, as usual, so I buy the drinks and give him dollar bills to stuff into the dancers’ thongs. We don’t get out of there until my wallet is empty. Two in the morning. Tanked. As we stumble home, I say something he doesn’t like, or else it cuts too close to some version of truth, and that’s us scuffling in the front yard of some frat house. Serious wrestling, life or death, rolling in the dirt and dark.

“I wanted to hurt you,” he will say to me later, not long before he quits speaking to me entirely. “I really wanted to hurt you.” His voice full of wonder.

You learn. But you get tired of some things long before you can change them.

-end-

EASE

By Richard Compson Sater

Monday crashed into Tuesday as I headed east, a hundred miles and a completed college degree behind me (for what that’s worth) and a thousand more to go before I’d reach home on the coast. I was already fighting sleep with loud music and coffee and losing. My dog prowled in the back seat, restless. Now and then, she’d poke her nose into my ear to remind me she was there.

For a good half hour, I followed some moron with his left-turn signal flashing. He finally caught on. A few minutes later, a blue “rest area one mile” sign appeared like a savior. It was a relief to pull off the highway for a break.

I parked in the lot near the building, got out of the car, stretched. The place was reasonably well-lit and like any of dozens I’d seen, cement picnic tables, vending machines, even a pay phone. A few trucks, dark, sat in a lower lot. At the far end of the upper lot was parked an old pickup. Otherwise, the place was deserted.

“Be right back,” I told my dog, slammed the door and headed inside the rest-area. Its interior too was standard. Next to a smiling portrait of the governor was a state map with a pin indicating “you are here,” regardless of whether you wanted to be or not. A water fountain, a couple of overpriced vending machines for snacks and sodas, two wooden benches, and a register for out-of-state visitors that I declined to sign. That was mostly it, except for a yellow bucket on wheels holding dirty water and a mop, sitting outside the men’s room, its door propped open.

Inside, an alarmingly thin man – the attendant, I supposed – stood hunched over at the first urinal in a row of three, his legs spread and the top of his head resting against the wall above the fixture. His jeans were at half-mast; the unbuttoned sleeves of his dark blue work shirt flapped, and he was quite obviously servicing himself.

He didn’t notice me. I stood there, uncertain, too tired even to smile. The place smelled of pine disinfectant and the floor was still damp with the swirled pattern of the mop. I wondered what could have aroused him so that he felt compelled to take advantage of the nearest receptacle. Was he simply desperate, or did he like taking chances?

I stepped over to the third urinal, two away from him, and startled him; he caught his breath, sharp. His moist brown eyes locked into mine, and he froze like a deer trapped in headlights of an oncoming vehicle. I would have placed him in his middle fifties, maybe – black hair salted with grey, his face lined like a roadmap and sandpapered from a day or perhaps two away from a razor. His baseball cap identified the state highway department.

I couldn’t move, either.

His eyes never left mine. Slowly, he resumed what he’d been doing to (and for) himself. When he reached his destination, he exhaled long and deep, closed his eyes, relaxed his scissored frame against the fixture and the wall.

His eyes opened again suddenly as if he’d really become aware of me for the first time. With absurd dignity, he straightened up. I watched stupidly as he hitched up his pants, zipped them, and stuffed his shirt in as if he were performing in some seedy, nonstop erotic cabaret. All I could think about was that his jeans were at least a size too large, as if his mother had purchased them that way so that he could grow into them.

The name patch on his shirt, in red embroidered script, read “Lucky,” I suspected it was ironic. He backed away from the urinal; I thought he would duck out and scurry away to hide somewhere, embarrassed, until I’d gone, but instead, he waited there until I too finished my business.

I really did have to piss, regardless of the setting.

I washed my hands carefully at a gleaming sink – no doubt, he took pride in his work and did it thoroughly and well. The soap dispenser was at the ready for me, full of neon-green liquid. I tapped the “on” switch for the electric hand dryer on the wall. Some humorist (the same one who visits every public restroom so equipped) had scratched out the appropriate letters on the instruction panel, no doubt amused with himself. Push butt. Rub hands gently under arm.

We have installed pollution-free hand dryers to protect you from the hazards of ease.

Lucky never took his eyes from me. I still had to make it past him to get out.

His voice, a hollow rattle and buzz, startled me. “Ya know how it is, friend. Don’tcha? It’s so damn lonely here at night. Ain’t hardly no one ever around.”

I expected some version of apology next, perhaps an urgent plea not to report him to his supervisor at the highway department. Something. He took a couple of steps closer to me. I retreated a couple. I could smell his expectancy. “Ain’t got no one waitin’ at home, neither.” His voice hoarse, insinuating. “I ain’t so particular. You know how it is. Don’tcha, friend?”

The glazed wall tile felt cool against my back.

“Ya want a cup o’ coffee? I got a fresh pot. Just made. In the back room. Private-like.”

He placed a hand on my shoulder. “C’mon back,” he whispered. His fingers caressed the back of my neck.

I recalled suddenly a conversation I’d had with my parents when I was about twelve, just before they put me on a cross-country bus by myself to visit my grandparents. Dad and Mom issued grave, cryptic warnings about grown men in public restrooms who might try to get something from me.

“What would they want?” I asked, unable to think of anything I might deny them if asked. I was genuinely mystified; my question remained unanswered, but the warning remained in place.

Look how we’ve grown.

Was that my dog I heard barking outside, or my imagination? I edged toward the door, but Lucky stopped me.

“I seen ya watching, friend,” he whispered, his voice at once an accusation and a prayer. “Ya musta liked what ya seen. Didn’t ya?” My mouth moved to say that I had miles to go, but there was no sound.

Sooner or later, I guess we’re all going to win some kind of lottery. When it’s your turn to get lucky, do you take the love or the money or just your life and wonder: is it true we only get what we deserve?

-end-

SCATTER

By Richard Compson Sater

Years from now, when I am living in a home for the disgusted, I will look back on these days, and perhaps they will make some kind of sense. But tomorrow is a long time away, and tonight I stand here in my own living room, wrapped up with a whole roll of my own red duct tape.

I can’t exactly move.

Rex and Janine are laughing their heads off, taking a couple of photos on their phones so they can remember how much fun we’re having and share on social media. All I can think of is how much it’s going to hurt to remove the tape -– being a furry guy and shirtless at the moment.

Today is my birthday. I am thirty-seven, too old for such foolishness.

Rex is smoking a cigarette, something I asked him years ago not to do in my house. There is cake on the table, still uncut although the candles have been blown out, and two empty champagne bottles, and one thing led to another.

Rex loves Janine. Janine loves me. As for me – well, you figure it out, if the three of us make a perfect equilateral triangle.

And if none of us get what we want, then perhaps we’re only victims of some unsound geometrical theorem where there simply are no equivalents.

Janine is to mostly to blame, I think, since she introduced me to Rex. We became friends, sort of, more through my insistence than any of his doing. It didn’t take him long to figure out exactly why I was interested, but if he really minded, wouldn’t he put a stop to it? Maybe he’s flattered. We all need a little attention.

Janine has known Rex for more than half of her life, and I doubt if she’ll ever take him seriously as a suitor because she regards him as some sort of big brother. Yet he persists. I wonder sometimes about the habits we develop in relationships. When our interest is not returned yet we continue our pursuit, are we hostages to love, or simply addicted to the chase?

“No” can be a powerful aphrodisiac. Perhaps Janine wants me more because she can’t have me. And possibly Rex puts up with my company because it frustrates Janine to no end. I would like to think that’s not the case. I would like to think we’re not that small. But I suspect we are.

Actually, Janine should prefer Rex over me. He’s a genuinely nice guy, for one thing (which you probably will never hear anyone say about me), and he’s quite handsome, for another –- something else you probably will never hear anyone say about me. When you walk past him for the first time, you want to turn around and look again, because you’re certain you’ve seen him in an advertisement for aftershave or an expensive wristwatch or something.

He works out regularly, weights, five miles of running every day, the whole thing. The cigarettes don’t quite fit into the picture, but we need vice in our lives too.

Earlier tonight, the three of us went to supper and then to some useless movie before coming back here. Janine brought the cake, and Rex, the champagne.

After we’d polished off one bottle and started on the second, Janine asked Rex if he would kiss me, on the mouth, as a birthday present from her. She told him she couldn’t think of anything special enough to get for me that I’d appreciate.

I don’t know where she came up with that idea. I suppose alcohol could do it, though.

“What’s in it for me?” Rex said.

She sighed. “All right, what do you want?” she said.

You can learn a lot about a woman by what she chooses to buy and what she’s willing to sell to pay for it. And you can learn a lot about a man under the same circumstances. Everything is for sale.

“How about a romantic night with you? Just the two of us,” he said.

“Get real,” she said.

“The same back from you, then,” he said. “A real kiss.”

She thought about it. “Well, I guess that’s only fair,” she said. They shook hands on it.

No one asked me.

“Do it now,” Janine instructed. “I want to watch.”

“Not on your life,” Rex told her. He herded Janine, unwillingly, into the bathroom and shut the door, and he turned to me.

“A kiss from Janine is worth all this?” I said.

He glared at me. “What are you waiting for?” he said as I hesitated. “I know you want to. So come on, for Christ’s sake.”

Well, since he put it that way. He tasted like stale tobacco, but he still had to push me away when he decided it had gone on long enough.

From the bathroom, Janine yelled, “Are you done?” Rex yelled back that we were.

She rejoined the party. “Did he enjoy it?” she asked Rex.

"Ask him.”

“Well?” she said.

I nodded; such a response was expected, and I aim to please. I realized it was the only time I was likely to attach my mouth to his, so I’d better have appreciated it.

She turned on Rex again. “Did you enjoy it?”

“I’m not likely to be converted,” he said.

She persisted. “What was it like?”

“Like this,” he said, taking her in his arms.

He tried to fit his mouth against hers, but she pushed him away, impatient, and wiped her hand across her lips. “Hey,” he said. “That didn’t count. You have to let me finish. You still owe me.”

After the rest of the champagne, we started roughhousing a little, Rex and I. He wrestled me out of my shirt, ripping it good, but then he pinned me down –- he’s stronger than me -– and I realized to my surprise that he honestly wanted to hurt me. As if this whole situation was my fault. Janine found the roll of tape on the counter, in a bag of stuff I’d picked up at the hardware store a couple days ago, and I guess it inspired her. Before long, fighting back was useless.

Even without the tape, fighting back would be useless. How stupid we can be about love. How careless we are with the affection of others, and how careless we are in throwing away our own. We end up making inconvenient good impressions on all the wrong people.

Happy birthday. And here I am, all wrapped up, my own present. As if I am all I deserve. I wonder if the whole stunt wasn’t Janine’s idea from start to finish, to get back at me for something that isn’t even my fault, as if Rex is the only thing standing between her and me and happy-ever-after.

As if he is the only thing.

Rex and Janine are laughing, the kind of desperate howling that comes near the end of something when you have nothing to lose, the kind that leaves you gulping for air.

By the time they calm down, we’re all worn out, for different reasons. No one knows what to do next. Into this awkward silence, I finally ask them to cut my hands loose, and I’ll take care of the rest by myself.

Rex unfolds his pocketknife and slices the tape at my wrists. His eyes avoid mine.

“Well, good night,” I say.

“We haven’t cut the cake yet,” Janine says.

“Good night, already,” I say.

They stop for a minute in the doorway, uncertain.

“It’s like taking a band-aid off. Pull it quick and it won’t hurt,” Janine says.

She is wrong. As I pull duct tape from my arms and belly, the sensation is not at all like taking a band-aid off. It hurts, damn it. On this night, I wonder about this thing that we have broken, if we will be able to collect these scattered pieces and mend it, but I know we are not that skilled. I will never want to see either of them again.

* * *

For some reason, while I’m skinning myself alive removing the tape, all I can think of is this one nonstop July day last summer. The whole scene keeps running through my head like video from some disaster being replayed endlessly on television: the three of us at the beach on that day, our pants rolled up, holding hands in a circle and spinning around and around, dizzy, laughing, the sun bouncing on the water.

We stay at the beach until late, long after everyone else has gone home for the day. Under the falling sun, Rex makes a stupid dare, and I stupidly accept, and we strip. It is the first time any of us has seen the others fully unclothed, as naked as the lies we tell ourselves. I can’t take my eyes off him, and he can see how aroused I’m getting.

Janine stares at me; she starts to unbutton her blouse and then –- possibly because she can smell Rex’s anticipation –- she changes her mind and refuses to join our game.

Rex only shrugs. “Last one in’s a rotten egg,” he says –- something I haven’t heard since I was a kid –- and we chase each other into the water. Janine wraps herself in my shirt and walks along the shore, just at the edge of the water on the smooth sand where the tide sneaks up to catch her. She jumps out of the way of the water as if it is boiling.

I hear Rex’s voice competing against the rolling surf, but I know she can hear him calling -– Janine! Janine! –- but she looks out across the water at me instead, shading her eyes from the last fierce glow of the sky. I’m trying to get his attention, except he’s signaling her, and we’re both so far from shore that she probably can’t tell if we are waving or drowning.

-end-

CHARITY

By Richard Compson Sater

He stood by the Salvation Army kettle, twenty-five yards from the Sears entrance, soldiering amid the reeling snow. A bank sign across the parking lot served as the sextant for this night before Christmas, measuring the incremental distance between his horizons and some wondrous unseen star, blinking 8:20, 23F, 8:21, 23F, 8:22, 23F. If this scene were somehow situated inside a miniature snowstorm globe, then a child had picked it up and given it a thorough, gleeful shake, just to activate the quiescent flakes.

The department store manager had refused to let him set up in the lobby; it was too distracting, too confrontational, he said. Spoiled the holiday mood. So the soldier bivouacked under a parking-lot lamp with his kettle. A portable cassette player sat on the ground next to him, the tape rolling -- no seasonal caroling this night; it was instead the ringing of a hand-bell, the volume turned up louder than the real thing, as if aptness of sound alone could build a barrier against dark and cold, could summon the generous.

By the padlocked kettle he stood, skinny as a broken slidewhistle, his thick mustache a frosted shredded-wheat biscuit from the wet, swirling snow, cap pulled low across his forehead, hands jammed deep in his pockets, his ears freezing, his hands as well. Should’ve remembered gloves, stupid, he told himself. Of course, he hadn’t intended to be outdoors.

Each December found him volunteering to man one of the kettles. It wasn’t the Salvation Army rhetoric that persuaded him but some kind of hope -- misguided, he thought, wry -- that such impulses could make up for a lack of good will in the angles and lines of his life during the remaining eleven-twelfths of the year. The balance sheet, summed up, still found him wanting, he reckoned; counterfeit and thus damned. Particularly since these cold nights found him sullen, muttering under his breath at those who passed him by without adding to the thin layer of coins and crumpled bills lining the bottom of the kettle. But here he was.

He watched a young woman trekking toward him from the warm glow of the store and through the spinning snow. Perhaps the tape-recorded bell caught her ear, or perhaps she simply was heading this direction anyway, but she stopped in front of the kettle and surveyed him. His eyes met hers and so he sized her up too, but he couldn't reach any conclusions. In her arms she balanced three shopping bags, bulging full with wrapped boxes, and a small child -- itself wrapped up like a package against the cold.

Under her appraisal, he wondered what she saw.

“You don’t look much like a soldier,” she said in summary. “Certainly not an onward Christian one.”

Perhaps a backward one, he thought, if there are such things, or one gone absent without leave. “Sorry, ma’am,” he murmured, more out of reflex than regret for not meeting standards. He was used to it.

She laughed. “No need to apologize. But why are you out here instead of over in the lobby?” she said. “No one can even see you out here in all this snow.”

He shrugged; it wasn’t worth explaining, and besides, he assumed she didn’t really expect an answer.

She looked into his kettle. “Looks like it’s been a lousy night,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

She shook her head. “Everybody’s in such a hurry today, like Christmas won’t even come if they don’t finish their shopping.” She set her shopping bags down first,

carefully, and then “Here,” she said, thrusting the child at him. Startled, he pulled his hands from his pockets to accept this sudden gift; he realized he had no idea even how he should hold it. He gripped it at the sides, at arm’s length as he might a basketball, and gazed into the child’s eyes, curious. A boy? A girl? The child sucked a red striped candycane and stared back, solemnly.

The bundle proved heavy; its weight surprised him, and without intending to, he brought it in close to him out of defense.

“Where are your gloves?” the woman said. “Don’t you have any gloves? Honestly.” She shook her head again. The parking-lot lamp illuminated a cheerful face, and if she were not beautiful then the light was inconceivably kind.

Free of the child, she unclasped her purse and rummaged into it. “My mother told me never to pass a Salvation Army kettle without putting something in,” she said. “It’s a habit, I guess, but there are worse ones.” She found a change purse and dumped its contents into the pot. “It’s not much,” she said. “But you’re welcome.”

“Thank you,” he said. He could never quite manage the “God bless you” that was supposed to follow it. The child in his arms discovered something funny and broke into a sticky grin.

Its mother considered the tape player and shook her head and then laughed. “It’s certainly ingenious. Your idea?”

He nodded.

“Good for you,” she said. “Saves a lot of useless effort.”

She picked up her shopping bags and he placed the child back in her arms. He wondered if what he felt was sorrow, surrendering it, or perhaps regret for so many things undone in his life.

“And you," she said, stern, “have a merry Christmas.”

Well, now. “I just might at that,” he said. “And the same to you both, ma’am.”

She wouldn’t have seen that the corners of his mouth had turned up, just slightly, under his mustache. She would not know that he would keep the smile because it had spread so deep inside him. She didn’t look back, and the snow swallowed her with her parcels as she headed off into the dark, toward her car, nothing more, he thought, except that the cassette player’s bells rang out some measure of excelcis deo, and –- hey! -– unto you a child is born.

Just after nine, he broke down his kettle and put it into the back seat of his car. He emptied his wallet into the pot, an afterthought, expecting -- needing -- nothing more of the next day except perhaps the sun coming up after the snow, the sun coming up, Christmas.

-end-