Susan’s house could have been described as prototypically suburban. It was of the oppressively geometric, “pleasant enough,” variety of home that hovered comfortably, but not very far, above the meek greenery of its accompanying lawn. When viewed from the road in front, the house looked so ludicrously rectangular and blandly photogenic that a mail man was once surprised to find, upon delivering to it, that the house existed in the third dimension at all. There lay now, a thing on Susan’s mind so perniciously heavy, that no amount of self-soothing could shake it off. No abundance of bath salts, nor stroll in the gentle late-morning breeze, could serve as the fulcrum from which to lift her sorrows. Susan’s only hope now, of alleviating any of her discontentment, was to acquire her daughter’s graduation certificate from Princeton University by that evening.
The largest obstacle standing in Susan’s way of accomplishing this was the fact that her daughter had not, in fact, graduated from Princeton that spring- she had taken a temporary leave in order to attend a rehab program. None of Susan’s friends knew this, and it was her mission to uphold her family’s veneer of perfection, now at risk of being savagely punctured by her daughter’s health issues. This certificate needed to be obtained that evening because the Morrison’s would be coming for dinner, and it would be disastrous for Susan not to have existing proof of her daughter’s nonexistent graduation. Mrs. Morrison had always been notorious for boasting profusely about her daughter, Molly’s, successes in various fields. Susan had always had to listen in quiet indignation to Mrs. Morrison blab on about how brilliantly Molly played the piano, and then how brilliantly Molly played the guitar after she’d given up the piano, and after that the drums. The amount of gloating ammunition that Mrs. Morrison would have, were she to discover the truth about Susan’s daughter’s spring term, would be unsalvageable.
Susan’s first trip was to the Saturday market to purchase a few baguettes. Midway through the waiting process, however, Susan began to grow anxious as she watched baguette after baguette being lifted from the great brown bag in which they sat, and handed over to customers. If Susan were unlucky they would all be gone, and no one in her home that night would see the plushy dough of the baguette’s innards that lay encased within that impenetrable crust, or the way their snow-white color became light-green with crystalline instantaneousness when dipped in olive oil. But fortune struck and Susan was delighted to see three entire baguettes still protruding from the rough-hewn rim of the bag, and promptly told the seller that she would buy them all.
“Excuse me, Miss,” a voice said from behind. Susan turned around to find a woman in what looked like her 70’s, tightly clutching her purse. “Do you think you could maybe
leave one baguette for me to buy? Or I’d happily buy it back from you for twice the price, if you insist?”
“No, I don’t think so. Sorry.” Susan replied icily. “It’s my money, and I chose to buy the three baguettes because I want the three baguettes for my dinner party.”
This interaction was immediately followed by another imploration and refusal, which was so similar to the first as to make it totally futile to quote directly. The old lady’s eyes began to burn like Pompeii, and even the bread seller could detect her ire and made a desperate attempt to appease her by handing her a small stack of ciabatta and telling her that she could have them all for the price of one loaf. The old lady gave a violent scoff that sounded like the severely belated unclogging of a garbage disposal, and then contemptuously threw the ciabatta onto the ground like a concert violinist being presented with a viola. But then worst of all, she turned back to Susan and said:
“I wish your dinner party to be a hellish affair! It will be so pitiful and lifeless, that those loaves of bread you hold may as well be stones, and the accompanying olive oil the blood of your ancestors! Your lies and embarrassments will be exposed once and for all, and you’ll be denigrated in your neighborhood for years to come!” As the old lady finished her supposed malediction she held up her arms, and her black sleeves rendered her, for a moment, with a sinister avian quality, and then she turned around and soon disappeared from sight. Susan walked around the market for a moment, more bewildered than perturbed. Suddenly she spotted a merchant stand that looked promising- there was a portrait painter in the process of painting a customer on the spot. It was quite fortuitous for Susan to discover this merchant today, and she immediately had the bright idea of commissioning him to forge the Princeton certificate.
Upon hearing Susan’s proposition the painter affectedly began to stroke his chin, an action that seemed quite incongruous with his beardless face, and then he said: “This is quite a job you ask of me. Usually people just want me to make caricatures of their faces. I can do it, but you’ll have to do something for me in return. The usual money fee won’t cover it.”
“What do you need from me?” Susan asked.
The painter shot Susan a quick, contemplative glance and then, after a sharp, sibilant intake of breath, explained: “My wife, Carol, has been undergoing a tremendous amount of stress lately. But she refuses to take any type of medication to counteract her anxiety.
I’ll give you the address of our home, and I want you to find some way to slip her some medicine.”
Susan was a bit skeptical, but quickly decided that the task seemed reasonable if it got her an uncanny imitation of a Princeton graduation certificate to decorate her refrigerator with. She accepted the bargain, and the painter quickly took a small, translucent plastic bottle out of his pocket, containing what looked like some type of aquamarine syrup. “Two drops should do it,” the painter said as he handed the phial to Susan.
While driving in her car on the way to the address in question, Susan was surprised to receive a call from Bill, a family friend, which she promptly answered. She was displeased to find out, however, that Bill was calling for a favor- he wanted Susan to give him her lasagne recipe which Bill’s mother, on her deathbed, had specifically asked for. “I’m incredibly sorry to hear about your mother, Bill,” Susan replied. “But I can’t give you the recipe. It’s a secret.”
Bill then gave a pleading, mildly irate retort in which, at some point, he used the phrase “after all we’ve been together,” a choice of words that especially enraged Susan, because it sounded to her like Bill was alluding to an affair that they had had together six years ago- an affair that Susan’s husband had never found out about to this day. Susan castigated Bill for “guilt-tripping” her and briskly hung up the phone.
About half an hour later, Susan found herself driving, with a reasonable amount of trepidation, up to the painter’s house. After snugly parking her car along the curb (one corner of it obnoxiously akimbo) she marched up to the door with a box of cookies in hand, an important prop in her scheme. Susan rang the doorbell only once, and became anxious when, after a minute of waiting, there was no sign of anyone coming to answer the door. Suddenly a prickly, pulsating pain began coursing through Susan’s left hand. She immediately became misty-eyed and looked down to find a large, black mass adjacent to her hand, the features of which were still amorphous behind the trickly, saline film coating her eyes. It took a few more seconds for Susan’s tears to substantially subside, at which point she realized that a crow was pecking at her hand.
Susan gave a shrill, rodential scream and then dropped her purse onto the porch, as the crow reared its head into it, and fumbled about for a few seconds, finally emerging with the blue pharmaceutical phial in its beak. With adrenaline-charged rapidity Susan bent down to the floor of the porch and grabbed the end of the phial but the crow began to suck the medicine out of the phial with its mouth. Susan was confounded by the fact that the crow was able to do this, considering its lack of either lips or a tongue, but was able to briskly yank the bottle out of the crow’s mouth once she rebounded from her confusion, and watched as it flew away in defeat.
No sooner had Susan had time to recover from this incident, when the door finally swung open and a woman a little older than her, presumably Carol, said: “Can I help you, dear?”
“Hi, I hope I’m not bothering you. My name’s Liz and we just moved into the neighborhood,” Susan said. She continued: “My daughter was supposed to be selling some cookies for a school fundraiser but she’s come down with a massive flu. Could I sell you any?”
To Susan’s shock, Carol burst into a torrent of tears. Every acting performance in a Hollywood melodrama compounded together would not constitute as many tears as deluged onto Carol’s porch in those twenty seconds. Susan was at a loss for what to say, and just awkwardly stood, like an armless scarecrow until finally placing a consoling hand on Carol’s shoulder.
Carol’s face contorted, briefly, into what looked like a rough blueprint of a smile, before retreating back into sobbing mode, at which point she buried her face into Susan’s shoulder and began blubbering into her shirt.
Finally, Carol regained partial composure and said: “I’m so sorry. I’m not sure what came over me. I’m so glad you came to check on me. I’ve had some horrible issues lately with my own kid, and none of the neighbors have interacted with me at all. I’d be happy to buy your cookies. Would you like to come in for some tea?”
“That would be fantastic,” Susan replied.
Susan sat down at Carol’s dining-room table, while Carol retreated into the kitchen. On the table was a shiny, partially-full water bottle with its cap nestled next to it. Carol asked, from the kitchen: “Do you have any other kids?”
“Yes! My oldest daughter just graduated from Princeton.” Suasn replied. With a delicate, supple motion, she reached her arm over to the water bottle, phial in hand, and squeezed it twice, each squeeze accompanied by a blue droplet oozing its way out of the opening of the phial and promptly crashing down into the stainless-steel well of the bottle. Carol’s shadow suddenly loomed onto the table and Susan hastily dispatched the
phial back into her purse, as Carol entered the room and set a pleasant-looking tray of tea in front of Susan.
“The issues that you said you’re having with your kid…could you tell me more about that?” Susan asked.
“It’s my son. He’s been a total mess ever since my husband and I divorced. I initiated the divorce, and he hasn’t forgiven me.” Carol replied.
“Wh- what does your ex-husband do?” Susan asked. “He’s a painter.”
Now that was incredibly odd, thought Susan as her anxieties returned. Why was the painter showing such an interest in his ex-wife’s health routine? The two women engaged in small talk for another twenty minutes before Susan noted the time and the dinner party that lay ahead of her, and stood up to leave. When Susan opened the door, she was greeted by the grotesque sight of the crow’s corpse, sprawled across the top of the porch- its beady eyes staring vacantly up at her like marbles, and a soapy, blue foam trickling down from its splayed-open beak. The pieces of this horrifying puzzle suddenly all connected like a reverse continental drift, and Susan became mortified. It all made sense now- the painter was having her poison his ex-wife- probably out of scorn for her having left him. And Susan had unwittingly been the instrument of revenge in all this.
After a brief period of Susan frantically banging on Carol’s door, Carol opened it with the very same water bottle in her hand. “What is it dear?” Carol asked.
Susan didn’t answer, but simply snatched the water bottle right from Carol’s hand- only to find that it was empty. Lightheaded and at a complete loss for words, Susan went into a state of pure panic and bolted from Carol’s porch, jumped into her car and sped away from the house. There was no way to salvage that situation, Susan thought, so she might as well make sure she received compensation for it.
Upon returning to the market, Susan got out of her car and sprinted like a gazelle back to the painter’s booth, only to find the painter being dragged away from his counter, in handcuffs, by police. Susan, exasperated, asked one of the police what was going on and they explained that the painter had been manufacturing fake IDs. Some time later, in grim spirits, Susan waddled back into her house to find her husband hunched over the kitchen table with a crumpled piece of paper, half a glass of orange juice, and a menacingly disgruntled expression on his face.
“What is it, now?” Susan asked.
“How could you lie to me that way?” her husband asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“You cheated on me. With Bill. He left me a note explaining everything.”
Susan remained silent for several moments. “I…he must have been really upset about the lasagna.” Susan whimpered.
“What?!” her husband asked. “It was-”
“Never mind, don’t tell me. I don’t care.” Her husband abruptly stood up, violently drank the remainder of the orange juice, and then set the glass back on the table with a surprisingly delicate motion, before storming out of the room. Overwhelmed with the disastrous results of the day, Susan picked up the house phone to call the Morrisons but, before dialing the number her hand just hung in the air for a few moments as the events of the day coursed through her mind and a succession of fleeting images came. Among them was her daughter’s graduation certificate which would never decorate her fridge. Then the teary-eyed face of a woman who had put her trust in Susan, and possibly died for it. And lastly, Susan took a moment to look through the window. The light was reflecting off of the duck pond in a way that made the water look almost like a mirage. Susan remembered all the times she would take her daughter to play by the pond. It was a shame, Susan thought, what their relationship had become. Then Susan remembered that she had never actually particularly enjoyed playing with her daughter by that duck pond to begin with, and suddenly everything felt alright again.