True evil entered young Dwight Skinner’s life with a little nosh narrishkeit, though his parents warned the chil‐ dren about food choking risks. Grandparents, to the contrary, test the frayed rope of perilous acts by the weight of their own ticking time, to steal precious moments from those around them. Yitzhak Skinner was no exception, as he encouraged his two grandsons to have a little fun with food to satisfy his own whims.
He pressed a long, translucent "nger to his thin, cracked lips, which broke into an impish smile. “It’ll be our little secret,” he said to Dwight and Aaron.
Deception was the heart of the Skinners’ safety for three generations. Secrets, their mistress.
The boys were eager to indulge their zayde’s whims of unsanc‐ tioned mischief when their parents were out of eyesight or earshot. This was a perfect opportunity.
A simple hanging kitchen table sconce glowed a dirty amber and cast an audience of macabre shadows backdropped by the
September 2022 Skokie, Illinois
2 J.T. PATTEN
creeping rumble of distant thunder. Under it, eighty-six-year-old Yitzhak leaned far back in the creaky chair and opened his jaws wide, a silver wire attaching a yellowed dental bridge in his gaped mouth. He absently tongued the wire, tempting a resurgence of memory...a time never spoken of...memories of survival.
Ten-year-old-Aaron tossed the grape at his zayde’s mouth. Yitzhak followed the fruit, tracking its launch above his chrome- rimmed spectacles, eyes darting, head swaying. It !ew in a perfect arch and landed on point.
Success! Yitzhak !ung his arms in the air as he chomped on the grape with a tight smile.
The young boys clapped and cheered.
“Goal! Dwight, you’re up,” he coaxed his twelve-year-old grandson. “And after, I’ll throw into each of your mouths. Just keep quiet. We mustn’t wake your mother,” he warned them.
Thunder boomed again; lingering rumbles echoed nearer as the storm crept closer.
Dwight’s eyes were as wide as the hand-painted bone china plates that adorned the kitchen cabinet tops. He lowered the scuba mask resting on his forehead. A snorkel dangled from wrapped masking tape that secured the tempered glass and sili‐ cone skirt to the strap.
“That was. A big. One. It’s close. One, two thousand. Five, one thousand. Four thousand. Eight...”
Aaron rolled his eyes. “You’re pathetic.”
“It. Might. Kill us.”
Dwight bit down on his lip and exaggerated the shivering of
his body. His eyebrows jumped, seeking refuge under his jagged brown bangs. He clapped his hands over his ears, as if anticipating the next boom.
The room dimmed from the cloud blanket that hovered over the house amidst their laughter and clandestine kitchen antics. Symbiotic shadow forms melted into one, painting the walls with gloom, a menacing stain that spread and lengthened to the !oor.
A sustained !are of light ripped through the late afternoon
WHISPERS OF A GYPSY 3
darkness. It scattered the conjoined silhouettes, sucking them to the ceiling corners. Between !ashes, the pitch reclaimed its dwelling in a back-and-forth mêlée. The kitchen went silent save for the clicks of the dog’s nails on the !oor.
Dwight embraced himself with crossed arms. His head tick- tocked with mounting anxiety. He jammed the snorkel mouth‐ piece under his lips. Erratic breaths warned of the nearing storm like a coastal fog horn through the air tube.
“Dwight, never you mind Mother Nature. C’mon.” You can do it, Zayde encouraged him with an inaudible whisper. You can do anything. There’s nothing to fear.
Dwight cocked his head. Message received. His tight lips released a smile around the blue rubber guard. The mask glass fogged from his hot nasal a#rmation.
“Don’t miss, Buttwipe Dwight,” Aaron taunted him. He had enchanting jade green eyes, genes for a strong future jawline, and the shrewdness of a seasoned street hustler. He was an alpha male like his father, which also made him an asshole most of the time.
Dwight, who was stuck in the awkward years for, well, all of his years, appealed to Aaron with restraint. Unlike most boys.
He swatted at the air, spit out his snorkel, and said with a trailing strand of drool, “I told you. I don’t. Like. That name. Please stop.” Dwight jutted his hand out like a tra#c cop to cement his warning.
Aaron hu$ed and rolled his eyes before smacking away his brother’s hand. “I. Uh. Don’t. Uh. Like. My buttwipe name.” He constantly mocked Dwight’s broken speech pattern. Many would say the eldest boy had been dealt two bad hands from the cards of life. He had several motor skill and developmental disabilities after the brain injury, and because of initial chromosomal abnormali‐ ties, all of which his brother admonished him for daily. And when Aaron forgot, his father was quick to prod.
Zayde rocked forward in his chair with a creak and smacked the back of Aaron’s head with a light slap. “Don’t be so naughty... Ass-vipe, Aaron.”
4 J.T. PATTEN
They all laughed, Dwight not as much as the others.
“Zayde.” Dwight slid the mask back to his forehead, with his brows bent for the scold, and said, “You shouldn’t tease. My brother. Ass is a bad. Word. Don’t feel bad, Aaron.” Dwight reached over the table, o!ering a hug to his brother.
Aaron rejected the embrace with dramatic disdain, as if it were the most stench-ridden, maggot-covered piece of garbage in a hot, rancid dumpster.
“Aaron. Would it hurt you to embrace your brother?” Yitzhak lowered his glasses to make direct eye contact. His tone, "rm. “Family can go away in a...snap.”
“He can go away. I’d love that. Put him on a train or an airplane and get him away someplace where I’ll never see him again. Maybe he could drown in an ocean with his stupid goggles and tube.”
Dwight’s eyes dropped, as did his #eeting moment of hope for a reassuring hug. “I love you. Aaron. I never want. My baby brother. To go. Away. I’d marry you. Even with your. Angry colors.”
“Oh, God.” Aaron stuck a "nger in his throat and mocked a gag.
Yitzhak rubbed his temples. His face tight with frustration, he strained a smile and diverted the conversation back to fun. He waved his hands like a schoolyard football receiver calling for the throw. “Dwight. Focus. Here. Let’s go.”
Dwight aimed, closed his eyes, and tossed. The grape sailed through the air, landing spot-on — until it slid to the back of his grandfather’s throat.
It stuck.
Yitzhak coughed. And nothing. The old man’s lungs were too empty to budge the grape.
He fought to swallow, but spasming muscles squeezed the bulbous grape, drawing it deeper into the blocked airway.
His tongue #icked and hands #apped as he choked. His eyes bulged and then rolled to their watery whites, while his grandsons
WHISPERS OF A GYPSY 5
laughed themselves to tears at the old man’s silly, clown-like gyrations.
As Yitzhak Skinner asphyxiated, it occurred to him that, for as many times as he’d survived death, the literal grapes of wrath persisted. About a century ago, Yitzhak was to be executed for being a Gypsy, and once again, because Russians assumed he was a Jew. He’d dodged death again, su!ering through both typhoid and sepsis. But those didn’t count, as they weren’t personal. And again, when he narrowly escaped death on Block No. 28’s experi‐ mental clinic #oor under a similar storm. That was most de$nitely personal.
Aaron’s face showed growing alarm. The nosh narrishkeit was no longer fun or funny. “Dwight, stop. He’s choking. Get Mom.”
Dwight, who couldn’t always relate perceptions to reality, was $xated on his grandfather’s silly movements. He tossed another grape at Zayde’s open mouth.
“Mom!” Aaron rose from his chair and gave his grandfather a slap on the back, slamming the chair forward.
Down the hall from the kitchen, the front door opened.
“Boy, it’s coming down out there. I’m soaked.”
“Dad’s home.” Aaron banged again on his grandfather’s back.
“Dad, help!”
“Hang on. Let me get in the door. I’m guessing your mom
passed out as usual, while you guys ran wild and trashed this place.” David balanced on one foot as he removed a sopping shoe. “Can someone get me a towel? Esther...boys...Dad? Eizeh balegan, I can’t even put my shoes anywhere in this mess.” He struggled with the other loafer and tossed it into the corner pile of shoes, then $nger-combed his dripping hair in the entryway mirror. From the re#ection, he saw his wife lying under a blanket on the sofa. He muttered, “Big surprise, Esther.?” Estrie, you life-sucking bitch. It was the usual routine: unmanaged noise and chaos for David, who returned day after day to what he felt was a cage that stole his life away minute by minute. The faded welcome mat out front was an ironic transom between freedom and con$nement.
6 J.T. PATTEN
Aaron screamed again, “It’s not working!”
Dwight’s laughter and the dog barking were just as loud, adding to the ruckus and confusion coming from the kitchen.
“Give me one damn minute to just take care of myself for a change before I have to deal with everyone else.”
Dwight grabbed a !st full of grapes and threw them into the ever-tempting target his grandfather stretched open wider and wider, gasping for the slightest relief of air.
The fruit banked o" Zayde’s glasses.
One knocked into the lighting sconce.
Another landed in Zayde’s gasping mouth.
Dwight cheered.
“Guys, what are you doing? I need a towel. Didn’t you hear
me?” David stood fuming by the door as the water droplets cascaded from his clothes. His tone warranted a response from someone amidst the shouting and barking.
Had Yitzhak fathomed in his wildest imagination his son had the capability of violence in the days to come, he would have panicked more at death’s grip.
Instead, at relative peace with the life he’d leave behind, the old man resigned himself to the big sleep and calming darkness, replacing the distant laughter of Dwight, a most kind-spirited boy, who was oblivious to what was happening. Yitzhak had had enough of keeping exhaustive secrets, performing fake smiles, and blocking ghastly memories. It was time for the new generation to live without such burdens.
Hachodesh haze lachem, the calendar is in your hands, Yitzhak o"ered to God in his adopted faith.
And then a tsunami wave of fear was triggered as he remem‐ bered something—someone—in the snapshots of history and horrors $ashing from the dying synapses of his brain just as the sounds of his grandsons faded and a cold blanket of death enveloped his soul.
Mortimer. No.
WHISPERS OF A GYPSY 7
Yitzhak fought against the clouding confusion in his mind for a way back from fate’s agency of supernatural control to teshuvah, a return to all things as they were intended to be.
At a time when his spirit should be repenting, instead he clawed forward through the colorless void’s walls of regret, toward a living hope.
Light vanished, and fate pulled him into the constricting blackness, wrapping him with paralysis in a chilling nothing that sapped him of all feeling of movement.
How could he have been so irresponsible?
The deal will be broken. He’ll come for the bloodline.
In his fading consciousness, he tried to raise a hand and point. Only in his altered state could he visualize the direction of the treacherous house down the road.
Back in the domain of the living, his actual hands remained limp at his sides, unable to show the danger.
Yitzhak Skinner screamed a desperate plea, Mal’ach, that God’s messenger angels might deliver the warning.
It was too late. Mortimer will come.
In the permanent place of the dead, there were no angels, no bright lights or family members waiting in the wings. He died in the blackness of regret and error, tumbling through Sheol.
The old man slumped over, falling from his chair when his adult son stepped within eyesight of the kitchen.
“Dad!”
Esther awoke in a deep haze from her Chardonnay nap on the family room sofa. She tried her best to follow David as she reori‐ ented herself to her whereabouts and sobered her wits over the shouting and crying.
Yitzhak hit the "oor, jarring a gullet of grapes that rolled from his slackened mouth to David’s feet.
“Do something!” David cried as he yanked at his sopped hair. “Esther! Help him, for God’s sake! I’m calling nine-one-one.”
Sleep vanished all at once, as though it never had been, a holdover from her days at the hospital, when she worked on the
8 J.T. PATTEN
ER !oor...before Dwight. Before...it all. Esther dropped to her knees and searched her father-in-law’s wrist, then his neck for a pulse. Her eyes welled. She lost her focus and became more distant from her surroundings. Her body slackened in the defeat of past and present failures to revive the dead.
“He’s gone.” Just like my sister, Beth, she didn’t say, nor would she dare.
“You’re not doing anything!” David shouted.
Esther swept her father-in-law’s mouth with a small, trem‐ bling #nger, probing for more grapes. She then started CPR breaths and compressions. His airway remained blocked.
The old man’s gaze was vacant but #xed on Dwight as Esther tried to resuscitate him in vain. Yitzhak’s lifeless eyes expired with the lingering horror of a more irrevocable mistake realized in his #nal death throes. A man would come to the house, by any means, at any cost for one of the boys.
Dwight stopped giggling. “Zayde fell. Down. Is he asleep?” He cocked his head and shrugged. The white snorkel wobbled. “Where did his. Colors go?” It perplexed Dwight. He looked outward into a world unseen by others and glimpsed the dissipat‐ ing, translucent hue of pastels. He smiled and waved. “Goodbye, Zayde. I love you.” He blew a kiss. “I’ll see you. Soon.”
“Dwight did it.” Aaron pointed at the accused. “He killed Zayde. He laughed when he did it. He meant to do it. He wouldn’t get Mom.”
David stared at the litter of grapes on the ceramic !oor tiles being gobbled up by the ratty pup, then stared at his dead father’s macabre frozen face. David’s expression reformed from confusion and disbelief to tightened contempt. His eyes narrowed as his black brows caved down. He snarled and booted the dog to the wall. It hit with a wet crunch, then dropped in a thump on the !oor.
The boys screamed and raced to the lifeless pooch.
David cocked his arm backward in his maniacal advance. In a !ash, he judged his drunken wife and the boy she insisted on
WHISPERS OF A GYPSY 9
bringing into the world. Esther and Dwight were both found guilty by a jury of one, while an unknown rage gave birth from the death at his feet.
“You!” he roared and let his arm !y until he could beat no more.
M r. Mortimer rocked to the full extension of the mildewed oak runners as he sat beneath the drum chorus of heavy rain and thunder. He relaxed in one of two oversized wooden chairs spaced to "t a glass-covered brass table with a crystal ashtray sitting upon it. His covered porch ran the length of the patio and shielded the elements short of the edges, where water cascaded down from the bloated gutters, pooling on the rain-soaked
!oorboards.
Above him, a stone chimney glowed muted shades of yellow
and orange from the !ue opening against the backdrop of the angry gray sky.
The old man drew in a mouthful of cigar smoke and let it roll over his tongue before sipping from his glass of 13-year-old Saint Cloud Kentucky bourbon. His antique rocker creaked with each back-and-forth swing. Under the raging storm’s acoustic fanfare, he hummed the Johnny Cash song “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” regaling his consciousness about the devil’s mighty herd of red- eyed bulls with hooves made of steel.
Mr. Mortimer blew a contemptuous breath of smoke toward the thin white "ngers of lightning as the !ash retreated from the black. He turned his head toward the Skinners’ home.
A mere block away, something had shifted in the world of Yitzhak Skinner, and in the world of Mr. Mortimer, too.
He heard the whispers, not from the same, but another. The whispers were strong. Pure. Mr. Mortimer rotated his head as his eyes rolled back, a human antenna trying to discern clarity through an unfamiliar signal. He sensed the pain and pleading
10 J.T. PATTEN
from the one he knew. And yet a curious joy came from the other whisperer. Was it the boy? He could not tell. It no longer mattered once Yitzhak Skinner’s silent screaming grew still. A new partnership would soon begin—willing or not.
Mr. Mortimer spat and grinned.
“Akana mukav tut le Devlesa, Soptitorului.” I leave you to God, Whisperer, Mr. Mortimer said in the tongue of Polish Roma while raising his whiskey glass to the dark sky with respect.
From a plate by his side, he lifted a long bone to his mouth and, with a splintering crunch, bit through the hard outer layer to tongue the rich marrow clot inside.
