Saint Oswald by Jay Bonansinga (motivational novels .txt) 📕

their budget to lease decades ago. The neighborhood around it was a blue-collar enclave on the north side of Chicago called Wrigleyville, the home of the Chicago Cubs and more taverns per capita than skid row. But the dream environment in which the little cottage sits is also warping reality like a funhouse mirror.

The iron lintel of the First Unitarian Cemetery rises over the porch, the letters embossed in rusty, timeworn metal. At the threshold of the flower-lined sidewalk leading up to the front door, a massive wrought iron sign is silhouetted against the dark, churning sky: LOMBARD MEMORIAL VETERANS CEMETARY AND COLUMBARIUM.

Oswald checks his watch. Time is running out. He lurches over to a side door, tries it, finds it locked, and curses silently. He has no voice in this dream; he can’t make a sound. He hears the soft, muffled cries of a woman inside the structure, moving in silhouette behind the shaded windows, her sobs coming in terrible waves, her breath hitching with each gasp as she searches the dark, empty rooms. She’s alone and scared. She calls out for Oswald. She needs him. She is lost without him.

In the dream, the word lost whispers in Oswald’s ears. It galvanizes him. He goes over to a shuttered window and bangs on it desperately. The ghostly woman inside the house stirs as a goldfish might twitch at a thump on the side of its bowl. She calls out, her words garbled as she gasps for breath. She falls to her knees, crying out for her dearly beloved missing husband.

Oswald claws at the seams along the side of the window until his fingernails bleed. He senses dusk rolling in, a darkness unlike any other he has ever seen or felt. In the midst of that darkness, a jaundiced, iridescent light begins to rise behind him. Like a cold, cadaverous finger touching the bare skin of his neck, the light whispers to him, Tick-tock—tick-tock—tick-tock.

Whirling around, Oswald sees the source of the light, and feels his soul contract into a tiny, hard seed of dread. The great, fiery, yellow sliver of a moon arcs in time-lapse motion across the infinite blackness of the night sky, ever changing, moving toward fullness, a ticking time bomb, a demonic stage light slanting down and illuminating a necropolis of dead strewn across the yard like cordwood.

Oswald sees the gangly body of the accountant that he whacked eleven years ago, now lying a few feet away from him, the Coke-bottle eyeglasses still askew on the dead face. A few feet to the left lie the crumpled remains of the Kiddie-Porn Guy, his head ruptured like a rotten gourd. More of them lie in contortions and twisted heaps in each direction—the Drug Dealer whose neck Oswald snapped like dry kindling with an axe handle, the Bloated Gambling-Addict Corpse, the Gangbanger Dude whom Oswald decommissioned with a screwdriver, and the Crooked Politician that Oswald took out three years ago with a length of coaxial cable and a little elbow grease. They all litter the yard like the ghosts of some Civil War battlefield, and Oswald is just beginning to register the import of the bodies when he sees the dark object hanging off a lone picket at the corner of the little white fence.

He gapes at it. His blood freezes in his veins. His flesh crawls. No bigger than a stocking cap or a baseball glove, the object radiates pain. Sorrow. Shame. Horror. He forces himself to walk over to it, weaving through the rows of dead bodies. Gripped in its thrall, his gaze remains fixed on the thing as he approaches, slowly, as though it might vanish at any moment.

He reaches the fence and pauses mere inches from the thing, his heart racing so hard it’s about to punch through his sternum.

He reaches out for it.

Oswald jerks awake in a tangle of bed linen and sweaty skivvies. He sits up in bed. The horrors of the nightmare reverberate in his brain like cobwebs sticking to his face.

He takes deep breaths. His heart thumps painfully in his chest as he looks around the lonely room, eyes adjusting to the darkness, to the cold splash of reality, to the lack of a wife.

Matilda’s absence is everywhere in the room. Even in the predawn dark, Oswald can see the bureau across the room now missing its makeup mirror and customary litter of moisturizers and skin creams. Next to the dresser, the empty side of the closet is as gaping and painful to Oswald as a pulled tooth. But it’s that last foreign object in his dream—the thing dangling off the fence post—that haunts him now.

He gets out of bed and pads across the room to his side of the closet. He reaches up to the hatboxes and stacks of old copies of National Geographic and Playboy, and he finds the shoebox. He pulls it out, takes it over to the dresser, sets it down, and blows the dust off it. The words Genuine Hush Puppies across the top have faded with age. The corners are worn. He opens it.

Inside, nestled in ancient tissue paper, lies the wig. Oswald has no idea why he has kept it all these years. The edges of the thing are charred, some of the natural hair split and fire damaged from the heat of a point-blank gunshot. In some far-flung time and place, in some other context—when the wig was new and very possibly sat in the window of Marshal Fields under a festive bonnet of white roses and calla lilies—the thing had probably been called Autumn Sunset Bouffant from the Joan Collins Collection.

Now, cradled in Oswald Means’s enormous hands, the thing looks like a dead animal.

She was whack number eight—the one that Oswald regretted the most. The details of the hit have long faded from his memory, but the lasting effects of this one will stay with Oswald for the rest of his sorry life. The woman was a prostitute—more accurately an upscale escort