Fern: A short story by Garret Allen Waugh

His letter, for it was a letter as Joe was trying to work on his penmanship skills so he could be a cake-decorator at Disney, was filled with the latest on who was sleeping with who. This was the main topic of his letter, because what else would he talk about? But alongside this were brief anecdotes about clubs that were opening, becoming passé and closing, brief references to our friends, the cat fights, who’d developed a Tina addiction, who had joined what gym, who’d gotten sober, and which unfortunate souls had found Jesus. 

His letter was by turns catty, chatty and a cathartic purging of Joe’s bitterness towards most of humanity. He got away with being a great misanthrope because he was campy while he hated humanity. I found that, despite this, it made me realize the comatose state of my social life in Labotta. If there even was one — for I didn’t think that Cookie Sunday at the Methodist Church compared much to doing E at 2am on a Tuesday. But then again, I was in Labotta recovering from a mental breakdown so perhaps I needed to reevaluate my ideas. Labotta though, for all the charm of its quaint, tree-lined streets, was not the best place for a gay man. I’d learned this lesson in my adolescence and was now painfully re-learning it. 

Aside from churches and the various community clubs, there were only two social settings — the Spoonful Café and the Rainbow Bar. These were my only options really, because I was not about to join the Labotta Kiwanis Club or the friends of Woodhill Cemetery Society. I weighed both of these options and as I found them both to be wanting I decided to take myself to the Spoonful for a brief dinner in the hopes of befriending one of the newly sober farmers who populated the place on a Friday night, or maybe running into one of the few people from my high school that I wasn’t loathe to see. 

The Rainbow Bar I decided against for a few reasons. The name, for one, was misleading and went against all my homosexual sensibilities. This place was decidedly not for the gays. It was primarily populated by the non-sober farmers. The name came from the street, an alley really, that it was located on — Rainbow Street. Where the Rainbow in the street came from neither I nor anyone else could say. It was a dirty, dank place, with sawdust on the floor, two kinds of whiskey and three kinds of beer. In my youth my mother had cautioned me to never go there, and, despite this endorsement, I choose the Spoonful for the sake of my health. 

It was close to six o’clock a Friday evening when I entered — the peak of dining hours in this town. Moreover, this small dinner lay two doors down from the Episcopal Church and I happened to come in right after their auxiliary meeting had let out, so the place was packed with hungry Episcopalians. 

I got my grilled cheese and chili, for carbs where the primary nutrient at the Spoonful, and settled down, trying to eat in a manner so slow and pitiful that it would invite some feeble conversation to improve my dreary outlook. I found that I didn’t attract much notice until the end of the meal, when in came Mrs. MacDonald, my high-school English teacher. 

Despite my desire to socialize, I was still able to avoid her, as I surely didn’t want to speak with the bitterest of the Labotta biddies. She’d always liked my excitable youth and bookish demeanor, but the feeling wasn’t mutual. I couldn’t stand her myself. This was a sentiment felt by most of the town, as she had been old and cantankerous for as long as anyone could remember. You couldn’t even imagine her being young. 

She wasn’t a teacher anymore. It wasn’t that she’d really retired per say but rather suffered a nervous eclipse shortly after I’d graduated. She now ran a small used clothing store by the Lutheran Church just north of downtown, though the story of how she ended up there was a chapter of Labotta history most people wanted to forget about. 

See Fern — that’s what I’ll call her, for she wasn’t your high-school English teacher — had a beloved cat. She always told these long and aimless stories in class about the cat, showing Polaroids of the cat to anyone who expressed the slightest interest. Her classroom was bedecked with pictures of the cat, who, as it happened, was over ten years old, had cat-anxiety, completely toothless and had three legs. The whole town knew about this cat and was thoroughly sick of it. He was called Tripod. 

One year, in a fit about “today’s youth” she made the entire Sophomore class read Moby Dick. This prompted an unusually large number of threats on Tripod’s life. There were more death threats against this cat than there were copies of Moby Dick in the school’s library, which made Inspector Paul down at the police officer’s station think that it was only a few students who were making multiple threats. After all, how many death threats could one cat engender? 

This finally came to a head one night when Fern arrived home and found that Tripod needed to be renamed to Bipod. Not only was this a hair-raising experience that necessitated a renaming but also forced Fern to expend large sums of money on vet bills and a small but expensive cart so the two legged cat could wheel himself around the house. 

Understandably, this caused poor Fern’s nerves to collapse, which is why she lost her position with the school for spending too much of class-time sobbing and not talking about the fear of castration. She was still on Moby Dick.  

Yet, she still had to pay for Bipod’s cat-Xanax, so she spent the last of her savings to buy the old Common Thread Store by the Lutheran Church to have something coming in before she started teaching again. 

Due to her unpopular reputation though, business was hardly booming. Most of the clothes worn in Labotta are at least twenty years old and seldom does anyone purchase anything new, even if they were used like all the clothes at Common Thread. Teenagers are really the only ones who buy new clothes in Labotta – the same demographic where Fern was the most unpopular. 

In an attempt to drum up business Fern changed the name to Recycled Threads. This was at the advice of Henry Redbird – a gentleman friend of Fern’s who managed the landscaping of the Lutheran Church. This was an attempt to capitalize on what Henry called the “global warming fad.” This approach did not work and now Fern was additionally out the money required to replace the store’s signs and run ads in the Labotta Gazette.  

Business did slowly improve over the next few years as Fern’s classroom tyranny faded in local memory. Still though, to make ends meet and pay Bipod’s medical bills, Fern had to do a small amount of part-time cleaning work. She didn’t mind it too much, except when former students hired her and dimly recalled the annals of The Canterbury Tales (she had insisted that they be read in Middle English) and thus attempted their revenge by observing this old woman scrubbing on her hands and knees with a sadistic grin on their faces – in particular the students who’d been sophomores in the year of Tripod’s “accident.” 

I was tempted to hire her based on some long-suppressed suffering at her hands. I couldn’t remember exactly what she had done to me, but I knew that there had to be something, some long ago sin that we had both forgotten. 

I suppose it would have livened up the dullness of Labotta to see the miserable old bat cleaning the bathroom, but this stay had already put too much of a strain on my meager funds. So, as satisfactory as that would have been, I grimly walked home in the grey twilight instead. It was only then that I realized something: I hadn’t spoken a word to a soul the whole evening long.