Shift Change - William Cass

Snow had crusted on the lid of a discarded washing machine in a vacant lot up the street from the factory. A slender boy of twelve leaned against it shuffling his feet and knitting his eyebrows. A man with a knit cap walked up the sidewalk toward the boy. He wore coveralls under a worn jacket and carried an empty lunch pail, just off his factory shift. As he approached, the man recognized the boy as the one he’d seen slinking around the neighborhood. The man stopped when he reached the boy and stared hard at him. The boy stood up straight. It was cold, and their breath hung in short clouds between them. The late afternoon’s gloaming had already begun; headlights on a passing car glowed dimly.

A long moment passed before the man continued up the street and turned onto the cracked walk of a small green house. A calico cat, feral, crouched in the shadows at a far corner of its sagging porch. The front door groaned as the man pushed it open, and the cat jumped off the porch into the snow.

The boy stuffed his hands into the pouch of his sweatshirt. He looked down the hill past the factory where the Cuyahoga River tumbled along against charcoal hills in the dwindling light, then crossed the street and headed up the sidewalk. When he passed the man’s house, he didn’t glance over. He was a boy who put candies into the desks of girls at school in the hopes that they would like him. Instead, most said nothing to him about the gifts, but ridiculed him behind his back. He continued up the street with his disheveled hair and black-framed glasses past squat houses with dead front lawns, patches of dirty snow, and warm, soft lights in many of the front windows.

The man switched on the wall heater in the hallway and went down it to his bedroom closet.  Heel-less slippers, scuffed oxfords, and a pair of sneakers with graying laces cluttered the floor of the closet. The man took off his work boots and slid on the slippers. He leaned the boots against a curtain rod that had fallen down a long time before and hung his cap on a hook on the back of the closet door.

He entered the kitchen without removing his jacket and pulled the cord of the gooseneck lamp on the table. After putting water on the stove for tea, he took a loaf of bread and a roll of liverwurst from the refrigerator and made himself two sandwiches. The kettle began to whistle. He took it off the stove and poured its steaming water over the tea bag in a chipped mug.  The man took his dinner over to the table and sat down. Through the window across from the table, he watched the calico cat slink through the bare, hanging branches of a willow tree and drop off the short back fence into the alley.

The boy walked up the hill and around the corner clenching a small paper bag in the pouch of his sweatshirt. He stopped in front of an Episcopal church where children’s choir practice was taking place, surveyed both directions, and then crept along the building until he could peak through one of the stained-glass windows. Muffled in the uneven, colored glass, he could make out children on risers and the tall, thin girl among them that he was looking for, the one who had twice thanked him for the candy. Organ music and high choral voices resounded in the big, empty church. The boy slipped back through the bushes, crossed the street, and sat down on the curb across from the church’s doors and a few steps away from the alley.  

He waited, hunched down in the cold, regarding the street. The lot of an auto body shop next to the church held a collection of rusted cars. The diner beside it displayed pink neon tubes in its window that spelled: “Eat”, and a cardboard sign announcing: “Dinner Special – Chicken Kiev”.  The boy watched the lights blink off in the variety store next to the diner. A woman in a dark overcoat left the store and locked the front doors of it from a jangle of keys. She dropped the keys into her purse, clicked it shut, tucked her hair under a plaid woolen scarf, and walked across the street. He watched her start down the alley in her goulashes, and then returned his focus to the church’s front doors.

The calico cat scampered behind a garbage can as the woman’s footsteps crunched past in the gravel. The man looked up at the same sound and stopped stirring his tea. As he watched the woman go by in the alley, his heart, as always, lurched. He stood up quickly and stepped over to the window where he strained to see her continue down the alley.

“Hello,” he said quietly, something he could never bring himself to say to her directly.  “Hello, you. Hello, there.”

He watched her walk briskly into the thin fog drifting up the alley from the river until she disappeared into it towards the factory and the soot-stained apartment buildings nearby. The stink of the factory hung in the air, and he could just make out the last of the nightshift workers entering through its entrance in the cyclone fencing. The man sat back down to his dinner slowly, but didn’t resume eating.

The cat crawled up the alley and around the corner where it brushed against the boy’s leg.  The boy stroked its matted fur. He took a butterscotch-flavored candy from his bag, unwrapped it, and held it out on his open palm. The cat licked at the candy, then turned away and slithered across the street into the lot of the auto body shop. A streetlamp blinked on in front of the shop throwing tepid, creamy light, and the smell of burning fireplaces wafted on the small, chill breeze along with the factory’s stink. 

Suddenly, children burst through the doors of the church. The boy stood up and let the butterscotch candy fall into the gutter’s slush. He saw the girl clamber down the church steps with a friend and cross the street towards the alley. He lifted the bag in their direction, but the girls hurried past him without noticing and headed into the alley. The boy stood on the curb looking after them with a stricken face, the bag dangling from his fingertips. He watched the girl turn in through a gate across from the man’s back fence as her friend continued on. He stood looking until her friend had disappeared at the end of the alley into the low fog, his heart hammering away.  

The boy walked slowly down the alley to the girl’s gate. It was bordered on one side by a juniper bush gone brown, a dusting of snow at its base. He knelt in the alley against the bush in the twilight and wrote a message with a pencil stub on the paper bag, folded it carefully, and set it on the gatepost.

The man watched him from his kitchen table, then stood up and went to the back door. The boy heard the latch click open and turned wide-eyed.  

“Hey, you,” the man barked. “Clear out of here.”

The boy stood frozen in the alley.

The man scowled, “What you got there?”

He stepped out onto his back porch, and the boy ran off down the alley. The man walked out in his slippers and jacket through his back gate into the alley. He could not see the boy through the fog, but he could hear the footsteps die away in the gravel. He picked up the small bag and read what the boy had written, then held its sweet-smelling contents up to his nose and felt an ache spread through him. Before returning to his house, the man swallowed once hard and replaced the bag on the post.

The woman from the variety store stood at the tiny kitchen stove in her upstairs apartment and stirred pea soup heating in a small pot. The television was on faintly behind her in the living room for the noise it provided. When the soup became hot, she carried it in the pot over to the tray table in front of the couch that she’d already set with a napkin, spoon, and short glass of rye whiskey. There were doilies that her mother had crocheted on the arms of the couch, and the stand-up lamp next to where she sat had a brown-paper shade with a picture of Venice on it, a place they’d both dreamed of someday going. From her window, she could see smoke lifting from the factory’s dual chimneys and, in the distance, lights from cars on Route 20. Her eyes held for a moment on the easy chair where her mother used to sit, her last crocheting project still in its satchel against the back cushion. Alone in that little room, it was close and warm. She forced herself to look at the television, sipped from her glass, and considered how she might fill the time before bed.

In the girl’s kitchen, a blue vase of artificial flowers sat on a red oilskin tablecloth: white carnations with a backing of ferns. The girl was setting the table for dinner as her mother gave her spelling words from her school list while peeling rinsed carrots at the sink, spotting wet the list on the countertop. The girl’s father hadn’t come home again yet from wherever he went after his factory shift, but neither of them spoke of that.

The ancient refrigerator in the boy’s kitchen made its regular hum, and damp towels hung hissing on a drooping cord over the radiator next to it. His parents hadn’t been home when he arrived but had left him a pot pie in its foil container on the stovetop that was still lukewarm.  The boy hadn’t stopped to eat; instead, he’d gone directly into his bedroom where he lay on the bed with his face buried in the pillows and the blinds drawn. In the gathering darkness, he was surrounded by his models and books and the boxes of old toys that he’d packed away the year before in the closet.

The man had his forehead down on the back of his hands at his kitchen table. His tea had grown cold. The cat crawled by silently in the coating of snow on the windowsill and stopped to look in at him. The cat licked its chest, then dropped onto the back step.

A long whistle blared at the factory into the cold evening: shift change. Most people in that town were aware of it but caught up as they were in their own affairs, very few actually listened.

Originally published by Penduline, 2012

William Cass: I've had over 390 short stories accepted for publication in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies such as december, Briar Cliff Review, and Zone 3. Winner of writing contests at Terrain.org and The Examined Life Journal, I’ve also been nominated once for Best of the Net, twice for Best Small Fictions, and six times for the Pushcart Prize. My three short story collections have all been published by Wising Up Press.