By Edith Eveon Brown
The bachelor arrived home and walked across his front porch in deep thought. In fact, he didn’t notice the package on the floor until he opened the screen door which knocked the package against the leg of the rocking chair. The sound startled him as his eyes came to rest on the small package. He bent down and picked it up in amazement. “I haven’t ordered anything in a very long time,” he thought. Further inspection of this parcel actually showed his name and address, but no return address. He tucked the package under his arm, opened the screen door again, unlocked the front door, entered his house setting the package on the side-table where he usually dropped his mail, and went on with his ritual of settling down for the evening. He never gave the package a second thought.
Four days later, on a bright Friday morning after having breakfast. The bachelor washed his breakfast dishes and headed up the hallway drinking a cup of coffee, and noticed the package still setting unopened on the side table. So Horace walked over to the table, sets his cup of coffee down, and opened the package. The first thing he saw was a note, when he removed the note he noticed something else in the box. He picked it up and said, “What in the hell is this?” On closer examination he saw it was a black leather pirate-style eye patch. “Why would any one send me such a thing?” He dropped the patch back in its box and picks up the note with a shaky hand. Rather than read it, he reaches for his cup of coffee with the other hand and takes a quick sip before setting the cup back on the table. Then he opened the note and read…
Dear Horace Madison,
I hope this brief note find you well. My family is the designed executors of your family’s estate and keeper of your heritage. At this point, I am sure you are aware that male heirs are extremely rare in your family and borne every forty years. This brings me to the point of the leather pirate-style eye patch which is passed to male heirs for a purpose – I cannot reveal in this note. For now I suggest that you put the patch in a safe place.
Sincerely,
/s/
Madison’s Family Executor
Horace refolds the note and placed it back in its box with the eye-patch, and just stood where he was for a while deep in thought. He quickly recovered, grabbed the box and his coffee cup from the table, and walked up the hallway to his bedroom. He opened his closet door and put the box on the top shelf, closed the door, and walked out of his room. He walked through the kitchen, put his coffee cup in the sink; walked out the back door, across the yard to the barn. By the time Horace cranked the tractor and backed out of the barn, the package was forgotten again.
Besides, Horace Madison was a farmer and it was early spring. The only thing on Horace’s mind was getting his spring wheat, corn, and oats in the ground. Otherwise he was a deep thinker, but never shared his thoughts with anyone. And he never married because his family was knee-deep in women. His immediate family consisted of 102 relatives; one-hundred of them were females, his 15 year old nephew, and him. As a youth, Horace often wondered why his family only had one or two males at any given time. But like everything else it was just a thought. No big deal.
Horace went to bed earlier then usual because tomorrow was going to be a long day. It was time to harvest the crops and twenty-five field hands were scheduled to meet him in the field at sunrise. At dawn, Horace was jarred awake by an extraordinary pain in his right eye; instantly he pressed the heel of his right hand to the area and rushed to the bathroom. Once there, he removed his hand and his eye ball plops into the sink. In shock, Horace looked into the mirror and saw a clean shiny white eye socket. Immediately he remembered the package. He washed his face, got dressed, removed the patch from its box, pulled it over his head positioning it over the eyeless socket, and went to meet the field-hands.
Tags: Creative stories, Short Short Stories, short story by Edith Eveon Brown, stories, Writings by Edith Eveon Brown