Death By Oboe

Fiction Writing Contest '09 Winner

by Jessica Penzias

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Published: Dec 29, 2009

About the Fiction Contest

This year, some 317 pieces of poetry and 79 pieces of fiction were submitted to our annual writing contest. All authors' names were removed before the entries were delivered to the judges. There will be a public reading by the winners and judges, schedule permitting. Once we've worked out the details, we'll post them om Critical Mass.

Fiction Judge's Comment

"Death By Oboe" invites us into a complete, quirky and tangible world. On the sentence level, it isn't self-indulgent, but doesn't hesitate to linger over odd, honest details like the jostling of a roomful of porcelain figurines — a moment, like many moments, both physically present and emotionally revealing. As a whole, the story is smart, observant and layered: not just the tale of a dead pet or a controlling mother or a crush on a guitar-playing neighbor, but what is found in the collision of all three.

—Elise Juska

ABOUT THE JUDGE: Elise Juska is the author of three novels, including One for Sorrow, Two for Joy. Her short fiction has appeared in The Hudson Review, American Literary Review and esquire.com, among other publications. Currently she is finishing her fourth novel, has a new story forthcoming in The Missouri Review and teaches fiction writing at the University of the Arts. For more information, visit elisejuska.com.

Chantal Alberghetti stared down at the dead rabbit. There was a cat hovering over the corpse with a bit of white fur in its mouth. Chantal nudged the rabbit with the toe of her sneaker. Its flesh separated from the bone, rolling away from her. The corpse flopped to one side helplessly, a deflated marshmallow. The horrified expression Chantal had maintained for the past few seconds shifted into a smile.

She had always been particularly fond of her mother's rabbit. The rabbit was a replacement for a parakeet that had flown into a window one sunny day, mistaking the clear pane of glass for the cool air just beyond it. Chantal had sympathized with the bird, even mourned its passing. She did not blame it for trying to get out. But her connection to the rabbit could never be attributed to mere empathy. It inspired a simple sentimental attachment — the kind none could comprehend, except maybe another young girl from a similar family who once had a rabbit she found dead at her feet when she was 12 years old.

The animal's pristine white fur was once unblemished, perfectly matching her mother's porcelain figurine collection. The house contained many white carpets, drapes and pieces of furniture to accompany this collection, each purchased only after passing her mother's careful inspection. The corresponding hue of the rabbit's fur caught the attention of Chantal's mother one day at a pet store in the center of town. She had scooped up the rabbit and pampered him ever since. But jealousy over her mother's preoccupation with the rabbit did not inspire Chantal to break into a grin; it was the fact that the cat belonged to John Malachuck.

The Malachuck family lived across the street from the Alberghettis, a fact Chantal attributed to the sublime powers of fate. Chantal had first developed a crush on John in the music room shared by the middle school and high school, a hive of social cross-pollination. She was the small girl with straight hair clutching an oboe. He and a few friends were in the corner, guitars slung low around their hips. After they left, she wandered over with her oboe. The scent of cigarettes that perpetually clung to their clothing still seemed to be drifting up from the carpet.

Unfortunately for the newly deceased cottontail and fortunately for the blossoming relationship between Chantal and her guitar-wielding crush, the Malachuck family's cat was a born killer. He'd developed the paradoxical athleticism of an NFL lineman, overweight but with a surprising ability to accelerate and change directions. Since he'd been installed in the neighborhood he'd evolved into an expert mouser, and he ate his catch whole. But larger prey, like squirrels and rats, he killed purely for sport, decapitating them and leaving them on the family's front porch. They'd lie there, headless figures, slick with sweat and blood, small limbs outstretched as through they were in the middle of making a point. The rabbit corpse would have experienced the same fate if Chantal hadn't stepped in when she did.

Chantal was to blame, however, for allowing the incident to get as far as it had. After all, she had brought the rabbit outside with her. While her mother scraped sodden, sour-smelling cedar chips out of the cage, she was told to watch over the esteemed pet and make sure he did not "defecate on the carpet in the foyer." Her mother pronounced foyer as "foy-yay" and ushered Chantal away with the rabbit in her arms. Hoping for a glance at John on his way home from smoking cigarettes at the train station with his friends, Chantal carried her beloved critter outside and placed him on the ground, then tilted her head to the perfect angle for surveillance of the quiet, tree-lined neighborhood.

The object of her adolescent fantasies was nowhere in sight, however, and Chantal's gaze returned to her rabbit charge after a bloodcurdling shriek emerged from its mouth. A loud mewing yip yip yip that could never be replicated by any sophisticated combination of instruments or man-made artifacts reverberated around Chantal as the Malachuck cat teethed on the rabbit's bloody head. Chantal was frozen for a moment as she watched, horrified. She let out a high-pitched cry and kicked at the cat, scaring it away, then knelt on the ground beside the rabbit until she regained her composure.

Despite the catastrophe, Chantal now recognized the opportunity to confront the cat's owner and coincidentally the potential love of her life. Unfortunately, she had to suffer the consequences of her actions before she could do so.

Her mother's reaction to her rabbit's death had been no less extreme than if she had lost a child. Chantal watched as her mother lamented the death of her would-be substitute sibling. Her overwhelming gestures of grief, arms flailing as though she were on top of a burning building seeking rescue, were reminiscent of a tragic scene out of an old Hollywood film. In her acute state of hysterics, she did not overtly scold Chantal but merely disregarded her. Her mother decided to leave Chantal at home while she immediately drove to the center of town to buy a new pet. She always went to the pet store on the same day her animals died, reasoning that the house was too quiet, even unbearable otherwise. Tears in her eyes, she turned to her dependable solution for every situation. She sent Chantal upstairs to practice the oboe, blocking Chantal's access to John.

Chantal stormed upstairs, ruminating on the fact that her parents had never exactly been orchestra connoisseurs. That, in fact, they easily confused Bach for Stamitz, only admitting to the mistake after pretentiously reinterpreting it as a commentary on the Baroque period. Her mother marveled at the oboe's allure, but Chantal was fairly certain she initially confused it with the bassoon based on an overhead description at a cocktail party and her mother's subsequent reaction at Chantal's first recital.

On angry nights, such as this one, Chantal would experiment with the instrument, torturing it in retribution. She was meant to practice the oboe section of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf for her middle school. And while many members of the class congratulated her on winning the position, since the oboe theme belonged to the beloved character of the duck, she had always secretly preferred the horns' portrayal of the wolf. The wolf, which ultimately consumed the poor duck, had the appropriate accompaniment of three triumphant horns blasting in unison. In her mind this trio easily trumped the bellow of the pitiful duck. Unfortunately, horn playing, with all its implications of marching bands and spit-valves, was too conventional for her high-cultured parents. So she had been forced to play the oboe and, as a product of this, was given the lesser role of duck-narrator.

On this occasion, she took claim of the second floor, making her own duck noises with the instrument, wailing and squawking, half wounded animal, half mating call. Chantal sat cross-legged at the top of the steps gazing out between the holes of the baby gate her parents had installed when she was learning to walk. They had made excuses to keep it up, although Chantal had never known them to be baby-sitters and was not familiar with any young cousins they wanted to prevent from tumbling down the steps. They refused to take it down, it seemed to Chantal, just in case they ever had another child who she anticipated would be forced to accompany her, playing the didgeridoo or triangle.

Down the stairs to the left was another room blocked with a baby gate that had an accompanying custom-made sign, "Caution, children at play." The room housed her mother's porcelain figurine collection. Behind the door was a collection that had grown along with Chantal since her parents bought the house to expand the family. As evidenced by the baby gate that stood before Chantal like prison bars, they'd always talked about having children, in the plural, but something had gone wrong and after 12 years she was the only child in a large house full of figurines and a now-deceased pet rabbit.

The figurine room was overpopulated now. The mantel was covered, and the figurines cluttered the shelves and crowded the coffee table. They arrived in waves, purchased from magazine orders, antiques shops or local craft stores that specialized in knick-knacks. They were all old-fashioned images of childlike innocence. Kids at play, ice skating together or building snowmen, winter hats and boots, the pale porcelain cheeks bitten pink with cold. Chantal was convinced she had seen one of them blink on a particularly daring night when she had snuck into the room after bedtime.

When Chantal bought her mother a bird figurine for her birthday one year, her mother had commented that the bird did not complement the other children and seemed disproportionately large when next to the statue of the children at the park. "Have you ever seen a bird the size of a Volkswagen?" she asked. She then exchanged the bird for store credit.

When she was younger, Chantal had found that if she ran from the front door down the hallway to the kitchen at a full sprint, bare heels banging against the floor, then stopped dead, she could hear the little figures clinking against one another in the other room. It gave her a sense of power, that she could send these invisible tremors through the house with the soles of her bare feet.

Now, as she sat at the top of the steps, peering through cracks in the baby gate, biting at the tip of her reed, that same sense of power that used to course through her on those bare-footed nights began to engulf her once more. Still holding her oboe, Chantal ran downstairs and looked around frantically until she spotted the shoebox.

Her mother's perfume lingered in the kitchen. The box lay open on the counter. Her mother had lined it with cut velvet from one of Chantal's favorite old dresses. Chantal had saved the dress for sentimental reasons despite the fact that the sleeves left her wrists exposed. She stroked the fabric, feeling her face growing hot, and looked around for someone — anyone — to share in her outrage. Seeing only white walls and curtains, she instinctively stuck her thumb in her mouth, a habit from her youth that resurfaced during overwhelming times. Angry with herself for the childish lapse in character, she forcefully picked up the shoebox, the saliva that remained on her thumb smudged against the velvet lining, leaving a wet spot on the fabric. Her palms began to sweat. She took three deep breaths, walked out of the house, then turned and re-entered.

She sped into her mother's bathroom. On top of an unopened box of pregnancy tests, and beside spare toothbrushes, she found her mother's makeup bag. Chantal hastily smeared some gray powder over her lids and blinked at herself in the mirror, flicking her hair over her shoulder. She was halfway to the door once more when she realized she had forgotten the rabbit in the bathroom. The shoebox rested on the counter next to her oboe and without thinking, she picked up both. She balanced both shoebox-coffin and oboe, and proceeded.

Walking down the footpath toward the street, Chantal played out potential conversations in her head. She envisioned John's apology and the following playful conversation in which she would drop some of the obscure punk-rock facts she had looked up on Wikipedia the day John wore a Sex Pistols shirt to school. "Oh, no," She would say. "I'm definitely on Sid's side, definitely. That Nancy is out of her mind." However, before she could expound on the musicality of the punk rock genre, she saw him. He was in the middle of the street with his cat at his side.

John had managed to elevate crossing the street to an art form. A delicate trio of horns, like those that accompanied angels, seemed to follow his every move. He strummed an air guitar as he sauntered to the imaginary beat. Scowl on his face as he anticipated a tough chord progression, John caught sight of Chantal, who scampered in front of him, blocking his path.

"Hi, um, hello," she said, her hopeful face upturned to him, beaming.

"Hello?"

"I'm good. I mean hello. I wanted to show you — well, I simply wanted to make it known that your cat ... " There was no sign of acknowledgement from John. He simply stood in front of Chantal, eyes fixated on the contents of the box with an expression on his face that could only be interpreted as sheer revulsion. She paused, losing confidence as she assessed his reaction, and then continued, "Well, your cat, here, he mutilated and killed my rabbit. This rabbit." She extended the box toward John's face in a swift upward motion. He flinched as it came flying at his face and struck the box as it came toward him, knocking it out of Chantal's hands. Out tumbled the rabbit's stiff corpse. Chantal began to feel a pressure in her chest and she was having trouble breathing, a pins-and-needles feeling spread across her face as tears welled in her eyes. John backed away.

"Wh-why did you?" Chantal stuttered.

"Why did I?" Chantal stood immobilized in front of him hesitantly holding her oboe away from her as if it were a snake that had suddenly leapt into her arms. John shrugged his shoulders and scoffed at her. "Look, I didn't kill your rabbit. There is nothing I can do." He backed away from her, his hands elevated in front of him as if blocking himself from her contagious lunacy. He retreated quickly. The celestial tone of the horns that once accompanied his swift movements was now replaced by a menacing blaring rhythm.

Chantal's appearance shifted. It was as though someone had taken the precious face of one of her mother's antique figurines and flicked it with a hammer, cracking the fragile porcelain to create a foul new expression. Fuming, she stood in the street watching him walk into his house without a backward glance. She knelt down to place the deceased respectfully back in his coffin.

When she lowered her face to the ground, however, she saw the Malachuck cat circling its kill, sniffing the dead body. The vision of the animals blurred as Chantal's eyes filled with tears, a looming black figure over the white body and interspersed splashes of red on the green grass.

Chantal's hands began to shake and her breathing grew heavy. She lifted her oboe above her head and, letting out a shriek of anger, brought the instrument down on the cat's skull. It yowled. Chantal relentlessly proceeded and once again smacked the cat directly on the head. The tortured cat emitted sounds that were rivaled by Chantal's own hysterical hissing calls. She felt at one with her oboe as she exacted the duck's revenge, a connection that Prokofiev's theme never managed to elicit prior to this moment. She continued beating the animal long after it was necessary. Then she picked the shoebox off the ground, ripped the velvet lining out, holding it in her hands as hot tears fell into the fabric. She looked down at her newly avenged rabbit next to its killer. Her oboe was dented in places, but the reality of the bashed-in skull of the cat far exceeded the damage manifested in her weapon.

In that moment of all-encompassing felinicidal frenzy, she placed the reed of her oboe in her mouth. Sounding the final lines of Prokofiev's oboe theme, she marched like Peter through the forest, the wolf successfully captured, back to her house.

The music continued, drifting through various windows inside the Alberghetti house. After a few notes, the squawking oboe sounds were interrupted briefly by sounds of porcelain figurines clattering to the floor. Then the music resumed.

The Bridge