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Ducks
A Guest Quarters story
by
Brendan Detzner
 The summer of my junior year in high school I had a job at the Open Window retirement community going around to the residents' apartments doing odd jobs. My boss was a guy named Dr. Amal. He'd hired me because a few of the residents suddenly decided they hated all the nursing staff; he thought it'd blow over, but in the meantime he thought it might be a good idea to have a fresh face up there.
It wasn't a hard job; I did laundry and moved boxes, whatever the residents wanted. The only one I ever felt like I had a real relationship with was a Jewish widow named Greta. Greta set herself apart in a lot of ways. She never wanted to talk about her life. There were no pictures of her family in her apartment. I never found out what jobs she'd held or where she'd grown up, and she seemed to get along better with the staff then with any of her neighbors. She and Dr. Amal had a little routine going- every time he came by to check on her she'd pretend to be freaked out that her "ancient enemy" had broken into her home and they'd spend five or ten minutes making jokes about whatever terrible things were going on in the Middle East that month.
One day I was walking down the hall towards Greta's apartment when I saw a guy my own age walking in the opposite direction. He was about twice my size, and older than me. He wore black pants and had a leather strap with metal studs sticking out of it wrapped around his left wrist. His face was flat and doughy, expressionless.
When I came to Greta's door it was already open. I went inside. Greta was leaning back in her chair.
"Greta?"
She opened her eyes. "It is time for you to stop by isn't it...?"
"Greta, did somebody just visit you?"
"My punk of a grandson. Does he look as ugly as he sounds?"
I cleared my throat. "He failed to take after you."
"You're a charmer. Show some mercy and help me up."
I took her by the hand and got her out of the chair. As she rose I noticed a grocery bag full of white bread next to the chair, a dozen loafs in a neat stack. Greta went through a lot of bread.
"Ducks hungry yesterday, Greta?"
"They got babies, they got to eat something."
There were no ducks anywhere around Open Window. I suspected that she'd been feeding geese, which tended to hang out in the rock garden on the ground near the highway, but whenever I brought it up she insisted she could hear the difference and if I pressed the issue she suggested that maybe the ducks only came out at night.
"I didn't know they let you guys hit the town at night."
"It's a stupid rule. I sneak out."
"Wild and crazy."
"I feed birds. Aren't you supposed to be working or something?"
I spent a few minutes dusting off some shelves before she shoved a book in my hand. I read to her for about an hour and a half. I didn't see her again until the following week. She didn't come to her door when I knocked, and when I went into her room, she had her chair turned towards the window. She was watching the lunch hour traffic with a sad look in her eyes. I'd never seen her like this.
"Greta?"
She sighed without turning away from the window. "My grandson stopped by again this morning."
"He did?"
"You bet he did. He let it slip that he thought he was getting in the Will somehow and we ended up yelling at each other for about half an hour."
I glanced back at the front door to her apartment. "Do you want me to talk to the front desk, keep him from coming up here?"
"He's my grandson. I'm not going to kick him out. Shit, I've been putting up with rotten kids for so long." She sighed again. "Maybe you could skip the housework today and just read me something."
So I read her poetry until my shift was over.
When I went to work the next morning there were two cops standing in front of the entrance to Greta's building. Dr. Amal came jogging through the doors, grabbed my arm, and escorted me around the corner. Greta'd gotten hurt and her entire extended family was camped out in the lobby looking for someone to blame. He wanted me to go home and stay there until things were sorted out. That was it. He didn't have time to get into the details. He went back inside as soon as he was sure I was leaving.
I went back to the fence behind the building where I'd locked my bike. My bike lock was a thick chain with a giant padlock on the end of it. I'd been pretty sure it would be impossible to pry off, but when I got back it was gone.
I went home and tried not to worry; killed the day reading and playing video games. I didn't start thinking about it again until after dinner. I was trying to figure out who would want to steal my bike lock but not my bike. Once I started thinking about that I started wondering how my bike got stolen when I only was only away from it for a few minutes. Because somebody was waiting for an opportunity. And Greta snuck out by herself at night. The only phone number I had for Open Window was Dr. Amal's office and nobody was there. I left the house and got on my bike.
I ditched my bike by the front gate and made my way towards the rock garden. The only light came from the streetlights shining through the slots of the fence by the highway. I saw Greta. She was holding a plastic grocery bag in her right hand and a cane in her left. She was walking towards a drainage pipe near the edge of the park. I heard a noise coming from inside of it. Greta was right, it sounded more like a goose then a duck, but it didn't sound much like a goose either. I wasn't sure what it was.
Greta took a piece of bread and threw it down near the pipe. I saw something move very quickly near the entrance. The bread was gone. Something moved in my peripheral vision. I turned my head back at the bushes surrounding one of the main buildings and saw Greta's grandson. He was holding my bike lock. He didn't seem to see me. He moved towards Greta and lifted the chain up over his head.
I ran up, grabbed him from behind, and pulled him backwards. Greta turned around.
"Is somebody there?"
Her grandson hit me in the side of the head with the chain before I could say anything and I fell down. He lifted the chain again.
It moved incredibly quickly. Before I knew what was going on, while I was still dizzy, it crawled out of the pipe and leaped up into the air. It landed behind Greta's grandson and wrapped an enormous pale hand around his shoulder.
In the second it took for me to clear my head it was joined by four more, another big one and three children. They were naked and hairless; with soft pink eyes and skin so pale you could see the veins underneath even in the darkness. They weren't human, but their great-grandparents might have been. They had tiny round heads, like a newborns', and skinny, elongated necks. They swarmed around Greta's grandson, wrapped a hand around his mouth before he could cry out, dragged him away headfirst into the drainage tunnel, and reemerged a moment later without him.
One of the small ones got down on her knees and inhaled sharply. With visible effort, she pushed the air back through her throat. There it was, that the noise. They all started doing it, squawking and munching on the bread as she threw it down to them.
Greta smiled, relieved.
"There you all are... I was worried about you... there you are, there you are..."
They glanced in my direction every so often, like maybe they were afraid I was going to steal their food, but they didn't bother me. I watched them for a minute, not sure what to say. Then I ran back to my bike and rode home as fast as I could.
Dr. Amal called me a couple of days later. Greta finally admitted that her grandson had hit her. She'd refused to talk about it before. He had a criminal record and had apparently blown town without telling anybody where he was going, so I was in the clear no matter what kind of noise the rest of Greta's family made. I could come back to work.
I didn't know what I was expecting when I went back to Greta's room, but I still managed to be surprised. Everything was just like it'd been, like nothing had happened. Greta was sitting in her chair waiting for me.
"Hey kid."
"Greta..."
She waved her hand at me. She had some stitches over her eye, I hadn't seen them before. "It's nothing. Don't even talk about it. It's nothing." She pointed at some shelves she wanted me to dust and waited until I got to work before she said anything else.
"It's always been like this. You've just got to get that through your head so you won't worry about me anymore. I'm used to taking care of things."
"You're talking about your family."
"Yeah, family."
I finished dusting.
"You want me to read you anything?"
"Not yet, I got more real work for you. There's some stuff in the fridge. Could you dump it in the sink and run some water over it for me please?"
I went into the kitchen and opened her fridge. There was a giant stack of T-bone steaks sitting on the bottom shelf.
"Just get them thawed out."
"What are these for, Greta?"
"They're for the ducks."
"I thought the ducks ate bread, Greta."
I looked over at her. She was still sitting in her chair. If anything, she seemed more comfortable then she had before.
"They like this better now."
 Brendan Detzner lives, works, and writes in Chicago. He went to school in Beloit, Wisconsin, and if you happen to be passing through you can check out Shadow's gazebo in the park a little ways northwest of the college campus on the edge of downtown Beloit. His work has previously appeared in Chiaroscaro and Gothic.net. He is also featured in the Twilight Tales anthology Dead Things, and likes to make himself known at the Twilight Tales reading series and over at Kate the Great's Book Emporium. This is his second appearance in The Edge of Propinquity. You can contact him at brendandetzner@yahoo.com.
Story by Brendan Detzner, Copyright 2009
Image by Rory Clark, Stopped Motion Photography, Copyright 2009
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