Short Stories by Phoenix Hocking

The three words for this story were "Father, Mother, Son," and were given to me by my friend Richard Dalrymple.  Thanks, Richard, for helping me through a dry spell!




Horace Grimsby was not ready to be a father. He knew that the very instant Annie told him she was going to become a mother. Parents. Dear God, they were going to be parents! He pictured a miniature version of himself, a son who looked just like him, but smarter. Please Lord, let the kid be smarter than me, he thought.

He was a sculptor, an artist who could create just about anything out of just about anything. He loved working in marble, but he was just as proficient in wood, or clay, or stone. Heaven knows, he was much better at being a sculptor than he was at his previous profession, that of small-town police officer. And now, he thought, with some incredulous pride, he had created a baby! It was almost too much to imagine.

When God passed out brains and looks, Horace was pretty much at the back of the line and God seemed to have run out of both by the time Horace’s turn came. He was tall and thin, with sharp elbows and knees and sticky-out places that poked through his clothes. As for being the sharpest tool in shed, well, he was more like a squared-off shovel than a spade. He grew up poor, barely passed high school, and then only because the teachers wanted to get rid of him. He wasn’t a trouble-maker, just had a certain something that was lacking in the intelligence department.

What nobody knew, except his mother, was how Horace spent all of his free time. Money was scarce in the Grimsby household. Art supplies would have been unheard of, even if he had enough nerve to ask for them, which he didn’t. Horace would gather bits of wood from the forest near his house, and when he scraped a few pennies together, he would buy bars of Ivory soap and carve intricate little creatures from it. Tiny mice, bears, dogs and birds somehow all found life in miniature under Horace’s gentle hands.

Now, Annie was another story. Annie was a whiz at just about everything. She was smart, and funny, and pretty. She could have had any boy she wanted. But the boy she set her cap for was Horace Grimsby. Who can understand the law of attraction? He was homely as a mud fence; she was pretty as marigolds in bloom. He was a toy short of a Happy Meal, while she could read, write and cypher better than anybody else in class.

All Horace wanted to do was carve, and sculpt, and paint. All Annie wanted was to get married and have children and keep house. In all his imaginings, Horace never in a million years thought he would be able to do what he loved and still make enough money to keep body and soul together, let alone have a family. So, he knew a friend of a friend who offered him a place as a Deputy on the local Police Department.

Annie...did I mention that Annie was also one determined young woman? What Annie wanted was Horace, God alone knows why, so she set out to get him. And Horace was no match for the love of a good woman. Before he knew it, Horace was standing in front of the Justice of the Peace saying “I do.”

The only person, outside of Horace’s mother, who knew his secret, was Annie, and she came upon that by accident. She knew he fooled around in the garage after work, but didn’t know what he was doing. One day she crept in after he went to work and discovered the most beautiful figurines she had ever seen. She snuck one out, went to New York to show it to a friend, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Even after Horace became famous, and he commanded a prince’s ransom for his work, they stayed in the same humble home they bought when they first got married. While the sculpting was Horace’s pride and joy, the home was Annie’s. She knew every flower that grew in the garden, and took extraordinary pride in keeping the house clean and tidy. She was born to be a wife and mother, and she knew it, and was happy in her role as such. Her friends from school used to tease her about not having any ambition. But she never wanted to be a nurse, or a doctor, or to enter the business world. She was happy just being Mrs. Horace Grimsby.

Annie took to pregnancy like she was born to have children. She never had morning sickness, didn’t gain too much weight, and loved to decorate the baby’s room in pastel colors. She wanted a boy, or a girl. It didn’t really matter to her, as long as the baby was healthy. Horace, she knew, wanted a boy, but then, didn’t all men want boys?

True to form, even Annie’s labor was short and sweet. Barely four hours after her first pain, she was delivered of a most marvelous miracle. Baby Emery emerged red and crying lustily before he was even all the way into this world. Horace, who did not have the stomach for such things, thank you, was in the waiting room for the news. When the doctor came in and said, “Mr. Grimsby, you have a boy!” he thought his whole face might split open from the smile.

Horace stood by his wife’s bedside, beaming. “Oh, Annie,” he said, “I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready to be a father.”

Annie just smiled. “Nobody is ready to be a father, Horace. You kind of grow into the position.”

“Yeah, well, I never grew into the position of police officer.”

“That’s because you didn’t love it. Look at it this way, Horace,” Annie said. “When you choose a piece of marble, or a scrap of wood, it doeesn’t look like much, right?”

“Right.”

“ And how do you make it look beautiful?”

“Well, I just carve away what doesn’t belong and keep what should be there, until it looks right.”

“Being a parent is just like that. You just train out the traits you don’t want your son to have, and what’s left is what’s right.”

Horace relaxed. “You may be right,” he said, “but I’m still scared to death.”

“So am I,” Annie said. “So am I. But with all this love, I’m pretty sure Emery Scott Grimsby will be just fine.”

“Prepared or not,” Horace grinned, “parenthood, here we come!”