Helen the Pearl Stringer

by Sean Ennis

 

Helen the Pearl Stringer calls in an accent thick as
blood, ten thirty at night. The mail has frightened
her tongue Polish again. It is the year of the
census and they want her to report.

My dad the accountant does her taxes every April, her
simple receipts in shoeboxes, cash stuffed in
envelopes, hidden around her row home. Some
reparations, some pension from the jewelry counter at
Wanamakers'. There are numbers on her wrist that she
has shown my dad, too.

Helen the Pearl Stringer was saved by her beauty; she
has shown the pictures to my dad. Young blonde in
Europe, war clouds approaching the beach. The soldiers
kept her while the rest of her family bled. Now, no
one can even pronounce her name so she is called what
she does.

My dad the accountant goes to her home because Helen
the Pearl Stringer does not want to be counted again.
He throws away the census form and tries to calm her,
but she is ugly now, and old. She grips her pearls
and they chatter like teeth.

 

© 2006 Sean Ennis

Sean Ennis is a Philadelphia, PA native and now an instructor at the University of Mississippi. His work has appeared in The Greensboro Review, River City, Swink, The Mississippi Review, and The Best New American Voices 2006 anthology.