Modeled after Giovanni Boccaccio's classic from the 14th Century, this collection similarly brought 100+ short stories to Wattpad readers. The original's premise was simple: ten individuals entertained themselves over a span of ten days by telling a...
When my brother Tereus, or Terry as I always called him, first got married, I thought it would be the end of his endlessly conniving and misogynistic ways. His new bride, Procne, and her family were wealthy, suburban Connecticut people who had a summer place in Martha's Vineyard with a fifty yacht harbored in the bay. I drove out for the wedding, brought a small gift off the registry at Bed, Bath and Beyond, congratulated the new couple and didn't hear from the them again until Christmas. My brother and I are blood, but a phone call now and then is as as close as we have ever needed to be.
A few years had slipped by before I got an email that they had procreated and I was going to be an uncle. I was living on the opposite coast and busy with work, so a visit was out of the question, but I'm sure I sent a congratulations and maybe a gift card or something for the baby. The phone calls came and went and before I knew it, they were sending me photos of a freckled kid, posting on Facebook from his school concerts and ice hockey games. I made sure to mail a package every December, but I wasn't going to fly home from Cali during winter.
The one day I get an email and, egad, was it a doozey.
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Turns out Procne had this long lost sister who my brother had never met. I think she was a booze hound or a druggie or something like that. The family had kept her under wraps for years, not wanting to damage their impeccable reputation. Anyway, she's leaving rehab at some place outside of Cozumel that sounds a lot like a resort for rich people who cant be bothered to get up for work in the mornings. Procne is at home, making house and looking after the kids, and her parents are getting old, too old to go fetch their underachieving daughter from the Caribbean. So they convince my brother, Terry, that he has got to be the one to sail down there and retrieve the bad girl sister, Mel.
In the very first email, Terry drops a bomb on me. There's this attachment, a selfie of a black-haired, big-lipped number with a booty like a pair of cherries leaned across the starboard runner in a tiny Lycra bikini. And there's Terry, standing behind her with a grin like a split melon, happy as a pig at the trough. Even if he hadn't told me he was head over heels for his wife's sister, it would have been obvious from one glance at this snapshot. My kid brother is coming to me for advice, what's he supposed to do? He can't control what his hearts telling him. He needs to be with the sister, Mel. She is like a cool breeze of the ocean. She is a ten, everything he's ever dreamed of, and life with the wife and kids, well, it's no Caribbean vacation. He tells me he is considering chartering a course for the Mediterranean, never coming back. Just leaving his past behind.
Well, you can imagine what I said. I told him he was crazy. That he needed to get himself on dry land. That he should call a shrink. That I didn't have time to talk him down from some ledge, when we'd probably spent an hour on the phone in the last decade. Of course, that's why he was sending messages to me. Because he knew I was the opposite of a fly on the wall. I wouldn't get my hands dirty for him.
About a week later, I get a voice mail. It's Terry. He sounds deranged. He says there was accident on the boat, a tempest. They'd been drinking. There was some confusion. Apparently, they disagreed over a few things, one of them being whether their sexual relations had been consensual or not. My kid brother, in so many words, was asking me if I thought he should call an attorney. And, oh yeah, they're still out there on the boat. Just the two of them.
Every part of me wants to call the cops. It's just like the Terry I knew and hated all through our teenage years and his frat boy idiocy as a Yaley. It's the kind of locker room talk, boys will be boys crap that I don't have any patience for. But he is my brother. So I call him back tell him to get himself to dry land. Tell him to contact the authorities and put some time and distance between himself and Mel. It sounds like they're stretched thin, emotionally. And call your wife for god's sake?
What else could I say?
Next time I hear from Terry, it's Christmas again. And nothing, no mention of the insane phone call. Nothing about his possible rape of his sister-in-law. It's like the line has gone cold. But, egad, and Christ be his name, if there isn't a kind of passive aggressive invite for a visit. The email says, and I quote, if you're ever back East, don't be a stranger. Well, it turns out I've got a meeting in uptown Manhattan, at The Rock coming up. So why not pop in on my messed up kid brother?
My curiosity was piqued, I admit. But I had no idea what I was in for. It was early June when I rented a nice little Fiat and drove up to Martha's Vineyard. Wind in the willows. Golden sunshine. Little cottages too cute to be true. But within an hour of arriving, I can see it in his eyes, Terry is loco, crazy-wazey, homicidal in the eyes. After dinner the wife, Procne, offers to put the kids to bed, so us bros can catch up. Terry pulls out a pair of cigars and we go for a stroll along the beach, bringing a bottle of single malt scotch with us for a warm companion.
One hundred yards down, Terry makes a hard right, gives me a wink, and knocks on the door of a perfect little forest green cabin. A dark-haired woman with a silver streak answers the door in a ratty bathrobe with knitting needles in her hand. Clearly she is whacked out of her head on meth. She can barely form a coherent sentence. But you can see it's still there, beneath the drug addled veneer, the beauty she once wore like a scarf tossed around her shoulders. It's her, the cuckolding and victimized sister, Mel. But when she smiles at me, her teeth are all gone, stumps, rotten and bloody. And, frankly, I am frightened.
Terry, that illegitimate bastard, he takes a swig of the hooch and passes me the bottle. Tells me to wait on the porch.
I sit there smoking, pondering the conflict of interest and what kind of courage I have left in my belly, getting drunker and drunker by the sip as the sun goes down over the Atlantic. When my brother returns, darkness has risen over the island. I watch him kiss his disturbed concubine goodbye, then feel a weird grazing across the seat of my jeans as we part ways.
When I reach down, I realize the woman has slipped a kerchief in my back pocket. I don't make a move for it, but that night before bed I slip it out of my pants and tuck
the weird needlepoint of stick figures into the bedside table. In the morning, I have a hangover like a bullet in the brain. I get up, pack my bag, say my goodbyes and get back on the road in my rental before breakfast, thinking of nothing but making my flight at JFK and getting the hell back to the family-free coast of Santa Monica.
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A few weeks later, my DM inbox is flooded. It's Terry. He is furious. The
messages are full of CAPS LOCK and profanity. His wife and son have left him, somehow he's got it in his thick skull that it's all my fault. Unsubscribe. I've had enough. I block his account. No more. I decide it is finally time to disown the bastard.
A week and a half later, I'm reading the most unbelievable clickbait story on Buzzfeed about a wealthy Wall Street broker, his philandering on a yacht, his multiple homes and his wife and her sister, all tied up in the knot of a love triangle gone wrong. Like something out of Shakespeare, the wife's body has been found hanging from a roof beam in the barn of their country home. Forensic evidence and police testimony indicates that she has killed her son, buried his remains in the woods of Long Island, and cooked him in a crock pot, then fed him to his own father. The man, also clearly insane, had been keeping his wife's sister prisoner and using her as a sex slave. It only dawns on me as I am reading over the felony sexual assault and unlawful confinement charges that right there, on my Iphone's screen, is my brother's name. God damn Terry.
