The Lord of Lil’ Grover’s...

The Lord of Lil’ Grover’s Mill, West Virginia

“The Lord brings death and gives life; He brings down to Sheol and raises up.”

1st Samuel 2:6  

“Sparks will fly”.  Rolling Stones lyrics

Lester Greenwald had an electric train set at 5; then again at 55—he had to find a hobby or be slowly driven mad by boredom and a nagging housewife when business was slow. Because he worked from home there was no escape; no “honey, I'll see ya a 5”; no eight-and-a-half hours free of Lucille’s shrill ear torture.

He couldn’t just slump around all day in the second floor apartment getting his brain potato-mashed by the cable news she had doom-droning all day, or be demanded to play Mr. Carson to her Lady Crawley either, so Les Misérables decided to reconstruct a miniature tableau of Grover’s Mill, West Virginia, in the basement-–at least he had a floor between her now in his lower servant’s quarters. He bought lil’ train sets, tracks, and trestles; used chicken wire, strips of the “Weekly Tribune”, flour, and water for the Allegheny Mountains that terraced through his miniature home town.

After the mountains dried and were spray-painted, he set up a lil’ coal train that carried real flakes of planet-killing fossil fuel; paved the five streets with gray construction paper; planted fir trees from conically-trimmed green bottle brushes; reconstructed, on a much smaller scale, their own house using popsicle sticks–for its columns, dowels painted white. He built the houses and downtown business buildings from boxes, then populated the little faux village with hand-carved lil’ wax figurines. The project he obsessed over and its model trains running through it kept the mortician’s mind moving, away from his work at hand. He took the same pride in his attention to detail in his creation he dubbed Lil’ Grover’s Mill as he did preparing his customers for an open casket.

One late twilight under an old man’s toenail clipping of an autumn moon, Lester was one-way chatting with his freshest moneymaker, Myron Jacobson, while he was swapping out the town crank’s hemoglobin for moonshine. “Probably happy you’re finally off this dumpy ball of mud, aren’t you, ya grumpy old bastard?” he asked, thankful a reply wasn't returned.   He yawned, then tired of waiting for the siphon tube to run dry, wheeled the gurney closer over to tiny town to fight the boredom. “Might as well paint a model citizen while he’s bleeding out.”

Overexcited about his bright idea to mix business with pleasure—in Lester’s case, corpses with crafts—he pushed the gurney over too hard, too far, too fast, hitting the edge of town like a 8 point earthquake–shaking it violently enough to derail a lil’ train that was just passing near, which caromed off the dead man’s flung limp arm, which yanked out the tube, which spurted blood on the tracks and on the figurine he had been dolling up. Sparks flew. Smoke proofed. The two-inch wax figure came to life, crabbing like normal, but  three octaves higher.

The embalmer wondered what the hell was going on: was this proof of life eternal that the uber-fervent evangelical and snake-handling nuts babbled about around these parts? A real-life Twilight Zone episode shot right here in the basement of Greenwald’s Funeral Home? Regardless of the cause-and-effect of this bloody lil’ trainwreck of a preparation for burial, he had his first semi-living citizen walking the cardboard sidewalks of Lil’ Grover’s Mill.

Dub Beatty, one of the town’s drunks, was the next—he got smashed at Big Whomp’s Tavern, then got re-smashed by a highway overpass pillar driving home on his Harley. The prep was quick and easy—most definitely a closed coffin—yet long enough to set Lester’s mind wandering about his newly-discovered power of soul-reaping, so he recreated the previous Frankensteinish chain of events with his guinea pig stretched out stiff and feeling no pain, anyway, and got the same miraculous results. Sparks, poof, life.

Lester set ‘lil Dub, a gossipped wife-beater, on a scaled-down plastic cycle, dropped him down on Main Street, and laughed when he heard high-pitched Myron Jacobson, bitch: “so do I have to hear him roaring through town forever? God, I hate this place.”

Another town drunk was the next to die from cirrhosis of the liver. The rumor went that Bonnie Sue Asperger was locking her three young ‘uns in a closet so she could go out a husband-huntin’ on Saturday nights, and since rumors are hailed as facts in small towns, Lester, now the judge as well as the lord of dinkyville, decided her fate. Lil’ Bonnie Sue was now locked inside the lil’ ladies’ room at lil' Big Whomp’s after going there looking for a single lil’ man while her yellow skin-tinged body lay in wait for visitation.

Two months later, 11-year old DeeDee Marie Kemp was delivered through the rear double-doors after succumbing to leukemia. Lester decided to let her innocent soul rest in peace, or to be shot up to heaven, or return to this planet reincarnated in another life form, or whatever the promise of eternity held for her. She did nothing to earn a sentence in his cardboard, styrofoam, paper-mache, and popsicle-stick purgatory so he let the girl’s soul be buried with her body. Greenwald’s viewing room was crushing; this is when he earned his pay.

Ancient Mrs. Samuelson, the town librarian, died next. Because the kind and gentle soul encouraged learning through books, she was also spared from Lester’s growing fascination with playing god—one reigning from a subterranean heaven reeking of mildew and embalming fluid.

The month’s passed. Lil’ Grover’s Mill began to hustle and bustle with its town namesake’s dead immoral immortal citizens: married soprano at King Mountain Baptist Church, Denise Stout, for her alleged affair with married tenor, Glenn Holman, now hitting high notes she once thought impossible; Franklin Suggs, soul-shrunk and sent here for dealing oxy to high school kids, so the scuttlebutt went; Donnie Dean Walters, for hanging around the city park—he sure looked like a child molester so he was miniaturized–like a computer chip–and corralled safely in the lil’ town’s park covered in plastic grass and absent of children who were yet uncorrupted.

Lester’s lil’ slice of demented paradise bedrocked on sheets of ¾” plywood was jangled one afternoon when Lucille came down from her ivory tower—a rare ‘treat’ since the lower level gave her the creeps, and since she had zero interest in either her husband’s “little train set that he should have outgrown at ten” or in his macabre job of “making stiffs look like they're just asleep” when he could have become a dentist.

She hot-stepped down the steps gingerly, yet in another pique of rage because Mr. Carson was blowing off her text messages that she needed this done, that done, this cleaned, that put away. She hurried past the prep room, eyes and nostrils closed; stopped cold at Lil’ Grover’s Mill, eyes wide open, and froze at the sight of the lil’ dead townsfolk living as if still alive—microscopic nearly, and chittering like crickets speaking mountain. “What in the fuck has that fucking idiot done!” were her last words ever.

Lester, just coming out of the supply room, could not have his secret out nor keep his rage in, and since Lucille had a tendency to flap her big fat gums, and loudly, he snuck up behind and beat her to death with a quarter turn arterial tube, then laid out her remains in a cooler after transferring her toxic spirit to a lil’ wax wife with a lil’ nick at her lil’ wax throat.

He reveled in placing her in the top floor of their popsicle sticks home and gloated, “God, it’s fun playing god!” as he watched the lil’ woman banging on a lil’ plastic window in her lil’ hell trying to scream obscenities, put-downs, and threats of violence against him without a lil’ wax larynx.

His work went on: Elizabeth Cornwall, rumors were she was embezzling money as a teller at the city bank so the lil’ crook was at her lil” window with her lil’ pockets stuffed with lil’ $1000 bills; for a lesson in bigotry he preserved Bart Taylor, a loud-mouth racist,  in a lil’ black body; old Father Ralph earned his stay because they said he was getting a little too friendly with a couple of Sacred Heart altar boys after Mass.

I was next.

My name is Clyde W. Smith, the former editor of the “Weekly Tribune”. I am writing this from my lil’ desk in my lil’ newspaper office in Lil’ Grover’s Mill, West Virginia. I wanted to bang out this story in hopes that someday a big person with a magnifying glass will find it when they discover Lester’s lil’ town he should have named Lil’ Sheol—hopefully while the maniac is still alive—and free our lil’ souls somehow.

How'd I end up here? I was investigating Lucille Greenwald’s sudden disappearance because nobody in town really believed the undertaker’s story that the belil’ing henpecker went to visit her step-sister in Illinois. I snuck down to the basement during Martha Henshaw’s viewing (now walking the construction paper streets like they say she walked the real ones), saw the horrors of what Lord Lester had created, and was strangled from behind. Though my corpse is stuffed in the same icebox with his wife’s, we live life as normally as can be considering we’ve all been crafted from mortician's putty.

By CraigE

From: United States