He had almost worked his finger in far enough to coax out the bill — he prayed it was at least a 10 — when his daughter turned on the light.
“What are you doing with my piggy bank?”
“I was just giving you a little present.”
“Why were you putting it in from the bottom?” She was blinking fast against tears.
“C’mere honey.”
She didn’t move.
“I was…” He put back the plug . The bank was heavy; enough for several Six Packs, a Fifth or two.
“You were stealing my money.”
“Ah honey. I wouldn’t do that.” He laughed believably. “I didn’t want to bother you. I put in a coin. But it was the wrong coin.”
Her expression hardened, but she tilted her head and met his eyes. Ah, interest.
She walked to the piggybank and cradled it under her arm. The coins shifted inside. “What kind of coin?”
He was long overdue for a drink, pills, something. He was almost seeing double and his thoughts careened. “A long time ago, in merry England, the coins — the coins of the realm, of the kingdom — these coins were supposed to be made of silver. But the king, King Henry the VIII, he was very greedy…”
“He was the fat one. He cut off his wife’s head.”
“Yes. So, what he did was,”
“He ate venison all the time. Venison is deer meat.”
“Yes. So what he did was, he had the Royal Mint — the Royal Money Makers — he had them shave a little tiny bit of the silver off each coin in the realm, and then put it all in bags and melted it down into big silver bars that were worth lots and lots of money. Well, you know what happened.”
She sighed and twisted her hair. “King Henry got fatter.”
“That’s right! Also that the coins got thinner and the people were starting to be able to see the light through the coins like, like they were as thin as a fly’s wing or piece of tissue paper — well, you can imagine the trouble, the upset the peasants experienced!”
“You shouldn’t say peasants. Call them common folk.”
“All the common folk were walking into potholes in the street because they were holding the coins up to the light to check to see if they were thin enough for the light to seep through, and therefore, therefore no good! And when the pea — the common folk and the pirates bit into the coins to see if they were, like, the right hardness, why, you can imagine what a terrible public health problem it was for thousands of the poor folk to have this highly toxic metallic wafer breaking off in their mouths and going into their bloodstreams and producing mutated and deformed children with twisted bodies and hair falling out and learning disabilities! There was going to be a revolution! So what the king did was to start mixing copper which was a whole lot cheaper than all silver coins, in with the silver. He had his royal money makers make the coins out of copper, with only a real thin coating of silver on top. This would make the poor folk and pirates think that what they had was a real silver coin instead of a mostly copper coin. But guess what happened?”
She shrugged.
“When the folk handled the coins for awhile, they saw that the thin silver coating was starting to wear away, because the little engraving of the king on the coin started to turn copper on the nose.”
She nodded wearily. “Old Coppernose.”
He watched breathlessly as she considered the story. Finally she asked, “Is the coin you put in the bank one of those coins?”
The question startled him; he’d forgotten the story’s point. “Well, no, I thought I’d put in the coin, but then, I wasn’t sure if I’d just put in a regular coin instead, and, I wanted to make sure, because if it wasn’t an old copper nose, but just a…”
He searched his daughter’s face. Her nearly horizontal pigtails, the grime on her fingers and cheeks from
playing outside, these all glowed with an inner, radiant light. “Goodnight daddy.”
He left the room. Never again. Never, ever again.
His next step was the extra purse his wife usually left in the kitchen.
He could almost taste his next drink.
Gregg Williard's fiction, poetry and drawings have appeared in Diagram, Wisconsin Academy Review, Chronic Art and Infinite Windows, among other publications. He is currently seeking a home for a novel called Art Soldiers, and an illustrated novella about a Japanese propaganda troupe during the last days of World War II. He's lived in Madison, Wisconsin, for 20 years but has never stopped feeling like a transplanted Brooklynite.
ISSUE:
S P R I N G
2011
THE NEW
RULES OF
W R I T I N G
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