{"id":2940,"date":"2016-01-28T01:33:05","date_gmt":"2016-01-28T01:33:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/?p=2940"},"modified":"2016-01-28T01:33:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-28T01:33:05","slug":"mrs-kedzierski-didnt-dig-kids-by-mike-taylor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/mrs-kedzierski-didnt-dig-kids-by-mike-taylor\/","title":{"rendered":"Mrs. Kedzierski didn\u2019t dig kids by Mike Taylor"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Art<\/a>
Art by Kristina Vardazaryan (click for more)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Mrs. Kedzierski didn\u2019t dig kids<\/h1>\n

by Mike Taylor<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat if she finds the body? Oh, man, we should never have buried it there!\u201d<\/p>\n

This is not a sentence a guy would normally utter over a phone line, especially if he knew Mrs. Kedzierski was listening in.<\/p>\n

But I was ten years old; the word \u201cconsequences\u201d was not to be found in my vocabulary.<\/p>\n

These were the days of the party line, back when four or five families \u2014 usually neighbors \u2014 all shared a single phone line. It seems impossible now, one step removed from smoke signals or beating sticks on a hollow log, but it happened kiddies, in the Long, Long Ago.<\/p>\n

At any rate, every time anyone made or received a call, it was a given that Mrs. Kedzierski was listening in, probably taking notes. As she no doubt was now.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy did we kill him?\u201d Jim moaned.<\/p>\n

Jim was my buddy from down the street.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust keep your mouth shut and nobody\u2019s ever going to find out,\u201d I said, ad-libbing my end of our pre-arranged dialogue. \u201cWe buried him deep enough. Don\u2019t worry.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut what if Mrs. Kedzierski starts digging around in her old garden? Oh man oh man\u2026\u201d Jim whined, adding just a touch too much breathless trepidation, in my opinion.<\/p>\n

I heard a gasp, neither my own or Jim\u2019s. Mrs. Kedzierski, of course, forgetting in her surprise to cup her hand over the phone\u2019s mouthpiece.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Kedzierski lived next door. She wasn\u2019t as old as Moses, but she could remember when he played tight end on the varsity football team during her sophomore year of high school.<\/p>\n

She spoke just enough English to holler at the neighborhood kids who wandered too close to her yard (this included walking on \u201cher\u201d sidewalk). She was also diligent about reporting any juvenile transgression to the neighborhood\u2019s parental contingent.<\/p>\n

Nobody under 13 liked her and to all appearances that feeling was reciprocated with a vengeance.<\/p>\n

Which was why Jim and I were doing our best to convince her we\u2019d buried a dead kid in her garden.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d planned this little caper a couple days in advance and had snuck out the night before with shovels to loosen the soil around the October remnants of her shriveled tomatoes and snap peas.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook,\u201d I said, sotto voce. \u201cJust keep your damn mouth shut and no one will ever know.\u201d I figured using a swear would convince her, if nothing else did, that we were unaware of her eavesdropping. Heaven knows Jim\u2019s chops as an actor were not going to do it.<\/p>\n

\u201cOK, OK,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cGood,\u201d I said, and hung up before Jim could gum up the works with any more of his over-acting.<\/p>\n

Two minutes later Jim\u2019s StingRay bike skidded to a halt in the alley bordering my side door. We watched from my upstairs bedroom window as Mrs. Kedzierski lurched to her garden, shovel in hand.<\/p>\n

She was out there digging for nearly two hours.<\/p>\n

I never did figure out why she hated kids.<\/p>\n

###<\/p>\n

“Columnist Mike Taylor resides in mid-Michigan where his weekly humor column ‘Reality Check’ appears in dozens of newspapers and online publications. He has won numerous ‘Best Column of the Year’ awards from both the Michigan Press Association and Associated Press. His writing may be found at MTRealityCheck.blogspot.com<\/a>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat if she finds the body? Oh, man, we should never have buried it there!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2941,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[273],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-short-short"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2940"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2940\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2942,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2940\/revisions\/2942"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}