Suprise E-Book

Edgar Allan Poe

• Herausgeber: Shadow POET
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

AHMET UNAL CAM, VIRGINIA WOOLF, ANTON CHEKHOV, STEPHEN CRANE, H.H. MUNRO (SAKI), MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN, O. HENRY, JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, WILLA CATHER, H. P. LOVECRAFT, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
“ SURPRISE “
The Best Short Stories
5

Table of contents
  SURPRISE
Kew Gardens A Lady's Story The Veteran
The Way to the Dairy Billy and Susy
The Furnished Room The Lake Gun
The Namesake
The Terrible Old Man The Minister's Black Veil

Leseprobe

AHMETUNALCAMVIRGINIA WOOLF, ANTON CHEKHOV, STEPHEN CRANE, H.H. MUNRO (SAKI), MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN,O.HENRY,JAMESFENIMORECOOPER, WILLA CATHER, H. P. LOVECRAFT, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

“ SURPRISE “

The Best Short Stories

5

Tableofcontents

SURPRISE

Kew GardensALady'sStoryThe Veteran

The Way to the DairyBilly and Susy

The Furnished RoomThe Lake Gun

TheNamesake

The Terrible Old ManTheMinister'sBlackVeil

SURPRISEBy Ahmet Unal CAM

The young girl checked her makeup in the hand mirror; “It's fine.”

She was sure she was beautiful. She already knew she was beautiful because of the men around her. She was someone who enjoyed life and lived comfortably.

She was trying to decide which entertainment place to go to with her friends in the evening when her cell phone rang. She looked at the number on the phone, it was her mother.

- Hello...my daughter, how are you?

- I'm fine mom. What's the matter?

- I have a surprise for you.

- A surprise?

- Yes. A very old friend of mine has come to our city....

- So who is it?

- It's a surprise who he is. But I want you to pick him up.

- Me?

- Yes, he knows the park near your work. I told him to go to the park and meet you. I want you to go to the park and pick him up.

- Mom, I don't like these things, why don't you do it yourself?

- Girl, I have a job for an hour or two. And she's a friend who knew you when you were a baby. She'll be happy to see you.

- Oh, no. Okay, okay... How will I recognize you?

-I described what you were wearing when you left the house. -In that park, some of the seats are picnic tables. Sit at the first picnic table on the movie theater side of the park. He'll come and find you.

-Okay mom...okay...

- Girl, do I ask you for something every day? I haven't sent you to pay a bill since I graduated from college, much less since I got a job.

- Don't get offended, I said okay...

- Whatever that means... anyway, come on then, take the day off and get out, don't keep me waiting. I'll finish my work and be right back.

****

The young girl excused herself and went out. After a short walk she arrived at the park. She realized that she had never lived in this park before. She and her friends always went to expensive, luxurious places of entertainment.

She found the first table at the entrance that her mother had described and sat at the empty one. On the other side of the table sat a peasant woman and a little girl. She felt ashamed to be in the same place with them. “If only my mother's friend would come quickly so I could get rid of them,” she thought.

The peasant woman called out timidly;

- Excuse me, daughter, can I ask you something?

“My daughter”, she was getting more and more annoyed.

- What, you want to ask for an address...

The woman lowered her voice in the face of the harsh outburst;

- No, my daughter, I wanted to ask something else.

- Ignorant people like you either ask for an address or money.

The peasant did not even pay attention to the woman's blushing face. At that moment, he saw a middle-aged woman dressed in elegant and luxurious clothes approaching from a distance. “Finally,” he thought. As he stood up and tried to greet her, she walked past them. She sulked and sat back down.

She saw a tear fall from the peasant woman's eye as she hugged the little girl next to her tighter and turned away to hide it, revealing a large burn mark on one side of her face. The young girl laughed meaningfully;

- Look, you can easily shed a tear, and you have an ugly burn mark on your face. What are you waiting for here, go to a corner and open your handkerchief and cry... But don't think that crying will get you anything from me, okay...

The woman couldn't stand it;

- You keep calling me ignorant. What ignorance did you see in me? Did I insult a woman I don't know in front of her granddaughter?

- Oooo... he knows how to talk

- I was going to try to send my granddaughter to trainings and colleges, but when I saw you, I gave up. I was going to try to educate my granddaughter, but when I saw you, I gave up.

As the old woman took the little girl and left the table, a smartly dressed woman approached the vacant seat. The young girl, who was getting ready to answer, gave up answering the old woman who was walking away when she saw the richly dressed, elegant woman. The old woman blocked the little girl's head with her hand as she tried to look back.

****

After a while, the young girl's mother came to her in the park.

- Hello my daughter, where is your Aunt Zeynep?

- No one came mom. At last a lady came and sat next to me. She was just someone who came to rest.

- Oh my God... I had described her clothes very well, I don't know how she couldn't find you. There was supposed to be a little girl with her.

The young girl paused for a moment.

-A little girl?

- Yes.

- Mom, we're rich, cultured people. Surely your friend is a rich, cultured person, right?

- Not uncultured, but not rich.

- Don't tell me she's a peasant woman.

- What do you call a woman from the village..

- Oh... fine, fine, you're sending me to meet peasant women.

- Girl, we owed that woman a debt. At that time we couldn't give her anything for our debt. “One day, when I need something, I'll knock on your door”. She said and today she knocked on our door.

-What does she want?

- He wants us to send his grandson to school. Your father will pick us all up in the car now and take us to school for enrollment.

- Mom, what do you owe that peasant woman, I don't understand?

Her mother couldn't stand her daughter's angry tone;

- Daughter, we were in the village when you were a baby.

- So...

- I told you years ago, our house in the village burned down, so we sold the cows, horses, fields, everything we had and left the village.

-Yes, I remember.

- We didn't tell you any details about that fire for fear that you might get upset or resent us for leaving you home alone.

- I guess you will tell me now...

- Your father wasn't at home, so I went to the village spring to fill up with water. The wind, you call it lodos, sometimes blows backwards, upside down or something like that. When the wind blew in through the chimney while you were asleep in the crib, the embers splashed from the stove onto the wood and the fire started. When I saw the smoke from the spring and ran, the flames were all around. As I rushed to enter the house that looked like it would collapse soon, Aunt Zeynep rushed out with you in her arms. I will never forget that scene; she was screaming when I took you from her lap...

- Why?

- When I rescued you, his right side was burned. You'll see there's a severe burn on your right cheek. He suffered a lot. Don't cry, I didn't know it would upset you so much. Okay girl, your makeup is running, don't cry. Hah... your father is here too. But Aunt Zeynep still hasn't found us...

KewGardens

byVirginiaWoolf

CamillePissaro,KewGreens,1892

FROMTHEOVAL-SHAPEDflower-bedthereroseperhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected themtoburstanddisappear.Instead,thedropwasleftina second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves.

Thenthebreezestirredrathermorebrisklyoverheadand the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.

The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement notunlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The man was aboutsixinchesinfrontofthewoman,strollingcarelessly, while she bore on with greater purpose, only turning her head now and then to see that the children were not too far behind. The man kept this distance in front of the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously, for he wished to go on with his thoughts.

"Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily," he thought. "We sat somewhere over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonflyandhershoewiththesquaresilverbuckleatthe toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatientlyIknewwithoutlookingupwhatshewasgoing to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say 'Yes' at once. But the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhereof course not, happily not, or I shouldn't be walking here with Eleanor and the childrenTell me, Eleanor. D'you ever think of the past?"

"Whydoyouask,Simon?"

"BecauseI'vebeenthinkingofthepast.I'vebeenthinking of Lily, the woman I might have married.... Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?"

"Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees?Aren'ttheyone'spast,allthatremainsofit,those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees,... one'shappiness,one'sreality?"

"Forme,asquaresilvershoebuckleandadragonfly"

"Forme,akiss.Imaginesixlittlegirlssittingbeforetheir easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, paintingthewater-lilies,thefirstredwater-liliesI'dever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn't paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes onlyit was so preciousthe kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses all my life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert."

Theywalkedonthepasttheflower-bed,nowwalkingfour abreast, and soon diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches.

In the oval flower bed the snail, whose shell had been stained red, blue, and yellow for the space of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth whichbrokeawayandrolleddownasitpassedoverthem. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differingin this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antenn trembling as if in deliberation,andthensteppedoffasrapidlyandstrangely in the opposite direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling textureall these objects lay acrossthesnail'sprogressbetweenonestalkandanother to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

This time they were both men. The younger of the two wore an expression of perhaps unnatural calm; he raised his eyes and fixed them very steadily in front of him while his companion spoke, and directly his companion had done speaking he looked on the ground again and sometimes opened his lips only after a long pause and sometimes did not open them at all. The elder man had a curiously uneven and shaky method of walking, jerkinghis hand forward and throwing up his head abruptly, rather in the manner of an impatient carriage horse tired of waiting outside a house; but in the man these gestures were irresolute and pointless. He talked almost incessantly; he smiled to himself and again began to talk, as if the smile had been an answer. He was talking about spiritsthe spirits of the dead, who, according to him, were even now telling him all sorts of odd things about their experiences in Heaven.

"Heaven was known to the ancients as Thessaly, William, andnow,withthiswar,thespiritmatterisrollingbetween thehillslikethunder."Hepaused,seemedtolisten,smiled, jerked his head and continued:

"You have a small electric battery and a piece of rubber toinsulate the wireisolate?insulate?well, we'll skip the details, no good going into details that wouldn't be understoodandinshortthelittlemachinestandsinanyconvenient position by the head of the bed, we will say, on a neatmahoganystand.Allarrangementsbeingproperlyfixed byworkmenundermydirection,thewidowappliesher earandsummonsthespiritbysignasagreed.Women!

Widows!Womeninblack"

Hereheseemedtohavecaughtsightofawoman'sdressin the distance, which in the shade looked a purple black. He took off his hat, placed his hand upon his heart, and hurried towards her muttering and gesticulating feverishly. But William caught him by the sleeve and touched a flower with the tip of his walking-stick in order to divert the old man's attention. After looking at it for a moment in some confusion the old man bent his ear to it and seemed to answer a voice speaking from it, for he began talking about the forests of Uruguay which he had visited hundreds of years ago in company with the most beautiful young woman in Europe. He could be heard murmuring about forests of Uruguay blanketed with the wax petals of tropical roses, nightingales, sea beaches, mermaids, and women drowned at sea, as he suffered himself to be moved on by William, upon whose face the look of stoical patience grew slowly deeper and deeper.

Following his steps so closely as to be slightly puzzled by his gestures came two elderly women of the lower middle class, one stout and ponderous, the other rosy cheekedand nimble. Like most people of their station they were frankly fascinated by any signs of eccentricity betokeninga disordered brain, especially in the well-to-do; but they were too far off to be certain whether the gestures were merely eccentric or genuinely mad. After they had scrutinisedtheoldman'sbackinsilenceforamomentand given each other a queer, sly look, they went on energetically piecing together their very complicated dialogue:

"Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says"

"MyBert,Sis,Bill,Grandad,theoldman,sugar,

Sugar, flour, kippers, greens, Sugar, sugar, sugar." The ponderous woman looked through the pattern of falling words at the flowers standing cool, firm, and upright inthe earth, with a curious expression. She saw them as a sleeperwakingfromaheavysleepseesabrasscandlestick reflecting the light in an unfamiliar way, and closes his eyes and opens them, and seeing the brass candlestick again,finallystartsbroadawakeandstaresatthe candlestick with all his powers. So the heavy woman came to a standstill opposite the oval-shaped flower bed, and ceased even to pretend to listen to what the other woman was saying. She stood there letting the words fall over her, swaying the top part of her body slowly backwards and forwards, looking at the flowers. Then she suggested that they should find a seat and have their tea. The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him.

He had just inserted his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool brown light when two other people came past outside on the turf. This time they were both young, a young man and a young woman. They were both in the prime of youth, or even in that season which precedes the prime of youth, the season before the smooth pink foldsof the flower have burst their gummy case, when the wings of the butterfly, though fully grown, are motionless in the sun.

"Luckyitisn'tFriday,"heobserved. "Why? D'you believe in luck?"

"TheymakeyoupaysixpenceonFriday."

"What'ssixpenceanyway?Isn'titworthsixpence?" "What's'it'whatdoyoumeanby'it'?"

"O,anythingImeanyouknowwhatImean."