Saturday's Storyteller: "Herbert Campote lived a very average life, in a very average town, on a very average street, in a very average house, near very average people, until one very average day when everything changed."

by Belinda Roddie

Herbert Campote lived a very average life, in a very average town, on a very average street, in a very average house, near very average people, until one very average day when everything changed.

It started with fever. His wife Lucy had come down with an outrageously high temperature. The first night, it was one hundred three. The second, one hundred five. Herbert had Lucy wheeled to the hospital, where the doctors searched for something - anything - to explain why her body was reacting so negatively. But they found nothing. Tests came back negative, so all they could was spoon medicine into her constricted throat and hope for the best.

It didn't stop there, however. Not only did his wife began to suffer convulsions, but his neighbor, Charles, began showing the same symptoms. It was odd, because Charles and Lucy never interacted, so no contagion could honestly be spread. To make things stranger, after said seizures, Herbert and Charles' wife Laura would both report that the two patients would fall into a deep, almost peaceful sleep. And something about them, in some way, had softened. Almost transformed.

Herbert, at the time his wife contracted the presumed illness, was sixty-four. But he had the restless, investigative mind of a thirteen-year-old trying to play detective. He had recently retired happily from his long-term underwriting job, and he took the opportunity to research heavily on diseases that involved a persistent fever, epilepsy, and long, almost coma-like sleeping spells. Herbert certainly got a list down, but no doctors would diagnose any of them for his wife. And to make things even more bizarre, Lucy stopped complaining so much about the symptoms. She even said, one night after one particularly bad attack, that she was starting to enjoy them.

"I feel so much stronger lately," she whispered to Herbert in a voice that sounded richer and warmer than ever. For years now, it had been becoming thinner and raspier. "Like I could take on the world."

"Hush. You're very sick. I'm going to talk to the owner of that restaurant we went to two weeks ago. Maybe it was the beef."

But Lucy grabbed his flabby arm and shushed him, putting a finger to his gray-whiskered lips. "Herbert, dear," she cooed. "There's no sense in doing that. I didn't eat the beef."

She was sleeping in a separate bed from him now because the convulsions disrupted his sleep. And yet, she seemed more restful, even youthful, with each passing day. Herbert was perturbed by it. He even thought he was going crazy and thinking her hair was becoming darker rather than retaining its normal silver hue. And the wrinkles were disappearing, faster by the day. He sat and watched his soaps alone. He ate alone. And sometimes, as he read the paper, he would hear Lucy humming from upstairs. Certainly not the attitude of a sick woman, a woman who was reaching sixty-two, suffering from fever and convulsions.

He called Laura and heard the same complaints. Charles, to her, was becoming more distant. He asked more questions. Wanted to do more things. Things he hadn't done in years. She couldn't understand it. And they now worked more and more together with each time they called one another. Neighbors who had once merely waved to each other as they went to their cars were now fellow sleuths seeking out an answer for their spouses' symptoms and behavior.

It wasn't until one morning - one very, very cold October morning - that Herbert Campote was met with the least average appearance.

***

He woke up at eight o'clock AM, as he always did, and looked to see that the set-up mattress beside him was empty. He blinked, unused to it. Lucy had not moved from her bed in three weeks, no matter how much she desired to. Because she was, at long last, recovering. He smiled slightly, rising slowly from his bed and being careful not to upset his back.

He felt heavier, less rested, than he had the day before. His normal appetite was gone, and he filled his belly with water while scrubbing down his molars with fluoride-free toothpaste. One glance at the mirror, and Herbert had never been so aware of his age. The protruding gut, the receding hairline, the continually drooping jowl. He looked like an old, hairy bulldog, even down to the way his bottom teeth nearly edged their way over his upper lip.

Snapping himself out of his self-examination, Herbert staggered down the hallway to see that the kitchen, and the living room, were both empty. He sat down quietly at the table, looking around to see if Lucy was playing a trick on him. She had always been very elf-like, very mischievous, but especially more at a young age. In fact, the day they had met was April Fool's Day, when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-three, and she had done the old dollar bill gag on him. After apologizing for slamming into her during his scramble for the Washington, Herbert had taken Lucy out to dinner, and that was what had led to a forty-year-long marriage thus far.

Now, for the first time, Herbert grew worried. Yes, the sickness that had taken Lucy had concerned him, but he was a practical man who had learned to wait things like that out. But to have Lucy missing was something different entirely. Her memory had begun to fail her in the recent year, and he wanted to make sure she was safe and secure. Perhaps he was too protective, but when age struck you in the back of the head like a ball hammer, you had to take precautions. Closing the paper before getting to the crossword section, Herbert suddenly heard giggling from what sounded like the front yard.

He heaved himself out of his chair, lumbering toward the nearest window. What he saw alarmed him. He was unaccustomed to seeing young adults on his street, let alone near his house. Mostly fifty or sixty-somethings, freed from long-term careers, settled in this neighborhoods. But the young man and his equally young female companion stuck out garishly in the whitewashed, suburban morning sun. The man was blond, stubbly, laughing and grinning sheepishly, as he reached out a trembling hand to brush a loose brown strand of hair from the woman's face. And as the woman's lips parted into a smile, Herbert felt his heart jump around in his rib cage.

It was the same smile he had seen that April Fool's Day, forty-one years ago. He was staring at a twenty-one-year-old version of his wife, Lucy.

But it couldn't be her. It was impossible. Lucy had aged well, considering, but she had gotten the silver hair and the wrinkles, and her smile had grown thinner and more faded in her pale face despite the luster of it. Now, it was as if Herbert had gone completely back in time. He was watching from a distance as the two youths convened, talking inaudibly, their words bouncing off the glass of the window that Herbert now stared out of. Looking very happy, and almost relieved, to be where they were now.

His curiosity getting the better of him, the old man unlocked his front door and stepped outside, ignoring the autumn chill. As he approached the alleged couple, he could hear sharp, nearly incoherent yelling from across the street. The golden-haired boy turned, eyes bulging at the sight of Laura, her white hair bouncing from a bad bun, screeching at him.

"Charles!" she howled. "You come back here and tell me what's going on right now!"

Charles? Herbert frowned. Charles was a scrawny, long-faced seventy-something, a veteran soldier and medical doctor. Not this scruffy, debonair boy. Though come to think of it, the clothes he wore looked familiar, like something Charles would wear today. And the girl, bouncing on her heels, wore a red dress that looked very much like the dress Lucy had worn during one of her first dates with Herbert. She had never gotten rid of her dresses, always joking that she wished to fit back into them in a second life.

He couldn't help it. He stepped behind the young woman and tapped her on the shoulder. The hem of her crimson skirt bristled in the slight breeze as she turned to look at him.

"Lucy?"

Lucy, twenty-one years old again, looked upon her husband and giggled. She spread out her arms, but she did not hug him.

"Look at me, Herbert," she murmured. "Look at us. We're cured. Charles and I are cured."

Laura was charging across the street, ignoring the frustrated driver of a white truck as it roared to a halt beside her. Charles hardly blinked. He seized Lucy's hand, and the two chorused a shrill laugh as they scurried down the street, disappearing around the corner and out of sight.

Herbert stood frozen. The face of his now young again wife loomed at him in his mind. The high cheekbones, the soft dimple, the brown bangs, and the bright hazel eyes taunted him. It made him lustful again, made him hungry again. And young Charles! He couldn't have been older than twenty-five now. The chiseled jaw, the dapper hair, the lopsided yet endearing grin. That was the Charles whom Laura had presumably fallen in love with. And they had run off, their youth billowing behind them like brand new coattails and capes.

Laura breathed loudly beside Herbert Campote. Herbert wiped his brow. He stroked his hairy chin. Then, shifting his bulk to face his neighbor, he gawked at her.

"I don't understand it."

Laura nodded, her lower lip quivering. It was clear that she was about to cry.

"The ice cream parlor," she suddenly said. "On Fifth Street. The new one?"

"Yes. Lucy and I went..."

"Two months ago. When it opened." Laura shuddered. "The root beer float. Charles had it. Lucy?"

"Yes. I can't have that stuff. I'm..."

"Diabetic?"

Herbert sighed. "Unfortunately."

"Perhaps there's a fountain of youth," Laura whimpered. "And the ice cream parlor man has it in a soda dispenser."

"You can't believe that."

"Look at what you just saw, Herbert. Look at my husband. Your wife." She shook her head. "It's over. We can't expect to follow suit."

"Why not? I can have a root beer float. I won't die."

"I have lived long enough," announced Laura, "without needing a second average life."

She turned and disappeared back into her house, her head lowered. Herbert would not see her again. He would not see anyone again. He died on his couch four hours later of an abrupt heart attack, with the thought of the ice cream parlor in his head. Somewhere, it was April Fool's Day.

***

"Back so soon?" Dan the ice cream man asked, the smile spray-painted on his face.

He was something straight out of a Norman Rockwell picture. Lucy Sheridan smiled. She nestled up beside her boyfriend, Charles Greenly, as the two of them looked eagerly at the chalk menu.

"Oh, yes. We could use a sundae."

"No root beer float special?"

Charles shook his head. "I think we had enough of that for now. Maybe when we're a little older, though."

Dan nodded. "Always welcome to try it again," he grinned.

He went to the display case and dolloped three scoops of vanilla ice cream into a chalice. As he pumped in the chocolate syrup and caramel, he kept shooting looks over to the happy couple. They pecked each other on the lips and squeezed each other's hands. Lucy Sheridan was quite the prankster, even at twenty-one years old. She always liked to pull Charles' leg.

"You know," he announced, as he brought the sundae to them with plenty of whipped cream, nuts, and two cherries, "My brother is opening up a shop in the next town, and I shared the float recipe with him."

"You'll cause a craze," Charles laughed. "Might want to be careful."

Dan the ice cream man pulled on a quizzical expression. "Careful? What ever for?" he asked. "I'm just bringing a bit of youth back to town. You know that."

"My friend Helen lives in the next town," explained Lucy. "She could use a root beer float."

"And her beau?"

"Wouldn't be able to resist."

Dan nodded and winked. "Long as you keep it away from the kids. Not too healthy for them, you know. It's an adult privilege."

Charles and Lucy silently agreed, digging into their sundae and snickering with crushed walnuts in their mouths. Dan chuckled and began to clean up the sticky floor. Not too much business today, but it would grow. Soon, he'd bring a little more livelihood to every average street in every average town. And it would involve a little carbonation to put color back into an old geezer's hair.

This week's prompt was provided by Arden Kilzer.