Named Pluto

new fiction from John Pinto (+10 of John's photos)

Thank you for being here. Today, a short story from John Pinto, plus 10 of John’s photographs to follow. But first, Kurt Vonnegut, in a letter to his dad:

Dear Pop:

I sold my first story to Collier's. Received my check ($750 minus a 10% agent's commission [from the Littauer and Wilkinson agency]), yesterday noon. It now appears that two more of my works have a good chance of being sold in the near future.

I think I'm on my way. I've deposited my first check in a savings account and, if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year's pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God.

I'm happier than I've been for a great many years.

Love,
К.

I found this in one of the four introductions to the chonky Complete Stories. Another intro suggested short stories were once this country’s entertainment, but the shit bottomed out when TV arrived.

Good news if it’s entertainment you’re after. In the time it takes your boyfriend, wife, or friend to flip through the apps and pick something to watch, you can read John Pinto’s “Named Pluto,” which rips. Should take 15-20 mins.

My squirrel traps come from Vijay, a parks and rec admin who owes me for supplying him with fireworks. He loans me the traps sans paperwork and says that if I have them back by Sunday night, his field agents will never know. Our exchange goes down in the municipal lot on Friday evening. Sky is French vanilla ice cream. Field hockey practice is whistling itself to completion in an adjacent field and, on a hillside overlooking the athletes, a coven of goth kids are cuddling. Vijay does not arrive on time or alone.

Please enjoy the story, John’s very accomplished photos, and share this post if you dig it. A COVEN OF GOTH KIDS ARE CUDDLING! 🖤AV

NAMED PLUTO
by John Pinto
(for Nick Camarata)

I agree to trap the squirrels in Mom’s attic. It will feel good to be of use. Mom’s no longer built for that sort of work. She’s breaking in her first-ever cane, and is in transition to that rhythm where you only need a little sleep each night.

“But this is too much,” she tells me on the phone. “These squirrels, Bobby. They keep me up.”

“Menaces,” I say. I’m in bed with a sword demonstration video paused on my laptop. This video starts, like all the others, with a swordmistress hacking apart cowboy boots stuffed with deli meat, but then comes a blooper reel where she gets giggly and eats the leftover meat—the part of the video I’m paused on. The blade sits halfway through the cowboy boots and the swordmistress stands frozen, her open mouth stuffed with pink slices of meat all piled and rolled together like a tangle of expensive lace, and I feel excited.

“But please Mom,” I say, “please, please, I gotta get back to sleep, it’s three a.m.”

“Like a blender stuck in the goddamn walls,” Mom says.

My squirrel traps come from Vijay, a parks and rec admin who owes me for supplying him with fireworks. He loans me the traps sans paperwork and says that if I have them back by Sunday night, his field agents will never know. Our exchange goes down in the municipal lot on Friday evening. Sky is French vanilla ice cream. Field hockey practice is whistling itself to completion in an adjacent field and, on a hillside overlooking the athletes, a coven of goth kids are cuddling. Vijay does not arrive on time or alone.

“Who’s that there in your passenger seat?” I ask him.

Vijay looks over his shoulder. “Nobody.”

“Are they cold?” Vijay’s passenger wears a thick winter coat, hood up, and a knit scarf hides all but their eyes.

“She’s fine,” Vijay says. “She’s my mom, ok? Please pay attention while I do the demonstration: the bait goes in here.”

Of course I do not pay attention. Vijay’s mom has gorgeous eyes, huge and brown above her scarf, and she’s staring us down. I can ignore somebody bored or impatient to get going, somebody fussing with the radio or dead asleep, but somebody watching demands I watch back.

“And then this flap drops here,” Vijay says. “How are you feeling in terms of resolution?”

“Remind me of my options,” I say.

“You’ve got humane,” Vijay says, “and speedy.”

“Humane would be my preference,” I say.

“Then you’ll have to drive whatever you trap three miles away before release. That’s three miles minimum, or else they’ll find their way back.”

“They know how to do that?”

“That’s all they know how to do.” Vijay passes me the traps and they jangle like tambourines.

“Well,” I say, “thank you, obviously. Consider us square on that thing now.”

Vijay’s face goes funny, like maybe he lied and the traps will maim the squirrels regardless and I’ll have to hose down their metal interiors, and then his mom throws herself on top of their car horn.

All field hockey ceases. The coven on the hill stands up fast as though caught being naughty. Vijay is saying things that make no sense: “Sorry, but we have to know. Where’d you get those fireworks?”

Too many staring goths and field hockey players. I tell Vijay a magician never reveals his secrets.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­“Because we didn’t ask for illegal,” Vijay says. “We didn’t even ask for fancy.”

“Vijay,” I say, “how were those fireworks?”

“Powerful,” he says. “Overpowering.”

I start putting my new traps away fast. Vijay’s mom hits the horn again while I’m not looking and I jump and wang my knuckles bad on the lip of my trunk.

“One of your Roman candles went off in my mother’s hands,” Vijay says. “She was bent right over top when it blew.”

But I’m already in my car and going, my hand afire on the steering wheel. I don’t want to hear another word and be misconstrued as responsible.

I drive up Saturday afternoon with the squirrel traps and a jar of peanut butter in the trunk. Mom is dozing on the porch with her new cane across her knees rifle-style. With her open koi mouth and jacket wrapped over a hoodie, she looks like one of those people you see napping on the bus, miles past their stop and unaware.

“Muddy shoes,” Mom says.

“Mom, it’s me.” I put the PB jar in her hands, shake her shoulder. “It’s Bobby, here for the squirrels.”

“Nuh-uh, nuh-uh. Not on my floor, dick brain. Bobby.” She comes awake for real and smiles. “My Bobby. Like the cane?”

I do. It’s a handsome thing, dark like a motorcycle jacket. I put my thumb over a swirl etched into the grip. “Gotta count the rings, bet it’s almost old as you.”

“That is, in fact, the thumbprint,” Mom says, “of the hunky guy who carved me this cane.”

She sits there waiting for me to kiss her feet congrats. I think about Mom taking my high school girlfriends to the diner, treating them, and asking what they’d do if I got them pregnant. Good for Mom!

“When we go inside,” I ask, “will I meet this hunky guy?”

“You would have,” Mom says, “a bit ago. But it ran its course. We were together a little less than three months. Now he’s a missing person.”

“He ghosted you?”

“No one’s found a body,” Mom says. “He’s officially missing. Don’t know tons about it. I guess check the Post Office? Check the flyers on the telephone poles.”

We’re in the kitchen and starting with coffee at Mom’s insistence. She fills one ceramic mug molded like a conch shell and another molded after a haunted house. I get the haunted house, drink from the chimney.

“We need to discuss this,” I say.

“Sounds like two squirrels, minimum,” Mom says.

“No! Your missing guy!”

“Missing,” Mom says, “guyyyyyyyyy. Do we have to? And who raised you? Traps away from where we eat.”

“Vijay assured me they were clean,” I say, but I put both traps on the floor like a good boy. “Missing guy, yes we do. Maybe pretend I’m police?”

“Already told the cops everything,” Mom says, “and that was boring, boring, boring.”

“Then keep it basic,” I say, “like, he’s really missing? You don’t know where he is?”

Mom drinks long from the conch shell and says, “I don’t care where he is.”

“And what’s his name?” I ask.

“Pluto,” Mom says.

“No one is named Pluto,” I say.

“He was,” Mom says. “We met in the rain at the grocery store. My car was so far across the lot my ankles got shaky, and I didn’t have, y’know.” She waggles her cane. “That’s when a purple voice said, ‘Pluto at your service, miss!’ and there he was, ready to escort me. Romance!”

She tells me Pluto was a rock-solid guy with adolescent hobbies. He was semi-retired, corralled shopping carts at the food store a few days a week to stay limber. He was into prog rock and owned multiples of the same vest. He could turn wood into anything and was always on time. There are pictures of him with a ponytail taken right before he’d cut it off and they’d met, and those are the pictures on all the missing posters.

“Which means they’re all misleading,” Mom says.

I sit quietly and let sadness compact me. This is someone who—had we met in person—I would have wanted to assault or at least harass, but now he’s merely the sum of his little preferences, his vests, his ex-ponytail, and I miss him.

“I bet that’s a problem for the people out looking for him,” I say.

Mom snorts. “No one’s looking for him anymore, hon. That dries up after a few weeks. He’s not a little kid or housewife.”

“But there were search parties,” I say, “right? People came out and walked in police lines?”

“People organized those, yes,” Mom says.

“And you went?”

“They were fun. A lot like when your Little League would do a night game.”

“Jesus, Mom.”

“It’s the truth, Bobby. He was no fun towards the end, ok? He’d get moody and listen to science fiction music while trying out varnish samples. Wood, wood, wood with him!” Mom hands me her empty conch shell. “Rinse me?”

I stare out the window. Beyond the backyard, woods. Every tree is thinned out by fall, and soon starving deer will be tearing bark away. I rinse out Mom’s shell and my haunted house, place them side-by-side in the sink, and say, “Before squirrels, wanna trespass on the Dietz’s property and walk around their pond, like when we used to hide from Dad?”

Mom takes up her cane. “Hell yeah.”

We go. The trail cuts through a half mile of woods, and behind every tree I see confused and desperate old men. We hit the Dietz property line, where I help Mom over the stone wall. Then we climb a long hill rhinestoned by settler tombstones. Mom and I were once accidentally shot at in this cemetery. This was Halloween time, back when I was eight or nine. Mom saw the gun before the shots and tackled me. I only ever heard the gun and still barely believe it was real. The shooter turned out to be Papa Dietz, who was unloading a rifle into a tombstone and never saw us lying behind a log. Mom and I stayed on the ground past dark, playing dead even when it rained, and then a week or two later we snuck back up to Dietz Pond like nothing ever nearly went wrong, and we have yet to discuss any of this.

Up, up through the cemetery, where Mom starts to fall behind. Her face goes pink and her breathing gets loud, and when it’s obvious she won’t make it to the water, she finds one of those trees without bark, a blonde and burned one past the last tombstone, and sits down against it.

“My bunions,” she says in the faraway voice I know from when she’d doze in front of the TV and lose arguments in her sleep with people I’d never met. I go on alone.

Dietz Pond proves disappointing. When I was small and the water seemed wide and black as the underside of the kitchen table, Mom and I would crouch on the shore, passing a microwavable food baggie back and forth, and she would let me point at a goose or plane and say, “Swan! Rocket!” without correction—a peaceful place for me. Now I’m grown, and Dietz Pond is a shallow pit scuzzed by algae and walled off on three sides by sagging orange construction fencing. A man I do not recognize is here fishing.

This fisherman is sleepy-eyed, potato-shaped, and about the age I imagine Mom’s man would be. He wears a night blue hoodie and, over top of that, a puffed-up outdoorsy thing I suppose retails as a vest. His voice sounds well-loved.

“No biting today.” The fisherman nods at a white styrofoam box at his feet, the sort of thing that shuttles organs saved for transplant. “Empty.”

He’s fishing in water that could not fill a bathtub. I see the trash people threw in when the pond was high—tires, rebar shards, football pads—but nothing alive.

“You usually lucky here?” I ask him.

“I’m lucky everywhere,” the fisherman says. “I’m fresh out of the hospital.”

The hospital! Like an idiot, I ask if he feels alright.

“I feel fine,” the fisherman says. “My problem was this neurological event that I can’t even remember because it erased itself while it was happening.”

“Oh,” I say.

“I woke up in the hospital, healthy, with nurses already asking me to be on my way. Wanna hazard a cast?”

“Never been fishing before,” I say.

“I’ll teach you!” The fisherman passes me the rod, a kiddie model shorter than my forearm and shellacked with stickers of cartoons.

“Where’d you get this?” I ask him.

“Found it leaning against a garage. Feel this?” The fisherman twists my arm back and forth as though miming an underhand dart toss. “It should feel strange.”

My first cast hits the mud between us and the water. I try again, following the fisherman’s teachings, and feel tingles inside my elbow and arm. The hook has no worm and hits mud over and over.

“You’re getting the motion down,” the fisherman says. “Do it again, but with more force.”

My elbow goes from warm to hot.

“One last try,” the fisherman says. “Figure this out and you’re set for life. You can go anywhere in the world with water, do this, and come away with dinner. You cold?”

He’s noticed my entire right arm shivering out of its socket from unnatural use.

“Freezing,” I lie.

“Well here’s something else I can teach you,” the fisherman says, “that will keep you alive in pretty much any weather,” and he takes my face in his hands and presses inward, mashing the sides of everything towards the middle. All sound except the blood commuting to and from my head is simply canceled.

“Mmmmmm nmm mmmmmm.” The fisherman’s voice is vibration riding down his arms and into my skull.

I cannot hear myself try to answer. My lips are forced out and puckered like a gasping fish.

“Mmmmmm nmm mmmmmm.” The fisherman’s voice is a foghorn dividing night.

With my face squeezed unusable, I can’t tell the fisherman to cut it out. I try to pry his hands away, but my arms are used up and rubbery. All of this is Mom’s fault.

“Mmmmmm nmm mmmmmm,” the fisherman says one more time, and then he releases me. “Feel warmer?”

I do. “Fuck you!” I say. “Who taught you that? What human impersonator taught you how to fish or act normal? What hospital lets a fuck like you leave?”

The fisherman looks very confused, very old. He holds his kiddie rod close to his chest with both hands while the wind throws dead leaves around, stuffing them in the gaps of the orange construction fence, and the sun goes down for real.

I return to the cemetery, shake Mom awake, and lead us home.

“The pond was sad and shitty,” I tell her. “Looks like no one’s taking care of it anymore.”

“The Dietz are all gone,” Mom explains. “She’s down someplace warm. He’s dead. The kids, you remember them?”

“Erik and Erika,” I say. A pair of snow blond nervous systems, they got pulled out of our public school in sixth grade and sent to Thompson Day.

“They own the house now,” Mom says, “and barely ever stop by. You like their cuts?”

“What?”

“Dietz and Watson cold cuts, that’s those kids now,” Mom says. “They’re half the company, the Dietz half.”

I mouth-imagine a sandwich and say, “Guess they’re alright.”

“Dietz and Watson in our backyard,” Mom says. “Shame you couldn’t bag Erika, make us millionaires.”

“She liked field hockey,” I say. “I liked pirate movies. We had no common ground. We weren’t you and whatshisname.”

“Common ground!” Mom laughs. “Near the end, I peeked in his garage and saw what he was making me for our six months: rocking chair. I’ve got three already and all of them suck. Four’s not gonna make me a rocking chair person! It was like he barely knew me.”

You’d probably like to hear about me trapping the squirrels, how much of a fight they put up, if there was any blood, etc., but there’s little to all that. Way more pink insulation than you would believe. The air up there is cramped and dense. I retain only bits of Vijay’s demonstration and can still set the traps thanks to educated guesswork. All the real drama goes down in the dark, with me downstairs.

Now it’s late, too late to drive home. I figure the couch—baggy leather and cold to the touch—will be a serviceable bed, and I’m even ready to ask Mom if she still keeps the spare blankets in the cabinet over the microwave, but then she leads me to my old room, where a made bed is waiting in the same corner I’d slept for so many years.

“This was Pluto’s room,” Mom says.

I look at the made bed. “He slept here?”

“Everyone gets tired,” Mom says. She turns off the lights, leaves without “Goodnight”—she’s never been one for tucking you in.

I get in the bed, a twin. No room to roll around or do anything but stare at the ceiling and listen to trapped things scurry and crash overhead. All around me are cold sheets that smell like the world’s cleanest wood floors. I put one hand on each side of my face and push in.

John Pinto is a film lab technician living in Philadelphia. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, HAD, Rejection Letters, Back Patio Press, and the Second and Third Bullshit Anthologies. Find him online at pintopintopinto.com. Find him IRL and he’ll give you a copy of his new zine Bill Kiss, coming fall 2024 from Tree Trunk Books.

LITTLE EXTRAS:

10 Photographs by John Pinto with words by John Pinto

I wrote the first draft of “Named Pluto” last July. Right around the same time, I visited a shore house. This chair was in the basement. I wanted to sit in it, but then I heard someone coming down the basement stairs. I was only visiting the house because my girlfriend’s mom worked for the owner, so I was already feeling a little intrusive. I didn’t want to spook anybody. I ended up hiding in the bathroom until whoever came down went back upstairs. There was a note from Vice President Nixon framed above the toilet. He’d had to miss some fundraiser or party and felt very sorry about it. This was a very nice house on a very nice beach. Every October, Springsteen rents the house next door.

Pretty sure I was gunning for The Red Ceiling here. Those deep, evil colors are impossible to replicate without the dye-transfer process, and Kodak discontinued all the materials for that before I was born. My friend Evan told me his classmates in photo school were split on William Eggleston. Some revered him as a genius, a beloved grandpa figure, while others dismissed him as merely in the right place at the right time. Pitchfork once asked him how he felt about Silver Jews using one of his photos for the cover of Tanglewood Numbers and he said, “I don’t know who that is.”