A Small Matter by M.M. Wilshire

surrounding her.
    She remembered as a girl she’d come down here
with Dad to hunt the grunion. The grunion--small silver
fish--assembled themselves each year by the millions offshore,
waiting for precisely the right time and tide to wash onto the
beach and lay their eggs. When they hit--usually around
midnight--they carpeted the sands with their flashing bodies, and
people walked around, loading up their buckets in the same manner
the ancient Israelites must have done when they gathered their
daily heaps of miraculous quail.
    The stupid fish, she thought. Doing the same
thing for millions of years and unable to tune in to the fact that
within the last seventy years, ten million people had gathered
along their shore to gobble them up. But perhaps they knew
something she didn’t. Perhaps they knew that in another seventy
years, the ten million people would be gone and it would be back to
the way it had always been.
    She identified with the grunion, and realized
that they were smarter than she was--because the grunion knew what
they were doing. She herself had no idea whether to swim towards a
goal or simply float with the tide of recent events. Either way,
the tumor was waiting at the shore to toss her into its bucket of
death. True, the tumor had stripped her of her need to continue
clinging to her old life of work-eat-sleep-and-play--had in fact
propelled her into the present fiery furnace of pain. To her
surprise, she’d found that once inside the furnace, her perspective
had changed. For one thing, just like the three men in the book of
Daniel who’d been saved from being turned into toast by a
mysterious angel, she’d likewise found a life-giving friend in her
fiery furnace--Mulroney.
    All her life she’d avoided pain and sought
comfort, but now her perspective had changed. Which was real, she
wondered, the world of pain or the world of comfort? She finally
understood the truth. The pain and the comfort weren’t separate
entities, but rather were, like the sand and sea before her, a
single reality. One always led to the other.
    She pulled out her phone and hit the speed
dial and asked for Bob, her accountant.
    “Vickie,” Bob said. “How are you? Ready for
Halloween?”
    “You have no idea,” she said. “Listen Bob,
I’m in a big hurry, so I’m going to dispense with the amenities.
I’m converting all my assets to cash today. I want you to total it
all up and sent a third to the IRS. Then I want you to contact the
best Realtor in Santa Monica and have them sell my house in the
Valley and call me right now about finding a good property here in
town. Next, call Simonson Mercedes and let them know that I’ll be
in there later and I’m good for whatever I want and not to give me
any sales bull. Third, get hold of a decent lawyer and setup
everything so whatever I own or buy in the next day or so can be
transferred to my brother upon my death with a minimum of
tax-impact. Finally, put about a hundred grand in an account for
perpetuity to cover taxes on any property I own which is
transferred over to Dalk.”
    “Is that all?” he said.
    “This is no time to be funny,” she said.
    “Vickie, why do I feel all of a sudden like
I’ve just boarded the Metro and asked Bernie Goetz for some spare
change?”
    “I’m sorry, Bob,” she said. “And I intend no
insult.”
    “What’s wrong?” he said.
    “My life’s fortunes,” she said, “are at a
critical juncture--I’m quite ill--I may have only a few days or
weeks left. So forgive me for being brusque.”
    “I’ll take care of everything you need,” Bob
said. “You can count on me. And it goes without saying, that after
twenty years of friendship, you have my deepest sympathy.”
    “Sorry to lay it on you like this,” Vickie
said. “I couldn’t think of any better way to do it. I guess it’s my
way of adapting to the none-too-distant moment when I will be
leaving this world.”
    “I’ll call you,” he said, “and let you know
how it’s