Words Will Never Hurt Me, a short story by Michael Fine

Words Will Never Hurt Me

By Michael Fine

 

© 2025 by Michael Fine

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

 

“Stop blaming Trump,” Jeffery said as he rolled over in bed. “Government depends on the consent of the governed.”

It was early fall.  The light had shifted as the sun dropped to the south and east.  There was daylight to be sure, but it lacked the bitter, biting quality of the burning sun at midday that you get in midsummer, or, if you live further south, in Florida, India, Central America, or equatorial Africa.  The light now was an angled, glancing light that was warm on the skin at midday but never hot, that let you be comfortable but did not make you sweat just from standing in it. There was a sweet smell in the air, the smell of the sugars of falling leaves, of the ripened wild grapes hanging in clusters from the grapevines in the trees, and of the drying flowers which were about to drop their petals and their seeds.

 

They had slept late, into midmorning, after arriving home past midnight, having spent a long weekend at the coast, in Maine, a place they went only after the season was over.  Where they went to walk, explore the lobster pots, the dive bars, and the clam shacks, and see the mist-covered mountains and coves that interdigitated with the sea.

“Are you saying that people generally support Trump?” Lisa said.

She pulled up the thick white quilt that Jeffery had pulled off her when he rolled over.  Jeffery put his cold hand on Lisa’s warm back, which made her shiver and twist away.

“Your neighbors do,” Jeffery said. “More people do than you might think.  Look, people are tired of all the chaos.  All the political correctness.  All that gender this and gender that and being called racist.  Tired of being told what words they can and can’t use.  What they aren’t allowed to think. Nobody voted for that.”  He turned over again to lay on his back and pulled the quilt over him as well and then moved his cool hand onto Lisa’s firm warm thigh.  She shivered with his touch again and pushed his hand away.

“I get the gun nuts. The firefighters and the police.  They are all in for Trump and always will be,” Lisa said.  “But regular people? They don’t want all this…  this… chaos, the National Guard and the army on the streets, and all the MAHA RFK craziness.”

“I don’t think anyone notices,” Jeffery said. “Everybody’s busy. Life is complicated. Meetings to go to.  Sports on TV.  Doomscrolling TikTok and Instagram.”

“That’s all fake.  You know that.  All fake news,” Lisa said.

“Bread and circus.  Which has become beer, weed, and circus. But that’s who people are.  We aren’t deep thinkers.  We ain’t spiritual people or even holy rollers anymore.  People just want to be left alone. Work out.  Watch sports on TV.  Gossip.  Eat.  And screw around a little when the spirit moves them,” Jeffery said. “Like now.”

 

 

 

 

 

Karl was more than just a handyman.  He was everything Jeffery wasn’t, but in a way that made Lisa uncomfortable whenever Karl was around.  He was part carpenter, part plumber, part electrician and even part architect, so he could fix anything that was broken, or build what needed to be built, but he also was a man with rough edges who spoke his mind and didn’t tolerate fools.

Karl was about fifty, almost six feet tall, a white man who had seen better days.  He had the shoulders and hands of a working man but walked stooped over, as though he was always afraid of hitting his head on a low beam. His olive-tinged skin was wrinkled from too much sun and too much wind, the skin of someone who slept rough, slept outside from time to time, though that was not his story — and he usually needed a shave.  Weathered.  Karl was weathered.  He had thick swept back greasy hair that was now greying but had once been black, a strong nose that reminded Lisa of a cigar store Indian, and piercing black eyes – he looked right at you when he talked to you, or more precisely, when he looked right through you.  He smoked and had the gravelly voice of a smoker, and he cussed freely when he spoke, as if he didn’t care who was in the room, who heard him or who he might offend.  He had been in Iraq, Jeffrey said, played slide guitar, couldn’t stay in one place for long – and just didn’t do idle conversation.

Lisa didn’t know if Karl drank but she thought he did, though he was never drunk and didn’t smell of alcohol when he was in their house, working for them.  Instead he smelled stale and bitter, dank and moldy, like compost or rotting hay, and Lisa would wonder, from time to time when he was working in the house, what he would look like if somebody cleaned him up, if he showered and shaved, got a decent haircut, decent clothes, and if someone could ever get him to stand up straight.

Karl drove an old white van in which he kept his whole shop, big enough that it could also be used to move lumber.  There was an American Flag decal on one of the back windows.  Lisa didn’t know what Karl’s politics were and she didn’t want to know.   At least there were no big American flags fluttering over or behind the van.

 

Lisa asked questions. Lots of questions.  She would go back and forth about certain decisions: what color she wanted the toilet and bathtub in the new bathroom to be.  The lights under the kitchen counters.  The flooring to use in that kitchen.  The size and style of windows and doors.   From time-to-time Lisa changed her mind, and once or twice she had work that was finished ripped out so she could go in a different direction.  Karl shouldn’t have cared.  He was getting paid.  Paid and paid well for his time.  Let Jeffery deal with him, Lisa thought.

Karl avoided her when he was working in the house, and she had the idea that he didn’t like her much, not that what he thought or didn’t think about her mattered.

 

 

 

 

That fall Karl finally got around to redoing the kitchen.  First the countertops were replaced by black granite. Then the cabinets had to be rebuilt, sanded down, and refinished.  Then the linoleum floor had to come up, and would be replaced by slate, after radiant heat was installed.  Then they were getting a new refrigerator and dishwasher.  And then new lighting.

Karl was doing it all, and all on his own schedule.  He’d work for a few days.  Then he’d disappear for a week, leaving the kitchen in shambles.

 

 

 

It rained on the day in question, a hard rain that came with a cold snap, one that made all the newly fallen leaves soggy.  The sky was dull and dark.  It was a day when you don’t expect to see the sun at all, when there was only twilight, and the rain fell as an endless drumming on the roof and cars, and rainwater ran down the windows. There was some distant thunder.

Lisa expected nothing from the world that day.  There were wars ongoing in various places, one more barbarous than the next, school shootings and murders and threats and counter threats all over the internet, as politicians and media types took every opportunity to needle everyone they disagreed with, calling names and lying lies, just to call attention to themselves, just to distract everyone from the simple joys of daily life, which, given the weather, were hard to remember.

 

 

Lisa was working at a table in the dining room, a bright room with good light.  She was a lawyer by training but worked at a nonprofit that helped find homes and jobs for new immigrants, for new refugees, and she was at her wits end, professionally, because her job now was trying to help protect people who were here without papers, helping them to avoid detention, where possible, or helping prepare families in case parents who were undocumented were deported, leaving children who were citizens behind.

Karl was taking up the old floor in the kitchen, working with a wrecking bar, work that made the floor shriek and groan as the nails were pulled out, and made the floor tremble and quake, sounds that echoed in the old house.  I can drive to the office she thought, but man is it raining hard.  Too cold. I’ll tough it out here.

Then she heard something that sounded like it might be music, coming from the kitchen, and her whole body clenched. Damn that Karl, she thought.  Most likely Oldies, she told herself, the popular music of thirty years ago, music she hated.  Or country.  More likely country.  A distraction, when she needed to concentrate.  Enough is enough, she thought.  What the world needs now is Mozart.  Vivaldi.  And Beethoven.  Not more trash.

So she went into the kitchen, armed for bear.

 

 

Karl was on his knees, holding a wrecking bar. He had kneepads on, and his toes, in work boots, were bent and flexed under his feet to give him leverage.  There was a pile of torn up linoleum on one side of the room.  And a pile of broken plywood flooring near the door. Karl was wearing thick dark green workman’s gloves.  He had positioned the wrecking bar between a joist and the subfloor, and Lisa expected him to grunt as he jammed the handle of the wrecking bar to the floor.

Then she noticed the music.  There was a shop radio, a radio with edges encased in black rubber to protect it if it fell, with heavy polished steel handles, a man’s radio, set on the counter.  But the radio wasn’t blaring out Jason Aldean or Luke Combs, the Allman Brothers or even Taylor Swift.

Instead the radio was playing Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s I Won’t’ Dance.

 

 

 

Karl moved his shoulders and his head to the music.  Hmm, Lisa said to herself.  Ella Fitzgerald. Who would have thought it? as It’s Ain’t Necessarily So came on.

Lisa stood and watched.  The rain hammered down.  The thunder had come closer. Now there was occasional lightning from outside.  But Karl kept working, oblivious to the storm and to Lisa’s presence.  He focused on his work and was absorbed by the music. There was dust on his hands, neck, and nose.

Lisa found herself moving to the music, back and forth, moving her head and tapping one foot.

Summertime came on, slow steamy music. Karl stood, balancing himself on the joists.  He took a step forward and started to kneel again.

Then he saw Lisa in the doorway, stood up and nodded.

“I didn’t know you…” Lisa said.

“There’s lots you don’t know, lady,” Karl said, words that could have been snarky but came out thoughtful, wistful, and kind.  “You want me to turn the volume down?”

He reached for the radio but stumbled and fell forward.

Lisa stepped into the kitchen to catch him, to try to help break his fall.

But Karl caught himself, and spun around, deftly, as if he was a dancer executing a planned spin, just as Lisa was reaching out to him.  He caught her, still off balance, to steady himself.

Then Cheek to Cheek came on.

A second later they were dancing in the kitchen, on what remained of the floor, while thunder and lightning rolled around them outside.

 

 

 

Not really.  That’s not what really happened.  That was the story Lisa made up for herself later, to justify what she did and how she did it, after her life unraveled.

Jeffery was away for a week.  Lisa had been reading about female empowerment, about how women’s desires and pleasure should be just as valid as men’s.  It was a cold and rainy day but there was no thunder and lightning.  Just that urge. That want. That need. Karl had a radio but it was playing bad country after all.  And he had been leaning against a kitchen counter when she came in, trying to figure out how to go outside to smoke.

Karl had been in houses before.  Many houses. He knew women.  The details do not require repeating here.

 

 

It was Jeffery’s infectious disease, which presented itself about six weeks later, that revealed, slowly, who was who and what was what.  Infections, like violence, are impossible to argue with. Disease, injury, and death being real, and not just words. Although words can stir people to action.  And actions have consequences.

There was a period of unwinding, of the casting of blame and the attempts to avoid blame.  Of alternative hypotheses.  And attempted false truths.

But the possibilities slowly evolved into the actuality; as they each and together worked the timing backward, in conversation and in the recesses of their own souls, which eliminated excuses and other explanations.  Jeffery knew what he had done and did not do with whom and when, and he was sure of those times and dates.  Lisa, who hoped against hope that Jeffery would confess to his own indiscretions, during the time he was away, began to understand that no such indiscretion had occurred, and had to admit, first to herself, and then to both of them, that what seemed at the time like something she had only imagined, had in fact occurred, and that she and she alone had initiated it.

She confronted Karl, of course, who threw his hands up.  He had made her no promises and told her no lies.  He was who he was.  He was in many houses.  He played a mean slide guitar in the clubs at night.  What you see is what you get.  Got.  So it goes.  You pays your money, you takes your chances.  So to speak.

Jeffery moved out.  He needed space.  To think.

They curdled, like old milk left in the refrigerator too long.

 

 

 

They divorced.  Their children were grown and well insulated by the current cultural expectation that all parents will divorce or die eventually.  They — their three children — were more upset by the emptying and sale of their childhood home than they were about their parents’ separation and divorce.

There were lawyers, and the decision to do this in a dignified, adult way, without casting blame or judgement, though there were moments of blame and judgement from time to time, that showed up when one made a passing comment or a remark to a child or friend about the other, which was repeated without intent or malice but that still stung.  Even so, they were both able to let those tiny slings and arrows pass without escalation, most of the time.  It could have been Jeffery, Lisa thought, just as well as her.  There were skeletons, things she had always suspected but never knew about.  Hints.  His libido. He traveled.  His issues and self-absorption.

The kitchen was finished by another contractor, who bled them in the process, but they needed to get it done, to be finished with it.

The house was emptied.  And then sold.

 

 

 

One day about a year later, when it was fall again, Lisa was walking in downtown Providence when a homeless guy approached her on Memorial Boulevard near the river.  He was tall and thin but bent over and shook a little when he walked.  He had stringy grey hair and red runny eyes and he was coughing, and he carried a cardboard sign that said “Homeless Vet, please help.”

Karl? Lisa asked herself, a part of her brain wanting it to be Karl, a part of her thinking that Karl deserved to end up like this, after what he had done to her and her life, just as a part of her wanted to see him again.  Then she pulled herself back.  You made your own trouble, she told herself. He wasn’t the culprit.  You started it. You knew what you were doing and who you were doing it with. Karl was who he was and she would never change him.  Her fault, not his.  Karl was just the right man in the wrong place at the right time.

But it wasn’t Karl.  Too thin.  Too beaten up by life.  Too strung out, from the looks of the guy.

“Spare change?”  the homeless man said.  He looked away, not at Lisa.

“I don’t think so,” Lisa said, because she didn’t think she had any spare change.  Didn’t this man know that most people have given up carrying cash?

“But what’s your name?” Lisa said.  This was Lisa’s long practiced approach to panhandlers.  Engage them.  Treat them with respect.  So you at least acknowledge their humanity.  And then give them a couple of dollars if you can.

“Elliot.  I’m Elliot,” the man said.  His eyes met Lisa’s and he smiled.

It was broad daylight.  They were standing in the middle of the city with cars driving by.  There were a few Brown and RISD students, and tourists, crossing Memorial Boulevard nearby.  Elliot seemed reasonable.  At least he didn’t sound crazy.

So Lisa opened her purse, to see if she had a couple of singles or a five she could give the guy, knowing full well he’d probably piss it away on nips or something worse.

 

 

Suddenly her purse jumped.  It was wrenched out of her hands.  The force pulled her forward, toward the homeless guy, toward Elliot. Who was across the street by the time Lisa got her balance back and understood what had happened, the cardboard sign abandoned on the street.

“Shit,” she said to herself.  Then ”Stop him,” she yelled, loud enough so that the drivers on Memorial Boulevard turned to look, even though all the car windows were closed.

She ran across the street blindly, dodging traffic.

A police siren sounded nearby.  Maybe someone had called it in.  Maybe not.

 

Elliot, the homeless guy, ran toward Capriccio and headed up Pine Street, with Lisa only twenty or thirty feet behind.  He crossed the street and ran right into a sharp-looking man in a camel hair jacket with slicked-back silver hair coming out of the restaurant.  He spun around, barely keeping his balance, and started to run again.

But he tripped over an orange rental bicycle that had been dumped across the sidewalk.  He went flying, and ended up spreadeagled on the sidewalk, just as a police car pulled up and two cops jumped out.

Lisa’s purse went flying through the air.  It ended up on the sidewalk near the street.

The cops pulled Elliot to his feet.

Lisa retrieved her purse.  Her wallet was gone, but then she saw it on the ground a few feet away, the edges of a one and a five still showing, left where they were when she was pulling them out.

“You bitch,” Elliot said.

“What’s wrong with you?” Lisa said. “Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.  That was more like punching a gift horse in the face.”

“Fuck you, bitch,” Elliot said.

“Enough,” one of the cops said. “You’re coming with us.  And you,” he said to Lisa.  “Stay where you are.  We need a statement.”

 

 

 

Later, when Lisa sat at the bar, nursing a drink, she started counting her blessings.  I didn’t lose a penny.  Got my credit cards and my driver’s license back.  Nobody got hurt, except perhaps the homeless guy, who got a little banged up when he fell.

She wondered about whether or not there would be a trial and whether she would be called to testify.  Probably not, she thought.  Nothing was actually stolen.  They’ll probably release him tomorrow after a night at Intake, after he sees a judge, who sees ten of these cases a day.

He did look like Karl, though, she thought.  A lot like Karl. Serves me right.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

 

 

Not really.  That’s not what really happened either.

Lisa gave Elliot a five and two ones –  more than she should have given him.  Then Elliot stumbled away, crossing the bridge.  Which left Lisa standing on the bridge alone.

So no robbery, no chase, and no arrest.

 

 

 

There wasn’t much to Lisa’s life then, not really.  She had her work and a condo downtown.  Her friends.  Her children, though all three had grown up and moved away, which meant her job was done.  The world appeared to be in shambles, but maybe that notion, that the world is falling apart, was just one more story, a distraction from the richness and the poverty of our lives, two completely different takes on the same set of circumstances:  we exist in a time of material richness, where no one has to worry about staying warm and dry in winter, and almost no one is starving, though plenty of people live hand to mouth.  But at the same time, we fight with one another, tell lies, jockey for position, live on our cell phones, which have taken the place of other people in terms of what or who we look at and talk to.

Most of us don’t watch the sun either rise or set.  Most of us don’t smell the clean air in the morning, or see, really see the purple and orange sky at night or even the blue sky flicked with whisps of cloud.  We travel incessantly but have no place that is home.  Man is born free and everywhere is in chains, chains we forge and wrap around ourselves, while we blame others for our oppression, even when we are not oppressed, and then just as often blame others for the oppression of people far away, who could, but don’t, stand up for themselves if they would only choose to.  Understanding that those people would be bombed and strafed the moment they stood up, slaughtered like buffalo on the prairies of long ago.

We make up stories about ourselves and our lives while time marches on.

Most people live simple lives and follow the path of least resistance.  Love is all around us but is accidental: we love who we are with. Some of us suffer and die.  Our stories show us who we like to think we are.  Our lives are brilliant and miraculous, but also trivial and meaningless, both at the same time.

What is to be done?

Stop, look and listen.

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

Or not.

 

 

Lisa stepped off the curb.  The low heel of her left shoe broke off, and she stumbled and fell into the street.

A car came screeching to a halt before hitting her.  A man burst from the car and came running to help her get up.

 

 

Jeffery.

 

 

 

 

 

Many thanks to Carol Levitt for proofreading, and to Lauren Hall for all-around help and support.

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