Julius Caesar Klein, alternately known to people as Julius, Jules, Caesar, Ceez, and Mr. Maven, is the protagonist of the new novel I have just published this month of December 2025 on Kindle. But over the weekend, not unlike my obsessive hero, a freelance writer in Manhattan who has a hard time letting go of things–any resemblance to myself is highly coincidental–I wrote this short story to introduce him to readers who will then, I hope, be curious to read further about his antics in The Man Who Reclaimed His Virginity, a “slice of life” story in my Specialty Library of psychological fiction.
SUSPENSE IN ORDINARY LIFE:
THE CURMUDGEON WALKS AMONG US!
Flash fiction by Irv O. Neil
Julius Caesar Klein’s increasing capacity, and willingness, to do much of nothing startled him. He began to wonder if he should make daily inventories of exactly what it was that he did on his days off, because they seemed to pass without much of usefulness or accomplishment and this was not the way he’d long been accustomed to live as a workaholic freelance writer in midtown Manhattan.
The statue of the poet Dante at Lincoln Center, New York City, Christmas 2025.
For example, take the long Christmas weekend of 2025. The holiday fell on a Thursday so he took four days off from his freelance work writing descriptions on social media about erotic movies. Christmas was quiet and he spent it by himself, though sharing greetings with friends in other states by phone; but on Friday morning he found himself obsessing about whether he should or should not order some more vintage paperback books online; after a long binge through the summer and fall of the last miserable, stress-inducing year of unpredictable national and world politics, he had succumbed to his book-buying habit in a big way, as a comforting escape from tension. He’d bought enough to keep himself reading, he knew, until the end of his life, even if he lived into his nineties, so now in the winter he tried to swear off more purchases. But then he sneaked a superfluous look at Ebay and the next thing he knew he was wrestling with the prospect of a potential purchase he told himself he did not need and maybe did not even really want.
Struggles like this took up his energy in a wasteful way, he lectured himself in a stern, watchful tone.
On Friday night he had gone to the store for a bottle of Sambuca and suspected, though he didn’t know how to prove it, that he had received what he thought might be a counterfeit five dollar bill in his change. Thinking about this obsessed him for a couple of hours; in the blustery, wintry air he had walked out of his way to go to the cheaper store on Tenth Avenue for the bottle (the closer shop on Eighth charged several bucks more), so the idea that he had ended up spending more money because the largest bill in his change was, possibly, counterfeit, depressed him. He imagined what the protagonist in an old Hitchcock tv suspense show might have done with such a bill, in order to negate his loss; but it frightened him to think of trying now to “pass” it himself and ending up in some kind of trouble. He wasn’t a criminal but he wanted to get rid of that damn bill! He knew he would probably end up just putting it away as a souvenir, an “object lesson” as if he needed it like some seventy-four year old schoolboy; but for the moment he kept it in a small roll of bills in his pocket.
In the afternoon on Friday he had picked up a penny from the pavement on 46th Street near Fifth Avenue, a habit he had gotten rid of sixty years ago in high school when finding a “lucky penny” had preceded his unexpectedly failing a biology test freshman year in high school. He’d only picked up the penny now in the wake of the government discontinuing the production of pennies in 2025, and because it looked rather old from his cursory glance; it was on the concrete next to some food cart; but the coin turned out to be only weathered and from 1966 and probably worthless. But then on Saturday morning he discovered he seemed to have lost one of his winter gloves, the left one of a rather nice pair, and was convinced that the penny, which he’d kept, had brought him bad luck; so later Saturday he tossed the penny away on Broadway. He bought himself a new pair of cheap gloves from a street vendor for five dollars, and deposited the remaining old right hand glove on top of a garbage can stuffed full with holiday detritus; maybe some homeless person who needed a glove would pick it up. But then he wondered why he hadn’t used that shady fiver from the liquor store to pay for the new gloves, to kill two birds with one stone! He still wanted to get rid of that perhaps-counterfeit bill. Would the street vendor have noticed? Maybe he would have, those vendors were pretty sharp fellows, and it might have been a bad move. So Klein kept that crumpled Lincoln in his pocket and instead broke a ten. Ah well, he decided he would take that suspicious five out of his small wad and consign it to the loss column of his existence.
On Friday too he went to the drugstore to get some dark chocolate truffles he knew he shouldn’t eat because of his pre-diabetic blood sugar rating, but the Christmas holiday weekend also had him gloomy because a gift he’d sent to a friend, in another state, seemed to have gotten lost in transit, and he needed some chocolate therapy to assuage the disappointment; since the chocolate was on sale, he told himself he would discipline his intake so as to not further aggravate the situation and elevate his glucose. But when he got home he noticed that the pack of truffles had been punctured somehow; he had forgotten to squeeze it in the store to make sure that it was tight with air inside, his usual procedure with plastic bag purchases. So he started to wonder if someone had tampered with the pack; now he found a tiny hole in the front, and imagined someone in the store might have done it. Theoretically it could be anyone, the store had quite a few employees, but he wondered if the miscreant was a rather savage Gothic looking chick with red-green hair who stocked shelves and worked the register; she had a tattooed anti-capitalist look about her, and maybe she’d stabbed a hole in some random bag, the one that he had unfortunately picked up, and perhaps with some kind of syringe she had injected one of the chocolate truffles with who knew what substance. Klein didn’t particularly care whether somebody was for or against capitalism, because as a freelance writer he was certainly a capitalist himself; and fortunately, he also realized these thoughts were completely screwy, and so instead of obsessing on them more, he sat down on his couch and contemplated for awhile the obvious fact (a “true fact” as the current idiotic lingo went in this “disinformation” age) about how attractive that Gothic girl was, with terrific legs in pink tights under the short black-green skirts the drugstore let her wear; and Julius thought about how her bitch-goddess attitude as she rang up purchases turned him on a lot even in his seventysomething state, but also left him grumpy that he was old enough to be her grandfather and couldn’t try to make a date with her.
So these were the things he concentrated on over the long Christmas weekend. Wasn’t there a better use of his time? With all the books he had to read, or just to organize! And the movies and DVDs to catch up with. Then, as if the “universe” (again the popular current lingo) wanted to “teach” him yet another “object lesson,” on Sunday morning he discovered he hadn’t lost the old left glove after all, and it had simply slipped down into the lining of his overcoat through a tear in the pocket he didn’t know was there. And damn, he’d impulsively tossed away the old right glove on that overflowing garbage bin! Goddamn it! Yes, it seemed as if fate was instructing him not to act so impulsively. Object lesson, Klein! Listen and learn! He mused once more on the perhaps unlucky penny and the disreputable looking fiver; but was all this overthinking a constructive use of his time? What was an old curmudgeon to do? The clock of life was ticking and eternity, like a mischievous stone gargoyle on an old building, was sticking its tongue out at him for wasting time.
In the end, overwhelmed on Sunday night, Julius Caesar Klein decided to just put a classic Karloff-Lugosi horror flick on the DVD player, and block everything else out of mind. Sometimes that seemed like the only way to proceed! Maybe if he was absorbed in Boris and Bela, he wouldn’t be tempted back to that hot find on Ebay!
The End
For more of the adventures of Julius Caesar Klein, go to your local Amazon Kindle store, like here!
Photo of Dante Park © 2025 Irv O. Neil.
“Suspense in Ordinary Life: The Curmudgeon Walks Among Us!” © 2025 Irv O. Neil
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