Fueling the Fire

The world had fallen.  Houses and buildings and whole towns were abandoned.  This girl and I went out at night to scavenge supplies from a nearby elementary school.  We climbed in through the window of one of the classrooms.  There were a number of crayon pictures hanging on the bulletin board there, draw by all the students.  The girl lingered to look at them, but I pulled her along.  We had to keep moving.

When we got back to the camp and we were sitting around the campfire, I opened up this briefcase that had all of these wadded up pieces of paper in them.  I started tossing them into the fire.  The girl snatched one away from me and opened it up.  She saw that it was one of the crayon drawings.  She lunged forward and tried to stop me from burning the rest.  With tears in her eyes she pleaded with me.  She told me that this was all that was left of them.  I understood, but we had to keep the fire going.

A Nice Place to Sleep

It was the living room at my Grandmother's old house.  All the same figurines and furniture decorated the room, the same handful of hardback mystery novels on the shelf, those same beat-up slippers discarded by the chair.  Each tick of the clock on the wall punctuated the stillness.  It was early morning and there was faint light and frost at the windows, but I came in wrapped in a blanket, carrying my own pillow, looking to sleep on the couch.  I felt exhausted, and this cozy room seemed like the nicest place on Earth to rest.

But there was someone there, a woman I used to work with, sitting off in the shadows in some corner of the room.  Just as I was about to settle in on the couch, she spoke up and told me, "You can't sleep here.  Your Grandmother's not around anymore.  There's other people that live here now.  You can't just go and sleep on other people's couches."

I waved her off.  I knew that what she said was true, but I was so tired, I didn't care.  I got comfortable on the couch, mumbling to her that they wouldn't mind, that I was just going to nap for a little while, that no one would care if I was just taking a nice innocent little nap, not bothering anyone.  And so I kept mumbling on and on like that, making every excuse I could think of until everything faded and I drifted back off to sleep.    

Young Again

We were two couples, passing along the street at night.  We were all friends.  The girls had been working on this patchwork tapestry that would be displayed on the side of a float in an upcoming parade.  The other guy and I, we'd been up ahead.  We'd seen into the future and we knew how it all turned out.  The tapestry would win all sorts of awards.  It would end up displayed on a grassy median along the town's main road.  We even foresaw the possibility that money would be won.  We saw all of us in new cars, shiny gold watches dangling from our wrists.  My friend turned to his girl with a grin, "Isn't it nice knowing in advance that it's all going to work out for the best?"

And so it went on, the money was won and there was a long string of nights drinking in the city, lights and parties and music and laughter.  As the last echoes of it trailed off, we ended up at this house in the gloamy half-light just before dawn.  We stumbled up the stairs and stomped around in the hushed rooms.  I began to comment on all this, somewhere above, somewhere outside myself and beyond all this, "This is when I was seventeen.  This is where I was.  I keep returning to this moment, drawn to it over and over.  But I've come to it now, young again, fresh as though it were the first time, wonderfully foolish, all my gathered wisdom gone."  Everyone else settled in on the floor somewhere to sleep, but I stayed at the window watching.   

Home Improvements

My brother and I both went over to do some work on my aunt’s house.  Originally we were just there to paint and patch a few things up, but a rivalry developed between us.  We started making these elaborate changes, each of us trying to top the other.  My brother built these brick arches with sloping layers and walkways and high castle ramparts.  In response, I built a huge gaming complex with a bowling alley and a maze-like pool where you could swim from room to room.
 
These constructions piled over each other, one after the another, spreading out over several acres of my aunt’s property, all of it connected by a network of underground tunnels and catacombs.  Somewhere at the far end of it all, quiet and away from everything, was the best part, my crowning touch.  A door at the dead end of a dark tunnel led unexpectedly outside to an open field where there were these two long clear tubes that stretched far up into the sky.  By regulating the pressure and the air currents in both tubes, it allowed a person to rise comfortably in one tube, and descend comfortably in the other.  The ride would take them up into the clouds, high above the world with a grand view of everything for miles around.

When my aunt came home and saw all the work that we had done, she just shook her head and said, "This is what you get when you ask Einstein to paint your house."  She said it with a grin, exasperated but affectionate, amused but amazed.  It was a good thing to hear.   

About My Son

One day I got a letter from a girl that I used to date.  She asked me to come see her, and I followed the address that she gave me to an old run down apartment building.  As I was climbing the stairs, she met me in the stairwell.  She didn't waste any time.  She came right out and told me that I had a son.  A dark-haired, dark-eyed boy peeked out shyly from behind her.

I stayed with them for the next couple of weeks, but oddly enough, all subsequent developments took place in that same stairwell.  We never made it up to the apartment.  I never took my shoes off and settled in where it was comfortable and warm.  We stayed in this cold stairwell like people locked out of their lives, that long waiting slide down the wall, gnawing tense and uncommitted.  The girl went to work and left me with the boy.  He brought a crude crayon drawing over to show me.  I realized that I felt no connection to this kid at all.

A friend of mine finally helped me to see it.  He dropped by the stairwell and told me I had to search my heart; I had to look at the boy's face and see if I saw anything of myself.  I had to accept this unsettled feeling that I had.  I stared into the boy's eyes for a long, long time.  There was nothing.  The girl had made a mistake.  This wasn't my son.  I handed him his drawing back to him, tousled his hair regretfully, and then I turned and headed back down those dank stairs and out of the building.     

Moving the Cosmic Levers

We moved into a new house.  The master bedroom was spacious and the entire ceiling was a huge domed skylight, giving the unmistakable impression of sleeping out in the open air.  Over by the mantelpiece there was a fairly large, rusty, contraption of levers.  The levers were marked "day", "month", etc.  They were heavy and hard to turn and I could feel gears inside the mechanism spinning in different directions as I slid the lever along its track.  Releasing the lever, it would pop up and lock into place.  I moved all of the levers to the proper settings, so that they matched with the current date,year, and time.

Once the mechanism was set, I turned and looked up towards the sky, somehow instinctively knowing that I would see the results of my manipulations there.  Nothing happened at first, but after a blink or two, I began to notice that the stars were moving, swimming, twirling, undulating even.  As it went on, it suggested music, although I heard nothing.  "Because there's no sound in space!", I reminded myself.  I just shook my head at the non-sequitur and smiled up at the orchestration of the stars.    

Gun Safety Tip

We ran into a small group of people and my brother decided to tell them the story about a mishap I'd had many years ago.  It was back when I was a teenager.  I was hanging out with my friends and we were drinking and someone had a handgun with them.  At some point I got a hold of the gun, and I randomly fired six rounds out the window laughing.  Well, it turns out that this kid that I had gone to school with was out for a walk that night, enjoying the nice summer air.  The bullet caught him right through the neck.  I shook my head in regret and told the group, "If you ever shoot a gun, make sure that you're always aiming a specific target and you're shooting directly at it.  Never fire aimlessly out a window." 

A People Whisperer

My job was to go in and deal with people who had been emotionally damaged or disturbed.  I wasn't there to provide therapy or analysis or anything like that.  I was just there to get them back on track, to ease the transition, to get them to a place where they could function in their lives again.

I showed up one morning to visit a client.  Her apartment was laid out in such a way that you had to cut through the kitchen on your way in, and as I was passing through I noticed two cold slices of toast sticking up from the toaster.  I found the client, Karen, in the living room clutching to a third slice of toast with both hands as she nibbled nervously at it.  "Karen", I said gently, as I typically did in such situations, "you know that there are already two slices of toast in the toaster."

"I can't go back in there.", she shook her head on the verge of panic.  Her eyes were sore and bulging, and for a second I saw it just as she did, the shadow lurking in the doorway at the end of the counter.  I crossed the room and took her in my arms, drawing her towards me.  "I know there are dark places sometimes.  It's alright.  It's all going to be okay."

But as she started away from me, I began to think of the worst thing I could do at the moment.  I thought of how awful it would be if I came up behind her and grabbed her and let out a loud yelp.  You know, like a joke.  And then somehow I found myself compelled forward, actually doing it whether I wanted to or not.  I grabbed her and yelled, and I ended up startling myself so much that I woke up. 

The Box

This woman that we knew had been in some kind of accident.  The only thing that the doctors had been able to save was her brain, which for some reason, they were keeping alive in this big concrete slab that was rooted to the ground in a dark corner of the local park.  My wife and I went to see her.  There were wet leaves scattered on the ground around the box and more leaves blowing in the air.  We huddled in our coats as we approached the box, stealing nervous glances at it, not sure what to say.  There was something inscribed on the front of it, but it was half-covered by the leaves, and we were too afraid to even touch the box and brush the leaves aside.

Still, we tried to talk to this woman, trapped somewhere inside the box.  But other than the mechanical sounds of the internal apparatus keeping the brain alive, there was nothing.  There was no sign that there was anything conscious in there.  We had nothing but the doctor's word that she was still a living, thinking, being.  I tried to imagine it, existing as nothing but a brain in a box, completely cut off from the world, totally alone in a dark, damp, corner of the park.  I made me sick to think about it.     

I Went Skydiving

It's funny, I wasn't even all that scared.  I just made sure I had my hand on the ripcord before I jumped and I clutched at it as hard as I could.  I hung there at the door of the plane, looking out at the cloudless sky and the perfectly cut squares of farmland plowed so neatly.  Before I hardly even knew what had happened someone had given me a little push, or the plane had hit a bump in the airstream, and I was out, falling free.  My hand had slipped from the ripcord in the confusion, but I found it again easy enough.  I pulled it and the chute unfurled and caught the air with a snap, suddenly pulling me up into a much gentler descent.

I drifted down and landed on the grassy median in the middle of the freeway.  The draft from a passing semi drew at my chute, threatening to pull me out onto the road.  I fumbled around, frantically trying to undo the latches.  I got the thing off and I watched it as the wind caught it and carried it across the sky and out of sight. 

I turned and there was a tall, portentous, man with white hair walking across the field towards me.  He wore a suit and he seemed very professional and determined, completely mindless of the cars zipping by on either side of the field.  He was apparently supposed to be my boss.  I had a moment of awkward confusion because I realized that I had missed work and now he had caught me.  He came up and took an appraising look down his nose at me.  He inquired about my health as I tried to sheepishly throw together an answer.  But then he just gave me a pat on my shoulder and told me to enjoy my vacation, and I remembered with a sigh of relief that I had legitimately taken this time off.  I looked up and saw the long trail left by the plane I had jumped from.  Everything was going to be alright.  There was nothing to worry about.    

Ulterior Motives

The owner's wife stopped by to take a tour of our shop one day.  Just as the boss was bringing her over by the press that I was running, my knife slipped out of my hand and I caught the blade awkwardly, cutting my finger.  After my finger was bandaged up, a meeting was convened in the human resources office up front to discuss the incident.

It was a large corner office with the blinds drawn against the evening light.  There were loose files piled all over the tables and cabinets.  A couple of my co-workers lounged on leather sofas across the room, while my boss and I sat before the HR woman's desk.  My boss insisted that I had cut my finger on purpose because the owner's wife had been there.  My co-workers across the room grumbled in agreement.  I wasn't sure why I would do that or what I would gain by cutting my finger in front of her - a point that I tried to argue in my favor - but again, they just insisted that I was playing dumb in order to appear innocent.

We went around like this for awhile, every argument I made they twisted around as more evidence of my guilt and my shady motives.  Finally I couldn't take it anymore.  I stood up, declared that I quit, gave my boss the finger, and left the room.  I could already hear them behind me twisting this latest turn.  They said that this was just a ploy to make it look like I was telling the truth.  The funny thing is that they were actually right about this.  They had kept at me until I started to feel the I really was guilty of something, and I really had just quit to make my point.

But I hadn't cut my finger on purpose, and I had given up on trying to make them see that.  The HR woman caught up with me in the parking-lot, asking me to come back.  Of course, I had counted on someone coming after me, but now I didn't really care.  I told her, "There's no way I can defend myself.  They do this all the time.  They always look for the absolute worse in everyone.  I'm done.", and I turned and walked off.

Room in the Clouds

My mother lived in a rather strange house.  It was a tall house, composed of three apartments stacked on top of each other, and there was a staircase that spiraled around the outside of the house like a corkscrew, each flight taking you up to the next apartment.  My mother occupied the middle apartment, and my aunt had the one at the very top.

One day my mother sent me up to my aunt's place to borrow something.  After climbing the dizzy heights along the open staircase, her apartment felt like a cramped, dim, collection of rooms in the sky.  But it was a lively place.  A bunch of my family were there, laughing and talking.  I settled in for a pleasant visit, and that's when someone mentioned the attic room.  There was something stored away up there that my cousin wanted to get.  I laughed and told her how I always had dreams about an attic room, tucked away in a closet just like this one, the same lonely switchback stairs.  I told her that it always creeped me out, but I wasn't sure why because there was never anything up there.

But everyone's smiles quickly faded, everything grew hushed and sober, and it dawned on me that this was one of my dreams.  That's why the attic room was here.  It was like a marker or a talisman.  I would only ever find it in a dream.  That's why it always troubled me.  It signified the dream state, like a dissonant cue.  They were all watching me now.  They seemed to be waiting for me to go up there.

Far Off Angels

My daughter was much younger at the time, and we lived in a different house then.  It was the last house at the end of a short street.  The ground sloped off beyond the trees at the end of the road, leaving the house situated at the top of a high hill with a nice view of the town's twinkling lights.  Amid these other lights, there was a beacon composed of three red lights that had particularly caught my daughter's interest.  Because the lights formed the three points of an upside-down triangle, my daughter somehow got it into her head that this beacon was an angel watching over the town.  Whenever we pulled out of the driveway that winter, she would brush the frost off the back window of the car and watch the beacon as we drove away.

As the months rolled by, I fell into a kind of slump, a listless stretch of grey afternoons passing without motivation.  As the weather began to warm up and the days were growing longer, I decided that it might lift my spirits if I took my daughter out to find her angel.  So I took her little hand and we went for a walk, navigating through different neighborhoods and side streets.  We passed kids playing in dusty front yards while their parents smoked and talked on porches, heard ragged mufflers and car radios fade into the distance, all the lonely, drowsy, sadness of a summer evening in a strange part of town.

It was nearly dusk when we finally arrived at the source of the beacon.  The lights were mounted on a tall metal tower that sat in the middle of a muddy clearing.  The sun was scorching, low and bright at the edge of this clearing.  We shaded our eyes and stumbled down a rocky embankment.  I was just about to point the tower out to my daughter, so that in my fatherly, almost spiteful, way I could disillusion her, show her the truth about her "angel", that it was just a plain metal tower in a dirty field.  But as we stood at the base of it, and I craned my neck to look up, I noticed that the scaffolding which supported the lights actually looked a little like a pair of wings.  I almost chuckled, but yet there was something about the way the light hit it at that hour and the white puffs of clouds in the sky above, that made me stop, that made everything stop, quiet and wonderful, and for a moment, even I believed.

An Affair to Forget

It was a rainy night.  I was talking to my wife before heading out the door for work.  I told her that a co-worker of mine had mentioned someone she might know, some guy named Greg Roland who delivered food to some restaurant that she used to work at.  She said that she didn't know the guy, but I could see that she had gotten this wistful, dreamy smile on her face when I had mentioned his name.  I knew she was lying.  I pressed her on it, but she kept denying it.

I had to get to work.  I was running late, so I figured that we'd pick up the conversation later.  But just as I was about to head out the door, my brother popped up out of nowhere.  He asked if anything was wrong.  I told him that there wasn't, but he insisted that he knew better.  "What, were you listening at the door?", I asked him.  He confessed that he had been, so I broke down and explained the situation to him.  We went to one of the back rooms of the house, where for some reason I had an old copy of this Greg's journal packed away.  We flipped through it, looking for some kind of evidence.  I found an entry from a few years back.  He spoke of a woman; he used a different name, but somehow I knew that he was talking about my wife.

I took the journal to show it to my wife.  I found her in the living room, talking on the phone.  I asked her who she was talking to, and she said, "That was Greg!  He's coming over to pick me up."  And before I even had a chance to ask any questions, she ran out of the house and into the rain.  I stood on the porch and watched her go.  The rain dripped from the gutters.  It was the worst night of my life.

I don't know if I called him or he called me, but somehow I ended up on the phone with this Greg.  At first I tried to be calm and reasonable about the whole thing.  I told him that I understood that my wife was free to make her own choices, and if this was what she thought would make her happy...  Then he cut me off and said, "I guess it's nice to have religion, dude." in the most cocky, patronizing, smart-ass voice that you could ever imagine.  From there it was just one button pushed after another.  I ended up telling him that if I ever got a hold of him I was going to reach up his asshole and tear his throat out.  I was screaming at the top of my lungs at that point, and all red in the face.  I'm pretty sure he hung up after that, leaving me holding the phone.  What was I going to do now?

The Bowling Alley

My Wife and daughter and I went down to the local bowling alley one night.  It was an absolute madhouse, very crowded.  At one point we left our lane for a minute to get something to eat, and we came back to find that someone else has taken our place while we were gone.  We had to move to another lane.  The only one available was the very last one down at the end along the wall which was painted with a black & white silhouette of a guy bowling against a background of light blue stripes.

There was a group of rowdy kids bowling on the next lane over.  They were a little too close for comfort.  They were horsing around, constantly crossing the line and getting in our way.  They were throwing the bowling balls so wildly and carelessly that I was afraid one of them was going to get loose and knock someone upside the head.  When it was my turn to bowl, a couple of them came over to me.  They wanted me to use their bowling ball.  It was a skull suspended in a transparent crystal that was cut into a rough cube shape.  I told them that a ball that shape wouldn't roll down the lane, but they insisted that it just had to be broken in.  The more it got used, the corners and flat edges would eventually get rounded into a nice smooth sphere.

I wasn't buying it.  I decided to go look for my own ball.  This search somehow led me out to the parking-lot.  It seemed that one of the bowling alley's regulars had died, and he had left his truck parked out in the lot with everything he owned in it.  His bowling buddies were picking through the stuff and dividing it up amongst themselves.  As I walked up, I noticed a bowling ball half-buried beneath some clothes in a cardboard box.  I asked if I could have it, and no one seemed to have any objections.  I pulled it out to have a look at it.  It was cream colored and decorated with the characters from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip.  Hobbes was on one side; Calvin was on the other with his hand held out, perfectly matching the finger holes on the ball.  It looked pretty awesome.

So I headed back to our lane against the wall, but I when I got there my wife was all worked up.  She said that we had to leave right that minute.  I turned back and looked at the lane as she grabbed my arm and started pulling me to the door.  The boards were all broken up, and down at the end by the pins there was nothing but a pile of brick and dust.  I kept trying to ask my wife what happened, but she was in too big a hurry.  Once we were out into the parking-lot she relaxed and started laughing about what had happened, but she still wouldn't stop to explain and she still insisted that we needed to get out of there.

So she pulled me along by one hand as we hunted for our car, and I clutched my new bowling ball in the other hand.  I was trying to show it to her, but she wouldn't slow down to look at it.  She just kept laughing and dragging me along, laughing and dragging me along, laughing and dragging me along...and then I woke up, and I swear as sure as I live and breathe, that I was holding onto the top of my head with my thumb and my two forefingers.  Yeah, it took me a minute to figure it out too.  

By the Dashlight

Took a road trip with my father.  He was doing all of the driving; I was in the passenger seat.  We rode with the windows down.  The sky was an inky blue as we turned onto the interstate ramp, the very last remains of the day.  My father flipped on the headlights and lit a cigarette without needing to say a word.  I was busy flipping through the dial on the radio, looking for the country station that he liked.  I had absolutely no idea where we were headed; I was just glad to see him again. 

The Dossier

The woman drove me out to a secluded shack in the woods.  I had been involved with this group for a while now, a little over a year probably.  It had started out as simple casual friendships, playing cards in the kitchen or sitting around watching TV with dopey boredom waiting for someone to show up and drive somebody somewhere.  In other words, it all seemed perfectly normal and innocent enough.  But gradually it became clear after a while that there were ideas and perhaps even beliefs that bonded these people together, something a little off the beaten path.  They were a "Group" with a capital "G."  Sideways glances and conspiratorial whispers in back bedrooms hinted at these things.  Finally it became clear that I was picking up on these secrets, and a decision was made to initiate me to the next level.  That's when this woman with the dark hair took me for a ride out to the woods.

The shack was made up like a roadside motel room.  There was a queen-sized bed in the main room when you came in the door.  There was a little kitchenette in the back with a louvered window that looked out onto the woods.  The dark-haired woman pulled a large white envelope from her coat and tossed it down on the bed.  "These are the pictures of the people who run our group.", she said.  "We only show this to people when we're completely sure they're ready to see it."  She paused, perhaps wondering if she really was sure.  "The last pictures are of our leader, an extraordinary man.  He has lived for 60,000 years and he has a hard time maintaining human form, so I have to warn you that you may be disturbed and confused by what you see.  But we have decided that you're ready."

She directed me to the kitchenette in the back, because she said that I had to view the photographs privately.  She went back to the front room and left me there as I sat down and undid the clasp on the envelope.  It contained a stack of large glossy photographs.  The first couple looked normal enough, like smiling photos from a senior yearbook.  Then I came to the end.  These were smaller, loose pictures, taken with a common home camera.  They were pictures of a small baby who showed clear signs of some kind of congenital birth defects.  I'm not sure exactly how I could tell that.  There was something wrong with the eyes, something wrong with the face, something dull and slack and wandering that suggested brain damage.  I stared in horror at the pictures, not because of their subject, but because of what they told me about these people.  I had to get out of there immediately.    

Portable Radio

I woke up thirsty from my nap, so I went downstairs to get something to drink.  As I stood there with the refrigerator door open, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that something seemed wrong about the light coming up from the basement.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  I couldn't tell if the light was flickering or whether that was just a manifestation of my rattled nerves.  I tried to go back upstairs to sleep, but I never got farther than the first step.  I kept going back to the kitchen to stare at the ambient, flickering, light coming up from the basement stairs.  I couldn't shake the feeling.

Finally, I realized that I was hearing very faint music coming from the basement.  The flickering was keeping beat with the music, and then I realized that the light wasn't actually flickering at all.  It was just an auditory suggestion caused by the fact that I wasn't aware that I was hearing the music.  I went down to check it out.  There was a little portable radio sitting on the top of a cabinet.  It was one of those cheap old radios with a handle on the top and a single speaker and an analog dial which spanned the length of it, the kind of radio someone would bring to a work site.  It was playing a harmless, familiar, song, but yet it made me feel uneasy all the same.  I knew that someone had left this radio on, and I knew that if I didn't change the station, they would be lured back here by the music.  And I knew that was bad.

So I started to tune the dial, but instead of it changing the radio station, it changed everything else.  I found myself in the backyard of one of my childhood neighbors.  My wife and my daughter were there too, sleeping on the patchy grass, still wrapped up in their blankets.  They stirred, wondering how we had gotten outside.  My memory was a little foggy, and just as things were starting to come back to me, the screen door at the back of the house came banging open and my bearded old neighbor came rushing out yelling something in a toothless, drunken garble.  Yeah, this wasn't good.  My wife and daughter gathered up their blankets and we started away, waving my neighbor off with our hands and assuring him that we were leaving.

As we were crossing the road, I noticed that I still had the radio.  I tuned the dial again.  Now we found ourselves in a long, narrow upstairs room in a strange house somewhere.  The room seemed to be an antechamber of some sort that opened onto other rooms on either side.  It spanned the width of the house with high, ornate, windows at either end.  In the evening the sunlight would fall through the window at the west end, and at night the streetlight outside would follow suit.  But the morning light would come through the window at the east end of the room, and everything would look different then.  I was anxious to see it.  I was comfortable here.  We stretched the blankets out on the floor below the west window.  Then I clicked off the radio and went back to sleep.   

A Door Left Open

The landlady dropped by to see me on Christmas day.  She wore a black dress that contrasted sharply with the fresh snow.  She narrowed her small eyes and informed me that I had left the front door open all night long.  I smiled and told her that we had left the door open on purpose, that it was a long standing tradition in our family.  Years ago, on Christmas Eve, my wife and I had fallen asleep and accidentally left the door wide open.  I remember the way that it had colored my dreams; the glow emanating through the doorway, the falling snow in the misted light, the vapors curling their way through the dark corridors, everything as soft as the wings of angels.  We had never slept so well in all our lives.  More miraculous even than the fact that we weren't robbed as we slept, was the fact that the house stayed warm and comfortable through-out the night.  Ever since then, that experience had come to embody everything Christmas meant to us.  So, we left the door wide open on Christmas Eve every year thereafter.  The landlady listened to all this with one eyebrow cocked skeptically, and then she just walked off shaking her head.

Hiding Places

It was a spring night, many years ago.  It was a little past eleven when I headed over to see this girl that I was dating at the time.  I climbed the lattice up to her bedroom window, which she had left unlatched for me.  I found her waiting in the lamp light.  Her face lit up as I came stumbling through the curtains.  But before I could even take a breath and really enjoy the moment, there was a loud, rough, knock at the door.  It was the girl's father.  She quickly stuffed me into her closet, and I burrowed as deeply as I could into the old clothes piled on the floor.  I kept my eyes fixed on the thin band of light at the bottom of the door and I held my breath.

I spent the next week trapped in this house.  The father was constantly trumping around upstairs, and there was no clear opportunity for me to slip away.  I never actually saw the man, but I continually heard his heavy steps and his booming, angry voice, like an ogre out of a fairy tale.  I was terrified that he would find me.  I had to keep moving.  He was remodeling one of the upstairs rooms, putting in dark paneling and hooking up a TV and a stereo speaker system.  Every whack of the hammer send a sharp pain through my heart, and several unpleasant images through my mind.

At one point, I think he caught a glimpse of me.  It was at least enough to make him drop what he was doing and get up to make sure that he wasn't seeing things.  I had slipped into a spare bedroom in the back that had been closed off and was stuffed with folded clothes and unused odds and ends.  There were boxes piled on the bed, and thick dust hanging in the sunbeam.  I climbed under the bed and waited.  I heard him come in and I grabbed hold of the box spring as tight as I could when he picked up the whole bed with one hand to look under it.  He stood there holding the bed, and scrutinizing the patch of carpet beneath it.  The springs were digging into my hands.  I braced myself as he let the bed fall back to the floor.  Then he left the room, grumbling to himself.

Well, that about did it for me.  I was getting out of there as fast as I could.  As soon as I heard his thudding steps making their way back downstairs again, I slipped out from under the bed and ran to the same window that I had climbed in through.  It was a beautiful afternoon, and the warm air that hit my face when I opened the window had never smelled so sweet.  I could hear the far off sound of someone mowing their lawn.  I scrambled out the window, dropped to the ground, and took off down the street.

The Afternoon Movie

I was sitting around watching some movie on TV.  It was a noir period piece set in the fifties.  A man in a grey suit with a fedora tilted over one eye was trying to track down the men who had killed his wife.  There's was one scene where they had him locked in a shed with one of his wrists shackled to some sort of chain.  Just as he began sawing through his wrist with a rusty band saw that he had found lying around, screaming in agony and soon becoming covered in his own blood, my daughter walked in and asked what I was watching.  She wanted to know what the movie was about, but I found myself strangely unable to explain the premise.  I really didn't know.  I explained to her that sometimes you looked for certain actors in movies of a certain mood or genre, and you took that alone as a promising sign, without knowing much else.  She considered this, nodded, and then left the room, and I went back to watching movie.  The man in the fedora slipped the severed hand into his pocket, the fingers still twitching.  He pulled his gun, fixed an expression of grim resolve on his face, and continued on his way.

My Workshop

I was an old man, living in a very old abandoned house.  It was more of a shack really, consisting mainly of one large room with crumbling wallpaper and gas lamp fixtures mounted on the wall that were years out of use.  There was a cot tucked away in a corner where I slept, and the rest of the room had been converted into a workshop of some sort.  A roll-top desk, as well as several wooden tables, were stacked with books, sheet music, maps, charts, and various measuring instruments.  A white lily bloomed in a jar, stimulated by a mild electrical current.  There was no furnace in the house, and my only source of heat and light was a fireplace which had the springs and gears from a broken clock scattered on the mantle.  I had only the contents of the room to fuel the fire.  I spent the winter nights deliberating about which books and papers I could spare to keep me alive.

Since I didn't officially hold the deed to the house, I suppose I was technically homeless, or at the very least a squatter.  With my ragged coat and unkempt beard, I looked every bit the part.  The police would frequently stop by to harass me, knocking at the door or tapping at the window pane.  It seems that they couldn't exactly prove that I didn't own the house, but they hoped to trip me up with their questions.  Sometimes I suffered these interrogations with as much polite equanimity as I could muster.  Other times I couldn't deal with it, so I took to to hiding down in the cellar with the spiders. 

On one such occasion, as I crouched in the dark, I could hear the officers' muffled voices outside.  They were taunting and threatening to arrest another homeless man that I knew who was a friend of mine.  I heard the thud and tired groan as he stumbled into the snowbank, followed by the cops' laughing as they hauled him up.  I felt compelled to respond to this.  I stirred in my damp hole, but then a strange hand, more prudent than my own, reached out of the dark and covered my mouth, preventing me from calling out.  If I came to the defense of another homeless man, I would be giving myself away.

Police Report

I went down to the local police station one morning to report that my wife was being tormented by the Devil.  Naturally, the cops there were more than a little skeptical.  They just kicked back in their creaky wooden desk chairs, scratching their bellies and listening complacently to my story.  I caught a couple of them shaking their heads and exchanging incredulous glances.  They all assumed my wife was crazy.  The warm smell of a fresh pot of coffee hung in the air.

The old brick apartment building where we lived sat on the far corner of the same intersection that the police station sat on.  The building could be seen from the station's window.  I pointed up at it.  "I know for a fact that six other residents have come down here to file complaints.  I suppose they're all lying!?  They're all crazy?"  The cops stared back impassively.  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.  I didn't want to admit it, but I had to say it.  "I know they're not crazy.  I know...because I've been hearing it too.  Day and night.  That voice, it never stops."

The moment I said that, everything just stopped.  The cops sat like wax figures.  They had gone from bored to deathly still.  One of them sat with their chair frozen in mid-tip.  Then, a man who had been sitting at a desk across the room with his back to me, slowly swiveled to face me.  He looked like an ordinary enough man, but I knew instantly who it was.  A grin spread across his face and he said, "Of course you do.", and then he laughed and laughed and laughed.