Halloween ’17

 

Night 6: “A Key to Eternity”

 

Keys are inherently sentimental.

They are sentimental because they unlock something and that something must be sentimental too if it is worth locking away.

Who knows what lovely and golden talismans or knick-knacks have wound their way through someone’s life like the threads that weave together two sides of a torn cloth — bridging them, holding them?

Some threads are more valuable, yes, and others less so. And a key, a key is like the needle that can unwind as well as join these threads.

A key is often as cherished as the items it protects: when a Rottweiler or Minotaur is too bulky or loud the finesse of a simple key, with its long neck and jagged teeth, shoulders their duty.

You also cannot wear a guard dog or a Minotaur around your neck; I, however, have a filigree string around mine and tied to it hanging down to my collarbone, is a key.

This key. Any key. They protect one’s valuables but they also describe one’s entire life. Observe:

The key around my neck is golden and as long as my ring finger.

It is ancient by its very feel.

It is very thin. It is so thin it looks fragile because of its length but it is not fragile. It is scraped and scuffed.

It is well-worn.

But despite these obvious fingerprints of time it is not rusted. Therefore it is often used and not often left to molder in some damp forgotten drawer.

It smells of sweat and brass.

It feels quite heavy when it is held, and one assumes that the lock that is sister to the key is likewise similar in look, feel and state.

The owner, too, is well worn with time. You can tell by the excessive use of the key that he has been unlocking his memories often and, most likely, recently.

The ancient feel from this key also comes from him: an old man, with deep lines around his eyes and mouth, his hair thin and sparse upon his scalp, his body frail but like the key defiant and unbent.

His clutch is like a vice.

His past is like a dream which fades upon waking.

The impressions and markings on the key describe this.

I have the ability to deduce these simple facts; as a thief it is my job.

This key of course is not my own.

I am standing in his house.

The old man isn’t here. I have been searching for the lock that will open to this key that I have stolen from him. The lock that belongs to this key is somewhere in this room. After hours of searching this is the last room to explore.

There is however not much worth exploring. In fact in this room there is nothing. It is barren.

On one side of the room is the door, closed to within a crack.

On its opposite side is a window where the moonlight pries in: my source of illumination in this witchly hour.

But still the lock must be in this room. It can be nowhere else. I have looked everywhere but here.

Perhaps the lock is for a small chest hidden within a secret nook disguised within these walls?

With fingers deftly crawling I feel along the wood for a misplaced crack.

A jutting edge.

An uneven gap.

A slight, quiet knock — thump thump — every few feet assures me that no, there is no such hollow within the walls. The same goes for the uncarpeted floorboards.

By now my fingers are chalked with dust. My clothes smell of something dry and dingy and stale.

Unlike the rest of the house which holds moving boxes and rolls of plastic for covering unsold furniture, this place hasn’t been touched for some time.

I will leave obvious marks in the dust when I depart.

No matter.

If they are noted I will be long gone before they are.

It was on the last wall – the wall with the window gatekeeping the cold moonlight into the room – that I found it.

I found the lock at last!

It was securing the latch that opens the window.

No, I thought, How was this possible?

An old and ancient key like this, the embodiment of hidden loot ripe for taking, merely used for securing a window?

It could not be.

It did not fit my deductions.

The wear along its head, the scrapes along its neck, the slight chipping along its teeth – the key has been used often, but this room has been used not at all.

It could not be, I kept thinking.

I took off the key and easily stuck it into the lock.

With a faint clink! the lock opened.

I looked at the lock then made to put it back. It was frustrating. My hopes had been high but a dud was a dud. Who knows why the old man had put this here.

But I saw something.

Oh?

Oh yes.

I opened the window.

It yawned outwards.

A breeze lifted my damp hair from my brow.

The snowy backyard was undented below and the clear twinkling sky was clear above.

I looked down and I saw an object on the window’s sill.

It was a box.

Small.

Square.

There were fairies painted dancing along its carven surface.

A jewellery box.

I held the box up before me. I turned it around and around and examined it. It was handmade and looked like he had made if for a daughter or a granddaughter.

Then I opened the latch and I lifted the –

Push!!

“Oomph!”

I felt myself falling forwards. The window was wide and I couldn’t control my body as I went through.

I fell over the window’s sill and I was falling and I was falling and then I was looking up from the snow in the old man’s back lawn.

The window two levels above loomed like a hollow, judgmental eye that looked coldly down upon me.

I could no longer feel my body.

I gasped and choked and twitched my hands and feet.

I heard music coming from above me. There was a man’s shadow staring down from the window. He was holding the box. I had dropped the box and he had opened it and its music chimed down to me and sounded sweet, lovely, and foul to my dying ears.

The old man stood there and leaned forward into the moonlight and I saw his face in the moonlight, opaque with dark eyes malicious. He was looking down on me with a smile.

“But I killed you,” I tried crying out to the old man. Nothing came out from my numb throat but gurgles.

“But I killed you! But I killed you! But I killed you!”

His smile was sentimental.

Halloween ’17

 

Night 5: “Play-thing”

 

“This is silly,” he said after awhile. I didn’t disagree.

We were in a yard behind a wood house. The house had two balconies, one in the front and long and one in the back overlooking the yard. The house itself was decrepit and abandoned.

We had found the house while out cruising.

It was along a grid road leading south from the city and towards a town called Minton. Jct. 623.

The front yard was very small compared to the back yard. The front yard was overgrown grass and there was a line of shorter grass running down the middle and towards the house’s front cement steps. The shorter grass was where the sidewalk had been.

First we had tried the front and found it locked.

We walked around peering at the windows but all were boarded up with warped, decay-weakened wood.

We walked around back.

There the back yard really opened up and though it was overgrown too you could tell by its size and by the solid shelter-belt surrounding it like a barricade that this had once been a sturdy household. If we looked we probably would’ve found a break in the trees where a lane would’ve been, leading beyond to some squat wooden bins where spare tractor tires and rolls of fence-wire might still remain.

It was one of the last nice days of the year and it was a quiet road. The house was an excuse to stay out in the sun. We went back to the truck and got a football. We went back to the back yard and starting tossing the ball.

“This is silly,” my friend said after awhile. I didn’t disagree.

As we were walking back a sound came from within.

It was a thumping sound.

Thump thump thump thump.

It came from inside the house and it came from the second level. Something was banging against the dried and wooden windows along the second floor.

It didn’t stay in one place. There was one window up to the right.

Thump thump thump thump.

When we heard it we looked and then we heard it again, without ample pause, from the window up and to the left:

Thump thump thump thump!

Then we heard it from the back.

Thump THUMP THUMP THUMP!

Then again we heard it. But this time it came from even higher. It must have come from the attic.

THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP!!

My friend suddenly and angrily threw the football at one of the windows. Survival instinct, maybe.

It cracked through the weak wood and flew in.

“No way I’m getting that,” I said.

“No way I’m getting that either,” said my friend. “Sorry. I didn’t think it would go through.”

“No problem. Let’s just go.”

“We shouldn’t have come here,” said my friend.

“Nope. This was stupid,” I said. Then we ran.

We ran back to the truck.

We got in.

I backed up.

I backed up and started going the opposite way we had come. Towards home.

The house was on the passenger’s side. As I pulled away we both saw it coming towards us: a perfect spiral.

The football slammed against the truck’s passenger window. It hit right where my friend’s head would have been had the window been open.

“Jesus fuck!” he said.

I tore away. I drove 120 down the grid and 140 up the highway.

I dropped off my friend back in the city. I drove home.

The next morning I was asked to come back over to my friend’s place but not by my friend, by his wife.

I drove over.

“I-I don’t know what to do,” she told me. “I called the police but I don’t want them to think… But I was working so they can’t think I did it, can they?”

She had been waiting outside on the doorstep.

She was a nurse and she must’ve just come off work; she was still in her scrubs.

Her scrubs were smeared in the front and her hands were pale and smeared and trembling.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said again. “I just came home and… And the way he… He can’t have done that himself, he can’t have. He can’t have done that to himself. He can’t have. He can’t have. He can’t have…“

I went inside and upstairs to their bedroom.

He was on the floor and my friend’s wife was right; he couldn’t have slashed himself open like that.

Over and over.

All over his stomach.

His arms.

Deep through the pants of his legs.

And then there was one long slash, it followed the hair-line of his forehead. It then cut off abruptly as if he had died while still scalping himself.

There was a message in streaky-red above the headboard of the bed:

WHY WON’T YOU PLAY WITH ME???

Later that night I came home.

In my state I could see three of them waiting there on the bed but I knew that that was just the booze.

My football.

Halloween ’17

 

Night 4: “Halloween’s a Time for Family”

 

The night was young and the house was dark.

The neighbour’s house had two levels and a deck with bannisters and the bannisters were decorated in wisps of string like cobwebs.

In the windows there were paper silhouettes. A warty witch in one, a tuxedoed vampire in another, and Frankenstein’s monster in another.

In the lawn there was a blow-up ghost 7-foot tall and tombstones. The tombstones were slanted and said RIP.

At the door there was a welcome mat that said “HELL-come to our HOUSE!” and had a pitchfork beneath the caption.

It was Oct. 28^th.

The night was cloudy. The wind breezy and chilled.

The guy who lived next door was out and about and currently he was taking the garbage to the curb. He turned. He saw Tom, the neighbour with the wispy bannisters and tombstones. Tom was in the front yard adding to his decorations.

He was digging around some props. Little baby arms and baby legs stuck up from freshly-dug ground before two of the tombstones. One was already finished and the other Tom was finishing.

“Hey there, Tom. Looking good!” said the neighbour.

“Hey there, Steve,” said Tom. “Yes, thank you.”

Steve went inside.

The next night was Oct. 29^th and Steve was pulling his garbage can up the driveway this time.

“Hey Tom,” said Steve as he passed. “Creepy mummy there. Looks good.”

Tom was in his front lawn. He was just setting up a mummy for Halloween. It was almost as tall as Tom was and ugly and its eyes were wide and staring from between its wrappings.

“Hey Steve,” said Tom. He didn’t look around.

The next night was Oct. 30^th and when Steve came home late from work he saw two more figures on Tom’s front lawn. One was a witch and the other was a zombie. The witch had a pale face and looked almost real and the zombie really did look like a decomposed body.  Tom was out there with a small can and was applying paint to the witch’s face.

“Pretty good decorations this year, Tom!” said Steve.

Tom waved. He looked a little tired, though. Dark rings under his eyes. His eyes looked downcast and forlorn.

The next night the kids started showing up around five-thirty and Steve became busy and he didn’t notice when Tom and Tom’s wife and kids got home from trick or treating. It can’t have been too late. They had new-born twins to look after this year.

The next day was a work day. But none of the vehicles left Tom’s driveway.

When Steve got home later he noticed for the first time the last piece of decor Tom had added to his scene.

It was a hanged man. Right in front of the doorway. Before it was a stool where an empty bowl for Halloween candy had been left for trick-or-treaters.

The bowl had yet to be taken in. The hanged man had yet to be taken down.

There was something about that hanging man that made Steve stop and reconsider.

Then, he walked up to the Davidson’s front sidewalk and past the fresh tombstones, and past the witch and zombie, and past the wrapped mummy and as he got closer he saw the hanged man’s swollen face and now understood the smell coming not from a sewer grate or from some dead bird nearby, but from his neighbour’s lawn.

Oh God, Steve was now thinking, how did I not see? How did I not see? His decorations! His decorations! I complimented him on his damn decorations!”

 

Halloween ’17

 

Night 3: “The Lewd Witch”

 

I was six years old when I was first told the story about the witch named Ann.

Ann.

The Devil’s Misfit, according to my father; the Lewd Witch, according to my uncle.

I always laughed when they referred to her like that. It played so well into the tale they had concocted, the tale about the witch named Ann.

Evil, lewd, disgraceful Ann.

When my father had first told me about her it was a windy night in autumn.

I sat before him on the floor beside the hearth.

My eyes were wide as he gestured.

He gestured madly.

He would first raise his voice into growling thunder and then he would lower his voice into a conspirator’s murmur, and that was somehow always worse.

I have transcripted my father’s story here and it is written now as how I remember it being told, though by now my father is long dead:

She came from out east by night, my boy.

It was never in the daytime.

Whether she couldn’t bear the sunlight no one was sure; maybe she simply found the night most fitting for her deeds.

For dark they were my boy, dark they were.

And filthy.

There’s no other word for it.

Filthy.

And you would never have known she was there until she was on you digging her long and grimy and chipped and ragged fingernails down your neck and down in between your shoulder blades, your spine! And you’d be lucky if those nails found only flesh, boy. Oh yes. Only flesh. Only flesh and muscle.

It was said that she could reach out and clutch your very heart if you didn’t turn quick enough away.

You ran.

That’s what you did with a creature like her boy, you ran.

Your heart she’d use for some spell or other. She’d stew it with the intestines of pigs and the hooves of horses so she could pass the rest of the night with the other loathsome beasts and demons she kept in her company, and the other witches that would gather with her and were as filthy as she was.

Folks called her Ann.

Why Ann?

No one remembers by now.

Those who might are down there in the St. Mary’s nut-house if not already dead. I heard Ann went for those first, the ones who gave her her name.

I think she thought it too plain, too human. But that matters not. What matters is that she came here one night, boy. Right here. She did!

She came right up to that window there, and peered in… Peering, peering, and creeping.

She was some witch alright.

Standing there on a dark night like this with a wintry wind wildly whispering its ill-intentions and the shadowed shades of the witch’s long and straightened hair shining from the light of the hearth’s fire. The fire-light glinted sickly off her shining, showing, always showing teeth which the fire turned from pearly white to yellow.

Her eyes were dark. Save for a speck of gold within each reflecting the inside devil-light, her eyes were dark. I stared and stared at her, not believing, and she never blinked once, I tell you. Not once.

Then when I looked away to see where your mum be I looked back and the witch was gone. I had looked back to the window and she wasn’t there. I heard a knocking at the door.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Devil’s tail boy! She was knocking at the door! And what would you do about it, eh? How would you face this devil’s misfit who looked to enter through your front door? Would you dare open it?

Aye, but I had to didn’t I?

Yes I did. A witch don’t come around unless she’s looking for some kind of mischief alright, and she won’t leave without getting it. And I knew very damn well what danger that meant for you, for your mum. So I went and I opened the door.

“Yes,” I said to the lady who came only at night.

The wind seemed to have stopped.

She stared at me.

The hideousness of her body was filthily plain to see.

She wore naught but underclothes in the chill air. If she was affected by the cold it did not show. And she wore gloves, too: as black as the rest of her rags they stretched up to her elbows like the legs of a spider. Never trust a woman willing to shed clothing to show skin boy, never trust em. I suppose it’ll be your skin their wanting next to wear for clothes. Why else wear the gloves eh? Skinning’s a messy business, that’s why. So never trust em. Never.

Deep down their kind are all just filthy and deceased, spineless little –

[At this I interjected and asked my father what happened with the witch at the door]

Aye. She was there. But I was standing in front of her and between her and the door and I wasn’t worth my table’s salt if I didn’t have some protection. I had my cross around my neck, see. And I had my knife, poking from my back. I kept my hands on my hips, like, so it was within easy reach.

“What d’you want?” I asked her.

“Your boy,” she answered. “He’s mine.”.

“Well, you won’t be gettin him,” I said. “You best be off now. Be off!”

Oh! But then her eyes turned from fire into ice and boy that’s a terrible thing to see in any woman, mind, but especially dangerous in a witch.

She hissed at me suddenly. Beginning some sort of spell.

She bared her teeth like a common beast’s.

Then she coiled her shoulders up like a lunging cat and lifted her twisted hands as if strike out for a heart.

She pounced!

[“No!” I remember yelling at my father, thinking for a second he was surely about to spring at me… Only I didn’t believe that it was he who was before me but the witch, the shadow of the witch somehow coming for me. My father would then lean back, back into his chair now collected and calm as if nothing at all extraordinary had happened in his story, and he continued:]

Yes my boy. She lunged at me. I grasped my knife but there was nothing I could do to fend her, she was quick. She pushed me, pushed me back through the door, and made to enter the house.

But at the doorway she suddenly stopped.

She couldn’t cross the threshold of the door.

She screamed at me, screamed at me her curses.

But without hesitation I took my blade out and went forward and thrust it fully into the witch’s heart. Then she straightened. Then she fell down. Down. Dead at my feet.

She clutched me as she fell down. I pried her fingers off me and let her lie there. I prayed for her soul and rejoiced that it would reside now in Hell and never worry us again.

But son, why couldn’t she gain entry into this home? Why didn’t she harm with her curses, or take my heart when she had lunged at me?

Well, I suspect it was her very nature that forbade her.

She who was unjust and worthless and vain could not enter this house where virtue and faith resided. Do you see that my boy? Do you see? It was not the blade that saved me and your mum and you that night from the witch who came knocking on this front door, but our faith! It is more powerful than any force on earth, you know. ‘Specially that of the Devil’s.

So that’s it. That is the end of the tale. And be warned: I did not tell you this for sport. There is a lesson here and one that you should always, always abide by. Otherwise you will turn into something like her…something like that evil, lewd witch named Ann. And a terrible shame that would be my son, a terrible shame. Promise me you will stay pious and promise me to stay righteous and of good faith. Promise me boy. Promise me.

And I promised.

That story had kept me wary of doors for many wakeful nights after its initial telling. That night when I had first been told the tale I had made my promise to my father but later on I forgot the finer points of the story and I all but forgot about the promise and this Lewd Witch.

That is, until years later when I saw her with my own eyes.

She was inside an old unnamed building not in service for decades. On a wall there were tattered posters glued, and below them a faded list of rules. And right there above the rules was Ann:

 

  1. Pasties and full pants are to be worn. Pasties are to be other than flesh coloured and securely attached. If you should lose a pastie, cover yourself appropriately and go off stage and the orchestra will cut your act. All panties will be other than flesh coloured and have a two inch strip of heavier material up the middle of the back.

  2. Once you start to remove your clothing, you cannot touch your body with your hands.

  3. You cannot communicate with the audience: i.e talking, noises, give away items to patrons.

  4. Do not touch curtains, walls or proscenium.

  5. You are not permitted to lie down on stage or run-way

  6. You are not permitted to bump a prop.

  7. You are not permitted to make any body movements that in the eyes of the public would simulate an act of sexual intercourse.

  8. You cannot run any article of clothing between your legs.

  9. After the first performance Friday, you must return to the mezzanine where your act will be analyzed by management. When your act has been reviewed and deletions are made from your routine, you will do your act as approved by the management for the balance of the engagement

Ann. Ann Perri. Perri is my surname. And the woman on this old poster would be no older than my parents. Staring at her picture I saw that her face shared the same features as me and my father.

Could it be?

Could it be that the Lewd Witch, this Devil’s Misfit Ann, was not a witch at all but my father’s poor sister, disgraced, and welcomed back into her family’s home with a knife and with a prayer now so long ago?

Halloween ’17

 

Night 2: “The Lantern”

 

Memories aren’t scripted. They are not fixed in every telling.

The child sits in front of me.

She sits cross-legged.

I creak in my rocking chair.

Her blue eyes shine. The fire to the side is very strong.

She asks me what it was like, and I continue rocking in my chair.

I slowly begin again:

Thoughts are not theatres, I say to her, running encores before fading backdrops. The mind doesn’t work that way – flawlessly. Events tangle. Change. They dwindle into details.  What happened, why were they there – who knows? The time has gone.

On my part I know only a little of this story – pieces of a memory and no more.

This is what I say I saw.

A lantern was on the ground.

A ring of pale yellow surrounded it. The flame inside was dim, wane.

I remember the hay lining the stable’s far walls and I remember the stable’s smell.

And I remember the hand.

It lay on the floor with the dirt and straw. Its fingers were curled into its palm. The tips were turning blue around the nails.

I remember the hand and I remember its wrist. Thin. And I remember the sleeve of its coat. Grey. And I know that the coat had once been brown.

I remember the man’s face. Stiff. I remember his lips thick and purple and his high cheeks like stone.

His hair was long and bristly.

The pony-tail was out and the hair had sprawled in the dirt and his eyes were hollow-like.

The winter air was sharp and fiery.

At the man’s side on his coat was a stain. Muddy red. In my hand, cold and indifferent, was a knife. My hand was crusted to it. It was stuck by the blood that had run over it.

Yes, granddaughter. I know I killed this man. An Indian but a man. Yes.

But this is nothing. This is nothing! For then the corpse had come to life.

It’s eyes were space-less and agape, child, and then they closed.

They opened.

They blinked again.

To my horror the corpse slowly turned its head to me.

It talked then. Its voice was raspy and its jaw was stiff. Its lips were blue at the edges. Thin air puffed out.

“Why?” it asked.

I could see the ice on its tongue and they looked like tiny crystals. The lantern still burned. It cast its silhouettes everywhere.

“You were acting as a beast!” I cried. “A terrible man! I was protecting my own property. I knew not who you were or what you were. You were on my farm. You were in my barn. I couldn’t hesitate! I knew not what you were!”

The corpse listened. The stain at its side didn’t grow.

When I had finished, it smiled.

“If true, then Death abates all sins, White Man,” it said with its smile.

Then the lantern guttered and then the lantern went out.

Blackness.

Hastily and clumsily I relit the lantern. Its light flourished again.

My eyes swept over the stable but it was an empty stable. The empty silhouettes danced and were plenty. The dead man’s body wasn’t there.

My granddaughter asks me now by the fireside, “Grandpa, do you think it hurts to die?”

Yes, I say. I think it does.

“But the dead man left you alive?”

But the dead man left me alive.

“He could’ve killed you?”

He could have.

“He must’ve been a good man, grandpa.”

He must’ve been, child. He must’ve been.

Then I stopped rocking in my rocking chair for I was very, very tired.

The Furrow Near the Lake

There was a furrow near the lake, a rift in the ground created by the roots of the trees, and that was where she’d died.

He can remember her hair was auburn – she had told him auburn, he had thought it brown – and later he’ll think he can remember the smells of fern and sage. Her eyes were open.

He had been sitting at her feet. He had reached over her body to cradle her hands and then he’d crossed her hands across her belly. She wore a white dress. The dress went down past her knees. Red patterns on it. Shapes. Nothing particular. Designs then. The dress had thin straps, worn over thin shoulders, a thin neck, her pierced ears had no earrings.

Then he had let her go. His left hand had left her right hand. He breathed. The air felt sick. The breath was shallow.

The world turned, moved and moved on and eventually he stood, and though he couldn’t help it and nor did he desire it he turned and moved on too.

Nem

“Is it that you’re scared to write?” Nem asked me. I was in his home. I had not been writing of late.

“No,” I said. Then, “Yes.”

“You think the resevoir that is your ideas is only so big,” Nem mused.

“Yes. But that’s only half the fear. That’s the half any writer can write about.”

“But not you?” said Nem, “What’s the other half?”

“If there’s one resevoir for ideas there’s a separate one for energy.”

“They’re not one and the same?”

“No. Separate. The first is taken from life experience and the second from the experience of writing. It takes energy to create the world the idea takes place in. The idea itself rarely takes energy at all.”

“Where does the second-half of your fear come into it?” asked Nem.

“I don’t know. It comes surely from fear of being wrong, I think.”

“You think that if you’re going to use up your resevoirs, you want to be sure it’ll be worthwhile?”

“Not worthwhile. Just… It needs to be perfect. It needs to be perfectly true. I’m scared that almost everything I write isn’t perfectly true and it isn’t worth the time or ideas if it can’t be. I’m scared of writing for nothing.”

“But writing is always for nothing,” said Nem. “All art is. Art is there never to be understood, only interpreted. When something is open to interpretation it becomes anything anyone wants it to be. Thus there is no true meaning but many meanings. Any purpose you may have behind your writing will get lost in this, it’s the price every artist knowingly pays. I don’t need to be telling you this.”

“But from many interpretations cannot, in time, come one solidified interpretation? This is what we call Truth, and it is what true artists will strive for. It’s not a divine kind of truth but it’s the best that humans have. I want my stories to carry a ring of this truth. It is the reason I write.”

“So if you feel like you’ve fallen short of this Truth – or I guess if you feel like you will fall short – you balk?”

“Like I said, truth is the reason I write. I have no interest in fiction for fiction’s sake nor in creation for the sake of creation. If I can’t write something that is true I cannot will myself to write at all.”

“And, being a man, you are fraught with insecurity and indecision with any growth you make as a human being, and truth then becomes a contradictory and impossible thing, in your life let alone your writing?”

“Often, yes.”

“Then you are becoming too silent with yourself,” said Nem. “You are growing into yourself and as you do your world views grow too but their expanding borders make you grow neutral to conflicts between them. But neutrality never helps anyone. Neutrality is only the opporessor’s weapon, never the oppressed’s. There is no good or bad in this world but as a man you must decide what is good for you and what is bad for you.”

“Give a real-life example. You speak too often in the abstract.”

“Smoking,” Nem said. “Is good for the soul and bad for the body  but the reasons why you smoke have nothing to with either. You smoke because you have your reasons to smoke. That’s all there is to it and there is no morality to it except that you do it, or that you don’t do it. Morality is only the rationalizing for why we do or don’t do things.”

“I don’t write without aiming for truth.”

“Then either sharpen your aim for a more concise truth, or broaden your aim for a greater number of truths. But know that, regardless, any  truth is not in this world, it’s in you.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “There are goood things in the world such as generosity, and there are bad things in the world such as violence.”

“Some things are beneficial or harmful for the community, and if one lives in a community it’s the community and the community’s safety and pleasure that comes before the self. Violence and generosity is bad or good depending on the community’s needs for safety and pleasure, and not based on the community’s individuals generalizing what’s needed now compared to what was needed or will be needed.”

“Yes, yes,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Generalizing without context doesn’t work. I know this. It doesn’t help my struggle with writing.”

“Writing like anything takes will,” said Nem. “But will-power  is not from within, it’s from the world – the world must inspire someone to make someone want to participate in it, in any way let alone in artful ways. That’s the great illusion of will; it comes from without and not within. Truth however is from within and not without. This difference you must reconcile. This is the difference between your two resevoirs and a bridge of some sort is needed.”

“I can’t think of what that bridge would be,” I said.

“Can’t you?” Nem asked. “You came here, did you not? You may not be sure in your inner truths, friend, but you have questions to lead to truths. If you can’t write about what you know, then write about what you learn; if you can’t write about what you’ve learned, then write about what you question.”

“Pff,” I said. “Easy for you to say.”

“True, and for you it’s easier to write.”

Ladders and Steps

I never really liked the man.

I don’t think I ever really knew him but I don’t mind. He was a good man, I suppose. The truth was that he was only good when it served a purpose but he had many purposes, so he seemed often a good man.

His root fear of his being, which is the same as my root fear, is failure through obscurity. He likes and has come to need a kind of daily chaos in his life which allows him to forget his fear. It makes him focus instead on action and so he continuously creates action, until it is chaos, and because he has created this chaos he feels power for controlling it and this sense of power defeats his fear until tomorrow, when he must create more. He is also the kind of man who equates this continuous chaos as a kind of journey for peace. I do not agree with this philosophy, but it is better, I think, then a lot of men do with fear.

One day I found him on the steps of a theatre. He was dressed very nicely, his hair was neatly combed and gelled. He seemed perhaps a little thinner around his neck.

He spoke to me without asking, “I’m done for, you know. I’ve lost everything.”

Everything he had lost was already gone – debt, and his attempts to buy his way out had not worked. I don’t know where he is today.

I feel little satisfaction in seeing a man climb a ladder you see is rotten at the top. A rung underfoot snapped, he fell, and now we all get to climb a little higher.

The ladder is rigged, and built downwards from those up top. It’s built so that they stay there; it is a form of defense, not openness. We, those who take its hold, should know this but if we do we step upwards anyway and little changes when one of us falls except a slight shift in the large bulk of human mass, gradually turning over like the skin of an ancient creature shaking off some rain.

And so we exist. We shift and wonder why the rain is wondrous.

The Lewd Witch

I was six years old when I was told this ghost story about the witch, Ann. Ann. The Devil’s Misfit, according to my father;  the Lewd Witch, my uncle called her. I always laughed when they referred to her like that. It played so well into the tale they had concocted about her, this woman named Ann.

Evil, lewd, disgraceful Ann.

When my father had told me about her it was a windy night in autumn. I sat before him on the floor beside the hearth. My eyes were wide as he gestured. He gestured madly. He first raised his voice like growling thunder then he lowered it to a conspirator’s murmur which was somehow worse. I have transcripted my father’s story here and it is written how I remember it and as he told it, though by now he is long dead:

She came out from the east by night. It was never in daytime. Whether she couln’t bear the sunlight no one was sure; maybe she simply found the night most fitting for her deeds, for dark they were my boy, dark they were. And filthy. There’s no other word for it. Filthy. And you would never have known she was there until she was on you, digging her long and grimy and chipped and ragged fingernails down your neck and down between your shoulder blades, your spine! And you’d be lucky if those nails found only flesh boy. Oh yes. Only flesh. Only flesh and muscle. It was said that she could reach out and clutch your very heart if you didn’t turn quick enough away. You ran. That’s what you did from a creature like her boy, you ran. Your heart she’d use for some spell or other. She’d stew it with the intestines of horses and the hooves of pigs so she could pass the rest of the nights with the other loathsome things she kept in her company and the other witches that were as filthy as she was.

They called her Ann. Why Ann? No one remembers by now. Those who might are down in St. Mary’s Bedlam if not already dead. I heard Ann went for those first, the ones who gave her her name. I think she thought it too plain but that matters not. What matters is that she came here one night boy, right here. She did!

She came right up to that window there, and peered in… Peering, peering, creeping. She was some witch alright, standing there, on a dark night like this one with the wind wisping the shadowed shades of her long and straightened hair and the light from the hearth’s fire glinting sickly off her shining, showing, always showing teeth which the fire turned from pearly white to yellow. Her eyes were dark. Save for a speck of gold within each reflecting the inside light, her eyes were dark. She never blinked once, I tell you. Not once. Then when I looked away to see where your mum be the witch was gone. I had looked back to the window and she wasn’t there. I heard a knocking at the door.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Devil’s tail boy! She was knocking at the door! And what would you do about it, eh? How would you face this devil’s misfit who wanted to enter through your front door? Would you dare open it?

Aye, but I had to didn’t I?

Yes I did. I needed to get in the way for your mum and for her to carry you if you suddenly needed to run… And I knew very damn well that’s what it could come down to alright. So I went and I opened the door.

“Yes,” I said to the lady who came out only at night.

The wind seemed to have stopped. She stared at me. The hideousness of her body was filthily plain to see. She wore naught but underclothes in the chill air. She wore gloves too, which was strange. As black as the rest of her rags the gloves stretched up to her elbows like the legs of a spider. Never trust a woman willing to shed clothing for skin boy, never trust em. I suppose it’ll be your skin their wearing next for clothes. Why else wear the gloves eh? Skinning’s a messy business, that’s why. So never trust em boy. Never. Deep down their kind are all just filthy and deceased, spineless  little –

[At this I interjected and asked my father what happened with the woman at the door]

Aye. She was there. But I was standing in front of her and between her and the door and I wasn’t worth my table’s salt if I didn’t have some protection should she suddenly use force. I had my knife, see, poking from my back. I kept my hands on my hips, like, so it was within easy reach.

“What d’you want?” I asked her.

“Your boy,” she answered. “He’s mine.”.

“You won’t be gettin him,” I said. “You best be off to some other poor friend. Be off!”

Oh, but then her eyes turned from fire to ice and boy that’s a terrible thing to see in any woman but especially dangerous in a witch. She hissed at me suddenly. She bared her teeth like a common beast’s. She coiled her shoulders up like a lunging cat and lifted her twisted hands as if strike out for a heart. She lunged!

[“No!” I remember yelling at my father, thinking for a second he was surely about to spring at me… Only I didn’t believe that it was he who was there but the witch, and I believed in her because through the story I felt terror and through my terror she took form. My father would then step back, collected and calm as if nothing at all extraordinary had happened in his story, and continue:]

Yes my boy. She lunged. I grasped my knife but there was nothing I could do to get it out to fend her, she was quick. She pushed me back, through the door, and there she suddenly stopped. She couldn’t cross the threshold of the door. Then without a hesitation I took my blade out and thrust it fully into the witch’s heart, and she straightened from her lunge and she fell down, down, dead at my feet. I prayed for her soul and rejoiced  that it would reside now in Hell and never worry us again.

Son why couldn’t she gain entry into this home? Well, I suspect it was her very nature that forbade her. She who was unjust and worthless and vain could not enter this house where virtue and faith and love resided. Do you see that my boy? Do you see? It was not the blade that saved me and your mum and you that night from the witch who came knocking on this front door, but our faith! It is more powerful than any force on earth, you know. ‘Specially that of the Devil’s.

So that’s it my son. That is the end of the tale. And be warned: I did not tell you this for sport. There is a lesson here and one that you should always, always abide by. Otherwise you will turn into something like her…something like that evil misfit Ann. And a terrible shame that would be my son, a terrible shame. So promise me you will stay pious and promise me to stay righteous and of good faith. Promise me boy. Promise me.

And I promised.

That story had kept me wary of all manner of doors and windows for many wakeful nights after its initial telling. That night I had made my promise to my father but later on I forgot the finer points of the story and I didn’t bother with them as my life carried its course and the years passed and eventually I all but forgot the promises and lessons and the Lewd Witch. That is until years later, when I saw her with my own eyes.

She was on a tattered poster, glued inside an old unnamed building not in service since the early sixties. Beneath her image was painted on the wood a list of rules:

  1. Pasties and full pants are to be worn. Pasties are to be other than flesh coloured and securely attached. If you should lose a pastie, cover yourself appropriately and go off stage and the orchestra will cut your act. All panties will be other than flesh coloured and have a two inch strip of heavier material up the middle of the back.

  2. Once you start to remove your clothing, you cannot touch your body with your hands.

  3. You cannot communicate with the audience: i.e talking, noises, give away items to patrons.

  4. Do not touch curtains, walls or proscenium.

  5. You are not permitted to lie down on stage or run-way

  6. You are not permitted to bump a prop.

  7. You are not permitted to make any body movements that in the eyes of the public would simulate an act of sexual intercourse.

  8. You cannot run any article of clothing between your legs.

  9. After the first performance Friday, you must return to the mezzanine where your act will be analyzed by management. When your act has been reviewed and deletions are made from your routine, you will do your act as approved by the management for the balance of the engagement

Ann. Ann Perri. Perri is my surname. And the woman on this old poster would be no older than my parents. Staring at her picture I saw that her face shared the same features as me and my father.

Could it be?

Could it be that the Lewd Witch, the Devil’s Misfit Ann, was not a witch at all but my father’s disgraced sister, welcomed back into her family’s home with a knife and with a prayer that night, now so long ago?

 

*Image from  http://silenttoronto.com/?p=2068, who had in turn printed the image with permission from The Toronto Star, dated April 29, 1962. **The list of “requirements of vaudeville acts”: Fulford, Robert. “Crisis at the Victory Burlesk,” pp.255-258, The Underside of Toronto,  McLelland & Stewart, 1970

Shelter-belt

“What was that?” asked Tim. He straightened from his struggle with his root that refused to break against the iron of his hoe.

“Nothing,”  replied Sam, his eyes were already downcast.

Tim sniggered, now looking back to the root.

“Sounds like you were reciting poetry there, little brother,” he said.

“Was not,” Sam said. The spade in his hand struck the earth with inspiration. “Besides I don’t know no poetry to be recitin.”

Tim shook his head. Tim had found a cracked book with a green cover that had had a suspicious air to it. Tim had found the book with the green cover where the dirty magazines should have been. For this Tim had great reason to fear. Fear perhaps great enough to go to father. Father would surely help direct the boy’s interests. Father would make sure the family name was upheld. Father would make sure that both of his sons turned out right. Poetry didn’t give a man pleasure. Words couldn’t give a man pleasure because words couldn’t touch a man,  a woman could. And anyone who liked poetry more than women was a queer. In fact in Tim’s sixteen years of life experience he’d surmised that if anyone liked anything more than women he was a queer. It was as simple as that. Father had told him as much. It was as simple as that. The day of Tim’s sixteenth birthday father had given him money and had told him to go out and spend it on a fine whore. Tim didn’t find a fine whore but he found one and with the money left over he had bought his brother candy.

“You know,” Tim said now. “You could try being a little more… A little like father, you know.”

Sam stopped with his spade at mid-strike and his elbow out and high. “What do you mean ‘a little like dad’?”

“Or Uncle Johnny,” said Tim. “Or someone like them, you know?” Tim thought, God he can be so sensitive on things like this. Doesn’t he know that he needs to become a man? Doesn’t he know that our father would’ve beat him silly if it had been him and not me who had found that book with the green cover? God, come the right time dad won’t waste money on Sam’s whore. He’ll just beat Sam until Sam sees right.

Sam was saying, “Uncle Johnny’s a drunk. He’s always drinking hard liquor. ”

“What’s wrong with hard liquor? If you can’t drink hard liquor drink beer.”

“Uncle Johnny can hardly speak with that swollen tongue of his and always his favourite stories involve either a woman hitting him while walking away or him hitting  a woman who hasn’t walked away fast enough.”

“At least he likes women!” burst Tim. He winced.

Sam swung his spade into the ground. “You don’t need to worry about that,” he said.

The shelter-belt they had been instructed to start this morning had made fine progress. Now that it was early evening a straight or somewhat straight line of shallow holes were ripe for new trees. The dirt piles beside each hole had long shadows which looked like fingers. They stretched along the lawn and the shadows of the brothers stretched along the lawn.

“Then why do you have the book with the green cover under your bed?” asked Tim.

“I like girls as much as the next man.”

“But men don’t read that stuff.”

“Who doesn’t read what stuff?”

“Men don’t. They don’t read that stuff like poems.”

“Sure they do. Some do.”

“Some do but mostly only certain ones do. Father doesn’t like them.”

“Dad doesn’t like a lot of people and he doesn’t know anything. Neither do you.”

“I might!” said Tim. Somehow his hands were empty and one fist was raised.

Just then, from the front yard their mother’s voice.

“Boys! Supper.”

“Coming!” Tim yelled back. He took up his hoe and Sam straightened with his spade. They began walking back to the house.

“You know,” Tim said, abruptly and with despair,

“Sometimes I feel like the world is closing in so much and is so small I could suffocate in it.”

“You know,” Sam said,  “Sometimes I feel like the world is expanding so much and is so big I could fall into it.”

At supper the boys told their father this and over the table he shook his head.

“You boys still think it’s the world that changes?” he asked.

Morning Change

“Good God,” he said. The man who was not young stared down at the table. The table stood with a limp in the middle of the small kitchen. “I think my life has changed today.”

The man’s voice was heard by the toaster in the corner on the counter-top and the dirty, dish-laden sink was also eavesdropping. Presently the room seemed to lean in towards the man as if eager to learn more. Sunlight glowed off the white cupboards and drawers. It was morning.

The man’s eyes were wide beneath their bushy white roofs called eyebrows. The eyes were divided by a singular trunk of a nose which divided the man’s face. His lips were parted slightly, failing to cover buck teeth, browned in his saliva-perforated mouth. Below was a weak chin. Two ears stapled to the sides of the man’s head happily twitched a little in his excitement. The man’s life may have changed.

After some minutes the man got to his feet. His thin, over-practised legs trembled like a tree about to be put to the axe. The man’s brown cane shook slightly under his clamping grip. He left the chair untucked from the table and deserted the crumbs dispersed along his plate. The glass of milk was empty.

He walked from the kitchen. In his stride was purpose, defiance, a will to get something done and done now like the old days. His eyes were hard and reedy. He didn’t slow as he passed the living room. He turned his back to the entrance hall and front door. The man continued to the other side of the house and paused long enough at the back door to clasp its knob. The old man stepped out of the house and into his back yard.

It was a clumsy space. Junk littered the square of wild-looking grass. If there were treasure there it lay somewhere buried by nature, and it would be rusty. The grand-kids used to like playing around the miscellaneous playground but now they were grown. Their children were too young yet for this dangerous battlefield or this haunted park or this Olympic-worthy obstacle course. The man feared that by the time his great-grandchildren came of age he would be dead.

The man stayed on the step. It was raised like a podium above the messy grass. He stayed there maybe to catch his breath or maybe to enjoy the lawn. I should clean the place up, he thought, make it habitual again. How easy was it to break an ankle in some dense hole? Very easy. Not safe at all. He would have to change that. Tomorrow afternoon seemed a good time.

With that decided the man turned back into the house. He crept back through the living room, not heeding the picture frames on the wall or placed on the shelves around the tv. He made his way to the kitchen, ignoring the entrance hall. Then he sat down to eat his breakfast. The toast was ready, he could smell it. The butter was melted to just the right spot in the middle of the top piece. The glass of milk was pure and full. It was a sunny morning.

The man sat down to eat his breakfast. It smelled very good. He reflected that he ate this same toast with butter and drank from the same brand of milk every morning. He would need to change that. Starting tomorrow morning, he would eat something different. That seemed a good time.

For now though the man picked up the glass and brought it to his mouth. It of course was empty.

The man’s eyes widened in astonishment, his bushy brows knitted above the orbs. His mouth kept slightly open ready to drink what was not there. His ears involuntarily and painfully twitched in his surprise. He looked down, and there was no toast on the table. An empty plate with crumbs. Who knows how long it’s been that way.

“Good God,” the old man said.  “I think my life has changed today.”

 

Antsy

An ant had crawled onto my shoe.

Frankly it was repulsive. I couldn’t feel it. The idea of the thing making its crittery contact on my foot to within layers of my skin, though – 

Oh God! What if it crawled up under my jeans and tangled itself in my leg hair?

I shiver and it feels like a trickle of water or a stream of running ants going down my back. Ugh. I suddenly feel ants everywhere. There’s not an army of one to contend with anymore – there could be a dozen or a hundred or a multitude.

Oh God!

I can feel their tiny camps along my arms. A clandestine regalia is in formation on my right calf. A tremendous squadron of them troop across my abdomen. A score have somehow claimed my nose and it tingles. One regiment has joined forces with an adjacent battalion and have created a brigade tramping through the thickets of my hair. I feel one on my earlobe. I feel one on my wrist. On my big toe. How did an ant get on my toe? I’m not sure but it must have and I can feel one now two and now two dozen twitching the twinges of my forehead too. It itches and I scratch away. But when I look down at my hand there are no ant guts.

Oh, damn you all.

The ants seemed to have mastered invisibility.

No matter.

My hand is large enough to squash the be-dickens out of them visible or no. I’ll show them. I’ll show them all their folly. They may believe themselves clever clamoring over me as they have and so quick. Well good on them for making it this far. But no more! It is time to create havoc of my own. Ants, prepare for devastation.

I slap down on my wrist like a riding switch. I swiftly and without mercy sweep hard my ass. I run fingers through my hair, each digit a scythe of doom wreaking pain and war and despair. I can imagine a fountain of the tiny critters falling away from me. Like a dog shaking himself of fleas. I’m inspired by this thought and wriggle my fur of enemies and fancy I hear their little screams of terror as the ants careen off with their makeshift ant-flags back to the ground where they had come from.

Eventually it is done. The battle is over. It was long, harsh, and ruthless. Losses were suffered on both sides: the numbers and numbers of ants who had either plummeted to their deaths or were beheaded by my fingernails, and for me, why, perhaps my sanity had been in danger of slipping off one of their bumpy backs there for a time. I had had to be careful; they tended to wait until I wasn’t looking before they niggled out a piece of my brain and stole away with it through an ear. Unlucky for them though I gave them a different piece of my mind.

It is over now. They are gone. I have won. Thank goodness graciousness.

But as I turned to walk away I happened to peer down at my shoe perhaps to ascertain that it was still there and whole and not lost during the war when I saw it, the first ant. Still there.

And crawling.

The Divine Can Cheat and Get Cheated Too

Stories don’t always flow for me and they haven’t been flowing lately but I have one now, so I’ll write it.

It’s cloudy outside today and that’s what reminded me.

Back in school I remember hearing about the Mother, and she was the girl in class you’d always pick on because she slept with many of her many boyfriends but she always showed up at school on Monday, brave girl. A lot of Mondays she shouldn’t have showed up to school. Some Mondays, yes. That’s because most weekends there were parties and if anything happened during the weekend and if it was bad it usually revolved around her somehow, this girl, the mother of all these stories we’d have for Monday.

She never got pregnant in school, and that was good. Her name began with an H. She was rich and a little bossy and on her sixteenth birthday she got a car. She didn’t like the colour of the car so she asked her dad if they could exchange it for a different one with a different colour and they did, so she showed up one Monday with a new new car. It was blue instead of red or pink or whatever it was. It was a Camry or something by Toyota or Hyundai and it was sportsy in a plastic kind of way so a lot of the shop guys hated it, they thought it was stupid and typical for the rich girl in town to have. Of course, I know they each would have fucked her if they could have — some maybe did but most were out of her league — and they probably all jacked-off to her every now and then, but shop guys don’t talk about those things in that way and they never think of themselves as hypocrites, no more than anyone else does.

Anyway, what the cloudy day reminded me of was not of the car or of the Mother but of what the Mother did one weekend.

Apparently she had had a boyfriend who wasn’t at this party, and her best girlfriend with her  own man ended up passing out at the house they were at. The girlfriend was still sleeping but the Mother came into the bedroom and proceeded to fuck the guy her best friend was with on the same bed.

They must have been very quiet or very quick, the couple, for I can’t really imagine the logistics of how it was possible and still be any good but it was funny, because on Monday all the buzz was about the the Mother and of how she was a cheating whore and of the scale of betrayal she had taken part in and of course must have instigated — because the boy never instigates these, ha —  but the boy who’d fucked the Mother right beside his own girlfriend never really cared and never got shamed on, in fact, I bet I wasn’t the only one jealous  of him. The guy not only had his pie and ate it too, the fucker got two pies.

Only, since then I’ve been caught playing all three parts of the age-old melodrama, being the cheater and the instigator and the one cheated on, and I must say those kind of situations are so sticky that no one really knows who to blame at the end of it all because no one who was there will comment on a situation like that, lest they make it worse. And, well, who the fuck are the rest of us anyway? Snivelling busy-bodies reporting on rumours that make us feel less shitty about the very things we secretly wish we could do.

And I guess that’s why I’m reminded of that story today: I have no one to cheat on, or with, no one.

We who were raised in thinking humanity is holy. So delusional sometimes.

The Keeper of Secrets II

The wood cracked.

Cracked, near the knob where the bolt that held the door impregnable would’ve been placed. It loosened its hold on the stone, no longer an overwhelming reinforcement but a wounded guard. With vigour renewed and not fuelled this time by fear nor rage but need I recommenced my pummelling around the handle. With each rasp I felt the wood retreat a little, more beaten slightly each time. Many minutes passed, a furious flurry of indestructible flesh against this unequal adversary. Then in an abrupt snap! the bolt gave way. The door had opened at last!

I fell forward in my suddenly unhindered momentum, landing on all fours on another stone landing. There was light in my new environment, and I could see nothing but shadows as my eyes, jolted from the lack of blanketing black, took time to adjust. Once my vision had returned – a grateful, joyous and impossibly enlivening! – I could view this new scene. The room was small, square, and with walls of stone; a single torch, mounted on an oily bracket the wall opposite of me, illuminating a bare room smaller than my height if I were to try and lay down. There were no other doors, no other entrances or exits save the one I had broke. This disconcerted me, and I looked to the heavens for some explanation. There, I beheld, was a door – a trap door. Opened from the floor above and more of a glassless window than a entrance. Twelve feet and out of my reach it was, impossible to get to.

Maniacal thought played with me, a dawning realization that jeered all my effort put forth.

I had heard of this notorious room. It was well known. It was used only for the damnest of prisoners. And this landing…

This landing was not its end, but its beginning.

My mind reeled, whirled, horribly accurate, unavoidably unrestrained. Fate was cheating, sneering at me, insisting its plan thwart my will, revealing the horrid err I had made. I here stood in a prison, a cell where the inmates were to be forced through the door above and descend, perhaps forever, the stairs. The torch lit to see the door… the door that was to be unbolted from the inside, the treacherous descent beyond a final, tantalizingly empty hope. A hope meant to toss out one’s senses into the black madness, the insanity of blindness, the heartlessness of nothing beyond…

Yes, I know the plot, Fate’s evil, twisted promise of Death, its most intimate and treasured companion. Yes, I knew, indeed, I knew this room. A familiarization came to me now, a vague but almost corporeal vision, intercepting my emotions and cutting through them with now-unhindered memories flashing through my being and becoming clearer now, ever clearer…

Slowly, without conscious meaning, I revolved around the room, turning a gradual circle, taking in the details… I had been here before. I know not how long ago now. Yes, indeed, I had been here. I had dropped, painfully, still in my night clothes and bare feet from the trap door above, thrust in by rough, merciless hands. And ere the gap of forgetfullness was closing, the journey between my lavish, comfortable sleep in my own familiar quarters to this wretched hell… it came to me as embers spark renewed into a monstrous flame…

Murder, they had said, mercilessly, the formless voices harshly crying in my ears. I knew not what they accused, my mind was groggy with slumber, and I did not comprehend that their proclamations were directed at me. Murder! they screeched again, and I opened my eyes. It was dark outside the windows and in the my quarters and there were bodies around my bed. I lay beneath thick covers in a feather mattress and those blankets were torn from my protection, stripped away in anger, in hatred, though I knew not why… They – the men, the policemen – grabbed me, shackled me like a wretched scoundrel, and, once secured, half-dragged and half-carried me out of my own house. A prisoner. No explanation was offered, there seemed to be nothing to pronounce, by their sure, poignant strides and brisk features. Six men surrounded me, two gripping my upper arms, two leading and two following. They took me away. They glanced at nothing but ahead, blinking hardly at all as we progressed through the streets and into a side alley. There, one of the two ahead of me turned and in a hoarse, grim voice stated more than asked, “Do you deny you have murdered your wife?”

I looked into cold eyes as he glared back into mine. His words echoed inside my skull, reflecting off its internal walls, distorting the sentence into minute, marrow-chilling phrases…

Deny … Murder … Your wife…Do you deny … Your wife … Murder…

What did they mean? What dare they speak about? My wife? Darlene? She had gone out this night, to meet with some colleagues. Yes, she was perhaps due to be home by this hour, but she couldn’t possibly be… She was merely late, likely now on her way home… What were these men saying to me this night so late?

Despite these thoughts I could not speak. My throat was dammed, and I began to tremble. What did they mean? What sick perversion were they meddling in, what cross humour could possibly arrange such lies?

The policeman moved to the side, unobstructing my view. A lantern flickered behind him. On the ground, with arms sprangled unceremoniously over her head, reposed my wife, my dear betrothed, my precious Darlene, my love… A smile lined her throat, a horrible sneer that was purplish-crimson; out of it trailed a scarlet path that pooled to the side. Her eyes, once beautifully alight with cloudless skies, remained open, dark,  empty.

O, the slanderous pain! O the tumultuous fright! I fell to my knees, was immediately caught by my escort, and dared not hold back my tears, my agony. No! This could not be! Hell and Heaven unite to propose such terrible love depart! I could not bear this sight! But lo! I could not dispel this coat of black paint imprinted on my soul. Paralysis stole my muscles, utter grief spoiled my very breath. My mind was rusted brown; rotted was my heart! Could I defend myself, speak forth against this atrocity? Nay, my tears bore out of dams that merely leaked the flooding turmoil within. My will was knotted and snapped; I dare not resist my captors and their wary assumptions, so stirred into my cantankerous internal well was I!

And so, dreary of tragedy, my escort lead me into their dungeons. Blurred streams of city streets, deep and dark, passed me as I was dragged to their lair. They believed me false, conceived and convinced that my strife was an act; an unauthentic ruse, a ploy – O how heartlessly blind men came to be in the tear-filled eyes of myself! They held no remorse for my pain, nor did they hesitate in my punishment. I knew not how the evidence voicing this ignoble deed, this foul treason, implicated me. But did I, could I speak forth? I say with hollow pride and stout pity, Nay – I did not – I could not! Such instinct, such intuitiveness fades when one such as I is immersed as I was in his own grief. My surroundings, my senses, faded into oblivion; they were trivial and insufficient in the red barren land where my soul had been dispersed. And so they threw me down, through the square hole, the trap door. For seconds, minutes or hours I stooped and did not rouse but merely cried out my madness and my innocence to the bare walls. Then, in immeasurable, unbearable return of instinct, I sought escape: I proceeded to descend through the door and into the darkness. I walked with demons, shapeless and vile, down, down, down,  in a loose, seemingly nonexistent spiral. Down, with the demons, not seen, not heard, but felt. Felt by my heart… In time unaccounted, I had reached the smoothness, flatness of a platform, a landing – the bottom of the stairs.

Blinded, half-delusional,  fragile, I attempted to further my journey. But I was weak, yes, fatigued, famished, overstrained. I do not recall falling down, collapsing like lead weight, nor do I remember thinking of falling down. I had merely blinked, the darkness beneath the lids a little lighter than the darkness without. I thought longingly, hopelessly, of my dearest wife Darlene, almost – but not aware of – wishing to join her, to be enveloped, reprieved, delivered by the substance of darkness, by the stone, the place that kept all secrets…

I then awoke, in this damnable state of blindness. I had walked, I know now, the wrong way; went up instead of down, withheld this madness in vain, vaporous hope! I had gone backwards, away from salvation, back to the beginning of my terrors…

I could not comprehend this, much as I could not be fully aware of my fleeting wish for death. Perhaps my sanity, in a desperate attempt of salvaging my mind, had banished my memories of how I came to be here, had ripped up my thoughts and threw them astray, into the darkness. It wasn’t the stone that held the secrets of eternity, not the cold stairs that hundreds had tread before me – no, not the stone, but the dark… The dark withheld the memories, the pain, the screams and cries and sights of its prisoners. Like a beastly draconian creature, a devil, hoarding its treasure, sniffing for its next feast, always clawing, always patient…

I was to be part of its need. I was to join the criminals and scoundrels and traitors before  me.

Join… to come together, to be as one, O how I wish now that such was possible, to join my dearest love…

And so it was:

A hope –

A true hope, a real hope, not false nor sneaked nor blemished –

I, to join my love!

I then turned to the gaping maw of black that had before been my entry into this room  and which was now to be my egress. With sure steps, not weak, but stable, I walked to the edge. Breath had fled me, as a sailor would a sinking ship. No matter… I was ready, I was hopeful… What I was about to do, at last, felt enticingly right.

I jumped, off to the side, away from the stairs… away into the darkness, so hallowed and welcoming…

Into the arms of the Keeper of Secrets I fell.

The Keeper of Secrets I

I blinked my eyes to darkness. For a moment I feared my sight had fled me and that I was blind. As blind as a bat drowning in a black river. Surely this was the doing of some sorcerer whom I incurred? A demon to rise and eclipse my senses?

But no, it is not. For I came to realize that beneath my back and calves was the chilly hardness only felt while lying onto stone. With horror did I realize that, not was my eyesight departed, but my very body displaced. I was no longer in my bedroom, in which I fell aslumber; no, not even amongst the same building. My quarters before were warm and soothing, like an angelic presence had enveloped, embraced, the walls, the furniture, and bed covers. That was welcoming, and how I longed for such a fair place now. Here, despite no tint of light, came the aura of some cell, some dank prison. My nostrils cringed at the salty scent of seaweed and algae, but there was no wind, no breeze that wafted this smell. The air around me was pressing, stifling my already drowned mind and heart, like the gloomy hand of Death had intercepted the seraphim’s embrace and clasped around me instead. It was a putrid place; my soul screamed so as my mind fought for order and reason. Fought in vain, after several moments of fruitless scrambling. I was not bound though my balance was severely disoriented, and it was firm stone on which I twisted onto my knees. I outstretched my arms, giving the pose of a pitiful man beseeching redemption. No wall or barrier skimmed my finger tips; the boundaries of my surroundings were unknown, or nonexistent. I tentatively waved my arms to and fro, above and behind my body, experimenting for any possible obstacle in immediate reach. No object was near me. The silence was heavy, like a thickly woven veil that suppressed my arms, face and chest. This stillness, this lack of danger, unnerved me most of all, though I have no reason why. Perhaps if something moved, or cried, or, indeed, did anything to make itself known, I would gain a depth, a direction, of my surroundings. As it was, I myself felt strongly disinclined to put sound in my own throat. Fear had closed such resources to me.

With excruciating effort I slowly put my feet under my weight. They were bare, not with the bandaging of a sock or slipper or shoe to protect them. Gradually, I stood, trembling, weak, for into my shock and my horror struck a streak a chilliness, spreading carnivorously and impossibly sharp under my skin. My hair on my arms and legs stretched; bumps crested as though mounds of tiny ants were crawling on my bones. The cold was deep, as a sword into an honourable grave or as the nails that holds its coffin fast. So I stood there, fighting to keep the horror and shock at bay. After a moment the stinging, piercing sensations of the cold began to quell. My breath, before shallow and timid, became more bold, more regular. An icy numbness settled within me, uncomfortable and unyielding despite my attempts to banish it. My mind as with my pulse came from fear and gradually into control. The order and reason I had sought seemed, for a time, less reluctant, more within reach. I revolved in a circle, my arms out from my sides like wings for balance. Still the darkness did not sway, but kept unnervingly immobile. Then, against my strongest intuition, I stepped forward. The ground greeted my foot earlier than I anticipated. I was on some kind of slope. Another step, nearly causing me to fall, revealed an even steeper incline. This venture inspired more, for my foot only half gained footing; the other half was in air, as though on a ledge. A stair! I marvelled. I was at the foot of a staircase! Still, this epiphany did nothing to give clue as to the whereabouts of where I was; it, if anything, made my situation more flustered. I ignored this fact, however; the chance that I was somewhere that man had been before lit a powerful emotion in me – hope. This staircase, I inferred, must lead to another somewhere – another location that was not only in my mind, not in some dreadfully malicious dream…

Without considering the possibilities of what lay behind me, I ascended. To what possible end was unbeknownst, but the action gave me purpose, fuelled my insecure hope. Three steps, I counted, then four, then five… Ten… Twenty… I continued to count, to resort back to the basic and familiar logic of adding one to another; like observing the seconds of a ticking clock in a bare room, it gave me a foundation of sanity, confirmation that some ability to reason was left to me.

Twenty turned to thirty, which duly proceeded to forty and then fifty, and by one hundred, I became less sure of my path. I was ascending, yes, but a shrewd suspicion became embedded into my brain, lurking around the corners of each number I incanted as a cougar will circle its prey. I stopped my climb. The stairs were, ever so slightly, twisting. Twisting … as if in a spiral… as if… as if in a circle…

This cruel and blasphemous idea, this destroyer of my hope, was not welcomed, not trusted, not acknowledged. It was shunted, pushed away to the back of my mind where it struggled against its gag and shackles which I unconsciously bound it to; but still, it made itself heard, always more louder, always more insistent, more damnably confident each time, each step I took as I continued upwards the stairs…

How did I come to be here? What erroneous motivation put me in this dank place so that I wandered with despair in the dark?

Two hundred-fifty I chided silently some time later, and an internal battle was taking place in my thoughts. I still clung to the steadfast belief that progress was being made, that a destination was about to be found, was about to present itself; but still, still the hated idea kept replying, responding evilly in my heart.

The staircase is twisting… I’m going in not but a circle …

As if in defiance of this suggestion, I spat phlegm to the side. I did not expect, nor, indeed, comprehend, the uncanny silence that followed. I thought, Surely, there should be a kind of splash, a faint, wet smack as the spit hit the stone?

My sight may be handicapped, but, most assuredly, I still retain the ability to hear? And with this cursed distinction, a stabbing, chilling fear gripped me anew. In a frenzied millisecond I lost my thoughts absurdly, willing to trust that the silence was never to be lightened. In such a hopeless state, a guttural grinding rumbled up my throat, a raspy and coarse sound that was but a whisper. My senses returned to me then, excluding my sight, for with the sound my cracked and hoarse throat had beckoned was what heard, listened to. My eardrums were not hollow then, were not lame and ignorant. No stomping or flapping had emitted from these stones that I tread in bare skin… It was as if the rock kept even my steps a cherished secret, a greedy, despicable entity that knew and never told. Vaguely, to my distilled consciousness, I pondered how many others had walked indefinitely on this stone, how many secrets this rock under my bare toes has kept.

But hark, the realm of sound was still afforded to me – what then, accounted for my silent spit? I bent down vulnerably, my knees coming to lay on a step above my feet. They immediately cooled numbly, as if the stone itself, this keeper of secrets, was hungrily sucking my blood’s warmth from me like a dead lover’s lustful lips. I had not realized, until the weight of my body was reprieved off my heels, that from my ankle down I no longer could feel. A creeping chill had instead replaced the circulation of my feet where my blood had once prospered. Heat, seething and pulsating heat, the semblance that with it comes light, had abandoned, deserted, bereft me. And as I knelt there, straining against the biting prickles that are like fangs, like needles with acid on their tips, the cold pierced me. I was aware that I was being stripped and sapped of my senses. Sight, sound, and now touch were being dragged out of my very being from the cold and the stone, as a child is taken by perverts, as a soul is sickled by Death.

And in wretched defiance of myself, my ringing mind, I reached out to the side, intending – pleading – that I feel somewhere on the stone the spit that I had sputtered. I reached for the approximate area I thought my saliva would have landed, and…

… kept reaching… kept grasping, clutching to the edge of the stair then into nothing…

My dilated eyes were wide as round coins; my pupils were spheres with a white universe around them. I could not feel anything, only the stagnant air that smelled blackly around my thwarted eyes. I was reaching now to be beneath my level on the stairway, leaning but not daring to lean too far to the side, where stone nor wall nor any solidity met my desperate, clinging fingertips. Nothing. Still on my knees, I tilted on an imbalanced axis to my other side, insisting – pleading! – that something other than foul, tantalizing, taunting air be touched. Nothing.

And so it was, despite my futile endeavours, that I came to grasp, not with my empty palms, but in a floodgate of terror that streamed through my veins, breaking and smothering my heart and seeping like venom into my mind, where demented, dreaded thoughts began again to rush forth, that I was trapped, entombed in a forsaken chasm, a damning void that yielded nothing and nothingness, except but this eternal spiral of stairs on which I had somehow been perched. I was surrounded by this nothingness, and it alone pressed towards me, feasting on my torment. I was blind, for I could only see black… I was deaf to all but my own voice, a voice that did not sound like my own, but that of a beast – a beast that, perhaps, I had imagined in my despair for something to be heard. Perhaps that foreign sound was no more than an illusion my mind had engineered to vainly protect me when my tongue was as thick and knotted as elderly bark… And I was becoming paralyzed, drained as water down a tub; my warmth and even my will for movement sinking into the stone, which has at least unveiled one of its deep secrets: that of theft. And I could do nothing to fight it…

Did this chasm and these stairs and this darkness and this dull, disorientated mind of mine truly exist? Or was this merely my own kind of hell, found in death, or my own created hell, found in insanity?

I sniffed, inhaling deeply… and was not surprised, but sickened in dismay that nothing but stale, scentless black air whistled through my nostrils. Black oxygen, and nothing more, inflated my cold lungs; no longer did the wretched seaweed or algae that before had so disgusted me sting my windpipes in its passage down my swollen throat. Nothing, I felt, I saw, I heard, I smelled, I tasted nothing; I had descended from my being, had flitted from my physical body, dissipated it. I was like a ghost, a wisp of what I was and oh what treachery had I succumbed to? What devilish sentience had I fallen to?

In a fluttered, clumsy state I sought to stand. I shuffled to my bloodless feet and swayed forward. My legs were stiff. My chest was taut and my shoulders aching with a heavy burden that was thrust on me by the impenetrable air.

And so I climbed, I willed forth with a strenuous heave that brought my foot down to the next proceeding step. I knew the act as foolish and fruitless, but with the action itself gave the false impression of purpose, of life. Somehow there remained the choice that what I performed next might approve a reason, a clue, a change to my misery. As the step was taken, no sound emitted from the Keeper of Secrets, who knew all and exhaled none of it, and a single notion then intruded my stupefied mind:

Two-hundred fifty-one, I thought.

Two-hundred fifty-two.

Two-hundred fifty –

THUD.

The top of my head, which was poised downwards, rammed into a solid barricade. At once the pain distorted and expanded, rushing down my skull and into my body, igniting in bursting tingles a power that of which I thought forbidden: hope. With it my senses were thrust back into me, returned from what I believed to be a permanent absence. Pain was felt, the throbbing on my head proved this; with the hit came sound, a heavy, dissonant chorus that may have been an angel’s low-tuned harp. I reached out my arms, hardly daring to conceive such a turn in fate – but surely I was hallucinating, reconstructing an escape that did not exist? But nay, I was not hoodwinked: my fingers, sensitive and now moist and clammy but functioning, touched delicately a surface of rough wood before me – a door! Yes, there was the handle, just above waist height and to the right side. I outlined the frame, the stone, smoother and colder and more damp than the door which I distinguished by its pattern of vertical impressions of the grain. At last! A portal, where answers of my circumstance my await! What explanations lay behind this door?

I found again the round, oval shaped handle that would turn and open wide the last obstacle of my horror. I grasped it, perhaps more tightly than was necessary, and twisted my wrist.

The handle turned not at all.

The door was locked. Despite how valiantly I twisted, I could not pry the jam nor force an entry. I then pounded the wooden barrier in anguished contempt, in pitiful frustration. All ice and chill had fled in the face of this newfound burning that rent my heart. Thought again was absent and my senses, in their most needed time, flushed and usurped any frail strategy I may have concocted with my mind. In a rage I beat my fists into the door, slammed them in a tirade of loss, of denial, of bestial madness. How numerously I beat it I know not – all such accounts were irrelevant to the actual doing of the violence. My turmoil craved release, a cathartic expression, and the warped wood had been found for my disposal. My fury eventually receded, though still hungry, and just as my blows began to decrease their insistent rapidity, there was another surprise that then froze them altogether:

The wood cracked.

Light streamed suddenly and dully from the edge of the door, near the its handle.

Moving On

The water’s blue sparkled sprightly on the waves. His body was blurred and his face was in the shadow of his hat and something was in his hand but whatever it was he’d been holding has been forgotten. He was there, though. In that silly little boat of his and on those shores just out of the frame and forever masked by his hat and forever in love with the water, still there.

In her hands the picture tremors slightly. The film that has for so long held her husband shimmers dully in the sunlight which stutters through the room’s dusty drapes. Fingers frail and twisted from arthritis but eternally her own sweep across to touch his face as if she can feel skin not memory. The nails are yellowed at the tips and the veins wisp away from the back of her hand to down under the sleeve of her sweater. It is strange that today she was shown this picture. Somehow it has defied fading but that may be her mind’s nostalgia that keeps everything still in daylight and the love still fresh and the sparkle of the waves motionless and the sun so strong. And him. He is there too. Him and his boat and that thing he’s holding as his hat hides his face.

“Mom?” Ellea asks. Ellea’s mother allows her eyes to drift upwards from the picture. The blue in her pupils is almost grey. Ellea waits patiently for her mother to speak. She waits for her mother to  thank her for finding the picture and for bringing it and then she’d insist with a smile that it was no problem and that she was glad to bring it over and that she’d found it. Then Ellea would mention the physio-therapy session that her mother had later in the week because her mother wouldn’t remember.

The living room they sit in – Ellea in a straight-backed unpadded wooden chair, Alida her mother in her rocking chair – was cluttered with junk. Most of it was already boxed. The past two weeks had been spent retrieving and selling and boxing old, crumbling and mostly musty paraphernalia of her mother’s life from around the house; two weeks of being immersed in a past that was not her own. Alida smiled not once as the process wore on. It’d been six decades since she moved in. Six decades now Alida was moving on.

That was Ellea’s way of speaking, as in Come on, mom. It’s time you moved on. It won’t be as bad as you think it is. It’s time to make the change.

Leaving was what Alida supposed she was doing but deserting was what she felt she was doing. This was her home, yes, but more intimately this was his home and had been for sixty years. He had built it himself and this was back in the earlier part of the last century now.

Aching, cold and dull like a shallow bruise inside Alida feels the smooth picture under her old fingernails. She smiles. Seeing him made her do that but the ache didn’t abate, though.

“Mom.” Ellea spoke and this time it was a statement more than an approach. Alida’s ears were slack but she did not mistake the tone, it was time to get moving. Naturally Alida ignored her daughter and looked back to the picture.

Anger hot as burnt coals rose inside her suddenly. Even after all these years the feelings were the same: the rage lashing out with menace directed at nothing but at the world and its dumb harshness and the ache there perching calmly in its hole and waiting, always waiting, forty years, and still they reared but loss isn’t measured like that.

“The car is out front,” Ellea was saying, “We have to hurry. The moving guys will get here. They won’t like us blocking the driveway. Don’t worry I told them to be gentle, they do this kind of stuff for a living, you know. They know how to handle another person’s things.” Ellea reached to pat her mother’s knee.

Ellea sensed her mother’s difficulty with change but did not know Alida was feeling betrayed. Betrayed and participating in betrayal; he had built this house and she had lived in it.

His name was Simon and he’d been The One and nothing not even the sea which he treasured could change that. Alida remembered when the picture was taken. It was the first picture of him she took and she’d been an amateur photographer and he was out there in the water with his hat and silly boat. The hat and the boat she thought of in the moment the camera flashed and she thought of them now. The rage melted as quickly as it had surged but the ache remained, now double. This was her first picture of him and though it was the first of many those were never the same because they were never as bright as that sea or as loved as that hat on him. Alida had moved on many times before today but loss isn’t measured like that.

“Mom!” her daughter was saying, “We need to be going, we need to leave. Come, lean on my arm…”

With her mother’s attention attuned back to reality Ellea determined it was time to be moving because any later and Ellea risked her mother lapsing into another one of her memories.

Alida allowed her daughter to take her arm and pull her with delicateness and with insistence, a skill Ellea had honed as a mother and a wife. Alida’s legs, forced into action in spite of their wishes to the contrary, supported her weight. The armchair offered a little creak in good riddance.

Standing put blood rushing to Alida’s head. Her heart beat with a spring. It beat more wildly than usual these last few weeks but now the old pump was really revving. Alida thought vaguely, Standing up shouldn’t be this exerting even for my age, why, next I’ll be panting like a dog just to–

And then pain.

In Alida’s chest, up and down her arm, she couldn’t comprehend that it was her left arm and through her head lightning bolts zig-zagged and prickled and stung and burnt and pain transcended her bones, her muscles, her thoughts, and her heart was beating heavier than usual these last few weeks but now it really was much too fast.

Alida crumpled to the ground. Ellea screamed her mother’s name and she dropped down and caressed her mother and the two were on the ground, “No. Mom, no,” Ellea was saying.

Ellea’s mother was dying but to Ellea she was supposed to be moving out of the house this morning and she had a therapy session later this week and she, Ellea, would have to remind her mother of it because her mother would of course forget.

Alida’s faded eyes sparkled. The picture was still in Alida’s hand.  Then she died.

The funeral was held three days later and Alida’s three children were there, her daughter and her two sons. Afterwards they sat in the kitchen and talked late in the night and shared memories and drinks but the drinks turned luke-warm because they were sipped at and the ice melted and turned the drinks watery. It was Ellea who brought out the photo albums and together she and her brothers smiled through them. Tears edged the smiles. One picture would never be seen again because it was buried with their mother. The loss welled like a bruise in the children and it would never really heal but sometimes Ellea would think to herself, Maybe that was Ok.

The Empty Frame

The picture frame hung on the far wall of the room. Once this may have been a bedroom where a couple would sleep; once this may have been a room where one of them tossed and turned under warm-less covers wondering achingly why love can turn to spite. How many tears of anguish or of hope or of depression or of joy have scented the stagnant air? How many words, vows and memories of shame and of laughter and of hatred and of life have been uttered aloud beneath this plaster ceiling? No one can tell; those who could are gone. Everything is gone, everything but this: the picture frame.

It is empty.

Its ornate frame is bronze. In its prime it deserved a perch in the quarters of royalty, the frame is very beautiful. Now it hangs in silence. Still, a dignity pervades from it like it will from a dully bruised sky after the sun’s set. The frame’s lived through much, has experienced the drama of its owners, knows of the secrets and the mysteries and of the life and of the death. It knows. Once it may have told of what it knows but not anymore, its picture is gone like everything else. Everything except the frame, its dusty back support and its glass front. A crack runs through the glass, beginning at one corner across to the other like the lifeline on an old man’s palm encased in his hold forever.

It is said that a picture can say a thousand words but this picture, though maybe it could, cannot now. It can only say this, in a faint voice barely above a whisper:

Alone.

And, following that, its last breath of all:

Goodbye.

 So, I took it off the wall, and wondered what to do with it.

The Wizard

SMASH!

And, on the heels of that,

“Drat it!”

Bartholomew hated when the kids outside were playing ball. He hated it, and he hated the ragtag group of insufferable boys that had the nerve to keep playing it. This was the ninth ball this spring to have found its winded way through the old man’s window, and it would not be the last, unless he put a stop to it.

Of course as a wizard, that was more than possible.

A bent and twisted posture struggling to hold up a frail and thin body, a beard sweeping to and fro like a white and furry pendulum, Bartholomew limped across the room to the old window sill. The room was cluttered with books, most with tangible layers of dust burying their torn pages and precarious condition. They were stacked everywhere. On the shelves, chairs, the floor… how the old man traversed this plain of forgotten tales was a mystery known only to him.

Shards of glass winked dully to greet the wizard as he presented himself at the window, glancing and glaring and daring the little ruffians to show themselves. They never did, of course. The instincts of a young boy are only quicker than his feet, and both would’ve been honed quite thoroughly since the first stray homerun had had the misfortune to enter Mr. B’s house. Oh, if Bartholomew could have caught one of them then… even a glimpse and he could send a nice and fatty rat to find one and crawl into his bed as he slept.

But that was the problem, the source for why nothing had been done since the first ball and this latest one. The wizard hadn’t caught even a glimpse of any of the boys, and there be a dozen of them and more sometimes when they decided to play.

How did they do it? Bartholomew wondered. Countless times he asked that question and not once an answer was unearthed. Not even he, a tested wizard, could find out.

They always waited, it seemed. Bartholomew was an old man, and old men as seasoned as he cannot spend the full day awake. He had to take a nap at one time or the other, and as soon as his tired eyes drooped, there the boys came out, their game ready and fast under way. Always, no matter what time the wizard went to doze, the boys waited. Waited and then sprung out of the bushes or holes or wherever it is they hid and out into the street they went for some ball.

Naturally, Bartholomew (who had heard the boys, and no doubt the other children followed suit, call him Mr. B. with no fear whatsoever) had attempted to trick the boys into their terrorizing game. He would feign sleep – even closing his eyes, though the children couldn’t possibly see – but no, the children never came out. Or, if they did, he usually had regrettably fallen asleep already.

And so here was the ninth ball. Peacefully malignant it perched on a nearby stooped pile of books. Marks from the broken glass made it look like it was smiling at him. This infuriated Mr. B. even more. A last glance past the broken window in the hopes of spying a last boy scrambling for cover and the wizard picked up the ball –  and threw it back out the window. The resounding smash as a second gap appeared beside the first startled him a little. Bartholomew hated children, but he strongly disliked loud sounds too. He had never done that before, throw a ball back into the street, giving the brats back a weapon to further lay siege on his windows, and he didn’t understand why he did so now. But an idea had struck him. It was always that way back in his adventures; when the right time came, the right idea always struck. So he had thrown the ball, and now he waited for the next step of his idea to form itself.

Not ten seconds later, it did.

A boy’s face had appeared amidst the hedge on the opposite street. Orange-red hair, freckles, and ears that stuck out comically. Bartholomew was aware of him instantly; he was old and tired but his eyes were sharp from reading all those books. Through the window the old man watched the red-haired boy crawl from his position, look to unseen comrades for confirmation or warning, and slowly, guiltily, bound for the ball. His sprint was very quick, pushed by fear as the shabby house loomed over him and his treasure, but the old man was smiling.

“Bigilly, flunter, pooch!” the old man cried in a swift voice.

As the boy’s fingertips grazed the smiling ball his red-orange hair tingled and his nose felt suddenly itchy. Next second, he wasn’t on the road of a quiet suburban street but inside a filthy and ragged house. With gloom nearing utter despair the boy knew that he was inside the place of his doom. It was the house his parents had warned against not to disturb. It was the one that was out of place on a block of neatly trimmed lawns and two-door garages. This was the house where Mr. B. lived. The old man had caught one of the kids at last; he had caught him.

Bartholomew watched the boy struggle before him; it was like the boy was dealing with a limp of his own inside his mind. It was very satisfying, after all the trouble the boy and his fickle friends had caused.

“Hmmm,” the wizard pondered. The next step in this so far triumphant plan remained veiled to him.  “What shall be done with you, then?”

The boy, of course, had no idea. Perhaps leaving the house alive would suffice, but he doubted fate could be so merciful. Reluctantly, and against all dignity and pride he possessed, the boy’s lips began to tremble.

The tears came next, seeping through the boy’s rapidly blinking eyes like free-falling hitchhikers. The old man saw this, though the boy had no intention to let him. And the old man was surprised when he felt a shifting in his own insides, beneath the frustration and magic. Arrgh! No, this couldn’t be possible! He had waited so long and now the moment for revenge was here and he was feeling remorse! Remorse for what? He hadn’t been able to do anything yet!

The boy’s faint whimpers were not only audible now, but were ascending to be potent sobs. The boy hated that he should lose his composure so surely. He hated that the old man kept looking at him.

The old man hated that he was feeling insecure of himself.

Then, just as abruptly as he had thrown the baseball out the window, the wizard acted.

“Leave!!!” he shouted into the boy’s face.

The boy’s gleaming eyes widened. They looked like white pebbles wet from the sea.

“Stop hassling me! You leave here alive only once! The next kid I get is DEAD!!”

Then the boy ran, out the room and into the hallway and out the front door, and the boys never played near Bartholomew’s house again.

Boy, he thought later. Magic isn’t dead in this world after all.

Marbles

Lacy popped the marble into the air. It first climbed up then dropped down. It spun gold and green reflections from the low sun. In its flight the girl grabbed at two more marbles on the driveway. Her eyes flicked to the plummeting marble. She had time to register her throw was too light and that the marble would fall and would smack the pavement and she’d lose any points this turn if it did. Lacy lunged for it anyway.

The back of her hand scraped against the driveway’s cement and her palm was flat and was under the marble centimetres away from ruining her chance of catching up to Gene. The marble dropped into her hand and it snapped closed with the practise of a venus flytrap. Lacy still clutched the other two marbles in her other hand; two points for her. Gene’s lead was cut to three. Maybe time for another round yet. She could still catch him.

The children crouching on the driveway of 462 Trent St. would scatter soon when one of their mothers called out it was supper time. The sun was hiding behind the houses across the street. It threw playful rays of orange into the children’s faces from between the houses and painted the neighborhood’s lawns. The smell of the BBQ came from nearby, 469, the man who lived there always liked to grill though he was a bachelor. It was very enticing. The children wanted their game to go on forever but they couldn’t ignore the smell of the BBQ or the reverberating grumble in their bellies so they wanted supper almost as much as they wanted another round of marbles. Some of the group had missed their afternoon snack too. Their bedrooms had needed cleaning. They should have cleaned their bedrooms four weeks ago as their mothers had asked but the summer was only so long and there were better things to do like marbles and so for four weeks they cleaned nothing and were sullen when their snacks had been taken away in punishment. But the bedrooms were still not cleaned. And they could still play at marbles.

Steve Migeeve gathered up and reset the marbles on the driveway. His real name was Steven Migriddle which was weird in itself but the others called him Migeeve anyway, it sounded funnier. Steve hated it. It was Steve’s turn. He tossed up the marble like Lacy had and scrambled to pick up the four marbles on the cement. This would tie him with Gene if he snatched them all and still caught the airborne marble, and thanks to the rule they’d invented if all five marbles were caught with the same hand you got ten points not five. That would give Steve Migeeve the day’s victory for sure.

Steve had given the marble more air than Lacy and had quicker hands. He probably would have made the catch if he used both hands. But Steve tried for the ten-point-snatcher and the marble fell and bounced off one of his fingers, tipping two more marbles out with it. The three marbles struck the pavement and Steve Migeeve’s hopes of winning rolled away. No catch, no points. Gene still leads. Frankie’s up next.

Frankie was eight points from Gene. He would attempt to pull off what Steve Migeeve could not. Frankie hardly won at marbles, he hardly won at anything, he was chubby and clumsy and shorter, but every now and then he got lucky. Sometimes Frankie would be behind by twenty early on only to come back in the final rounds and somehow win or come nastily close. Everyone knew not to trust in Frankie’s lack of skill because of his knack for luck. In crucial moments like this especially.

Frankie threw the marble. The toss was high and to the side. The marble plummeted impossibly slow. Every eye was on the sparkle of green and gold. Frankie grabbed at the first three marbles and got ‘em but the fourth caught between the index finger and his middle one, it lifted an inch towards Frankie’s palm and slipped away. Frankie took his eyes off the fifth marble to scan for it and by the time he located it the tossed marble fell to the concrete with a hard tap tap tap. It bounced and rolled down the driveway away from Lucy and Gene and Steve Migeeve and came to a stop across the street in the gutter.

At the same time a blonde woman in her early thirties poked her head out of a window a few houses down, at 467. “Gene! Supper!” she said.

Then her head was back inside the cool house.

Gene’s house was larger than his neighbours’. His friends didn’t mind him and generally enjoyed his company and also enjoyed the ready supply of iced tea in the afternoons as they engineered tunnels and roads and crossings for the sand-people in the massive sandbox at the corner of his backyard. Gene also had a screened-in trampoline and a hot tub that was best used in winter-time. Gene’s parents however knew their presence on Trent St. created leers and sneers from those nearby, like Frankie’s dad, who was unemployed and quick of temper and willing to cast the first stone or, as Frankie saw once, a trash bag. One predawn morning Frankie had been on his way to the bathroom and had seen his dad spilling trash all over Gene’s grass. Why he did that Frankie didn’t know, only that his dad was sometimes very sad and other times very angry. It was wise to stay away and keep dead silent at those times, and even Frankie’s mom knew that.

Gene’s summons to dinner broke the game’s spell. Gene was eleven and a half and the oldest. Steve was eleven and loved to brag about it when Gene wasn`t around. Lacy was ten and was three months younger than Steve and to her the embarrassment was absolute. Frankie was the youngest and that was clear during their escapades in the park or outdoor rink. Frankie was only seven and he was alone in his age group so the other three had accepted him but only in select activities or when other kids weren’t around and Frankie usually went last or first, whichever was worse. He still carried some of his baby fat or so his mom told them but Steve had told Lacy and Gene that it probably didn’t help that Frankie got cake for dessert and goodies – real ­goodies, the ones with Kellogg’s on them – for snacks. Steve wished he could eat such things for his mom home-cooked everything and so the sweets he got were not sweet at all but were carrot muffins or Rice Krispy squares made not with real rice krispys but with Krispy Rice, by No Name. Lacy loved them when he shared them with her and Gene and sometimes Frankie but Lacy didn`t have them every day like Steve did. Gene always grimaced when Steve offered him food. Gene thought cheap stuff tasted cheap and didn’t like the taste. All four jumped at the call from Gene`s mom. They smiled at each other. Gene’s smile was the only one that showed real joy, for he was the winner today and the game was over now. Then the kids agreed without much discussion that they would meet again in the morning around eleven and would bring bikes and drinks and lunches. Frankie could come too but he would ride with the cooler Gene would bring for the lunches and the drinks. They got up and began drifting towards their houses. The game of marbles was already becoming forgotten.

The driver of a F-250 pulled around the corner of Trent St. at 6:35 pm that evening late in August with the sun setting earlier than he was accustomed to and shining straight through his driver’s side window beneath the sun-flap which was aggravating. Trent St. was a quiet street, the kind that a welder driving an F-250 never regards unless one evening like this one kids were on the sidewalk, one trotting up a lawn, one crossing the street, a couple of others on the sidewalk with laughter annoying and shrill. The driver took little or no notice of them after he saw them for he was tired and dreaded returning home after last night’s fight with his wife which was over his drinking, which he thought was necessary because of the work he did and the lack of support he received for it. But his wife disagreed and had offered choice reiterations of previous disagreements and none of them favoured him and all of them were exaggerated but not one could he call her on because he couldn`t remember for sure if she was right and he couldn’t chance at guessing wrong. His sleep last night was edgy and ill-tempered and he was longing for a drink and he briefly thought that Darly his wife might after all have a point, a small one, but then again he –

He saw the kid crossing back across the street straight in front of him. The kid was fat and the driver of the F-250 couldn’t stop in time.

The driver of the F-250 stamped on the breaks and tires screeched – howled – and the driver lurched forward, straining his seatbelt to lock.

The vehicle swerved as the driver swept the wheel to the right. No thought entered his mind now. There was a horrible slime splattered against his insides and was cold and stuck like frozen snot.

He couldn’t honk the horn in time. The kid wouldn`t be able get out of the way, he was too chubby and too little.

Frankie brought his head up and his eyes became a piglet’s eyes looking at the slaughter-house with understanding. Frankie saw chrome over a black grill, he saw the blue sideways oval with Ford written in cursive within it. The headlights weren`t very bright but the glare on the chrome from the red sunset was like fire. When the driver struck the breaks he was two or three metres away, his speed was sixty-five km/h, the truck slid toward Frankie in less than three heartbeats. In less time the boy Frankie realized that life was unfair, that he was going to miss his supper, that he was going to die, that he loved and would always love Lacy Loueharte, and that he wasn’t going bike riding with any of his friends, his real, good friends, tomorrow at eleven in the morning. Then the truck hit him.

It was Lacy who reacted to the tires first. It was a lone, dreadful second of intuition – Frankie had crossed the street to dig the marble from the gutter; a truck that had rolled down from the intersection was black and too fast. The two events connected in her mind and Lacy tried crying “Stop!” but before she could open her mouth there was a dull sound of impact and she felt sick.

The sound was a hollow sound like wind being sucked out of a large eavesdrop. Then there was blood. On the road, on the sidewalk opposite of Lacy and the two boys, under the black truck. Bits and chunks of white were sprinkled in with the discoloured red but in the failing sunset all of it looked dark purple. The tires slid a little ways after the sound and stopped. The truck shuddered. Twin trails of tracks were burned into the asphalt behind it. No one seemed to move. The driver stayed inside the black truck. The sun-flap was still down and shadowed his face. The boys were watching now and their eyes were wide moons with craters in the middle and Lacy’s mouth was still open.

Then a head poked out of a house down the block. It was behind the black truck, its view obscured.

Another head appeared in a window next door to the first head. Then a head from the house nearest the scene and with full view of the broken form that might have been a child lodged beneath an overlarge and freshly painted Ford, peeped out. The owner of the head was Mrs. Olsley. The pieces of the scene connected for Mrs. Olsley and her horrified scream broke the quiet moment on Trent St. and was too much like the howl of the black truck’s tires for Lacy and the eleven year old couldn’t help it, she screamed too. Her scream was full of fear and disbelief and loss.

Mrs. Olsley ran out in a faded pink apron, mousy hair flying in strands. She ran around the gore to the little girl standing there and screaming. Mrs. Olsley had not bothered with footwear and she was aware vaguely of the warm wetness that licked her heel as she ran through the red

(not blood, Mrs. Olsley thought, no, not blood)

and then she was at the little girl who shouldn’t have to see this but Lacy was seeing little now anyway, her eyes were swimming in clear and sun-tinted tears. Lacy kept screaming. She was screaming until Mrs. Olsley wrapped arms around her and shielded Lacy’s face with her breasts and then Lacy stopped screaming and cried and kept crying and she didn’t know why because she never cried and she never ever cried around boys but Mrs. Olsley had embraced Lacy, and Lacy was no longer in some bad dream but was grounded to reality now and even if she didn’t know that, she was.

*****

Frankie’s funeral was small. A few coworkers from the plant his dad got laid-off at, his three friends Steve and Gene and Lacy and their parents, and his family. Some extended family, some older cousins that barely knew him, a single uncle, some old friends of Frankie’s mom and dad. Frankie’s parents wanted it this way because if they had allowed it the whole town would have showed and though the town was not very large grief is very reclusive.

Steve and Gene and Lacy didn’t go bike riding the day after Frankie’s death and it was Gene, the eldest, who went up to the casket at the funeral and put the bag of marbles on Frankie’s closed coffin.

The driver of the black Ford F-250 pleaded guilty to manslaughter, to reckless driving, speeding, and every other charge that could be thrown at him. No one held much sympathy for him and he felt little for himself and two months later he was found unconscious in a temporary jail cell, awaiting a hearing, the gash in his forehead and the slight marking in the stone wall suggesting a suicide attempt. The driver was taken to the hospital where his wife, now separated, sat by his bed until he woke up. When he did he told her how sorry he was for everything and if he could have gone back things would’ve been different, very much different, and he was sorry, very sorry. His wife Darly stared at his lament then she slapped him across his face and left.

She did pause at the door, where she said without looking back, “You say that now but would you have stopped the drinking and the speeding otherwise? Hm? It just took  that little boy to run over with your big tough truck and now you’re ready for change.”

*****

Gene went to the U of T and graduated with honours in engineering. His salary the first year out of school was $120,000. He returned back home and married his high-school sweetheart and they raised four children, three girls and a boy named Thomas. Thomas was eight when Gene bought the boy his first set of marbles. Thomas listened to the rules of the silly game with the attentiveness all eight year olds show their fathers and played it with his friends non-stop for two days before he lost interest and Gene was a little glad.

Steve and Lacy married after university. Steve taught ELA at the junior high school where they all grew up and Lacy taught grammar in the elementary school down the block. They lived some distance from Trent St.. In 1997 Lacy and Steve were told they were unable to have children but after four years of trying they did. Their daughter’s name was Francine and she loved to ride her bike once she learned. All was well for the three friends who stayed friends all through the years. But Francine knew as early as age five that there was something, something strange, that her parents and their friends alluded to sometimes but wouldn’t talk of directly.

Ten years later when Francine snuck out of the house for a party, a boy there got drunk and offered her a ride home and Francine accepted and recognized what that strange something might’ve been after that. She saw it in the drunk boy’s eyes a little later when he looked at her across the hospital waiting room while waiting to see if their friend would survive after they’d crashed into a guardrail. Their friend didn’t and she saw the boy’s fear and pain and confusion and as she listened to the boy saying “I’m so sorry, if I could I would’ve changed everything,” Francine thought to herself, But what would have made you change otherwise?

2010

Birds of a Feather

Fickle feathering swept beneath her fingertips.

She peered at the whiteness that enveloped her sight and her attention and her world. It was the neck of an ostrich. A silly circumstance had brought them together.

The ostrich was very still. It stood upright like a surly guardian secretly kind at heart. It tolerated the girl’s rapt touches with a disdainful expression yet didn’t move. The ostrich didn’t move because it was dead. It had been stuffed.

The other birds perching in the white and grey high-roofed room were also still.

The girl, however, marvelled at the ostrich’s feathering. It was very soft. She wondered if she could grow feathers. On closer inspection though she realized that it was not likely and that further feathers were a repulsive thing to have. Her hair which was almost as soft as the feathers and much shinier was better.

The thought cheered her. Her hair flowed gracefully like ribbons catching in a mist while the ostrich’s feathers were like large furry arrow heads and were stumpy and would turn disheveled and unpleasing in the rain. The ostrich, the girl concluded, was irregular to her. It felt soft but it looked strange. All the birds looked strange.

It brought a frown to the girl’s face, it was deep. It was of undisguised disapproval. The bird took no offense. The girl then made a point of straightening her white dress which was much whiter than any of the feathers in the room and she snugged tight her headband. The headband didn’t need refitting but she needed to make a point. Her appearance now was proper and right. She looked around at the birds in the room with the air of a stern teacher. When the birds didn’t react she blew a frustrated sound at them that carried disgust and meanness despite its inarticulateness and she ran from the room. She thought to herself how stupid birds were, they didn’t understand beauty, they didn’t understand that some things were right and some things were wrong. When she ran away the ostrich didn’t blink.

When she went to the room a few doors down she found her father, who was polishing a favourite rifle, and she told him how stupid and boring birds were and that they didn’t understand anything. She spoke of them as if they were alive and the father nodded as she talked and kept polishing.