In the House

He could still hear her wailing in the other room, as wretched and insane as a barn cat. 

Sing, Goddess

"She said 'Cassie is a total dicktease in those shorts' "

Daphne looks over at me sideways to gauge my reaction as she takes a long drag on the cigarette -- her third since we've been down here.

I look down at what I'm wearing to the second day of ninth grade.  T-shirt, tights and boots: all black.  And the rolled up jean shorts that offended Diana so much.  They're leftovers from junior high.  The rule is, no new clothes the first week of school.  You look like you're trying too hard.

"Why?  Why would she say that?" I make it come out like I'm mildly irritated, but inside, a prickly Oh FUCK is rising up my throat.  I try to tamp it down with another fake-inhale of the Camel Light I've mostly been holding and flicking against the soles of my Docs.  I know enough to hold it in for at least 15 seconds and make sure to exhale a little out my nose, so it looks like I'm really smoking. 

She shrugs and scratches her flaking eyeliner with a chipped pinky nail.  "Who knows?  Maybe because of your dad?"

"My dad?"

"Well, yeah."

"He's just the mayor -- he's not a king or anything."  Now my hands are really shaking, not just with nicotine and Mountain Dew.  I haven't been here long enough to cross Diana and Leah -- senior girls who would punch me in the locker room just to make a point.   

"Yeah, but he's all over TV and stuff.  I don't know.  They were just saying that you seem a little stuck up." she takes another long, dramatic drag before flicking the butt off onto the tracks.  She looks over at me "They're probably just acting like that because they want to fuck your brother."

"Then they should quit being such bitches behind my back.  They don't even know me."  I'm too wound up to concentrate on my cigarette anymore.  I grind it out on the cement ledge.

Winter Tale

When did it start?  January, I guess.  When I discovered the ice creeping up the inside of the second floor windows.  That’s when I began hearing it like a quiet whine.  When I started looking for ghosts in the hallway and somehow expected to run into one sipping tea or swishing skirts, but just generally going about its business like she knew all along.

It never was a ghost.  I cursed my way through another session of scraping the windshield of my pickup.  Shivering violently, I waited ages, ages for the fucking engine to warm up.  How could the sky be so grey but the snow shine bright enough to sting my eyes?  Somewhere past the backyard the river was still flowing.  I would get these elaborate ideas in my head that I would walk down there in boots and coat and mittens to watch the icy current.  Maybe they would see me from the street and think how tortured I must be, how picturesquely tragic.  But it was too cold for anyone else to be walking around near the park anyway, so I just got into my truck and drove to Meijer. 

We had started out that winter watching Hitchcock movies in the front room.  Vertigo.  Rear Window.  Rope.  I used to think I hated old movies.  Assumed they were yet another affectation of the people I knew who prided themselves in being moderately counter-culture. 

Then one day, I was paging through my roommate’s art appreciation book and I settled on a street scene.  It was an early photograph of a street I know I had been on when my parents took us to the City in the 8^th grade.  All those men wearing hats.  The fruit stands and the dogs sniffing around for discards.  They never thought they were going to be art or history or anything to be appreciated.  Not like that.  They were just living their lives.  I got the dizzy pit in my throat I used to get when I would think about outer space and I had to slam the book shut and walk around the library. Digging nails into palms and biting the insides of my cheeks, pain reminding me I’m still inside of my flesh.

I started noticing them as much as I could. Not the storyline or the dresses.  But the eyelids.  The individual teeth.  Things these long-dead actors didn’t give a passing thought, but that proved to me they were once as alive as I am.  And how someday I’d be equally dead.

Those weeks of hot panic have passed.  Now I’m just moving through the house, watching the street through the curtains.  Perking up when the heater clicks on from the ancient basement.  Not thinking of the wet boots I pull on and off throughout the day. 

Image:  Lake George Window, Georgia O'Keefe 1929

June in the Apartment

What she is doing is laying on the bed. But not in the bed.


She is face down, horizontally at the foot of her bed at 2:00 in the afternoon. Her eyes are closed and, although she is wide awake, she has decided she will not move from this spot.

“Get up!”

It is her grandfather, his bald head floating upside down from the corner of the ceiling.

She ignores him. Pear-scented lotion has transferred from her skin to the sheets and she inhales it along with her morning breath.

“Come on, get up!” right into her ear.

“I’m sitting this one out,” she says to him, though the mattress.

“Sitting out?” He cackles. “You can’t sit out the month of June! Get up.”

“You don’t know what you are talking about” she snarls and shifts her face so it’s hidden beneath the pillow.

“Oh, so now I don’t know what I am talking about?” he taunts. He has grabbed a blade of the ceiling fan and spins with it, hooting down at her.

“Grandpa – cut it out. Just leave me alone.”

“OK. I’ll leave you alone, but do me one favor.”

She looks up and sees that he has pulled out a tobacco pouch. RED MAN is printed in scarlet block letters next to an Indian chief in full feathered head dress.

“No! Do not chew that in here, I mean it!” she sits up in bed.

Too late – he stuffs a pinch in his translucent cheek. She can see it in there, soaking as he hovers above in the lotus position like a demented Buddha.

“Go get me a can to spit in” he orders thickly through the accumulating saliva.

“No. I said I’m not getting up.”

“OK, then…” she can see him eyeing the white sheets, tobacco juice pulsing against his gums.

“No, wait! I’m going! Just wait!” she leaps out of bed and runs to the bathroom for a pink plastic cup. Running back with it, she remembers.

“Damn it, grandpa.”

He’s laughing at her. The pouch, the tobacco spit and the threat of stained sheets have disappeared.

“But you’re up! I got you up!”

Sighing, she heads for the kitchen. “Yeah, you got me.”

Sun is spilling through the window and she fills the coffee pot from the faucet, pulls a clean filter from the cupboard and dumps coffee from the jar in the fridge. Her stomach is rumbling from the long stint in bed as she sits at the table to make a grocery list. Strawberries, asparagus, half and half…

“Remember last summer, when you made s’mores on the stove?” Her grandfather’s head is poking up from one of the gas burners.

“Yeah?”

“You still have marshmallows in here!” his voice calls out from the cupboard.

She shakes her head and adds graham crackers, chocolate to the list.