11 Main St.

Dreams

(Mention of Suicide. If you or anyone you know needs help please call 988.)

An evil man with a wide set chest took up residence in Dad’s work shop. After school we would crouch behind the peonies to peer in the windows whose glass, warped with age, distilled the visions of cruelty he preformed upon victims tied to a chair. Every afternoon when he stepped out for coffee and a jelly donut we would unlock the green door and explore the cool shadowy rooms dusty with sawdust and climb the stairs to a stuffy attic where a narrow and deep closet radiated wicked magic.

One afternoon thinking the man was out we silently slipped into the shop only to find him bound to the chair, dead. Long deep gashes covered his forehead and chest and a sickle stuck out from the tattered remains of his plan shirt. There was too much blood and I looked away.

…

We ran hard through the fields behind the house, hurling our bodies through tall grass and underbrush. A lion chased us his gold mane wild in the wind. Our hearts beat with the fear of the hunted, of those about to die, “Hurry up,” I called, “Hurry up.”

Coming to the edge the field where the swamp and forest meet we dived low into the protecting arms of craggily branches and damp shadows. Heaving for breath, throats raw, legs limp we lay behind a clump of birch trees and as the roar of our hearts quieted in our ringing ears unease pooled around us. “Shh,”  I whispered and peered through the trees. Two men with pick axes stood in a shallow hole stacking skulls and bones of uncovered bodies into a long snaking line. Up to their thighs in skeletal remains the sun filtered through the green of new leaves as the smoke from their lit cigarets mingled with the smell of wet earth and worms. If discovered we too would join the nameless masses in this bottomless grave.

…

Washing clothes in a shallow meandering river, the air was yellow and the sun reflected off the water making the ripples shiver and jump. You looked up to see a wave taller than the pine trees that lined the bank rushing towards you. As the wave raced forward it gained momentum and height, a swirling wall with a small curve of foam at the top. You started to run passing gray-gold reeds that lay flat in the wind as grass whipped about in frenzied circles, a quivering mass of sliver and green. But when the wave crashed down around you the water was only as deep as your anklebones.

…

Mum hung herself in the broom closet and I am not sure why. We had a pleasant morning drinking tea and talking about the future. Smiling she had stirred the tea around and around in her cup making a small whirlpool. Around and around as life has felt since we left the house on the hill to follow the allusive dream of greener pastures. Around and around realizing the golden glow of such promises it just that, a golden glow to help warm the cold nights of mind-blowing panic. But somehow I thought we had found hope.

Maybe she saw the Bird Man out the kitchen window and realized hope was fleeting and the best way to deal with its fickleness was to take matters into her own hands and call it a day. But I too saw the Bird Man while enjoying the sun and though I did rush into the apartment praying not to be seen while fumbling with the keys as he came through the building’s front entrance I did not seal myself up in the dark and take my life.

Is it cowardice on my part not to call a spade a spade? To continue to breath the stale air of a planet that has erupted with fiends of hell? For the time being there has been a reprieve in the fighting the tanks coming to a monetary lull among the new grass but what will happen in a month from now, a year, five years? I watched the planes fall out of the heavens, the satellites hurl themselves at my feet as storm cloud the hight and breath of Mount Everest rose above the city and funneled down ripping through the pyramids of our ancestors, tearing buildings to pieces, tossing bodies aside with the ease of brushing crumps off the table, and yet I dare to ask where is Mum’s hope?

Barred Owl

The gray tree that grew in the meadow, on the edge of the pond, was cut down yesterday.  It was dead and winter was coming with wind and snow, but there was a sadness coming upon its massive and hollow stump in the foggy afternoon.  I stood on the stump and looked into the rotted hole that was once the base wondering where will the crows perch as they summon the dawn with raspy calls?

Before Daniel was born there was an apple orchard behind the house. The trees were over one hundred years old planted by some distant family member whose name has long been forgotten.  Due to lack of upkeep the trees had stopped producing apples and were covered in poison ivy but the birds loved the orchard, as did Mama, and the other wildlife that slinked and scurried in the tall grass under the low hanging branches.

 “Falling right down,” Dad said into to Billy Burton while standing in the driveway. Billy leaned from the pickup window, “know what you mean,” he said, “Hate to see good land going to waste.”  A few weeks later Billy came back and cut the orchard down.  Dad had him come on a Sunday morning because we would be at church, and Mama, who was against the cutting of the orchard, would not be there to see it destroyed. But Billy was not done by the time we got home and Dad, Mama, and I walked behind the house to watch the bulldozer push down the last of the gnarled old trees as swallows swooped and dived catching the bugs disturbed from their hiding places. The bugs began to swarm forming a frantic cloud that moved before and around each toppling tree.  Mama started to cry, and Dad said, “Ellen it had to be done.”  His voice was harsher then he intended it to be, but to him the trees were dead and winter was coming with wind and snow.

Dad did instruct Billy to leave one apple tree standing.  This particular tree stood away from the rest of the orchard on a rise of land behind the barn.  This tree never produced edible apples only hard deformed fruit we threw into the empty cornfield in fall but the tree was not in bad condition and Dad could fit the lawn mower under it in the summer, a prerequisite to any tree standing on the property. The apple tree was my favorite place growing up for it was far enough from the house to feel free, close enough to feel safe, and high enough to keep a watch on the way back field that abutted the Great Dane kennel.

One winter full of wind and snow Mum, Dan, and I took a walk.  As we rounded the corner of the barn something golden red flashed at the base of the apple tree. It was a dead fox. One of the foxes back feet was wrapped in wire; bloody it dangled from a bit of skin.  “What happened?” I kept asking, “it must have got caught in a trap of some kind,” Mum said.  The body was still only the tail blew back and forth in the wind.  In the late afternoon sun all four of our shadows shadow stretched long and blue across the snow.  Mum took our hands and led us back to the house. 

Last summer the apple tree finally succumbed to old age, ants and rot. Dad cut it down for firewood. 

American Girl, American Doll

(Mention of an eating disorder)

In a dream a woman had an eating disorder. It had been under control for several years, but it came back the way sickness has a way of doing. For a long time she as able to hide it from her husband and mother, but secretly she was making ropes out of hair she pulled from her scalp and food she chewed but spit out. These hair ropes she hung individually, and with care, from nails in a secret room behind the living room wall, small totems to her daily meals. The afternoon her secret was discovered her husband filled with rage tried to kill her while her mother sat looking on in silence. I stood between the man and woman waiting for him to strike, not knowing if I could stop the violence.

Her hair never grew back. Isn't that the consolation prize for surviving cancer or at least the radiation and chemo therapy? You stand on the brink, look death in the face, but you get your hair back, right? But who would have known the consequences? Time was ticking she was in stage four of lymphoma. The doctor had misdiagnosed and misdiagnosed and she could now die if all the stops were not pulled out. It was all hands on deck. No one was thinking about the future as they cut off her long blonde hair and filled her with chemicals. It was later she learned that what “they” say is not always true, and she began to shoulder the burden of regret, of not thinking ahead, as if, at age ten, she would have had the insight.

All she had left was a few wispy patches of hair as fine and thin as a babies. So she wore poorly designed wigs. Wigs that had pink hues and strange colors with no name that shimmered under the harsh florescent lights of school. Wigs in styles reminiscent of grandmothers who came of age in the 1950s. But she was too young too sheltered to know the plethora of wig options out there, the freedom of colors and styles, or the beauty and power of a bald head.

We lived in a world of zero options. Girls had long hair. Girls wore dresses and kept their legs in lady like positions. Girls wore the same layers of undergarments, cross ties, jumpers, vests and skirts. The same oxford shirt buttoned all the way up the neck, the same tights and knee socks, the same black or blue dress shoes. There was no room for the physical transformation of sickness the differences that cancer brings. Those outer manifestations of physical demise and vulnerability.

  In middle school she had aspirations of becoming an astronaut. One night during a sleepover a friend confided in me, “I know it is not kind, but all I can see is her wig floating into space.” The humor of children in the confusion of loss. Humor mixed with sympathy. Laughing softly in the darkness we envisioned her wig floating up and out into that great black void.

  A few days ago while washing the dishes she appeared to me. A long blond hair had wrapped itself around the dish sponge and suddenly there she was in her school uniform wearing her favorite head covering a little cloth drawstring cap with a paisley and floral print in black, pink, and aqua. She stood in the kitchen doorway and watched as I soaped each dish and then rinse it, placing each one on the rack to dry.