It had a fence made out of big wooden doors taken off of churches and Masonic temples, all nailed together around the perimeter. It had rained so many times on the old doors, the sun had come and beat down on them to suck the rain back out so many times they were all warped. Leaning in different directions like some old peasants teeth, they rotted away.
The lights never, ever came on. “who lives in there?” I asked my mother 26 years ago.
“Nobody. If they do, they are probably those bums. The ones in jail, they don’t pray, and they draw and write on themselves.” In the backyard there was a small pile of bicycles, rusting. A shed had burned down and its black skeleton huddled in the corner, the door clinging to the leaning frame. Some kids once climbed the tree in the front of the yard a long time ago and hung bottles from its branches that would barely sway even in a strong wind, but occasionally clink into one another. Nothing was cinematic about this house, not the overturned floral sofa on the ground by the porch, not the vines and weeds that grew out of it. And not especially collection of bright orange stickers attached to the front door and windows. I concluded it was 1608, the address. The houses on either side were 1606 and 1610, they still had the numbers attached to them. I wished then there were something that would drive me inside the house. Maybe a little girl would go missing and I find a piece of material with the same pattern as the dress she was last seen in clinging to a sharp nail on the back gate. I walk slower when I pass the house, perhaps to catch a muffled scream come from the basement, something that would draw me close the camera from the crane shot narrows to my face my eyes, they widen and I turn and run only to lay awake at night finally throw the covers off where I am fully dressed and venture out in the darkness with a flashlight a rope a pocket knife back to the house and crawl towards the basement window on the damp ground where……..
It never came up, I never heard anything. I only occasionally heard the clink of empty bottles in the tree. I had an older cousin who lived a street over from it, and on a hill from his back porch I could see the upstairs windows at night. When the houses around it were lit up from activity, hers were blacker than the sky itself. Silent they were like a tomb like a mausoleum if it had windows, as if by misled intention or chance tradition mausoleums were designed to have windows because it was intended for the eager dead to look out but not escape or for the jealous dead to look in but not enter.
Ghosts would not stay there any more than sparrows would stay in the charred boughs of her tree.
I would follow my cousin out to his porch I stared out at the rooftops while he talked to the air. “I don’t know why she wants to leave me, man. Maybe she doesn’t like herself”
I nodded and watched the black space growing. Even ghosts would not stay, what has a house to offer? What when all its life is drawn. My head was humming.
“I think I felt like this ever since I saw this picture on her fridge, it was her when she was little..” My cousin was talking, he wasn’t next to me anymore, he meandered about in the fuzzy din of static in my head my ears picked up his presence. I saw the black windows of the house falling toward me growing the blackness spilling out of them. My cousins voice was like a slippery radio signal, “I looked at that picture every time I went over to her place, man”. He was coming from inside the house, and his face appeared behind the black window staring out at me. How did you get in there? Can you see out the window?
I must be hovering in the air in front of him. “It was like, she was that little girl, you know? And she looked all innocent, like asking me why I was doing this to her life, you know she had no idea I was going to come around and mess it up.”
He came in more clear now, the glass rattled slightly at his voice. I must be hovering I thought again, or I was on a string like one of those bottles and was swaying in the wind.
A string, its keeping me from touching the window. “I feel like she was looking at me, I mean she was looking at whoever was taking the picture, but in a way, I took the picture, you know how some people used to think cameras would steal your soul, well”
He kept talking but the wind carried the words away, and he took a step backwards and disappeared from the window and it went blacker still. The sounds went out and soundless there was no weight.
“There is a package for you, I left it in your room” my mother said when I came home.
I opened the box and spilled its contents on my bed, a musty damp smell waifed out and there were two sheets of old mildewed wallpaper. The weight was due to a piece of floorboard, and there were bits of drywall in there as well. I turned the box over, I was right. No postage, it was from 1608.
No comments:
Post a Comment