old old house.. Part 3

I was beginning to regret this whole trip back home, to regret the very idea of coming back home after so many years away from it. Whatever I expected to gain had been crushed by crippling disappointment. What did I expect to learn?

What did I exactly expect to learn? I walked right through the front door, which was unlocked even at two in the morning, right past my insomniac father lying on the couch reading a magazine while eating leftover takeout and watching television without noticing me. I think it was a documentary about wasps. The insects, not the white people. I went upstairs into my old room. My old, old room that is, because it was my room two rooms ago before I got my sister’s room across the hall when she moved out. This was the cramped room that fit a twin bed and scarcely much else, although it didn’t seem so small at the time when I slept in it years ago. I entered, soaking wet and sat down on the bed. Water trickled out my pants leg onto the floor. My hair was plastered to my face and forehead, naturally after walking a mile and a half in the pouring rain. I should have gotten undressed right away, but I thought I would rather sit and stare at myself in the blank television screen instead. I looked myself dead in the eye and slowly, knelt and then lay down on the hardwood floor, curling up, fully dressed and drenched in rain. Even my socks were wet. Right below me, perhaps my father’s reading would be interrupted by a drop of water from the ceiling hitting his true crime magazine, then another, looking up he may see a puddle on the ceiling. There was a lot of dust under the TV stand, now that my head was on the floor I could see it. I only tried to help my cousin because I had nothing else to do, and also whenever he would complain or whine, it would hurt my ears like a high pitched frequency, like they were going to bleed if he didn’t shut up. The rain was streaming against the window behind Suzy’s head in the car when we pulled up in her driveway, I protested, that this wasn’t my parent’s house, but she just put her finger to my lips to suggest I be silent.

I thought that I had acted appropriately, but now as I thought, I began to remember more, and I felt the stab of regret, Instead of taking the hint from her I first kept talking, “I shouldn’t be away so long, you know my father is sick, and my mother is not well either, that’s why I’m here after all.” That was when she told me to be quiet.

The rain was streaming against the window, I can see the rain, the red light against the rain.

She asked if I ever thought about her, her hand was on my neck.

“I remember you. I remember…”

The heat from her body grew as she leaned in.

That heat, burning. She didn’t know, how could she know?

I didn’t come here for her, for my idiot cousin, for that fucking house, for anything.

I just wanted to be left alone, I didn’t have the strength. I remember that expression, that’s on her face just now. I saw that same expression, sort of half exhausted and surprised on an even colder night. The lake had frozen over and I found a hole in the Ice near the shore just large enough.

Was that a nightmare? The part where this girl was chasing me in the woods, she was wet having just emerged from the bottom of the lake, her hair caked in mud and algae.

Her body was entwined with ropes and at the end of the ropes around her arms were tied cinder blocks, which she would swing around by the ropes and try and hit me with all her might.

I turn around in time to see a cinder block hit a tree, sending bark flying towards me. I keep running.

I snap awake, it had only been a few minutes, I was still on the floor.

my head felt like it was nailed to the floor,

I could barely move, I was so stiff.


…..the air in my old old room was stifling, I cant fucking breathe.

I reached up and turned on the television..

Let the stairway run over me, stick your pins in me too.

I can’t breathe in the heat,

I can’t breathe….