Howl ©

The first time we met, it was cold and she wore shackles on her bare-feet. The shackles had worn her white ankles so badly that they glowed pink and bled from chaffing. She said it was terribly uncomfortable but that it was a small penance that would soon heal. I was led to her holding-cell where she was telling another man, who was just leaving, how much she hated funerals and that she felt lucky because every time someone close to her died, she was in jail. But that was long ago she said, and now there is no longer anyone close to her. I do not know why she told him that and I did not know what to think about it. I knew even less about how to respond to it, and since she was not speaking to me, I did not say anything. I only waited as she wished the man a good evening. The man was very upset and angry. Apparently the man’s wife had recently died, and because of that, evidently, he had some business with the girl.

Something about the girl made her seem sick and I did not like to be with sick people. Sick people were never happy and unhappy people rarely did kind things for others. Even when unhappy people tried to be kind to others, it came out wrong and left you wondering if they were being unkind in clever ways, or if they were being as kind as they knew how to be, and that the kindness was misconstrued as evil social-ignorance; one does not wish a man who has recently lost his wife a good evening. She did however tell him that she was sorry for his loss and she asked him to understand that she was not responsible, in spite of the evidence – and that she would prove it. This was before I knew about the virus.

She said the slick, satin-finished floor was the first unpleasant cold thing she dealt with and that peeling the covers back and placing her bare sensitive feet onto the institutional-gray floor was never a pleasant way to start a day. She said the cold toilet seat was always the cruelest thing and it was the one thing she could never prepare herself for. The girl told me that being cold wasn’t so bad in itself, it was waiting for the sun to warm the room and to warm the cold things in the room that made her impatient. The girl seemed normal and pleasant enough as she spoke about the things any young girl her age might speak of, but there was something about the girl that was unsettling.

As we talked, the sunlight’s long fingers stretched through the barred window and drew warm vertical shadows on the block wall of her cell. The gray shadows grew taller and by mid-afternoon the vertical shadows were perfectly painted into the grout-filled grooves between the sun-brightened blocks. The dark shadows of the bars aligned themselves with the spaces between the blocks in such a way that one might think the bars and grooves were married to one another by a great architect of fabulous and fancy sun-dials. The girl was fascinated by the shadows and seemed to be obsessed with keeping an accurate count of the time. She said she was able to tell the time of day by watching the shadows creep across the wall. When the shadows from the bars met the rough separations of the blocks, the girl understood it was almost time. She said she was ready. She was very mature for such a young and delicate girl. That was the day the unnatural thing occurred.

The girl once claimed that she’d had the Lycan virus longer than I have been alive. I dismissed this and simply wrote the note in my report. She later explained to me that she is a “Leapling” and that she was born under a full moon on leap day, February 29, 1736. She said she has a birthday every 1,461 days; the number of days between leap days, and that a full moon on leap day is an extremely rare occurrence. I had been visiting the girl for nearly a year when, looking back, I saw the virus-note scribbled in the margin of my journal. I had written the note in the margin when I thought the girl was being uncooperative. Now I believe otherwise. I believe she actually cooperated with me because she liked me; not because I believed her story, but because I believed she believed it, and for her, that was an important distinction from those who assumed she was lying, which I never did.

The girl said she was cursed with the Lycan virus. – I believe it was not a virus at all, but a metaphysical mutation that had more to do with celestial syzygy than paranormal illness, or maybe it was the other way around. I did not know how to think about it any further than that, and I did not care to think about it more. She told me the Lycan virus is a demonic burden placed on the first child born under a full moon on February 29, and that on the leapling’s birthday, the affliction shows itself in the wickedest way.

I think I will never see a thing more disturbing than when the girl bit her forearm – quite deeply. She did this to show me it was nearly time and said I should not be concerned because it was not a painful thing to do, only a painful and unnatural thing to see. She said the skin was now dead and that she was no longer cold and that she had not been cold for sometime – not since the new sensitive skin in the beginning. She called the dead skin slough. She pronounced it “sluff” and said it would all be shed my morning; her birthday. But I did not see her in the morning, or ever again.

It was not the biting of her arm that was so disturbing that day, it was that she did not bleed, and when she peeled back the thick layer of dead skin – black and coarse fur sprang from the injury. That is what was disturbing, and that is a thing I can not un-see.

I never got to write the girl’s story but if I had I believe I would have included fear and I would have made it clear that the girl was not unhealthy or sick, but a lycanthrope – a werewolf – but I could not prove it, and so I did not write it.

Eli ©

It was the way the blackbirds poured over him that made him feel small and insignificant, and feeling insignificant was enough to sadden anyone. Feeling sad was the cost of being alone, but being alone was never reason enough to be lonely – that came with feeling small and insignificant.

When the cornfields in his mind cast the blackbirds out and flung them across the hazy horizon, it looked at first, from a distance, like dark-colored shoes were tossed about in many directions at once. The blackbirds, it seemed, always moved in his direction then grew larger and larger until they were enormous enough in their numbers to sound fan-like as they beat past his ears and cawed just above his head. It was always best to stand hard and face the blackbirds, but to turn with them and watch them rise and circle back was also a thing worth doing.

Watching the blackbirds always cleared Eli’s head, but it was only when the birds sprayed upward from the fields and fanned out overhead that Eli felt petty and unimportant. But that is the way it was with watching blackbirds rise, and circle, and then fall again; it was the same every time. This time was no different, except that perhaps, because this time he had finally gone through with the threats, he thought, that things did somehow seem better. Eli thought about what he had done and he was okay with it. He was okay with it, and his head was clear, and feeling okay and having a clear head meant he did not need to think about it any longer. But still he thought about it, and he remembered it, and remembering it made him angry.

Eli did not like to be angry. Being angry confused him, and when he was confused he panicked and when he panicked he made threats and when he made threats they were mean to him and they held him tight with the unfriendly weight of their bodies. Sometimes they held him hard to the cold floor of the infirmary and with his cheek pressed firm to the parquet he watched their black shoes fly about in many directions at once. They gave him shots and then held him tighter and when they held him tight and close, Eli cried out and kicked and tears filled his angry eyes and he choked and spat more terrible threats until the shots came and after the shots came the birds returned and it was the way the blackbirds poured over him that made Eli feel small and insignificant – and to feel small and insignificant was always enough to sadden even Eli.

Baby Ben ©

I watched the carriage rock forward the way horse-drawn carriages do when solid horses stand before them, tethered and impatient. I locked my eyes on the carriage as it settled down slightly and relaxed, then sharply jerked forward again before rolling smoothly away at last. I remember how the horses’ hooves clacked the cobblestone and how the sound cracked through the white fog and how it rang down the narrow lane and into my bedroom. The bedroom I shared with my little brother had one window that stared down the length of our street. The window peered out in a narrow and determined way, not to gaze or to survey, but to focus – the way a boy might focus on a rabbit through the v-shaped sight of a long-barreled hunting rifle.

I remember mother crying hysterically and how, after some time, the doctor and my father offered her no more comfort. I remember how every gasp that caught in her throat stabbed me again and again. I sat alone, cowered in isolation, and stared steadily through that lone window of our bedroom. I did not want the carriage to carry my brother away, but I knew it could not stay. I remember wishing it were me in that carriage and not my brother. I understood, even then, as the carriage pulled away, that every good thing in my life went with it.

My father and the doctor talked outside my window. Their words were framed hard and firm like the windowsill that separated me from my father.

“I will give her something to help her sleep.” 

“Thank you.”

“The sheriff will be called. There will be an inquest.”

“It was an accident I tell you, the boys never fought.”

“But it is the way these things are done – nothing can be done about it.”

“Of course. I understand.”

“I will check on her in the morning.”

After my brother was carried away in the carriage – an hour passed, and then another hour passed and with each hollow hour that dragged on, my bedside-clock unwound itself. Its tight and tense inside pounded out slow and deliberate minutes. The clock was a Baby Ben clock and I remember how it slowly measured my misery with one enormous second after another – and then another, until at last it was as though there was nothing else in the world but the clock, and me.

I sat and listened to the tick-tocking of the Baby Ben and noticed for the first time that each second actually sounded out as three separate tiny taps.

As the clock banged out this triangle of tick-tocks, I realized the cold steel taps had turned to dull and lifeless thuds that seemed to represent the parts of my brother that were his birth, his life, and finally – his death.

Before the Fall of Abigail ©

In the beginning it was only the eyes, then it was the warts, but the warts came last and it was the warts that made it difficult. It was troublesome to look into her eyes, as troublesome as it was to look into the sun, but the warts and the sun were things you knew were there, and both were things your eyes avoided. It was natural to look away from the sun or to shield your eyes from its glare, it was expected and thought nothing of, but to avert your eyes from the sadness and fear in her eyes or to shield your glance from hers was thought to be, at first, unnatural and ill-mannered. But it was a necessary reaction. Nothing else could be done. Instinct was to look away. In time, the sadness and fear in her eyes was replaced by confidence, and the confidence was as vulgar and troublesome as the obscene tone her personality had taken.

She was neither Catholic nor religious, so later, after the fear, the wide collared nun’s habit she began favoring was as mysterious as the other changes in Abigail and could only have been a mockery to God.

I forget when she started the candle lighting. It was a subtle change in Abigail; one I hadn’t noticed before it became an obsession with her. She said it was to keep the evil things away. But that was in the beginning, when she was afraid.

Soon after I discovered her obsession with the candles, I found her one evening in her room, sitting on the edge of her bed, in the amber light of a candle which she cradled in her palms. She was rocking herself and whispering repeatedly, “Dear Lord, lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from evil.” Abigail kept the lights out in her room but always a candle was lit. She said it was the only way, and she was afraid then.
When Abigail was no longer afraid and the warts had come in like organic pebbles, she began walking through the low growing ferns and into the forest beyond the house. At first she would stay away for hours, then days. Now she returns only to creep around the yard like an animal or feral beast. A footpath is worn lifeless where she pads about after dark.

Before the fall of Abigail, when things made sense and nights were pleasant, a lit candle meant one thing only – that a candle had been lit. Now it means a thing that is deeper and darker than any I have ever known is near. Why I should sit here in this darkness and invite the evil in I do not know, but still I do it. I sit here now, warts and all, with my hands balled and clasped in my lap, rocking, fighting temptation to extinguish my good candle.

I miss Abigail the way a crying child is missed after the child is sent away to school or the way the sun is missed on a dreary day and realize now, when the sun was bright and high in the sky, I paid it no attention.

I know horror, now that things are bleak, and Abigail is lost to darkness. Oh how I wish I did not know such terror, but I believe there is a wicked thing here in this darkness, and that I must go to it – to be with Abigail.

A Farewell to Ernest ©

They spelled Ernest wrong

 

 

In the mornings I would go down to the café for coffee where the girl knew my face and knew I took the coffee black. Hadley and Bumby slept late in those days, but later, after Bumby woke, he and Hadley would come down to join me and we would breakfast in the café and watch the pink tourists glow and carry their things out to the beach. From our room in the hotel next to the café we could look down onto the tables beneath the trees in the courtyard outside the café. Our room was on the third floor and looked out over the gray ocean. The ocean was always gray in that part of the country, but the gray made the blue sky that much richer. In the late afternoons Hadley and I would sit on the balcony outside our room and watch the same, now reddened, middle-aged tourists with their fat-bellied children struggle inland with their family’s vacation supplies in tow. They loaded their surplus into steaming station wagons parked below us in the hotel’s parking spaces. In these late afternoons, Bumby would nap on the bed in the room. Hadley would read in the chair next to mine on the balcony. Sometimes she would read a magazine or open my mail that came into the hotel. I would often write and drink Armagnac poured over iced water. The girl from the café would bring the Armagnac up after I phoned down and asked for her by name. Maybe her name was Marita. I don’t remember her name now, but I knew it then, and I remember liking it. I drank the Armagnac for my health but it did not hurt the writing either. If, while opening the mail, Hadley found a check, she would playfully toss it onto my writing and smile with pride. She would tell me again how proud she was of me and how glad she was for us and for all the money coming in. The checks would always have been deposited already but Hadley liked to think of the checks as trophies that signified an accomplishment. My latest book was in its second printing and an advance had come for the next book. I had a good feeling about my next book. The publisher liked it as well, but it is always difficult to predict how well a book will sell. It is always best to think about such things as little as can be allowed. But it is not always easy to think infrequently of a nice dream. Hadley liked to think the money would last forever, but I knew it could not and I had to start writing again. The short stories came easiest, but in those days, writing the stories made me feel like a whore to the literature. Now I see that it is the short story that is my craft and the novel is best left to better writers such as James and Scott. It was always better to compliment another writer in your own writing, because to compliment another writer in person was considered an insult. We still went under the system, then, that praise to the face was open disgrace. Maybe that has changed with a new generation, but that is the way it was with our lost one.

I no longer have Hadley or Bumby, but I still have the writing and the drinks. Some days I have more drinks than I have writing, but Catherine is understanding. I tell her easy reading is damn hard writing. She laughs. Catherine laughs easily and often. Some days I think I love her, some days I know I do not. Catherine is wise to this and to this she is also understanding. She tells me she loves me and says it is not because I am a writer that she is with me. I believe her. But it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t. Maybe some day I will write about the garden of Eden Catherine and I live in; a garden where it is only the two of us, one loving the other, the other unloved. Although this is mostly untrue, it is how I will write it, because I must write what I know. I know I can never be lonely with Catherine. No matter how cold and rainy the weather is outside, each morning the spring in Catherine’s eyes beats back the cold rain so that it seems it will never arrive. It is unnatural to think the rains will never come, and frightening to think that Catherine’s love may someday fail and let the cold rains come close. When the rains finally come in, I understand it will be because I have failed her. I would stop the rain if I could, but I can not. Someday I am likely to let the cold winter rain destroy our garden. Until then, I still have Catherine, my writing and my drinks – Catherine has no one. Afterwards, I too will have no one and Catherine will have, for what it is worth, only my writings.