Hi, all! I enjoy writing horror, both prose and poetry. Working on my prose at the moment. Thank you for reading!
Hi, all! I enjoy writing horror, both prose and poetry. Working on my prose at the moment. Thank you for reading!
From the window, I can see it’s snowing outside. Again. I press my hands to the sill, but can’t feel any of the coldness. Even the glass of the window doesn’t feel cool, just tepid, as does my forehead and skin. They have for the past months. My chest heaves with deep breaths as I watch each snowflake falling, thinking about what it feels like to be water made so beautiful, only to fall and intermingle with the fluff on the ground and vanish forever, never to be remembered. I suppose it’s a hard existence, like mine. I don’t want to be maudlin, though. She doesn’t like it when I’m sad. So I turn from the window, close the shades, and go back under the covers, thinking about what she’ll have me make for dinner.
I wait in the chair. I know what’s coming. Every Sunday is the same: he comes in, he wipes my teeth with a cloth, and presses a wrench to them. Lightly. I don’t know why that’s his fetish, and I know he has others, but for me, that’s what he does. I’m the patient, he’s the dentist. He even looks the part, with his scrubs and glasses. I just have to sit here for him and when it’s over, no more than two minutes, he gives me $200. One of my highest paying clients for the time, and I don’t even need any preparation.
I hear his footsteps now and ready myself. He likes me to act like I’m numb and just coming out of a deep sleep. Only this time, he doesn’t have a wrench in his hands: he has a drill.
The grim reaper sits before his marble desk, bones drawn across his lap. His robe hangs loose at his sides and the holes in his skull where his eyes used to be feel heavy. Before him are hundreds of millions of glass spheres, like snowglobes, showcasing his work: there sits the miniature body of a man he took from a hospital; there, a mother with her child. Some of them make him feel sad all over again. He knows nobody wants to hear about that. The grim reaper can’t be sad, can’t feel emotion! But he does, and he reaches out towards a particular sphere that means more to him than the others.
A bell rings behind him. His day off is over. He has no time to relive the past. It’s time to reap again.
I see the phone. Like a human, it makes me want to talk, ask questions. But I’m sitting here waiting, not for whoever the phone might be, but for you. It’s silent. Then I ask the air, “Who am I to be sitting here, waiting like this, when I can’t even bring myself to hear your whisper any longer?” The thought of it alone would destroy me. You no longer belong to anyone, to this world.
When the phone rings, I ring too. With excitement and nervousness, I reach my hand out and pick up. It’s not you. Of course it wouldn’t be. I know you can’t call - won’t call - any more. So, like a toddler with its blanket, I take myself to sleep to find you in my dreams.
I thought I recognized him from across the bar, but when I looked, he didn’t turn my way. I couldn’t tell if it was him or not by just his hair. Even just the hair, though, took me back to us. Years and years ago when we were different people with different goals and thoughts, which is what ultimately drew us apart. But when I heard his order at the counter, I knew it was him for sure and debated going to say hi. How do you say hi to somebody you once knew everything about when they’ve now become a stranger?
I picked up my things and left, but wondered who he was now, and if I would still have fallen in love with him as he was now.
I watched the street be paved from dirt into tar. I stood with Crystal, just kids, looking at the trucks and men come in and out, day after day, after school. We had no plans, no agenda, but to watch them.
We watched the cracks form in that asphalt, and rode over them ourselves when we got a car. She even won worst driver in high school, which we all laughed about. The street was older now, nothing new, but each crack told a story we’d try to remember.
She’s dead now, and when I see that street I know it knew her, too. I think of all the memories, scenes, families that tar has seen, and wonder if there’s a way for me to dig my fingers deep into the ground and tear them out to watch again.
Of course, I know there isn’t.
In a heart-shaped box, a mother keeps her children’s teeth. They’re all she has left of them. They’re mingled together with their roots and grime, but she can identify each one as if she were looking at them eye to eye. “That one there is Michael’s,” she’d say, showing anyone who’d listen. “And that one, with the hole on the side, is Miriam’s. Oh, and that one gave little Morris so much trouble.”
The children all lost their teeth on the same day, one by one. Mother wanted something to remember them by before she lit the home on fire and fled to the yard to watch it burn. Father was long gone by then, away with some new woman in America, was the rumor. Mother had intended to walk into the burning house, but seeing the teeth in the box gave her a new fuel for life.
She found that so depressingly odd.
The umbrella sat stuck in the sand like a person, overseeing today’s festivities. A sparking sun shone with relentless heat and purpose, illuminating the hazy deep browns and blues of the forest. Birds chirped in different meter, making it difficult to distinguish where they were and what they said. People walked hand in hand among the foliage, letting their legs drag against the thick plants that had grown there for hundreds of years. There was laughter, echoes, kisses, and promises made there, on that secret cove with the tightly-packed leaves and stems. At night, above it all, the sun faded into a full, yellow moon, smiling down at the visitors. Although it was humid even then, nobody complained: everyone enjoyed the day and the night with respect.
“Looking at a bubble, I find myself wondering when it lost its glamor. Remember being a child and seeing something so wonderful you simply couldn’t imagine anything cooler? When was the last time you felt something like that? Something raw and real, like seeing a bubble for the very first time. Think about it. I think it’s pretty sad that we lose that childhood wonder, but I find myself more curious lately to find out why. So, my studies will be on when we lose our sense of wonder and how we can get it back. I intend to start my discoveries today with approval of this project.”
The board looked at me and shook their heads. “Such a childish, useless project is not approved. Please seek approval elsewhere.”
I walked out of the room, wishing to see a bubble again for the first time.
I lived a thousand lives in this room, for better and for worse. The carpet, still not replaced, absorbed my tears, shower water, and spilled drinks, from my time as a toddler to my adulthood. There was always a distinct smell: once of paint, then of rain and clean air, now of mustiness and dust. I remember life’s happenings through the posters on the walls. The posters that I’m here to take down because the house is being sold to someone who will never knew all the things I did, the thoughts I thought, the tears I cried and the celebrations I had in this space. Someone who might make this room into an office, or something worse.
I feel like I’m betraying an old friend.
