Jocelyn’s eyes begged for Andrew to stay as she whispered, “Please, just one more night.  Just stay tonight and hold me; be with me.”  Tears welled up in her eyes.  “Please.”  Her head swung from side to side and droplets tumbled off of her cheeks.

He rolled his eyes.  “What the fuck?  Who do you think I am?”

“I just…”  She looked like she felt stupid and Andrew hoped she did.  “I am going to miss you so much.  I don’t know what else to do.”

He shook his head as if trying to shake something loose from inside of his brain.  “Nope, I don’t fucking understand.  Are you on drugs?  Did you hear what I said to you?”

Tears ran down her cheeks, but something in her eyes said that she was serious.  “I’m sober.”  Her shoulders drooped and the tears tumbled from her eyes.  “I love you so much.  I don’t care that you don’t want to be with me, I just don’t know how to deal with anything by myself. At least stay one night, so I’m not alone.”  She brushed her long brown bangs out of her eyes, her gaze was focused on Andrew and still begged.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.  He opened his mouth as if to say something, raised one finger, then closed his mouth again.  His head swung from right to left; he opened his eyes and studied her.  “For the past year, I have been sleeping with Beth.”  She seemed unaffected.  “Then I come home and I give it to you right after.  Now, you want to hold me?  If you aren’t trying to get close to me to kill me, you’re really fucked up.”

“I don’t want sex.  I just want to sleep next to you one last time.  What can it hurt?  I think you owe me something with everything you’ve put me through.”

“Stop.”  He turned away.  “Don’t do this to me, it’s hard enough.”

She reached out and grabbed his sleeve, pulling at his arm.  “Please, don’t go.”  She gripped tighter.  “You owe me!”

“I’m leaving, Josie.  I have enough respect for you to leave.  That’s what I owe you, respect that I didn’t show you before.”

She dropped to her knees, her face wrenched up as tears sprung from her eyes.

Andrew turned around.  “I-”

Her lip quivered.  “That’s not fair.”  She broke off into sobs.

What could he say?  He only called her Josie when they were alone together.  The kind of name that no one even knew he had for her; it was their secret name.  “I didn’t mean to –.”

“Just go.”  Her head dropped low and she turned away from him.  “You’ve done enough.”

“It was an accident, I swear.”

“I know.”  She walked away, “Doesn’t hurt any less, though.”  She turned the corner and up the stairs.

Andrew picked up his bags and walked out the front door.

Andrew had just crossed the city line when Beth called.

“I was on my way over to surprise you.”  His face was tight from smiling

There was a moment of silence.  “You’re coming here?”

“I’m on the highway now; be there in five minutes.”  In his excitement, he barely noticed her apprehension.  “She begged me to stay with her and hold her for one night.”

“You told her everything?”

“I told her everything!  Now we can be together forever like we talked about.”

“Forever?”  She sighed, “Like you always talked about.”  She moaned a bit as if in thought.  “Don’t’ come here, Andrew.  I don’t want forever.  In fact, I’m not going to be able to see you tonight.  I have company.”

“Company?  Who?”

“Look, it doesn’t matter who it is.”  She sounded harried.  “I really have to go, just turn around and go home, Andy.  Apologize to your girlfriend and go home.  Forget about me if  you have to, but I really have to go now.”

Andrew pulled into her driveway.  “This isn’t funny.  Please tell me you’re joking.”

“Just go, Andrew.”

He looked up at and saw her curtains closed.  The lights were on in her room and there were silhouettes moving behind them.

He opened his mouth to argue, thought better of it and left.
Andrew pulled into the driveway he had only left a half hour before.  The light on the porch was on, but inside of the house was dark.  He stared up at it for a moment, not sure how to even begin to apologize.  His heart raced, but he forced himself to get out of the car.  He took slow, steady steps up the walk and onto the porch.

Andrew raised his hand and tried to bring himself to knock, but fear took over him and he turned back to his car just as the door behind him opened.

“Andrew?  I thought you left.”  She sounded like she had been crying.

He shook his head as he turned back around, tears rolled down his cheeks.  “I’m so sorry that I hurt you.  I was wrong.”

“I knew you’d be back.”  She smiled a calm, gentle smile.

“Can I please stay here tonight?  I could find a hotel room, but I just don’t want to be alone.”

She opened the door.  “Of course I don’t want you to be alone.  Come in.”

He ducked into the house and stood in the doorway for a moment.  He wasn’t sure what to expect

“I’m glad you came back.”  She hugged him tight.

“You aren’t mad at me?”

She looked at the ground, waved her head from side to side, then looked at him.  “Can we just go to bed?”  She put her arms around him again and pressed her mouth against his.  “I want to make love to you.”

A voice in the back of Andrew’s mind objected, but he ignored the voice and joined her in the bedroom.

Jocelyn sat a bagel and a cup of coffee down in front of Andrew.  “I’m glad you came back.  I was lost without you.”

“I’m sorry about everything.”  He took a bite and stared down at his plate.

She studied his face from across the table.  “Why’d you come back so soon?”

“I didn’t realize what I was involved in.  You loved me, but she never did.  She was using me.  I shouldn’t have ever been stupid enough to think someone else could be better to me than you are.”  He looked into her eyes.  “I will never make that mistake again.”

She stood up and took his empty plate from in front of him.   “I have some things I need to get done, but I’ll be home by the time you get home from work.”  She kissed him hard and caressed his cheek, pressing her body against his as she did.

“I’ll be thinking about you all day.”  She kissed him again, smiled and backed away.  “Have a good day!  I love you!”

It was almost seven when Andrew got home from work.  As he stepped inside, Jocelyn ran to him and hugged him tight.        “You’re home!  I was a little worried you were going to have second thoughts about coming home tonight or something.  I got the kitchen and dining rooms clean for you today.”

Andrew didn’t see much of a difference, but there were candles lit in the dining room and the table was set for two. The house smelled like food and Andrew’s stomach rumbled.

He smiled at her.  “It’s beautiful, thank you.”

“I made dinner.  Meatloaf; I even used your Mom’s recipe.  You are going to love it.”

She ran into the kitchen and came back out with a pan in her hands.  “And I made brownies!”  She sat them down on the table, motioned for him to sit and turned back toward the kitchen.  “I’ll be right back with the rest.”

Andrew took his seat and listened to the clanking sound of pots and pans.

“Here I come.”  She had a platter in one hand and a bowl of green beans in the other.

“You made all of this for me?  I’m the one who fucked up; you shouldnt’ be doing things for me.”

“Don’t worry about it.  I have another surprise, but you have to eat first.”  She motioned for him to go ahead.  “You first.  I’m too excited.”

“What are you excited about?”

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at him gently.  “I just want to make you happy so you don’t’ feel like you have to wander off again.  I’m excited taht I get a second chance to prove myself to you.”

“I don’t deserve this after what I did to you.”

She stood up.  “Okay, I was gonna wait to give you the last present, but you seem like you need something to calm you down.”  Jocelyn started toward the stairwell, motioning for Andrew to follow along with her.

Andrew hesitated for a moment, and then followed her to the second floor.

She led him into the bathroom; Andrew noticed at once that the shower curtain was closed.  They didn’t close the shower curtain during the day because Jocelyn was convinced that someone was going to be hiding behind it.

She smiled at him.  “Had to break my own rule for decency.”  She pulled back the curtain to show Beth lying in the tub.  She was on her stomach with her head tilted back.  Her eyes were open and staring at the toilet.  “I felt like she was watching me while I was peeing.  So, I closed the curtain.”

“What have you done?”  Andrew managed.

“‘It’s not what I’ve done; it’s what I am going to do.”  She smiled.  “I am going to stuff her, then when you feel like running away, you can have your way with her.  Now I don’t have to worry about you leaving me for her and you don’t have to worry about her leaving you.”  She stood on her tip toes and gave him a kiss on the cheek.  “I’ll be in bed waiting.”  She walked to the door and turned back around.  “I love you so much.”  She blew him a kiss, turned and headed down the hallway.

James J. Fontaine’s funeral brought paid respects from family, friends and acquaintances that passed before the casket revering with tenderness. Long hollow halls, ancient benches, and portraits of priests hung in silence echoing their devotion and years of prayer. The fickle sun teased those attending with bright hues of yellow through clouds of gray. Ten to twelve people drifted to their seats. James’ only son, Mike Fontaine, Mike’s wife Henora, and two boys silently wept near the casket as the priest prepared James for his resting-place. Mike’s sister, Rebecca, watched expressionless, sighing and yawning from time to time. Their mother, Franny Fontaine, covered her mouth with her shaky hand appearing legitimately saddened for the loss of her husband, but secretly latched a door to a dungeon in her memory locking away moments never to be freed.

“James J. Fontaine was an honest man, a devoted husband to his loving wife and a loyal father to his two children, excuse me.” The priest’s cough reverberated through the corridors of the church.

“Yea, devoted to kicking your ass,” Rebecca said confidently as she leaned into Mike with sinister mannerisms.

“If you hated him so much, then why the hell did you come?” Mike kept a sincere and direct profile towards the priest who sipped from a glass of water and continued.

“May his soul be blessed in Heaven. Jim, as his friends called him, go in peace and go with God.” Through the picture-framed windows of the church, leaves blew as ravenous winds picked up and dusk closed in on the late Autumn Sunday afternoon. Mike’s watch read 3:15pm and he realized the football game was nearing half- time. He could still make the second half depending on how long the funeral lasted. He debated with great fervor that he did not want the funeral held on a Sunday. He believed that the decisions for his life had to be his own convictions, an essential part to his survival as a human being. His father’s mad ravings, his lunacies and sudden outbursts hovered in Mike’s mind. He recollected his fits of sweating and anxiety as he often created revenge scenarios on many cold winter nights imagining some demented conquest over his father. He chewed the flavorless gum trying to favor the good side of his father’s life. He listened vaguely to Rebecca’s curses and verbal dances on his father’s grave. He wavered on tears. Tears of guilt hollowed out his stomach and he cursed himself silently for adopting the notion of violence against his father.

“Patriots on?” His sister was tugging at his elbow. “They are; aren’t they? They’re playing today and you’re at the old man’s funeral. Kind of ironic, don’t you think? Bet you’re just dying to do a score-check. Who they playing?” She snickered and he felt as though she had stuck him with a hundred needles. Rebecca cringed with shame at her pathetic brother pretending, her mother pretending. They were all pretending. She relentlessly attacked, “To brake”, as she so often referred to it. “Who are they playing?”

“Kansas City.” His body went limp. He wanted to smack her in the face, but decided the timing poor. “Rebecca, don’t you have any respect? He was your father. He fed you, clothed you your entire life. He might not have been perfect, but you don’t get a choice in these matters. What about Mom? Have some respect for Mom.” His final words cracked and sounded whiny.

“Oh, I got respect. I got plenty of respect, Mikey. So, who’s playing,” she insisted on talking about the football game.

“I told you, Kansas City.” He wanted to watch the game. Today’s game advertised serious ramifications being the Patriots first real challenge to defend their 4-0 status against a highly rated defense. He glanced at Henora noticing her fairly stout figure. She defied her middle age by exercising and emanating a romance for life.

Henora cherished her family with enormous pride and often concluded that nothing else mattered. She cried delicately as the church organ trumpeted hymns. When she and Mike first married, Franny Fontaine’s plight peeked from out of the dark curtains covering the windows of the Fontaine house. On one occasion she recalled a black eye, a few years later she tried to disguise a fat-lip, and then, the worst of them all, the dislocated shoulder. These moments occurred so sparingly that Henora never took any action. Mike’s horror stories of growing up with James Fontaine often haunted her sleep. Married to Mike for fifteen years she considered these intervals between injuries too inconsistent to believe that he beat her. Henora trusted Franny’s explanations, which often described her clumsy nature. Henora liked Mrs. Fonataine very much and in many ways tried to emulate her. Henora loved her husband, even though she found Mike insensitive sometimes, well what men weren’t, and she gave a half smile to this thought. Mike always found it important to make up after a fight as soon as possible. Mike’s societal role defined her role as a mother, a devoted wife, and he reflected her personality, or at least he tried. She admired his strength to get up at three in the morning to plow snow, or work his butt off in the summer building houses, while at the same time, keeping to his duties, his responsibilities as a husband, a father and a provider. She caught him fidgeting and she recognized the child inside him. “What are you doing?” She asked.

“Nothing,” he replied.

“Why do you keep looking at your watch? You’re worried about the game? You’ll be able to catch the second half.” She patted his arm.

“Dad would have wanted me to watch the game instead of being here. He’s probably laughing at me right now. Cause he knows I’m getting skunked with this thing.” He kissed her gently on the cheek and tasted the salt from her drying tears. He rose up and shuffled out of the bench row. He walked down the long, gothic hall and out of the church. Mike stepped into his car. He turned on the radio and lit a cigarette. He searched, not frantically but casually, for the right station. The announcer came through strong and clear.

“What an explosive game it has been. They’re just about to come out from half- time. The Patriots are looking flat. I don’t know if it’s this place or that they just haven’t come here to play today,” the announcer complained and passed the torch onto the other.

“I agree, they just look like they didn’t show up to play football that’s for sure,” the other voice interjected the agreement.

“God, I hate it when you guys talk like that,” Mike said out loud startling himself by the sound of his own voice and lit a cigarette. He thought of how his father often threw fits of anger and contempt for the sportscasters referring to them on more times than none as “Baffoons”, “Ignorant assholes”, and “Idiots”.

“Idiots,” Mike said quietly to himself as he smoked his cigarette. He grew frustrated when he witnessed his wife depart from the church and approach his vehicle. She had a look of disappointment, usually a look filed away and reserved for the children. He desperately needed some time to himself. He wanted this peace and he discovered that as he aged, these moments were becoming less frequent. It wasn’t just his wife shutting down these moments, but the children, his job and his mother. His responsibilities to his mother recently doubled. She became extremely reliant on him when his father grew ill. How could he help not growing old, he thought.

“What are you doing?” Henora said as she knocked on the window. Mike rolled down the window.

“I’m doing a score-check. Look, this is all too depressing for me. Why don’t you round up the kids and we’ll head home.” He desperately wanted her to acquiesce.

“It’s almost over, we’ll all go home and have dinner. Rebecca says she can’t make it.”

“Lucky her.” Mike watched as she walked back into the church. The funeral guests were planning on returning to his home for dinner and drinks following the funeral. All Mike wanted to do, however, was watch the game.

“That’s the half. Stay tuned for highlights from around the league,” the announcer said as a commercial came on. He continued to listen to the scores and highlights from around the league. The wind occasionally picked up and leaves splashed against his windshield. He looked at the church. He knew his father would have preferred him watching the game than being at his funeral. He would be appalled if he knew that his wife planned his own funeral on an Autumn Sunday. He waited patiently as he finally watched the guests depart from the church. His family entered the vehicle. His wife sat in the passenger seat and his mother and children stepped into the back seat.

“I know you’re upset Michael, but it’s just a part of life. Michael, turn down that football and listen to me for a moment,” Franny said. Henora turned the volume down. “You have to pay your respects to the dead at a funeral. It’s not right for you to just run out on your father like that. Are you all right?” His mother was in between crying fits. Mike put the car into gear and drove home. He spied on his mother in the rear view mirror and slowly turned up the football game.

Mike Fontaine’s father introduced him to football. Through his growing up, Sunday did not mean dressing up and going to church with his mother, but it did mean spending the day watching the professional sport of football. The NFL was not merely an organization that brought the game to his television. It was a way of life. Statistics, ending scores, quarterback ratings and a strong defense brought excitement to Mike’s life, which appeared quite ineffectual, meaningless and dismal to him as a teenager. When he went to school, most of the discussions with friends and teachers were about how the Patriots fared that particular season. If he thought they were going to have a winning season, then his friends belittled his opinion with that inbred cynicism that their fathers conveyed and passed down to them. On occasion and depending upon his mood, his confidence lifted their spirits. His idealism and overall optimism challenged their skepticism for the great season ahead.

Winning was everything! ! ! His father’s reactions– triumph embracing a win and defiance berating a loss–influenced the young boy’s blossoming nature tremendously.

His mother, a life-long homemaker, understood his father’s behavior and appreciated the important ritual even her own father had practiced while he was alive. Occasionally, she watched the game, content with her love and often confessing that nothing mattered in this world more than family. Rebecca also understood why the game was so important to her father and brother. It defined them as males. She didn’t realize this when she was young, but as she grew older and matured as a woman, she became convinced that all human males needed their personalities defined because they were too stupid to come up with their own. Even at the youthful age of seven, Rebecca began to have a vile and adverse attitude towards the game. She would go to church with her mother. There was an understanding in their house. They were to enjoy the game or become non-existent if deciding they were not in the mood to watch football. To not want to watch a football game meant two things to her father James Fontaine: one, that you were a typical female, or two, that you were a fag.

“Grogan sets up the play. They need six yards for a first. This will be the last time they will have possession of the ball. Grogan takes the snap, hands off to Craig, he’s stopped for a loss. Oh! That hurt,” the announcer said with a tone resonating sympathy and frustration. Mike’s father stood up and threw his beer bottle across the room as Mike accented a similar, but less dramatic reaction by slapping the sofa.

“Craig! What the hell were they thinking running? God damn it!” A broken lamp followed this exclamation. Mike watched in silence gluing his eyes upon the television and avoiding all eye contact with his father. Mike stewed silently as he kept a razor sharp glance on his father from his peripheral vision.

Being too young to drink, he could not throw a beer bottle across the room. He hoped his slapping the couch convinced his father that he was truly upset. His father spoke the truth. How stupid it was to run the ball on that last play. Thrown objects, brandished chips, holes in the walls, and broken lamps, sculpted Mike to remain stone-faced, as neutral of an object in the room as possible. His father often hurled beer bottles in his direction. He ducked them when luck was with him. Sometimes he was too late.

“Why do I watch them? What the hell! Who cares!” His father stormed off to the kitchen. He returned with a new beer.

“Is it over?” He asked Mike.

“Yea, they lost again!” Mike got up to leave. On his exit he eyeballed his father cracking open his fifth beer.

“Where are you going?”

“I got some homework to do.”

“That’s a good idea figuring your grades this year have been in the gutter.” Mike’s father stood close enough for him to absorb the rank smell of beer breath.

“That’s why I’m going to study.” Mike continued towards his room, but was stopped once again by his father.

“Let me tell you something, you fail one more class and you’re out of this house. Do you understand what I’m saying?” His father squeezed his arm so that his fingernails penetrated Mike’s skin. “This is the last time I get a report card that reads “Numbskull”! Do you read me, buddy?”

“Yea. Let go.” His defiance brewed in him as he grew older. He recognized his new physical strengths and abilities that the eve of his adolescence promised.

“What did you say?” His father’s grip tightened .

“Look, you’re just upset because of the g. . .”

“Don’t tell me what or why I’m upset. I know exactly why. My boy is a numbskull!” James J. Fontaine smacked his son with his right hand.

The Patriots were looking at a losing season. Second to last in the AFC East. The disappointment reflected in James J. Fontaine’s eyes. Mike found it imperitive, as a survival instinct, to forgive his father of these infrequent outbursts. If he wanted them to stop he had to forgive. Mike believed that these acts, random as they were, were not personal attacks on his being, but simply displaced aggression for a season gone bad.

“You finished?” The bravery, the defiance, and the anger were repressed in him and Mike stared like a martyr as his father let go. Mike walked to his room where he found his history book and solace. He wiped the blood from his lip and tried to focus on the American Constitution. He did not cry.

Franny Fontaine arrived home with Rebecca to find her boy studying which creased a smile on her face. These were her finer moments. Before she closed Mike’s door she recognized his fat lip. She knew two things: that her husband had hit her son, and, that the Patriots had lost. These moments of life caused great alarm and imposed an obligation on her to confront her husband’s outbursts. After all, it was only a game. Other moments, however, depicted a father and son relationship that was cherished as an American tradition. Franny, being raised from a long line of family members, mostly men, but there were some women she recalled, who loved the game. When the leaves fell to the ground conversation was trifle unless the topic was football. She hoped to convince her husband that a trip to Florida in an ensuing winter would be just what the doctor ordered. If the expenses were to high, then she was willing to get a job. Her marriage lasted many years enjoying the spirit of competition and extreme pontification she and her husband shared over early morning coffee and the sports page. She had the uncanny knack of prediction. James Fontaine ended many seasons in disbelief at how accurate his wife’s ability was to name the team that would head to the Super Bowl, which team was destined to have a poor season, and how the Patriots rated in all this. He had married the right woman and Franny was proud that she lived up to his expectations.

In New England, the leaves changed with glorious beauty, triumphant fame, interpreted by most New Englanders that life was beautiful. James Fonataine’s income met the needs of her two children and gave both a proper dose of attention through their growing up. He coached most of their teams in many different sports. He coached Mike in football, baseball, and basketball, while he also gave some enthusiasm in coaching Rebecca in soccer, field hockey, and basketball. He was a good father, Franny thought.

Mrs. Fontaine went into her kitchen to contemplate what to cook for dinner. It was her pleasure to cook dinner, her honor. She could cook for two weeks straight and present a different meal each evening. Her cooking, her kitchen, accented her need of a defined role in life. Dinner put her stamp on the end of the day. In the community she was reputed by many as a devoted wife and well-respected mother. She often admitted to herself that she was not bred for anything else. Mrs. Fontaine attended two years of college before he husband proposed to her. On a rainy spring evening she sat in her room of her parents’ house studying for a literature mid-term when James came calling. They dated through high school. Now that she was taking classes at the community college his visits became less frequent. A world unknown to Franny opened itself up distracting her from high school romances. As the rain spattered against her window she thought of James. With a burst of fear he appeared his wet, drenched face in her window causing her to scream from surprise. She let him in where he dropped down on his knee with a ring in his left hand and asked for her devotion. She accepted and they were married two months later. It was quite a time. The Dallas Cowboys lost to the Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl that year. Was it Super Bowl five? She was not sure. She knew, however, they married in 1971 and she became pregnant with Mike that following year.

“Honey? What was the Super Bowl when Mike was born?” she asked through the kitchen and into the living room.

“1972! Miami against Dallas! Dallas killed ‘em 24-3!” her husband yelled back. She retrieved a filet of halibut from the freezer to defrost. Franny loved James. She loved him more than she loved herself. He exploded when he lost control and that was wrong. His anger crushed her at times. Opportunities to discuss his temper often were lost in a malaise of denial. She confessed to herself that he was often the first to apologize. If he could take that moment to see himself, then he spouted a gruff apology and Franny Fontaine knew best to never bring up the incident again. As she clipped the ends off of green beans she relaxed with confidence that James Fonatine was aware of his faults.

Mike heard the knock on his door and said, “Come in!” It was his father.

“Look, Mike,” he staggered a bit and conveniently leaned up against Mike’s bed. He took a casual swig of his beer. “Look, Mike. I didn’t mean to hit you like that. It’s just that, I get frustrated with you. You’re so smart. You’re so damn smart and you insist on getting bad grades. How are you going to get into a good school with those kinds of grades?”

“I’m going to get a scholarship,” Mike said to his history book.

“I don’t think you have what it takes,” Mike turned to face his father wide eyed. It was the first time his father said that he lacked potential to receive a scholarship to a college. From there on, these words bounced a hundred times in his head. The pain in his heart was that Mike knew his father was right. He could not keep these words from taking up space in his brain. These words affected everything he did for the rest of his life. He read the constitution as he shielded his father’s silent gaze. The words in history book meant nothing and Mike brushed through the pages left to read and those pages already read. He had retained nothing.

“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that, but it’s the truth. You’re only hope is that you study. Try to get some good grades and hopefully between bank loans and our support we’ll be able to find you placement at State. Just know that I’m sorry. You know that, right?

“Yes,” Mike felt sorry for his father. His father was drunk and pathetic, but his sympathy often gave way to intolerance. Mike reflected on how this recent incident was the third of its kind within the last year. This created staunch confusion and often caused him to break down and cry in the middle of the night. Cursing his internal thoughts at these moments, pointing out to himself how much of a coward and a weakling he thought of himself, brought little comfort, but he was desperate to release his frustrations when most of the time they were spent concealed, or ignored from everyone within his world. Christmas last year, he recalled, ducking and dodging an attempted blow, but he still counted it. He didn’t know how to express himself. He thought everything was normal, or if it wasn’t, then he knew to make sure everything looked normal. He convinced himself that all fathers were the same; only degrees of violence separated them. Mike’s father exited his room slouched over, crushing his beer can and wandered into the kitchen. He watched his wife prepare dinner.

“Patriots lost.” He said.

“I know.” She replied. ” I heard the end of the game on the radio.”

“Hey, Franny, I want to ask you something, and I don’t want any crap about this, but. . . Do you think I’m a good father?” His stare focused on her from the sad, inflamed and bloated face. She was not sure whether his eyes were just bloodshot or tearful as he glanced down, breaking his stare. He knew the answer.

“What a silly question. What would make you ask such a silly question?” She wasn’t looking at him.

“Franny, please. What do you say? For once let’s just be honest with each other.” She turned around and faced him. “Do you think I’m a good father?” He repeated his question.

“Yes. I think you’re upset because the Patriots lost. I think you love your children very much and I want you to know that I love you very much. You know how you can get.” She went back to clipping green beans in the sink.

“How do I get?” He moved towards the refrigerator.

“When they lose. You get upset. There’s no excuse. . .”

“That’s what I’m saying. There is no excuse for them to be playing so sloppy. They’re the worst damn team in their division. Why? Management reasons, coaching reasons and talent reasons. No, they have talent. What the hell is it?” He opened the fridge contemplating his own words never looking back at the conversation he had opened.

“How many is that?” Franny asked out of mere curiosity. It was the game. He never missed work. Every morning, for the last sixteen years, he never ceased from rising early in the morning to begin his workday.

“Five, six. Why?” He held open the door. “I bought them, shouldn’t I drink them?” He continued to stare holding open the door. “Franny, don’t not look at me on purpose. That makes me think there’s a problem. Is there?” He disconnected a beer from the rest of a brand new six-pack and placed the remaining beer inside the fridge and poised himself to ask his question a second time. “Do you have a problem?”

“No, I just wanted to make you sure you didn’t get too sleepy before dinner,” Franny said as she washed the beans in a strainer.

“Oh, well what are we having?” He moved closer to her.

“White fish. Green beans and mashed potatoes,” she said noticing her increased tempo of aggressive pacing in snipping off the ends of the green beans.

“Yea, I think I could stay up for that,” he said as he kissed her gently on the cheek and walked into the living room. Franny recognized that he emanated a feisty mood this night. She realized that Mike was slowly turning up the volume as she heard the low murmuring of football statistics hum through her ears. She vowed to God that she would always hold her memories of James dear. Through tough times and the glorious times, there was nothing closer to God than an honest and respectful marriage where love and friendship, the welcoming of neighbors, and the nurturing of children were the pinnacle and sole purpose of existence.

Mike slightly shivered at his mother’s stare in his rear view mirror as she eyeballed the volume dial on the radio.

“He’s fine,” Henora spoke for him. Mike slammed the car in gear and drove, exceeding the speed limit on certain streets. He approached his driveway anticipating with great anxiousness popping open a beer, sitting back in his easy chair and turning on the game. He pulled the car into the driveway and parked pushing himself out of the driver’s seat as if in one motion. He walked impatiently into the house. Mike threw his keys down on the coffee table and turned on the television. The game was on.

The guests arrived, not many, but enough to create a distraction for viewing the football game. His Uncle Alf and his Aunt Carol approached him.

“You OK, sweety?” Aunt Carol was a truly gifted woman at giving unrevokable love to a human being. Mike stored fond memories of both his Aunt and Uncle.

“Yea, if there’s anything we can do for you, don’t hesitate to. . . ,” Alf said.

“No, I’m fine. Really. Thank you. You both are very special to me. Always will be.” Mike felt Carol gently and slowly reaching for his hand and rubbing it with her thumb. Alf gently applied his hand on Mike’s left shoulder. ” Hey, Alf, could you. . .”

“You name it,” Alf responded.

“Could you get me a beer?”

“Sure, not a problem. Then I’ll come back and watch the game a little, then Carol and I have to be going, its a long ride back to New York.

Mike cracked open his seventh beer. He refused to count the two beers he slammed before the funeral because they had lost their effect. The game ticked off final fourth quarter minutes and Mike’s nerves electrified as his heart bounced. The game presented a long, frustrating day for the Patriots.

“Ok, we got 4:52 left in the game. Our score at Arrowhead is Chiefs 16 and the Patriots 7. They are beginning to feel the mistakes coming back to haunt them. Jefferson,
I can recall, dropped at least three of Bledsoe’s passes. . . ,” the announcer was cut off by the other.

“Don’t forget Allen’s fumble in the red zone,” said the other announcer.

“Well, I was getting to that. That fumble has definitely proven fatal for the Patriots in these final minutes,” the first announcer commented. Mike understood the detrimental consequences of being a die-hard Patriots fan, especially this season, because they were playing and ending close games. He thought of the game with the Indianapolis Colts where the Patriots pulled out a win in the final seconds. He cursed the announcers. They didn’t know the potential of the Patriots offense. They could pull this one out just like they did with Indianapolis, he thought. His faith grew powerful as he gulped down the rest of his beer.

“How many is that?” Henora entered leering at him.

“Not enough.” Mike regretted his snide remark, but she knew how important the game was to him.

“Don’t you think you could come and visit with some of the quests?” She crossed her arms. Mike consistently thought of Henora as a light from the sky shinning down on him. He often spoke his love for her. He knew that these words were something she enjoyed to hear.

“Could you get me another beer, dear?” He said with a hint of sarcasm that caused Henora to fume. Mike hardened as she did. He felt her anger standing next to him. She irritated him, and wrestled with his nerves on this day more than ever. He sized up the situation as a slow evolution of a human being. She was changing.

“You can get your own beer. I’m really not happy with you today. I just want you to know. . .”

“Look! Either get me a beer or shut the hell up!” He stared strong at the television. He enjoyed the new found sensation of asserting his maleness. Henora’s mouth dropped breathing contempt and left him at his chair with the empty beer. He turned the volume up on the television.

“The Patriots have just scored with Bledsoe connecting to Simmons for a 39-yard gain and then acquiring the touchdown by passing to Shawn Jefferson in the end zone. What a come back!” The announcer sounded legitimately impressed. Mike crushed the beer can and cheered the defense to only give the Chiefs three downs forcing them to punt. Then, the Patriots would own 2:43 to get into field goal range. There was plenty of time. Mike leaned closer to the television like an optometrist studying a patient. Its electricity and excitement hypnotized him. No one doubted that the Patriots were a truly talented team, especially to be able to create a win after a horrible day of play. Relieved by the current performance of the Patriots; he aspired to apologize to his wife. He sighed slowly spinning his wedding ring around his finger.

“Bledsoe drops back and rockets a pass to big Ben Coates for an 18 yard gain! That’s huge,” the announcer informed. A surge of invigorating passion traveled through Mike spawning great confidence that everything was going to work out for the best. The Patriots were going to win. No longer a question of faith, but the fact that their offense was about to turn-on and gain steam. So much talent blessed this football team. If only their damn coach could put some order to it, he debated with himself.

“Surprise, Bledsoe drops back and fires. Wow! He hits Terry Glenn, which looks to be a 27-yard gain putting them well into field goal range! Unbelievable!” The announcer was ecstatic. To this, Mike stood up from his chair.

“Yes!” No longer was Mike going to cage his enthusiasm. Franny approached the television room.

“Mike? Can you come in here for a minute?” Franny requested.

“Can it wait?” Mike didn’t look at her. It dumbfounded him to be stung with so many inconsiderate distractions. Why wasn’t everyone watching the game? After all, his father, who’s death brought them all together on this day, was the biggest Patriots fan in all of New England. It’s what he would have wanted. Franny turned slapping the top of Mike’s chair.

“All they need is a field goal and the Patriots can leave Arrowhead stadium wiping their brow at another close win for them this season. Adam Vinatieri prepares for the snap.” The announcer ‘s voice reflected the tension of the game. As the Patriots lined up for the field goal Henora approached Mike from behind.

“Mike, your mother wants to talk with you. Could you take some time today for your family? I know you have trouble with these kinds of things and I think, considering the way you just spoke to me, that you could come and talk with your mother and maybe even your children for god’s sake.” The second announcer chimed in over her last words.

“The kick is up! It looks good! Oh no! It hit the post! No good! No good!” The second announcer was quick to recognize that the referee signaled the field goal as a failed attempt. Mike’s body deflated and all the sound in the room, including his wife’s voice, became inaudible. His head filled with the sound of his father’s echoing laughter. He flashed to a time when his father chopped him across the bridge of his nose while they waited for a traffic light. He was remembering the first time being hit. He stared down at his empty, crushed beer can and without honest consciousness of the act, violently and with great precision, smashed his fist into his wife’s forehead cutting her with his wedding ring and sending her to the ground. As the guests entered the television room, including his children, Mike thought of his father. He slowly panned down at his hand and blinked with shock at his taught fist. He glanced back to the television. Players and coaches were interviewed about the game. Franny tended to Henora’s cut forehead. He caught his mother’s eyes and Mike searched to see if she recognized her freedom. A silence floated through the room. He turned the volume of the television up as loud as it would go and sat back in his chair. His two children gazed upon their mother’s blood mystified that such a fluid existed inside human beings. The final score of the game displayed on the television screen read Patriots 14 and the Chiefs 16.

Mother’s Day was never the token celebration of blessed mothers in our house. It was met with the shrill nuances of my deplorable mother, so it never held the same sense of duty and respect that might be found in other, more normal homes. As a grown man, I never thought that everything happened for a reason, but I do now more than ever. I never thought that I would begin to believe in a life other than the present: a spiritual awakening in this prison cell.

I was in the basement of our recently rented apartment on a typical foggy morning. The neighborhood was surrounded with palms and oaks. We rented an apartment in Carpenteria. California was entering June, and an ever-consistent fog lingered in the air. Sometimes by late afternoon it might break with penetrating sunshine, but sometimes it wouldn’t. We called it June Gloom. The streets were lined with hybrid cars, locals getting their coffee and walking their dogs. There was always the unfortunate tourist who was disappointed at the misfortune of not knowing about June Gloom. They’d wonder out loud, “Where was this amazing California weather that we’ve heard so much about?” After all, they’d spent so much time planning and saving for their California vacation.

We had to share a laundry room with the rest of the tenants. It was our two-hour slot, and I was just taking the last load of clothing from out of the dryer while my wife prepared a beef stew for our dinner when the ceiling light turned off. I had grown quite used to the apparition by this point. There in the dark was my nightmare of nightmares. Hovering. She was probably haunting me in this dirty old laundry room, because she was too drunk to find the gates of Heaven, or Hell. She just floated there smoking a cigarette. The smoke would dissipate into the air just above the washing machine. It was as if the smoke hit a force field and was blocked. She occupied the certain amount of physical space between two rickety old cabinets just above the washer. We could see each other, but we couldn’t touch.

I felt lucky to be shielded from her second hand smoke. Her three and a half packs of cigarettes a day had given me asthma in my adulthood. To this day, I can’t laugh without whirling into a coughing fit. Her stare was emphatic. Her eyes were dead set on mine. I didn’t know whether to feel frightened or angry. To be honest, when I saw her floating apparition it brought back flurries of memories from my childhood. I shook myself out of my daze and became quite startled at the creepy realization: this was my DEAD MOTHER directly in front of me in this dusty, dingy, old laundry room. I wasn’t always gripped by fear when I saw her. But for some reason, on this particular night she looked more pissed off than usual. “Nothing good will come of it,” I heard her voice echoing in and out of my head like an old cassette tape that had become warped or run down. She had said this to me once when I told her that I was going to be married. It is an unfortunate thing to hear your mother say in response to your “Big News!” The fear gripped me tighter and I noticed my left hand. It was shaking. I was shaking. I felt moisture accumulating above my brow. It would be the last time I would see the physical apparition of my mother.

I was reminded of walking in the woods of New England at dusk, when I knew in my most rational place of thinking that nothing could possibly hurt me, yet I was still afraid. Vulnerable. I became resigned to the fact that my imagination has and always will get the better of me. I was reminded of Joey Renford as I stared deep into the sallow eyes of my mother’s stare just above the washing machine. Joey Renford was a short scrappy kid. His parents were devout, Fundamentalist Christians. He despised them as much as I despised my own. Well, my Dad was okay, but he could never really handle my mother. Joey Renford always joined in when all of us neighborhood kids egged his own house in the middle of the summer vacation. Joey was a great kid. He understood that his parents were very disturbed people. He lived on Cape Cod, and my family vacationed there from Los Angeles for the summers. He was a local. A real “Cape Codda.” When we were kids, we’d catch fireflies on really humid nights. He was terrified of the dark and of returning home to his house, so we only had a few precious minutes in which to catch the fireflies in jars before the dark of night arrived. Oftentimes he snuck out and came over to my house. We’d spend the night watching them flicker in their individual jars trapped throughout the night.

“Hey, Jake? You think that there are little souls trapped in the fireflies?” He asked seriously.

“What are you talking about? Go to sleep,” but I turned over and thought about what he said.

“How could they just light up like that? And they beat like a heart,” his voice tapered off into his own curiosity and I stared at the fly that I had caught. We were only 8 or 9 at the time, but it was a pretty profound conversation for us.

We’d set them free the next morning. Joey demanded it. Joey was a great childhood friend. He wasn’t allowed to watch television growing up. One time the neighborhood kids were hanging out on Sea Street, close to the Renfords’ house talking about how Stanley Kubrick’s The Shinning was so scary. Joey’s mouth was completely agape when we described the scene when the kid riding the big wheel runs into the twin girls all chopped up in the hallway. His Dad came out.

“What are you boys discussing?” Mr. Renford asked looking at his son suspiciously.

“Ah, they were just telling me about a movie,” Joey looked down at the road. With that said, Mr. Renford whooshed his hand and slapped Joey’s face turning his pale white cheek a bright red. Joey cried and ran into the house.

“You kids stay away from my home. Get out of here,” he said with a gleam of nasty satisfaction in his eyes.

“You shouldn’t hit him like that Mr. Renford,” I said as I bravely stood my ground against his overpowering shadow in the mid-summer sun.

“Jacob Minheart? You are going straight to hell. Your own mother will tell you that,” and he turned around and entered his house. He would continue to beat Joey. We could hear him screaming. After that, Joey wasn’t allowed to hang out with anymore. When he got older and braver and brawny, Joey flipped his parents the middle finger with a smile and went off for days. It was understandable why he ended up running away when he was fifteen. No one ever saw him again. When he left, The Renford house became haunted and gloomy on those humid Cape Cod July nights that lingered into marshy dusks. No one was ever sure if The Renfords were there or not. No one ever caught anybody coming or going.

All the kids in the neighborhood loved coming over to my house. They knew that my parents had cable television and they could get away with watching whatever horror movie they wanted like The Shinning, the Friday the 13th hacker flicks, skin flicks, Rated R comedies like Caddy Shack, Blazing Saddles, or Cheech and Chong, movies that were really raunchy for their time. Mr. Renford said we were bludgeoning our minds with filth, degradation, and sin. We thought he was a crazy evangelical Whack Job who had owned a miserable life. It was a very matter of fact understanding.

Sometimes, when Dad went to sleep, we’d hit the liquor cabinets. It was easy. The screws on the cabinet doors were completely warped. I would simply get ten fingers from one of the guys and literally flick the screws out of place. We would get drunk and refill the half empty liquor bottles with water. They never noticed. We could only get away with this precocious behavior, because my mother was always on her way to passing out, or, had already done so. My dad offered little parental supervision because he was mostly relieved when she passed out too, and would relish in his solitude, his solace. Those Cape Cod summers offered me an escape that I will never forget.

And so of course when I saw the ghost of my dead mother’s hovering torso, neck faded out, translucent so you could see the detergent resting on top of the washing machine behind her, these distant moments of my childhood came swirling back around in my memory. The smoke continued to be blocked by its invisible wall. Her face was that of her elderly self. What frightened me the most was that I could only see her torso, her arms and her face smoking the cigarette; the rest of her body did not exist. This made her appear morbidly deformed. I stood there shaking, realizing this was no fantasy, all the while staring deeply into her eyes, a smoker’s eyes, shades of yellow around the pupils that told the story of a woman that smoked three packs to four packs of Marlboro Gold cigarettes a day and drank the labels off the bottles of bourbon.

My parents’ house was always filled with booze, every cabinet: Jack Daniels, Jim Beam bourbon.

“Would you like another, dear?” My Dad would ask. The earlier they started the worse it would be. Five O’clock was the witching hour. She would simply clink the ice in her cocktail glass, and Dad would get up and retrieve another drink for her. He was her servant; he was her weak, little man.

“Easy on the ice, Charlie,” she would say with that scraggly, husky, smoker’s voice. It was almost the growl of a tiger, except not quite as eloquent. It was hard to put into words exactly what her voice sounded like unless you knew someone who smoked like a smokestack and drank like a sailor day in and day out for decades. She’d burble kisses and slobber hugs. Her breath always hung in front of me. When I was a child my dad forced me to return her affection no matter what condition she was in. I kissed her and it was like puckering up to an ashtray full of stamped out Marlboro Golds.

The woman made it difficult for me to hug people. Even with Joanna, my wife: Joanna claimed that sometimes she would need a hug, and so I would hug her, but it felt more like patting than embracing. She said I hugged her sometimes like I was patting a dog, and it made her feel like a dog.

Joanna and I had met in high school and never looked back. She was the one my Mom could never drive away. She was patient with me. She helped me calm down when my mother got me upset. All of the times Mother called Joanna a “bitch!” -all the times she made me embarrassed from slurring and passing out at restaurants-all the times she blew her smoke right into Joanna’s face while we were eating-all of these times Joanna was patient and laughed it off. I loved her for that. Joanna could see these moments for what they were: a joke. Joanna had a way of seeing what she called, “The hysterically awkward moments.” She made the moments sardonically laughable, and it eased the pain and sorrow I felt on so many occasions.

“Well, your wife is being a BITCH!” This after Joanna had suggested that my mother had had enough to drink. Her voice escalated with such ferocity when she was in a drunken stupor.

“Goddammit Mom, don’t speak to her that way!” I came to Joanna’s defense every time. After all, what woman in the world tolerated such abuse? Then my mother would take an enormous drag from her cigarette and slam down her Manhattan while exhaling in my direction. She would stare blankly at me with those liver-stained eyes.

“Well, excuse me! Everything is my fault, I suppose? Everything’s always my fault!” She would make these dramatic proclamations and have absolutely no recollection of them in the morning. She wouldn’t remember a thing from the previous night.

“Dad, put her to bed? Please?” My dad would nod in agreement with me.

“ Com’on Marylyn. I think it’s time for you to go to bed,” he grabbed her arm slowly.

“Don’t forget to take my drink Charlie,” she tapered off and slowly followed his lead into their bedroom. He didn’t forget the drink. He was kind of a perverted multitasker at these moments. Upon their departure Joanna would stare at me with “this is the last time we are ever eating over” look.

“Well, that was fun. Did you have fun tonight?” She waited for me to smile. Sometimes I would. Sometimes I just couldn’t.

Back in the laundry room, she was hovering in the air, staring at me with a hint of guilt and shame, disguising an underlying meanness hidden away, but dying to show itself. I remember when Joanna first saw her ghost.

Joanna had been sitting in our living room on the couch when she noticed the rocking chair in the corner began to sway, and then she saw her. At first she thought she was seeing things. Our living room wasn’t very well lit, a reading lamp here, a table lamp there. But then, she gazed more intensely at the chair and saw the old woman. She called me into the living room, “Jake? There’s something you need to see, I think.” Her tone of voice offered a mordant wit combined with a genuine stain of fear. I scurried into the living room and saw Joanna eyeballing the rocker. It was wicker, I think. The thing was a second-hand run down lacquer peeling yard sale item we purchased when we moved in together. We had been meaning to throw it out. Fitting, I thought, that the image of my mother should be sitting in it. Joanna looked at me to verify that I saw what she was seeing.

“I’ve seen her a few times. But never this much in focus. Usually, she’s much more translucent. Like a reflection in the window, or more like a shadow,” I confessed to Joanna.

“Can she see us?” she asked. I looked at her dumbfounded.

“I don’t think so.”

“I mean have you had a conversation with her?”

“No, she has just appeared a few times and I thought nothing of it.”

“The ghost of your dead mother shows herself to you and you think nothing of it? I think this could have been discussed. I mean, WOW, that’s really Marylyn!”

“I thought I was seeing things. To be honest, I wish we could just ignore it. For a while,” I faltered as Joanna looked at me with her dark blue eyes.

“I figured it was only a matter of time before you’d see her, or it would be quite evident that I was losing my fucking mind. Which now I can say with relief that I am not. And there you have it and that’s really all there is to it so let’s move onto to something else.”

“Unreal,” she whispered as she swiped her hand through the ghost of my mother floating on the wicker chair smoking. “Her smoke seems to get blocked,” Joanna observed. She looked at me. “Well, that’s good news. I cannot tell you how many times that woman blew smoke in my face,” Joanna smiled. I smiled back. Joanna made a fist and punched my mother in the head. It went right through, and it put us into a curious fit of uncomfortable laughter.

But there was really more to this than both of us were willing to discuss. But we let it lay. The apparition didn’t really do anything. She just sat there staring at you. Big deal. She wasn’t always around, and when she would appear, well, it was completely inconsequential. Joanna picked up on this after awhile. One night we threw a party, a Christmas bash, everyone getting smashed, music rockin’, Joanna and I getting along the best we ever had, and all of sudden Mike Sax bumps into Joanna and me dancing and he asks, “Who’s the old woman in the corner on the chair?”

Sometimes she reflected her image in our apartment’s mirrors. I remember one time looking at a portrait of Joanna that was placed bedside and I saw my Mom’s face reflecting off of the glass within the picture frame. I turned around quickly. And saw nothing.

“Oh that’s just my Aunt Sophie. She’s a friend of my family, but we call her Auntie, that kind of thing?” When she gave that explanation I knew Joanna had seen it like I did. It was like an old portrait, a Polaroid shot. And it went on this way for the next five years.

One night I came home from work at the college. I went into the living room and saw my mother in the wicker rocking chair. Joanna had hung a large thickly roped noose from the ceiling and the length reached her neck perfectly. I ran into the kitchen.

“I love it!”

“I thought you would,” she smiled and hugged me like it was my birthday.

I had a dream the other night that reminded me of an incident when my dad, my mother, and I went out to dinner. I was about 17. It was a Thursday night. Except in the dream everyone was staring at me: the waiters, the customers, even my father. Their brows were all furrowed. We were sitting in this restaurant in Beverly Hills. We never spoke when we went out. I spent every moment as a child on Thursday nights imprisoned. Every Thursday night wondering when it was going to happen. When she would do something to make me wish she wasn’t my mother. It was an inevitable moment. There were nights when waiters had to cut her off. She would protest, and my dad would usually try to calm her down to avoid a scene. It was always about the scene. The DREADFUL scene. The embarrassment and public humiliation. The wishing for her slow and painful death. The wishing she would just “SHUT UP!” herself. She had exclaimed, “SHUT UP, CHARLIE!” on many a Thursday evening with a voice like a pit of gravel. My dad prided himself often on bringing up interesting ideas associated with specific news worthy articles. And he’d go on and on about what he thought of President Carter and the hostage crisis, or the future of American youth. She always interrupted my insecure, shell-shocked father with an “OH SHUT UP, CHARLIE!” In the dream, everyone was blaming me. They never stopped staring, as if they were all asking me collectively, “How long until you kill her?” I shot awake propped up on my elbows and imagined all the ways I wanted her to die.

My life growing up was difficult. There were many bad times; everyone had them. I watched Joanna sleep. I was lucky to be with Joanna: my solid beloved rock of a wife. So when she showed me that she was going to tolerate my mother’s ghost in our house, I felt reconfirmed that I had got one of the better ones. Our alternatives were limited.

“A letter came today from your father,” Joanna had said casually, but not without a touch of compassion. I looked at it and it was addressed from the penitentiary. It was from my father. I looked up at Joanna. She did not return my gaze. She went on to the kitchen to chop celery stalks for a beef stew. Joanna made the best beef stew. It tasted so comforting on those cold rainy nights. I followed her into the kitchen.

“What can I say?”

“You can say you miss him. You can at least write him back?” I watched her chop the celery waiting for me to reply.

“What could I say? The ghost of your late wife has been spotted haunting our house on many different occasions. Please remove her immediately?” She looked at me shamefully and reproachfully.

“No, that’ll just upset him, besides he would just think you were being cruel. But you can still write to him: about your life? Me? Us? It would mean the a lot to him. He’s all alone in there.” I understood what she meant. Joanna saw compassion in every thing. Beyond her darkened sense of humor she sincerely believed people deserved forgiveness and second, sometimes even third chances. I sat down to write my father a letter like Joanna suggested. I glanced into the mirror behind the desk and saw my mother lingering. I crumpled up the piece of paper and threw it into the wastebasket. I stared at her in the mirror. I turned around, and of course she wasn’t there.

As one of the only duties she performed, my mother prepared salads for dinner. She smoked and drank while doing this. Many times I caught sight of large pieces of ash from her lit cigarette dropping into her salads. My dad always bellowed about the great hunger he felt before dinner. The three of us ate. I usually passed on the salad. When we ate steak, my mother had difficulty slicing her meat. After a while, she successfully separated the fat from the rest of the cut. She would take a sip, put the glass down, and look over at me sitting next to her, my plate close to hers. With great sincerity she looked at me and offered up her fat. Her fat. The fat of her meat!

“Would you like my fat, Darling?” She would question with her ghoulish and raspy voice.

“No thanks?” She would drunkenly nod with understanding only to offer it up to me again ten minutes later.

“Marylyn, the boy doesn’t want your fat. And we need to all get to bed early tonight. We have an early flight out tomorrow morning.” It was only moments away, and I drew in a breath of great relief as Dad took her into their bedroom. He would return as if life had always been an F. Scott Fitzgerald picnic. He would wash the dishes. I’d offer to help, but he would always refuse my offer. He probably felt that I suffered enough.

When I turned into a solid and ripe teenager I started bringing girls over to the house. Dates. Before Joanna. I remembered thinking, “How can you even sleep in the same bed as her, Dad?” I brought home a girl named Rachel Perkins. We were in the tenth grade and I had invited her over to swim in our pool. I made sure she arrived at least two hours before the 5 O’clock witching hour. But my mother had already been on her third and the slow buzzing warmth of the bourbon was sailing through her veins and brain. She had poured for herself. That was such an abhorrent homecoming. Anytime that she had begun early and poured for herself, it meant total emotional devastation for me.

“Nice to meet you Mrs. Minheart,” Rachel said politely.

“Another one of your little whores, dear?” Mom said back. All I remember after that is Rachel crying on the phone begging for her dad to come pick her up from the Mineheart house. There was nothing I could say to her. Rachel’s father had some stern words for my father when he came home from work that night. He brushed them off. He was so accustomed to the shaking fingers, the threats, the overall vitriol.

I had spent the last few years getting used to Mother’s ghost being here or there, showing up and drifting away for long periods of time only to appear for one more insignificant moment. We were quite used to her, and evidently, she to us. Of course, I struggled psychologically sometimes when seeing her image. Those moments passed and returned. All of the embarrassment, the humiliation in front of friends, and girls like Rachel, was sometimes too much to bear when coupled with a bad day. When I told her that I was planning to marry Joanna she said to me, “No.”

“No?” I replied, “Why not?”

“Because she’s Jewish…You can’t marry her…” I took a long pause at this remark. It was an amazingly difficult moment to realize that your mother is an anti Semite: she felt hatred towards the woman I loved.

Poison would work. It would be clean. Just poison her. Right? But what kind of poison do you use? It was a thought that became a reality, but not for me, or for my wife Joanna.

Our families often came together Christmas mornings at my parents’ house. She’d be half in the bag by noon, and Joanna’s father and mother, Joanna herself, my Dad and myself all knew. We all knew the endgame. Her drunkenness became so obvious, so obnoxiously hideous that someone was inevitably forced to do something.

“Perhaps you’ve had enough,” Joanna’s dad would say.

“Can’t we all just get a long,” Joanna often asked with an underlying snicker when a moment like this was destined to become a scene. She would almost become hysterical, but not unglued. Joanna told me once she reveled in the chaotic episodes in life.

“Goddamit Dad! Make her stop or put her to bed!” I yelled.

“Well, excuse the FUCK out of me if you’re too embarrassed to be around me on Christmas! I don’t even care!” She slurred and burbled. She stamped out her cigarette and would stumble to her feet. My father would go to her and help her off to the bedroom. It made for opening the gifts uncomfortable and depressing. My poor dad would always return from putting her to bed. His face would be so somber, so stretched with guilt and humiliation. He would bring himself into the kitchen and retrieve a glass of water for her, carry it back to her bedside, where she had long passed out, and return pretending nothing had happened. Sometimes he appeared quite relieved, “Now, that we put the monster to bed we can have Christmas proper,” I often imagined him saying out loud. That’s why this next part of my story is extremely difficult for me to tell.

One night, about three ¾ years ago I got this call in the middle of the night. It was my father. He was hysterical. But there was something I read more deeply into the tone of his voice. It was hysteria of relief. A catharsis delivered through tears and broken ramblings.

“Slow down, Dad. What’s wrong?”

“DEAD! She’s DEAD!” I could hear him crying. But, it was much more of a “Thank goodness that’s over with now” kind of cry.

“What happened?” I asked with trepidation.

She wasn’t supposed to drink booze at all anymore. Doctor’s orders. Also, she was to only smoke two cigarettes a day. I doubted that there was anyway in Hell that she would be able to do it. Slowly, the doctors were taking away the two things she enjoyed the most out of life: booze and cigarettes.

“I don’t know. I just walked into the bedroom to go to sleep tonight and discovered she had, ah Jesus, son. She choked on her own vomit it looks like,” as he said this I could tell he was looking at her directly in the bed as we spoke.

“You’re sure she’s dead?”

“I took her pulse, Son.”

“Call 911 anyways. I’ll be right over,” I hung up the phone and felt the chilliest sensation run through my body. It was an awful realization, but one I believed to be true in my heart of hearts. My father had murdered my mother. I was convinced. And the police would be too.

After the longest night I can remember in all my days, Joanna and I sat on the curb in front of my parents’ house, the same house where we had watched my drunken mother ruin Christmases and Thanksgivings, birthdays, and anniversaries, and every other celebratory event. We sat and watched the body bag get zipped up. His story was weak; the poisoning was highly suspicious. He explained that he had the house emptied of all alcohol because the doctor had required her to quit drinking or she would die. Evidently, now this is according to him, there was a half full bottle of Jim Beam hidden in the utility closet that he was unaware of; one perhaps she had stashed. Fine. Fair enough, but upon further examination, cyanide was found in the bottle. Why was there cyanide in the half full bottle of Jim Beam hidden away in the utility closet? Dad simply had no answer for the investigator’s question. He hadn’t really thought it through. He did it for Joanna and me as if he was sorry for all of the years or sorrow and anguish. It was my father’s grand apology.

The trial came around: California State vs. Charlie Jacob Minheart. He lost. And, yes, I believe my dad murdered my mom with cyanide. His defense claimed she committed suicide, and that she was the one who ordered the poison online, except it was ordered by a credit card under his own name, and a credit card on a private savings account. She had no credit cards in her name. Instead he gave her cash. There were no financial accounts with her name on them. And, believe me, there was plenty of testimony that she was a burden to my father. The state proved that there was a motive too. Countless of so-called “friends”, recalled revolting anecdotes of my mother abusing my submissive and often publicly humiliated father. So they sent him to jail for the murder of his wife, Mrs. Marylyn Minheart. I remember thinking, “Couldn’t you have just divorced her?” He was from an era that didn’t believe in divorce, but evidently an era that believed in murder.

She continued to stare at me above the washing machine.

“You’re not invited to be here!” I barked at her, and then scared myself that someone may have heard me in the apartment complex. I turned the fluorescent light back on. She became more translucent, but I could still see her. I slowly reached down for the laundry basket without leaving sight of her. I turned, hit the lights, and exited the laundry room. On my walk back to the apartment, I wondered why some of the dead came back from the beyond. I thought of the beyond. I thought of Heaven and Hell. I thought about purgatory. Then it hit me. Perhaps souls were simply floating forms of energy, like turning on a lamp, electricity; empty of substance and temporary like the light in a firefly. I hoped she would eventually go away. And she would eventually.

Joanna and I folded the laundry. She had just got a call that her father had been laid off from his job, “Early retirement” they said. He worked for a dog food company. I felt bad for the man. They were tough times for everyone.

“A letter from your father came in the mail today. Do you want me to throw it away or do you want to read it?” Joanna was so wonderfully compassionate. She never gave up asking. She went into the bathroom, and I went into the kitchen to help her prepare the beef stew. I slowly chopped beef into inch wide cubes. As I sliced the beef I reflected on one Thursday evening in particular when my mother slipped and fell in dog shit. She was drunk, cursing, and covered in it. She had stepped out of my father’s Cadillac, tripped on the curb and rolled across a grassy part of the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. The Valet went to help her up. Some patrons also went to her aid. They slowly moved away realizing she was covered and smeared with brown dog poop. She smelled herself realizing what she had done.

“Marylyn, for the love of God!” My father pleaded.

“I’m covered in dog shit!” She grumbled and her eyes were popping out of her head with shock. My father helped her back into the car.

I chopped the beef. I felt a touch slowly on my shoulder. A subtle tapping and turned around and saw my mother’s face a breath away from me, eyes fierce and yellow. I thrust the blade into my mother to make her go away forever.

But when I looked down at the blade, it was stuck in Joanna’s chest. Her look of shock has never escaped my nightmares. She slowly slipped off of the blade and collapsed onto the kitchen floor. I was still holding the knife in my hand. The blood slowly spread across the white linoleum. She was dead.

My mother’s apparition went away that night. The days go by. One right after another. Empty, cold, haunting days. Days that I wish would not arrive. Sometimes the thought of ending it all appeals to me. But, there’s something inside me that demands I go on living, at least temporarily. Like a faint light, or fading energy, like the light of a firefly.

My Dad came by this morning while the cellblocks were open, asking me for a cigarette. I gave him one. He took out a book of matches and lit it in my cell. He exhaled. He put his hands in his pockets, and walked away. I go months without seeing him.

We had met somewhat precariously. Had I not known what she was before I met her, things might have turned out differently. The book I had read in the very back of the library when I was fifteen turned me onto a dimension of reality that most never even have a passing thought about. I can still remember that day, sitting in the darkened corner of the library basement. Nobody ever went down there. I had the whole place to myself, books about witchcraft that really worked, books about potions you could really make, books about nightmares that could really kill you. The book I picked up told about creatures that actually existed. The pages, like shining holographs, stunk of magic. The pixie dust came off on my hands. But I didn’t care. The magical twisting words on the pages riveted me.

At seventeen, I explored a huge tree in the forest behind my house because I thought a fairy lived in it. I was wrong. And if I had been right, I never would have known. Fairies make themselves appear. You can never search for a fairy and find one.

The day that we hired Chelsea, she caught my eye immediately. She was by no means a supermodel, and she knew it. In fact, she was more negative about herself than anyone else. I appreciated humility. She was beautiful though, to me. Short, only about five-two. Black hair, dark eyes, full lips, cute smile, and cappuccino skin. She had intelligence behind her eyes that made her look more than competent. In her interview, she told me her parents were from the Philippines. She was short and compact, but emanated a sexiness that took me over. Beautifully well endowed from top to bottom, she caught my eye immediately.

The guys loved her from the first day. She was cute and playful and witty. I didn’t particularly care how anyone else saw her. Of course I couldn’t look away when she leaned over so I couldn’t blame anyone’s attraction to her either. But she looked at me a little different. Sometimes I felt like she knew that I knew what she was. At times, it worried me. I found myself looking over my shoulder, worried that she would be there to turn me into a frog. I quickly got over that, though. She talked to me as if she wanted to know what was on my mind, unlike the way she talked to everyone else, which was vacant flirting or useless laughing. I grew to really enjoy the things she had to say. And even though I knew she was a fairy, I didn’t mind that she put on the mask of a human. I didn’t mind that she told everyone her parents were from the Philippines, when in fact she didn’t have parents. When a fairy is born, it is from the face that the teardrop falls that the fairy gets most of its physical characteristics. Chelsea’s teardrop came from an Philippino girl.

I was twenty-four when she got a job at my store. She was eighteen. That I believed, too. She very well could have been older, but I trusted her. She looked eighteen.

The rules of fairy state that no fairy can love a human. If a fairy and a human fall in love, then that fairy must return to her world, and never again see the human world. As I read in the book, fairies liked to live in the human world for several years at a time because sometimes it is difficult to live with other fairies. I still don’t know why, but that’s how it is.

I trained Chelsea because that was my job at the store. I spent more time with her than others because I had to train her. But our age gap kept the nosy employees at bay. Everyone joked of my crush on her, but nobody took it seriously.

During the third week she worked at my store, Chelsea and I closed two nights together. I found myself flirting with her uncontrollably. I loved to watch her smile. We shared our love for Star Wars, reiterating our favorite scenes to each other, laughing wildly. I took the first step. I told her that my crush on her was highly inappropriate. She didn’t know yet that I knew she was a fairy. Calling my crush inappropriate worked on more than just the obvious level. Humans and fairies are forbidden to fall in love. As are bosses and employees. As are eighteen year olds and twenty-four years olds. The latter is not so much forbidden as it is frowned upon though.

But I didn’t care. She had captured me.

On that second night we closed together, after everyone left the store, she stayed behind because she told everyone else that she needed a ride home, and I was giving it to her. I closed the front doors and locked up. I caught her walking into the front office, so I followed.

I had been mistaken. She knew that I knew.

Fairies have the ability to hide their fairy attributes. Some look completely different from their human masks, some look barely different. When I walked into the dim office, Chelsea stood in the back corner, draped in shadow. A violet twinkling broke the darkness. I shut the door. The room was very dark, only a small bit of light shone in through the two-way mirror. She crept toward me slowly. I barely noticed the changes in her, if there were any.

I sat down on one of the chairs in the office and she sat on my lap. I gently ran my hand down the ethereal surface of her wings. They flickered in the darkness like glistening tricks. We kissed. I can’t describe to you the feelings of a fairy kiss very well. It’s difficult to put together the words that depict the sensations. I learned from the book that a fairy keeps her magic on her lips, under her finger nails, and on the bottoms of her feet. Kissing magical lips filled me with tingling. Chelsea’s lips were soft and gentle. Her tongue felt like velvet. I felt like I was kissing a girl for the first time, back in middle school, out in the hallway after a football game. I felt like I had no idea what I was doing.

We had a few guys who regularly hit on Chelsea. Sometimes it irritated me, not because of what the two of us had, but because it interfered with their work. None of them were so serious about it that I ever felt jealous. I hated the things that some of these guys would say though. Lying about getting places with her, getting her shirt off, or pulling their pants down. It made me sick. But I couldn’t open my mouth. I wanted to keep my job, and she was still only eighteen and one of my employees. And though fairies aren’t allowed to fall in love with humans, they are allowed to do everything but, as long as nobody speaks a word of it. It must be a wholly private matter.

Some time after we hired Chelsea, we picked up a couple more young people for work. A young man and a young woman, both eighteen. For a week or two, the spotlight came off of Chelsea and onto the new girl. Alexandra was tall, fit, slender, athletic. She went to a local college and competed on the diving team. The guys in the store instantly targeted her.

She didn’t match up to Chelsea, though. Chelsea was close to perfect, which, I suppose, is just what a fairy is supposed to be.

Perhaps it was the magic, but I think it was simply her charm and cute smile that brought the boys back to eye her more than Alexandra.

And that’s why I don’t think it bothered me. I knew how Chelsea felt about me.

Sitting in the office, watching my employees on a particularly slow night, I laughed to myself. I could see the front desk where our newest young man was sitting on the counter against the wall, right next to Chelsea. I didn’t mind that they weren’t doing anything because it was late and we’d be closing soon. Seeing the way Danny acted with Chelsea brought me back to my days as a clueless high schooler. I would go to parties after football games and sit on couches in basements or on lounge chairs in backyards and sit as close to a girl as possible. I would wait and wait and wait until the right time came to say something. But that time never came because I was too chicken to say anything at all. I knew Danny wasn’t waiting for the right time to speak, but sitting right next to a girl with that cool, confident face just screams, “I think I’m cool because I’m sitting on the counter next to Chelsea. And she’s laughing at my jokes. And she isn’t running away.”

I leaned down on the tiny ledge and stared out at the front desk. What a spectacle. Danny had that confident stride about him. It made me laugh because he thinks he might be flirting in his own little way with a girl his age who might be interested in him. It’s not like he wasn’t an attractive guy. With any other girl, he might be doing the right thing. But with Chelsea, he was batting zero.

I walked out onto the floor to close up the registers.

“Are you still giving me a ride home?” Chelsea asked me.

“Sure,” I said, sounding as indifferent and managerial as possible.

“I’ll drive you,” Danny chimed in.

I cursed silently, but I didn’t catch myself before I snapped my head up to look at Chelsea. It wasn’t the actions in the office we shared that made me want to see her, it was her, the whole package. I made a forceful effort to look back down at the money in my hands.

“Um…okay, thanks,” she said, unable to refuse. If she refused it would look weird, I guess. Having someone catch on would be a disaster. I didn’t mind as much as my initial reaction would have indicated. I’d see her again. I could see it in her eyes though. She wished Danny hadn’t offered the ride.

I looked up and gave her a passing smile as I went along closing the store.

We continued on like that for weeks. Sometimes we just sat in the dark in the office after work and talked about things. I told her everything that I knew about the fairy world. She told me everything that she knew about the human world. We became much closer than I would have imagined.

I didn’t know it would all come crashing in on me. Somewhere, though, in my mind, maybe I did know. But I didn’t want to admit anything to myself.

I worked the morning shift a couple of days a week and she only worked at night. But she showed up at the store one morning, just to see me. I can’t explain in words how that made me feel. I was special enough to her that she risked coming to see me. I wanted so much to be with her as a normal couple would be, but I knew it would never be allowed. She knew too, which was why I found her arrival that morning so surprising.

“I want to show you something today,” she said to me.

“Okay,” I replied. “I’ll leave early. Where can I find you?”

“I’ll be waiting in your car,” she said. And then she left.

The rest of the morning dragged on forever. I peed ten times. I nervously cut out fifty snowflakes from pieces of colored paper. I even spent a solid motionless ten minutes staring at a blue dot on the wall of the office. Each click of the minute hand on the clock lasted forever. I thought I would die before I left work that day. I don’t know how I made it through those four grueling hours, but I did. And as she had promised, she awaited me in my locked car.

“Drive me somewhere,” she said without looking at me. I tried to catch the expression on her face, but all I could feel from her was a despairing fear.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I’ll show you the way.”

She placed her hand on my leg and I saw the way. I drove us down roads until all of the cars disappeared, until we were the only ones on the road. I drove us through hills and fields. Our destination was a lone tree at the top of a large hill. We climbed up to it and sat in its shade.

Chelsea let her wings out and she lay in my arms for hours. The sun never went down where we sat. It stayed light out forever. Days, weeks might have passed. I had no idea, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to be with her, lay on the soft grass with her until I closed my eyes and died.

“This is my tree,” she said. “It is my only passage into my world. Do you know what happens to a fairy that’s fallen in love?”

I nodded. “The tree withers and dies, trapping the fairy in the human world forever, to die.”

“A fairy cannot permanently live in the human world,” she added. She turned around and faced me. She was crying. I knew what was happening, but I didn’t think about it. She crawled onto me and kissed me, held me like the world was ending. We hugged and kissed lovingly and then she handed me a folded piece of paper.

“Read it when I’m gone,” she said, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Okay,” I said softly.

She stepped into the tree, melded into the bark like the spirit that she was.

I watched in horror as the beautiful tree in front of me died. Its leaves dried up and fell to the ground. Then its branches cracked off, one by one. In only a minute, a dried up rotted stump lay on the ground at my feet.

I sniffed and wiped tears from my eyes as I opened the folded piece of paper.

“I love you,” it read.

I whispered those same words into the wind, though I knew she would never hear them.

10:45 A.M.

“Looks like rain today,” I said to Sue, the just-beyond-middle-aged woman at customer service. She looked around blankly as I strolled away. I could have turned and reiterated, but I knew she was way too burnt out to care. She was great. But her mind wandered like a ten-year old’s.

I walked toward the back of the building, my black shoes tapping hollowly on the tiled floor. Mark worked the merchandise in the aisle as I passed him. He said something to me, I replied, we laughed. As I made my way around the store, I fixed things, little imperfections in the shelves that caught my eye. It didn’t take me long to arrive up front again. I peered out the windows to take note of the gray skies closing in.

I sighed. This was going to be a long day. A quick glance at the clock on the cash register monitor told me it was only ten of eleven. A deep roar of thunder brought my attention to the windows again. The overcast sky had intensified and hardened in the split second I had glanced at the monitor.

“Do you know what today is?” asked someone from behind me. I turned to find an elderly nun standing there, staring prayerfully outside.

“Um…yeah, I do.”

“It could happen at any moment on this day, you know,” said the nun. “On the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year of the new millennium. He may already be here.”

I rolled my eyes, and I was pretty sure the nun noticed, though she didn’t respond to my obvious display of disrespect. I sighed. “Do you need help finding anything?”

She smiled warmly, the way a nun should smile, and she said, “No, dear. Thank you, though.”

I walked, shoulders slumped, toward the security room in the front of the building where we kept the safe. I unlocked the door and stepped in, plopped down on the swivel chair and tapped on the desk with my pen. I think I dosed a little. When I woke up I felt a little bad about it.

11:01 A.M.

I’d never heard rain fall so hard. The storm had blown the power, which meant that our automatic doors at the front of the store didn’t work. I couldn’t possibly understand why anyone out shopping would continue shopping in such a storm instead of going straight home. However, people did come, trudging across the parking lot like zealot pilgrims, hoods and umbrellas shielding their faces. I felt a little bad when I stopped them at the doors, saying, “I’m sorry. We can’t complete any transactions. Our power is out.” And then they venture back into storm, seeming to meld with the rain like so many wandering shades.

With the power out, the only illumination in the store came from the few ceiling lights that stayed on in emergencies. The customers had gathered at the front of the store as had all of my employees. We all stood together, watching the rain that had overtaken the world for the moment. I felt a peculiar sense of camaraderie with everyone, as if the storm was an approaching army and we all stood together to defend our homeland.

I felt like a corporal holding his unit inside of a ruined building while fleeing a failed advance. We huddled together, but not too close together, feeding our own self-confidence through the proximity of everyone else around us. The rain turned the world outside of the store bleak and gray, like the “Steamboat Willy” cartoon. The vertical lines of rain even made the scene look like an old reel of film. There was lightening somewhere within a few hundred feet of the store. The thunder clap reverberated through my jaw, my ribcage, down through my feet.

While the sound of the lightening lingered in our ears, I stepped forward as the self-proclaimed leader of the group. I approached the front door and opened it, satisfied now that no more customers would be coming to shop in this torrent. I leaned on the side of the jamb and peered through the monochromatic scenery. My eyes made distinguished the outlines of the shopping center buildings, but nothing more.

Gloria joined me. She was an hourly associate that worked between part-time and full-time. Her frequency in the store offered me a lot of time to talk with her and get to know her.

Since the first day I met her I’d always admired her eyes. They were a heavy green color with flecks of gold, like jade from a deposit with a gold vein crossing through it. Every time I’d look at her, I’d step closer and examine those gilded irises. They amazed me.

“This is some kind of storm, huh?” she said conversationally.

I twisted my lips together and raised my eyebrows in the manner that I often did and said, “Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so crazy. Worst storm I’ve ever been in.”

“Luckily, you’re not actually in it.”

I nodded and smiled. She replied with a warm smile of her own. “Nice,” I said.

She looked at me inquisitively. “Nice what?”

“Nice smile.”

She smirked.

“I wonder how long this will last.”

11:30 A.M.

“Finally.” I watched as the irate customer who had needed several things right now, today, I can’t wait, I need them today, and so on and so on, I’m sorry there’s nothing we can do about it, sir, et cetera, et cetera, walked out into the parking lot. The rain had stopped so abruptly that I wondered for a moment if someone hadn’t turned off a faucet. While Gloria and Sue took care of the customers at the front of the store, rounding them up, and making sure they didn’t steal anything before they left the store, I trotted out to my car to make sure I had the windows up.

I hit the button to unlock my doors and I jumped in. I had been having problems with the brakes, so I decided to check something in the glove box, something about my warranty. I swung the door closed. The sound of the door closing and the sound of the thunder were simultaneous. Immediately, the rain came anew. As I sat in my car, watching my windshield become a riverbed, my stomach turned. I felt something like an electrical current running into my body, tingling me everywhere.

Panic overtook me. I frantically grabbed for my umbrella in the back seat. I scrambled out of my car, slammed the door behind me, and ran rampant for the store. I stumbled and doused myself in an ocean-like puddle. My knees burned. I stood up, looking around, unable to believe that I had just wiped out in the parking lot. As the sense returned to my head, I remembered why I had been running. I looked up at the sky, shuddered, and ran once more. As the rain bore down on me like a tidal wave, I heard Gloria screaming my name, calling me to hurry up.

I heard sounds around me as I closed in on the front doors that I never thought I would hear in the world of the living. The sounds disturbed me. I turned around, looked up against the rain. Black forms descended from the black infinity above me. Despite the darkness of the sky, the forms were even darker, pure blackness, like voids in the fabric of reality. They were like black holes, sucking in all color and light. I suddenly felt like I needed that nun next to me.

11:47 A.M.

As I power-walked to the back of the store, barking orders at John, my second in command, the lighting in the aisles gradually vanished. I pushed open the doors to the warehouse where it was completely dark. The light from the emergency lights in the hall off of the warehouse told me where to go. I pushed through the door, unlocked the door to my manager’s office, and went in. The lights didn’t work at all in there and only the dim emergency light from the hall gave me any kind of vision. I tore off my shirts and sat down on the chair. I was soaked and angry and, at the bottom, bare, rawest level of my soul, I was a frightened little child.

“Don’t be afraid.” The soft voice startled me, but only slightly. I knew Gloria had followed me into the back. “I’m here with you.” She tapped her pink fingernails on the doorjamb of the office and I felt a ripple inside my soul. Something was a little different. The air in the room became still like a lifeless pond in a deep underground cavern.

I smiled. I appreciated her comforting. “Thanks.” I suddenly became very aware that I didn’t have a shirt on. “Will you hand me the shirt on the back of the door?” She handed it to me with a sly grin, eyeing me up and down. “Thanks.”

“Want to talk?” she asked. She looked down at her wrist watch and I noticed for the first time that she wore an abundance of hospital bracelets around both wrists. She looked up from her watch. “I have time.”

“I’m glad you could fit me into your busy schedule,” I remarked sarcastically.

She gave me a look that said, “That’s not fair.”

“Just joking.”

She smiled.

“So what do you want to talk about?” I asked.

“I was just wondering if you were doing all right. I heard about some things going on in your life.”

I looked up at her askance. “What, my mom?” I asked.

“Mmhmm.”

I wondered intensely how she could have known. I hadn’t told anyone. “How’d you know about that?”

She shrugged absently, like answering the question didn’t matter. I took in her beauty in one long gaze up and down as she stood there in the doorway, the dim light from the hallway glowing around her a little brighter than it should have been. It almost looked as if she were the one glowing, and not the light behind her. Her gold-flecked eyes seemed like tiny suns burning life into a frozen tundra.

I cocked my head to the side and regarded this girl who I’d worked with for over a year now yet never quite understood. She seemed now more of a friend in this strange circumstance than she had before, yet somehow odder than I’d ever known her to be.

“What’s with those hospital bracelets?” I asked.

She looked down at them and then back up at me. “I go to the hospital a lot. I tend to the sick and dying. I like to comfort them before they…you know.”

I felt a sudden need to criticize her for that. “What gives you the right to that?” I asked with a bit of an edge.

“What are you talking about?” she asked defensively.

“Do you know those people? Are you related to them? Do you work for a hospice?”

“No, but it’s part of what I do. I help them into the next life.”

“Part of what you do? What does that mean?”

“Because dying is the most difficult part of life. Life is the greatest gift, and losing that gift is very, very difficult to deal with.”

“How do you get all those bracelets?”

“The patients give them to me.”

“As a gift?”

“As a way to remember that I helped them.”

I shook my head. I was calmer now, but I still didn’t get it. It occurred to me that I was still in the middle of the strangest, most frightful storm of my life, and I was relaxing in the back of the store with the most gorgeous girl on the planet. “I don’t…”

“You’re amazing, you know that?” she blurted. “Ever since I arrived, I’ve watched you. You are beyond most humans, you know. It’s true. Be proud of that.” Her face became suddenly embarrassed as if she hadn’t meant to reveal her feelings about me. I’d always kind of hinted to her that I would like to get to know her outside of work but she’d never shown any sort of interest before. I wondered what I had done to increase her curiosity in me now.

She gestured with her hand that we might want to get back up front. I let her last comment pass without pursuing it further. It was obvious that she didn’t feel entirely ready, for whatever reason, to outwardly deal with her feelings. I had too much on my mind anyway: the rain, the power outage, and the bone-chilling events outside the store.

I stood up and shook myself like a shaggy dog. A chill ran down my spine and I yawned. “All right. Let’s go back up front. What time is it?” I couldn’t believe that only a few minutes had gone by when I looked at the clock. It had felt like at least half an hour.

11:50 A.M.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before.” The pale, black-haired young man stood at the windows staring open-mouthed at the sky. He seemed to be expecting something completely epic and Earth-shattering. Frankly, his demeanor set me on edge even more than I was already, and he wasn’t doing anything to help the morale of the group.

We stood quietly, motionless, like we were waiting for a Nazi raid to end and move on to the next building. I stood back behind everyone, near the aisles. The eight employees and seven customers in the store stood in a mass together. I looked them all over. I knew the nun was having a theological field day with this, thinking that all of her ideas about Armageddon were coming true.

“That nun doesn’t really know anything,” Gloria said to me.

“You seem to have a lot to say about weird stuff,” I replied. She looked me in the eyes. The gold-accented irises mesmerized me. I felt suddenly calm then.

“We should go out sometime,” she told me out of the blue. “I’ve never had Chinese before. And I’ve always thought that you’d be a good person to introduce me to the cuisine.”

I gaped. What an odd thing to say. “Really? You’ve really never had Chinese food before?”

“No. But I’ve always wanted to try it.”

I nodded slowly. “That’s weird,” I said, preoccupied with the members of our little group.

I looked at the group again. The black-haired teenager still stood at the window, staring at the sky. I decided to talk to him. If for any reason, just to find out what was with him.

“How’s it going, man?” I asked as I came up next to him. He looked at me briefly and then sent his attention back up at the sky. “Are you doing okay?”

He glanced at me again and then said, “This is one of the first signs.”

“What, the rain?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I took a deep breath in and looked up at the sky. It sent chills through my bones. “Ever seen anything like this?”

“I knew I shouldn’t have come here today. I knew this was going to happen. I should have looked at my damn calendar.” I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or to himself. He might have been talking to an imaginary friend.

“You can tell me –”

“I woke up this morning with a terrible feeling. Damn. Damn, damn, damn.”

“Okay,” I said, stepping away. I walked toward the group to make sure everyone was doing all right when the black-haired teenager turned.

He spoke loudly, gravely. “Does anyone know what happens when the sky is as black as hell?” He waited while everyone thought about his words. “Stay away from the door.”

12:00 Noon

I wondered if I would live to see another day. I looked around at everyone. I looked at Gloria. I wondered if I would ever get to take her out the way she had asked me. As most men would have, I’m sure, I wondered if I’d ever get the chance to see her naked or kiss her passionately or wake up next to her. Even with the extreme fear that coursed through my body, I thought about Gloria’s golden eyes. They weren’t contacts. She told me so. Most of all, as I stood there with the group of customers and employees behind me, I thought about all of the things in my life that I hadn’t done yet. I wished that I had skydived and scuba dived. I wished that I had asked that girl out in twelfth grade who said she liked me, but I didn’t believe she did because she was the homecoming queen. I thought about so many things that my mind became a glob of fear and regret.

We all stared fearfully. The rain had become so hard that the sounds simply meshed together into one, endless, droning pound. The hulking creature that had appeared out in the rain had to have been ten feet tall. Its huge wings flapped periodically in the rain, slashing through the downpour devilishly, spraying water violently like a massive fountain for children to play in on the front lawn. Every minute or so another one winged down from the darkness above. The thumps that signaled the creatures landing rumbled through the floor of the store. Each creature slowly walked forward, falling in line next to or behind the one before it. Red eyes burned through the rain. I was reminded of the book Amityville Horror that I had read as a teenager, and the red eyes describing the pig face the family saw in the fireplace.

I stood at the front of the group, watching, wondering what I should do, wondering if my life was about to come to an end. Gloria came up next to me, grasping my hand. She came close to me and kissed my cheek.

“Don’t be afraid,” she whispered into my ear. “Stand still. Fight the urge to flee. If things get out of hand, then I’ll protect you.”

I tried to speak, but my throat closed up. The creatures seemed to look directly into my heart, to the most primordial fears locked up deep in my subconscious.

“Don’t speak,” she whispered. She tightened her hand around mine. I felt some sort of energy flowing through her. Like the energy you feel when you touch one of those blue-lightning bolt spheres.

I glanced out the front door at the creatures that now filled the parking lot. Rows and rows of horrifying beasts. The rest of the world seemed to be replaced by these things. My eyes watched the creatures as the first beast started slowly forward, but my mind focused on Gloria.

“Don’t be afraid,” she chanted even as my heart beat painfully fast, as if it was trying to get out every beat possible before I died.

I turned my face to look into her golden eyes. “Who are you?”

Still staring into my eyes, she said, “I am a Virtue.”

With that, Gloria stepped forward, right up to the front doors. She glowed radiantly now. The creature stood outside. It slid its claws between the doors and pushed them open. Gloria put her hand up at the creature and then turned to walk back into the store. I watched her intently, witnessed her form as it became slightly ethereal. Her eyes locked onto the black-haired teenager, who suddenly squealed and turned to flee. With glorious grace, Heavenly white wings sprouted from Gloria’s back and propelled her across the front of the store, over the group of us. She snatched up the young man and swooped around. She landed in a determined walk that took her out into the rain to stand before the creature.

I went to the open doors to watch. Gloria stood tall and virtuous. Her clothes had transformed into a white robe and long brown hair flowed down her back, impervious to the rain. Each fiber on each feather of her wondrous wings shined like a florescent light bulb. An aura of celestial light surrounded her form. All colors around her became brighter, more vibrant, as if all of the inner beauty of things around her was given a chance to soar into the sky and fly free for everyone to see. The black parking lot became onyx. The red brick of the store became crimson. The gray rain became diamond-clear. Even the blackish-green skin of the demon in front of her became deeply verdant. Gloria commanded a level of power and respect that I couldn’t even begin to understand. She stood tall and faced evil head on.

She began speaking in a language no human could ever comprehend.

Thunder crashed continuously for ten minutes as Gloria handed the black-haired young man over to the head demon.

The demon spoke.

Gloria spoke again, seeming to end the exchange.

A Heavenly flash of lightening blinded me for a moment. When my eyes blurred back into use, I was standing on the sidewalk outside the store.

12:01 P.M.

The sun shined brightly and the sky was no longer crow-black. I couldn’t even tell that it had rained. The parking lot had returned to normal, all the cars and buildings in order. I looked in my store to find it running smoothly. Gloria walked up to me. She wore her work outfit as she had before.

“What happened?” I asked.

“A deal for Earth,” she said noncommittally.

“Why did those creatures take him?”

“The Devil doesn’t want war against Heaven. He just wants to live alone with his minions and his sons.”

“So that nun really didn’t know anything, huh?”

She shook her head. “No. Not even close.”

“Why are you still here then? Didn’t you do you duty? Go back to Heaven and enjoy an eternity of bliss…or whatever.”

“Well, here’s the thing. I died not too long ago. I was twenty-five. When I got up to Heaven, there was a job opening to be an angel. I took the job and found out that as an angel, I could be the head of this little project to make a deal with the Devil. Nobody else wanted the job, so I took it. And during my work here on Earth, I met you. When did I start here? About a year ago? And…well…I think I’ve found a good reason to stay here on Earth.”

I nodded. “Good choice.”

“Thanks.”

“So does that mean that you can’t be an angel if you live on Earth again?”

She shook her head. “Nah. It’s like being a judge. You’re an angel till you die. So that would be for eternity.”

“Good.”

“Why?”

“Well, I have to admit…those wings and that robe were pretty sexy.”

She gave me a smirk and then burst into laughter. I joined until we both calmed down a bit.

After a deep breath I said, “So you’re an angel, huh.”

She nodded. “I hope it doesn’t freak you out.”

“Nah,” I said with a shrug.

“Good. So, what did you think?”

“About what?”

“About my work out there with the demons?” She sounded as if she sincerely needed my approval. “It’s not everyday I need approval from a human.”

“Well I told you that those wings are sexy. I’m serious they are.”

She smiled. Her gold-flecked eyes flickered at me and she nodded excitedly. “Good.”

We held each other’s gaze for a few long minutes, looking away for a moment and then looking back with a new smile on. I fell into her eyes with abandon. “I know a great Chinese place in the city,” I said.

“Great,” she said. “We’ll go tonight.”

It was an orange-moon night.

The ominous orb of mythical cheese hovered above Samuel’s head, urging him on through the forest. The forest glowed with pumpkin light. Samuel was looking for something. But he did not know what that something was. He thought about his life back on the island and wondered why he had even started on this journey through the wood. The color of the moon lingered, and the shaman from the village had told him not to go. He had warned Samuel that an orange moon told of battles and of blood shed coming forth through time.

The ground was soft with a rain from two days ago.

The mud had hardened somewhat, but the ground stayed tender. The trees drank in the moisture; Samuel could hear them. He could hear the foliage around him, in the orangewood, drinking in the life-giving remnants of rain. Samuel tried to remember why he had gone into the forest in the first place.

As he walked, he took note of the animals around him. Squirrels skittered abundant. They snickered and chattered loudly, and a woodpecker clacked against the trunk of a tree, filling the forest with its cacophony. Samuel knew that woodpecker. It spoke to him daily. The woodpecker told him stories of different places and people. Samuel did not always believe the red-headed bird, knowing that the woodpecker, as the myths told, was not always truthful in his tales. The woodpecker’s fables were of the most outrageous of all the animals’ fables. But alas, Samuel had much time on his hands each day, and listening to the woodpecker was always interesting, even though the shaman continuously warned him that the bird spirits cannot always be trusted. Only the bluebird, the watchman of the forest, ever offered help to any humans. Always, always, he warned Samuel to stay away from the woodpecker, the mischief-maker, often known to impersonate the voices of the goodly spirits. Samuel listened anyway. He enjoyed listening to the woodpecker. After all, the woodpecker was merely a bird and simply an exaggerator.

Samuel remembered something about the forest.

The cave was in the forest. The cave was deep, dark, and frightening to the villagers back on the island. The metal bars brought thunderous rumbling and sometimes burned and screamed. They did not know what the bars were for. They did not know what the wooden planks were for. Samuel looked at his hands, his light brown skin glistening with sweat in the pumpkin light of the moon. He wondered what it would feel like to touch the metal bars or the wooden planks. He wondered why he was on the mainland, searching for the cave.

His friends told him he was foolish. His friends told him not to go. The shaman told him to stay in the village. The shaman told him that only death and pain can come from the cave on the mainland, in the forest.

Samuel did not care what they said. The woodpecker told him the story about the shimmering rocks in the walls of the cave. Samuel had heard of the stones, stones called gold. He had heard that they were inside of caves. But he wondered and feared the bars and planks that ran into the cave that he was trying to find.

The orange forest found Samuel halfway through. Owls screeched at him in protest. They told him to leave. They told him to stop chasing away their mice and chipmunks so they could feast a feast fit for an owl. Samuel paid them no mind. He trekked on. He heard the woodpecker knocking on a tree, telling him that the owls were not as tough as they sounded.

Samuel found a fire as orange as the moon in the sky. Unfamiliar with the people of the mainland, Samuel decided to stop and observe them.

He crawled on his belly, as quietly as he could, until he came close enough to see the people. They had light skin. They also had light hair, and their language was not familiar to Samuel. He watched them with curiosity. They used long sticks to roast balls of clouds in the orange fire. The flames licked at the clouds, turning them brown. They smashed the brown clouds within slabs of tree skin and dirt. And they ate them. The light-skinned people ate the clouds and tree skin and dirt together. They seemed to enjoy the snack as much as Samuel enjoyed the dried smoked beef and salted pork that the elders made back in the village on the island. Samuel found his mouth was watering as he sniffed the pleasant aroma of the odd meals.

Suddenly Samuel wanted to taste the clouds. The woodpecker clacked loudly on a tree deep in the forest, startling Samuel, telling him to leave the natives alone. Samuel decided not to listen and the woodpecker told him that he needed to get to the cave. But he stayed there, watched the people. They unrolled thick pieces of fabric that swished when it rubbed together with itself. The people used fluffy pads as headrests, and they climbed into the unrolled fabric. Samuel listened to them talk and sing. One of them played a wooden instrument that sounded like the instruments played on the island. He did not understand the music, because he did not understand the language, but he enjoyed the tune nonetheless. Samuel found himself sleeping in the forest, outside of the light-skinned camp.

He woke up to the sounds of the woodpecker, clacking on a tree, yelling at him to get up. Samuel stood up quietly, and went back to the trail he had been using. He walked through the forest again. The orange moon basked the forest in its light. Samuel walked for a long time until he reached the dreaded trail of metal bars and wooden planks. He followed the frightening trail to the cave. He did not enter the cave. He stood outside of the cave, and listened to the woodpecker telling him to go in. He did not move. Samuel watched the infinite blackness move with a stillness that chilled him to the core.

The knocking of the woodpecker urged him on.

Samuel resisted. But he could not resist forever.

He gave the woodpecker one last thought, took a deep breath, and started into the cave. The woodpecker clacked its acceptance on a tree. Samuel heard the red-headed bird deep into the cave. But when the light came, he was caught unawares.

The horror sounds coming at him from the light drowned out the clacking of the woodpecker, but when Samuel turned to look for the bird, he knew he would not hear the woodpecker any longer. As the cave rumbled like death around him, Samuel saw something else. There, flittering away into the air, as if disappointed, was a bright blue bird. It must have been trying to save him from peril.

But now its words did not matter, for Samuel could not hear them.

Like two rays extending in opposite directions from a common endpoint to infinity, Aiden Jacobs was a man with no past, Jack Austen a man with no future. Their common endpoint was not one of time, however, but of place. The place was Dean’s Blue Hole, the Bahamas; the time, August 2010 and December 1783. Aiden was going for a dive. Jack was dying.

***

Aiden nodded to Dr. Kovach, the exobiologist who had commissioned the trip, and waded into the shallows. It was early afternoon. The line of palm trees that surrounded the horseshoe-shaped bay swayed in the wind.

“Remember two things and you’ll be fine,” Aiden said during the drive to the bay from his small dive shop in Deadman’s Cay. Judging from the familiar way the locals treated him, he assumed that he had owned the dive shop for a long time. Like the blue hole in the center of the bay, his past plunged abruptly into darkness. Unlike the blue hole, he chose not to occupy himself in plumbing its depths.

“One,” Aiden said. “Keep at least one hand on the guideline. Dean’s is relatively safe, but we could get turned around in the tunnels at the bottom. Two. Stay to the sides of the hole. There’s a powerful vortex in the center. If it grabs you it’s going to drag you to the bottom and crush you there. And three: watch out for the lusca.”

“The lusca?” Dr. Kovach asked.

The lusca was a mythical sea monster believed to lurk in the blue holes of the Caribbean. Aiden explained and added that he was kidding.

“Oh,” Dr. Kovach said.

“But seriously,” Aiden said. “If you see a seventy-five foot octopus, feel free to ditch the guideline and swim like hell.”

Dr. Kovach smiled, but he couldn’t tell if Aiden was still joking. Neither could Aiden. Although he refused to believe the lusca existed, every time he swam over the dark opening of Dean’s Blue Hole his balls ached with fear. They knew there was something down there.

In December, 1783, Jack Austen’s balls were also aching. A group of twenty or thirty well-dressed men and women stood huddled together on the beach. It was a breezy winter day and the sky was overcast. They watched the dancing palm trees, the darting fish in the turquoise shallows, each other, but never the man who was swimming across the dark patch in the water toward the opposite side of the horseshoe-shaped bay. No one said a word. Only one person, a sixty-year-old man with a broad mouth, perpetually burnt skin, and white eyebrows that jetted upward like flames, stared unflinchingly at Jack. His name was Nathaniel Gates.

A month ago Jack had looked into the Austen family finances for the last time and concluded that they were ruined. Like many other ardent loyalists, Jack’s father had fled with his family from the Colonies to the Bahamas to escape the financial and social ruin certain to follow the defeat of the British. Now the fate they had fled had caught up with them and their money was gone–worse than gone. They owed more than they had ever owned. Lucinda, Jack’s sister, begged Jack not to go, but he insisted that he was bound by honor to fulfill the duty that had devolved to him in his father’s absence. If he chose to ignore his duty, he would only exacerbate the situation by forcing Mr. Gates to send his agents to arrest him.

“Jack Austen,” Nathaniel Gates said. He was sitting in an armchair in the solarium in the western wing of his mansion overlooking the sea. The bright, burning sun of the Bahamas, streaming through the windows behind him, bathed the real estate magnate in a godly light. A black servant ushered Jack into the room, bowed, and left. The god spoke. “Any word from your father?”

“No, sir,” Jack said.

“How long has it been?”

“Six months, sir.”

“I offer my sympathy,” Mr. Gates said, relaxing deeper into his armchair. “It has been a hard year. Your father . . . he is a weak man. He should not have abandoned you and saddled you with his debts. But you are honorable and brave, Jack, to come here of your own volition to fulfill your duty. I commend you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I assume that you know what today is.”

The glare from the windows behind Mr. Gates made Jack’s eyes water and forced him to look away. “Yes, sir,” Jack said to the floor.

“I also assume that, since you have not taken your family and fled, you have brought what is expected of you as per the terms of our contract.”

“Actually, sir,” Jack said, “that’s what I wanted to talk about.”

Mr. Gates held up his hand. Jack waited.

“Do you have the payment?” Nathaniel asked.

“My sister, sir, she’s far along in her pregnancy, and my mother is not at all well. . . .”

“I hope the child survives and your mother recovers, but I did not inquire as to your family’s health, but as to the status of our business affairs. Do you have the payment?”

“Sir, I know the terms of the contract, but–”

Mr. Gates’s complacent manner broke. He slapped his palm against the arm of the armchair. “Answer the question!” he said.

“Mr. Gates, sir, I can’t be expected–”

“You are expected,” Mr. Gates interrupted, “to pay the debt your family owes, and you shall. I feel for your family, truly I do, but frankly at the moment I care more about the fulfillment of our contract!”

“My father took all our savings and left us with a failed plantation,” Jack said. “My mother is ill. My sister is pregnant. I’m only one man. There’s nothing we could have done.”

“The contract clearly states that the Austen family owes the money, not your father, nor is there any provision that nullifies the contract in the sudden event of abandonment, pregnancy, or illness. Your father is gone. Your mother is ill. Your sister is pregnant. The responsibility rests with you. Are you a member of the Austen family?”

“Yes, sir, but–”

“Do you have what your family owes me?”

“No, sir, but–“

“Then I’m afraid,” Mr. Gates said, “I have no choice but to honor the terms of our contract and have you arrested until the remaining members of the Austen family can fulfill our agreement.”

The black servant reentered the solarium in the company of several officers who restrained the indignant Jack.

“What are my mother and sister supposed to do?” Jack said. “They can’t run the plantation.”

Mr. Gates squinted at Jack while he turned the matter over in his mind then said, “Very well, let him go.”

Jack shook himself free of the officers. He extended a hand toward Mr. Gates.

“Thank you, sir,” Jack said. “I know we’ve broken the contract, but I promise, on my honor, that we’ll find a way to make it up to you. With interest.”

Nathaniel shook Jack’s hand. “Good,” he said. “Officers, arrest Lucinda. I believe that you will find her at the Austen plantation.”

Jack tore his hand free of Mr. Gates’s grasp and wheeled around to face the officers who were walking toward the door.

“Wait!” he said. “You can’t lock her up! She’s seven months pregnant!”

“Your mother then?” Mr. Gates said.

“She’s very sick, sir, I told you!”

“I thought so. If I can’t arrest your mother or your sister, then I shall have to arrest you. I must have a guarantee. I have fulfilled my half of the contract. Now the Austen family must fulfill theirs. Officers.”

Jack didn’t struggle.

“You have one month,” Nathaniel said. “If you have yet to pay your debt as of the first of December, I will lock up Lucinda, and then, the first of January, your mother, and the three of you can rot in prison, sick, pregnant, or whatever else you might be. Goodbye, Mr. Austen.”

Jack peered into the bottomless darkness that swallowed his kicking feet. He stayed to the edges of the darkness in the center of the bay as advised, but that didn’t prevent the adrenaline from surging through his veins and making his heart to pump faster and his lungs to work harder. He began to pant. The far shore, to which he had to swim in order to win the wager, telescoped into the distance. He was in better shape than this. It was pure fear–of the unknown, of the lusca–a myth, Jack, a myth–that clenched his chest and made his legs burn. The sooner he was past the dark patch the better. Swim on. He glanced back at the shore from which he had embarked. Nathaniel Gates was grinning. As Jack knew, he wanted nothing more than to see a pinkish gray tentacle wrap around his torso and drag him down to the crushing depths. Jack Austen turned and swam on.

Treading water over the blue hole, Aiden Jacobs put his regulator into his mouth, then noticed that Dr. Kovach was hyperventilating.

“You okay, doc?” Aiden said.

“I’ll be fine,” Dr. Kovach said. He slipped his regulator into his mouth and they dove.

The first obstacle they encountered was a silver film of hydrogen sulfide, a toxic byproduct of bacteria and dead matter that floated in the water about fifty feet down. Every time he went for a dive in a blue hole, Aiden thought the same thing, although he had no recollection of having done so a hundred times before: the hydrogen sulfide layer is the ordeal all divers must endure in order to access of the mysteries beneath.

Unlike Aiden, Dr. Kovach had never experienced the effects of hydrogen sulfide before. He’d been instructed, but there was no teacher like experience. Reeling with nausea and dizziness, the doctor reacted in the most dangerous way possible. He released the guideline and began to drift toward the invisible vortex in the center of the blue hole. Aiden shot out an arm and grabbed Dr. Kovach’s ankle, but the doctor kept drifting toward the vortex. If the vortex caught Dr. Kovach now, Aiden would be dragged in too, and they’d both die at the bottom of the whole, skulls smashed and tanks cracked.

Aiden yanked Dr. Kovach’s ankle as hard as he could. The force of Aiden grabbing and shaking him was enough to rouse him, who shook his head and swam back to the guideline. He mimed disorientation by tapping his head and waving his arms around confusedly. Aiden nodded and pointed downward. The sooner they were through the hydrogen sulfide the better.

Five minutes later they reached the bottom. Casting the beam of the flashlight into the darkness, Aiden illuminated the tunnels that led who-knew-where: other blue holes, the center of the earth, Atlantis, the lair of the lusca. One or two of the tunnels had been explored, but only partially. They branched into mazes that divided into labyrinths which could confound and kill even the most experienced of divers. Aiden Jacobs urged Dr. Kovach to hold onto the guideline and stay close, then pointed his flashlight into one of the uncharted tunnels and began to swim.

***

Jack Austen felt as relieved and exultant as a shipwreck survivor when he pulled himself up on the far shore of the bay. He sat in the sand and stared across the water at the group gathered on the opposite beach. They had come to see him devoured by the lusca, but he had survived and won the wager. Nathaniel Gates would be furious. Even now one of his servants was rounding the circumference of the bay with a message no doubt full of the bitterness of defeat. It would take a while for the servant to arrive, but Jack didn’t care. He could stand to wait. Flopping on his back and scooping up handfuls of sand, he stared into the cloudy sky and realized what a beautiful day it was. The seriousness of the task at hand had prevented him from noticing before. He must have dozed off in the cool sand because when he opened his eyes what felt like a minute later a dark face was staring down at him.

“Hello, Mr. Austen,” the servant said.

“Hello,” Jack said.

“Mr. Gates has a proposition for you.”

“Mr. Gates can kiss my ass. I won the wager fair and square.”

“Mr. Gates has forgiven your family’s debt,” the servant said. “He wonders now if you’d care to go double or nothing?”

“What does that mean?” Jack said.

“The party on the opposite beach was pleased that you managed to escape the lusca”–bullshit, Jack thought–“but they disagree with each other whether it proves that the creature does not exist. Some say that when you passed over its lair it may have been sleeping and that your passing only served to wake it up. If you were willing to swim back, everyone agrees that they would be convinced of the nonexistence of the lusca.”

“The terms?”

“Mr. Gates is prepared to offer you a new plantation, free and clear, fully equipped and ready to farm,” the servant said.

“No,” Jack said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“He also mentioned,” the servant said, “that if you were decidedly against the idea, he was prepared to offer your family a handsome yearly stipend, which would be enough, even should the plantation fail, to keep you and your family more than comfortable.”

Nathaniel Gates believed fiercely in the lusca. He claimed that he had once seen the monster split a ship in two and drag both halves to the bottom of the sea. There had been no survivors. The ship had belonged to his brother. His brother had been on board.

But in these faithless times none of Mr. Gates’s friends, acquaintances, and partners, those gathered with him on the opposite shore, believed in the beast. They attributed the claims of its existence to the misperception or misinterpretation of natural phenomena and consigned the monster to myth. Mr. Gates, who with his own eyes had watched the lusca devour his brother, refused to let things stand as they were and had set out to prove to everyone that the creature existed. But how?

And a week ago he had figured it out. Rotting in a jail cell in Deadman’s Cay was a young debtor so honorable and so brave and so desperate that he might be tempted, Mr. Gates reasoned, to exchange his life for forgiveness of his family’s debt. But Nathaniel Gates was not a fool. To compensate for the loss of the Austen family debt, he would place a bet against his associates at incredibly favorable odds that the lusca would devour Jack Austen while the young fool swam over its lair.

One of Mr. Gates’s servants explained the terms to Jack through the bars of his cell. Unable to see any alternative, and for the sake of his family, Jack accepted.

Now, lying in the sand on the far shore, his muscles starting to feel cold, he had fulfilled the agreement. He had swum over the blue hole and the Austen family debt was forgiven. But Nathaniel Gates, determined to prove the existence of the lusca, was prepared to offer more. Jack’s family was out of imminent danger, but the future still threatened. He had preserved them for the present. Could he fix them for the future?

“If I am killed. . . .” Jack said.

“Mr. Gates will give the plantation and the stipend to your family,” the servant said.

“Do you have a written contract prepared?”

The servant pulled a roll of paper out of his shirt.

Seeing the roll of paper across the bay, Lucinda, a bulging eight months pregnant, began to run as best she could around the bay toward her brother. A few men broke from the party and dragged her back. She shouted–what, Jack couldn’t make out–and waved her arms violently.

After careful inspection, he signed the paper. Then he rose, his legs aching, and shook the servant’s hand.

“We have a deal,” Jack Austen said, and plunged into the water.

Ariadne was a genius, Aiden Jacobs thought. The guideline would see Dr. Kovach and himself safely through the labyrinth of tunnels in which they had gotten themselves lost. As long as there’s no minotaur in here we’re all set.

An exobiologist, Dr. Kovach studied life, or the possibility for it, elsewhere in the universe. He hoped, by studying how extremophiles managed to survive under such harsh conditions in Dean’s Blue Hole, he would learn how similar entities might survive on faraway planets in faraway solar systems. The tunnels had already surrendered a number of their secrets.

They swam on, pausing occasionally for samples, until they reached a length of tunnel blocked by a cage of stalagmites and stalactites. Aiden checked his oxygen gauge, then tapped Dr. Kovach on the shoulder and drew his finger across his neck. Time to go. Dr. Kovach nodded. He was satisfied. They began the long and slow swim back, careful not to scrape or bang any vital equipment against the close walls of the tunnel.

About halfway there the guideline went slack. Dr. Kovach frowned at Aiden as if to ask, Why did this happen? and Is it serious? Aiden shook his head. Poor bastard, he thought. He doesn’t know we just died. Had he tied the knot around the base of the palm tree correctly? At the time he’d been tying the knot he hadn’t been thinking–it was easier not to think–which was in part why he used the guideline and why he didn’t know who or what he’d been before–poof!–he appeared as the proprietor of a small dive shop in Deadman’s Cay, the Bahamas. Lack of thought freed him from memory. Lack of memory freed him from the past–and the monster that lurked there. But now he had lost the guideline. He shrugged and mouthed the word “Sorry.” Bubbles, byproduct of their last minutes of respiration, escaped Aiden Jacobs’s mouth.

As he started back across the bay, Jack Austen wondered whether his father might hear about the change of the Austen family fortune and return. If he did, Jack would cast him out no matter how he begged. It was unforgivable to abandon one’s family–the opposite of honorable, which was to sacrifice everything for them.

As he crossed the lip of the blue hole a cramp seized his left leg. He’d never swum this far in his life and certainly never under threat of death by lusca. But now the monster was the least of his worries. First he had to save himself from drowning.

One of the officers who had brought Jack his breakfast every morning and his dinner every night while he crouched in the dingy cell in Deadman’s Cay had warned him that, if he attempted this stunt, he should avoid the center of the bay where the water was darkest. Other daredevils had skirted the periphery of blue holes in the past, but no one had ever returned from a swim through the middle.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jack said.

But as more parts of his body began to cramp–his right side, then his shoulder–Jack Austen had no choice but to brave the darkest water before he locked up completely and sunk. Somewhere Nathaniel Gates was grinning.

Aiden Jacobs looked at his oxygen gauge. Ten minutes left. They’d been searching the tunnels for an hour and hadn’t found any trace of the exit. The rock and mineral formations all looked the same to Aiden. Dr. Kovach would have been able to offer some help in this regard if he hadn’t been so preoccupied collecting his samples.

They were branching into another tunnel when Dr. Kovach grabbed Aiden’s shoulder. Aiden’s first thought was, inexplicably, the lusca. But there was no seventy-five foot octopus in sight. Dr. Kovach gestured toward an oblong hunk of white rock tucked into one corner of the tunnel. You’re fucking kidding me, old man. We’re going to die down here and you want to collect more samples. Dr. Kovach swam over and, careful not to bash his oxygen tank against the tunnel wall, scooped up the rock. Centuries of sediment drifted to the ground and revealed that the oblong hunk of white stone was actually a human skull.

That’s not ominous at all, Aiden said to himself.

Dr. Kovach extended the skull toward him.

Why would you think I want to hold that?

Dr. Kovach shook the skull, insisting. Aiden Jacobs reached out and took it.

Jack Austen felt the vortex grab him. When he looked down he expected to see the red eye of the lusca glaring up at him from the black depths, a forest of tentacles filling the water, but he saw nothing. And then he was gone, sucked beneath the waves, leaving behind only a few bubbles and a ripple.

For years Jack had ignored the murky depths of the future and the certain ruin it spelled for his family, but when he lay at the bottom of the blue hole, his back broken and his breath running out, he peered into the shadows and saw no lusca, but saw all this instead. He saw what came after and he saw what came next.

Years later a distant relative and descendent of his named Aiden Jacobs, the great-great-great-great-great-great grandson of the baby in Luscinda Austen’s womb, would discover Jack’s skull, picked clean by the passage of time. Turning the skull over in his hands, the red warning light on his oxygen gauge blinking, Aiden would glimpse the mind of his ancestor just as Jack had glimpsed the mind of his descendant and remember everything that he had forgotten as well as a few things he had never known. Pointing his flashlight in the correct direction, Aiden would lead Dr. Kovach through the tunnels, up the wall of Dean’s Blue Hole, and out into the late afternoon. The data gleaned from Dr. Kovach’s samples would amount to nothing and the mystery of the stars would remain inviolate, but the skull of Jack Austen would rest on the corner of Aiden’s desk like a Shakespearian prop while, in accordance with the ancestor whose mind he had shared for an instant, he booked his flight back to New York, back to the family he had forgotten, back to the past and into the future.

They brought in the new shower curtain on Monty’s three-thousand-two-hundred-eighty-sixth day alive on this earth.

He didn’t like it.

And just a day before his birthday too. Thanks mom and dad. The curtain shimmered with an oddness that put Monty on edge. They put the curtain, all wonders and myth, in their bathroom, which was different from the first floor bathroom, which was where Monty took his own showers. Thankfully, Monty never had to use that shower, never had to touch that curtain, and never had to open it. Once he needed to use the toilet so badly that he ran upstairs, did his business, and ran back downstairs with his eyes closed, knocking over a vase, and nearly knocking himself out when he clipped the wall coming out of the bathroom, not to mention the little mess that his mother had to clean up soon thereafter. The only time Monty had ever seen the shower curtain was on that first day, shimmering with magic and pixie dust.

He didn’t like it.

On a very random and regular day in the sixth grade, Monty and his best friend Luke walked toward lunch. They stopped in the boy’s room to relieve themselves. “I swear, Monty, she had the best ones I’ve ever seen,” said Luke fervently. “I swear. I swear on my mom’s grave.” Luke finished and washed his hands. Absently, he played with the handle of a locked hatch on the wall while he waited for Monty to finish.

Monty glanced at him as he finished, and did a double take, his face that of utter horror. “Oh my god, get away from that!” he shouted, forgetting to zip his pants as he turned to his friend.

Luke looked around confusedly. “What?” he asked.

“Do you even know what’s behind that door?” he cried, his voice cracking a little.

Luke looked around again, looked at the hatch on the wall. “No.”

Monty simply shook his head and ran out of the bathroom, his friend trailing behind. Monty did not talk while they hurried on toward the cafeteria. He stomped on, his head down, his teeth chattering. Luke followed, but couldn’t keep up, yelling after him, “What? What?” When they finally found their table and sat down across from each other, Monty looked his friend right in the face and said, “There’s magic behind there.”

Luke held his expression for a moment, but just a moment. In fact, it was barely a moment. It was more of a nanosecond. Or a fraction of that. Luke burst out into flat, unadulterated laughter.

Monty shook his head reprovingly, his face absolutely stern, austere even. “It’s not funny at all, Luke,” he said with the air of a boarding school headmaster. “It is the most unfunny thing I’ve ever said.”

Luke, in the midst of his mirth, managed to pull himself together for just a second to respond with, “oh?” before collapsing again into a ball of laughs and snorts. Several minutes later, when he finally stopped laughing, Luke looked at Monty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What do you mean by magic,” he asked before wiping his running nose on his sleeve.

Monty looked around as if the entirety of the CIA was listening through bugs all over the place. “My mom bought this cereal, and I had some this morning, and it…”

“Was it those new chocolate puffs?” Luke interrupted. “Or was it those fruity flakes with the marshmallows?”

Monty thought about this, his train of thought momentarily held up due to cereal cows on the tracks. “The chocolate puffs.”

“Aw man, I love them!”

“Yeah, they’re awesome. Anyway, I was eating this morning and I was reading the back of the box, ‘cause, you know they put mazes and stuff on the back. The back of the box had all these doors on it and a maze to get through them. You had to, like, get to the right one or something. But on the top of the box, it said, ‘The magic lies behind the doors that you’ve never seen open.’” Monty stopped for effect, but obviously, the story had no effect on Luke whatsoever. He added heatedly, “Magic like the shower curtain in my parents’ room.”

“So you’re listening to cereal boxes now?” asked Luke incredulously. He laughed in Monty’s face, but this time, his laugh was much more hurtful, intentionally so. Monty was left alone for the rest of the day. Luke must have told everyone.

In seventh grade, Monty experienced fright like never before. His parents had gone out with friends and he sat alone in the living room, a beat up cereal box accompanying him on the coffee table. All of the lights in the house were on, turned on by Monty himself. And every single door in the house that he’d opened before stood open. Every closet, every cabinet, every drawer, everything that had a hinge or a runner was pulled open. He held this tradition when he found himself lonesome in the house ever since he’d read the cereal box. The only door that he kept closed was the bathroom door in his parent’s upstairs bedroom. He refused to open that door. Nothing good could come of that.

No one had called Monty since that day in sixth grade. Luke disappeared from his life the day after. Nobody came to his birthday that year. He wasn’t invited to anybody else’s party either.

Monty found refuge in solidarity, immersing himself in books and movies. He became intimately involved in Star Wars and Harry Potter. He watched intently the third Harry Potter movie on DVD, analyzing the details and whether or not they coincided with the book. The sounds of the movie blared over the surround sound system, but when a cabinet slammed shut, Monty jumped. He excitedly grabbed the remote and turned off the TV and DVD player. He sat completely still, facing forward, staring at the matte black picture on the TV. The light from the kitchen behind him and the end table lamps on either side of him glared on the screen.

He didn’t dare flinch. His only movement came from his pulse forcing him to rock back and forth. His heart beat like a jackhammer with a Nascar engine. His mouth agape and his eyes unclosing, he trembled slightly. One minute passed. He watched the clock. Two minutes. Three. Four. Five.

The sound of the cabinet slamming echoed in his ears, in his mind. He heard it again and again like it was happening repeatedly as he sat there. High pitched, screaming, whining, squeaking, screeching like an abominable monstrosity from the depths of who-knows-where. Monty silently coaxed himself to calm down, willed his heart to slow.

Watching the clock like a hawk watches a field mouse scamper across the weeds, Monty did not move a muscle for thirteen minutes and seven seconds. It was then that he relaxed, settled back down into the couch cushions. He slowly brought the remote control up to turn everything back on.

Another cabinet slammed, high-pitched and rattling, sending Monty into catatonia. The remote fell from his hand, and he whimpered like a newborn puppy. “Oh my god,” he whispered to himself. Another cabinet slammed, louder this time. Time stood still at that moment for Monty. He reflected on his life so far and decided that he’d not accomplished much. With adrenaline and the purest fear streaking through his veins, Monty gathered up his gumption and sprinted to his bedroom where he slammed the door shut and locked, dived under his covers and held them tight around his head. He tucked the edges of the covers under his body and feet, holding them down tight.

And, as he lay there, he whimpered. He cried. He squeaked and coughed and wet himself. And all around him, the doors and cabinets and drawers of the house opened and closed with such dominating volume that Monty nearly died from shock that night.

Monty had to put forth a serious effort to forget about the events of that night in seventh grade. The memories were dead and buried by the time he reached tenth grade, still in one piece thankfully, when he encountered yet another spine-tingling affair. At home on Halloween, giving out candy to kids in festive costumes, Monty enjoyed a night alone. Between trick-or-treaters, he would waltz into the kitchen, where all of the blinds were closed, out of eyesight of the front door, and take a long drag from a joint he rolled earlier in the evening. A fan blew the smoke into the vent above the stove, and a scented candle kept the kitchen and living room smelling floral as usual. Monty’s parents had gone to a party where they would be most of the night.

At eight o’clock when the younger candy scavengers were going home and the older groups were still wandering, Monty took a break, went to the kitchen, and made himself a ham and cheese sandwich to satisfy his overwhelming craving for the munchies. He puffed on his joint and sat down on the love seat in the living room, “Night of the Living Dead” playing on the TV in pre-Technicolor picture. The moans of the zombies made him chuckle. After a minute, a knock on the door brought Monty up from his mirth. He stood up from the cream-colored loveseat to answer the trick-or-treaters.

A young man dressed as a werewolf and a young man dressed as a football player stood on the front steps, pillowcases dangling from their hands, filled with candy. Monty dropped some candy into their bags from his bowl and smiled at them. A low growl emanated from somewhere around him, and he immediately looked at the werewolf.

“Nice growl, kid,” he said approvingly, pointing at him. “Sounds real. What is it, a tape?”

The kid looked up at Monty and cocked his head sideways. “What are you talking about?” he said incredulously. Then he turned with his friend and hopped down the steps to continue gathering sweets. Monty stood at the door, wondering where he’d heard the sound come from. After a moment of thought, he turned and reentered his house, content that it was the weed making him hear things. He shut the door and sat the bowl down on the end table and froze right in his place.

Surveying the black hair strewn about the loveseat, Monty began to shake down to his core. “What the hell,” he whispered. He wanted to go look at the hair, see what kind of animal it might have come from, but he couldn’t move. He was trapped in his footsteps. The loveseat was absolutely covered in the black hair. There was not one square inch of cream-colored fabric showing through the blackness. The seat looked like a blob of oil, pitch black and endlessly deep. Staring at it, intoxicated as he was, Monty thought he saw it move, ooze like some sort of amorphous creature from Hell.

Heavy footsteps from the second floor shocked Monty so completely that he screamed and jumped and fell to the floor. He looked around frantically, hoping that he’d see something that might explain the sound from above. He looked left and right, and stared at the loveseat once more. The hair was gone. The seat could have just been vacuumed to perfection. It was pristine. It looked like it had just been delivered.

Slowly, Monty regained his feet, standing straight up and trying to focus his vision. The pot sent him into a sort of hovering awareness that kept his thoughts and his motor skills just above his head. He saw himself walking toward the stair to the top floor. He watched from above, like a Zen master leaving his body in the middle of deep meditation. He wished that he didn’t feel as such. He wished that he could stop himself. But he had no control. And he quickly found himself turning the corner at the top of the steps and walking down the hallway. Monty’s parents’ bedroom lay at the end of the hall where an odd, multicolored light flickered.

Monty felt his entire ribcage vibrating with subtle convulsions that he couldn’t prevent. His nerves were breaking with each step, like an ancient rope bridge across a bottomless gorge. His good sense would have told him to turn around, but the illegal substance in his body kept him moving forward. From just inside the bedroom, the same heavy footsteps resounded moving from the center of the room to the back toward the bathroom.

The sudden sounds sent Monty into fresh convulsions. His whole body shook under the tension that he forced into his muscles. His head shook left and right. His fingers twitched like insect legs. His teeth chattered together like a roll on a snare drum.

He stepped into the bedroom, which was basked in the multicolored light, which was coming from the bathroom. Monty stealthily sneaked to the corner and peered around it toward the bathroom. He gasped silently, and nearly choked on his breath. He snapped back behind the corner. The lights went out. The room was fully dark once more. Monty’s breath came rapid and short. As he stood there, trying to regain himself, trying to overcome the effects of the weed, a low, rumbling, earthquake of a growl slowly emanated from the bathroom in a wave of audible turbulence. Monty felt the sound deep within himself.

“O-oh my g-g-god,” he whispered. Feeling a misplaced need for some sort of confirmation, Monty slowly peeked around the corner again.

He took off. “No!” he screamed, and flicked on all of the light switches along the way out of his house. He grabbed the Halloween bowl on the way, and made himself comfortable outside on the front steps.

He didn’t reenter the house until his parents returned, at three-thirty in the morning.

Seven years passed along with the life of Monty’s cereal box. And, likewise, died the reputation of his being a scare-dee-cat. Over the years, Monty found himself a new life. With the memory of that horrific night fading into the depths of his subconscious, he moved on through high school, then college, and then plans for graduate school. In eleventh grade, he attended a party after a high school football game where he and his friends got busted for underage drinking. He only had to attend alcohol abuse classes instead of more severe penalties because his friend’s dad was a cop. Later that year, Monty found himself heavily into the world of pot, enjoying a bowl or a bong once or twice a weekend. He never got caught. In twelfth grade, forgetting the nonsense about the doors and the magic, he joined in a party with a rather uneven ratio of girls to boys, which was precisely the point. He doused himself in beer and weed and lost his virginity in a closet that he’d never been in before. It didn’t matter though because he was high and drunk and with a girl who wanted nothing more than to take off all of her clothing.

Once in college, Monty settled himself down. His dorm room and building had many doors that he’d never been behind, but he didn’t mind. His father died that year of liver cancer and later that year, his mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. The doctors cut out everything they could, but it spread, and she only had a small amount of time, so they said. Monty went home to take care of her every weekend, his fears of cabinets and doors left at the curb, although he never did go into his parents’ bathroom.

Just before graduation, Monty fell in love with a girl his age who was also planning on going to graduate school. He bought her flowers and spent all of the money that he’d been saving since eighth grade on an engagement ring that her mother described as “dazzling.”

Monty’s mother had survived her cancer until Monty had graduated, but not much longer after that. The whole family arrived at Monty’s parent’s house on a Friday afternoon to show their respects to their dying relative. The day waned progressively, and Monty shared a lot of his life story with relatives that he hadn’t seen in years. His fiancé gave out drinks and sat on his leg while he talked, admiring his eyes and speech, thinking about how wonderful it would be once they were married. Monty thought the same things as he talked and talked, checking on his mother once in a while. Each family member went upstairs to join her for a moment or two, talking of love and companionship and trusts that everything will be all right.

When the night finally came to a close, Monty’s fiancé elected to clean up while Monty went up to his mother. She was as fragile as a cracked crystal wine glass and looked even more so than that.

He sat down on the bed next to her. He felt like he could see her life escaping from her like wisps of smoke. She opened her blue eyes slowly. “Hi mom,” he said softly, lovingly.

She smiled. “Oh, my Monty,” she replied. Her smile sustained. “It was nice seeing everyone. I’m glad you’re here, Monty. I love you so much.”

“I love you too, mom,” he said, a tear trickling down his cheek.

“Don’t cry, Monty. Don’t. I’ll be happier where I’m going.”

Monty sniffed, unable to contain his sadness. It’s not everyday one loses a mother. Monty never thought he’d have to do it. This was even harder to handle than when his father had died.

“You’re going to be fine, Monty. Don’t worry yourself.”

He was crying now, straight out, crying unabated. “I don’t want you to miss my wedding, mom.” His voice was barely a whisper, but his emotions put his words through a bullhorn. “I just want you to be there.”

She smiled anew. “I will be, Monty. I will be.” She placed a weak hand on Monty’s hand. “I love you, Monty. My Monty.” And she was gone.

Monty sat on the bed for several unchecked minutes, crying freely. He sniffled and cried some more. He looked around for tissues, but found none, so he went to the bathroom to grab some toilet paper. He walked in, flipped on the light switch.

The light didn’t go on. And just as he flipped the switch up, the door slammed shut with ferocity. As he turned to grab the knob and open the door, something strong and horrifying pushed him down into the corner of the room. The past suddenly overcame Monty with such terrible fury that he lost his voice and motor skills. His eyes stayed open wide, trying to adjust to the darkness. He drew air in short furtive breaths.

The voice came from close to the ground. It was the voice of a leprechaun or a yeti. It was the voice of a werewolf or an animated doll. “You’ve forgotten about this house,” it said venomously. “Forgotten about me.”

“What are you,” Monty choked out.

“You should have trusted yourself.”

Monty’s breath slowed as his eyes adjusted. For some reason, seeing outlines and shadows eased him somewhat. He could see eyes like a cat’s, reflecting the darkness into a greenish-yellow. He might have seen a snout. He might have seen huge ears or ten arms. He might have seen anything. All he could really make out was an amorphous shadow and those animalistic eyes.

“Did you kill my father?” he asked. “My mother is gone. You can’t have her.”

It breathed in and out heavily, sounding like its chest and lungs were the size of pickle barrels. “I do not live here for them.” Its voice molded into something slithering and mucus-ridden.

Monty suddenly tightened up.

“Yes,” it grunted, laughing harshly. “Yes. I have always been here for you.” It paused. Then, ominously, abominably, it added slowly, “Montgomery.”

Once again, his breathing became short and erratic. His heart became a mere lump of vibrating muscle in his chest. He only found two words. “Why me?”

The hot steaming breath of it was in his face then. Wetness hung close to him, and he felt terror like no other. The faint clicking of claws came up from the tile. The swoosh of fur reached his ears. The growl of something feral, something primeval, something prehistoric, something magical and deadly pounded in his ears.

Monty’s eyes wandered lifelessly up to the curtain that hung from the shower. It flapped as if in some sort of wind, shimmering wildly, though no light shone against it to be reflected. It glinted like the eyes of the creature, all magic and myth. For a moment, Monty wondered where his parents had gotten that curtain. Whatever it was, it had brought this thing into his house.

Monty turned his head to face the creature’s yellow-green eyes. “Why me,” he repeated softly.

It grunted and growled. It replied as if satisfied after millennia of searching for a goal, “Because you believe.”

His eyes opened to a room he didn’t recognize. The cool night sweats covering him evaporated as the fear blazed inside. Where am I? He jumped up in bed.

Was he in the hospital again? No! A familiar face eased his fear. It was his wife Kara sleeping next to him.

Seeing the clock, the fear of time flooded him. I woke up late! Steve Jackson had always been a human alarm clock—except for that one time a year ago from today.

Steve rushed through his morning preparations, not wanting to be any later than he already was. Normally his days began lax; not this one. Whose life is this? ‘Cause it damn sure isn’t mine. Steve hoped exiting the house would calm the craziness; instead, it intensified it before his first step out.

Through the doors, he noticed something flutter out. It was an envelope, which had something scribbled on it. At first the thick black lines were gibberish, but further decoding sent a messenger-spider up his spine—one word: STEVE.

He picked up the envelope as he peered down at the mailbox. He was about to tear the envelope open, but the clock brought his attention back to his main concern—his lateness. He set the envelope on the table inside the door, and headed to work.

Like a marathon runner, he checked his time as he ran into work. He hoped to ghost his way in, but Harry, his boss, spotted him. “Is everything okay, Stevie?”

Steve waved and continued to the staff lounge. He put his belongings in his locker and went to the bathroom. In front of the mirror he stood staring into his own eyes, but saw only the envelope. It’s nothing. He splashed water on his face, hoping to wash it from his mind. He then went to face Harry.

Steve expected a word from Harry for being late—not like a boss, but more like a concerned friend. A lecture on punctuality was redundant either way. “Where do you want me?”

“We’ll get to that. Tell me what’s going on.”

“I woke late.” Steve exhaled hard.

“Okay? I’m talking about what’s going on with you. Because it looks like something is having a racquetball match in that head of yours.”

It’s just an envelope.

Harry laid a comforting hand on Steve’s shoulder. “If you keep letting it eat at you, it’s just going to turn you into shit. So set it loose and end this feast.”

“It’s nothing. I found this envelope with my name on it when I was leaving.”

“What did it say?”

“I didn’t open it.”

“So what’s the problem then?”

“It’s where I found it. Whoever left it, left it between the front doors with no return address or stamp, just my name written on it.”

“So?” Harry surely didn’t understand Steve’s concern.

Steve wasn’t even sure why he was concerned. “Why didn’t they leave it in the mailbox?”

“Is that the problem? I bet it’s from a neighbor who was going to hand-deliver it, but when no one answered, they left there between the doors.”

“That’s the problem. I left around eleven last night to drop off some movies we rented, and it wasn’t there when I came back.” Steve’s voice raced. “So that means it was delivered last night between eleven-thirty and this morning. Who would deliver a note then?”

Harry remained silent.

Steve realized it wasn’t the envelope that concerned him, but its possible contents. Thoughts of the letters Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather received—the anthrax ones—filled his mind. His mouth fell open, not at the thought he was the target of a madman, but at where he’d left the envelope. The idea of it being in his house with his wife and kids caused an earthquake of emotion to erupt inside him. “I’ll be back!”

Home, Steve sprinted into his house. He rounded the door and slammed his hand where he’d set the envelope. It wasn’t there.

He searched the floor. Nothing! His body trembled. Kara and the kids! He went to find them—but as he passed the living room archway he realized he didn’t need to go any further.
There they were—motionless.

At one end of the couch, Kara’s head shone, slumped against the back; on the other hung his daughter’s tiny legs. He wanted to assure himself they were okay, but then he saw the envelope lying on the floor—torn open. They’re dead! It was addressed to me. I should be the one dead, not them.

Commonsense was the furthest thing from his mind as he ran into the living room to his family. That’s when he saw his son on the floor in front of the TV. Steve went to get him, and bring him over with the rest of the family—to die as one. Just as he did, his son looked up at him with a What are you doing? look.

He looked at his wife, who gripped a piece of paper as tears silently rained down her face. His daughter too was okay, looking at him with the same expression as her brother. He still swept up his son and set him between the others. He hugged them as tightly as he could.

Kara hugged him back four times tighter; that was how he knew the note still contained some form of “anthrax” for him. He pulled back and stared sympathetically into her eyes. “What is it, Honey?”

“Oh Batty…I’m glad you’re okay. I thought something happened to you…you need to go to the police before he hurts you?”

“What…Who hurts me?”

Kara’s lips trembled, but no words formed in the hurricane exiting her mouth. She handed him the note.

He took it, half afraid, half curious. As he read it, he realized it wasn’t anthrax—it was worse.

My name is Jack Stevenson and nearly a year ago you stole something of mine. A year ago today you had a car accident, which left you hospitalized for over a month. Me too! You sustained many injuries that left you swollen and scarred. Me too! You suffered severe head trauma, which hazed away your memories. Me too! You woke in hospital room 349. Me too!

The only difference! You woke first, because you had my friends, my family, and my wife and kids helping you through your recovery. You see, the thing you stole from me was my life, and I want it back. You are really Jack, and I am Steve. You only have two options here. Either voluntarily swap lives back with me, or I’ll kill you and take my life back. Tell anyone, especially Kara and the kids, and I’ll kill them too. Don’t be stupid, just right the wrong you caused and everyone will go on living their happy lives.

Steve didn’t have to announce he finished the letter. It was written all over him. Kara hugged him. “Batty, what’s this all about?”

“I don’t know.”

“This man seems crazy.”

“Kids, go watch TV upstairs,” Steve interrupted. “Your mother and I need to talk privately.”

Both kids darted up the stairs.

“You need to get that letter to the police,” Kara cried.

Steve stared at the words of the razorblade he held, not reading them, but trying to see the face of the hand that wrote them. How could our lives have been switched? Steve replied, “I’m not calling the police. He said if I did, he’d kill you and the kids, and that’s a risk I’m not willing to take.”

“Well, no madman is stepping a single foot in this house or near this family. I’ll kill him if he tries!”

“Easy there, Slugger.” Steve crumbled the note and tossed it in the garbage. “Everything will be fine.”

***

Later, Kara found Steve in the den glaring at the computer. “The kids are in bed and you know they won’t fall asleep until you kiss them goodnight. I wonder if that bastard knows that.” Her tone sharpened.

“Okay, I’ll be up in five. I just want to finish this inventory report for Harry.”

“I thought you finished that last night? … Wait, how can you be working like it’s nothing when a crazy man is threatening your life?!”

“Not like it’s nothing. I just don’t want to drive myself mad thinking about it and neither should you.” He grabbed her hand.

For the first time in the day, Kara smiled. “Okay, I trust you. Now go kiss your kids goodnight.” She left.

Steve shut the computer off.

***

The next morning Steve woke like always—his inner alarm clock back on cue. After getting ready, he kissed his wife and kids goodbye, and told them he loved them. He did this every morning, but it felt different today, because it was.

Walking into work, Steve was brought back to reality by Harry. “I assume the envelope was as important as you suspected, since you never returned yesterday.”

“I’m sorry about that. Things just got a little crazy.”

“Is everything okay with Kara and the kids?”

“Yeah, they’re fine…. They’re gonna be just fine…” Steve didn’t believe his own words. “You know, Harry, we’ve known each other quite some time and you know me pretty well, right?”

“Yeah, we’ve been friends for ages.”

“I know the accident messed my brain up and all, but you still saw potential in me when no one else did—and now, look, I’m like your right-hand man with the inventory lists and going to conferences and stuff…. I guess what I’m trying to get at is, if I don’t seem myself the next few weeks, don’t…”

“Inventory lists? Conferences? Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the work you do around here on the few days you come in—”

“Look at the time. I better get to work.” Steve walked away.

Harry said nothing, but his eyes asked more questions than all three Jeopardy contestants combined.

***

A loud shatter came from the front of the store. Steve came around the building toward it. Harry was already out front. “What was that noise?” Steve asked, winded.

“It sounded like glass shattering,” Harry replied. He looked Steve over: sweating, out of breath. “Are you okay? You look exhausted.”

“I’m fine.” Steve’s eyes were glued to his car. He knew it was the origin.

He crept to it and saw the driver’s side window was shattered. His reaction must have been more noticeable than a blimp in flight, because Harry asked, “Is there a lot of damage?”

“No, just the window…. Probably the heat. Can you get me a broom and dustpan to clean up the glass?”

“Sure.” Harry went into the store.

Steve checked inside the car, not sure what he’d find. Not seeing anything dramatic like a person with a gun or knife hiding in there, he slowly opened the door. The inside was clutter-free, which was why his heart stopped when he saw the bulky envelope on the floor. He snatched it up and jumped from the car. He played with it, trying to figure out its contents–two rectangular objects. He ripped it open.

The smaller rectangle was a fob bearing the BMW symbol. The other was a New York driver’s license issued to Jack Stevenson. Now I see how this whole mess started. Steve was staring at a face so familiar that he saw it that very morning.

Jack looked exactly like him.

The only difference was Jack had slicked-back hair and wore a business suit. Steve didn’t own a suit; he never needed one. He always wanted one and wanted to live in New York with a job on Wall Street, but he hadn’t even attended college. He married his high school sweetheart, Kara, and that was the life he chose—or so he was told. Maybe Jack is right and our lives were switched. He slid the license into his wallet and raised the fob, pressing the unlock button. A chirp and flashing headlights shone from the far end of the parking lot.

The BMW was the epiphany of power and success: a fully tinted-out black BMW M5 sitting on chrome wheels. Steve took a seat and started it. A woman’s robotic voice spoke through the speakers. “Turn right onto South Fourth Street.”

Steve knew it was the GPS, but where did Jack program it to take him? Let’s see what else he’s offering. He put the BMW in gear and followed the directions.

The three-hour drive only felt like a few minutes with Steve in awe of the car. “You have arrived at your destination,” the GPS said as he pulled up in front of a luxurious high rise condo in Manhattan. He pulled into the turnaround of the complex. The place was exquisite.

A knock at the driver’s door startled him.

It was the valet. “Welcome home, Mr. Stevenson? How are you this fine evening?” the valet asked.

Through a shaky voice, Steve replied, “I’m doing good… I mean well… I’m doing well, thank you.”

Steve exited the car and the valet drove off in it. There goes my escape plan if anyone realizes I’m not Jack. Steve walked to the front door. The doorman greeted him the same as the valet. Steve nodded. Entering the building, Steve felt like a worm in the ocean. The clerk behind the desk greeted him like the others and also handed him a key card, a stack of mail, and list of messages for him—well, for Jack. Steve took everything with a wavy smile and walked toward the elevators. He hit the up button and wondered what floor Jack’s place was on. Luck struck when the door opened, as there was an elevator operator who hit the thirtieth floor; it was in the collection of four other buttons listed as penthouse suites.

When the doors opened on the thirtieth floor, Steve had no worries to which suite: There was a short hallway and a single door. He exited the elevator, afraid to turn around. He frantically slid the card into the lock mechanism. The light changed from red to green and he rushed in, locking the chain lock on the inside. His heart pounded, but that tiny chain in place strangely soothed him. I made it, and I think no one realizes I’m not Jack.

Steve walked the condo like a museum—afraid to touch anything. It all looked so expensive. Everything was gorgeous: the furniture, the décor, the layout, and the skyline view. This place is amazing. Why would Jack give this up for my puny life? Steve walked over to the bar and poured himself a glass of scotch to calm his nerves. He then took a seat on the couch overlooking the wall of glass. It felt like he was floating on a cloud. I could get used to this.

Time passed as Steve continued to enjoy the scotch. The bottle near empty, Steve felt the effects of the alcohol. I better not let Kara see me like this— The thought sent a centipede of concern loose in his body. I wonder if they know that’s Jack there with them and not me. He jumped to his feet, wobbled, and sat back down. Wait, he said our lives were swapped. They’re his kids and wife, not mine. Where did those thoughts come from? He only planned to play along to fool Jack and then go take his life back, but this was the life he’d wished for. I like it here. Steve went to pour another drink. He stopped at the wall full of pictures of Jack with other people; they all looked important and powerful. Jealousy began to build inside him—then he realized, I am Jack. He looked in the mirror between the pictures. “You are Steve…enson, Jack Stevenson.” His words slurred, but sounded so nice to his ears.

He decided to get more comfortable in his new—old—life. He took a quick shower and changed into a pair of silk pajamas. This is the life. Passing the mirror, Jack stopped to admire the new him. He even slicked his hair back. He was Jack.

Again he looked at all the pictures on the wall. His eye caught something that caused his heart to rattle in his ribcage. One by one he ripped the pictures from the wall. With enough confirmation, Jack—or Steve, or whoever he was—raised his hand to the scar on his forehead. Apparently he and Jack had even more in common.

In every picture Jack, with his slicked-back hairdo, revealed he not only had the same mole as Steve on his forehead, but also had the same scar—the scar Steve got in his accident, and also the reason Kara called him “Batty,” since the scar, next to his mole, was shaped like a baseball bat. That was no coincidence. Everything to this point seemed like coincidences, from their closely related names, to their accidents, to sharing the same hospital room, and even to looking alike. But the chances of all those coincidences and now having the same scar were beyond belief.

There was only one explanation: They were the same person.

Everything since finding the letter played through his head. No, it went further than that. It went to the night before he found it when he was working on the inventory list he never supposedly did. If I wasn’t working on the inventory list, what was I working on? Did I write the letter to myself? Pieces of the past day televised in his head like the evidence checklist of the game Clue. Did he do it? His life was a lie—how long had he been living a lie? He needed the evidence of this crazy predicament he was in. He knew where that evidence was—on his computer back home. He knew this because the letter was typed, and he saw no computer anywhere here.

Escaping the condo complex was not as hard as he imagined. Now home, he found getting in to be more of a challenge. His keys were back at Harry’s in his locker and Kara didn’t allow any hide-a-key. Steve didn’t want to wake anyone, since all he planned to do was find the evidence of the letter, delete it, and leave. He would return tomorrow and say Harry had sent him on an emergency job a few towns over and after he was so tired he rented a room. This wasn’t like him, but he knew he could persuade Kara to forgive him.

With no other option, Steve punched out one of the small back door windows. Inside he stood silently at the bottom of the stairs, listening for any signs of life. It was so quiet, death was louder. He tiptoed to the den and turned on his computer. The few seconds it took for the computer to boot up felt like an eternity. Steve opened Microsoft Word and clicked on the Options tab. He located the auto-save folder and opened it.

There was the letter on the screen. He was about to delete it, but stopped at a loud shatter, like a porcelain casserole dish hitting a tile floor, inside his head. He was thrown from the chair. His head bounced off the wall, the desk, and the chair like a pinball in play—bells rang each time his head hit. Lying on the floor, all he could see was white. As the white diminished into millions of stars, the room came back into view. He felt warm fluid rushing from his face and head like springs from a mountain. A pool developed in his mouth. The scene was different, but the effects were the same. He was dying—and on the one-year anniversary of the accident in which he’d almost died.

White, red, then black was how the dying process had gone for him the first time. It was two-thirds through. He fought not to see the black by spitting out the red so he could breathe.

A ray of hope shined before him. It was his loving wife Kara—only he saw she wasn’t his ray of hope, but his bringer of black. She held a baseball bat dripping with blood. He knew he had to speak, but the blood filled his mouth too fast, drowning his words. She thinks you’re Jack. Show her you’re not. Show her you’re Steve, the man she loves. His hand vibrated as he brought it to his face. He pushed back his blood-soaked hair, trying to show her his scar so she would know it was him.

She ripped his wallet from his back pocket and pulled out his driver’s license. Like a volcano her face reddened and exploded with tears. Her hands choked the bat as she raised it.

“Die, you bastard!”

I was driving home from school and on the way, stopped to pick up Mom from work. She was the glue in our family and always the one who set the standards for us to abide by. She constantly was organizing everything. Who did what and when. Once in the car, she started in on me about my chores.

“Did you take out the trash?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Why do I have to take out the trash all the time?”

“It’s part of your chores. That’s why. Everyone in this family has to pull their own weight.”

Everything after that was a blur, until the gruesome crash. I was conscious through the whole ordeal, but everything was in slow motion. I heard the glass breaking, steel-on-steel crunching, and in all the chaos, a scream cut off abruptly with a gurgle. Looking to the right, I saw my mom’s body all bloody, her clothes torn, and she was hanging out the window. Eventually I freed myself to help her and limped to the other side of the car. As soon as I came to the other side, I stopped, dropped to my knees, and cried, “No, God, no!” Her body was hanging on the door half out of the car and her head severed from her body.

The next thing I remembered was waking up in the hospital. The only thing that ran through my mind was the miniscule argument with Mom. If I had only taken out the trash, maybe none of this would have happened and she would still be here.

Meanwhile, my father, my twin sister, and I moved to the country. Father figured it would be a good change for all of us with all that went on in the past year. I was still having a tough time since my horrible accident that killed my mother over a year earlier. I remembered it as if it was yesterday. That day’s events ran repeatedly in my head. Even in my sleep, my dreams reminded me of the tragic event. My nightmares worsened, and I woke up screaming with terrible sweats and shook uncontrollably.

“John, wake up,” my father said as he woke me up.

“What’s up?” I said groggily. “What’s wrong?”

“You were dreaming and screaming, ‘No, I didn’t mean to.’”

“Oh, another nightmare.”

“Is it the same one?”

“Yeah, it has worsened in intensity though.”

“Well it is only three in the morning. Try to get some more sleep before school starts.”

My dad left the room. Sleep was hard to come by so I sat on the windowsill of my second-floor bedroom and looked out the window. The moon was full, the stars were bright, and the night sky was lit up bright as day. In the distance, I noticed an old structure that stretched above the treetops. I couldn’t quite make it out in the moonlight so I grabbed my binoculars to take a peek. It was a tower from an old castle. Shadows moved around in the candlelight of the room. A woman in a white nightgown came to the window, peered out as if looking for something, threw an object outside, and then looked straight at me. Did she see me? Freaked out I slammed the window shut and jumped into bed.

“WAKE UP,” Julie, my twin sister, screamed into my ear.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT?” I yelled back.

“Get out of bed, you lazy fuck.”

“Go wash your mouth out with soap. I can’t believe you talk like that. You have the mouth of a sailor.”

“Just get out of bed and mind your own business. I’ll say whatever I want to.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever.”

“You better be ready in fifteen minutes or I’ll leave without you.”

Sure enough thirty minutes later she was gone. I went downstairs to see if Dad was still here but he was gone too. Entering the kitchen, the temperature dropped about ten degrees. I continued slowly as the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Feeling a presence behind me, I turned quickly thinking someone was there but there was no one. A few seconds passed and the kitchen warmed back up. Then my cell phone rang and startled me. “Hello,” I said.

“Come to meeeeeeee…” a guttural sounding voice came across the phone.

“Who is this?” I said.

CLICK.

The screen of my cell phone turned all white. After a second it changed to black then it vibrated and I dropped it like a hot potato. Scrambling to pick up the pieces, I noticed the clock on the wall. It was late so I hustled to get to school.

Running most of the way I reached the old castle tower that I saw from my window early this morning. I stopped and stared at the old structure. It was dilapidated from hundreds of years of neglect. Part of the stones from the wall had fallen to the ground. I bent down to touch them and there was a clear slimy coating on the stone structure. It left a creepy feeling inside me. It was not what I had expected. I was about to leave and heard a faint whisper call my name, but, when I turned around, no one was there. The hairs on the back of my neck started to rise again. I thought better continue on to school before I was too late. Something pulled at me when I was leaving the castle. A strong strange force told me to go back. But I trudged forward.

When I arrived at school, it was already into the first period. I tried to sneak into the classroom but my sister ratted me out.

“Young man, where have you been?” Ms. Aglesby asked.

“I overslept,” I said.

“Well you need to see the principal after class and explain to him why you were late.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thanks for nothing, sis,” I whispered to my sister.

“I told you I would leave you,” Julie said. “Maybe next time you’ll heed my warnings and hurry the fuck up.”

“There you go again with that sailor’s mouth of yours. If Mom could hear you now, she would roll over in her grave.”

Next thing I knew Julie jumped up, slapped me in the face, and knocked me off my chair. The look in her eyes just before she swung at me was a look I’ll never forget. Pure evil was in those eyes. She tried to punch me but I ducked. She then tried a backhand swing but I grabbed her wrist. The force flung us both onto the floor with me landing on top of her.

“Hey, what’s going on back there?” Ms. Aglesby inquired. “You two come up here.”

Just as I was getting up, Julie kneed me in the crotch, which sent me tumbling to the floor gasping for air.

As she walked away, I heard the teacher say, “Both of you go to the principal’s office right now.”

Then I passed out.

When I came to, I was in the nurse’s office on the bed. My father and sister were arguing on the other side of the room. Quietly I left the room and started down the hall. Once in the main hallway, I took off running. Needing some time for myself I ran into the woods behind the school. Far enough away, I slowed to a walk. I could see the tower up ahead so I decided to check it out more in depth.

Approaching the tower, I saw a book lying on the ground. The book the woman threw out the tower window earlier this morning. Something was familiar about it. I bent over to pick it up and rain started to fall so I ducked into a tunnel off to the side of the structure. I continued to look through the book and a loud screeching sound like someone dragging their nails across a chalkboard came from inside. I tried to trace where the sound was coming from but all I found was more tunnels.

“Hey John, where are you going?” Julie said as she entered the opening of the tunnel.

“Damn, you scared the shit out of me,” I said.

“Yeah, it smells like it.”

“Ha, ha, very funny.”

“Look John, I am sorry about what happened back at school. I didn’t mean to. Ever since…you know, I have had all this pent-up aggression and no place to displace it. Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine now. Don’t worry about it. All of us are going through problems since the accident. But you did knee me so hard I thought my junk was going to fall off. Feels like you need a boyfriend to pop that cherry of yours. Then maybe you won’t take all your aggression out on me.”

“Are you offering?”

“Ewe, that’s disgusting. You’re my sister for crying out loud.”

“Just kidding, Bro.”

At that moment the screeching sounded again and deafened my ears which sent chills up and down my spine. “I heard that same sound a few minutes ago. I was gonna find out where it came from. Do you wanna come?”

“Sure, like I have nothing else better to do.”

She was being sarcastic, then all of a sudden a white apparition floated across the intersection at the end of the tunnel and disappeared.

“Did you see that?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Julie replied.

We tried to follow but the further we walked the worse the smell. The tunnel sloped downward until reaching a huge cavern that looked like the dome of a cathedral. Figures were drawn on the dome walls and statues were against them. By this time the smell was horrendous. It smelt like raw sewage baked in the hot summer day. In the cavern was a labyrinth of tunnels. Rats scurried at our feet, and Julie screamed.

I looked at Julie, and she had terror in her eyes as she was looking behind me.

“What is that?” Julie asked as her voice was cracking, and she pointed in the direction behind me.

I turned around to find a huge snake-like creature slithering in the sewage. It was about six-feet long and approaching us at a steady pace. It stopped and started to rise out of the sewer water. Fear in my eyes, I ran into the labyrinth of tunnels with my sister in tow. The farther we ran in the tunnels the more a mist accumulated. The mist was strange though. It wasn’t wet. I stopped and Julie crashed into my backside.

“Why did you stop?” Julie asked.

“Take a look at this,” I said. “This mist doesn’t have any texture to it. I wonder what it is.”

“I don’t know. But I say we not stick around and find out.”

Just then the mist rushed into one pile in front of us and then formed into a human shape. A medieval-looking warrior with two swords crisscrossed against his chest guarded the entrance of a tunnel that led to the tower. The warrior said in a bellowing voice, “I am the gatekeeper of this castle. For two hundred years, I have protected and served the spirits within these walls. You have intruded into the sacred portal from which no one returns. Prepare to reach your demise.”

He then took both of his swords from their scabbards and swung them at our heads. With the first swing, we ran as if our asses were on fire.

As we ran there was a trail of a white smoke that floated in the air. It passed us like we were standing still and all of a sudden stopped at the entrance to a tunnel as if to show us the way. We followed and came upon a locked door. Being the ever creative mind that my sister is, she pulled out a beret from her hair and started picking the lock.

After a few moments of her tinkering, we heard a loud noise like that of a steel chain sliding across a metal surface, then a loud CLINK. The door swung open and a blast of air rushed in that pulled us in and the door slammed shut behind us. I looked around the huge room to find dividers separating the room into sections. A light came on from behind one of them and I saw a silhouette of a woman. But she had no head; it was just the lower body sitting at a table. A few seconds went by and the silhouette picked up something off the table. It was her head, and she placed it on her shoulders.

At this point, Julie was groping to get out. She scurried around the huge room searching for a way out. She did not find one and settled at my side just behind me.

“You dare to interrupt me. What do you want? Why did you not heed the warnings of the warrior outside my door?” she yelled as she brushed back the divider and turned to face us.

We jumped back. Then we stood face to face with the ghost of our mother. She was wearing a white dress, the same I saw from my window. Her eyes were all black, with no whites in them, no pupils, just all black like a deep dark void into the soul. Blood dripped down her neck from the cut around her throat. Two wolves, one on each side, were now next to her. The vicious animals growled and lunged after us. Blood and saliva dripped from their fanged teeth. If it weren’t for the chains around them, we would have been their dinner.

“Mom, is that you?” Julie asked as her voice trembled with fear.

“Mom? Who are you calling Mom?” the ghost bellowed, “You had better leave before the warrior comes and takes you away.”

Just then, the medieval warrior pounded on the door. With the force of 100 men, the door exploded off the hinges. A bright flash of lightning accompanied by a loud thundering roar filled the room. The smoke cleared and in the doorway stood a massive hulk of a man.

“Sis, go over to the other door and see where it leads while I keep him busy,” I said.

“Keep him busy? With what?” Julie replied, as she opened the other door.

“I’ll think of something.”

“Come quickly, go through here.”

Behind the other door was a small crawlspace leading downward to some abyss. There was an obstacle in our way though. Skeletal remains were in the crawlspace. Maggots, worms, and bugs crawled through what remained of the flesh and bones. As we tried to move the remains, millions of flies flew into the room and swarmed around Julie and me. My sister quickly vomited from the onslaught of flies and the putrid smell from the remains. I wasn’t far behind; I felt the back of my throat begin to fill with my regurgitated food. The stench from the crawlspace permeated my pores and made me vomit uncontrollably.

Once in the crawlspace, the flies left us alone and attacked the warrior. Holding back my vomit, I cleared the remains and started to crawl through. All of a sudden, something grabbed my shoe. I looked back and it was the warrior trying to pull me back. I struggled to get out of his grip. The force of my escape propelled me into my sister and both of us slid down the crawlspace. It seemed forever until we came to an opening and splashed down in a pool of rat- infested sewage water.

I looked at Julie and she looked back at me with anger. At about that time the tower started to crumble and crash to the ground. A flash of light crashed through the walls of the tower and soared into the night sky and it was gone. The tower collapsed right at our feet.

The rubble settled, the smoke cleared and I heard a faint voice in the distance. I turned around and there was the woman in the white dress again.

“Mom?” I asked.

“Yes, dear,” she said, “it is me. You have released me and it is time for me to go.”

“Don’t go,” Julie said.

“But I must,” Mom said. “You must move on with your life, my children. The accident was just that, an accident. There is no need to dwell on it. Live your life and be happy. And, John, take care of your sister. Both of you look after your father.”

A flash of light into the night sky and she was gone, disappearing in front of our eyes. Julie and I walked home not saying a word. Then when we reached our house, I looked at her and asked, “Should we tell Dad?”

“No way,” Julie said. “He’ll think we’re crazy. Let’s just keep it our little secret.”

“Okay, agreed.”

We never spoke of it again.