Write the Year 2024—Week 13: DK

Just an odd memory that has surfaced recently about someone I was sort of tossed into friendship with. This is a Domino Rhyme.

Title: DK
WC: 77

That fedora’s been on my mind
The cream silk scarf you had to add
Brim tipped low over one arched brow
Yearning to look like an old soul

It must have belonged to your dad
The spoils of a dark closet raid
Like the jacket: herringbone tweed
Sentiment you would disavow

You filled the pockets; the seams frayed
A dead man’s things you de-enshrined
To clothe yourself in what you stole
Cream silk, rolled cuffs, unspoken need

Write the Year 2023—Week 5: Particles

This prompt from writers write (which forms the last line here) sparked a (rather unfortunate) memory of my grandmother, who would have turned 106 last week; but it ended up being about my cousin (who is tangentially related to the unfortunate memory, as I was driving with my grandmother to her house at the time). This is a series of Soledads.

Title: Particles
WC: 93

Culvert—a word I didn’t know
Swing set—a thing I didn’t have
I was the city cousin, though.

Type writer—under-bed surprise
Boy doll—big yawn; I change diapers
Undercover, we traded whys

Shoes—dish soap only goes so far
Eggs—water shouldn’t smell like them
Feet on the dash of your first car

Scotch tape—a way to save a stamp
Bad dog—a mall-based memory
The soft snick, you switched off the lamp

Afraid—something you never were
Colored—a word for others’ fears
I never stopped looking for her

Write the Year 2022—Week 15: Wail

Just a dashed-off memory in response to this prompt

Title: Wail
WC: 900

I must have been fourteen. It was summer and I’d gotten what was supposed to be a regular babysitting gig. The kids were a girl my little brother’s age—not quite seven that summer—and a baby, eight or nine months old. Amy and Allison, respectively.

They were half-sisters. It was their mom who hired me, their mom who had taken a job at the Dominicks deli counter, or something like it, so she needed a sitter. The baby’s dad—not Amy’s dad—was a complete blank to me. He was a second husband (maybe). He was a stepfather (I suppose). It was exotic in my world, half-sisters and second husbands were not thick on the ground.

The first time I met him, he was surprised to see me. I was mortified by this for some reason, as though I’d crawled into the house through the bathroom window or something—as if I wasn’t the person his wife had hired to watch his infant daughter, apparently with zero involvement from him.

His wife had had to work late. She’d called twice, three times to ask me to stay later. She’d pay me time and a half. She’d pay me double. They wanted her to work late. Late turned into later than her husband (probably) had worked. There he was and there I was and neither of us knew what to do with one another.

He wanted to know how much he owed me. I truly had no idea at that point. There was time and a half and double time, but all that had been rushed and informal. It seemed indecent to ask for money from a man I’d never met. I clearly exasperated him. I have no memory of how much he actually paid me—if he paid me at all. I only remember walking home alone in the dark, a pretty long way. It never occurred to him to offer to drive me. It might well have killed me to ask.

That wasn’t the day the baby cried. It was a different day that she would not stop crying. She’d rolled off the bed earlier in the day—a low junior bed in the older girl’s room—when I’d stepped into the kitchen to get their lunch. Amy, the older girl, had screamed in fear. The baby had screamed, by all appearances, to keep her half sister company.

The baby had calmed down first. She’d stared in puzzlement as I tried to talk her sister down. She’d kicked her feet in her high chair and stuffed chubby fists full of Cheerios into her mouth, shooting sidelong glances from Amy to me as if to ask What’s that about?

An hour later, maybe two, she started crying again. It was unusual. She wasn’t a particularly fussy baby, and it started small. It was a noncommittal whine that I figured a little time in her bouncy chair would solve. But the bouncy chair seemed to make things worse. The whine built to something more substantial. I picked her up and danced her around to—I’m not making this up—music by Jem and the Holograms. She was unmoved.

Soon, she had worked herself up to that serial roar that babies do, the kind where they startle themselves by running out of breath, which scares them and makes them cry all the harder. I checked her diaper. I changed it even though it didn’t need changing. It was hot in the house, so I stripped her down to just a t-shirt and an unnecessarily changed diaper. When that had no effect, I unsnapped the shoulder of her little undershirt and whipped that over her head. She roared in protest.

I tried offering her milk, Cheerios, forbidden juice. I tried putting her down for a nap, even though I’d been afraid to try to let her sleep after the bed incident, even though she’d fallen less than a foot into an enormous pile of laundry in her sister’s untidy room.

It felt like the walls were marching inward, as if the baby’s screams rattling the windows in their frames was calling everything closer. I walked the length of the house with her in my arms, talking a mile a minute. Amy trailed after me making the kind of distinctly unhelpful suggestions that seven-year-olds like to make.

I knew the neighbors must be wondering why I was murdering the kid. I knew they must be wondering why I couldn’t just be quick about it. I took both kids out on to the front porch. I told Amy it was because we were also so overheated at that point, but I think I was scared. I think I was hoping someone would be annoyed enough to come see what was going on, and I was fully prepared to push that wailing, twenty-pound nightmare into adult hands.

But no adults, annoyed or otherwise, were forthcoming. I sank down on the step with the baby on my knee. I turned her toward me. I was prepared to plead. I was fully prepared to negotiate with this terrorist. With my hand spread wide on her naked back, I dipped my head to look her in the eye. She sucked in a breath. Her mouth opened wide. And she let out the most earth-shaking belch I have heard to this day.

Write the Year 2020—Week 49: Retrograde

No prompt, just an idea that popped into my head.

Title: Retograde
WC: 1000

The house was toothpaste green, its aluminum siding dented enough to make Callum wonder how the color hadn’t faded more, dented enough to make him wonder how much more electric it must have been before it faded. 

“Getting out here,” the driver grunted as he cut the engine. 

A odd thing, that. The man hadn’t said two words, even  when receiving his orders. He had nodded, quick like an ocean bird nipping its prey right out of the water. Callum wondered if this was the driver’s idea of mercy—three words in the end. 

“Out.” The driver made it four as he yanked open the car’s back door. 

Callum batted his eyes, a pain in the ass till the end, and held up his still-cuffed wrists. The driver scowled, and to Callum’s surprise, bent to apply the key to one bracelet then the other. He gave a tug on each, rending the silence with the sound of two ratchets, then stepped clear of the car’s back door.

“You won’t run,” he said. His face cracked open about three-quarters of the way down in something almost totally unrecognizable as a grin. “I’ve unsnapped a lot of these.” He jangled the cuffs briefly before pocketing them. “Not a one of ‘em’s run. Now git.” 

The driver jerked his chin toward the toothpaste-green house. Callum felt himself tugged along with the motion. He was hardly aware of the thud of the car doors closing—one, two, back, front. He was hardly aware of the engine turning over and the car pulling away as he mounted the grey concrete steps to the brilliant white door cut in the front of that dented, toothpaste green siding. 

He opened the door. He must have, because he was through it now. He was inside the house, drawn deeper and deeper by scent. There was the warm, furry smell of old carpet, just vacuumed, and from what he knew must be the kitchen, a pork roast with the not-entirely-pleasant blend of spices his mother had always used. There was cigarette smoke in the very seams of the wallpaper, in every last fold of the heavy curtains. He didn’t pause to run his fingers over the top of the heavy cabinet television, but he knew it would be pocked with burn scars. 

And there was music—tinny big band stuff from a transistor radio he knew without seeing was army green. Muffled behind that there were dogs barking in a distant yard, there was the wind whipping sheets on the line for seven houses in a row. There was a woman speaking, calm and matter of fact from the mouth of the hallway with the length of the dining room stretching out between them. “Callum. I see you’ve made yourself at home.” 

“Who are you?” he demanded. He knew the answer. He raised one hand to his forehead and tried to think. He was sure he should know the answer, but he couldn’t help but think she was out of place, this nondescript woman in her beige cardigan and black skirt. This nondescript woman with her unremarkable voice and a face that kept sliding to the corner of his eye. 

“You can call me Dinah if you have to call me something. Would you like to sit?” 

She gestured behind him and to his left, to where he knew without looking there would be a brown recliner, cracked and ancient, there would be an ivory couch with peach brocade tea roses, covered in brittle plastic. 

“No.” Callum pressed his hands together, resisting something—the feel of that brittle plastic under sticky palms, or maybe the sensation of gravity as he tipped illicitly all the way back in that cracked brown recliner. “I don’t want to.” 

“I don’t need it, you know.” Dinah’s voice might have been gentle if the pitch, the tone, the lilt of its vowels had lasted for more than a second at a time. 

“Tactile sensations, haptic feedback. For whatever reason, they’re the least evocative. We get a few more choices if we can get the offender’s memory working on that level, but it’s scent, it’s sound, it’s all the million little things you’ve seen without seeing. That’s the smorgasbord.” She shook her head. A lock of hair that might have been blond, might have been grey, might have  been toothpaste green slipped its pin and curled forward over her ear. “My point is, you might as well sit.” 

She followed her own advice, crackling down on one edge of the couch. Callum moved to follow suit. His palm landed on the arm of the recliner, a rough sticky spot that was more duct  tape than vinyl, and he almost cried out. 

“Well,” Dinahs’s eyebrows shot upward. Callum’s mind leapt to seize the detail, to fix it in place, but it was going already. “You might just be the exception that proves the rule.” She rearranged herself on the couch’s edge, pressing her fists into the plastic as though she was carrying on a conversation. “Yes.” She nodded. “That gives us an unusual number of additional options.” 

Settling, she lifted her hands to press her palms together, thumbs coming to rest briefly against the center of her chest. Her eyes closed and Callum had the sensation of the world flipped from 33 RPM to 78. Dinah drew her hands apart as if to reveal a chain of paper dolls, but between them were no blank white shapes, endlessly repeating. Instead, between them was every moment worth remembering of Callum’s life in living color, a live soundtrack, a panoply of scents and sensations. In between Dinah’s hands was everything. 

“Now Callum, here they are. Your top one hundred memories.” Her brow wrinkled as if she wasn’t sure why these made the cut. “You know the sentence—10% loss. Now, “ said Dinah, on the edge of the plastic-covered ivory couch, in the house with the toothpaste green siding, “where shall we start?” 

Write the Year 2020—Week 37: Odsutnost (Absence)

This is not really a response to this prompt.

Title: Odsutnost (Absence)
WC: 800

I’ve been thinking about my grandfather this week—my last living grandparent, though he’s been gone for years, and he was, to me, so largely a blank. That seems like it shouldn’t be true. I spent days and weeks and months at my grandparents’ big yellow frame house in Gage Park—Mimi and Papa’s house. 

But my memories are dominated by Mimi, who would play checkers with me on a TV tray and never let me win. 

Mimi, whose chair was a cracked brown leather recliner with an ancient heating/massage pad slumped over the back. 

Mimi, whose dresser-top glass sheltered a hundred prayer cards from a hundred funerals underneath, every one guarded by the Blessed Mother and a massive jar of Pond’s cold cream.  

Mimi, whose olive green transistor radio I’d hold up to my ear as I stared up at the trompe-l’œil wallpaper of crumbling, mossy green bricks.

Mimi, whose bed I would sleep in when I stayed over, who would sleep on the plastic-covered couch in the front room and always—always—send up a horrible wail in the middle of the night, trapped in some dream no one and nothing could wake her from. 

Mimi’s room was not Papa’s room, though every one of my uncles and at least one of my aunts had a story of coming across Papa “sleepwalking” in the hall outside Mimi’s door. Papa’s room was at the absolute back of the house—a tiny converted porch, maybe, past the back hall where the Frigidaire sat in the dark. 

The room had an old, twin-sized iron bedstead and a beat up chest of drawers. I know this—I know about the contents of the room—only because the pantry had a tiny window in its back wall, high up. My cousin and I, one day, pulled one of the rickety kitchen chairs back there to look, a clandestine operation foiled by the fact that those damned chairs would tip over if anyone so much as looked at them. 

Papa smoked Pall Malls and drank beer—or Schlitz malt liquor—out of the big forty-ounce bottles. That much I remember, though that makes him sound like a direct-from-factory pre-War grandfather. He wasn’t, I don’t think. He didn’t smoke a lot. He didn’t drink a lot. I thought of him as a fiddly, nervous driver, but I think his car had a three-on-the-tree shifter. (I don’t even know what kind of car it was, but ask me anything about Mimi’s 1972 Nova with the vinyl houndstooth interior and bingo chips and coupons flying around.) 

My aunt says he was always—always—painting the house on his weekends and off days. If he had hobbies, I never knew about them. And I don’t remember him in the house. I simply don’t. 

At someone’s wedding—one of my younger uncles? One of my sisters?—he sang and danced along with Cab Calloway on Minnie the Moocher, loud as anything and smooth and joyful in his big body. At my cousin’s wedding—the daughter of my youngest uncle—he danced in his wheel chair to “Shout,” more aware, I think, than anyone had seen him be in a long time. Someone gave him a framed picture of Mimi to hold. I’m not sure he knew why. I’m not sure he knew it was her. 

He had what always seemed like a million brothers and sisters. It’s hard to get an accounting of them all, though I loved the enormous family picnic we’d sometimes have at a huge park somewhere. There’s a picture of me and my cousin, each of us perched on one of his knees, at one of these. I don’t remember this. 

One of his brothers lived near my house. My husband and I drove him one year to a Christmas party in the back of beyond at my uncle’s, to my aunt’s second wedding? Maybe both. He had a Crown Royal bag filled with change for the tolls. We couldn’t explain the I-Pass to them. Standing around at the church, he asked me out of the blue, “Do you and your husband keep up the Catholic faith.” (Uh. That would be a no.)

But these are all—almost all—stories not about Papa. I learned just last Christmas that his family name is not spelled at all the way we have always spelled it—the way my mother spelled her name and a hole set of my cousins spell theirs. That hit me hard for some reason. I think because these are stories not about Papa, and they’re other people’s stories. I don’t know that I have any stories of my own. I don’t know that I have a single one. 

Write the Year—Week 20.5: Breach

This is the first piece I wrote for the writing class I’m taking right now, Memories in the Windy City. We read a story by Aimee Bender (“The Rememberer”) and excerpts from Blake Butlers’ Scorch Atlas (“Water Damaged Photos of Our Home Before I Left It”). Our assignment was just to use either one of those models (short story or series of vignettes) to write about an event that had an impact on us.

This class includes more formal workshopping than the Experiments in Writing class I took earlier this spring, so we all had to read what we’d written aloud. That turned out to be a strange, harrowing experience for me. I wrote this very much from beginning to end with not a lot of backtracking (or, honestly, editing—I finished it at about 3 AM Wednesday morning), and in reading it, I not only got really emotional (and suddenly remembered the dark days when I CRIED IN FRONT OF PEOPLE IN SONGWRITING), but I also . . . didn’t know how the story would turn out? I mean, obviously I did, but I suddenly realized there was suspense that I had not consciously inserted, and yet it was how things felt in real time.

I, um, should have changed the names to protect the innocent here, BUT I DID NOT. and it seems like it’s too late now.

I haven’t edited this based on feedback (which I will probably do), though I did fix a sentence that trailed off unintentionally.

Title: Breach 
WC: 1290

This was my house when I left for school this morning. The front of it is white with blue glittery rocks in a rectangle underneath the big frontroom window. It is the same house as the Grinings’ next door, except their rocks are black. I like ours better, but they are harder to see, because of Mr. Mike, who is a big bush, not a person. The Grinings don’t have any bushes in front of their house. 

My dad walked me home from school today. He didn’t come especially to walk me. I am big enough to walk home without anyone, but he was at Shop N Bag to pay the bills when school was over, so he walked me home. We waited for the crossing guard at the two-way street, even though he is only a seventh grader and my dad is a policeman. I am supposed to wait for the crossing guard even when there are no cars at all. 

While we waited, I asked my dad what makes my legs purple. They are purple in between the bottom of my brown uniform and the top of my brown socks, and my dad said that it is because of the cold and because of my veins. I said that I though my veins were blue, and my dad said they are sometimes. 

My coat is purple, too. I got to pick it out. It has long sideways buttons and purple thread loops that I like. It has never been anyone’s coat but mine. 

There are purple flowers right next to me. They are not real flowers. They are puffy tops of green things called chives, which are like onions. The purple part is because of winter. I am glad there are flowers in winter, even if they are not real flowers. My dad told me another time that the purple parts mean that the chives are not good to eat any more, but we never eat them, even when they are just green things, and even though they grow next to the back door of our house. 

I am sitting by the back door now. Something is not right inside the house. 

When we came home, me and my dad went in the front door. We go in the back door most times. Buttons did not jump off the couch when we came in. She was not on the couch or my bed or Jimmy’s bed or my mom and dad’s bed. She was in Trish and Terry’s room with the door closed and chicken from last night on a green plate that I like. Buttons should not have chicken because there are bones. 

My dad let Buttons out of Trish and Terry’s room and he made me go very fast through the kitchen and down the back stairs and outside into the yard. He told me to stay there in the yard and wait. I am still waiting, and I think it has been a long time. 

My legs are purple even though I pull my uniform down and I pull my knees up so that there is brown touching brown. I can see see purple at the sides, and that is because of the cold and because it has been a long time.

My dad comes and tells me to come inside the house. He says that someone was here and they should not have been here. They gave Buttons the chicken from last night so she wouldn’t bark and they closed the bedroom door with her inside so they could take things. 

They didn’t just take things. They made a mess. In my mom and dad’s room there are presents on the bed and on the floor and everywhere. There is Christmas wrapping paper and boxes torn open right in the middle, all over the bed. 

My dad tells me they are presents from Aunt Jeannie in California. They are for me and for my cousins and for the baby. The present for the baby is white and made of lace and it has a poem with it. The poem says it is for a baptism and for a wedding and I want to ask my dad about it, but he takes it away from me. He says the presents were supposed to be a surprise. I don’t know if they are still a surprise or if they are still even presents. 

My mom’s dresser has all the drawers open. Her slips and underpants are hanging out and all the holy cards are on the floor. These are from funerals for my Grandma and Great Grandpa and Uncle Buddy and a lot of people whose names I forget. They should be all around the mirror. I think we should pick them up, but my dad says to leave them alone and leave the dresser drawers alone. 

There is a mess in my room, too. All the hangers are on the floor in a pile of my clothes and Jimmy’s clothes. Some of our dresser drawers are open and some are not. My library books are not on the shelf. Some of them are on the floor and some are on Jimmy’s bed. There are two books in the baby’s crib. One of them is my big pink book about ballet dancing. When the baby comes, it will sleep in the crib in the room with me and Jimmy. I don’t want my books in the crib, but I think dad will say to leave the mess alone in my room, too. 

No one is home except me and my dad for a long time. He talks on the phone and I sit on the floor in the frontroom with Buttons. I try to open her mouth to see if there are chicken bones in her throat. I don’t think there are, but I’m scared. I don’t know how long I have to wait until I know she will not die from chicken bones. 

I think I am not supposed to hear what my dad is saying on the phone, but the frontroom is not very far from the kitchen. He says that person who was inside the house took Christmas money that was his shirt pocket in the closet. I don’t know what Christmas money means, but jewelry means necklaces and bracelets and rings and my dad says they took those, too. They were on little hooks on my mom’s side of the closet and in a brown jewelry box high up that has doors like in a dollhouse. 

My dad doesn’t know how the person got into the house. He slams the back door hard and the window in in the top of it breaks. There is big glass piled up by the door and little glass on all the stairs going down into the basement. 

There is still no one home except me and my dad when policemen come. They are not policemen my dad knows. They look at the mess in my mom and dad’s room and in my room. They have black shoes that crunch in the glass by the back door  and down the basement stairs. The policemen find a window in the basement that is open a little. It is all the way in the back by the barrel where my summer clothes are. 

The policeman say this might be how the person got inside, but I don’t understand how a person could get inside through a window that is only open a little and I think maybe they couldn’t get out through it either. 

I am scared that the person is still inside somewhere. There are a lot of places inside the house, and I am scared.

Write the Year 2019—Week 13: Dauntless

Late, but I left this to the last second again and I didn’t want to use that as an excuse to recycle something older. Not happy with the execution of this, but it’s a start on a memory that I know is important.

Title: Dauntless
WC: 1300

How about a story that starts with me cringing? Writing it starts like that, all these years later, and I think that would probably make you smile: Me cringing now, me cringing then.

That gives the wrong impression, though. It makes you out to be some kind of mean girl, and nothing could be further from the truth. You were and are the kindest person I’ve ever known. 

Maybe it goes without saying that kindness is a liability in the teen years. Maybe that’s necessarily true, or maybe yours was—is—a special brand. I only know that the way you saw the world, and I really do hope you still see it that way, is how this story ends up with me cringing back then. 

Generosity wasn’t something either of us had on hand. There was never quite enough to go around at home for either of us in any sense of the word—money, privacy, empathy, openness, care. We were a burden—an imposition—just by our existence. That was the subtext of our lives. 

I was sullen about it a lot of the time, shamefaced when it meant falling through on a promise I’d have done anything to keep. I harbored some pretty direct-from-factory fantasies about how different it would be when I was finally on my own. I’d give and help and say yes to the people I loved as often as I possibly could. But you weren’t one to wait.

You were friends with everyone. You were involved with everything. You were an athlete and a singer, a musician and eventually student council president. You were so truly open hearted and interested and nice in the best sense of the word that the lines of demarcation that seemed so irrefutably to carve up the world simply didn’t exist for you. You were fearless. I wasn’t, but we were friends—very good friends—so sometimes I played fearless on TV. 

We had two favorite teachers our Junior year: Honors English and Honors Algebra II/Trig/Precalc, with Mrs. and Mr. H., respectively. They were wonderful teachers and wonderful people who’d gotten married just a few years before. 

English was British Lit that year. We started with Beowulf and The Venerable Bede. Mrs. H. explained that its power wasn’t on the page, but in the performance. She pulled out a box of ridiculous, chintzy props and had us all act out MacNeice’s “Dark Age Glosses.” 

It was the weirdest, funnest thing. You and I ate it up. We wrote a framing device and commandeered a giant leather-bound tome from somewhere. I swiveled around in Mrs. H.’s desk chair, doing a  cheesy Alistair Cooke impression welcoming our audience to Beefbone Theatre. We thought in that class. We put in ridiculously hard work and loved it At Christmas time, we passed the hat around and bought Mrs. H. the rubber chicken she’d confessed to coveting. She proudly, gratefully added it to her prop box. 

Mr. H., strangely, was fun in much the same way. He was unashamedly smart. He was passionate about math and patient and demanding. He’d teach us the weirdest ways to solve problems and offer tiny amounts of extra credit for solving ridiculously hard questions. Most of us would turn them in. You and I definitely would. We’d go about them in the most arcane way possible and delight as much in finding out where we went wrong as in the triumph of getting it right. 

That summer between Junior and Senior year Mr. and Mrs. H. had bought a house just a few blocks from mine. I don’t know how we knew that, though I suppose it’s possible I’d seen them emerging on my own walk to catch the bus each morning. It would make sense that I’d awkwardly wave as they climbed into their battered car, but I can’t help thinking it was something you found out, not me.

I can’t remember why you were at my house the day I’m thinking of. It wasn’t common, and it’s possible that the story really starts with you showing up unannounced in the little blue Geo Metro that made the distance between my neighborhood and yours less insurmountable than it had been before either of us could drive. It’s possible, now that I think about it, that you showed up with the harebrained, cringeworthy scheme in mind. 

I would have been happy to see you anytime. That summer, I would have been ecstatic. The inevitable drift away from friends on the block was painfully well under way by then. I would have been bored, restless, stranded. I would have been so easily caught up in your fearlessness. 

That’s what happened that day. You showed up at my door, smiling, and suddenly we were walking the block and a half to Mr. and Mrs. H.’s to show up at their door, unannounced and in the middle of summer. 

I must have cringed. I must have imagined them staring at us—or at least me—coldly, blankly. I must have imagined them sneering and slamming the door in our faces. I must have been nearly paralyzed by things that never occurred to you as you rang the bell with a smile. 

They were . . . perplexed, certainly. When I think about the door to their little ranch house swinging open, I see Mrs. H. blinking and conjuring up a smile, then Mr. H. looming behind her in the front hall. I see the look they exchanged and feel my face burning in the moment before they pushed open the screen door and welcomed us in. 

We stood in the frontroom, more than a little awkwardly. Mr. H. was on his way out, but he hung around longer than he could afford to, I think. He chatted with us before giving Mrs. H. an awkward sideways hug and a kiss somewhere between her nose and her ear as he said goodbye.

They showed us the small bedroom where their reptiles lived. They had half a dozen lizards and snakes, and Mrs. H. laughed when she told us they called it the nursery. They told us the story of how they got together. Mrs. H. had thought Mr. H. was inviting her to see Evita along with a group of teachers. She’d panicked when he’d showed up alone and didn’t really come to the conclusion that it was a date until the eleventh hour. 

I know it’s true that they told the story in tandem. It’s true that they both laughed about it, she more easily than he, but it seems like such an odd thing to tell two teenagers—two once and future students for Mr. H., who’d have us for Calculus the next year. 

Maybe you asked about it. Maybe I cringed inwardly and listened eagerly, because I would have wanted to know. I would have desperately wanted to know everything about how they had put together such a weird and wonderful life together, but I was never fearless like you.  

I don’t think we were there long. It might have 15 or 20 minutes. It’s hard to say. It’s compressed, jumbled into a spiral that memory has worked on so often since then. Those minutes, however few or many they were, were so crucial to me. In them, I understood that I was weird—really weird—and that I’d survive. I saw fully a way out that I’d only been able to glimpse at school. 

I cringed. I was probably was the one to say we should go. But I also let out a terrible breath I’d been holding all my life, too. I stepped into the kind of person you thought I could be. 

I cringed, but I got a little fearless, too. 

Write the Year 2019—Week 10: Lock & Key

This is not a good stretch for this project. I’m having to resort to something I wrote a while ago here, too, and next week, it’s overwhelmingly likely that I’ll have to do so again. but here’s a thing, at last

Title: Lock & Key
WC: 1010

I’m trying to think what to call it. 

I can still taste it. If I think back, I can still call up that strange sensation of legs and arms galvanized by something and feel the press of cracked plaster walls against my elbows and the backs of my knees as my cousin and I raced from one point to the next. We took the long way, entirely without discussion. We made our way in short bursts all around the dining room to the big picture window. All the way to the front hall and back around to the tantalizing door of the little room right behind it. I can still remember the strange pride in that. The way we traveled the whole route, perfectly in sync, without once looking at one another.

We were staying with our grandparents, as we often did. It was exciting just to be together, and we reveled in the benign neglect. In the absolute freedom to roam the enormous, old-fashioned yellow frame house from top to bottom.

Our youngest uncle still lived at home then. Or lived at home again, maybe. I wasn’t sure then, and I’m still not, even though I’ve asked. I’ve tried to elicit the facts of the case from somewhere other than my own flawed memory, but I’ve never gotten far. We’re not exactly a family of linear storytellers.

He was hardly older than my sisters, a fact that confused both me and my cousin. We were both sure that uncles should be grown-ups, and he wasn’t quite. He considered us a nuisance, and we weren’t sure he had any right to do that. We weren’t sure he didn’t belong at the metaphorical kids’ table with the two of us and all the other cousins, right down the line to the littlest baby.

But he certainly thought he had the right. He’d grumble about the fact that we were there. He’d grumble when our grandmother would give over her bed to the two of us and sleep in the frontroom, right outside his bedroom door.

He certainly hadn’t made a friend in either of us, but still I don’t have a name for whatever got into us that day. I can’t even remember what might’ve been different

It wasn’t the way he banged his fist against just the right spot on the screen door to make the hook that held it closed jump and pop free. All the uncles did that, and on a good day he might even lift us up, my cousin or me or each of us one at a time, trying to show us how it was done.

It wasn’t the way he muttered you two again and slammed the bedroom door. That, too, was a constant, and I don’t remember any special malice in it that day.

I can’t for the life of me think what prompted it. Every lock in the place had had its own brass key fitted snugly in it since time immemorial, and I don’t remember any particular boredom or itch or lack of prospects on our part that would have made them suddenly draw our attention.

The sun was out and we had the run of the block from corner to corner. The filthy, lattice-front space under the porch was as magnificent a secret lair as ever.

I’ve tried and tried to remember, but I’ve never found it. The butterfly flap that moved us to it. I only remember the urgency. Wordless certainty, equitably shared between us, that we had to turn that key.

We knew he was in there. We knew he was sleeping, even though it was the middle of the day. We absolutely knew that, though there’d be tearful denials later. I’d insit and she’d insist that we’d forgotten or hadn’t known in the first place, and I can’t say they were lies exactly.

I can say it was shocking. Even now, my ribs remember the percussion of immediate fear, and it was shocking, whatever we knew or didn’t know. Whatever we might or might not have forgotten.

He rattled the cut-crystal knob exactly once. The panic after that was instant and loud and terrifying.

Maaaaaaaaaaaaa! 

A long howl and then the sound of his whole body slamming against the heavy wood door in its frame. Plaster rained down, and the floor under the long vinyl runner vibrated up through our bare feet to rattle our teeth.

We looked at each other, wide-eyed and shaken. We never thought to run. I didn’t and she didn’t. We stood by, clutching at each other even when our grandmother flew down the hall, shrieking. Summoning the lumbering form of our grandfather from his tiny room at the back of the house.

We never moved. Not at the sharp report of cracking wood or the awful zigzag of light slipping through it. Not at the shock of unfamiliar given names bellowed back and forth. 

Florence! 

Paul! 

We never moved, and I think it was an accident. Some artifact of my grandmother’s blind, unthinking fury as she jerked at the knob and twisted the key along with it. She must have. It’s how it must have happened, but for me—for both of us—there’s only the memory of our uncle falling through the doorway. Absolutely falling and real tears on his cheeks. 

What possessed you? 

With our grandmother’s hands on her hips. With our feet dangling from kitchen chairs all too likely to tip over, we had nothing to say. 

What possessed you?

I’ve tried to remember. I’ve tried for years to put a name to it. But it’s lost in memories of the house. Of my cousin and the window in the pantry looking into our grandfather’s room. Of cold cream and holy cards under the glass top of my grandmother’s dresser. 

I’ve tried to put a name to it.  

Possession. 

The house is long gone from our family. Out of reach, though I’m the closest to it.

Possession. 

It’s as good a name as any.