A Door Left Open

The landlady dropped by to see me on Christmas day.  She wore a black dress that contrasted sharply with the fresh snow.  She narrowed her small eyes and informed me that I had left the front door open all night long.  I smiled and told her that we had left the door open on purpose, that it was a long standing tradition in our family.  Years ago, on Christmas Eve, my wife and I had fallen asleep and accidentally left the door wide open.  I remember the way that it had colored my dreams; the glow emanating through the doorway, the falling snow in the misted light, the vapors curling their way through the dark corridors, everything as soft as the wings of angels.  We had never slept so well in all our lives.  More miraculous even than the fact that we weren't robbed as we slept, was the fact that the house stayed warm and comfortable through-out the night.  Ever since then, that experience had come to embody everything Christmas meant to us.  So, we left the door wide open on Christmas Eve every year thereafter.  The landlady listened to all this with one eyebrow cocked skeptically, and then she just walked off shaking her head.

Hiding Places

It was a spring night, many years ago.  It was a little past eleven when I headed over to see this girl that I was dating at the time.  I climbed the lattice up to her bedroom window, which she had left unlatched for me.  I found her waiting in the lamp light.  Her face lit up as I came stumbling through the curtains.  But before I could even take a breath and really enjoy the moment, there was a loud, rough, knock at the door.  It was the girl's father.  She quickly stuffed me into her closet, and I burrowed as deeply as I could into the old clothes piled on the floor.  I kept my eyes fixed on the thin band of light at the bottom of the door and I held my breath.

I spent the next week trapped in this house.  The father was constantly trumping around upstairs, and there was no clear opportunity for me to slip away.  I never actually saw the man, but I continually heard his heavy steps and his booming, angry voice, like an ogre out of a fairy tale.  I was terrified that he would find me.  I had to keep moving.  He was remodeling one of the upstairs rooms, putting in dark paneling and hooking up a TV and a stereo speaker system.  Every whack of the hammer send a sharp pain through my heart, and several unpleasant images through my mind.

At one point, I think he caught a glimpse of me.  It was at least enough to make him drop what he was doing and get up to make sure that he wasn't seeing things.  I had slipped into a spare bedroom in the back that had been closed off and was stuffed with folded clothes and unused odds and ends.  There were boxes piled on the bed, and thick dust hanging in the sunbeam.  I climbed under the bed and waited.  I heard him come in and I grabbed hold of the box spring as tight as I could when he picked up the whole bed with one hand to look under it.  He stood there holding the bed, and scrutinizing the patch of carpet beneath it.  The springs were digging into my hands.  I braced myself as he let the bed fall back to the floor.  Then he left the room, grumbling to himself.

Well, that about did it for me.  I was getting out of there as fast as I could.  As soon as I heard his thudding steps making their way back downstairs again, I slipped out from under the bed and ran to the same window that I had climbed in through.  It was a beautiful afternoon, and the warm air that hit my face when I opened the window had never smelled so sweet.  I could hear the far off sound of someone mowing their lawn.  I scrambled out the window, dropped to the ground, and took off down the street.

The Afternoon Movie

I was sitting around watching some movie on TV.  It was a noir period piece set in the fifties.  A man in a grey suit with a fedora tilted over one eye was trying to track down the men who had killed his wife.  There's was one scene where they had him locked in a shed with one of his wrists shackled to some sort of chain.  Just as he began sawing through his wrist with a rusty band saw that he had found lying around, screaming in agony and soon becoming covered in his own blood, my daughter walked in and asked what I was watching.  She wanted to know what the movie was about, but I found myself strangely unable to explain the premise.  I really didn't know.  I explained to her that sometimes you looked for certain actors in movies of a certain mood or genre, and you took that alone as a promising sign, without knowing much else.  She considered this, nodded, and then left the room, and I went back to watching movie.  The man in the fedora slipped the severed hand into his pocket, the fingers still twitching.  He pulled his gun, fixed an expression of grim resolve on his face, and continued on his way.

My Workshop

I was an old man, living in a very old abandoned house.  It was more of a shack really, consisting mainly of one large room with crumbling wallpaper and gas lamp fixtures mounted on the wall that were years out of use.  There was a cot tucked away in a corner where I slept, and the rest of the room had been converted into a workshop of some sort.  A roll-top desk, as well as several wooden tables, were stacked with books, sheet music, maps, charts, and various measuring instruments.  A white lily bloomed in a jar, stimulated by a mild electrical current.  There was no furnace in the house, and my only source of heat and light was a fireplace which had the springs and gears from a broken clock scattered on the mantle.  I had only the contents of the room to fuel the fire.  I spent the winter nights deliberating about which books and papers I could spare to keep me alive.

Since I didn't officially hold the deed to the house, I suppose I was technically homeless, or at the very least a squatter.  With my ragged coat and unkempt beard, I looked every bit the part.  The police would frequently stop by to harass me, knocking at the door or tapping at the window pane.  It seems that they couldn't exactly prove that I didn't own the house, but they hoped to trip me up with their questions.  Sometimes I suffered these interrogations with as much polite equanimity as I could muster.  Other times I couldn't deal with it, so I took to to hiding down in the cellar with the spiders. 

On one such occasion, as I crouched in the dark, I could hear the officers' muffled voices outside.  They were taunting and threatening to arrest another homeless man that I knew who was a friend of mine.  I heard the thud and tired groan as he stumbled into the snowbank, followed by the cops' laughing as they hauled him up.  I felt compelled to respond to this.  I stirred in my damp hole, but then a strange hand, more prudent than my own, reached out of the dark and covered my mouth, preventing me from calling out.  If I came to the defense of another homeless man, I would be giving myself away.

Police Report

I went down to the local police station one morning to report that my wife was being tormented by the Devil.  Naturally, the cops there were more than a little skeptical.  They just kicked back in their creaky wooden desk chairs, scratching their bellies and listening complacently to my story.  I caught a couple of them shaking their heads and exchanging incredulous glances.  They all assumed my wife was crazy.  The warm smell of a fresh pot of coffee hung in the air.

The old brick apartment building where we lived sat on the far corner of the same intersection that the police station sat on.  The building could be seen from the station's window.  I pointed up at it.  "I know for a fact that six other residents have come down here to file complaints.  I suppose they're all lying!?  They're all crazy?"  The cops stared back impassively.  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.  I didn't want to admit it, but I had to say it.  "I know they're not crazy.  I know...because I've been hearing it too.  Day and night.  That voice, it never stops."

The moment I said that, everything just stopped.  The cops sat like wax figures.  They had gone from bored to deathly still.  One of them sat with their chair frozen in mid-tip.  Then, a man who had been sitting at a desk across the room with his back to me, slowly swiveled to face me.  He looked like an ordinary enough man, but I knew instantly who it was.  A grin spread across his face and he said, "Of course you do.", and then he laughed and laughed and laughed.