Portable Radio

I woke up thirsty from my nap, so I went downstairs to get something to drink.  As I stood there with the refrigerator door open, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that something seemed wrong about the light coming up from the basement.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  I couldn't tell if the light was flickering or whether that was just a manifestation of my rattled nerves.  I tried to go back upstairs to sleep, but I never got farther than the first step.  I kept going back to the kitchen to stare at the ambient, flickering, light coming up from the basement stairs.  I couldn't shake the feeling.

Finally, I realized that I was hearing very faint music coming from the basement.  The flickering was keeping beat with the music, and then I realized that the light wasn't actually flickering at all.  It was just an auditory suggestion caused by the fact that I wasn't aware that I was hearing the music.  I went down to check it out.  There was a little portable radio sitting on the top of a cabinet.  It was one of those cheap old radios with a handle on the top and a single speaker and an analog dial which spanned the length of it, the kind of radio someone would bring to a work site.  It was playing a harmless, familiar, song, but yet it made me feel uneasy all the same.  I knew that someone had left this radio on, and I knew that if I didn't change the station, they would be lured back here by the music.  And I knew that was bad.

So I started to tune the dial, but instead of it changing the radio station, it changed everything else.  I found myself in the backyard of one of my childhood neighbors.  My wife and my daughter were there too, sleeping on the patchy grass, still wrapped up in their blankets.  They stirred, wondering how we had gotten outside.  My memory was a little foggy, and just as things were starting to come back to me, the screen door at the back of the house came banging open and my bearded old neighbor came rushing out yelling something in a toothless, drunken garble.  Yeah, this wasn't good.  My wife and daughter gathered up their blankets and we started away, waving my neighbor off with our hands and assuring him that we were leaving.

As we were crossing the road, I noticed that I still had the radio.  I tuned the dial again.  Now we found ourselves in a long, narrow upstairs room in a strange house somewhere.  The room seemed to be an antechamber of some sort that opened onto other rooms on either side.  It spanned the width of the house with high, ornate, windows at either end.  In the evening the sunlight would fall through the window at the west end, and at night the streetlight outside would follow suit.  But the morning light would come through the window at the east end of the room, and everything would look different then.  I was anxious to see it.  I was comfortable here.  We stretched the blankets out on the floor below the west window.  Then I clicked off the radio and went back to sleep.   

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.