Room in the Clouds

My mother lived in a rather strange house.  It was a tall house, composed of three apartments stacked on top of each other, and there was a staircase that spiraled around the outside of the house like a corkscrew, each flight taking you up to the next apartment.  My mother occupied the middle apartment, and my aunt had the one at the very top.

One day my mother sent me up to my aunt's place to borrow something.  After climbing the dizzy heights along the open staircase, her apartment felt like a cramped, dim, collection of rooms in the sky.  But it was a lively place.  A bunch of my family were there, laughing and talking.  I settled in for a pleasant visit, and that's when someone mentioned the attic room.  There was something stored away up there that my cousin wanted to get.  I laughed and told her how I always had dreams about an attic room, tucked away in a closet just like this one, the same lonely switchback stairs.  I told her that it always creeped me out, but I wasn't sure why because there was never anything up there.

But everyone's smiles quickly faded, everything grew hushed and sober, and it dawned on me that this was one of my dreams.  That's why the attic room was here.  It was like a marker or a talisman.  I would only ever find it in a dream.  That's why it always troubled me.  It signified the dream state, like a dissonant cue.  They were all watching me now.  They seemed to be waiting for me to go up there.

Far Off Angels

My daughter was much younger at the time, and we lived in a different house then.  It was the last house at the end of a short street.  The ground sloped off beyond the trees at the end of the road, leaving the house situated at the top of a high hill with a nice view of the town's twinkling lights.  Amid these other lights, there was a beacon composed of three red lights that had particularly caught my daughter's interest.  Because the lights formed the three points of an upside-down triangle, my daughter somehow got it into her head that this beacon was an angel watching over the town.  Whenever we pulled out of the driveway that winter, she would brush the frost off the back window of the car and watch the beacon as we drove away.

As the months rolled by, I fell into a kind of slump, a listless stretch of grey afternoons passing without motivation.  As the weather began to warm up and the days were growing longer, I decided that it might lift my spirits if I took my daughter out to find her angel.  So I took her little hand and we went for a walk, navigating through different neighborhoods and side streets.  We passed kids playing in dusty front yards while their parents smoked and talked on porches, heard ragged mufflers and car radios fade into the distance, all the lonely, drowsy, sadness of a summer evening in a strange part of town.

It was nearly dusk when we finally arrived at the source of the beacon.  The lights were mounted on a tall metal tower that sat in the middle of a muddy clearing.  The sun was scorching, low and bright at the edge of this clearing.  We shaded our eyes and stumbled down a rocky embankment.  I was just about to point the tower out to my daughter, so that in my fatherly, almost spiteful, way I could disillusion her, show her the truth about her "angel", that it was just a plain metal tower in a dirty field.  But as we stood at the base of it, and I craned my neck to look up, I noticed that the scaffolding which supported the lights actually looked a little like a pair of wings.  I almost chuckled, but yet there was something about the way the light hit it at that hour and the white puffs of clouds in the sky above, that made me stop, that made everything stop, quiet and wonderful, and for a moment, even I believed.

An Affair to Forget

It was a rainy night.  I was talking to my wife before heading out the door for work.  I told her that a co-worker of mine had mentioned someone she might know, some guy named Greg Roland who delivered food to some restaurant that she used to work at.  She said that she didn't know the guy, but I could see that she had gotten this wistful, dreamy smile on her face when I had mentioned his name.  I knew she was lying.  I pressed her on it, but she kept denying it.

I had to get to work.  I was running late, so I figured that we'd pick up the conversation later.  But just as I was about to head out the door, my brother popped up out of nowhere.  He asked if anything was wrong.  I told him that there wasn't, but he insisted that he knew better.  "What, were you listening at the door?", I asked him.  He confessed that he had been, so I broke down and explained the situation to him.  We went to one of the back rooms of the house, where for some reason I had an old copy of this Greg's journal packed away.  We flipped through it, looking for some kind of evidence.  I found an entry from a few years back.  He spoke of a woman; he used a different name, but somehow I knew that he was talking about my wife.

I took the journal to show it to my wife.  I found her in the living room, talking on the phone.  I asked her who she was talking to, and she said, "That was Greg!  He's coming over to pick me up."  And before I even had a chance to ask any questions, she ran out of the house and into the rain.  I stood on the porch and watched her go.  The rain dripped from the gutters.  It was the worst night of my life.

I don't know if I called him or he called me, but somehow I ended up on the phone with this Greg.  At first I tried to be calm and reasonable about the whole thing.  I told him that I understood that my wife was free to make her own choices, and if this was what she thought would make her happy...  Then he cut me off and said, "I guess it's nice to have religion, dude." in the most cocky, patronizing, smart-ass voice that you could ever imagine.  From there it was just one button pushed after another.  I ended up telling him that if I ever got a hold of him I was going to reach up his asshole and tear his throat out.  I was screaming at the top of my lungs at that point, and all red in the face.  I'm pretty sure he hung up after that, leaving me holding the phone.  What was I going to do now?

The Bowling Alley

My Wife and daughter and I went down to the local bowling alley one night.  It was an absolute madhouse, very crowded.  At one point we left our lane for a minute to get something to eat, and we came back to find that someone else has taken our place while we were gone.  We had to move to another lane.  The only one available was the very last one down at the end along the wall which was painted with a black & white silhouette of a guy bowling against a background of light blue stripes.

There was a group of rowdy kids bowling on the next lane over.  They were a little too close for comfort.  They were horsing around, constantly crossing the line and getting in our way.  They were throwing the bowling balls so wildly and carelessly that I was afraid one of them was going to get loose and knock someone upside the head.  When it was my turn to bowl, a couple of them came over to me.  They wanted me to use their bowling ball.  It was a skull suspended in a transparent crystal that was cut into a rough cube shape.  I told them that a ball that shape wouldn't roll down the lane, but they insisted that it just had to be broken in.  The more it got used, the corners and flat edges would eventually get rounded into a nice smooth sphere.

I wasn't buying it.  I decided to go look for my own ball.  This search somehow led me out to the parking-lot.  It seemed that one of the bowling alley's regulars had died, and he had left his truck parked out in the lot with everything he owned in it.  His bowling buddies were picking through the stuff and dividing it up amongst themselves.  As I walked up, I noticed a bowling ball half-buried beneath some clothes in a cardboard box.  I asked if I could have it, and no one seemed to have any objections.  I pulled it out to have a look at it.  It was cream colored and decorated with the characters from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip.  Hobbes was on one side; Calvin was on the other with his hand held out, perfectly matching the finger holes on the ball.  It looked pretty awesome.

So I headed back to our lane against the wall, but I when I got there my wife was all worked up.  She said that we had to leave right that minute.  I turned back and looked at the lane as she grabbed my arm and started pulling me to the door.  The boards were all broken up, and down at the end by the pins there was nothing but a pile of brick and dust.  I kept trying to ask my wife what happened, but she was in too big a hurry.  Once we were out into the parking-lot she relaxed and started laughing about what had happened, but she still wouldn't stop to explain and she still insisted that we needed to get out of there.

So she pulled me along by one hand as we hunted for our car, and I clutched my new bowling ball in the other hand.  I was trying to show it to her, but she wouldn't slow down to look at it.  She just kept laughing and dragging me along, laughing and dragging me along, laughing and dragging me along...and then I woke up, and I swear as sure as I live and breathe, that I was holding onto the top of my head with my thumb and my two forefingers.  Yeah, it took me a minute to figure it out too.  

By the Dashlight

Took a road trip with my father.  He was doing all of the driving; I was in the passenger seat.  We rode with the windows down.  The sky was an inky blue as we turned onto the interstate ramp, the very last remains of the day.  My father flipped on the headlights and lit a cigarette without needing to say a word.  I was busy flipping through the dial on the radio, looking for the country station that he liked.  I had absolutely no idea where we were headed; I was just glad to see him again.