/yesod

Tag: father

  • brief reunion

    …we sit together in the small living room, balancing plates on our knees and doing our best to keep up the conversation despite the fact that there are some genuinely difficult conflicts unresolved between a few of us. And the fact that some of us are dead.

    It’s a surprise to see them, my grandparents. Odder still is the appearance of multiple versions of my grandfather — he sits with my grandmother, each of them in their late fifties, full of good humor and health . . . and he sits next to me in his early nineties, broken and cadaverous, his eyes pits of sorrow.

    My mother is there . . . but there is something odd about her. I can’t quite tell what it is and I don’t understand why no one else seems to notice or care…

    …and when I wake, I wonder what it means . . . wonder if a call will come today with bad news.

  • again

    The voices again tonight.

    No music this time, no men.

    One or two women, I can’t quite be sure. Possibly a child.

    I told my wife about the voices a few days ago. She could tell tonight that I was hearing them again. And, of course, she cannot.

    We keep a fan going at night, even in cold weather. White noise.

    She suggested I turn it off, just to see if that helped.

    She might be right. I honestly can’t say for sure.

    Maybe it’s a trick of the sound in the room, the combination of the fan and the hiss of the baby monitor.

    With the fan off, we sat there in the dark and waited.

    There. Not as loud, not as much. But there.

    And again.

    “I don’t hear anything,” she told me.

    I apologized, turned the fan back on so she could sleep and came downstairs to wait it out.

    Down here it’s the usual creaks and hums of the house by night. The fridge ticks over from time to time. The radiators gurgle. The cats snore, dozing. The baby monitor sounds a bit like running water.

    And, sometimes, I think I catch a brief murmur underneath it all. Somewhere.

    I honestly don’t know. Maybe it’s all just paradoelia.

    But . . . I have a vague memory of something similar when I was a child. This would have been when I was maybe six or seven years old.

    I remember my two older brothers got to stay up later than me, I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair they got to watch Hawaii 5.0 and I didn’t.

    I remember lying there in bed, listening to the pulse of drums and what sounded like singing or chanting –faint and very far away.

    I got up to complain that the TV was too loud.

    My mother told me that the set was off. It was later than i realized, my brothers had gone to bed, She asked me what I heard. When I told her, she gave my father an odd look.

    I would get to know that gesture very well in the coming years — the sidelong glance, lips compressed, a knot of worry in between her eyes.

  • mother, father, cat

    Do demons stand still? Can you look for them in corners or out of the way places? Do demons stop long enough for you to see them? Do demons stand near us? Where do they stand?

    In the dream, my house has been transformed into a filthy hole. The kitchen is a mess, bits of food, dirty pots and pans, and crusty dishes piled everywhere.

    My mother sits on the patio and smokes cigarettes.

    My father sits in the living room, studying Talmud.

    I try to clean up the mess.

    My cat walks though my dream, his mind embraced by madness. His mouth gapes, his eyes stare, insane light shining through. His tongue flaps out between his fangs, drooling mucous and vomit. He yowls to wake the dead.

    I call to my mother to put on her glasses. I ask her “Can you see him? Can you see the cat?” She doesn’t answer. And I ask her again, and then I say “Can you see demons..?” And I go into my earlier ideas on demons. I speak and the cat yowls and in the living room my father is a dusty corpse.

    When I woke from this dream I was saying “Do demons stand still?” in a breathless gasp.