/yesod

Tag: son

  • friend in need

    In the night, as I move through a crowded back street, I get a message from someone who used to be a friend but is now, after much time and distance, nothing more than a vague acquaintance.

    “I need your help.”

    A few minutes later I walk into a one-room bar that barely qualifies as a place of business, let alone an actual physical structure. 

    Bare floorboards and walls, stained by spilled drink and nicotine. Dim bulbs strung along one wall. Reek of sour memories and beer. 

    In the back corner, some men are—inexplicably—dumping out large bottles of cheap, bottom shelf gin. 

    Adam sits on a stool, clearly and wholly drunk. I sit next to him and wave off the offer from the clearly concerned woman serving behind the counter. 

    He does not and, as she pours, she tells him he needs to eat something. But if he has as much cheap liquor in him as I suspect he does, he wouldn’t be able to keep anything down. 

    “I have fucked my life,” he tells me. “All of it. My career, it’s fucked. All of it.” 

    The self-loathing is palpable and all I can say is that I am sorry.

    The woman brings over a bowl of cereal, multicolored loops already fading and dissolving into a slurry of gray. He pushes the bowl away and it sloshes over the bar top.

    A large man approaches, clearly in charge of taking care of the surly and unwelcome. But the woman waves him off, showing more sympathy than Adam deserves. 

    “I’ve got it,” I tell her, and help my friend try to stand. As he turns, he sees the bouncer there behind us as shoves him back. 

    It’s a mistake. The bouncer moves in and takes charge of him. Adam shoves him again, this time reeling back  to punch the much, much larger man in his substantial gut to literally no effect. 

    With a quick, economical movement of his shoulder,  the bouncer calmly folds Adam around his fist. 

    I take my cue and help him stumble out of the back, back onto the street.

    I bring him home. My wife isn’t pleased by this intrusion but there’s nowhere and no one else. I set him up in a cluttered back bedroom, telling him to sleep it off. But he is restless and starts talking about a writing project he’s working on, asking to see some old comic books I have. 

    I tell them that they’re all boxed up in the basement and he stumbles his way downstairs to find them.

    –

    As I write this now, I recognize that somewhere in the course of the dream, the person changes from being my friend Adam into my son Sam. This is troubling to me.

  • danger

    A kitchen, a house in the country — dry and dusty, very little greenery.

    A little boy with dark hair and a baby face sits at the kitchen table playing with an old wooden birdhouse.

    I see a yellowjacket crawl sluggishly over the back of the birdhouse. Inside I see the telltale paper comb covered with more yellowjackets.

    I shout a warning to the boy — he is my son in this dream — and he laughs at my fear. I command him to take the birdhouse out of the house.

    He does grudgingly.

    I turn to see a girl — his sister, my daughter in the dream — sitting on the floor by my briefcase. She is playing with another hunk of honeycombed nest. She digs her finger into a hole, tearing at the gray papery mass, and draws out a still pupating larva. 

    She tells me it’s safe.

      
     

  • “Hey Dad?”

    Walking through the office I hear — or I think I hear — my son’s voice, very distinct and clear, call to me.

    I look back down the hallway but, of course, no one is there.

  • a tornado, two corpses, and a leather sofa

    Inside the house, people are starting to panic. The sky outside is dark and green, the wind bending the trees to almost impossible angles. We can hear the sirens and, in a house this old, there is no safe place . . . every room has windows, the elderly frame flexes and creaks in the wind just like the trees outside.

    Women huddle with their children, people cover in corners and try to stay out of the way as pictures fall from walls, little knickknacks shatter to the floor.

    I can feel a pressure in the house, a suction that ebbs and flows as the storm overhead rages on. I move from room to room, peeking out of windows as I pass, making sure they stay open so that the suction won’t blow them out completely.

    Through one window, I watch as a massive trees outside comes down. The entire house shudders under the weight of it. People are screaming now.

    I look up to the mass of gray swirling in the sky, like ink in milk . . . funnel clouds dance around each other, like strands of barbed wire twisted together. I count five of them, shouting out to the people to take cover. The funnels move in.

    I head into another room and suddenly the house is vibrating, a low hum that slowly builds to unbelievable intensity. I can feel it in my eardrums, in my molars, in my gut.

    People are praying, people are crying.

    Looking back on it now, I am surprised I did not think of the gods.

    The ceiling of the room I am in begins to peel away, I move quickly to the other side of the house . . . Just in time to see something so odd, my eyes have trouble making sense of it at first.

    It is a rubble in the suddenly still air of the room, a wavering column of distortion that runs from floor to ceiling, as wide as a refrigerator and spinning. It moves across and through the opposite wall without leaving a trace of its passing.

    Then all is quiet once more — save for the sobs and cries from the other rooms.

    Later…

    The specific circumstances of it escape me now, but at some point I am helping out with a local theatre company in town. One of the actors has an old van that we need to pick up to haul props. I volunteer to go over to their house and collect it.

    They live in a seedy part of town, their house is a hoarder’s nightmare. Out back in the tall weed a is a rusty van, engine idling.

    I go to see if they’re inside, ready to go . . . only to find that while they are inside, they’ve already gone.

    Her face is bloated, her lank gray hair matted to her skull with sweat and vomit. There’s no way of telling how long she’s been this way.

    Repulsed, I back away.

    And later still…

    “I need to talk to you,” my son tells me. I nod and suggest we go out back where it is quieter and the people at the party won’t bother us.

    Why we are having the cast party in the dead woman’s house, I don’t know. It didn’t seem odd at the time, but I have a vague recollection of being worried that she might be discovered back there and somehow spoil things for everyone.

    On the rickety back porch, I see the van in the weeds — the engine has long since run out of gas — and I suddenly remember that I never called the police.

    My son is already down the steps, trying the side door of the van. I call to him to leave it be but he is curious. Something dark and vile has pooled at one corner in the grass below, running from the door frame like a faucet accidentally left on.

    He opens the door and I hear his disgust. He starts to move the body, to try and get her out but she’s become a liquid, gelatinous mess. I tell him to leave things as they are, otherwise the police might suspect him of trying to cover something up.

    He runs inside to call 911.

    Standing there in the dead grass, I turn my head to look down the broad alley at the back of the house. A few yards down there is a splintered wooden fence, leaning to one side. A large dead tree bends low over it, the skeletal boughs hanging over the alley.

    Caught in the boughs is the body of a small child.

    And just before I wake…

    My wife and I are walking through the house, we cannot believe that we are so lucky to have a place of our own at last. In the attic room we find an old leather sofa that the previous owners have left behind. I flop down on it in exhaustion. Under my hand, the dull surface gleams as I wipe the dust away.

    My wife stands at the gable window and looks out onto the street below. She turns and raises her blouse over her head, tosses it aside. Her jeans and panties follow. By the time she gets to me, I am ready for her.

    She straddles me and we begin to move, the old sofa creaking under us.

    Somewhere down below in the house, we hear a door slam. A woman calls out, we hear the voices of children, little feet running up the stairs…

  • flames, new and old

    [This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated June 16th, 1998]

    …and, somehow, in my dreams I hear a huge crash — metal and glass — ignoring it, I dream on…

    …a flickering light from outside — flash of orange through the blinds — send me up to the window, women’s voices, laughing and talking . . . and I see them gathered around a fire, a smashed and twisted wreckage to one side, smoke from the fire rising through the branches above . . . I run out to comfort them but…

    ..I’m awake, my son crying in the next room…

    …dreaming again, this time the Queen of Middle Night puts in an appearance of an old girlfriend from years past — the red haired dancer. Old flame, slowly kindled, surprisingly warm. Her family home, my son and I just passing through . . . she embraces me, a big sister, a past lover — though she was, in reality, neither. Passing through the rooms, everyone sleeping quietly, I see a black puma chained in a dark corner. It blinks once, green eyes blazing, hungry. I walk away. Slowly.

    We move on and, when it is time, I go. Her farewell kiss is surprisingly sweet…

    ..and, in darkness, I am awake once again.