I sold the books I used to take on our Saturday breakfast trips.

Do you remember them?

"How can you do that instead of see where we're going?" You'd ask that sometimes, when you were driving. Sometimes I'd answer with, "I know how to get home."

It isn't like we talked, anyway.

But if I was lucky, you'd even chuckle at my answer. Smiling was rare enough.

We'd go to a little diner, and I'd always pick a wooden-backed booth instead of one of the green vinyl mid-century modern ones. I remembered them as having higher backs, but I found a picture online of the place. 1951, it was dated. Hard to believe so many decades later we were being served by the same staff.

Every Saturday.

Unless we went to Hardee's. There, it was Moose cups and sausage biscuits.

I never really liked it when you chose Hardee's, because the little tiny town I used to live in only had that restaurant in it. Maybe two other local spots, but just the fast food was available for a Sunday meal. The rest of the city was rolled up tight when Jesus walked in across the lake for his weekly tithe.

I don't miss you like I thought I would, but I miss our breakfasts.

I miss the you that you used to be, goddammit.

I miss the us that we were, before age and anger and bitterness crept in around your edges. I miss the days before I got old enough to see the rust in the frame, the cracks in the leather. I miss the days when you cared enough to pretend to be happy, and maybe you were.

To a grandson, you were what a man was supposed to be.

I wish we'd been able to speak as men.

In the end, I wish we'd been able to speak at all.

I sold the books I used to take on our Saturday morning trips, not because they reminded me of you. Nothing so sentimental. I sold them because they were just decoration on a shelf, and I have new memories to put on display.

I don't need those mementos of our time together, because I see you every time I look in the mirror.

‘‘Whoa— there- don’t be afraid, child. C’mon in. All are welcome in this humble abode!’’

The radio static like voice startled the kid. But soon after recalling that there might be some tasty snacks/treats in here, the child stepped into the abandoned building. Pieces of glass were scattered all about the floor. The place had no lights on. The only light that was present was the one that seemed to pour in through the cracks on the roof. The walls of the building looked as if someone, or something had been chipping away at the paint. There were a bunch of cigarette butts that were lying around in random corners of the old building. The kid wondered if someone, or a bunch of other folks had been around here not too long ago.

The child stared at the random still life Dutch paintings- and one in particularly kinda looked like the building, but it seemed to be a throw back to what it might have been like back in its glory days. The more the kid gazed at the painting, the more it seemed to come to life. What kind of trickster was pulling this off?

The sound of heavy footsteps approaching brought the kid back to the present moment. Then a pair of hands landed on the child’s shoulders, and the child let out a scream. Turning around to face the person, or whatever the thing was, the kid came face to face with an elderly person. The older folk smiled, and then revealed a pair of beaver teeth.

The cries for help from the abandoned building could not be heard by any other person around. The child had not listened to its parents warning. The kid had wandered too far away from the village, and ended up lost in the middle of thether world.

The elderly woman rubbed her hands together, and hummed along to the sounds of the spectres playing lively jazz music in the parlor. She bowed her head, and one of the spectres came along to dance with her. They spun around in circles— while waiting for her good and traditional famous hot dish to be ready that she liked to call: Petit Oiseau. She would enjoy and have the meal all to herself.

The spectres did not need to eat anything anyway…well what they enjoyed was something much more tasty. The elderly woman would need an extra boost of strength first before she set out to gather what the spectres liked to devour.

#CORVUS (All Rights Reserved)

Lundi, 10.03.2025

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MDbYmImkKMg

Our terrier bared his teeth and his tail went taut. He snarled and howled at the curtained window with every scrap of ferocity his twelve pounds could summon.

“Jellybean is barking again!” I announced. “Which means tonight we play…”

Luna dropped her crayon to her plastic table and clapped. She shouted, “Spook! Or! Squirrel!”

“What do you both think?”

Kristy lay reading on our couch, the sunken one we had stretched at least three years past its useful life. “Squirrel,” she said. When Luna turned to her, she smiled. “Squirrel for sure.”

Jellybean reared back for another volley of barks, so I raised my voice. “Mommy says squirrel. What do you think, Luna? Is she right?”

“Yessss.”

“You always say squirrel.”

Luna giggled. Jellybean’s growl rumbled in his white belly, which I knelt to rub. He was a good boy.

“Anya!” Luna whined. “You have to say, too!”

“Well—” The growl snapped into a snarl, and I stood. “You both said squirrel. So I’ll say… spook.”

Luna’s pigtails flew as she shook her head. “Nooo… You’re wrong, Anya!”

Jellybean howled and barked at the window. Kristy held her novel but had not gone back to reading. “Hanna, are you going to look?”

“Of course!” I answered. “That’s how we play the game!”

“Mommy and I will win!” Luna announced.

“I’ll go see.”

I walked from our living room to the darkened kitchen. Though it had been a stifling summer day, we kept the window overlooking our driveway latched. The night air would be cool and calm. I missed it.

“Anya! Which is it?”

“Hold your horses, little pigtails.”

Jellybean had not let up. I leaned over the sink’s faucet and peered outside. No squirrel hopped along our fence. As my mouth opened to say nothing, I saw a piece of it. The white shadow began to turn as it glided past the edge of my vision. I glimpsed its eye, unholy and red, and then could see no more.

Kristy called from the couch. “What do you see, Hanna?”

“A squirrel,” I said.

The dead rest in his pocket, their brittle wings catching against the fabric like whispered secrets. He’s been collecting them for weeks—the fallen, the forgotten, those that spent their final moments beating against glass.

His fingers move like a watchmaker’s, peeling back the paper shroud to reveal each specimen: a cricket frozen mid-leap, a luna moth faded to bone, a paper wasp with its warning stripes turned soft with time. He arranges them on the sun-bleached bench slats, smallest to largest, a procession of lost things.

“—probably tortures cats too—” A woman’s whisper slinks through the air as her companion tightens his grip on her arm, steering her away. Shadows pass over his collection, a brief eclipse.

He doesn’t look up. Judgment moves in footfalls, in voices pitched low but meant to be heard. His hands remain steady, adjusting a blow fly so its iridescent body catches the afternoon light. In death, it has become something else—not beautiful exactly, but worthy of attention.

The tissue paper crinkles as he unwraps the prize of his collection: a giant swallowtail, wings spread in eternal flight. He’d found it in a spider’s web three days ago, a stained-glass window caught mid-collapse. The spider had abandoned it, leaving him this gift.

More footsteps approach, hesitate, retreat. The whispers bloom and die.

He measures the space between bodies with a ruler worn smooth by touch. Ant to beetle to moth to butterfly—a journey marked in millimeters, in metamorphosis.

In his pocket rests one last specimen: a cicada shell, hollow but whole. Not dead, just abandoned. A ghost of something that climbed out of itself and flew away. He places it at the end of the line, a punctuation mark on his quiet arrangement of small deaths.

The sun sinks lower, soaking the bench in amber light. Soon, he will wrap them again, tuck them away like beads on a rosary, like treasures, like proof that even the smallest lives cast shadows. But for now, he sits with them, a keeper of forgotten things, an architect of this tiny cemetery.

He is fourteen. Strange. Surrounded by death. Yet his hands are careful, his heart steady, beating in time with wings that no longer move.

Above him, insects trace unseen paths through the dying light. Soon, they too will fall. And he will find them. And he will give them this: a place, a measure, a moment of remembrance. Until then, he keeps arranging, measuring the distance between what was and what remains.

It is a relentlessly cold February morning, temperatures well below freezing. Silence breaks as each step is strategically placed with a resounding crunch echoing across the frozen pond. All else remains quiet with nary an animal in sight. Even the birds have not dared to venture forth so early. Greta thinks she must be mad, crossing the ice in such conditions. She has no no other choice, however, save allowing a life’s demise.

The pond’s been frozen solid for more than a month, making Greta’s weekly trek a bit easier while also shorter. She knows she shouldn’t chance it, but considering all that's to be accomplished in a given day, taking the shorter route has been worth the risk.

Greta glances up, watching illustrious clouds drift across dark skies. Delicate snowflakes are beginning to fall in rapid succession. She’s struck by the contrast betwixt intricately laced snowflakes and despairing, shadowed skies. The dismal thought lurches to the pit of her stomach as though a foreboding of things to come. Despite wearing boots and heavy layers, Greta shivers. Will the darkness of winter ever give way to spring? She will gleefully dance when she witnesses a blossom of new life. This winter's been a long one and spring cannot come soon enough.

She spies Grandma Agatha’s house in the distance, just before the heavy coppice of trees. The trees' branches, along with the house’s roof, are already laden with snowfall. Greta sighs with relief as spirals of smoke escape the chimney. Thankfully, Grandma Agatha won’t freeze for there is an abundance of logs to burn within easy reach.

Today, Greta’s basket carries loaves of freshly baked bread, red apples, tart cheese, as well as carrots and cabbage from the winter garden. Greta has made the same treacherous trip each week since mid-fall to ensure Grandma Agatha lacks for nothing. She can’t risk the old woman starving, especially when she has no other willing to offer assistance. The old woman lived a promiscuous life – certainly not up to the villager’s standards - so in older years, she is paying steeply. Greta’s conscience, however, dictates she help the woman for judgement is God’s alone to make.

Reaching the center of the pond, a noise resounds in the eerie silence. Panicked, adrenalin pumping, Greta begins to run, slipping and falling less than ten feet away. Spread eagle, she watches as an apple rolls across the ice, its redness resembling blood against the whiteness of the newly fallen snow.

The crack expands; cold-water invades. Greta bobs in the frigid water, gasping and struggling for only a moment before acceptance registers. No one hears save the birds, their wings flapping against air. The sound fills Greta’s ears.

Calming numbness floods. Hands, fingers already frozen, slide across the ice. The irony strikes hard and swift and confusion mounts as warmth infuses and peace encompasses. Has spring arrived?

A single leaf falls on the snow. A whisper of a selfless prayer.

“Please don’t let Grandma Agatha starve.”

Feigning happiness to match the perceived levels everyone around me appears to have reached has taken its toll. My forced smiles and hollow laughter are created from kinesthetic memory, not a genuine, exuberant response. Detrimental advice from strangers posing as friends props me up while unachievable expectations that things will get better from well-intentioned loved ones knocks me down. Both actions place a heavy burden on my weakened confidence, adding bruises to my soul.

Then again, maybe he’s right. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe it is too late to make a change. Maybe I am an ingrate. Maybe I would be nothing without him. Maybe he is the best I can do, and I deserve everything coming to me. Maybe I should count what he deems as my blessings but in reality are condemnations. Then again, what if I accept that the need for continually prefacing these thoughts with “Maybe” proves they are patently false? Certainly, that’s closer to the truth.

The ruts carved in the road I’m traveling are deep. Formed after years of attrition, they’ve been tempered by relentless browbeating. Turning the wheels to forge a new route to a healthier life is risky. With tires entrenched in furrows sculpted from abrasion, I fear what would happen if a quick course correction was attempted. If I try steering myself toward happiness from this position, additional stress will be placed on the front axle, causing mechanical failure. This won’t result in liberation, but dependence on this God-forsaken road, a road I can’t remember why I took in the first place.

So, my only option is to get out and walk alone. Leave the discomfort behind. Embark, untethered to the past. Find solid, level ground. I will rely on atrophied muscles to drag me out of the darkness and into the medicinal light by casting off my mental shackles. Independence is the key to unlocking these restraints. Although I’ve always had access to this key, I am now capable of employing it.

Holding an overstuffed duffel bag, she leaves a note on the kitchen table in plain view. It doesn’t convey reasons, just outlines basic instructions. Without apologetic overtones, it is written from the heart, a place she hadn’t sought refuge in for quite some time now. Before slipping out the back door, she pivots in the early morning calm. She wants to capture the moment so she can then turn and set it free.

It’s dark.

Yellow streetlights cast a dusty light into the room, illuminating little.

I can’t see the floor. I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me. But I can feel that the room is small.

The walls are close. The air thick.

Cluttered.

I can sense how cluttered it is. An odor of something rotten.

Do I smell paint?

I’m not sure how I got here, but I know I need to get out.

The only way out is forward. Through the room.

I’m cautious where I step, feeling with my toe because I can’t see the floor.

Through the side window, the foggy gold from the street turns to a dingy beige within.

A table beneath the window holds piles. Books, papers, dirty dishes left over from who knows when. Beyond the table, a bench seat is built into the corner walls.

The ceiling is low.

Am I in a trailer?

The door must be off to the right, in the darkness.

I grasp at the dark and take a step. I stumble over something. A step stool? What’s on the floor?

A faint outline catches my eye.

Is someone standing there? Motionless?

My ears prickle. My heart pounds.

I lunge forward, kicking something hard with my shin.

It knocks into other unseen things. Clattering, scraping. Crashes fill the room.

So loud!

I lunge again. There must be a door.

I see it. Faint in the dark. I stride again, as if through a dumpster. My fingers touch the wooden door, thin and cheap. It’s ajar.

My body, already committed, pushes it open. It does easily, and I lose balance.

I fall to my knees, bracing myself as my hands feel the ground of the next room.

Shag carpet.

A noise behind me.

Still on the ground, I kick the door closed behind me. Hard. The cheap wood splinters.

In another room now. Still dark.

Something large looms in the center of the room. Is it moving?

I struggle to my feet. I can see a door behind the heap.

Light– still tan, still dirty– oozes in through shards of greasy glass.

I heave myself, a single stride, then another. Clamoring past the shadow, it tugs at my pantlegs.

I explode into the outside air.

Seaside saltiness, yet cloying and muggy.

A noise behind me.

I stand atop a thin staircase, wooden and decrepit.

No railing.

Rock wall just out of reach.

The stairs spiral down into darkness.

I WAS mad—maddened by the ceaseless grinding of the lighthouse’s gears; my weary eyes twitched at every strike of the devil’s hour, booming from the longcase clock towering at my footboard.

Dong. Dong. Dong!

The pendulum swung in synchrony with the torrent waters crashing against the cliffsides, taunting me, reaching for me, begging me to surrender to the icy Atlantic, forever. Most men would skirt the edge of insanity after two days—six was incomprehensible.

But it wasn’t just the pendulum, the gnashing of mechanical teeth, or the whirling of Fresnel lenses forty-six meters above that became the metronome of my insomnia. No—sleep had evaded me six nights because of the old keeper’s last words.

They befuddled…no…they tortured me.

What did he mean by this being the last lighthouse anyone should ever be at? That I was either a fool or insane to have come?

Were these sounds…these horrible sounds and THE VOICES the reason for his hurried retreat, and my mounting turmoil?

***

I arrived by boat—the only way to arrive, and I was no lunatic. My incentive was money, but my intent was benevolent. The compensation was more than generous, arguably excessive—the reason I applied so rashly. I had arranged for my earnings to be sent to my dearest mother, suffering from consumption. The one-year assignment—a sacrifice well worth it, to save her!

But without delay, my dread manifested itself when proper introductions with the old keeper were cut short. I knocked. The door swung open. He began speaking so fast it was nearly impossible to comprehend. I grasped little. He moved with the urgency of someone thirty years his junior, someone escaping, fleeing—someone unhinged. Before I could stop him, before I could react to his unusual hastiness, he disappeared into the salty black, taking with him my tender.

There I stood upon the craggy cliffs of my island prison, holding the keys to the very place driving my mental decline—the Split Rock Lighthouse.

***

I was nearly finished polishing the lantern room windows when a faint clacking started the first night.

TickTickTickTickTickTickTick…

It grew louder, above everything else. Before long, it was all I heard!

TickTickTickTickTickTickTick…

I searched the watch room, the service room, the stairwell. NOTHING. All night I tore the place apart, greasing every moving piece, but the clacking was relentless.

TickTickTickTickTickTickTick…

The second night, there was drumming…drumming and clacking! It never quit—day and night I tended to the swirling spotlight, the machine, the very gears causing my agony, but I received no relief.

The third night it was the spinning lights—mocking, me! Blinding images so horrid, I mustn’t ever share.

On the fourth night, the voices started—the chattering of degradation and regret. The coaxing, manipulation, and depression.

Chatter, Chatter, CHATTER!

Six nights—of hell, of torture. Six—KNOCKS AT THE DOOR?!

I jerked from my bedside, frenzied.

This was the last lighthouse anyone should ever be at. Only a fool or madman would’ve come.

I flung open the door and fled into the salty black.

The yellow dress was neither her most expensive nor the prettiest, but Alisha was well aware of what baits her trap held and the yellow dress flaunted those feminine enticements in spades. It was the same dress, in fact, that she’d worn to catch Nat Duncan’s eye those years ago. This yellow dress had won her man then and it would win him now. Not long after his sentencing Nat had affirmed to her in a letter (which she’d read ragged) that his desire to give her “everything she’d never had” was what had landed him on the “inside”. It stood to reason that if his desire for her had put him in, then might her own yearnings for him not pluck him back out again?

Alisha (thirty years old) was no flouncy child, so when she’d looked into the warden’s eyes that last time the price she would have to pay for Nat’s freedom became obvious. It was certainly not a debt she relished paying, but the warden’s unspoken, non-monetary suggestion to her was coincidentally the only form of payment she currently had the means to render, making the offer seem fair enough, and was the only reason she considered it. Besides, need her jealous-hearted Nat ever even know?

So, after very little deliberation here she was, her yellow dress carefully folded beneath her knees to cushion them away from the industrial tiled floor.

Not knowing who was there was painfully awkward for her when the door’s latch clicked open behind her, creeping a cold draft up her unclothed back, though the hand gripping the back of her head prevented her from turning, prompting the continued humming from her that this sordid work necessitated until it finally became obvious to both people involved that the job was satisfactorily completed. And as the hand relaxed from its dissolute pull she was permitted a curious peek back to see who was there, a peek which revealed to her Nat’s naturally expressed revulsion at the sight of it; the sight of her unexpected nakedness and obsequious posture, that is. Made sick herself by her love’s blatant and obvious disgust in her Alisha wretched back up what had just gone down. At that Nat turned away from her, his ogling guard in tow, their clanking chains the only voice given to his rejection of her as he shuffled away forever into the prison’s bowels, a disconsolate Alisha trailing behind, crawling along the filthy floor in distressed, if useless, supplication.

And further back behind her the warden chuckled apathetically at her plight as his rapacious hands reached for her, their fingers sinking into her g form about it’s warmly rounded hips, his grip not only checking her progress, but also bodily lifting and dragging her disconsolate form back into the room for his continued depravity.

“It appears the sentence will be thirty more years, Mrs. Duncan,” Nat’s trustee counseled as he petted. “Thirty years or life… with time deferred for good behavior, of course.”

At last, Saturday afternoon arrives. The line of teen-agers and wannabe teens on the sidewalk stretches all the way from the box office window to the end of the block. And kids are still coming.

Fortunately, I am third in line for the Atlas Theatre’s Horror Movie Spectacular. That is enough to irk the kids directly behind me. And they go ballistic when I give cuts to my two younger brothers, Larry and Arty. A freckle-faced boy shoves me. His friend yells, “Back of the line, dudes.” But armed with a growth spurt and the heady pride of a fourteen-year-old, I stare down the shorter whiners. There is no need to say anything, but Larry feels compelled to explain to the kids that we had been taking turns in line since this morning.

It is one-thirty p.m. and the line begins to move. Brimming with excitement, my brothers and I pay for our tickets, skip the concessions, and run into the dimly lit theater. The only two kids in this giant place are in the front row; it’s like we have the Atlas to ourselves. But more kids pour in, so we three grab primo seats: in a row that is a third of the way back, and on the aisle. We have a great view of the screen and the ability to make an easy exit to get candy or take a leak.

Empty seats are all around when a shadowy figure stops in the aisle and glares at us.

“Don’t look at him,” I whisper to my brothers sitting on my right and left.

I see out of the corner of my eye that the figure is that bully at the end of our street. Everybody calls him “Big Bill.” The tough guy is wearing his high school letter jacket. He recently made Arty pay to cross his sidewalk, and threatened to make me suffer the same fate as Tommy Blair. Tommy and his family used to live on our street until they mysteriously disappeared.

“Ahem.”

The figure clears his throat, but we do not look up.

Another voice approaches. “What’s the holdup, Big Bill?”

Bill loudly tells his toady, “Some punks are in our seats.”

Bill reaches into the aisle seat, grabs Larry by the shirt collar, and growls, “I’m gonna count. When I hit three, you three kids better be gone—or else. … One, two…”

“We are not moving!” I hear myself utter as I look straight ahead.

Big Bell comes into our row and sits on my lap. He says, “Did you say something?”

Now I am looking into the back of Big Bill’s neck. But I say loudly, “We are not moving, are we Larry and Arty. … Larry? … Arty?”

Big Bill stands up to let me leave.

I slowly walk back up the aisle to search for Larry and Arty. And hope that I have another growth spurt.