Overlook Kristy Bowen
Overlook
Kristy Bowen
The poems in this series were inspired by both Stephen King’s original novel and Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining.
1. In the middle of the ballroom is a chair. Hallway after hallway filled with broken balloons and faded streamers. Have a drink if you dare. Whiskey straight, thin on the ice. Nice to see you. Nicer still to feel you wandering the corridors, hands out touching the walls. All the falling down staircases and baseball bat wielding wives is nothing if not for miles of terrible carpet we laid over even more terrible carpet. It was covered in blood. The flood of a thousand unhappy feet walking from the bed to the door. One man shot himself in the bathroom, but still it's glorious, all archways and celadon dreams. Who can haunt something so very pretty, so very sticky with time and faux fur rugs. Your tug on the whiskey makes a sucking sound that echoes through the Gold Room. Stay awhile, your hands are already wet with ink.
2. What is a hotel, but a hotel laid over another hotel? One leaning structure propped over a second? In the mountains, the air is thin enough to make your nose bleed. The skiers slice through the white spaces mercilessly. But first, you build a structure out of timber then fill it with ghosts. Left to elements, they'll rot within a decade if they haven't already burned. Fill it with dishes and canned goods. A large number of hatchets. The boiler room sweats and the lights flicker when it sighs. Fill it with floral wallpaper and broken arms. With fire alarms and dead little girls. Stuff a hooker in every mattress. After all, women will not fare well here. The drugstore heiress tore her nylons in the coat check room with the bus boy. He tasted like death, but choked her politely. She stumbled out into a flurry of confetti and just keeps tumbling from room to room, from bed to bed, carrying her gold heels.
3. Think of it as spaces opening to more spaces. Each one more vast than the last. Past the lobby, the rooms get smaller and smaller until they're just a tiny door in the wall. You might mistake it for a dumbwaiter if you didn't know better. If you hadn't lived in those small spaces for years with barely a breath or a sigh. Barely a tiny cough. Often enough, someone wandered ina blood-spattered maid, the boy with a broken truck. Opening the door and surprised to find you there. Your typewriter on your knees drawn up to your chin. All that space to wander, decades even, but you stayed here, listening to the pipes roll and decay. Bit by bit, the hotel crumbled around you. The spaces inside far more open than the caverns that spread themselves against the mountain. That yawn and gape into the wilderness.
4.
If we hide the body under the bed, no one will know. How we bled and rolled through every hallway as if we were still alive. Still beating against the windows of our chests like a bird. Still washing the dishes and cleaning the sink.
You'd think the winter would be unbearable, but really what is another one? Collected like lost keys and placed on a hook in the stockroom. Umbrellas and briefcases. False teeth and watches. You'd think we'd lay out the wares and take what we wanted, but what to do with the body like a blunt instrument, heavy blood bag. The things we collected from the shower drain, the pillow. The soft space beneath the sofa. Mirabou slippers and vials of cocaine. A single broken champagne flute, its rim glossed with red.
5.
You can go 20 miles and find only woods. Only flooded out crossings and muddy, rutted Roads. Only blood colored poppies in summer. Bare woods in the snow. Still, we know our way by habit, past the leaning spruce, the broken wheelbarrow in the middle of the clearing. The fear we rope to our chests and heave into the closest mountain stream. The scream of demons from the bottle, cork on the ground. How we made it back, windblown and knees filthy in the tub. You can go 20 miles into the interior of the heart and find only branches. The busted out windows of a hatchback. How we tracked her by her footprints on the snow and caught her shivering in the woodshed. What violence in the way we bound her hands and feet and throat. Tried to save her by killing the beast that beat the ribcage from the inside. The rage that sparked the wind and carried her screams down the mountain and into town. How we wrote our names in dirt and blood on the bathroom mirror. Our fear flaking away on bleached white sheets.
6.
At the end of the hall, the window you see is not an actual window. But the reflection of a hundred identical windows and we’ve smashed every one. Every fun house shadow we could cram into our throats. We hollered down corridors into black. Racked up nicknames and slack bar maids like a game. The women who spun round and round, skirts upside down. The shot glass pinup who lost her clothes, swallow after swallow. The swizzle stick shaped like a woman's backside. Everything we left behind the bar now dusty with disuse. When the market fell, we crawled out to the edge of the buildings and jumped. The wife floating through like an angel or a ghost, the mistress we kept in the city. Playboys every one, our neckties tight around our throats as we jumped one by one from the chandeliers, chanting our way to greatness.
7. There are openings in the story and we fall through. Plummeting through 70's shag and terrible wallpaper. Past the ice clinking slowly in the glass. The ax we brought but never used. Part of the party was that we didn't know it was a party until it was too late. The lights dimming above the dance floor and one too many debutantes crashing through the punch bowl. Throwing up Sunday dinner into the bushes outside. Had we known it was so late, we would have gathered our wives and sons and drove to Boulder. Placed a coat over shoulders, then poisoned them properly at home. No one knew the roads would be so bad, impassable, and we'd be stuck. In the lobby, the wives loll over and over into their backs and we can't help but hate them more. The tidy pocketbooks, the strings they bound us with. The hate that burned bright, then sizzled as each champagne bottle lost its cork, then fizzled flat against our shoes.
8. If you stand to the left, the walls are slightly warped with damp. When winter came, we huddled under a mattress in the cellar, dragged our broken radios and bedsheets down and down until we were a whisper under the floorboards, a collective gasp when the doors blew in with a swirl of snow. So much blood in the machinery, so much masonry cold to the touch. What we thought was good weather, only smoke from the forest that burned for days, How we basked in the heat with ash in our hair, collecting in our eyelashes. Took to breathing through are skin and veins when our lungs gave out. Tasting things with our fear instead of our tongues.
9. In the rooms, the televisions have all stopped working. A moment of click and fuzz, then nothing but static. Nothing but impossible stairways and broken radiator knobs. We could name our baby claustrophobia, but for the way her ears bleed, out of key in the music room. The way the furniture is always too big for the room. The rooms too big for the building . Too big for ghosts, but nonetheless we have them, knocking along the walls, trying to speak. You would think the open spaces would frighten them. So much sunlight filtered through greasy curtains. They rattle wall sconces and boxes of dishes like they know what they're doing. Busting lightbulbs and loving captivity. Their bodies floating the ceiling, Breathy and too big for the hollow their shadows make on the floor.
10. In the kitchen, the knives gleam under flourescents. Against gallon jugs of mayonnaise and industrial sized cans of tuna. We don't know what all we have, but we have enough. Rough estimations of flower and baking powder. Enough eggs to toss them one by one over the balcony railing and still not starve. Carving our days into mealtimes, counting every lift of fork, every coddled spoon. The woman who ran screaming from the room about the piglet, eats it with relish now that it's covered in flies. Lies on the couch in the lobby hands over her eyes. How she longs for sweets, for apples the size of her hand. But the eggs are all scrambled, double-yolked and bloody.
11. Inside, we use inside voices. Inside the body, a hundred million corridors we could easily use to lose our way. In the lobby, a man sweats bourbon and the keys move, but no sound cracks the stillness. No room keys lost and found, rattling in the drawer. Before, we burn things in the rooms slowly. The damask chair, a bloody sheet. It gets to be routine. We line up and throw our greatest sadness in the flame. Now the sadness grows and sputters the lightbulbs in every room. You couldn't find us if you tried. We're there, then gone, like a flickering headlamp. The canary we swallowed as soon as it was dead sings all night inside us. But still nothing escapes the hatch of our throats.
12.
In the distance, all you see is rock and snow, bits of green dotting the landscape that could be a pine tree or could be a man in in a green coat. Escaped from the great dark forest we travel through each time we return. And we always return. The mountainside releases us, then takes us back into its gaping mouth. Inside, what could be a tree or a labyrinth, could be a dream, or the body within a dream and a sound like someone splitting wood. Or splitting bone like wood. A coat that could be green or black or even red depending on the light. Inside the mountain we wait with our coats dark with blood. For what could be a car or could be the wind blowing up and down the valley.
13. Before the hotel, there is no Wendy. We make her out of bangs and terror. Out of gingham and coveralls and mount her on the stairs. Her only purpose is terror. That which we go into, down and down as into a cellar. No Wendy after, a lit cigarette burning her through second marriage, her third. No Wendy haunting the house that is her husband. her hands and head bloody. No Wendy opening giant cans of corn with a can opener in the kitchen. Without all that crying, no Wendy in the ink moving across the page where we go down and down like a rat into a trap where terror makes us like a bed. Where we write our names in blood on the wall with our fingers. The Wendy of our nightmares sobbing through the bathroom door.
14.
On the 4th of July, the lawn is all potato salad and oysters wasting in the sun. The children are covered in mosquito bites. Pluck the fireflies from the air at dusk and force them into jars. By far, the greatest misfortune is the debutante we set on fire. One tiny explosion, and up went her hair. We didn't dare call it a disaster, didn't dare call the ambulence, when so many were already bleeding. Already feeding and purging into the trashcans we kept for such disasters. The paper mill two counties over saw to our dysfunction, then multiplied it. Three armed babies and blind monsters blinking in closets. At least we knew what was coming when we tried to sew up the debutantes dress with a needle and thread. To smear her wounds with salve. All the while muttering shh..shh..
as the sky sputtered and sparked over the mountain. While the crowd wandered into the woods littering the grass with cups and chairs. With purses and limbs.
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15.
Inside every writer is a garden. Is a duckpond filled with the dead. Bread and feathers on the surface, but only blood underneath. Still he comes with papers in the briefcase. The wide-eyed wife. We'll hide her for safekeeping in a cereal box, but he'll shake her out like a spoiled child. There's no telling who we kill in our narration. Who falls between the gaps in the words on the page. The garden fills with flies. On a map they look like Xes to the treasure we forgot we buried last summer deep beneath the water.
16. The labyrinth outside is nothing compared to the labyrinth inside. By summer, we're so pruned back and neat you wouldn't recognize us but for the bruises. For the uses of our limbs splayed against the staircase. Build a hotel and you build an entire world filled with impossible spaces where nothing fits or connects. A woman's legs dangle from the ceiling, but her heart is in the sink. You'd think we'd have grown used to it by now. The way the rooms shift like a puzzle box every time we leave them. Where the curtains lift to reveal a blank wall. After all, the men we dined with held their knives in sticky fists and demanded only the best. The West, with all that wide open prosperity. And yet were surprised to find arms mysteriously reaching out from the shower wall. Bloody stockings in the elevator. ‘
Our best dresses round our waist in the shrubbery, waiting for all that money.
17.
Rats in the pantry chew through boxes of shredded wheat and start in on the rice. We can't keep the outside out, anymore than we can keep the inside in. In the freezer, a dozen corpse cows, 40 chickens missing their heads. How long does it take to move through that much flesh? Gnawing our way to hunger with sharp, angry teeth? The liquor lined up behind the lighted bar, bottles collecting dust from carpets we shake every day. The bathrooms spotless, but the sinks filling with blood nonetheless. Guess how much bleach it takes to remove any trace of red? How many caretakers lost to ghosts? Guess how many guests we've sacrificed to the swimming pool. Pulling their bodies from the bottom. We cant' keep the water inside them, anymore than we can keep them out of the water.
18. Beam by beam, the writer builds a structure. Heating ducts and secret passages, the lay of winding hallways that shifts each time you pass from one corridor to another. The horror of stairwells that vanish into walls. I take this structure and tilt it sideways so the people fall out. Men in expensive suits cling to velvet curtains that are already on fire. The women who outline their lips in the mirror and eat warm cucumber sandwiches in the atrium. Throw up in the rhododendrums. The writer builds and demolishes them, limb by limb. Thinks they belong to the story, but he belongs them. Caretaker to a thousand late night bed hops. God of a million sighs.
19.
You were always the caretaker, even before you were the caretaker. Even before the fake palm fronds found their way into your throat. Artists are dangerous, mixing sugar-like into even the best masonry. Put it on paper and it's there forever. The rich men summer in the mountain and you bring them champagne. Maintain the forest that threatens to eat them. The drains are always clogged with hair and small animals that gnawed their way into the pipes. The upkeep was exhausting, keeping the money spit-shined every morning. They'd line their shoes in the hallway and you'd chuck them into the incinerator. The rich men played backgammon on the backs of horses in the barn and dined on rare meat They eventually died fat and white in their beds. You wrote only on the weekends and only
then with your pen in your teeth, waiting for someone to notice you. Your hands deep in sheets laundered free of their blood, while their wives held teacups to tiny dog’s mouths and cried.
20. So what if a man builds ghosts into his house or hotel. Water in the walls, in the seafoam green tub. He builds it only to haunt the mountains, that were already haunted. The woods that were already teeming with blood and anger. You put the ghost in the house, in the room, in the body, and let it rattle the chandeliers for a while. Let it knock books off the shelf and slit its pretty wrist against the gleaming tile. We're Americans, it’s how we do. Later, we'll drink bourbon and ruin the carpets. We'll blame the ghosts that were already here, but when we leave, take our fury with us. Tuck her into bed in safe suburban houses. Roll her into heels and cotton shifts and pretend she's our wife while the corpse goes black in the bathwater we ran and left running for days.
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