The Places We Keep Our Dead

TYLER EVANS

I listen as my father reads Uncle Vanya with a thick Russian accent into an old transistor radio. The only light on in the house is from his work station across the hall. It filters a low glow like electric candlelight under the frame of my door. He won’t sleep again tonight. His voice will break on tragicomedy notes of the play until he sobs. Maggie, are you awake yet?

The transistor radio breathes static and we both know we’re alone.

H

On the day before Maggie died, my dad and I sat at her bedside in the terminal ward for children at St. Mark’s hospital. Maggie’s black Vietnamese eyes shone more dead with her hair gone. I could feel them devouring the light from the room when she asked us what we thought was the best way to be buried.

“You aren’t going to die,” I said fighting back tears.

“You always were such a pretty liar, Mary,” I winced every time she mentioned my name. My mother spent my childhood reminding me I was named after the whore, not the Virgin.

Maggie weighed the pros and cons of her final resting place. Either she would be tossed in the ground and slowly deteriorate into worm shit or be fired in a kiln and turned into a pulpy ash.

“If that’s the case, I want you to bake me into a cake and eat the entire thing in one sitting.”

“You want us to eat you, dear?” My dad intended the comment as a joke, but his voice betrayed him, wavering back into tears before the punch line.

“It has to be on my birthday and you have to buy me presents.”

Maggie abandoned the option of cremation finally because she imagined herself as cake working through my digestive system to eventually be reborn as poop.

That left traditional burial. We decided she would be placed in the cemetery across from our house. It was a small lot overlooking the Atlantic. Maggie wanted to hear the chime of metal as the fishermen left the docks in the morning. She wanted to smell the salt and look out on the coast as it reached its vanishing point and intersected eternity beyond New England.

She became quiet at a point and looked concerned.

“What if I wake up though?”

My dad took her tiny, burnt hands in his.

“I’ll be there when you wake up.”

H

At the funeral, I ignored a balding priest who talked about God’s mercy in a world beyond ours. Me and Maggie were of a different belief system and had our own notion about the afterlife. I knew that as the father spoke, Maggie was in an all-inclusive island resort in heaven playing billiards with Hitler. Heaven was the Caribbean, we had decided.

It was a week before my fourteenth birthday, but there would be no celebration that year. We definitely wouldn’t have a cake. I looked down the rows of graves lined like a Halloween tessellation and thought of my last words to Maggie. I don’t know if I can promise you that, kiddo.

Just lie to me a little bit. It’ll be such a beautiful lie.

After the priest said his final soulless amen and the last of the mourners left, my father and I walked across the street to our house. I realized I could see Maggie’s grave from my bedroom window and I would be reminded of all our sweet moments by just looking out. I shut my blinds that day and haven’t opened them since.

H

That night my father dug up my sister’s body and planted a receiver to his transistor radio in her casket. He gave her a tender kiss and reburied her. That night he made his first transmission with the Three Sisters by Chekhov.

H

A year since father died last May the fifth, on your name day, Irina. It was very cold then, and snowing. I thought I would never live and you were in a dead faint.

H

Father doesn’t hear the vampires come tonight. His voice is focused too much on his rendition of Uncle Vanya even though he stumbles with Marina’s lines.

The vampires float outside my window, rapping on the glass with long, pointed fingernails. The blind is drawn so I can’t see their twisted forms, eyes empty and white like broken eggshells. They whisper promises to me, asking to be invited in to my room. Mary, let us in and you’ll live forever. You’ll be a child again and everything will be wonderful and new. We’ll go to Europe, says a handsome voice with an exotic accent. We’ll sail the Mediterranean and make love. We’ll go to Disneyland like you were never able to as a child. We’ll give you wealth.

Beauty. Orgasms at a moment’s notice. Eternal Life.

H

They leave before dawn breaks. The sun bleeds its obnoxious cheer into my room. I can hear the clank of a metal bell sounding from the wharf as crews gather awaiting departure and the half-conscious mumble of Voynitsky from my father’s workstation: A fine day to hang oneself.

H

I tell my father over breakfast that the vampires have come back.

“You know not to invite them in. Don’t even speak to them. They can manipulate even the strongest-willed people.”

“Like Mother?”

“Don’t acknowledge them, please sweetheart. I can’t lose you. The dead have started following me. They’re crossing over. With you gone, there would be nothing to stop them from taking me.”

I look him over. His body is concave and starved. Even with a six foot frame, he can’t weigh more than 130 pounds by this point. His head is newly shaved, revealing a patchwork sprinkling of pink scars from where he nervously yanked out his hair. He shakes and rocks back and forth in his chair.

“Mary, why aren’t you dressed for school?” he asks in a distant voice.

“I haven’t gone to school in over a year.”

“Oh.”

“Have you been taking your pills, dad?”

He leans across the table and takes my hand.

“Don’t acknowledge them. The vampires.”

“Why would it be so terrible?”

“Mary, the only thing more horrifying in this world than death is living forever.”

H

There are several reasons my mother was angry the day that Maggie arrived from Vietnam.

Before he lost his mind, my father worked as a radio engineer for the government inspecting the antennas of steel towers. When the war came, he left my pregnant mother and enlisted with a com unit ten miles south of Saigon. He worked a night shift, listening through static over hundreds of channels for the slightest discrepancies that would suggest enemy activity. He was lonely every night there and eventually he met a woman, La`hn, who would become Maggie’s mother.

Maggie was born after my father’s unit was disbanded, the war was lost, and he was safe at home with his wife and newborn daughter. He wrote the U.S. government every week asking that they allow Maggie to flee the communist regime to come to the U.S.

“I don’t give a damn about your rice paddy whore and her daughter,” my mom said many times over the decade. “If she comes here, I’m leaving.”

One day, Maggie did. She showed up a dust mite of a girl. The silk dress she wore framed her slender face and dimpled chin like the point of a fat Valentine’s Day heart. To me she was a Japanese Geisha, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

My father hugged her at the door, only stopping to introduce us. I was nervous and stood further back in the room.

“You’re sisters, Mary; you’re going to have to look out for one another from now on.”

My mother locked herself in her bedroom with a bottle full of painkillers and a fifth of vodka.

“I’ll kill myself if she stays. Say that I won’t.”

My father called the bluff and Maggie moved into my room.

The girl was fluent in Vietnamese, French and English. She had a vinyl copy of Revolver by the Beatles, liked French existentialists, thought Jimmy Carter was sexy and hated Ernest Hemingway because she said he was a man-child who blamed women for his depression in real life, so he killed them in his novels. I immediately liked Maggie.

That night, my mother left with the vampires.

Maggie and I lay in bed wide awake listening to my parents scream in the next room.

“You fucked a local farm worker, Mike, so did everyone else in the goddamn war. The only difference is no one else told their wives about it or expected them to take care of their illegitimate chink babies.”

“Why are you so ungrateful? For all my time here in the U.S., I’ve been devoted to you.”

“Ungrateful?! You slept with another woman.”

My father didn’t respond for a while and the house was quiet. I could hear male crickets chirping desperately for mates on the beds of graves across the way.

“Are they fighting about me?” Maggie asked timidly.

“American husbands and wives do this all the time. It’s why so few of them stay together.”

My father broke the silence.

“Why can’t you just be happy with the life I’ve given you?”

“Because it’s not the life I imagined for myself.”

H

My father had left to buy cigarettes when the vampires came. Maggie and I listened at the wall as they spoke in hushed voices at my mother’s window. We would never betray you like he did, dear. You’ve given your entire life to him and you’ll never get it back. We’ll give you your youth back again. You can travel the world like you always wanted to, instead of playing caretaker to that little shit.

“Okay,” my mother said. “Come in.”

The window groaned open and we heard their jagged toenails scrape as they moved across her hardwood floor to her bedside. There was the sound of sheets being pulled back followed by low moans.

“So this is what it feels like,” my mother’s voice was languid, laced with a dreamlike quality.

Then there was nothing. The room was quiet. I pressed my head against the wall. A raspy voice laughed from the other side. Is that you, Mary? Why don’t you let us in and come join your mother.

“Leave us alone,” Maggie shrieked from my side. Maggie, oh sweet Maggie. We don’t want you. You’re going to be dead in a couple years anyways. Do you want us to tell you how it happens?

“They can’t see my death, can they?” Mary, we’ll come back when you’re old enough.

They raked their fingernails on the drywall as they filed out of my parents’ bedroom. My mother was the last to leave. Goodbye my dear, she hissed. You were always a disappointment to me. Tell your father that our relationship was an embarrassing disaster and he never satisfied me.

And just like that, my mother was gone from my life. Maggie dropped to her knees and cowered beside the wall.

“They can’t see my death. How could they?”

H

Anna Pavlovna: As for the wife, she stays at home with a sick child, waiting, when at last a note comes from him – asking her to send his linen and things.

H

Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn have all been replaced by the sound of power tools from my father’s workstation. He works late into the night, sparks flying off of power saws to send the ghosts of shadows dancing through the hallway. He’s drawn all the blinds to the house and in the daytime, he hauls radio equipment into his room from his pickup. Some nights he leaves and comes back days later covered in hardened dirt. He nods his head before retreating back into his workshop as though that’s all the explanation a person needs in the world.

“Come here, Mary.” He motions me over to the windows at our breakfast nook one morning. Across the street is a white party convection

van with tinted windows. Two men in black suits lean against the back of the vehicle smoking cigarettes. “You see? The dead, they know where we live now. They know about my plans, they don’t want me to find Maggie.”

I rub his back between his shoulder blades. The bones of his spine jut like xylophone keys. I wonder if Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker will play if I press them in the right order. Maybe the chemicals in his brain will balance out if I play the right melody.

“How do you know they’re dead?” I ask.

“There’s a number of ways you can spot them. They walk around in formal dresses or the tailored suits they were buried in, always in their finest jewelry or cufflinks. Sometimes they wear medals they got in the war, or handle newspaper clippings and letters that were left at their sites. Sometimes you can spot rotting flowers tucked back behind their ears, or in suit pockets. They don’t blink.”

“Dad, we can’t stay like this.”

“They’re more temporary than us. They rent homes; they don’t own. They stay awake late into the night in front of a television, unblinking, watching reruns of sitcoms and televangelists solicit heaven. They know better than this. Still, they send these men donations. The dead send severed fingers and eyelids in closed envelopes. They don’t use them anyways. They’ve forgotten the names and faces of their loved ones. At grocery stores sometimes, they confuse an ice cream sandwich for a wife of fifty years. I spotted one of them crying into a lawn gnome the other day. The dead woman shed a silk black dress and sat naked embracing the statuette, running her fingertips over the point in his hat. More than anything, they’re angry, Mary. They’re angry that a person is bothering their eternity. They’re angry that none of them got it right while they were alive, and they still have no idea what they should have done. It’s not going to be too much longer before they come for me.”

I bring my father a bowl of cornflakes from the kitchen. He stares at them, wincing each time the flakes pop in the milk like miniature breakfast firecrackers.

“The dead aren’t going to come for you, Dad.”

“Why not?” He makes no movement towards the cereal.

“Because they’re dead.”

Later that night, as I cross the threshold of his workstation for a glass of water I hear voices from the other side. A boy speaks in a frightened voice through the static of an old transistor. I hear children laughing in the background and the rusted joints of a carousel groaning from a distance.

“It’s so dark in here. I can’t see anything,” the boy says.

“Do you see Maggie in there? Call out to Maggie.”

“The people here don’t talk. They just laugh. Their mouths and eyes have been stitched over with black thread. It doesn’t matter if I ask them where my mom is. I tell them I’m cold. It is so cold here.”

“Call out to Maggie. Tell my daughter I’m going to be there when she wakes up.”

The transistor cuts out. I hear a loud crash as it hits the opposite side of the wall and my dad begins to sob.

The vampires don’t come that night. I sit in bed listening to a 45-yearold man cry over a workhorse and can’t help but wonder if their prediction hadn’t been right. Later in the month, after my mother left, Maggie was diagnosed with cancer. My father was fired from his job when he told a government shrink visiting his company that his wife had been abducted by vampires, and that if you listened low enough in the static of a broadcast you could hear whispers from God from the beginning of creation. God’s voice moved like the light of stars and if you had the right ears you could almost make out a plan for the end of the universe more lyrical than its conception.

I was suspended from eighth grade when Dan Rissel tried going down my pants behind the 7-Up machine and I stabbed him in the shoulder with a clicky pen. When they pulled me off him screaming, “Give me back my mother, give her back,” they say I had dug the pen in deep enough that I had narrowly missed an artery by a quarter inch. For my time off, I was supposed to write an apology to him and his family, something to the effect that I regretted shanking their pervert son. Get Well Soon. I never went back.

After her first chemo treatments, Maggie was tired. Her dark geisha hair was already thinning and I found bloated clumps of it in the shower drain in the morning. She couldn’t move out of bed so my father would read to her in the night.

“What do you want to hear tonight?”

“Let’s read The Love Girl and the Innocent again. I can read the parts of Nemov.”

“Don’t you want to read something a little more cheerful?”

She never did. Maggie liked the Russian playwrights because they were censored, imprisoned and shot.

“Only true creation comes from boundaries,” she said.

H

The Dead: I had a dream last night. My father: You dream? The Dead: I was sitting in a field of sunflowers with an old friend, reminiscing about our time together. Between laughter and a nervous exchange of glances he would push his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. I realized I had never met him before and questioned if he was even a man, or woman, and what constitutes the difference? When I was alive, I remember there was talk of penetration and God. Sometimes things like love and fidelity were thrown into the equation as though those things summed it all up. Sometimes I trace my fingers over the silhouettes of words I’ve forgotten, realizing there’s no difference between concepts like disease and cotton candy, God and pornography. A train passed by bound west for Prague. It had rusted over in tones of sea foam green and soft browns. The man held my hand and told me we shouldn’t talk about love. It was then that I realized that I had been sitting in the field alone. My father: I’m looking for my daughter, Maggie. Have you seen her? The Dead: In spring, we dank palm wine on the Sahara, and we didn’t use heavy words like love or halibut. There was a bonfire of fast-burning brush, dry from sun exposure. Everyone in the group danced until someone mentioned that maybe we weren’t in the desert. Maybe it was just something we had read in a book. My father: I don’t care about all that. Just tell me if you’ve seen my daughter. The Dead: We’re trying to explain it to you. Listen.

H

Even though Maggie wasn’t Catholic, we took her to St. Augustine’s Chapel to be baptized a week before she died. When the moment came and Maggie was called forth, she looked like an extraterrestrial in her tiny child wheelchair, meekly rolling down the aisle. A visiting Bishop from the New England Diocese was overseeing the service that day. With Maggie sitting on the stage, this flabby bear of a holy man approached her with his dripping baptismal wand. It was at that moment Maggie swore she could hear the crucified Jesuses nailed to crosses and trinkets on the walls of the building laughing. The Saints in stained glass and doves proclaiming peace joined in with the Jesus choir till their song became a mad cackle. “We have you forever, Maggie. You can’t escape.” Maggie in all her frailness kicked the holy man in his stomach and rolled herself like a terminal linebacker down the aisle. I was the only person at Mass who laughed when her screams reached us from the main lobby of the building.

“You’ll never take me alive, Jesus!”

H

Later in her hospital room, Maggie told me her mother never believed in God. That anytime she was a bad girl, La`hn would tell Maggie a fairytale from her village about a witch that wandered the countryside and collected all the evil, spoiled children in a giant burlap sack she carried over her shoulder. The witch carried a sewing set and she snuck into the children’s rooms late at night with a threaded needle. She sewed their mouths, eyes and ears shut with a cross pattern of black stitches and carried them away to hell in her bag.

“I wish the witch would come for me now,” Maggie said. “Anything is better than this place.”

“What would I do without you?” I asked her.

“You can come too.”

Because Maggie didn’t want to go to a Christian heaven, filled with good white boys and girls, we decided to create our own religion that day. Our following was called the Church of the Indifferent Host. Maggie was appointed the Archbishop and I was the High Templest, positions that

were as powerful as they were meaningless.

Maggie scrawled our book of Genesis with a black eyeliner pencil into a tea paper journal her mother had given her before she left for America. She detailed Creation as only Maggie could, dictating the nature of our God: God is a great thespian in the sky that smokes clove cigarettes from an ivory holder. He wears a satin cigar jacket and watches the events of the world through a pair of opera glasses. He has only one eye from a tragic cricket accident and for His lack of depth perception, His blessings and curses fall on the earth at random, leaving luck and random chance to reign supreme. It’s more fun for Him that way. Most of all we exist to amuse God. He created mankind and free will for entertainment. Those most esteemed by Him are those that resist death in the most violent and comical ways.

“So fuck your brother’s wife,” Maggie said. “Fuck your brother. Start an opium den. Kill somebody. Kill an entire race of somebodies. He’ll only love you more in the end.”

“What about Heaven?” I asked.

“What about it? Everyone is accepted. Broadway cherishes its flops along with its triumphs. Those who are the most repulsive, the most deprived of morality sit at God’s right hand in the all-inclusive Caribbean resort of Heaven.”

“And Hitler?”

“We should only be so lucky to play a game of shuffleboard with the Fuhrer.” She let out a little pixie laugh at the mention.

Heaven, we decided, was anything your mind conceived. Every trip you wanted to take, sensation had, Beatles member fucked.

“It seems like I’d get pretty bored before eternity ends though,” Maggie said.

“I guess at that point death might be a good thing.”

H

The Dead: I had the best dream of my life last night. My father: I don’t need to know these things. You might not even exist.

The Dead: The best thing about the dream was that in it, I was you. I woke up to the alarm at the base of my headboard at exactly 5:45. I breakfasted on coffee and organic cornflakes that had forty percent of my recommended fiber intake. I looked over the crossword unsure of a seven letter word for ‘a mature ovum after penetration by sperm but before the formation of a zygote.’ I put the paper down. I got in my shitty car and instead of going to my job I thought about ways I could drive it off an overpass, into oncoming traffic, a brick wall, a line of mall Santas. I want to tell you how happy I was when I woke up from this dream, tires still squealing in my throat. I want to tell you so much, but I’ve forgotten the words. My father: I quit my job. You must be thinking of someone else. The Dead: Your daughter Mary was in the passenger seat. My father: How do you know my daughter’s name? The Dead: We’re getting close, Mike. We can smell the Atlantic. You didn’t think there wouldn’t be repercussions for talking to the dead, did you?

H

I wake in the night as a powerful set of hands clamp down on my mouth. I know that the dead have come for me because I can smell generic funeral home cologne on the sleeves of the man’s fitted tuxedo. The scent mingles with the odor of a decaying bouquet or daisies shoved into the pocket of his coat. I can see how dead and unblinking his eyes are between thin strands of hair. He pulls me from the bed and slams me down on the wood floor of the room forcing the air from my lungs. I struggle to breathe.

In the hallway, there is the sound of struggle, the crash of a workhorse and of radio equipment against a wall. My father’s screaming is muffled but hysterical. The man pulls me by my hair over the floor to the threshold of the room while whistling “Sweet Chariot.”

A man and a woman are stooped over my father’s body in the hallway. The man wears a general’s uniform with tassels and metal trinkets dangling from the suit’s breast. His hair is gray and worn short, revealing segments of his scalp. He forces my father’s hands down on the floor while the woman in a black dress with a blood red Japanese floral print straddles his chest and works a strand of black thread into the eye of a needle.

“Please don’t,” I gasp towards them.

They both look towards me.

“I think I used to have a daughter that looked like that,” The woman says. The general clamps my father’s mouth shut while the she starts to sew over his mouth in a cross-stitch pattern. I think with his mouth sewn, my father so boney and worn, he looks like the candy skulls that are passed around for children on the Day of the Dead.

“Really?” The general asks.

“She was a light shade of green and when I ran my hand over her exterior it would prick the tips of my fingers. I only had to water her once a month.”

“I don’t think that was your daughter,” the other dead man says releasing my hair. He sits across my back forcing me into the floor. He’s so heavy. The peripherals of my vision blur and I feel like I might vomit.

“Then what was it?” she asks.

“I think it might have been the Novel.”

“No, that can’t be right. What’s a bicycle then?” The general asks. Blood collects at the edges of my father’s mouth.

“I hate how they ooze liquid like that.” The woman says. “It’s gross. It seems like all their time is spent collecting and expelling waste.”

The general looks around the hallway and sees a copy of Platonov at the base of my father’s room a foot away. He rips the pages from the spine and begins to dab blood from my father’s mouth with them.

“Please don’t take him away from me.” I plead from the floor.

The woman doesn’t look up while he is closing over my father’s left eye in a blue-green lace. She is wearing an elegant diamond necklace. She has a milky-white complexion that contrasts perfectly with her chic black bob. I wonder if in her life she was a diplomat’s wife.

“Your father crossed a line, little girl. Can you imagine a world where death isn’t a mystery? What a dreadfully boring place that would be.”

They finish their work and throw a brown sack over my father’s head. He mumbles pathetically through his stitches as the general, and the diplomat’s wife transport him across the threshold of the living room, each one holding a shoulder.

“What do we do with the girl?” The other man asks, climbing off my

back. The woman’s response comes back to me as though from a great distance.

“I told you, she reminds me of my daughter. I kept her in a beige pot beside a reading lamp. I loved her very much.”

There is the sound of footsteps across the foyer and the front door slams shut.

And just like that, my father is gone. From a distance I can almost hear laughter and clapping followed by a man’s voice in a British accent.

“ENCORE. ENCORE!”

As darkness from the corners of my eyes closes in on me, I can almost hear the steady cadence of a heart rate machine during Maggie’s last minutes alive. I sit at her bedside watching as her organs fail and she gets more and more tired. Our last conversation might have been nothing more than a thirteen–year-old girl sleep talking or a lucid dream.

“Mary, you have to promise me that once I live millions of years in Heaven and do everything, I won’t imagine myself as dead,” the dying girl says to me.

My father tries gagging his tears by shoving his fist down his mouth from the corner of the room.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “We’re wired to fantasize our own destruction.”

I explain to Maggie that boredom is the most powerful force in the universe. That’s why our God and our religion, all of creation, suicide, and cable television exist.

Maggie struggles to keep her eyes open. The machine’s tempo drops to a crawl of a concert bass drum.

“Just promise me that I won’t want death.”

I think of my mother’s last words the night she welcomed the vampires to come in.

“I don’t know if I can promise you that, kiddo.”

“Just lie to me a little bit. It’ll be such a beautiful lie,” Maggie’s last sentence collapses on the word ‘lie.’ The machine slows even further. It’s as though we’re in the hull of a large submarine and a sonar machine lets out an occasional dull beep. My father is sobbing behind me in his corner. There’s a long pause and then one last beep. Then static.

H

I nearly drop the gas can when I enter my father’s workstation later than night. The room is a wonderland of radio equipment; lined on all sides with flashing metallic panels, switchboards, antennae, and black wiring. The voices of the dead call out to me from all sides of the room as I pour the gasoline over the machines. Is anyone listening? It’s dark here. God? God can you hear me? My Grandson turns four today. I just want to wish him a happy birthday.

I save the old transistor linked to Maggie’s grave for last. It rests on a table in the center of the room. When I throw a match down, the room comes alive with hysterical voices and sparks flying from the dying hulls of metal equipment. The heat forces me back in the hall.

“Mary, is that you?” Maggie’s voice sounds from the old transistor. The device hasn’t caught yet sitting isolated on the table.

“Maggie, where are you?” I scream from the hallway into the blaze.

“I can’t get these stitches off Dad’s mouth, no matter how hard I pull at them. He just sits here.”

“Dad’s there with you?”

The fire jumps from the sides of the room to the table. The old transistor catches but Maggie’s voice still holds firm.

“Mary, you have to come find us. I don’t want to stay here anymore.”

The transistor spits out electricity. The metal glows red at its corners.

“Are you in Heaven? Is Hitler there with you?”

“Mary, did the witch come and take me and throw me in her bag?”

“I don’t know, Maggie. I don’t know what to do.”

“Please, come save us, Mary. I…”

The transmission is cut short as the top of the transistor collapses in. The smoke becomes thick in the hall and forces me to crawl on the floor with flames climbing out of my dad’s workstation to the rest of the house.

I make my way into my room and close the door gasping for breath against my dresser on the hardwood floor. I hear a tapping on the window pane.

“Mary, open up dear,” my mother says from behind the blinds of the

window. “I can help you put out that awful fire you’ve started.”

Smoke filters in through the gap in the door. Other voices join my mother’s. Mary, let us in. We know how to find Maggie and your father, says my grandma. You can all go to Heaven together, the voice of a childhood friend from when I was six.

I hear the hungry crackle of flames in the hallway and the splinter of wood. With the room slowly darkening in smoke, I realize I’ll suffocate if I don’t open the window. Maybe it won’t be so bad. I’ll be able to see my mom and all my friends from childhood that I miss so much.

I crawl to the drawn blind of my window and I think of God laughing, watching down on me at that moment through an antique pair of opera glasses, of my father, a candy skull man now with lips laced over in black thread, and of Maggie alone in the witch’s bag. I do want to see them all so badly.

“Alright,” I say. “You can all come in now.”