In her cottage there are so many thing strewn about. Cooking things, dead things in jars, braids of garlic hanging from the ceiling, plants crawling up walls, a typewriter, a battered old leatherbound thing that looks familiar. The doors are hidden behind the mess. But there is one passage draped with strings of seashell that I was told not to go into. She called it her boudoir, and entering I see a long mirror and in it lives a stroppy-looking teenager with a middle part and a droopy eyelid.

“Primordial scene three,” he says. “Hateful high school trip, bus on the way home. I sort through somebody’s Nokia as kids would and see who he knows and what are the nicknames. I find your number under ‘Untalented.'”

This, then, was my persecutor.

“I saw you,” he says, “on the other side, cutting your own hair, trying to make yourself look like a soldier again. I saw you but you didn’t see me.”

I say nothing. I stand before him, accused.

“You forgot about me,” he continues. “you left me behind. I taught you though, didn’t I? So proud of your adulthood you were. You thought you were through with me. But I am a screaming wound I will not be sidelined I will not–“

He stopped at his own rage turning to tears. I let the silence fall heavy.

He sniffed a little. “But I had my hands on your heart-strings, you frayed little reins. Me all along. I was there when the new blonde was nibbling at your edges. I made you disregard her just the right amount, playfully, dropping hints to draw her in. You read your little turd about the stolen voices and she laughed and applauded. So proud of you you must have been.

“But it was my voice that was stolen. You cultured your grey airs around me. You put me in a jar with all the other exhibits. You never let me play unless you wanted something.

“But I saw you. I saw you but you didn’t see me,” tears were streaming now.

“You never see anyone.”

I rooted around my thoughts then. His sorrow was my sorrow, and I was wrenched though I didn’t show it. Then a memory stirred, and I began to tell it as it formed itself anew:

“You know,” I said, “we were at the video store, one of those nights out with the gang that wouldn’t end, trying to pick a movie to rent we were all equally disinterested in.” I let a half-smile play at him, see if I could soothe him. “And we saw these three people, who looked so uninteresting we felt bad for their own sake. The hierarchy didn’t even exist for them. Two guys and a girl, and they were trying to choose between two movies. She wanted something other than what they did, and she must have been ready to relent and defer. And then the one guy, who must have been the boyfriend, stepped in and said, ‘hey,’ Mary or whatever, ‘it’s ok. We’ll take both.'”

His mood had changed. So had mine.

“And we never forgot about them, did we? They were the sweetest people on earth. He wanted to do something nice for his girlfriend. And he broke the rule that says you only rent one video for the night. Isn’t that something?”

I must have had a smirk on and he a playful bittersweet kind of relief.

“Fuck off you big poser,” he said, and we both started laughing.

“Oh,” he went on, “look at the big shot, only he knows what ’embossed’ means!”

I held on to my knees and laughed my belly out. “He will turn you into so much content!”

“The fit I threw to get our parents to fix that eyelid,” I said. “Cosmetic surgery at seventeen. I should have gotten a boob job while at it.”

“And the time Effi Sarri called you to tell you she was into you and you told her to fuck off cause you thought it must be a prank.”

“Well they did do that a lot. Or there would be someone listening in on the other line? Gosh. Landlines.”

“Nobody misses them.”

I sighed. “So what happens now? I am very newly dead. I don’t know anything.”

He went hmmm. That was new. I never used to go hmmm at that age.

“I think you oughta come over.”

He was serious. They say noone is as serious as a child at play.

“Yes,” he continued, “you will come find me. And I will teach you the red pen spells.”

“How do I–” I started saying, but he was gone.

I rode the signal and saw what was left behind, and knew, suddenly, how to want again.

I passed through the seashell strings like it were the curtain of a waterfall, and found the dark woman there waiting for me, and I could tell that this time she meant business.

“Darkness,” she said, and every light was gone, so that darkness may speak.

<~