iv. night lights

It was around the start of December, Christmas trees were being sold
off neighbors' private lots, the cattle bundled up inside barns and
stalls, that celebration began in earnest in Small Wood. My mother had a tradition; she'd round the family up in the car and take us on a long winding ride to check out Christmas lights on display. It was exasperating in its tedium, but also good quality family time, stuck together as we were. The tone was often far more mocking than
revelatory, as Christmas was a time when even the more cultured and
well-meaning were somehow struck with a curious holiday affliction
known as complete and wanton tastelessness.

This year, Mom heard about a botanical garden and adjoining bed and
breakfast that was said to house a splendid and classy assortment of
holiday lights and decorations. So it was to be our mini-vacation to drive
there and spend a cozy night, relaxing away from it all.

Maybe for a week or so I could not get a particular girl out of my head. She was
not an expected choice for carefree idle obsessing over, as she was
as different from me as could be. So many attractions in life tend to
be of that variety, but for me it was a rare thing and I kept it to myself. It was not that I had anyone to really share the notion of her with. My family, I preferred their ignorance on all matters romantic, and the friends I could claim would have just tried to knock some
sense into me. So I found it the most casual and comfortable to just let the feeling linger beneath the surface, and pop up for breath only on occasion.

But as school winded down with the impending holiday time, and we, as a
family, took long drives up and down the coast to do our shopping and
preparations, I had an excess of time to fantasize and live in my head
with her. Some women I find very good for that, and it is ever only
in the imagination that they take on real and exacting depth. A
horrible thought, but I'd learned that so much of life was trial and
error, with the end result so often siding with the negative. I actually tried asking this girl to Winter Formal, only to be shot down in flames. The notion and my attempt really did come out of nowhere and must have appeared to the poor girl as a blustery,
confused sort of query. She knew of me, but nothing concrete solid. We
had no real interaction with each other except eye contact in halls.
We did not share a pool of friends, nor did we participate in
activities together. It was admittedly a pretty horrible idea on my
part, but I regarded her as older, cooler, and my hormones ruled all.
Thankfully, after my subsequent dismissal, no mention of my attempt to
ask her out was ever relayed back to me by a third party, so I always
assumed she had the common decency not to make a show among her
friends regarding the error of my ways.

It's very strange because even now, almost ten years after last
seeing her, I really don't want to say her name or conjure up her
image. When I write, I want to feign ignorance. This is that part of
me I have trouble reconciling. So intensely personal I feel I can shed
light upon
some incidents from my past, but small little things like this, it's
almost like a stopper is in place and I can not drain this pool of
thought. It's personal shame, perhaps. I stash away the memory for my
own, and realize that there was once so much wasted opportunity for
connection, and my own personality and development as a person comes into
doubt when I think back to all my blunders and blind fool ignorance. I withheld
so much of my true feeling and emotion, and that baggage still runs within
me, deep and prescient. In the end it all comes down to that
unshakeable feeling, and
I harbor so much doubt about what might have been, could have been.

So there was that, and here now my extended analysis of rejection, and I suppose ties somehow to how I feel most alone during holidays, a time of all that
togetherness and cheer, that strips me naked, leaves me to shiver in the cold. I love my family, I love my friends, I love the women who were that half of me in their
time. The holy days, the change in temperature and climate, the
lengths we go to show how much we love and cherish. It all seemed a
bit much. Ennui is the best way to define it, as it has always been
there, that cold bit of distance like I'm a goddamn exile in my own
skin. Every last sentiment and doubt is quite firmly my own mental
folly, an excuse to despair when all is seemingly well in the world.

The holiday food I ate the year before I came to Small Wood was the
hallaca, a variant on the tamale, very popular in Venezuela. It was a
true mutt of cuisine. Inside the ground lard and maize enclosure was
basically whatever leftover the chef felt obliged to insert. I've
always very much enjoyed that tamale texture and flavor, or anything
dumpling-like in nature, all carefully portioned, wrapped, and
steamed. Half the fun was the surprise in seeing how very different
each meal turned out. A little bit of this and a little bit of that,
all wrapped up like a present, very time consuming to prepare, a labor
of love and special to the season. I bring this up, because that was
the last time I felt like a child, when the holiday was sacred, and
the world so beautiful it hurt. The cusp, is what I know it as.
Somewhere between the Small Wood holiday, and the Venezuelan one
prior, I'd lost it. I'd breached the cusp and was well on my way. The
luster, the luminous veil I now regard childhood with, that was gone
from sight.

Christmas lights were dull and obnoxious to me, an eye sore. The
Christmas tree, a decaying thing, gaudy all dolled up like that. I
never really believed in Santa as child, but in his place I always had
a sense of spirit, a concept of the beauty of the thing, and whatever
that unknown now failed me, or perhaps I failed myself. That sense of
history, the richness of the collective suspension of disbelief, the majesty and dream of a white sunrise, all that gone. I played pretend along with everyone who believed, I willed myself into fooling them all and going along with their foolishness because it mattered so very much to the world at large.

I spoke to my father my newfound sense of holiday dread and
he shrugged and told me, "When you have young children, I hope you'll
feel it again."

Before departing to the bed and breakfast and the Feast of Lights, I was
talked into playing a part of the town's annual radio drama rendition
of some sappy holiday pap our school librarian had written and poured every last bit
of herself into. I was to play Santa.

St. Nick and I had a confused and troubled history, as I'd also been assigned to play
him in a second grade wee tyke production about cultural confusion. It
would almost have been construed as racist if it weren't so gosh
darned cute.

For the radio play, I hoped to draw upon my rich and checkered past
with the character, so I wouldn't actually have to do any damn work. So
all that week, I lied and said I'd practiced my part, and when it came time to do a live reading on the air, I stumbled through my lines and botched the whole mess. Regardless of that performance, the librarian was so pleased with my enthusiasm and
doltish nature, she cast me as Lil Abner in the school musical without
even asking me. I refused to hurt her feelings, and keeping with the
holiday cheer I agreed to that as well.

Between mucking up an attempt to ask mystery girl out to winter
formal, making an ass of myself on the radio, and feeling general
loathing anytime anyone muttered "Merry Christmas", things were going
as well as they could.

The family unit put miles on the minivan that Friday evening, driving
in darkness an hour and a half away from Small Wood. I remember
sitting in the passenger seat, watching it all with a casual
detachment, feeling emotionally empty in a strange and novel way. I
did like I do now, I thought through my situation, gave much mind to
my troubles, if they even existed in a definable sense, and plotted a
course of action. With the winter holiday occurring after the end of
the next week, there was closure to the football season, to my first
school term in Small Wood, and an end to a year that started half a
world away.

We stopped at a small book store between Small Wood and the bed and
breakfast. The name of the place was "The Cat's Pause", and it was
lorded over by two elderly lesbians who knew their shit when it came
to good books. Tammy had saved a whole bag of paperbacks for my sister and
I, to our surprise. Grandma and Tammy organized a library book sale and
had ferreted out some pretty choice titles. Also included, for me
specifically, was a journal. It was a curious thing because it had a
name written on the outside, but nothing else to go on within. Right
there on the cover, it had once belonged to "Dean", whose hand-writing
was far superior to my own.

Later on, I took to writing to Dean from the perspective of some
stupid kid who had stolen his super awesome journal. It was
an entertaining way to write, but also a silly way to jot down
thoughts. I was pleased when something far more natural came out of
the process over time.

"Dean. I think you did the right thing, finding some way to rid
yourself of this diary before a kid like me got the chance to find it
and read it. See, now I'm the fool, putting my words in here, to be
discovered and divulged. If I had any secrets, I'd share them with
you, Dean, but as it goes, I'm pretty boring. I don't have a
girlfriend, I'm not all that popular, and I'm not sure what I'll be
doing when I graduate. I might do something with computers, or I might
see what's up with this journalism thing. I've had some strange dreams
Dean, like you wouldn't believe. I keep dreaming about this second
house on the property that doesn't exist in real life. I guess if you
were to go there awake, you'd find nothing but trees and maybe a bit
of a crick running through it. But in my dreams, it's this old
abandoned place, maybe three stories tall, but the third story has
sort of fallen in on the second, so it's very hard to get around in, lots of mattresses lying about everywhere. In my dream, my room is somewhere in there, and I'm always getting in trouble for how messy I keep the second house, as if I had anything to do with how gross it is. Tell you what Dean, if you ever come back and want your journal, I'll set you up a room real nice in the second house. You can live there, like a boarder, only rent free, because it's basically my place, and since you've given me the diary, I feel I can give you a room in return. Fair trade, huh? Now I don't feel so bad, because my words are going in here where yours never will."

So on and so forth, until I began to get more serious about
my words and the exact effect they were having. Say you create a
character in your mind, for instance this Dean fellow. Say he actually
exists, but the details about him are so very thin, like the skin of
milk left out to sit. Dean becomes something else with every passing
suggestion or idea that comes to mind. You begin to say stuff like, "I
wonder what Dean would think of this?" And Dean takes some precedence
in your thoughts, and over time he takes on features and the barest
emergence of personality begins to emerge. What has Dean become now,
but a presence nestled against the small of your thoughts? To me, Dean
always existed, he was around before my thoughts could ever give birth
to him. I hesitate to reveal just how I saw Dean, and where to lead
the narrative thread from here, but like any ghost that ever was, know
that Dean is dead now, and continues to live on in an appropriate form long after his demise. Because like I said, Dean once existed and will forever continue to haunt places such as these.

In my lap I held Dean's diary, gripped tight by fingers itching to
begin a dialogue with the white space inside. The oncoming headlights
looked like slowly exploding fireflies and I blinked in deep thought, working details
around in my head. Distortions in the glass were visual riffs, music
that I could play off in thought, a game of connection and
association.

We arrived and I pulled myself out of the daze. Opening the door, I heard the faint mewling of some animal or small child. It was off in the distance and it took a moment of the family standing around discussing it to realize the sound was coming from the woods on the other side of the road. We chose to ignore it and walked over to the bed and breakfast. The sign outside named it the “The Cozier Cottage”. A large Christmas tree was seen inside through the large front windows. The edges of everything were streamed in white lights, most of which simulated tall candles, dripping fake plastic wax.

It was dark, and we could not see the actual structure itself, but a lighthouse beacon burnt out across the night, its glass eye catching mine until I stopped staring.

The garden was a thing of beauty, tended by the young husband, Trav, who had quit his successful real estate career in southern California and moved up north on whimsy. The wife was Jo, and her face so full of joy, it seemed carefully molded on just so. The expanse of several manicured acres stretched out in most every direction. There were carefully placed rows to walk along and everywhere I looked, something was in bloom for the season, even in the dull cold chill of winter.

Inside the restored home was bracing warmth, clean and fertile smells of spice, and the comfortable feeling of being instantly familiar in the home of friends. It was a feeling I had to fight against, almost like nostalgic holiday intoxication; I wanted to keep myself cut off from, to preserve some individual sense of integrity.

Jo took our family photograph with a Polaroid camera, and pasted it into an album she kept by a register. She had us sign in and then ushered us into a sitting room, where hot cocoa and cookies were waiting. She told us a brief history of who they were, what they hoped to do with their new lives, and a little bit about the place. I wasn’t paying much attention, but caught fragments of pieces while I filled up on their foodstuff.

Trav came in and shook hands enthusiastically, told us he’d take us out for a night walk along the trail leading up to the lighthouse. He called it the ghost whistle. Trav explained that strong coastal winds would find their way into and out of the cracks of the column and the resulting sounds would carry far into the night. Sometimes, he said, it would seem as if voices called out.

We all carried large flashlights of the two-handed variety. We laughed as we trudged, clouds of vapor lit by our beams. Varieties of flora were singled out and lectured upon, my father gave lessons in coastal geological strata, and my sister and I discussed movies we’d like to see in the coming new year.

The lighthouse was surrounded by barbed gate, padlocked and rising high. Trav produced keys and let us into the bricked foundation walkway. He pointed out imaginary people and incidents long since past, snorting out disdain for the teenagers and tourists who’d come up to drink and fool around, oblivious to the high winds and slippery underfoot. He went on to explain that he and Jo were part of a troupe of community actors who’d re-enact historical pageants at the lighthouse during the summer and holidays. Although the lighthouse was not needed any more due to technological seafaring innovation, it was still kept operating by local tradition with diesel burning generating machines and their electricity.

This lighthouse was once hand-wound; the intricate lenses a dance of refraction and convection, the distance seen in all directions until disappearing under the natural curvature of the Pacific Ocean.

Trav told us about Russian lighthouses run on nuclear power and how they had disappeared into the ether, lost off the map. Their nuclear contents stolen for black-market materials, their physical locations erased from maps and memories. He dreamed of the intrigue of physically reaching those remote and precarious locations, the lighthouse silo like something out of a James Bond novel.

We were all getting very cold out there, but the sound inside was so very unusual. It was a haunted sound, painful and beautiful, shrill and serene. The pounding of the surf was like the sound of blood through the ears, thick and occluded and so close to overwhelming, echoed all around. Rooted to that spot we were, looking up in darkness, the stone masonry surrounding, the light twinkling up above shot out of floorboard and crevasse.

It was like nothing Christmas should ever be. Unnatural beauty erected at odds with the surrounding scar of water and rock. It was a beacon, this fortress of solitude. Slim and narrow, damp and noisy, a full time job and a home of sorts, this lighthouse was nothing if not an exaggeration of duty and human commitment.

If I had a girl to hug close, it would have been romantic. But even my family felt distant so close to me. I wrapped my arms around my chest to brace against the shivers that came easy, my teeth knocking against each other, my nose and ears so very red and flush cold.

iii. points of impact

I got very angry. Over the summer spent training for football, I had
slimmed down, gained considerable muscle mass, and worked up a healthy
appetite of unchecked aggression. When I think back on football, I
remember the mindset it put me in. When at first I was apprehensive and
distant, tossing in witty asides and cracking wise, I was later
borderline bloodthirsty and hair-trigger. I did not know my limits. I
strained to push myself harder and further than I had ever known. I'd
run for miles, knowing no end to what I could actually accomplish. I'd
gained my breath and got the beat down like it was a musical
performance I knew intrinsically. I could go and go, and sometimes it was
all I did.

I learned how alone and empty I was on the inside, I
strained to fill that interior space of myself with connection,
knowledge and beauty. To know myself, I'd push on into fringes of
not quite exactly normal.

What happened was this. Our first two games,
not to count our pre-season exercises, were away games. We actually
won our first two without much fanfare. In between victory, the pep
squad left us little
handmade offerings on our lockers. We wore our jerseys to school and
puffed our stuff. It was all a bit of a show, as we had two star
players who made up for the relative lack of experience all around and
made the rest of us look
good. There were many happy accidents on the away fields, as well the
early teams we played were far more rural and lackluster than the
pride and joy of Small Wood. The Friday night of our first home game
was raucous. The crowd was electric, the turnout
left the minority of town still at home, and the game began beautifully.
One, two quarters passed with us doing a bit more than nudging ahead.

Coach Kordowski humbled things down in the locker room, trying to
exercise a modicum of restraint and beat it into our heads the game
was far from over. Near the end of his impassioned plea for
level-headedness, an assistant coach came up and whispered into
Kordowski's ear.

Kordowski took a moment, raised his hands as if to
strangle or hug, than lowered them, his face washed red. He
tried choking them back but the tears came anyway.

He told us in a plain voice that two girls were killed in a hit and
run accident just two blocks from the stadium near the start of the
first quarter. Everyone on the team knew the dead girls by name except me. The
teenager was named Erica and despite sharing class together, I'd never
really noticed her. She was walking her developmentally disabled
sister, Monica, to the game when a motorist ran into them at a speed
that tore their bodies to pieces. Later on, details would emerge that
he was drunk and the gore of the impact so shocking he stopped and
tried to throw the scattered remains into the drainage ditch and cover
the bodies and flee. He made it to a motel before he broke down, wept
himself sober and over the phone turned himself into the police.

Fast Forward

Four years later, I was attending a nearby state university. Living in
the farm house was a family of four. The husband employed himself as a
full time metal sculpture artist and part time handy man. The wife
sold chicken eggs by the side of the road. The rent on the place
wasn't much, and they managed the day to day life just fine. They had
two cute young daughters who were smitten with the farm life.

One day, the husband and father began over-reacting to every little
thing. Something in his voice betrayed a hidden anger. He retreated to
his workshop and tore apart metal, twisting the original forms beyond
comprehension. He stayed there all day and all night. His wife and
mother of his children brought him food and drink and a blanket, which
he didn't need in the heat of composition.

Inside the home, the wife put the children to bed. She read them
stories together, and when the smaller girl was asleep, read to the
older one individually. She put on reading glasses halfway through the
hour long ritual, and sipped at an ever cooling mug of hot tea and
honey.

She pushed the edge of the blankets under and over the tiny forms
tight and checked the windows for cracks. The mother and wife closed
the door, leaving a sliver of light to cut into the warm space. She
walked down the stairs, grabbing an afghan blanket off the banister.
She put her cup in the sink of the kitchen and ran it under water. She
looked out the kitchen window, past the fruit-bearing trees and saw
the light from the workshop.

She went into the living room and turned on the small, barely working
television. Local reception was spotty, more radio than video. She
tuned into public broadcasting, interrupted the middle of a raucous
British imported sitcom. She sat with the blanket on her lap and
slowly drifted off to sleep.

She was woken suddenly by the sound of glass breaking. Coming out of
first stage sleep, she initially shook it off as the remnants of a
near dream. But then it happened again, the sound coming from outside.
It was barely there, muted by distance, then again in her right ear,
hardly registering. She stood and went to the window, but saw only
darkness past the light cast from inside. She felt like a tiny ship at
sea, the moon hidden behind clouds, and pulled the afghan closer. Time
passed and she waited, keeping watch. Nothing happened.

She walked to the service porch, pulled on a jacket and unlocked the
door. The smashing, shattering sound of glass again, this time from
right outside in the garage port not twenty feet from her. The wife
and mother got very afraid now. She locked the door back up and
retreated into the living room. There were two large picture windows
that killed the heating bill, but provided a gorgeous view of the
valley. She looked out from behind, like a second pair of glasses, the
feeling of desperation and inaction overtaking rational thought like
the quickening of her breath.

She heard the sound of broken glass, the tinkling of the shards
against the floor, now from inside the house. The small service porch
window, she rushed back to it, just peeking in. A clump of metal was
still coming to a rolling stop. She locked the secondary service door
and rushed upstairs, one hand in front of her mouth, the other
swinging and grabbing and pushing. She was crying, tears were coming
fast down her face, but she made no sound. One of the picture windows
imploded as she went up the steps, not looking back.

The mother went to her children, who were already awake and confused.
She pulled them from their blankets and they all went into the master
bedroom, with its two stairwell hallway doors and connecting bathroom.

The sound of breaking glass continued. The mother phoned the police,
who were calm and even. The mother tried to match their rationale
tone. It occurred to her that they were separated by so much. The
voice on the other end was sympathetic, casual, and assuring, trained
to relay information, to be a presence, but the two worlds the mother
and the dispatcher occupied were far apart and could never be bridged.

One was safe, away from harm, comfortable and emotionally distant.
Whereas the mother was suffering a shock induced breakdown, her home
invaded and raped by brute force, her children contemplating their own
mortal danger perhaps for the first time, her own very life perhaps in
the balance. What was in her ear, alien, calm and constant, a flood of
reassurance and it's alrights it's okays. The mother knew the voice on
the other end could not hear the tinkle of glass, the crunch of
footsteps over the ruin, the bass of whole house beating to the sound
of approach.

His voice called out to them, the husband father's. He said he was
bleeding, that he'd cut himself, that he needed help. The mother wife
kept talking into the phone, her children close to her in silence,
erratic breathing in their tiny chests, not sure what they should be
doing. They played with each other's hair.

He pounded his fists against the hard wood door. When it would not
give way, he tried kicking it. He persisted for minutes, screaming
obscenities and threats of violence, pleading love and death in the
same bloody roar. Eventually he collapsed, weeping, shaking the door
with his sobs.

When the police arrived, he came back to life and took to defending
his home from the authorities. He was subdued and sedated and put in
the back of the police car until the ambulance arrived. When the
officers assured her it was over, and that she could come out, the
mother wife and her daughters emerged, shaking but pacified calm.

There were smears of gore all through the house. The father husband
had cut himself pretty bad on his hands and arms. It was revealed that
he punched out his car's windows first, with his bare fists. When he
noticed how badly he'd cut himself, he wrapped them and continued
punching out windows with his bandaged hands. For the windows he could
not reach, he threw his works of art through.

The husband father was not a bad man, he just for some reason forgot
to take his medication. The mother wife and her daughters stayed at an
anonymous women's shelter in the woods for three weeks while he
recovered, served a small stint in jail, and went to counseling. All
the while I helped my grandmother with the repairs to the family home.
The mother wife felt so incredibly horrible and understood that no
simple apology or explanation would do. The family vanished to another
town, another rented home and prayed to god something like this would
never happen again.


Rewind

A simple statement, over and over. I'd sing it to myself for hours at
a time, alone in bed at night. I was struck with insomnia. Most nights
I was up till three or four in the morning, up at six-thirty for
school. When I could sleep, I'd often wake up hours early and not be
able to fall back asleep. I made up a song and sang it to myself,
hoping I'd rediscover a natural pattern. I felt most alone at these
hours. Often I'd just keep reading from twelve at night until the next
morning. I didn't let me family know about it, my school work did not
suffer; my performance on the field never mattered enough.

Often I'd just look out my window, at the moon on the night horizon,
falling behind the many trees, I'd listen to noises of animals and the
lands surrounding. I worked myself into a state of extreme paranoia
and anxiety. Thoughts overtook me; I'd consider what ifs that made me
shake. The song, the mantra, the statement was my key to fighting the
night terror, but it would only work once or twice in an evening,
after that I was left to fight my way to dawn, until the shadows
pulled back and wet covered the earth.

It wasn't simply being afraid of the dark; it was more the thought of
the overwhelming horrible pit of despair I'd see people sink into, it
was about me coming to terms with the total otherness that existed in
the world. I lived on the edge of darkness, and I peered into it every
night. When thousands of stars were out in force, I was afraid of the
alien unknown, how very small and pointless I was, how over-powering,
all encompassing it was in relation. When the clouds covered and all
was a foggy haze, I was afraid of what looked just out of view, the
tangible barrier between here and there, to lose yourself inside and
never come out.

All around me was fear, and I never let on how just afraid I was. What
really made my blood run cold was the idea that for every genuine
terror that hit me, there were a dozen more out there I'd never even
considered. Just the sheer enormity of me being unfamiliar and
uncomfortable in Small Wood hit me, and it hit me hard. I was coming
to understand and appreciate the true transition to adulthood, could
feel the impending weight of responsibility and decision. And that
scared me. So I stayed up late, my eyelids not my enemy, but doing me
no favors.

From September to December, my thoughts turned grim. My classmates
gave me the nickname Morbid, though I never really saw myself in that
light. I always felt my tone far more diffusive and joking than
serious, but I knew my nighttime thoughts were overtaking my daytime
interactions and it was reflecting on my habit and nature. There was a
lot of bad going on in the world that first fall in Small Wood, and
this was the very first time it got through to me, affected me in ways
beyond my understanding.

Tender was the flesh of the left and right edges of my mouth, the seams between my lips. I needed a shave and I'd been rubbing out of habit. The home game, my helmet off while I stood on the sidelines. When I first started practicing, before we got suited up, I was afraid for my safety. We weren't supposed to be hitting each other like we were, and minor injuries were frequent and noticeable. At the end of the day we could grimace a smile and compare our wounds. In hindsight, the week without pads was probably to toughen us up and weed out the players who couldn't grin and bear it. But the pads were like the best thing ever, I felt like a rubber ball, like I could bounce off anything. It was as much mental padding as physical, and without having to worry, the body could do some pretty crazy stuff. Gross physical injury placebo is what it was.

We were getting walked all over the third quarter. The news of the hit and run had sobered everyone to the point of detached introspection. There was no big whoop do it for the dead girls speech, only silence and tears. We were short two players who'd left the game to go to their dear friends, the family in shock and mourning. There was an understanding that a football game was not life and death tonight, that no one would be able to concentrate on winning after such a great loss. But we played and we won, I'll save you the suspense, as that wasn't the goddamn point. It was our last victory of the season, the rest downhill, each game far more humiliating than the last.

I just remember the final touchdown, the final ticking away of the clock, our victory assured. When it was all over, they flashed R.I.P. on the scoreboard and people filed out and away into the night. It was a Friday night where the players agreed not to get trashed and make trouble in the supermarket parking lot, where parents talked by their cars about finding the human filth responsible and doing unspeakable things to him, where religious types and the sympathetic souls held a candlelight vigil at church across the street, and where I went straight home to take a shower, sit in silence and stare out the window at the coming storm.

ii. "The Siren of Seagash"

Her real name was Delores Wiebe. Born in the late 1800s, her legs
fused together during development in her mother's womb and her toes
splayed out like long thin fingers, upon which thin webbing crept
part way down the lengths, joining each digit. A man collecting freaks
squinted in just the right light and saw himself a genuine mermaid.
His name was Eric Jarvis, a showman and grifter who was aging and
looking to set down roots. Delores' parents did not abandon her so
much as sell her, exhausted from the efforts of rearing her. No doubt
they saw the charms of her youth slowly twisted into a parody of
adolescence. I did not learn the daily details of her life, but I
could imagine them unpleasant. To sell his attraction, Jarvis stripped
young Delores naked and had someone carry her onto a small,
semi-aquatic stage with an unnatural island for her to pine at young
men from a distance, all for the cost of a few coins.

I don't know why I started researching the mermaid, but I was intrigued. I
knew of the Fiji Mermaid, a con job of P.T. Barnum and wondered if
this Siren may also be the somewhat convincing chimerical concoction
of an over-stimulated taxidermist. But Ms. Wiebe was no shaved monkey
fused to a tuna. I found no other pictures or photographs of her,
beyond the initial discovery of the carved wooden advertisement. In
Small Wood's Elk Lodge, a newspaper clipping existed to re-enforce her
historical existence. I will return to its significance later on.

Interlude

It's not like I was poring over books to find out the history of this
woman. The story of Delores came to me in fragments during the years I
lived there, like most such stories that come out of small towns.
Understand that there is a veil about places like Small Wood and that
veil must be actively lifted, bit by bit, if you ever wish to see past
the ignorance of the place and the populace. Small towns guard their
secrets well, as the stain of time will forever tarnish family names,
local businesses, and whole generations whose ideas and practices have
fallen out of fashion with modern thinking. If anything, Small Wood
was a wonderful repository for wayward ideals, a time capsule, sealed
tight, of mores, taboos, and tragedy.

I had a dream about the mermaid while I was napping between morning
and evening sessions of football practice. I was not expecting the
sheer exhaustion of the routine and did little for the first week
besides eat, sleep, and bathe. I remember the dream because it was vivid,
and I was soaking out my soreness in the large sunken first-floor
bathtub when it
occurred.

I was back in Venezuela, in the Canaima region, naturally rich in elevated
tepuis, dense with dark green vegetation, and flowing with towering
waterfalls, a primal, unspoiled, and humbling place. Specifically, I
was in one of the many smaller Sapo Falls, under the beat of the
cascading wall. The opaque film of water in front of me, distorted the
world outside the cool calm wet of the underneath. And that's where
she came to me, this mermaid. Her lower half was more eel
than fish, leather thick with mucous, her hair long and looped in on
itself wet, her eyes curious but innocent, like a neighbor's timid pet
dog. Her lips found mine under the water and she pressed up against
me. It was a short dream, far more sensual than sexual. I woke up with
a nervous anxiety that had to do more with the imagery of being late
for practice, than of leaving behind a pastoral tropical dreamland.

I did not give the dream much thought. I had an eye on a teammate's
sister who picked him up after practice, and she in fact occupied most
of my waking fantasies. She was a very thin dark featured young woman,
exotic looking to the thick and pale sorts such as myself who made up
the majority in Small Wood. In two months time, my tan was quickly
fading, and serious sunbathing out on the roof above my bedroom could
not sustain what I'd acquired at the equator. Her name was May, and
she was fun to think about amid all the poundings in pads, the forced
repetition of drilling, distracting my thoughts from the sounds of whistles and grunts.

She was casual carefree, beautiful and strong in self, content just to sit
around half the day and watch the boys practice football. She
eventually settled on a star player and disappeared into the
background noise of life once school started. But May and I crossed
paths many times, for many reasons, and her connection to Delores in
my mind was always liquid, never firm, as May and Delores were as
different as two individuals could be, living a hundred years and just
one mile apart.

End interlude

The Cliffside Circus looked more like a bordello or gaming parlor than
an actual circus. The main building was true enough built up along the
edge of a cliff, overlooking jagged rock outcroppings, beaten raw by
the harsh surf beneath. Smaller satellite lodgings and showrooms were
built up in a semi-circle, like half a wagon train.

Eric Jarvis had an only child whose name was David. Since the age of
fifteen, he was known as a hard-drinking, hard hitting man. He was
eventually killed at the age of thirty-three for allegedly raping a
prominent mill owner's daughter. David grew up on the road, a brutal
life for any child of that era, leaving his siblings dead and buried across the
landscape of his youth. At his father's insistence, David had
relations with many of the retinue retained at the circus. He often
said he loved the face of Delores, in more ways than one, but by all
accounts he truly did care for the misshapen girl. He was often seen
nursing a bottle, standing watch over her like a protective older
brother, often intimidating the rowdies who'd try to climb over the
rail, wade into the pool and grab a feel.

David's uncle and Eric's brother, Jeff, was the primary attraction at
the Cliffside Circus, a very talented and renowned clown and
vaudevillian performer. He was a bitter misogynist, though his disdain
for life was spread pretty evenly out across all ethnicities,
religious convictions and sexual hang-ups. He was a foul and funny
individual, and according to rumors, a very successful chicken hawk. There were no
surviving women in the Jarvis household, so Jeff took it upon himself
to hold the dwindling family together.

In the cold spring of 1902, an ice storm hit the coast hard. It was an
unusual sight, to see frost in the sand, trees glazed in clear. It
lasted close to a week and culminated with hundred mile an hour winds,
and a torrential wash of misery. Water came down off the mountains in
wicked gushes, uprooting trees and tearing through homes. The
Cliffside Circus had the unfortunate position of being situated at a
washout point on the coast. The staff and workers worked in freezing
conditions to salvage as much as they could, as fast as they could,
before it all was swept into the sea.

Somehow Delores was forgotten about until the end. They heard her
screaming as her tropical island enclosure was being slowly carried
away over the erosion of the actual cliff side itself. The shelf was
sloughing off completely, weakened beyond the point of no return. She
called out for help, but the ground was an unstable, sinking mess.
Invisible cracks in the earth filled with water, and a misplaced foot
would at best, sprain an ankle, at worst, disappear you completely in
quicksand.

A split tree had gashed David's arm and he was being tended to, and
implored his father to go after the trapped girl. Eric got a team of
able-bodied young men, tethered with ropes, and inched towards the
stranded, perilous mermaid exhibit. Reports differ about the exact
timing of the collapse, but it was at this point that much of cliff
gave away, and about twenty feet of rock slid into the surf, taking
several buildings down the side, and leaving the remainder straddled
on the very edge. When the team got into the home, it was already at
an angle, mud pouring into it, and out a window. Delores was seen
holding herself above the cold thick shock of it all, grasping for
dear life to the tropical tree. She was screaming ever more
desperately, but knew that to release hold would be to swept out the
back, and to her certain death. Eric did his absolute best to save her
life, but their timing was just not good enough. The rest of the shelf
gave way, and the house crumbled into the ocean, taking Delores Wiebe,
Eric Jarvis, and two other men into the sea.

In the hours that followed, another team led by Jeff ventured to the
rocky bottoms, and recovered all the bodies, save for Delores. Whether
or not Jeff refused to waste time to salvage the corpse of Delores, or
it was never actually found, remains an unresolved sticking point.

But the story of Delores does not end there. As she was a tragic
figure in life, she remained, if not became, and even more tragic
figure in death.

Second Interlude

The grunion is a fish. A small, silvery fish that crawls ashore to reproduce. It is in almost every way unimportant, save for the fact that Small Wood holds an annual grunion festival, a celebration dedicated to the peculiar lifecycle of the odd fish. Local artisans and tourist shops promote the sale of special grunion bags, to make an extra buck or two off those who hold an opinion of the event an actual importance or significance. All this in hopes of sacking a fish driven defenseless by its basest instinct to mate.

It happened on a Sunday. I was kissed by a girl who had a boyfriend, and the kiss was not innocent. It was lust, plain, simple, and if there was fault for it happening it was my own. I pushed her away and held her at arm's length and her smile, her heat, turned to cold, sad anger as I watched her breathe in and out.

It all started earlier in the day. There was a beach-clean up my family was a part of. We scoured the coast for whatever nuggest of refuse we could find. The problem of beach litter wasn't much of a problem, so the whole ordeal turned into a competition to see who could fill the inside of a whole trash bag, and even then everyone joined together to work in teams. The beach-clean up was a community event in preparation for the Grunion Festival, whereupon carnival equipment and food vendors were turned loose, high school beauty pageants held, and middling prizes raffled off. Many of us found it somewhat shortsighted that we were putting all our effort into making the town look good before the whole ordeal, instead of after. As it was, the festival put the whole town in a heightened sense of activity and tempers ran short all the way down the one main street that ran from the pacific coast inland. The town cop was being a bigger dick to dick teenagers, and the four beauty pageant queens were in cuthroat competition to build floats, bolster their support, and be highly visible for their own charity work.

Since it was down to the wire, all four girls were volunteering their last few hours, helping with the beach clean-up, each going at it with their own brand of chipper fascism. It was here I met Katrina. She was the youngest of the competing queens, very beautiful, quite fiesty and sometimes a chore. She would later develop extreme hypochondria as she grew older, and we would eventually become good friends, but at this exact moment, she was at once, headstrong, sweet and easygoing. She liked most every person she dealt with, and abstained from the gossipmongering that was so common in her clique.

She approached me during the clean-up, and wanted to know who I was and what my situation entailed. I knew right off she wasn't hitting on me, it was more of a determined curiosity. She enganged my younger sister as well, asking her just as many questions. Katrina was the only daughter of Russian immigrants in the early seventies, born on these shores, instilled with a certain anxiety and worldlook that was at odds with the rest of the local community. Perhaps this common thread was the root of a friendship, perhaps it was just that she was smart, friendly, and I gained much entertainment by working her into a frenzy. Just to clear this up, Kate was not the girl who kissed me. That was Kate's friend, Shannon, who I had met a few weeks back.

My parents wanted a night together, so they dropped my sister and I off at Small Wood Rec Center, a small, deteriorating one room building on the main drag of town. Unfortunately, that night was a young person's dance instead of the usual, casual come as you are games of foosball, pool, and scattered cartridges popped into an old nintendo system. A portly kid was the deejay, and there were eight kids making an effort, not counting my sister and I. We were standing at the entrance horrified, refusing to budge another step. A backwards glance confirmed that our ride had left for good. Janess and I made for the back where we arranged fold-up chairs in sitting positions and looked around for out-dated but readily available reading material. We could stonewall it together, if we were careful, block out the horrible spectacle playing itself out. The deejay sensed our combined resigned unease and came over to us, introduced himself while the music played itself out in the background.

His name was Jay Rose, and his aspirations in no particular order were actor, artist, and musician. He was popular in the sense that everyone liked the guy, not necessarily was he the most handsome, talented, charming person our age, but possesed a good mix of qualities that gave him confidence, most notably calm in the face of failure. He was out-going and energetic, very good at observing when people needed a solid word to pull them out of their own heads.

We never became fast friends, but always respected and kept a charitable distance from each other. We were alike in many ways, so the desire to stand apart was quite strong, and Rose was a senior so there was a natural falling out of touch after the school year was over.

Rose came up to inform me he'd kill the dance soon due to the poor turn out and instead open up the middle school gym to get a pick-up basketball game going.

Before that happened, a girl I hadn't paid much attention to came up and asked me to dance. I shrugged a confused sort of agreement and we walked out hand in hand sideways to the obvious dead zone of couples shuffling around in place ever so suggestively to the time of the beat.

She had a big grin on her face and kept her head rested on my chest for most of the dance. I wasn't really clued into the whole dating scene, and wasn't making any serious attempts at much of anything. If rumors that I was gay existed, which they probably did, I couldn't care less. My heart was actually getting nostalgic and pining for an older romance overseas, which was pesky and impossible, but still, that's where my head was. The major qualities I found attractive in a woman, outside of beauty, still eluded me in Small Wood, and I was craving something approaching serious intellect quite diligently. Shannon was not what I was looking for in the slightest, but we danced.

Jay Rose killed the thing dead and we all shuffled off to a ballgame.

End second interlude


In the immediate months following the death of his father, David Jarvis moved himself fifteen miles north and found work in a cannery. He was a frequent and noisy drunk, both on the job and off, and made few friends. His uncle had taken it upon himself to salvage the remnants of the circus, but David wanted nothing more to do with it. Jeff had the foresight to relocate the tiny operation to the new township of Cooper’s Bay, which would later become the coastal retreat of choice, due to its relative proximity to Portland, and the overwhelming and untapped natural beauty that surrounded the place.

David chose this new profession as a means to work his way onto a commercial fishing boat, an area he had no experience in, but also one where he’d have to be competing against hardened veterans who had been born into the industry, as had their still employed fathers before them.

A week after the disaster at Cliffside, while David was holed up in rented lodgings on the physical mend, he wandered out onto the beach to watch the sunset and break the silence of his self-imposed exile. He related the tale of what happened next with irregular flourishes and inventions, and my own interpretation is as such,

”I walked down to the water’s edge. It was after dark, and the moon could not be seen behind the clouds. In fact, light was hard to come by, what little of it shone was caught up in water that gleamed off the fresh tide’s edge. There was a plague of sand fleas, newly emerged to congregate and swarm upon the living and the dead. It was sitting there, after some time, that I noticed a bodily form working its way up on shore. At first I thought it to be a lone sea lion, then it stood upright. I stood and strained my eyes to see. It was a woman, naked to the world. The weather this time of year was loathe to tolerate well-bundled, so I rushed to her, so that I might cover her. The sand at night would seem to go on forever, what with the ebb and pull of the ocean, giving and taking away the surface, but eventually I got near enough to call out to her and be heard. She was in up to her navel, her arms out, dragging them along the surface. People say, I wanted to make her real again, bring her back to life. She walked out to me, her arms out for me to take her in and hold her. She was walking on two good legs. So I don’t know what to think myself, let alone explain to others. She didn’t say a word, she just stood there, the water at her knees, and I just stared back at her. I hate to say it, but a real chill crept over me, my body was telling me that this was no good, and every small hair on my body went tight. I backed away slowly, not wanting to take my eyes off her, and she just kept standing there with her hands out. Naked as she always was, for the entire world to see.”

But it was just David out there alone that night, and the only witness to the dramatic rebirth and reconfigurement of Delores Wiebe. No words were reported exchanged between the two, no real objective contact was made. It had the makings of a ghost story, and could only be dismissed or embraced as such. It was true that Delores had a younger sister, Rachel, but the two were about as different as two blood related siblings could possibly be, and a case of mistaken identity was out of the question. Rachel was married at age fifteen to the captain of a San Francisco based light cargo vessel, and was not seen in Small Wood again until her twenty-eighth year.

So it was that David spread the tale of the one-time mermaid, full-time ghost, who haunted the shores of Small Wood with frequent regularity. It was noted in public record that no one associated with Delores and her short, strange life died under irregular circumstances, nor did they report any unusual supernatural out of the ordinariness amid the everyday humdrum, nor receive any death-rattle messages from the beyond. As hauntings were reported then tallied in later years, the frequency attributed to Delores Wiebe manifestations rose. Nude young women emerging from the water silently and unexpectedly happened far more often than one might imagine.

David, while not believing Delores alive, did also not think her dead. He was a harsh realist who enjoyed storytelling and conniving a few dollars out of an unwilling victim, but almost seemed to refuse to believe his own tale when it ended and his consideration of it began. To everyone else in Small Wood, the strange report of Delores had little to no value, yet it was a curiosity that consumed David, and to the select few that knew the young man, it was more a product of his psychological grief and torment, than an actual real supernatural manifestation of the tragedy that lingered.



Third interlude

School started, the football season began, and I joined the school newspaper on a whim. While football season was a glorious disaster and worthy of further commentary later on, the newspaper whim turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me in Small Wood. I had enough distinction at writing, design, reporting and editing to fill many capacities in an understaffed, underfunded academic endeavor and help make it shine in truly successful terms. The gig also got me out and about in the town under the pretext of scooping, digging my nose in and spending more time than necessary in a school or county library. It should be noted that Katrina was a photographer for the paper, Shannon a features writer, and it was Jay Rose who pencilled the one and only comic strip, "Drift Wood", about a teenager named Wood and his yearnings to leave forever. Most of my friendships in Small Wood were forged out of that classroom and the late nights that I learned to manage myself and others, finding an escape from the spotlight of athletics.

From that very first day, I took to the newspaper with a passion. I'd write my stories on bus rides to and fro football games with headphones on, and ask just enough questions to get plenty of dirty looks and sideways glances. I enjoyed the itching sensation from when a good idea gnawed at me, and the pressure of a deadline sawed through any mental laziness that accumulated over the course of a week. Writing kept me honest and sane I discovered, as there was a good deal of dishonesty and insanity going around.

It was no big secret that Shannon had a thing for me, but I brushed her aside and all but ignored her. I did not and still do not enjoy hurting the feelings of others, but I was young and dumb and made the mistake of trying to have it both ways and be a nice guy. Within a week of her writing notes, having friends relay vague come-ons and hints, I figured she'd moved on. Hell, I saw her riding shotgun on Derek's arm and was instantly relieved and thought nothing more on the matter until her lips found mine.

So she kissed me and I might have kissed back a little. It was sensation and it was good, but my head knew better and I started talking and that sure did the trick. She was tears and bitter anger, and she quietly exploded on me. I just stood there silent while she lashed into me and it sure enough hurt, but there was something about her and the situation that made me numb. I did not understand her feelings, and all I could give back in return were looks of confusion. Up to this point, I was not passionate about girls at all, save for summer time romances, vacation liasons and bookstore glances. I was cold and insensitive for the most part. I was permanently nice and curious and could listen to them talk for hours, but when it came to giving, I didn't know what it was I could offer. I wanted so much that teenage girl presence in my life, that female half that was more wise and connected than my own twitcy male uncomfortable in my own skin nonsense, and I took advantage of their friendships because I saw them as good people I wanted in my life.

I suppose the reason I kept a tangible thread alive and well between us was because I didn't know that many people, and while I didn't have passionate longings for Shannon, she was decent company and I very much valued that in a human being. I couldn't explain my position in regards to her, so I did my best to stand there and let the backlash wash over me. The guilt I was feeling for hurting her was replaced by my anger for her own seething resentment. It was unfair, and while I understood it, it deeply hurt. Derek was a teammate, I was the new kid, and I got my ass a little kicked on the playing field by him and his friends. I suppose I welcomed that, playing the part of the whipping boy, to assail my own guilt. Nothing got broken or beat up too bad, but a little penance went a long way. One day harsh words were exchanged, and when it came to baritone ball-shaking bravado, I unleashed the honest truth and my godawful rage. Teenage angst if left unchecked, explodes, just like every other goddamn adolscent emotion. No short fuses, all or nothing.

End third interlude


Disappearances occur at a higher than normal percentile in towns such as Small Wood. Firstly, they get noticed as it is hard not to notice the absence when everyone knows, or knows of, everyone else. Second, the rural quality of life is a warm blanket that can both comfort and smother. When someone wants to vanish, it is very simple to do. Third, small towns put up the front of being a lone beacon of light amid so much darkness. At once, people flock together for company and distance themselves just so. This duality of small town existence is a fragile and carefully designed thing. And finally, the most very sad and true fact about a person who disappears off the face of the map is that they are most often never heard from again. There are always exceptions, as people are so prone to prove.

A girl by the name of Gloria Bryant was last seen tending to chickens in a coop outside her room. Because of the unusual nature of the disappearance, and the fact that she appeared to be a content young woman of the era, foul play was immediately suspected. In truth, she had absconded with David Jarvis to his small one-bedroom home. They lived in sin for four days, enjoying each other in as many ways possible. Gloria laid low in the home, tending to small inside chores and errands, and waited for David in the evenings. The hammer fell when David revealed to the girl that he really had no feelings for her, and was not looking forward to the prospect of marriage or the remotest possibility of commitment. Jarvis made the mistake of giving the girl too much credit. She showed a casual disdain for most men, and David figured she'd tire of him as quick as he tired of her. He was wrong.

Gloria was found by the side of the road, beaten and dishevelled. Her rescueer was a travelling minister by the name of Cook. Him and his wife tended to her cuts and bruises and delivered her into the safekeeping of her parents. Gloria was the victim of a horrible crime, an inhuman monster. She played like she had never met Jarvis before, though several citizens had seen the two trysting together previous. Her act worked, and her description of the rapist yielded a warrant for the arrest of David Jarvis.

Jarvis caught wind of the lynch mob headed his way, and managed to get as far as the port authority before a group manacled him and beat him to death. His body was delivered to the water and that was his burial.

But there is a further wrinkle to this narrative that begins like this. David Jarvis was at once, both reported killed in 1910, and working as a fisherman later that year. Unusual consistencies such as this showed up time and time again in Small Wood records. The town population hovered at around a thousand since the first official census. The article included the testimony of one David Jarvis, interviewed by an out of town paper covering the damming of the Shohshan River. I've summed up as follows,

"The fish will die, the industry will die, and finally the very town itself will die. If this action goes forward, there is nothing nobody can do to stop it. Those of us who still have voices are coming forward to say what needs to be said."

It is not known when or where the interview happened exactly, if the person claiming to be David Jarvis changed his name to protect his identity, or as some altogether cruel joke, but the words were writ in print and stamped with a date. If it was an anomoly, it was a curious one. If it was more than that, it was as if the boy afraid to cry wolf became just that.

i. a brief history of me, part one

This will not be a typical bit of biography.

At this moment in time I am twenty-six years old, far more potential
than actual. I was just recently told this by my mother, that I am
stunted developmentally, not as much an adult as I should be, that I
regressed for many years by staying in Small Wood when I should have
been moving forward. This latest retreat was from my second stint in
Small Wood, the first was years before.

My family moved to Small Wood the summer after my sophomore year spent
overseas in Caracas, Venezuela. My dad was out of work, and we fell
back to regroup in the states on my grandmother's unused piece of
country property.

I found it to be a beautiful but fallen upon disrepair ranch house. It
was two stories, yellowed and mildewed on the outside, shingles split
and prone to falling loose. The house proper could be reached driving
down from the coastal highway by turning off a small, one-lane pebble
road marked with a sign stating simply, 'Little Switzerland".

Surrounding the property were cow pastures, bordered on one edge by a
river, the other by primal woods descending down to touch the valley.
It was a quiet place; neighbors were distant and never encountered
with any real frequency. Cows got loose, the river flooded, trees
split and fell across the road. These were typical of the intrusions
upon day to day life.

I had spent holidays in the house years before. I was familiar with
it, but it was not my home, it was my grandmother's. It had a
comfortable, nostalgic feel, but I was a teenager, and coming from a
very large, alien city to a small, isolated house within a small,
isolated community unnerved me. I was not at heart a spoiled bright
lights big city boy, and I did not complain about the sudden and
drastic change to life and the pace of life, yet I was always
self-aware and out of place. I lacked the skills my father and sister
had to tend the land, and raise livestock in limited quantities. I
helped out where I could that summer, pulling weeds, feeding grain to
the beasts, unpacking and moving into the place proper, but I was not
an easy fit with the new accommodations.

I remembered skinny-dipping in the chill cold waters of the river, of
hopping the fence and dodging cow pies in a mad rush to the water and
not to catch the bull's attention. I had brought friends with me in my
youth, and those memories lingered around the place with an almost
empty solace.

I was a true teenager, halfway between innocence and aged. The world
had wizened me beyond my years, my family always a wonderful blessing
to have as moral poles in my life. My parents were smart, if not
brilliant, in ways I'd never understand, both so very warm and wise
and open to my development as a human being.

My father, on his trips into town, started rumors about a promising
young athlete from Venezuela, and before long I was signed up for the
local high school football team. I had no experience playing the game,
none at all. My dad made a name for himself in his youth, owing much
of his collegiate opportunity to the sport.

I was expected to follow in his footsteps, at least in theory if not
actual ability. To appeal to my intellect and curiosity, my father
hailed high school football as, 'a cultural experience'.

He assured me, in a mocking tone that I would get to know and
appreciate the locals, their customs and beliefs.

So in preparation for joining the team, I began running along the road
up and down the property to get myself in shape and make a better case
for why this strange, tall, half-way foreign boy should earn a spot on
an already established dynasty. I had routinely generalized that the
people of Small Wood were nothing if not unaccepting and distrusting
of outsiders, which turned out to be not far from the truth.

For the first few days of activity, I was sweating and seeing the
sights around me as landmarks I had to pass on the way to better
shape. Breathing in and out commenced with a more regular rhythm,
pounding my feet to the ground, paced to the beat of my racing heart.

After several stretches of growing boredom and familiarity with my
route, I branched off to scale the terrain, to stimulate my own sense
of adventure. There were knotted paths leading both up and down the
road, twisting alongside cricks, emerging upon tool shed areas, out of
the way pole barns, and the remains of old fallen in houses. Debris of
lives lost in transition, abandoned and forgotten.

The first time I saw the crumpled barn, I thought it part of the hill,
foliage consuming much of the exterior, more negative space than
positive. I pushed my way in and found remnants in corners, hidden in
shadows, the sunlight poking through bleached and crumbled the flesh
of it in places.

A cabinet of sorts held a broken marionette, sagging at the hip. At
one time it danced on a vaudevillian stage, but the glass fourth wall
was broken, buttons and levers that controlled the nickelodeon
automaton still worked, herking and jerking the sneering performing
puppet this way and that. His name in red paint, Jiggles the Juggler.
His head came to rest against his shoulder after the exhausting
performance. His smile and jeering eyes set upon a something across
the way.

Jiggles was not alone in his old age, so triumphed, half hanging from
the wall as audience before him, a carved wooden sign.

A beautiful woman sat on a rock, naked from the waist up. Her dark
hair covered just enough of her chest, fell down below her waist. The
rest of her figure was the product of an artist's imagination, a long
blue fish tail that hugged the rock, as heavy surf crashed up behind
her. In old script was writ, "Come Visit Today", "A Twisted Beauty and
a Beast", "Only at The Cliffside Circus Attraction",

preface

You need a title, it says to me, the little voice behind my thoughts.

small wood volumes, (I fill this in later.)

Up awake, at hours when the company I keep is made up of figments and
fragments. I write because words keep coming, that is, the thoughts
are neverending. I eat crumbs that are the remains of yesterday. The
transition time between then and now, thoughts racing before the dawn
of another day. The frenzy takes me and I must keep going, I must not
stop. I have to write, about all of them. Those who know their place,
the ones who live with damaged goods, whose only dream is to come up
even on the karmic scale. My heart goes out to them, and their
restless thoughts. Pollution of hurt and grief spills out like split
trash bags on the sidwalk. This is an essay on nothing, no thesis body
to be found. An example made in maps on walls, delineating who we are
by where we live. Status and circumstance, the rise and fall of a
nobody, no name given.

Music sits softly on my ears, headphones hug and comfort. I make up a
fiction to dilute the facts of this life. My story is simple and easy,
so I'll begin there and take you someplace else.

It's not that my history unnerves me, it is just that it has been so
long since I've sat down to write seriously, I don't think I can tell
the truth without boring myself, so I must fabricate and you must
settle. You found these words, and continue reading of your own
accord.

I lived in a town called Small Wood, on the coast of Oregon. I moved
from there three years ago after many endings occurred all at once. I
kept a diary while I was living there, collecting scraps of what I
thought to be history, art, and a living fiction of the town I lived
in. I write this in recollection and add the remnants from the old
life where their place belongs. Know this is all a puzzle to me,
thousands of pieces all touching and connecting in so many ways.

I'm not sure which piece goes first.

This is a story not as it was, nor how I wanted it to be, it is the
story of ghosts that live on, failures that haunt, peoples that
persist, and death that goes unremarked upon.

There is no structure to the telling of this story, there is no one
medium for ideas to stick to.

Such is life.

A beginning now, to set the stage, to pull the curtain back, and have
our narrator come in on cue.