Category: short creative nonfiction

Radio | Chelsea Yates

I am hunkered down in my coat closet. I’ve shoved my winter coats to the far end, wondering why I brought so many with me to Houston. To make space, I’ve pulled out my shoe rack, the vacuum cleaner, and a box of knick-knacks that don’t yet have homes. This closet cleanout takes just a few minutes since I moved into the apartment only three weeks ago. I spread the comforter from my bed onto the floor, folding it in half like a sleeping bag. I’ve propped my pillows against the closet wall. It’s a cozy little bed, but I know I’m not going to sleep. 

The wind roars outside. The power’s just gone out. I switch on my only flashlight. Its beam gets my cats’ attention. Herschel jumps to catch it, but Oliver is distracted by the tree branches that are now scraping against the window panes. He hunches, and his tail twitches. I curse myself for not buying more batteries. 

Other than the cats, I am alone and three states away from family and friends. I’m used to tornado warnings—common back home in the Midwest, they crop up without much notice through the spring and summer. But I have never lived in a place where hurricanes are a threat, like Ike, which is making its way toward me now. When storm warnings were issued earlier in the week, my new coworkers told me not to worry: hurricanes may hit Galveston and other parts of the Texas coastline, but they never travel as far inland as Houston. Even as the threat grew and the warnings swelled, the weather seemed pleasant—so much so that I didn’t believe anything severe would happen. 

Then, about three days ago, I began noticing signs outside of the gas stations and grocery stores on my route to work: 

TANKS TAPPED 

SORRY OUT OF MILK 

NO MORE BOTTLED WATER 

As Ike approached, panic buying cleared shelves. Many businesses boarded up windows and front doors. Mandatory evacuations were announced in the coastal communities. Colleagues who’d originally claimed the storm wasn’t a big deal began packing their bags and heading to Dallas and Austin to stay with family. Shadows of Hurricane Katrina, which had pummeled the Gulf Coast just three years before, fell across the city.

I didn’t leave my apartment the Saturday before Ike made landfall. I didn’t know anyone in the city, and I had nowhere to go. Only in the early hours of the morning did I finally decide to shelter in the closet. 

I try to force my cats to stay near me, but they are far more interested in exploring our small apartment—anxious about the storm, skittish as the rain pounds our roof. I reluctantly let them roam, though I worry that if a window breaks they will jump out and disappear into Ike. 

My phone says it’s about 1:30 in the morning. I’m exhausted but too nervous to sleep. I want to call my boyfriend back in Kansas City, or my sister in Nebraska, but I know I need to preserve my phone battery, unsure how long I’ll be without power or how bad things might get. I shut the flashlight off and sit in my closet listening to the rain and wind, the cracking and scraping of branches, and my inner critic. What will I do if I can’t get out of my building? Why didn’t I stock up with more provisions? How will I protect myself if shit gets bad? Why haven’t I put the cats in their carriers? What was I thinking, moving to Houston? 

I start crying.

I am thirty, and I’m scared. I took this job and made this move to prove to myself that I could do it. That I could take care of myself. 

But the truth is, I miss everyone, especially my dad. He died just a few months ago. The last time I’d spoken with him was in the Houston airport, on my way back to Kansas City from interviewing for the museum job I now had. The hiring manager called me on the day of Dad’s funeral to officially offer it to me. I told her I’d have to get back to her because my dad had died. A week later I returned the call, accepted the position, and began making plans to move on.  

But ever since settling in Houston, I’d been crying a lot. At my new job, in my car, in the shower, at night before falling asleep. I’d driven to an Episcopal church one afternoon and cried in the nave. I cried in the cereal aisle of my neighborhood Fiesta Mart when an old Ricky Nelson song—one of Dad’s favorites—played on the grocery store’s sound system.

Dad used to sing to me when I was little—Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Dion and the Belmonts. He’d tell me about his days as a disc jockey for his high school’s radio station. And about how in November of 1963, when the halls of that same high school began to stir with unsettling information from Dallas, he rushed from class to his locker. He kept a little homemade radio there, which he tuned to a local news channel. It confirmed the news that President Kennedy had been shot. 

This memory reminds me of the little gray twelve-band radio he’d given me years before when I’d moved into my first apartment. “It’s always good to have an emergency radio on hand,” he’d said. I’d never figured out how to use it, as I had no idea what the different bands beyond AM and FM—such as TV, MW, SW 1-9—were for. But I hung onto it, moving it from apartment to apartment across Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and now Texas. 

Radios were always humming when Dad was around. On the way to school in the morning he’d turn the car stereo volume up when a good song started, then beat the rhythm with his thumbs against the steering wheel. On potential snow days, he was the first in our house to tune the kitchen radio to one of the local FM stations so we could find out if school had been delayed or canceled.  

He gave me one of my favorite stuffed animals when I was little—a black and white cat from Radio Shack. It had a small AM/FM radio built into its belly, and I named it Nip (short for catnip). When I was twelve, he gifted me an oversized black boom box. It had a cassette tape deck so I could record songs I liked from the radio. My sister and I would often play deejay, taping songs from the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 and making up our own commercials in between them. Dad made sure we never ran out of blank cassettes.   

Dad kept a CB radio in the car, which he’d let me play with on road trips. And on the nightstand by his side of the bed were ham and shortwave radios stacked on top of each other. As my mom slept, he’d stay awake tuning them to pick up conversations and dispatches. Then the next morning at breakfast, as he drank coffee and I ate Cheerios, he’d recount his successes: the British Navy off the coast of Canada, a Russian submarine, men speaking Chinese. He was certain that once he’d listened in on Air Force One.

I make my way through the darkness to the cardboard box where I’d remembered seeing the emergency radio. I unearth it amidst a stack of CD cases and art books. It’s only about three inches tall and six wide, but it’s a heavy little thing. I check the batteries—two of those 1.5 volt D-cells. How old are they? I’m certain I’ve never replaced them, and I know I don’t have any extras. I return to my little closet bunker and wrap myself in my comforter. I turn on the radio. A dull crack, then silence. I extend the antenna, wondering if doing so will make any difference from inside my closet. I have no idea which direction to aim it. I crank up the volume. I switch through the bands. I fiddle with the dials.

There’s another dull crack, and I hear the tinny sound of a violin. I adjust the knob to hone in on it, careful not to lose whatever I’ve managed to pick up. I follow the lovely melody as it dances across notes. Once the music ends, a soft voice identifies the Bach concerto I’ve just heard. The voice introduces himself and the station, 88.7 KUHF-FM. It’s a local classical music station, and he’s the overnight deejay, playing classics by request from midnight to 5 a.m. The deejay acknowledges the storm raging outside and assures listeners that he’ll be on air playing music all night. 

Outside the hurricane plummets Houston, but inside my apartment, things have calmed. My tears have stopped. Oliver and Herschel have snuggled next to me. I cling to the little radio, allowing KUHF to carry me to sleep. I thank my dad for being there with me.  

Ike made landfall at 2:10 a.m. on Sunday, September 13, 2008, over Galveston Island. A strong Category 2 hurricane, it brought a Category 5 storm surge, which destroyed property up and down Texas’s Bolivar Peninsula. It was one of the deadliest and most expensive storms, the third costliest hurricane in U.S. history at the time, behind Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina. 

Ike traveled north and along the east side of Houston, bringing about ten hours of tropical storm force winds, topping out at 110 miles per hour. It marked the first time a curfew was issued for the City of Houston. Many chemical plants and oil refineries were closed. Grocery store shelves remained empty for weeks, and some parts of the city waited that long for power to be restored.

But Ike moved fast over Houston. As a result, flooding was not as much of an issue as it was with other storms, like the devastating Harvey, which waterlogged the city about ten years later. As Ike continued its drive north, it dumped record amounts of rainfall on parts of Canada. I read somewhere that remnants of the storm were experienced as far as Iceland.

By the time I wake up, the storm has passed. The radio is quiet. I must have turned it off at some point in the early hours of the morning. I feed Oliver and Herschel and return blankets from the closet to my bed. I push the vacuum cleaner back into the closet. I spread the hangers of my winter coats across the clothes rod. I cradle the radio to my chest and carry it to my bedroom, where I set it on my nightstand. 

I dress and head outside to assess the damage. The yards of my neighborhood are a mess of downed limbs and power lines and uprooted trees. But the sky is calm and the air is strangely cool. And other than losing power and a few gutters, my little building seems to have survived unscathed. 

Suddenly my street is alive. Neighbors talk to neighbors, laughing, hugging, helping each other clear debris from cars, roofs, and lawns. I meet the woman who lives in the apartment below me. She invites me to join her and two friends at Rudyard’s, the bar around the corner from our apartment building. It has a generator and cold beer, so I have a few Lone Stars at a picnic table with these strangers who immediately feel like old friends. Later, we watch from my apartment balcony as neighbors stretch extension cords across driveways and front yards, connecting generators and electrical devices down the block. We’re invited to a few impromptu barbecues and cookouts, where folks have gathered to grill and share food before it goes bad. An unexpected beauty reveals itself in the kindness of strangers.   

The next day is Monday. I head in to work. The museum is running on generators and I take my phone, laptop, and other items that need a charge. During the workday, I roam the galleries. I think about how art and nature remind us of how small we are, and how interconnected.

That evening back at my apartment, I pick up a pineapple from my building’s foyer. An old friend has overnighted it to me since reading my Facebook post about how hard it’s been to find fresh fruit in Houston after the storm. I slice into it in my kitchen. It’s slightly overripe but I still savor each piece. I call my mom to check-in. I feed the cats. Once the sun sets I light candles, turn on the little emergency radio, and listen to the classical music station. This will be my ritual for the next five nights until my building’s power is restored. 

Somehow the radio’s batteries never die. So each night as I drift off with Mozart, Dvořák, and Mendelssohn, I think about my dad. I’m the little girl peeking into my parents’ room well after I’m supposed to be in bed, with Nip tucked under my arm. I watch as Dad tunes the dials of the shortwave radio on his nightstand, the volume low so as not to wake anyone, static humming in the dark, connecting him to other souls across distance and, possibly, even across time.

More about the author:

Chelsea Yates is originally from northeast Nebraska. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest and is a writer for the University of Washington. Her essays have appeared in HerStry, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Hear Nebraska, and more.

Coyote | Nicki Orser

Sometimes it’s hard to look at the big picture of your life, of our lives together for the past seventeen years. Mostly, I see snapshots. Like the one when we’d taken apart your bed to rearrange your room and there was a message scrawled in sharpie on the underside of the frame in your eight-year-old hand: Dad gave my brother five dollars and I wish I was dead.

I laughed when I saw it, not on purpose, but because it was so dramatic. I laughed at the ridiculousness of where it had been written, the spelling, the childish script. I guess I had laughed at the fact that it had been hidden for the past five years and we hadn’t even known it was there.

Two years later, at fifteen, when you really did want to be dead and you tried to kill yourself, I was in shock.

When it happened again at seventeen, I was blind-sided once more. Not that there hadn’t been problems in the months leading up: the new crescents covering your arms – never too deep, hidden almost always beneath long sleeves; the vape pens and lighters I’d found in your backpack; the battle we faced most mornings when it was time for you to leave for school.

In January, you’d blacked out on your bedroom floor in a pile of laundry after drinking half a bottle of vodka.

“Hey,” I’d called, pushing against your bedroom door which was blocked by your trash can. “Hey, are you in there?” I said again before shoving it open and seeing you on the floor.I shook you, gently at first, then more frantically. When you didn’t move, I slapped your cheeks, the way people do when they’re about to fall asleep while driving, until you finally stirred.

I lifted you in a makeshift fireman drag, like the one I’d seen a friend do while practicing for the police academy exam, and pulled you onto your bed. You seemed just as heavy, the same dead weight, as the bag used to simulate an injured body that my friend had dragged around that dusty field during her test years ago.I turned your head to the side in case you were sick, and stood at the foot of your bed.

Not the same bed as the childhood message, although it would have been nice if we could have had it all spelled out: “I’m D-R-U-N-K” or “I’m S-A-D” or “I’m in T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”

In February, I sat with you in the vice principal’s office as she laid out the contents of your backpack on the floor in front of us. She’d typed up a helpful list and included it with your suspension paperwork: one nicotine vape pen, one canister of nicotine vape juice, one nicotine vape pod, marijuana, one grinder shaped like Rubik’s Cube with marijuana residue, rolling papers, marijuana joints, one pipe with marijuana residue, one lighter, six cigarettes, and pepper spray. PPD Incident # PE 22-672.

In the weeks after the suspension, when you’d started working with your counselor, Martin, I thought things were getting better. You looked tiny next to him, the former nose tackle who had traded in his NFL career to coach football at the junior college and mentor teens at the local high schools to keep them out of juvie. Working with him had let you avoid a criminal record for bringing drugs to school and it seemed like things might be turning around.

Yes, I know I always say that, but that’s why I was surprised when I saw the cops parked in front of our house after I pulled into our driveway that night, exactly one month after your suspension. I was afraid to open the car door, thinking, Oh shit. What now?

“Your daughter is around the corner,” the officer began.

“Son,” I said.

“They’re with one of our officers,” he continued, “and appear to be intoxicated.”

I assumed I would take you home, put you in your bed, and wait for you to sober up, but the cop was insistent that I take you to the ER, that something was terribly wrong. He suspected some kind of overdose.

***

My mother and I had both had our spells of sadness over the years, as had your grandmother, your great grandmother, and probably many of the grandmothers before. The Dark Place, I’d heard it called.

While your great-great-great-grandmother’s last episode had landed her dead on her kitchen floor with her head in an oven, the darkness had lightened some over the generations. My mother’s depression seemed more of a muted brown when she died, the color of her nicotine-stained walls. I liked to think mine resembled a dusky beige, like what you’d find on a paint swatch at Home Depot, the kind you could browse while contemplating freshening up the walls of a laundry room.

I’d hoped by the time it hit you, there’d be hardly any darkness left.

In movies people kill themselves by taking pills, but it’s not as easy as it looks on TV. At least it didn’t work for me, either time I had tried it, and luckily not for you.

When I was a teen, no one told me my great grandmother had hung herself, and it wasn’t until years later that I learned that my grandmother had stopped taking her heart medication because she, according to my Aunt Sue, was just too tired to live anymore.

I’m not sure that it would have made a difference, knowing all that. I doubt it would have made me any less depressed, but it might have saved a decade or two of shame, knowing I wasn’t alone.

It’s hard to know what finally did help with my depression, I’d tried so many things over the years. Getting sober in my twenties was a start, searching out therapists who did EMDR and somatic therapies also made a big difference. Another part of my recovery was starting a writing group and getting all my crazy thoughts on paper. That was when I was really able to see the patterns in my family through all of those generations; that was when I began to realize that it wasn’t completely my fault. I wasn’t a bad person trying to get good, just a sick person trying to get well. Having you and your brother was the biggest motivator of all.

Knowing that the two of you were depending on me forced me to keep trying. More than anything, I wished I could figure out how to save you from the same kind of pain that I’d gone through, but it seemed like you would have to learn it through your own experience.

***

While in the hospital waiting room, I took advantage of your intoxication and quizzed you on what you had taken. You were unusually talkative in this state even though I couldn’t make out everything you were saying. I tricked you into giving me the password on your phone: 1 2 3 4 5 6. Really, kid?

I scrolled through your texts and tried to piece together what had happened, while simultaneously redirecting you each time you announced you thought we should leave. We walked over to a Dasani machine, I bought us each a bottle of water, and you told me about the alcohol you had hidden in your room and the package of Benadryl you had taken a few hours earlier.

When I Googled Benadryl overdose, I learned there had been some kind of Benadryl Challenge happening on TikTok, where teenagers filmed their recollections of hallucinating after taking large doses of the drug. I wasn’t sure if you had taken the Benadryl because you knew it wouldn’t show up on the home drug tests we had been forcing you to do. I didn’t know if you had used it to get high or if you knew that taking a large dose could be fatal.

***

When your dad arrived at the hospital, we’d agreed that one of us would always stay with you, that we would visit in shifts. We didn’t want to leave your brother home alone all night and the hospital was restricting the number of people in the ER because of COVID.

When I arrived back at the hospital, around four in the morning, you were wearing a gown and your arm was strapped down. You kept spasming and flailing and had pulled your IV out once already. You had an IV of Ativan in one arm and a blood pressure cuff on the other, plus a dozen EKG leads stuck to various parts of your body. The nurse explained that the electrocardiogram would record the electrical signals of your heart and sound an alarm when something was off.

I wished I had read the signals of your heart; if I had, maybe we wouldn’t have been in this situation.

Because you were twitching so much and your eyes looked so crazy, you reminded me of someone from The Walking Dead when they were transitioning from human to zombie. You seemed like a little frail zombie though, not a dangerous one, and I couldn’t help petting your zombie head, and your crazily matted zombie hair.

You had been awake for almost 24 hours straight now, if you counted the morning of school that day, which had happened a million years before.

I texted your dad another update: He’s twitching and can’t talk right. I think he can sometimes understand me though.

“Can people overdose on Ativan?” I asked the nurse. “It seems like you’re giving him a lot.”

“This is protocol in these kinds of cases,” she said.

It seemed unfathomable that there could be other cases like yours.

You were pulling things from the air and putting them into your mouth. Sometimes you would hand me one and I would pretend to eat it.

“Yum,” I said, thinking I hope this is a strawberry and not a spider.

You tried standing up in your bed a lot but I found if I rubbed your hair softly the way TV moms do, the way I would have liked my mother to have done, I could get you to lie back down and settle you pretty quickly.

We went through that scene on repeat all night. You’d sit up, try to stand from your bed, the alarm on your IV or heart monitor would go off, and I would coax you back into a lying position, push the hair back on your forehead, and distract you while an attendant shut off the alarm. After the fifth or sixth time, they just showed me how I could turn the alarm off myself so the nurse wouldn’t have to keep coming in every few minutes.

It felt like we were communicating even though you couldn’t speak. It felt like I was sending you messages through mental telepathy.

I love you. It’s ok. You’re going to be ok. We’ll be home soon. That last one was a lie and I figured if you could read my mind, hear my thoughts, you could probably also tell when my thoughts were lying, so I’d try to quickly correct myself. I think we will be ok.

Around 1:00 that afternoon, your dad came to switch places and your doctor let us both stay with you for a bit, then pulled us aside to tell us that she had gone through a similar thing with her own child when she was a teen.

“You’re going to get through this,” she said. “It is possible for things to turn around. My own daughter is living proof.”

She recommended a book to read and said we were doing a good job even though that was clearly a lie. She said we just needed to make it through these terrible teen years, that things could get better.

She wasn’t patronizing or condescending like the psychiatrist we’d been working with for the last several months. She wasn’t menacing like the nurse who’d checked you’d in the night before, the one who’d tried to bully you into holding still by threatening to take your temperature rectally if you wouldn’t keep the regular thermometer in your mouth. She didn’t seem clueless about addiction and didn’t judge us for having problems. She didn’t rush off after making her rounds even though the ER was crowded with sick patients and nurses in scrubs rushing from curtained room to curtained room.

Instead, she pulled us aside and talked to us. Of all of the doctors and nurses and nursing assistants and hospital guards and therapists and substance abuse counselors and social workers and transgender specialists and psychiatrists and medical staff that we had dealt with over the last few years, this doctor was the first to really give me any hope.

***

Around 2:45 on Thursday afternoon, the EMTs arrived to transfer you to the Kaiser ER in Marin. It had been nearly twenty hours in the ER now, about the same amount of time it took to start and stall in labor before having an emergency C-section the day you were born.

After spending the next day with you in the new ER, it started to feel like I was making a cosmic shift somehow because I was getting kind of good at taking care of you, even, dare I say, good at being a mom.

I had spent my whole life feeling guilty about how bad I was at that, at being a mom, at taking care of people. I have an inner Nurse Ratched voice that thinks mean thoughts whenever someone is sick or starts to complain too much.

When you or your brother would stay home sick, I would start out saintly at first, bringing you orange juice or Tylenol, reminding you to let me know if you needed anything. But give it a few hours and I’d be thinking shut up and drink your stupid juice. Or shut up and go to sleep. You’re not that sick, just go to school. And Dear god, please shut the fuck up and leave me alone.

But in the hospital, it started to feel really different. I started to feel really different.

I texted your dad around nine that Thursday night to let him know that they were moving you to the Telemetry Unit, room 302, in a wing of the ICU.

You finally fell asleep, just after midnight Friday night, after being awake for more than forty hours. Of course, as soon as you fell asleep, the nurse came in and announced she needed to give you a new IV. You were sleeping on your stomach at the time and she had to lift your arm at a weird angle to reach the crook where the old IV was situated, leaking blood, and not delivering medication effectively. She missed the vein on the first try and switched to the other arm to look for a better one. It took her two more attempts before she was successful and you slept through all three punctures.

***

Your dad came to the hospital early Friday morning to change shifts. I’d parked across the street from the hospital the day before, next to a field full of hairy vetch and wild lupine. The grass had seemed bright the day before with shocks of purple, but that morning everything was pretty gray.

My eyes were adjusting to the change between the hospital room and the outdoor light when I saw a stray dog near my car. I looked around for its owner but as I got closer and got a better look at it, I realized it was a coyote.

He was just standing there on the sidewalk as though he was waiting for me. We looked at each other for a second and I reached for my phone to try to snap a picture of him, but in the moments it took to enter my code and click on the camera icon, he had trotted off, disappearing into the early morning fog.

There are legends about coyotes. Some Native tribes considered them mythical creatures. Some believed they could linger between the land of the living and the spirit world, that they were mediators between life and death. I guess that might explain what he was doing hanging around a hospital.

***

When I returned to your room in the early afternoon, you were awake and had no memory of the past two days. You didn’t remember the police or the hallucinations.

You had no memory of the deep bond we’d forged the nights before. I wondered if you would at least feel it subconsciously, the way they say coma patients do, but it didn’t seem like you did.

We would spend another twenty-four hours in the Telemetry Unit waiting for a room to open up at a treatment place somewhere, an adolescent facility that had a private room to accommodate a trans teen. Your dad and I debated back and forth, trying to decide whether you should go to a hospital or substance abuse rehab center. We didn’t have much say since we were at the mercy of the insurance company, what they would authorize and pay for, and what the psychiatrist on duty deemed the best plan.

When we finally did get a chance to talk to the psychiatrist after lunch, she wasn’t on board with our ideas of rehab.“We’ll be transferring him to Willow Rock, an adolescent facility in San Leandro,” she said.

They didn’t allow visitors during the assessment period but she said we could call you anytime. She handed me a post-it with their website and I looked it up on my phone and scrolled through the pages, reading their philosophy: “Recovery involves living a meaningful life with the capacity to love and be loved.”

The EMTs pulled in just after two that afternoon, and we hugged you goodbye one more time before they wheeled you away on the stretcher.

“We’ll call you as soon as you get there,” I said. “You’ll probably get there faster than we’ll even get home.”

We stood in the parking lot and waved, but I’m not sure if you could see us. We couldn’t see you through the mirrored back window but we waved anyway until the ambulance pulled onto Monticello Road, then we each walked toward our cars.

“See you at home,” your dad said, and I nodded.

When I got to my car, I remembered the coyote. Had it shown up next to me the morning after you could have died because he knew I needed a sign or because he knew it wasn’t your time? The doctor in Petaluma had repeated how serious this was, how this could have gone so much worse: “Kids have died from these kinds of overdoses,” she had said. “We were so lucky.”

I hoped you could be like the coyote: no matter how scrappy or tattered he got, he’d find a way to survive. The superstitious part of me wanted to believe that the coyote, and that particular doctor, had both been placed there on purpose, that they were there to bring us some kind of comfort, maybe even some luck.

Something had alerted the neighbor who had found you to call the police on the night of your overdose. Something urged the police officer to insist I take you to the emergency room. And something had changed in me during those nights in the hospital together. Whether it was medicine or magic that had kept you alive, I was willing to accept the help, from wherever we could get it.

Coyote by Nicki Orser was selected as the runner-up of the 2023 HoneyBee Prize in Nonfiction by Hugh Reilly. Here’s what Mr. Reilly had to say about the piece:

“Coyote” dealt with the tragic epidemic of suicide among trans teens. This timely story explores the love between mother and child and the toll societal pressures place on families.  The language was spare and powerful. The anecdotes were authentic and helped to lead the story to a memorable conclusion. I particularly enjoyed the use of the coyote as a metaphor. I have long had a passion for Native American culture and history and the inclusion of the “trickster” coyote in the story gave it an ethereal flavor. 

More about the author:

Nicki Orser, a Nebraska native, completed her MFA at San Francisco State University where she was the recipient of the Joe Brainard Creative Writing Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Dunes Review, The American River Review, and Susurrus. She lives in Northern California with her two sons.

The Truth About My Old Haunts | Elizabeth Collis

Truth

I lived in this house between the ages of four and seven.

For the past fifty-four years, I have not been near this area of England.

I’m sixty-one, which means I haven’t seen this house since my family moved from it.

I visit this place often. These visits are involuntary.

Lie

As childhood things always seem to, the house has shrunk since I was seven.

These features are smaller than when I was a child (from what I can glimpse from the road—I dare not step on the property—there’s a barking guard dog and security cameras and ‘Private Property’ notices): 

Apple orchard, neatly rowed vegetable garden, riotous flower beds, juice green lawns, bitter-lemon privet hedges, sentinel poplar trees, fish pond circled with a low brick wall.

Maybe

Menace pressures the inside of the house’s three doors, ready to burst out: the fortress front door we never used, the back one on the shady side, also never used, the black kitchen door warmed by the West sun, always used, always open, to release a girl from house to garden.

The house is riddled with evil.

The garden is heavenly, sweet-pea fragrant with joy.

The house is haunted. 

Or the house haunts. 

Or I haunt the house.

The garden is a refuge.

Or the garden protected child me from the house.

Or I was a child with a vivid imagination.

***

The house name, ‘Inverarnold’, has peppered my consciousness awake and dreaming this past half century, but I don’t know the exact address, only that it was two or three orchards away from the village of Leeds in Southern England, in the rural county of Kent. So my husband and I, on a nostalgia visit from Canada, park our rental car on the narrow road twisting through Leeds village, opposite a residence named ‘The Old Store’. It used to be a shop where I bought my penny sweets with Saturday pocket money. There’s a pub, playing field, stone church. Low, black-beamed Elizabethan cottages. It’s peaceful, bucolic.

Once I find the former store, I know how to get to the house.

“Across the road, up there,” I say, pointing to a field with a wooden fence and a border of sycamore trees, “there’s a footpath on the other side of that hedge.”

I’m right. A narrow passage tucked between empty meadows, canopied by rustling branches and delineated by thick hedgerow dotted with white cowslips, pink-red campions balanced on downy stems, and purple woundwort. Same path, same wildflowers, same trees. All as it used to be. I laugh at the familiarity, at the wonder of my adult feet connecting to the same path my child feet skipped along so long ago.

Except the orchards have changed. They grow cherries now, not apples. The trees are small, in tight rows, shrouded with bird netting wrapped on metal hoops. Umbilical cords of water and nutrition lines connect each sapling with the earth. We reach the far side of the last orchard, and an informational sign headed ‘Arnold Farms’ explains that modern fruit farming is very different from traditional cultivation. The information doesn’t lessen my disappointment, which settles, aching, in my arthritic toes. I spent a lot of happy childhood time in the old orchards.

The Arnolds were wealthy landowners long before my family lived in their house. They’d built the home on a corner of their farmland, where country lanes between villages formed a crossroads. In all four directions—agriculture. Apple, cherry and plum orchards, strawberry and hop fields, a chicken farm, beyond them grazing fields for sheep, then villages.

Inverarnold, a mock-Tudor house built in the nineteen twenties or thirties, still scowls beneath a heavy roof, still looks clandestine when we reach it on foot. Three storeys high, dark-timbered, white-walled, sharp-gabled, it sits enclosed with tall hedges and borders of giant whispering poplar trees in the middle of nowhere. In 1965, it was nowhere anyone wanted to live.

Truth

My father signed a three-year lease for the house at a ridiculously low rate.

Mrs. Arnold was killed when her car crashed into the ditch in front of Inverarnold returning from a party a few months before we moved in. Neck broken, snap. 

No local would rent the place, no babysitter babysit, no cleaner help my mother. Only the ancient gardener, Mr. Sears, too near haunting himself to bother about ghosts, tended the enormous vegetable garden twice a week. He rarely entered the house, and with his liver-spotted hands, bent back, and shabby brown gardening coat, he was more flora than a person who lived under a roof.

The house was fully equipped with the Arnold’s furniture, linens and decorations. Mrs. Arnold’s adult son had locked some things in the study, but otherwise rented the place as it was the day his mother died.

There were portraits of Mrs. Arnold dressed in ball gowns on the walls and in desk drawers.

Her hair was incendiary red, her eyes forget-me-not blue.

When a landlord locks things in a ground-floor room but doesn’t draw the curtains, the tenant children will haul themselves up on the windowsill, peer through the dirty diamond-paned window, and believe they see ghosts.

Lie

The portraits of the dead house owner were good enough that her eyes followed us.

The man driving the car was her lover.

The man driving the car was her ex-husband.

The man driving the car was her murderer.

Maybe

Fear, misery, love, desire for vengeance are emotions strong enough to worm their way into the bowels of a house, coil into the walls, lurk in the long dim corridor shadows, fester at the back of musty cupboards and bedroom dresser drawers, secret themselves in the Gothic folds of blood-red velvet curtains.

Or a curious child can let the malignancy out through the conduit of her mind.

Or instead of being passively haunted by ghosts, a house can be the active haunter.

***

Forbidden to explore outside the garden boundary alone, I did anyway. I hated being in the house, needed to be outside. My rubber boots squished into cool soil as I navigated the clumpy ridges of plowed fields. My tramping disturbed the thrushes, pretty yellowhammers and trilling linnets profiting from insects upturned by the plow.

The area was so rural I never met anyone unless it was harvest time. Then, I’d stay out of the orchards with their cidery scent of fermenting apples for fear of the fruit pickers; quick-moving gypsies and coarse-mouthed East-End Londoners. They were unsettling, alien, their Cockney and traveller accents impossible to follow. In the heat of late August, their scruffy children played on the orchard peripheries, around the Beatles declaring “She loves you yeah yeah yeah” through tinny transistor radios and their prone parents taking beer-softened lunch breaks in the shade of a hedge.

Safely on Inverarnold territory, I was summer barefoot. Springy moss under the weeping willow tree cushioned my skinny backside. Its sinewy roots became walls, its canopy the roof. I played houses, fairies, collected sweet dog rose petals to make sticky perfume in jam jars, climbed the old chestnut trees, scraped my legs on their fissured bark, got stuck, got rescued at dusk. My mother didn’t bother looking for me before then, she’d have at least five acres of land to cover. I never returned to the house until I had to.

Truth

My eight-year-old sister heard a party going on downstairs one Saturday night, right under her bedroom. Clinking glasses, chatter, laughter, the never-used front door opening and closing, Jerry Lee Lewis sending ‘Great Balls of Fire’ among the guests dancing the Twist, up through the dark wooden ceiling beams, vibrating the legs of her bed.

I imagine she crept along the landing to spy, expecting to see grownups flourishing martini glasses and jiving through whirling cigarette smoke. Instead she found my parents huddled round the living room fireplace, the only source of warmth in the house except the massive cooking range in the kitchen. A damp smudge smell emanated from their woollen sweaters and heavy socks. Pops from the burning fire wood accented the shush-shush sound of them turning the pages of their books.

In the linoleum which loosely covered the stone kitchen floor, Mrs. Arnold’s stiletto heels had left pock marks.

Lie 

It was me who started the mass panic at my elementary school at age five when I declared the sports pavilion was haunted by a headless monk and led my screaming classmates running to barricade ourselves in our classroom.

Maybe

My parents never entertained at the house because all invitations were refused.

***

I learned to read at four and discovered stories, made friends at school (but never had play dates at my house, only theirs), made up outrageous fictions. My mother had been on oxygen in hospital, gravely ill, when my father lit a cigarette and blew them both up. Tragically (I wept as I waited for my mother to pick me up from school), I was now an orphan trapped in a terrifying house. There wasn’t a wicked witch imprisoning me there, the house was the witch. No wonder the other parents didn’t want to make the twelve-mile round trip so their children could interact with me and my crazy home.

The dreams came for me after we moved away, tethering me to the house ever since. I was a middle child by then; my younger sister was born in 1967. My family was three daughters widely spaced in age, one budgerigar, two Dutch rabbits, a father often away for work, and a lonely, scared, exhausted forty-year-old mother who slept with a shotgun under her bed in case of burglars and was convinced the phone was tapped by the Russians. (It was the Cold War era, my father was a nuclear engineer, so she was probably right.) She didn’t hide her distress from my older sister and me. 

My Inverarnold dreams are not nightmares. I’m talking in the present; the dreams still infiltrate my sleep. They’re not blissful either—more a hybrid. Years later, I discovered my mother and older sister also dream about the house. But they’ve never described their dreams. I don’t know if we have the same one.

Question

If we all dream about the house, is the house the instigator?

If we all dream about the house, am I to blame?

Truth 

By their nature, dreams cannot be false.

In my dream, the garden is a living being. It gives me freedom like it’s handing me the keys to the city. I can wander wherever I want, unlock pleasing secrets and have them rock me in their arms, wander under dappled foliage, touch the waxy white trumpets of woodbine flowers, let them sound out their triumphant news across Kent that this child is at liberty, she may explore wherever she pleases in total security.

Popular trees keep vigil at my side, the tendrils of climbing clematis and trailing honeysuckle soothe me. I nibble nasturtium leaves; they taste of pepper and innocence. While I’m burrowed in tall grass, ladybugs tickle me to giggles. The wild rabbits who feed in the quiet evening ignore me, flip up their white tails and hop away. I am no threat in the garden, nor am I threatened.

In the dream, the house is a living being. At the start, I’m at a cold, unused door. Entering cool grey passageways on the periphery of the house, a palpable beat draws me inward. In my mouth, bitter almond and metal. Threading my hair, cool wisps of air, ephemeral ghost breath.

As I’m pulled to its centre, the house changes colour and temperature like an infrared heat image. The quasar blues and steel greys shift to apple green as I pass through shapeshifting rooms, passageways, tunnels which dimple and adapt to my form. I’m travelling through the house’s limbs, its sinews and arteries. I glimpse buttercup yellow round a corner, and my tongue is clogged with soft egg yolk, my nose filled with sulphur.

Now weak from heat, I wipe sweat from my eyes, but I can’t see for the burnt orange haze around viscous, churning organs which squeeze me forward until I enter with a roar the pulsing blood-red chamber of Inverarnold’s heart.

Lie

A door-to-door salesman cursed my pregnant mother when she refused to buy a broom. He was Indian, she thought. He said:

“Curses on you and your unborn child.”

My mother told my older sister and I this in the kitchen after school, a small glass of sherry balanced on her taught baby bump, her one-a-day cigarette held out the open door. Her smoking hand shook. The baby kicked and the sherry sloshed. My father was absent, doing something secret.

The next morning, she told us that her mother (alive and well in Canada) had come to her in a dream that night, and told her not to worry, everything would be alright with the birth, the baby and her.

Mothers are always somewhere near your heart.

Question

Why would a door-to-door salesman travel on foot in an area where the houses are one mile apart?

Maybe

It’s my heart I’m entering in the house dream. 

My heart is an inferno.

I am evil at heart because I make up tales and tell them.

The house is sentient. 

Or I’m still working out what is heaven and what is hell.

***

Compelled to see my old home despite the dog, I step off the road onto the driveway. To the right of the garage there’s a new stone wall and then a tennis court replaces the old kennels and garden sheds. Behind the garage, all that is visible of the house is a chimney and third floor dormer windows, the old maids’ quarters where my older sister and I slept in summer.

To the left, a hedge as high as the garage hides the side garden, which I remember being carpeted every year in February with white snowdrops, in March with purple crocuses, then bluebells; like a lava lamp changing hues. I can just glimpse some of the big trees shielding the house: copper birches, ash and oak. Clearly, the house owners still guard their privacy. No wonder the place had a reputation for mystery.

When a dog barks, I scuttle back to the road and follow the line of poplar trees to the orchard, but sights of the property are blocked by greenery.

“I know,” I tell my husband, “there’s another public footpath along the other side. Come on.” I have no idea how I know that—I don’t remember using it. But again, I’m right. At last, we’re able to get views of the house by pushing aside the hedge. I feel furtive, as if I’m on a spy operation.

The house is the same. A familiar excitement-fear makes my heart go pop-pop in my chest. The place is built wicked, badness in its bones. I can’t look away. I want to crouch behind a tree in the garden and do surveillance, like a stalker.

Truth

Stalking is a lot like haunting.

Lie

A house has a heart.

Maybe

I don’t want the dreams to stop.

Or this house haunts me.

Or this house is haunted by me.

Or I once lived in a haunted house.

About the Author:

Elizabeth Collis (she/her) is a writer based in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her work has appeared in Progenitor Art and Literary Journal, Tangled Locks Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, The South Shore Review, and elsewhere. Find more online at www.elizabethcollis.com and on Twitter @ElizabethCollis

Nocturnal Lagophthalmos | Christi Krug

At Bethany Faith Temple, there was clapping during the singing, shouting during the clapping, and dancing during the shouting. The golden front pew flickered in a flame of bold souls—people who’d gone to church forever, knew all the verses and when to say Amen. In the slow songs, they raised their hands, closed their eyes, and sang to God. In the fourth row, I stared at the vaulted ceiling where pendant lights hung from sparkling plaster. I fixed my gaze on brass and crystal, raising arms above eyebrows, palms inward. I didn’t shut my eyes.

The people of Bethany Faith Temple—my new family—believed in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which included healing. This woman, Harriet Denham Prix, was a faith healer coming to speak. Marietta told me about it. “She’s healed all kinds of people! Cancer patients, people with heart problems, paralytics who get right out of their wheelchairs and walk!”

One thing about Marietta, she had faith. Maybe that’s why she’d wanted me in the first place. Christian Family Services had a kid available: a pretty decent 12-year-old who tried hard in school, mostly followed the rules, and had lived in one family after another. Marietta decided she and Joe would be the best parents I’d ever had. It was one thing I wanted her to be right about. One thing I was trying hard to believe. 

We were sitting down to lunch, and Marietta slipped me a plate of perfect toasted sandwich halves, bookending rosy apple wedges. “We should invite your mother to church,” she said.

Grilled cheese went gummy in my mouth. This would mean bringing my stumbling, greasy-haired, wool-coated, drab little mother into a place where, after a year and a half with Joe and Marietta, I was finally making a good impression. Darlene Harris, the pastor’s wife, always touched my shoulder, told my new parents how fast I was growing. I got to be in The Shoemaker’s Christmas, my dark hair snowy with baby powder for playing old Mrs. Shoemaker. Before this, grownups didn’t notice me. Except a long time ago. 

“When you were a baby,” Mother said, “you slept with your eyes open, and we would laugh, not knowing if you were asleep or awake.” She smiled. “Oh, how we loved to watch you.”

I looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the reason babies sleep with eyes open is because their brains are developing in REM sleep—nocturnal lagophthalmos it’s called. But maybe, in my case, I just wanted to know what was going on. 

What was going on now was Marietta inviting Mother to a faith healer. 

Bad enough that I didn’t know what a faith healer was. I’d read the Bible all the way through, spoken in tongues, been baptized. On TV, faith healers were hyper, dressy people on platforms with scads of crowds. It was all I could picture.

“Just think what it would be like if your mother was healed!” Marietta said. 

Mother would get freaked out by the jouncy music and pushy talk. At the altar call, she would stumble into the church aisle, eyes wide, a hand quivering at her forehead, like when she was hearing voices. Healing or no healing, Mother was at best worried. At worst, ranting and hallucinating. 

Most dreaded of all, if she was faith-healed, I was sure I would have to live with her again.

Marietta was the one who ironed creases into my jeans. Cut and feathered my hair. Kept a bathroom with sage-scented shampoo for me to use and velvety guest towels for me not to. Drove me to youth group. For the first time, I had a life like other kids—in a clean, happy house.

After school Wednesday, church night, Marietta greeted me with a smile, her short auburn hair shining in the daylight windows. The curtains were open and two tabbies curled on chairs, two Great Danes bounded in the backyard, and even the house spider plants dangled their tails in delight.

I had learned not to cry myself to sleep for missing Mother. I had learned how to fold towels, smooth my bedspread over a fluffed pillow, brush my teeth every morning and evening. I was ashamed of all I was never taught, afraid of what I might never learn. How to make people like me, want me, keep me. To make my own good family some day. The last thing I wanted was everyone seeing the very worst thing about Christy Penney: the mother I came from.

Marietta nodded and smiled. “This is so-o-o exciting!” She and God were a team, and if she thought God needed to faith-heal Mother, then certainly God must think so, too. I felt shaky, weak. I couldn’t tell Marietta what a bad idea this was.

She reached for the phone. “Mrs. Penney? Can you join us at church?” 

Mother would be murmuring, “Oh my. This week?” and protesting that she didn’t have anything to wear.

“Come as you are!” said Marietta. 

Then Marietta was repeating Mother’s address and writing it down in her gigantic, confident, loopy hand. My breath caught in a knot in my sternum. 

Mother lived at Mercer Inn, a halfway house in a creepy, crumbling old building in downtown Seattle. Joe had picked her up a couple of times. I had gone in to get her, confronted by dazed residents sitting like barnacles on ripped red vinyl chairs in a hot, smoke-filled lobby that burned my eyes and turned my stomach. Now my mind reeled with horrific moments, there and elsewhere, of Mother slow-stomping to school conferences, choking on her food at Thanksgiving dinners, saying stupid things when I brought a friend over to play. 

Wednesday night came quick. Marietta and I got in the car; Joe was working late driving his Washington State Patrol car. We rolled down the freeway, exiting downtown. My stomach clenched. How could I stop this? I had no choice but to pray to the same God everyone else was praying to. God, please don’t let my mother come to the meeting and get faith-healed.

The brown Ford Pinto wound through downtown streets, a left, a right, a lurch to a stop sign. With a tomato-red nail, Marietta touched the paper with the directions. “Pike . . . Pine . . . Boylston. Oh crap, it’s a one-way!” A U-turn in a parking lot, a circle around the block. “It’s supposed to be right here!” Minutes of frustration ticked into half an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour of useless driving.

Marietta looked at me. “I can’t believe this. I can’t find Mercer Inn. We’re so late to the service there’s no point. Might as well go home.” She shook her head. 

I could breathe again, my whole body relaxing against the vinyl seat. 

But I’d done evil. I’d prayed at cross-purposes against her, against God. I could never let Marietta know. She wouldn’t want me anymore.

After we crossed an overpass, the Space Needle disappearing behind us in the fog, a thought punched in: What if Mother really could get better? What if she could, again and always, be the person who read to me in her soft voice, who laughed at my dumbest jokes, who wrote a poem of her daughter as a beautiful pearl? Had I doomed her to that tiny room with cockroaches and suitcases and pantyhose mildewing at a dripping, green-ringed sink? I smothered the images, clinging to my frail relief that we hadn’t picked her up. My secret identity was safe.

When we got home and shared a late dinner, Marietta told Joe, “The Devil kept us from finding Christy’s mother. She would have been healed. She was supposed to be healed.” 

I was an instrument of the Devil. 

Sister Harriet was scheduled to speak again the following Sunday night. Mother wasn’t coming. It was a saving grace that, with Marietta and Joe in choir, they couldn’t pick her up.

I was a tangle of conflicting emotions as we walked early into church. Marietta and Joe disappeared to put on their long purple choir robes. Curiosity welled while I waited in the foyer. Who was Harriet Denham Prix? Was she glowing, serious, powerful, masculine, young, or grandmotherly like Mrs. Shoemaker? I peeked into the sanctuary. An ordinary middle-aged woman sat next to Reverend Harris while Marietta and Joe filed onto risers with the choir. They all burst into the rousing, “Highway to Heaven.” The woman had old-fashioned strawberry-blonde hair tapered around her face like June Cleaver, and a long blue silky dress with a gleaming chunky silver cross around her neck. She was thin and smiley with a giant mouth of white teeth. 

I moved aside as people flooded past. I tried to blend in, even though I was the only middle-schooler; the youth group was meeting elsewhere.

People were wheeling in on wheelchairs and hobbling in on canes, people with loose, mustardy skin and rheumy eyes, parading silently into their places.

Harriet Denham Prix walked to the lectern, her face turning serious. Congregants nodded. They stuck hands in the air and waggled them. Small, twisted bodies sat in heaps, looking down, while strong, determined bodies held the wooden backs of pews, faces bright and focused.

Sister Harriet must have given an invitation to come forward, because a pasty old man crawled out of his seat and inched down the aisle, dragging a leg like Igor. He stood below her, waiting. She talked while he tottered, and I was afraid he was going to collapse in an accident if she didn’t hurry up and heal him. And then she jumped down the altar steps, stretched her hands over his balding head, and closed her eyes, face glowing. She looked like an angel. Her shout leaked out the sanctuary doors: “I thank you Lord for this healing. Whatever it takes!” 

He stood, nothing different about him, but everyone in the church lowered their hands, statue-still. I didn’t know if this was a healing. Confusion roiled in my chest.

All these hopefuls, with their cancers and diseases—they belonged to the world of miracles. Mother wasn’t here, never would be. Her illness was beyond the body; she had suffered shock treatments and hospitalizations and lectures and assaults, she had been outcast and divorced and widowed and broken; she had parented me badly, whenever she could get out of bed.

I turned, taking the side steps two at a time to the youth annex. Late to youth group, I acted casual, slipping onto the threadbare, overstuffed couch. Pastor Stan was saying he wanted to be relevant to kids today. He read to us sex advice from a Christian college magazine, Love, Sex, and The Whole Person. Those in seventh grade sat bewildered, while the eighth graders snorted and rolled their eyes, and Jen Baskin, a tenth grader, leaned forward and asked, “Does it count as sex if you’re just touching each other?”

The night ended with the usual drive home, Joe and Marietta bouncily reprising “Highway to Heaven” in the car. 

I thought about the healing service for a long time. Years later, I would pray my best prayers for Mother, asking for miracles, saying, “Whatever it takes, God.” My heart would break, wanting her to have a different life. But not yet. I was still living with the threat that any moment my happy life could end.

When we got home, Marietta spooned up fudge batter pudding at the dessert table. “Sister Harriet said interesting things,” she said. “You should never pray for something you’re not ready to believe. If it doesn’t happen, your faith will be destroyed.”

I’d tried doing two things at once: believing in God, and keeping Mother out of the picture. Maybe my faith was destroyed, but then again, maybe I had all the faith in the world. Good or evil, what I asked for had happened.

I had done something strange, abnormal, like nocturnal lagophthalmos. But maybe God had answered because God couldn’t help it. Smiling at me, thinking I was cute. Sleeping with my eyes open. 

About the Author:

Christi Krug’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in dozens of journals, zines, and anthologies, most recently in Backchannels Journal, The Saturday Evening Post, and GRIFFEL. Christi is a 2022 Emerging Writer for Centrum and a 2019 creative resident for North Cascades Institute. She is a presenter, a Pushcart nominee for poetry, and the author of Burn Wild: A Writer’s Guide to Creative Breakthrough, inspiring audiences across the United States. Christi serves as a writing coach, teaches for community education programs in Oregon and Washington, and leads nature/yoga/writing experiences at the Oregon Coast where she makes her home. www.christikrug.com