Story

The sun-speckled pattern of leaves against sky has grown important. In these last years, pinned inside a routine, ignoring the world as it grows more unfamiliar, I can only draw the exactitude of my presence from this familiar change. It’s a ballet: Small, private, lovely, and when I lay awake those nights between August and August, growing almost stagnant in the small circle of my mind, this was my window out into the ever changing world.

Quick to express, always, the fact of ‘getting better’. Do you know, like the relevant nature of size, progress only exists by comparison? Distance, the measurement of space, is a manmade construct, and the word ‘progress’ is simply the information that you aren’t standing in the same place you were before. As far as foreward or backward is concerned, in a world of endless planes and dimensions, there’s really no such thing. Just a marker, ‘Look here, I’m not where I was then.’

The voice in my head is all too laconic as it remarks, “Ah. Well, that’s progress.”

Let’s talk about David. He would walk outside my window all those late hours, right under the dancing leaves. I didn’t know who he was and I was afraid. I didn’t picture ghosts, but something more malevolent. An old shape. Something I knew.

I never looked. The blinds would be open, a provision for when I wake in confusion; like all traditional runaways, I navigate by the stars. He would only pass when my back was to the window. I would freeze, silent, huddled in the dark, waiting for his shadow to cross the bedroom wall. The house is on a lower level than the road, so it gives the impression of passer-bys looming over.

Who was it? What did they mean, walking past a private road at this hour? Why here? Why now?

I could have turned and looked, but to ’see’ is the scary part. It’s never the hook, the claw, the knife sliding through your viscera that imprints horror, it’s the image itself. Not death, but living through the dying. The idea of turning to find eyes staring in at me was more than I could bear. 

So I didn’t see anything to put my fear at ease, either, until the night your falter drove me out.

I insist that your voice is the most beautiful thing I ever heard of. And that night it cracked, and ran in rivulets down my mind and over the tight knot behind my breast-bone, I thrashed around unwilling to find the same old ground beneath my feet.

I’ve imagined myself into this corner, and you made me aware- that it’s this world you live in, and this world I’ll have to engage in if ever I’m to find the person behind that voice.

Do you know the raw material of you disorients me? That you could be flesh, blood, bone. Man- raw as dirt and creek and rotted leaves? That you walk along this same earth, but in a totally separate reality. One I could reach if I could only start in the right direction.

But it would take moving from this place where I’ve grown so still. Moving from the frozen trance where shadows bind me to silence.

That’s why I so love the leaves, I think. They are a part of the real world and my imagination, both. They are an invitation to the world; to dirt and creeks and rotted leaves; to birth and death-

and Life.

So that night I went and walked down the hill after midnight. I felt such a need driving me down, down, past the shadows of trees and the darkness that is such a horror and a fascination.

And half-way down I realized he was coming up at the same time. The impetuous urge to go struck me as suddenly foolish as I walked, defenseless and alone in the dark. Blam^blam^blam^blam, my heart pounded recognizing this form from imagination: My ex looked this way coming at me out of memory; the werewolf came just this way out of childhood nightmares- a point of  blackness separating from the dark, becoming its own approaching shadow.

My hands clutched at nothing, throat working to swallow as the inevitable became unavoidable. What do you say at 1a.m. when you’re about to meet your own murderer on a deserted street?

I said nothing. He grew large and then passed by me. We nodded. It was nothing, and it fell around my ears like rain.

I continued to walk, brain pinging helplessly, and then I flipped around to call at the receding shadow, “What’s your name?”

“Da-vid?” He was startled into answering. 

“Very good!!”

I flipped back around. Maybe he paused. Maybe he went home to retrieve his murder weapon. I was lost into the darkness though, jubilant that I’d met my phantom and learned his name.

I moved on more confident, less fearful, thinking, “Well… that’s progress.”

 

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