I want to feel something again.
The trees are bare, I watch them from my window. Their limbs dance in the wind, limbs too thin, like the arms of dying men, like the elbows of the sick. Too many limbs, dancing their sickly dance, painting me with their moving pattern. I have become a canvas.
I cough into my arm. It’s that time of year again, nearly winter, and many of us are coughing. An elderly couple walk by the window, hand in hand, and for a moment they are on my chest, because the sun is low. Their shadows bleed onto me and for a moment they are walking hand in hand across the street as well as on my chest. It was just a moment, though, before their journey made them leap off my shoulder and onto the wall. The man lets go of her hand and coughs into his fist. Out of sight now, but very much in my mind. I envy the couple. I want to be in love. I want to know that feeling again, any feeling. O, but I do know one feeling. It’s the only feeling I can recall for certain, because it’s the last feeling I ever felt. It lives in my head like a memory, and when I want it, I can conjure it up from deep below the surface, like a demon from Hell, or the spirit of a dead and buried horse, something wild and fierce to ride, a surfer on a rogue wave. Sometimes I do just that, just to feel one thing. Anything.
Fear. Suffocating fear. Abject fear. Fear-fear-fear. I look for it now and bring it to the surface. I dig it up. My heart matches the speed of its gallop. I stagger and stumble and fall backwards to the floor and I hug my knees and shake. I make a sound, an unconscious sound, a trembling monotone note, the hum of the damned. I’m transported back through time and suddenly I’m on that dirt road in Nowhere, North America.
My ride is now a cloud of dust on the horizon. Goodbye joy. Goodbye another life. Goodbye to so many things, all of them existing in that cloud of dust like an unreachable galaxy. It’s dusk, the sun just a red streak below a purple sky. Ahead of me is a house; a quiet, comfy home. The lights are on and cast a tungsten orange glow. Beside the house there’s an ax lodged deep into a stump of wood beside a woodpile. It’s my parents’ house. I know it well. I’ve contributed to that woodpile. I bet that the bottom of the stack could have been my work. The crickets own the night, they play the same song on their endless arena tour. It’s a fan favourite.
I’ll admit that growing up in the bucolic countryside had its luxuries. The clean air, the smell of earth, the lilting hills, the surrounding vibrance and vitality of every living thing. The very ground was rich and fertile. And inside our house each window was really a painting, and the painting moved when I moved. The people were kind and neighbourly. It was quiet and peaceful and perfect. But something lived with us there. Something cruel and malevolent lurked in the shadows of each peaceful night. Something as rotten and damp as the wood at the bottom of a wood-stack invaded our comfy home. I knew it because I’d see it around, watching us, waiting for an opportunity to pounce. I heard it in the silence of the laundry room as I walked by toward the warm, welcoming light of the kitchen. I saw it contort on the walls, black and gangly, too many limbs, thin and sickly, but smiling. It was a disease, and its smell was noxious.
I left home early, only sixteen years old. My parents may not mind living in a haunted house, but I couldn’t stomach it. It plagued my mind with troubled thoughts, and I knew that pretty soon I’d do something bad. Something terrible. I needed to escape. My thumb took me all the way from Nowhere, North America to Everywhere, Earth. I was a ramblin’ man, a hobo king, a rebel and a bum. I got into drugs, fights, bad situations, good situations, all kinds of situations. My life was saturated and beautiful. I was a walking outlaw, I’ve heard songs about me. I left that peaceful, comfy home and never looked back. I chose to live rough, down in the weeds.
I got a phone call one day. I’m not sure how they got my number, but my father called me up. I hadn’t spoken to my parents in several years. I thought about them nearly every day, but I was on the run. My dreams sometimes took me back, and in my dreams I had premonitions. A cloud of black birds covered the skies above my parents’ house, the lonely sky of Nowhere, North America, and on the roof and the eaves and the gutter troughs they sat and cawed and watched me approach with their terrible ink splotched eyes.
My father’s voice then, on the phone, and I was telling Janet to shush, but she was naked and tugging on my sleeve. I told her to shush, but she wouldn’t, so I put a finger in my ear and listened to my father. He sounded sick. He was sick. He begged me to come home. A mixture of feelings, a tie-dye blend of emotions. I had to go. I owed them that much.
All the way from Everywhere, Earth to Nowhere, North America. It took weeks and a handjob to get there, but I finally did it. I’d arrived. I thanked the driver—Tommy was his name—and tapped the hood of the car. He drove off, and I’m there again now, since I conjured up my fear. Tommy was a dust cloud on the horizon. The sky a deep purple above a streak of red, and there were lights on in the house. But I had lied. There was no ax lodged deep into the stump by the woodpile. That was wishful thinking. Goodbye ax. Goodbye woodpile.
I walked up the steps feeling a little uneasy. There were no omens here, no dark birds on the roof, this was not a reoccurrence of my dreams, but still, there was something foul in the air. A smell like dead, rotten wood. Damp and infested with mites and worms. My father was dying. Brain cancer. A baseball sized tumor, he’d said. One would think you’d be able to see it protruding through the skull. I spoke with my mother since his summoning call, and she had said that it affected his behaviour. It put pressure on the part of his mind where feelings reside. He’d cry for no reason at all. He’d laugh like a child as he swatted at flies. His sickness pressed the keys. He was a carousel of painted horses. The horses went by these names: Anger, Suffering, Pleasure, Malcontent, Melancholy, Indignation, Repulsion, Curiosity, Shame, and Fear. What I would do to ride those horses now. But only one is available to me, and I’m saddled in, giddyup.
Before knocking I glanced to the side, towards the lawn and the woodpile and the lonely stump. It wasn’t fair for them to bring me back there. It wasn’t fair that my father was dying. It wasn’t fair that I’d have to expose myself to the contortionist that lived in our house, a disease that dampened all my moods but one, a poltergeist with incredible powers, the power to fill my head with troubled thoughts. I thought of Janet and felt nothing, because I was only a guest in this memory. In the moment, though, in the actual moment I had thought of her and felt a pang of longing. And for a moment it felt like my heart was attached to a grappling hook and I reeled on my heels and as I tried to step forward, toward the house and its orange glow, I was instead pulled ten steps back. Towards the settling dust on the horizon, away from the empty stump, towards her and our love ballad.
I jumped off the horse. I unhugged my knees and let my note drop. I sat on the floor, in a shaft of light. The wall behind me was a canvas and in it my father danced. His frail, sickly limbs waved back and forth, his knobby elbows bent and twisted. In his bony hands he held an ax. It came up and down. Rain, like blood, began to tap on my windows, and it painted the scene with gore.
I wish I could feel anything. There is something here that’s suppressing it all. The blunt end of an ax or a cruel entity in the dark corners of the house. Something powerful and with the ability to cover me up with a smile. Something with the ability to put me in a box and leave me there to scream and suffocate. There’s a scar above my right eye, it’s where my fear resides. My painted horse. It beckons to me, and I climb aboard. It brays, wild and fierce. I ride that rogue wave with my arms around its neck. I hug my knees and begin to hum. I tremble. The crickets are an almighty orchestra. I climb the steps and stand on the rickety porch. It needs a new paint job. Maybe red, or purple. Like the sky. I knock on the door, the door back home, the door to coziness and comfort, but also not just that. Something evil lives here too. I wait. Goodbye laughter. Goodbye sweet bliss. Goodbye, mom. Goodbye, dad. No one answers. I let myself in. It’s not uncommon in the country to leave the doors unlocked, so this doesn’t invoke any immediate concern. But I know better, because I am only visiting, I’ve been here before, and I know better. My grip tightens around the neck of the beast I ride, my sweaty hands clutching madly at its silky hairs, my face buried in a black mane. I let myself in. I can never get out. It is a box in which I suffocate. The wall is a canvas of abstract art. It’s smeared red and purple in a complex pattern, the paint still wet. The floor is where to dip your brush, a spreading puddle.
My father greeted me with a half-smile. One side of his face remained in a palsy frown, but the other side of his face was alive and exuberant. Exalted, even. He must have been very happy to see me because he practically erupted with lunatic joy, and he danced up and down and did a little spin, and behind his shoulder something pitch black, as black as the eyes of the birds in my dreams, watched us and smiled at me with black teeth and it lifted a thin black arm in a nice-to-see-you-again wave. Goodbye love. Goodbye trust.
My father’s arms were as thin as my thumbs. They were long and skeletal. Weak. His legs were unstable stilts, shaking under his weight. He held his arms up above his head, and in his hands, an ax. My mother lay at his feet, an open sack of spilled tomatoes, her eyes like empty pits, dead and glaring, admiring the art on the walls. Goodbye faith. Goodbye sweet lullaby.
I turned around and stared out at the world through the still open door. A dirt road in the bucolic country side. A purple sky above Nowhere, North America. Home. No more. The crickets hit a crescendo, it was all I could hear. And then I turned back to the horror I faced, and my father was right before me, exalted, insane, a man possessed. His feeble arms had wondrous strength, for he brought the ax down hard, blunt end first, and it got me right above the eye. Goodbye feelings.
I did not fall unconscious, but my vision blurred, and my right eye watched my father dance through a red veil. The artist came in for another stroke but I knocked him aside. I wanted to scream because the ride was out of control, the carousel was spinning too fast. The family I left. The family I always knew was there if and when I needed them. The family I would have returned to eventually. And the puppeteer, in the shadows of the laundry room, standing there, smiling at me. I turned back to my father who was still within the grips of his frenzy. He wasn’t really my father then, he was a skeleton from a zombie flick, and he had strings coming out of his back, strings that led to the laundry room, much like that tether around my heart that led back to Janet. My father was at its mercy, and it did with him what it willed. His arms danced above his head, his legs shook at the knees above shins like stilts. I swallowed dry fear, it tasted like venom, and I calmly plucked the ax from his broken looking fingers. He was agitated and scratched at me. He called me a whore. My father.
I walked through the front door and gently closed it behind me. My father did not follow. I descended the steps that once led to my childhood home, and in the purple night I swung that bloody ax into the stump where it belonged. I sat down in the grass, a front row ticket to the cricket show, and I hugged my knees and joined their song. The song was called The Hum of the Damned. It was a hit.
I got off the horse then, the ride finally over. I don’t know why I put myself through that sometimes, but I can’t go too long in this apathy. Even fear is better than nothing at all.
I left my room and the two-way window. Two-way because it was itself a painting, and when I moved the painting moved with me. But also, when the sun was angled correctly, the objects in the painting cast themselves through, onto the chest of the viewer and the bare walls behind. But the sun was low now, a red streak on the horizon.
I worked my way slowly down each creaking step. I did not want to wake my roommate. He nested silently in the laundry room. Carefully, on tip-toes, I stepped to the door and gently pried it open. I was hit by the nippy breeze of November, a sobering cool that drank the sweat from my brow. My fear now a distant memory. I stood on the rickety porch and stared out at a purple sky in which rain somehow fell, from a single black cloud above the house. Over on the lawn there was a stump, and protruding from it like an oblong tumour was the hilt of an ax. They meant nothing to me, I’d said my farewells. The crickets sang their song and I was unmoved. I thought of Janet and felt nothing at all.
I could leave, I knew that. I could walk down the steps and wander forever down the road to that unreachable galaxy, to mingle as one with all the dust out there on the horizon, I could, I could. But I had strings coming out of my back, and when my master awoke he would make me dance.
I sighed out of habit—because I really did not feel anything that should have resulted in a sigh—and went back inside. I tip-toed up the creaky steps and coughed into my arm. I heard something shuffle in the dark of the hallway. I didn’t care. I went to my room and shut the door.
The sun is down, my wall is bare. I am bare. Maybe tomorrow there will be more trees like limbs dancing on the walls, or couples coughing. Maybe tomorrow I’ll envy the dog who sticks his curious muzzle in the rat infested drainage pipe. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go for another ride. For now, I’ll sleep.
And in my dreams, I’ll ride that carousel. I’ll take a ride on each horse. O, how sweet it will be in my dreams to feel something, anything, besides that dry venom, besides the taste of that black mane, besides the swell of that rogue wave.
How sweet it will be to sit on that cloud of dark birds and call it home.