fiction: Kerosene and Dust
Kerosene and Dust
the sounds from the attic are getting too great to bear, the thick heat of his breath in the darkness
March 1st. Writer’s block still. Today I spent most of the morning drinking coffee in the second floor landing, staring out the window. Furniture doesn’t arrive till next week-I thought this ornate old house, with a mattress on the floor, would constrain me to writing, somehow. Constrain. I mean inspire. No wonder I can’t finish a chapter, I can’t even write what damned word I actually mean anymore.
The tree in the back yard has occupied all of my attention. It has the gentlest leaves and the most sinister bark. I watched the sun chase the leaves and felt the coffee get colder in my hand. I didn’t write a single word on the novel and ignored Clairce’s calls. I just stared at that tree, the deep bark-shadows and dappled patches of sunlight.
March 15th. The house feels more real with furniture in it, like I am an owner instead of a ghost. I took the first floor bedroom. There’s a great one on the second floor, all circular and painted white, with windows set into the walls. Writing there I feel that something clings in there like a film, like something has died and crawled into the walls.
I put a desk in the center of the room, facing the windows. Maybe some of that life will creep into my writing and the book will finally go somewhere.
April 1st-April fools indeed, if I’ve dropped one thing today I’ve dropped ten. Makes me the fool. April showers, too, as it just rained all day, dripping from the eaves and glooming up the kitchen. Miserable.
Screening Clarice’s calls. I haven’t picked up the phone in two days and couldn’t be happier. Got four chapters done on the next Sam Keen, finally, I’m sure she just wants to read over my damn shoulder the whole time. Just what I need, another armchair critic to tell me how hollow it sounds when I already know.
For some reason the chapters keep coming back to Sam’s mother. I try but I can’t stop it. He’s the boy detective, star of the show, and she’s a dead lunatic but I’ve started dreaming of a woman with a crescent-moon smile and I think it’s her. I never pictured her in my mind, not like I did Sam. She’s got Sam’s dark hair and cheekbones, but her eyes are too washed-out blue for her face. Maybe she’ll go somewhere in the story after all, readers have been asking me about Sam’s family for years. I said I wanted the house to inspire the book, didn’t I?
April 19th. Writing in that white room is starting to grate on me. I was deep into a scene yesterday when I hears singing coming from the hall, too faint and high to make out, and something shuffling on the stairs. I don’t want to write with my back to the door. It hangs on the frame wrong; the knob doesn’t fit onto the latch and it won’t close.
Sam’s mother is coming through now. He’s tracing her letters back through his grandmother-he just found an article about her house burning down, right before she was institutionalized, but his grandmother never told him. His father is starting to come together in a shadowy way, through bits and pieces of his mother’s ranting letters. If I’m right then Derrick, who he’s been chasing all this time, would be his uncle after all. Finally the history of the Keen family unfolds! For the thirteenth book of the series, I can do a few big reveals…
If only his mother would stop invading my dreams. I can’t sleep anymore for the nightmares. Watching her eyes as they roll back in her head, her hands and feet shaking violently against the white straps, the tongue depressors they shove into her mouth to keep her from biting her tongue. In my dreams she is at shock therapy every night, too gagged to loose the scream on her face, and I wake up sweating to grab the nearest legal pad and start scribbling in bed. I keep seeing her face but I can’t name her. It has to be something classic, and delicate with some hint of wildness in it, like a wrought-iron flower. Charlotte, maybe, or Marianne. Juliet? Delilah? Kathryn? She’s more real to me now than Sam is.
May 6th. Not a word. Roaring drunk on daiquiris with some latino futbol-fanatic kids downtown. ¡Viva la españa!
I got home and none of the lights would turn on. It must have been windy because the house made the most awful wailing all night long
May 21st-Clarice came by. Her hair’s been cut, a bob now instead of a bun every day. Still pearl earrings and Miss Pantsuits. She gave me that disappointed mouth, all one thin line, when I refused to show her the manuscript.
“Now Alan,” she said in that voice I despise, “You got an advance for the rent-”
“And I’m thirty-one chapters in,” I interrupted. “You’ll get it when I’m done. I don’t need you coming around and giving me suggestions for what new gadget you want Sam Keen to use. All you want out of me are product placements.”
“Alan, we get a lot of mail and you get a lot of money for Sam Keen to use certain products,” she began. “You wrote him as the tech geek. After all, it’s not like it’s out of character for him to want the newest and best-”
I stopped listening. Sam Keen is a twat who was born out of fire and only survived because of his mother. This is family drama, not a tech plug.
June 7th-God this heat is oppressive. I barred all the windows and pulled the shutters to keep the house shaded. The noises this house makes are unreal, attic floorboards creaking like something is being dragged across them. I haven’t even been to the attic sine I moved in, since you have to go down to the second floor and then up that weird closet staircase. The whole house is so slipshod and accidental.
It’s too hot to eat. I sit at the desk drinking whiskey sours and filling up legal pad after legal pad. If only Clarice could see me now. I haven’t written about Sam in a week, only her with the crescent-moon smile and frightened blue eyes. If I sit at the desk long enough, writing, not looking up, I can hear the faintest noise of her feet on the floor, feel her eyes reading over my shoulder. I can’t look up; it would only frighten her. She’s so skittish, after the shock treatments and the haloperidol. The slightest word will send her back to crying in the bathtub for days, until the water flows over the edge of the tub.
July 4th-Forgot the holiday until the noise startled me away from dinner, which was tuna again. I haven’t been to the store in a while. I can’t stop writing, she only comes when I’m writing and filling up one legal pad after another. Usually I write about her, but when I can’t think of anything else to say I just keep writing gibberish, a scribe for a language I don’t know. Anything, just so I can keep writing, keep feeling her presence over my shoulder.
She becomes calmer when I write. Last week she only overflowed the bathtub twice, the blood-and-water mixture spilling out onto the floor, and I scrubbed it with my eyes downcast so I wouldn’t look at her body laid out in the tub. I could only see the dark shadow of her hair, hanging over the edge of the porcelain, out of the corner of my eye.
Someday the temptation will be too great and I, like Orpheus, will not be able to stand it anymore. I feel without knowing, without daring to say it, that one look at her will be my downfall.
July 25th-Grocery. People stared at me in the aisles. I had to read the labels out loud to get them to make sense. Tuna, rice, beans, more handles of whiskey to go on ice.
“You need help with that, mister?” the bag girl asked me, but I just stared blankly and shuffled away.
August 11th. Found a stack of legal pads in the fridge this morning. Reading over them, they’re all drivel. Some teenage tech detective named Sam Keen, with an obnoxious golden retriever and an asinine, high-school hacker love interest. They’re in my handwriting. That’s how I got this house, isn’t it?
I stick them in an envelope with Clarice’s address, no return address. “That’s your son,” I tell her, reentering the house after I pull up the flag on the mailbox. We both laugh at the thought.
August 20th. She gets scared in the fall. He comes back then, every fall he comes back (she whispers, at night. She follows me all day but only speaks in my dreams). Oh, he comes with his matches and his kerosene and he comes and I must bury myself in the water-
Then it is the tub overflowing again, blood and water. I sing to her as I scrub it off the floor. Oh, my darlin’, oh, my darlin’, oh, my darlin’ Clementine…you were lost, and gone, forever, oh my darlin’ Clementine…
It calms her. The weeping subsides but the shaking continues.
September 13th. Cleaning out the basement. does everything crawl down here to die
September 22nd. I begin to hear him coming too. She weeps in bed, inconsolable, behind my back. She makes love to me only when I am blindfolded. Afterwards she cries against the space between my shoulderblades, tries to make herself very small.
Do you hear him, she cries at me in my dreams. You must stop him, he burned me alive, he roasted every inch of my body my soul-
And I listen. I must sit at my desk in the white circle room, with my back to the door, and I must fill up the legal pads with words. Only then can I hear his heavy footsteps, and see the lines his feet have disturbed in the dust. Yesterday something heavy was dragged along the floor in the attic while I wrote, keeping my eyes glued to the paper.
In the dreams I saw his silhouette while she wept. I woke up to feel the heat of his breath still in the air.
October 15th. I am going mad. I am going mad. She has told me her name, this woman I love and am only dreaming up, and I can no longer hear her voice because I can no longer sleep. I sit in the white room, gray at night with only that one bare bulb and I stare at the legal paper all night long, so I can hear him when he comes. So I can hear his footsteps on the stairs, the sloshing sound of kerosene splashing up on the side of the red plastic gas can. I bought it, I filled it and put it in the garage.
I only fall asleep when the dawn breaks on the windows, slumping over the desk in a few terrified hours of blackness where I cannot feel or hear her anywhere.
“Speak to me,” I beg the house when I wake. “What do you want?” but all I get of her now is blood in the bath water.
October 31st. I sat in the white room until midnight. I have put all my filled legal pads with her story around the edges of the room, a narrowing spiral with me at the center, sitting at my desk. I sit facing the door this time, and all the windows stare down my back like dogs, teeth bared and snarling softly.
I sit facing the open door, staring down the empty hallway until my vision narrows on the converging lines of doorframe and hallway, floorboards and the periphery of the stairs. I hear the shuffling coming before I see it and this time he is coming for me, because I have coveted what is his and for this I will burn.
I see her at last, her form getting larger slowly like she is approaching from an impossible distance. She is just as exactly as I knew she was. She is holding the baby, with blood dripping from her wrists and from between her legs, her body still soaking wet, water that pours from her mouth when she speaks. “You’re wrong, she’s a girl,” Delilah tells me, and I open my mouth to tell her that the arsonist is standing behind her with the red container of kerosene in his hands.
This time he is coming for me and it is kerosene on the legal pads and it is me, not her, screaming the crescent-moon smile, my arms and legs jerking violently against the restraints, the smell of my blistering skin and the metallic tang of my blood on the tile, the stinging in both of my wrists. It is my child, not his, and in that flash of blinding rage I am filling the kerosene tank, I am pouring it on the legal pads, I am destroying every last trace of her in the hope that she will disappear completely. It is light and head and noise, and then it is only her face before my eyes and then my vision collapses completely. Fire and acid replace moonlight and silk. I knew one look at her would be my downfall-
still working on it, it needs revision. But it is Halloween, and I refuse to break with my self-imposed scary story tradition.
the sounds from the attic are getting too great to bear, the thick heat of his breath in the darkness
March 1st. Writer’s block still. Today I spent most of the morning drinking coffee in the second floor landing, staring out the window. Furniture doesn’t arrive till next week-I thought this ornate old house, with a mattress on the floor, would constrain me to writing, somehow. Constrain. I mean inspire. No wonder I can’t finish a chapter, I can’t even write what damned word I actually mean anymore.
The tree in the back yard has occupied all of my attention. It has the gentlest leaves and the most sinister bark. I watched the sun chase the leaves and felt the coffee get colder in my hand. I didn’t write a single word on the novel and ignored Clairce’s calls. I just stared at that tree, the deep bark-shadows and dappled patches of sunlight.
March 15th. The house feels more real with furniture in it, like I am an owner instead of a ghost. I took the first floor bedroom. There’s a great one on the second floor, all circular and painted white, with windows set into the walls. Writing there I feel that something clings in there like a film, like something has died and crawled into the walls.
I put a desk in the center of the room, facing the windows. Maybe some of that life will creep into my writing and the book will finally go somewhere.
April 1st-April fools indeed, if I’ve dropped one thing today I’ve dropped ten. Makes me the fool. April showers, too, as it just rained all day, dripping from the eaves and glooming up the kitchen. Miserable.
Screening Clarice’s calls. I haven’t picked up the phone in two days and couldn’t be happier. Got four chapters done on the next Sam Keen, finally, I’m sure she just wants to read over my damn shoulder the whole time. Just what I need, another armchair critic to tell me how hollow it sounds when I already know.
For some reason the chapters keep coming back to Sam’s mother. I try but I can’t stop it. He’s the boy detective, star of the show, and she’s a dead lunatic but I’ve started dreaming of a woman with a crescent-moon smile and I think it’s her. I never pictured her in my mind, not like I did Sam. She’s got Sam’s dark hair and cheekbones, but her eyes are too washed-out blue for her face. Maybe she’ll go somewhere in the story after all, readers have been asking me about Sam’s family for years. I said I wanted the house to inspire the book, didn’t I?
April 19th. Writing in that white room is starting to grate on me. I was deep into a scene yesterday when I hears singing coming from the hall, too faint and high to make out, and something shuffling on the stairs. I don’t want to write with my back to the door. It hangs on the frame wrong; the knob doesn’t fit onto the latch and it won’t close.
Sam’s mother is coming through now. He’s tracing her letters back through his grandmother-he just found an article about her house burning down, right before she was institutionalized, but his grandmother never told him. His father is starting to come together in a shadowy way, through bits and pieces of his mother’s ranting letters. If I’m right then Derrick, who he’s been chasing all this time, would be his uncle after all. Finally the history of the Keen family unfolds! For the thirteenth book of the series, I can do a few big reveals…
If only his mother would stop invading my dreams. I can’t sleep anymore for the nightmares. Watching her eyes as they roll back in her head, her hands and feet shaking violently against the white straps, the tongue depressors they shove into her mouth to keep her from biting her tongue. In my dreams she is at shock therapy every night, too gagged to loose the scream on her face, and I wake up sweating to grab the nearest legal pad and start scribbling in bed. I keep seeing her face but I can’t name her. It has to be something classic, and delicate with some hint of wildness in it, like a wrought-iron flower. Charlotte, maybe, or Marianne. Juliet? Delilah? Kathryn? She’s more real to me now than Sam is.
May 6th. Not a word. Roaring drunk on daiquiris with some latino futbol-fanatic kids downtown. ¡Viva la españa!
I got home and none of the lights would turn on. It must have been windy because the house made the most awful wailing all night long
May 21st-Clarice came by. Her hair’s been cut, a bob now instead of a bun every day. Still pearl earrings and Miss Pantsuits. She gave me that disappointed mouth, all one thin line, when I refused to show her the manuscript.
“Now Alan,” she said in that voice I despise, “You got an advance for the rent-”
“And I’m thirty-one chapters in,” I interrupted. “You’ll get it when I’m done. I don’t need you coming around and giving me suggestions for what new gadget you want Sam Keen to use. All you want out of me are product placements.”
“Alan, we get a lot of mail and you get a lot of money for Sam Keen to use certain products,” she began. “You wrote him as the tech geek. After all, it’s not like it’s out of character for him to want the newest and best-”
I stopped listening. Sam Keen is a twat who was born out of fire and only survived because of his mother. This is family drama, not a tech plug.
June 7th-God this heat is oppressive. I barred all the windows and pulled the shutters to keep the house shaded. The noises this house makes are unreal, attic floorboards creaking like something is being dragged across them. I haven’t even been to the attic sine I moved in, since you have to go down to the second floor and then up that weird closet staircase. The whole house is so slipshod and accidental.
It’s too hot to eat. I sit at the desk drinking whiskey sours and filling up legal pad after legal pad. If only Clarice could see me now. I haven’t written about Sam in a week, only her with the crescent-moon smile and frightened blue eyes. If I sit at the desk long enough, writing, not looking up, I can hear the faintest noise of her feet on the floor, feel her eyes reading over my shoulder. I can’t look up; it would only frighten her. She’s so skittish, after the shock treatments and the haloperidol. The slightest word will send her back to crying in the bathtub for days, until the water flows over the edge of the tub.
July 4th-Forgot the holiday until the noise startled me away from dinner, which was tuna again. I haven’t been to the store in a while. I can’t stop writing, she only comes when I’m writing and filling up one legal pad after another. Usually I write about her, but when I can’t think of anything else to say I just keep writing gibberish, a scribe for a language I don’t know. Anything, just so I can keep writing, keep feeling her presence over my shoulder.
She becomes calmer when I write. Last week she only overflowed the bathtub twice, the blood-and-water mixture spilling out onto the floor, and I scrubbed it with my eyes downcast so I wouldn’t look at her body laid out in the tub. I could only see the dark shadow of her hair, hanging over the edge of the porcelain, out of the corner of my eye.
Someday the temptation will be too great and I, like Orpheus, will not be able to stand it anymore. I feel without knowing, without daring to say it, that one look at her will be my downfall.
July 25th-Grocery. People stared at me in the aisles. I had to read the labels out loud to get them to make sense. Tuna, rice, beans, more handles of whiskey to go on ice.
“You need help with that, mister?” the bag girl asked me, but I just stared blankly and shuffled away.
August 11th. Found a stack of legal pads in the fridge this morning. Reading over them, they’re all drivel. Some teenage tech detective named Sam Keen, with an obnoxious golden retriever and an asinine, high-school hacker love interest. They’re in my handwriting. That’s how I got this house, isn’t it?
I stick them in an envelope with Clarice’s address, no return address. “That’s your son,” I tell her, reentering the house after I pull up the flag on the mailbox. We both laugh at the thought.
August 20th. She gets scared in the fall. He comes back then, every fall he comes back (she whispers, at night. She follows me all day but only speaks in my dreams). Oh, he comes with his matches and his kerosene and he comes and I must bury myself in the water-
Then it is the tub overflowing again, blood and water. I sing to her as I scrub it off the floor. Oh, my darlin’, oh, my darlin’, oh, my darlin’ Clementine…you were lost, and gone, forever, oh my darlin’ Clementine…
It calms her. The weeping subsides but the shaking continues.
September 13th. Cleaning out the basement. does everything crawl down here to die
September 22nd. I begin to hear him coming too. She weeps in bed, inconsolable, behind my back. She makes love to me only when I am blindfolded. Afterwards she cries against the space between my shoulderblades, tries to make herself very small.
Do you hear him, she cries at me in my dreams. You must stop him, he burned me alive, he roasted every inch of my body my soul-
And I listen. I must sit at my desk in the white circle room, with my back to the door, and I must fill up the legal pads with words. Only then can I hear his heavy footsteps, and see the lines his feet have disturbed in the dust. Yesterday something heavy was dragged along the floor in the attic while I wrote, keeping my eyes glued to the paper.
In the dreams I saw his silhouette while she wept. I woke up to feel the heat of his breath still in the air.
October 15th. I am going mad. I am going mad. She has told me her name, this woman I love and am only dreaming up, and I can no longer hear her voice because I can no longer sleep. I sit in the white room, gray at night with only that one bare bulb and I stare at the legal paper all night long, so I can hear him when he comes. So I can hear his footsteps on the stairs, the sloshing sound of kerosene splashing up on the side of the red plastic gas can. I bought it, I filled it and put it in the garage.
I only fall asleep when the dawn breaks on the windows, slumping over the desk in a few terrified hours of blackness where I cannot feel or hear her anywhere.
“Speak to me,” I beg the house when I wake. “What do you want?” but all I get of her now is blood in the bath water.
October 31st. I sat in the white room until midnight. I have put all my filled legal pads with her story around the edges of the room, a narrowing spiral with me at the center, sitting at my desk. I sit facing the door this time, and all the windows stare down my back like dogs, teeth bared and snarling softly.
I sit facing the open door, staring down the empty hallway until my vision narrows on the converging lines of doorframe and hallway, floorboards and the periphery of the stairs. I hear the shuffling coming before I see it and this time he is coming for me, because I have coveted what is his and for this I will burn.
I see her at last, her form getting larger slowly like she is approaching from an impossible distance. She is just as exactly as I knew she was. She is holding the baby, with blood dripping from her wrists and from between her legs, her body still soaking wet, water that pours from her mouth when she speaks. “You’re wrong, she’s a girl,” Delilah tells me, and I open my mouth to tell her that the arsonist is standing behind her with the red container of kerosene in his hands.
This time he is coming for me and it is kerosene on the legal pads and it is me, not her, screaming the crescent-moon smile, my arms and legs jerking violently against the restraints, the smell of my blistering skin and the metallic tang of my blood on the tile, the stinging in both of my wrists. It is my child, not his, and in that flash of blinding rage I am filling the kerosene tank, I am pouring it on the legal pads, I am destroying every last trace of her in the hope that she will disappear completely. It is light and head and noise, and then it is only her face before my eyes and then my vision collapses completely. Fire and acid replace moonlight and silk. I knew one look at her would be my downfall-
still working on it, it needs revision. But it is Halloween, and I refuse to break with my self-imposed scary story tradition.