Thu, 19 May 2005

Every Stitch
I told myself if we stayed here in the city for another year I’d kill myself. Sarah would laugh at calling this a city; it’s too green for that, she’d say, too open, but the crowdedness and the tension and the relentless sound of a jibbering idiot future everybody told me was inevitable was suffocating me, making me act terribly. Sarah had many friends here, had her job at the clinic, had akido and video editing classes; she had made a home here. After hinting that leaving the city might be my entryway into starting a family, after a pair of nights of listening to me locked in the bathroom going unhinged, after wearing her down and breaking her resolve, Sarah was willing to leave her life here and move with me, farther north.

Summerland was something of a fluke; I once had a professor who lived there, suggested it to the class once in a drunken rant half-passing for a lecture, and the name always stuck as the sort of place one could write a novel, the novel that’s been haunting me for ten years now. We did a bit of house-hunting before we moved and found an old two-story farmhouse by the river, the sort of zone between the outlying neighborhood and the farms, plenty of space without being entirely isolated. Convinced the place was flood-safe (Sarah had a thing about floods) and filled with ideas for use of the emptied barn, her acceptance of the idea grew into slow elation. We felt like conspirators, like infiltrators, children playing at spies, playing at being adults. The rent was so cheap we didn’t even bother finding a subletter for the last three months on our apartment’s old lease; we packed our stuff in a day and never looked back.

The property owner was an older legacy farmer named Asa who had two missing fingers on his left hand and a wife who could have thrown me into the trees. They showed us around, warned us of the big dryrotted oak on the bank, told us about the neighbors, told us something was living under the front porch but it’d never get in the house. We were smitten. A week’s worth of unpacking and we were set.

Rent being so cheap we could afford to wait a while before seeking out work, but Sarah’s not the type to drift. The best we could do was a dialup connection, but as I had no interest in the outside world and Sarah had lined up enough technical writing jobs to last out the year that was fine. One thing we were always good at was giving each other space, mostly as our sleep schedules didn’t sync up; she’d usually get to sleep around eleven, when I’d nap with her for a couple hours, get up and start writing, actually getting to sleep around the time she was getting up. I’d spend the night sitting upstairs, making coffee in the second half-kitchen, listening to my headphones and watching out over the street, to the houses out in the hills and the fields and the blinking radio towers, then turning to the other window and watching the river through the black trees. We’d go into town on weekends and make elaborate Sunday dinners. We cleaned out the barn and decided it was time we learned how to paint. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

One night I heard something out by the road and saw a neighbordog, an old black lab, letting out a low howl as it staggered into the yard, falling in a heap by the mailbox. I got dressed, got a flashlight, and went out to look, but by the time I got out there it was gone. The first time I thought nothing of it. Every couple weeks, however, some sort of animal had crawled to our yard, seemingly to die, only to be gone by the time I got to the yard. One night, having had no luck at writing and having had far too much coffee, I heard a barn cat’s call and climbed out onto the roof, watching. The cat fell, breathed out, and was silent. Two large rabbits then bounded out from beneath the porch, where they grabbed the cat gently in their jaws and pulled it back beneath the porch. This should have seemed a bit odd, but ultimately untroublesome, but I was terrified.

At the age of six I was the youngest non-baby child in my neighborhood, all the other kids older, bigger, knowing. I would tag along behind them, attempt to find a place among them, but I was at best a gadfly, a niusance. One day they told me I could be a part of their group if I passed the test. I agreed without thinking and they took me to the back end of the park, near the drainage ditch, and sat me down in front of a small hole in the ground. They told me a baseball had fallen into the hole; were I to pull it out I was one of them. I knew something was wrong, but I did not care. I reached out, slowly, staring for the slightest motion from inside the hole. I could not stop shaking. I stopped reaching and had to lean forward to make progress. I could not see my hand, my arm, twitching each time my hand brushed along the inside of the hole. I felt something then, something soft, something not a baseball, and I was relieved for a second. The half-rabbit then turned and bit into my hand, hooked into my skin as I pulled it out of the hole, its face and paws mangled from a lawnmower or something worse, flailing around as I kept falling backwards, trying to get away, my hand covered in blood and thick ropey saliva. I ran home and hid my wound from my mother, going back that night and pouring gasoline into the hole. For years afterward I was visited in my sleep by the half-rabbit, giant in its death, standing at the foot of my bed, patches of singed fur around exposed muscle, its jaws silently jerking open and shut, waiting for me to move and then kill me.

This was decades ago, and I barely remember anymore. A girlfriend I had in college had a rabbit which, in time, I’d learned to feed and pet. All that was in the past. I barely remembered.

I became terrified of the porch.

I told all this to Sarah, who told me not to worry, this was the country, you have to get used to animals being around. Which, of course, is the truth, and I was being a child. I couldn’t leave it alone, though, spending the nights sitting on the roof, staring down at the porch, waiting for a sign. Eventually Sarah, who believes greatly that any fear should be run toward head-on and thus erased, told me I had to go down under the porch and see for myself that a couple rabbits are nothing to worry about. A week of procrastinating later, I was shamed and sleepless enough to follow through.

Too afraid to go at night, I got my flashlight and stick (like a kid, I had to have some sort of club in hand) and pryed back the panel next to the stairs, by the front hose spigot. I looked inside but could see nothing from that angle and had to actually crawl inside, closer to the house. I knocked something over and saw it was a skull, a dog-skull I guessed. I pointed the flashlight at it and saw a number of other animal skulls, piles of them, dozens and dozens, spilling up from holes in the dirt. I heard something scurry behind them, saw the movement of fur, and panicked, scrambling back out, slamming the panel shut. Over dinner a couple hours later we laughed about it, about how little we actually knew of the country, but it was obvious to both of us that I was ashamed, that I wasn’t finished. Laying in bed with her I heard a raccoon howl in the yard. She rolled away from me. I picked up the flashlight and stick, sitting at the foot of the bed, and went to the yard.

I pulled back the panel and immediately crawled inside. I could see the two rabbits pulling the body of the raccoon into a small hole, where they used their teeth and paws to strip it of its skin. There was a light which escaped from the skull of the animal, short and dim but visible, while the rabbits polished and cleaned the skull with their saliva and fur. They then kicked dirt over the remains in the hole and lept farther along the porch. I followed, my flashlight off, trying to be silent. There was a large mound at the far end of the porch, which the rabbits stopped in front of. From within the mound I heard a low squealing sound, the sound of a speaker dying. The rabbits listened to this sound, then chattered back and forth to each other excitedly. The thing in the mound then let out a short barking sound, and the rabbits turned, facing me. I did not move. The two rabbits approached me, sniffed at my face and hands. I breathed in and out, hoping they would not thing I was dead, but I did not move. The rabbits bit into my shoulders and slowly pulled me toward the mound, the flashlight and stick falling out of my hands. I realized I could not move, even if I wanted to. The thing within the mound shifted, at which point I realized the mound was not a mound at all. There was a hugely obese man, as large as a small sow, whose arms and legs had atrophied and wilted, whose teeth were gnarled as roots, piercing his cheeks and lips. I am not certain this was a man at all, but it spoke in the voice of a man, as I remember:

“Have you died? Do you remember?”

“No. I live here.”

“You do not live in the portal. You are not a dead man and do not belong here.”

“I wanted to know.”

“And what do you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“You are a dead man. You are late in arrival; your brain has decayed. There is still time.”

“No. I am leaving.”

“Can you leave?”

I tried to turn, but could only twitch; the rabbits let go of my shoulders and lept back, staring at me.

“You are a dead man. You need to let go before we can open your skull.”

“I do not want to die,” I cried, and began sobbing.

“The black lights are falling away. You are cursing your release by your fear. You need to die.”

I could not speak. I could barely breathe. The pig-man called in a low hum to the rabbits, who pulled him forward, biting into the rings of sores across its chest. The pig-man arched up as the rabbits pulled him toward me, then descended on top of me. It was going to smother me. I heard it hum, heard the rabbits hum, heard the animals in the woods and barns hum, and I stopped trying to move, and felt myself falling upwards, and I saw a spinning cluster of lights, far away, and I knew I could only reach the most outerlying of them if I fell into its gravity.

Something pulled me back into my body, out from beneath the pig-man, out from beneath the porch. Sarah was brushing mud out of my eyes, shaking me, and I felt a snap and began convulsing. At the hospital she told me I kept screaming about the lights, so she kept turning them off and on, trying to figure out what I was talking about.

Neighbors with shotguns came in and investigated beneath the porch, finding nothing but holes and skulls. They suspect we had a wolf, or some sort of wild boar, although there shouldn’t be any boar this far east. I had stopped writing even after I got off the medication, spending my nights driving around the back roads, looking. One night I saw the rabbits, pulling somethign toward a storm-lamed barn out by the tracks. I began searching for recent roadkill, carrying the carcasses to the barn where the portal was hidden, hoping I could erase the memory by delivering the souls of other animals.

Years have come and gone. Someday I will wake up and forget all of this, wake up with my wife and my new child and my life as I always wanted it, and I will be okay again, with nothing staring at me from the foot of the bed, waiting for me to move.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #