Lost in the Drywall

Happy October! I thought you might enjoy something a little scary this month - Kate

Somehow, being lost in the drywall seems so much worse than being lost in the barrens (ah, a literary reference) or the Antarctic (a scientific reference) or in space (a TV and movie reference). Spencer wishes he could transform himself into one of those other stories but he’s well and truly stuck here in the drywall.

He isn’t sure how it happened. What he does know is that, if he gets out, he will never say yes to helping with renovations again. Even if the person asking for the favor is the woman he’s been trying to get next to for almost five years.

He said yes because of her big brown eyes, her silky hair, her jaw-dropping breasts and perfect hips. He said yes because he’s been in love (or lust, at least) with Leanne for what feels like forever.

He didn’t know much about drywalling when she asked, but he’s a quick learner and the drywall guy at the Home Depot down the street was a genius at telling him what he needed to know. He and Leanne had no trouble lifting the big slabs into place and he was damn good – if he said so himself – at the taping and filling. But then something went wrong.

And here he is in some limbo between her apartment and his, surrounded by slabs of perfectly taped and filled drywall, the dust on the floor silencing his footsteps and making his eyes water each time he moves. He has tried yelling but the dust and the drywall throws his voice back at him. He tried pounding on the walls with the same result. Finally, he sits in the dust and ponders his situation.

The last thing he remembers was filling the final nail hole while listening to the chant Leanne crooned behind him and smelling the oddly scented candle she had lit to celebrate the completion of the job. It was an odd-sounding piece of music, certainly nothing he’d ever heard before, and an unusual scent. Together they made him a little dizzy. Maybe he fainted.

Spencer lifts his head and looks around one more time. He swears he’s been in this space for weeks but he’s neither hungry nor thirsty. And he swears he’s walked miles and never once re-crossed his footsteps. When he looks behind him, the indentations in the dust are clear but when he tries to step back into them, they disappear.

Something is keeping him here. Be realistic, he tells himself. Someone named Leanne is keeping him here. And he doesn’t know why. Except maybe she was a little upset when he accidentally brushed against her breasts for the fifteenth time. The look in her eyes scared him to death. He remembers that.

And he remembers occasionally thinking that he should maybe give up this job but each time he thought that, Leanne would say something or make a slight gesture with her hand, and he would forget all about it. He would remember how much he loved working with Leanne and how the sight of the drywall he helped her with, would ensure his success with her.

But it wasn’t too long after the chant and the candle that the dizziness started. He picks himself up off the floor and starts walking again. This time, he follows no plan, thinking that a completely random walk might lead him somewhere. Anywhere.

And it does. It leads him to a big black metal door. It’s slightly ajar and he pushes at it until it swings all the way open. There is a fire flickering in the room he enters and it’s warm. There is no dust. And there is no drywall.

Spencer carefully sits himself down in the leather chair on the hearth and takes a sip from the glass of water on the table beside it. He is a bit worried about poison but suddenly, the thirst he has been denying seizes him by the throat and poison becomes the least of his worries. He crams the meat on the plate into his mouth and swallows it without chewing. Spencer groans in relief.

A tall woman, taller than he and Spencer is considered a tall man, materializes at his elbow.

“Spencer. Have you figured out where you are? And why you are here?”

He shrugs and continues drinking and eating.

“You are here,” she says in a stern voice, “because of your bad attitude.”

“I figured it was something like that,” he says around a gob of meat. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been attracted to Leanne for years. I couldn’t help myself.”

The woman smiles at him, her teeth shiny and bone white. Spencer feels a frisson of horror but thinks about the days in the drywall and shakes it off.

“Go home, Spencer.”

And just like that, he is in his dining room, drywall dust falling from his clothes and hair and skin onto his mahogany table and matching floors. He can hear each droplet as it hits. Each time he inhales, dust invades his nostrils and his throat.  He shakes himself like a Labrador puppy coming out of the water and the dust flies around him, coating everything in the room.

Spencer listens carefully but there is no one else in the apartment. He leans against the wall and hears nothing from Leanne’s apartment. He drops his clothes to the floor – no point making another room messy – and hurries into the shower.

The Chinese food – five different dishes – is delivered just in time to stop him from fainting again. He sits in his recliner and repeats his new mantra. Just say no. Just say no. Just say no. But the thought of Leanne in the apartment across the hall has him rushing through his shower. He wonders what he might help her with as he steps outside his door and into the dust.

Twitter story - JAMAL

Jamal was four years old when it happened and though he sees it in his dreams, he knows that he doesn’t see what really happened but what he read in the newspapers and saw on the TV long after it was over.


So he has this un-memory superimposed over the reality of it – the things that he remembers. The real things. He remembers the noise, the big unbearably loud bang. He remembers the car slowing and zig-zagging down the road, making him feel sick. He remembers a man – he to this day he doesn’t know who the man was – reaching in through the broken window and steering the car to a halt. He remembers being trapped in his car seat.

Most of all, he remembers that he never saw his mother again. Or his father.

He remembers being taken to a cold place with other children. They were nice, he thinks he remembers, but he didn’t know them and he wanted his mother. Even his seldom-seen and often-mean father would be better than these strangers.

It isn’t until he is sixteen and spending a lot of time in the computer lab at school that he finds out what happened to him when he was four. At first, he can’t believe it, can’t believe that the young child who witnessed his mother’s murder is him. But there are too many coincidences to be ignored.

So now Jamal must live with not just the memories, but the reality of this story that isn’t really his. He was in the back seat of his father’s car. His mother’s car had broken down so she took the Cadillac. She was driving him to… Where? That’s one thing that doesn’t seem clear in any of the articles. Wherever. Someone (no one knows who or if they do, they aren’t saying) pulled up beside the car and shot his mother three times in the chest. She slumped against the wheel and the car started to zig-zag slowly down the street until a man reached in the broken window and steered them to the curb.

His mother was dead. His father, rich and scary and probably (so the stories go) a drug dealer, allows the Ministry to take Jamal away and put him to live with strangers. He never saw or heard of either of them again.

Nice story, he thinks. He should be able to dine out on that story. But every time he tries, the person laughs and says, you’ve made that up.

Only part of it, Jamal says. Most of it is true.

Twitter story - LITTLE WHITE LIES

Reminds me of that song, the song I can never remember. And that’s probably just as well, because if I remember the song then I’ll remember the lies. And they weren’t so little. Or white. But they were – very definitely – lies.

I didn’t really mean to tell them, at least from this distance it seems that way. I meant, as I remember it, to make things better. Or at least bearable. She seemed so unhappy, that deep down dirty kind of unhappiness, and I couldn’t bear to see her that way.

So I said, “He’ll be back, Mom.”

“No he won’t.”

“He told me he’d be back.”

“When?”

Okay, you can see what happened, can’t you? With every question of hers, I got myself in deeper. I had to keep going, had to keep the story alive. Or she’d be unhappy and pissed off, a lethal combination.

“He didn’t say exactly, but definitely before your birthday.”

Her birthday was almost six months away. By that time I was sure she’d be on to some new guy. They never lasted very long though he had been around for almost a year before he disappeared.

“Why didn’t he say goodbye to me?”

The sobs weren’t subsiding.

“Because,” I hesitated, searching for inspiration. “Because he couldn’t bear to see you cry.”

“Oh,” she said, the sniffles slowing and the tears stopping.

I hadn’t counted on her waiting for him. I hadn’t even considered it a possibility. But she did. And the night before her birthday she stood on the porch in the cool night air and waited for the headlights to come up the drive. She waited all through the night and the next day and into heat of the following one before she swayed and fell to the porch.

I lifted her up – she never was very big – and carried her into bed. I made her drink chicken noodle soup and water and I waited for her to move on.

But she didn’t. She hasn’t. She’s convinced something terrible happened to him and she has me searching for him. Each afternoon when I get home from school, I turn on the computer and search – state by state – for any mention of him. It’s been good for my geography class but otherwise? Nothing.

But she believes.

And I, I have to live with it.

Twitter story - LAKE BEAUTIFUL

 
For those of you who didn't read this story when I first published it on the blog many, many months ago and have been following it on Twitter - here it is in its entirety:

Kate

Lake Beautiful


The lake shines a cool turquoise in the winter sun. A raft of cinnamon teals huddle in a tight scrum around the dock, shifting slightly as the crimson canoe draws near. The silence, solid as January ice, enfolds me and through it, I hear only small sounds: the ruffling of feathers; a drop of water from my paddle hitting the still water of the lake; the distant caw of a crow; the susurration of my own breath.

Peaceful does not begin to describe this place. In times of tension or sorrow I imagine myself here, the details growing sharper and clearer with each visit, until now, ten years after its first imagining, it has become as real to me as my own body.

It is always winter at the lake I’ve named Beautiful, always sunny, always late afternoon. I begin each visit by walking to the boathouse by the dock, pulling the canoe from its rack, the paddle from its hook, and carrying them down to the lake. The canoe is light, easily carried by one small woman, and I’ve learned to balance it on my shoulders as I walk out onto the dock. I place the canoe in the water on the lefthand side of the dock, the side closest to the cabin. The water is cold, and clear. I can see the mottled grey rocks on the lakebed as it slopes away from the shore.

I step carefully into the crimson canoe and wait until the rocking stops before I pull on my gloves and pick up the paddle lying on the dock beside me. I stroke, slowly, first one side, then another. The cabin is at my back as I glide through the still water. There are no other people at Lake Beautiful, no evidence of human occupation, save my dock and my cabin. I pass bushes of kinnikinnick, the berries beckoning bright-red in the light. Leafless poplars stand guard over the edge of the lake, and Rocky Mountain maples shed their few remaining yellow leaves at their feet.

The circuit of Lake Beautiful takes me almost two hours. I stop only once and always at the same place, a rocky spit on the far side of the lake across from the cabin – the farthest point in my journey – and drink the hot chocolate I’ve brought with me. The cabin is almost invisible from this distance but a faint reflection of light on its windows serves to guide me home.

The pale lemon sun illuminates the frosted tips of the pine branches, setting the forest aglow as it settles below the mountains. I time my return to that moment when the west side of the lake sinks into darkness, the east side still retaining the light, a beacon by which I steer for home.

Candles gleam in the windows of the tiny cabin. I know a fire warms the room, just as I know that the fragrance of fresh-baked bread will envelop me when I open the door. I have not lit the fire, nor the candles. I have not baked the bread. These things are prepared for me by my dream lover, the man who inhabits this cabin.

I move slowly now, my body tired from the long slow trip around the lake. I pull the canoe from the water and return it to the boathouse. I walk back up the path to the cabin and pull open the door. You are never there when I return to the cabin, but I know you are near.

I strip the clothes from my body and step into the bath set in front of the fire. The water is almost too hot, scented with lavender and a faint hint of orange. A glass of champagne sits on the edge of the tub, condensation beading its crystal sides. The bottle nestles next to it in a silver ice bucket.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. When I open them, you are here with me.