Back then, we lived in a retrofitted millhouse. Our street once led to the old mill, but that was demolished years ago. Now, the road trailed off into a meadow where the unsalvaged rail tracks peeked up through the flowers. The last remains of the old ways. On the back porch, we could see the vast green of the wildlife preserve and Singletary Pond like a slate boot in the haze. It was all falling apart. Some houses on the block were boarded, the timbers sagging. Others bore a cauterized wimpling from old fires. But we had neighbors. A few kids. A half dozen retirees. It was quiet, and my mother would smoke Virginia Slims out on the porch, looking toward the city. Waiting.

My father took a job at the Marriott in Worcester. He was rarely home. Long hours in the banquet halls. Early for prep and late with paperwork. The cooks all know him. Invited him out for drinks. It didn’t matter. When he was home, he’d hole up with Mom in the master bedroom, smoking grass and napping away the afternoons.

Our little black-and-white television had rabbit ears, but it rarely played more than static. A small shelf of dog-eared paperbacks stood in the kitchen. Fleetwood Mac on the radio. There was absolutely nothing to do. I wandered down into the park to swing, or onto the asphalt lot to follow the painted lines like a Minoan labyrinth walker. Or throw stones at the birds. Sometimes I wandered into the forest, where white oak and tulip and hemlock canopied everything in broken shadows.

In those woods, I found the crumbling ruins of the black house.

It sat deep in the trees, obscured by creeping vines. The siding was cracked and peeling. Grey as bleached driftwood. What windows remained were shattered, and the little porch had begun a slow uncoupling. The entire house was canted into a strained parallelogram, upright only because of the hardwoods that buttressed it. Though the green door lay in the grass, spongy with moss, the entrance was blocked by fallen timber and sodden leaves. After circling the house, I found the back door.

It led into a simple kitchen. Something from a different time. Plaster walls and a tin backsplash. The linoleum floors were cracked and curling. A bench stood by the wood-fire stove, and the rusted-out ice chest. A water basin. The roof had collapsed, creating a jagged skylight that funneled in a slush of leaves, and wood shingles, and animal bones onto the ruined dining room table. In the mound of filth, a single sapling had taken root and spread its fragile branches to catch the light. As if risen up from the dead, like Lazarus. Around the tree, the table was set with tarnished silver and plates trimmed in pink roses. Everything half-buried under fallen leaves. Saucers filled with mirror pools of black water. I could see them moving. There were shadows all around me.

When the wind blew and the house groaned, I fled in terror.

I told some boys who lived nearby. Two brothers, Jon and Sam, lived a few houses down. An older kid from the playground named Thomas. I told them about the black house. The tree. They all wanted to see it, so I led them through the woods like a tracker. The brothers brought plastic squirt guns and painted my back in cold water, laughing with each shot. Pew, pew.

Everything was just as I had left it. The tree growing from the ruined table. Light filtering down, and leaves dripping. The gaping skylight. We raided the empty pantry and tore open cabinets. Poked at the rotting floor. There was nothing in the kitchen, and Jon approached the dining table. He studied the tree for a while as though lost. As though reconciling something.

Then he stepped back and kicked the table. The rotten legs buckled, and the whole tableau collapsed. Plates shattered, their edges stark and white in the muted darkness. Water splashed our feet. When it all came to rest, the tree lay on its side like a broken armature. I knew it would die. In my heart, it was already dead.

Jon shoved the table flat, sending up a rank cloud of dust, and we hurried out.

The living room was skeletal. A scattering of leaves. A half dozen mouse nests. Lime plaster had fallen in fist-sized gray scabs, and the lathing showed through, and shafts of light from the ruined exterior dotted the floors as if projecting constellations from some other galaxy. Beneath the shattered windows, the floors were stained and warping, and we walked among fans of attenuating blackness. A single mattress sat askew near the wall, sodden and feathery with fungal threads, and a little camp stove lay near it, toppled among a scattering of open cans. Above it all, a rosary hung from a nail, the cross long gone, and the beads gray with dust.

Thomas had a Bic. He worked the key on the camp stove, trying to light it, but nothing happened, so we jumped on the bed and ripped up the ragged blankets. Jon and Sam kicked the cans around the room. They tried to write their names on the wall with the squirt guns, but ran dry before the task was done. The dark, broken letters read JOSA. Already fading into the plaster.

In the bedroom, we found stacks of magazines. Hustler and Playboy. Swank. High Society. Words I didn’t know at the time. Each slim volume was swollen with the years of damp, and the stacks had fallen over. Many of the magazines lay in water, dissolving into a strange, gray soup where lurid eyes peered up among the fragmented flesh and bleeding texts. Breasts of nameless women. Their female parts like pink oysters. Their legs and mouths open. Their hooded glances. Into the camera.

Thomas squatted down, picking at the fused books, but couldn’t free them enough to see more. Eventually, he gave up and touched the lighter to the stack. We watched the pages curl and blacken, and wink out. It was all too wet to burn, so Sam held up his gun while Thomas melted the squirt tip. The plastic sizzled and fell in stringy droplets, like pine sap, and thin grey smoke burned our eyes. The taste, sharp and acrid.

All of this terrified me. The denuded women, contorted like accident victims. The campfire scent of burning paper. The melted gun and the hissing pop of plastic on the floor. Everyone laughing. Crowing. All of it senseless.

As I reached for the lighter to take it away, a wad of boiling plastic landed on my wrist. The pain was instant. Blinding as it seared into my skin. Everyone froze and I began to wail. They all tossed away the guns and the lighter in a panic, shushing me. Its okay. It’s not that bad. Please, just be quiet. But, oh, the pain. The pain would not let me be silent. Thomas pulled me out of the woods. No one said a word. I screamed when he picked out the hardened plastic, and the brothers bolted.

My mother ran cold water over my arm and slathered the burn with the udder cream she used on her chapped hands. After that, she held me until I slept. Dad looked it over the next day, his eyes red and watering. He just shrugged.

You’re alright, he said.

A week later, we were all treated for lice. They shaved our heads, kept us home. We bathed in shampoo that smelled of rotten fruit and kerosene. They burned our clothes. I’d sometimes see the other boys on the street. Their long necks. Pale skulls like starved aliens. Like beads on a string. They wanted nothing to do with me.

In time, the scar healed into a puckered oval. A closed mouth. A kiss seared into my flesh. It seems so small now. Catches me off guard.

Sometimes, I think it’s smiling.

We opened at six, but often regulars came early. Knocking on the glass and waiting with their hands in their pockets. Looking around at the empty buildings. Collars up. They’d sit at the counter as we turned down the chairs and brought up the lights. Mom poured coffee. Everyone looked tired.

Most were men on their way to laborious jobs. House painter and crane operator. Barney had two bagels and a cappuccino. Jim, just a coffee to go. That sort of thing. The cafe was not upscale. We’d build the counter from planed yellow pine two-by-sixes. The tables came from the district, where they’d languished in the old refectory for a decade. Bought for a few dollars a piece. Almost everything was scavenged and refurbished, except the hood system over the cook station. That cost my parents dearly. All their wealth and much more tied up in two thousand square feet of commercial space. I was only twelve and gave it little thought.

At six-thirty, I’d walk to school and wait in the asphalt lot for the bell. The entire campus was surrounded by chain-link fencing capped with concertina wire, a kind of battlefield perimeter. Metal detectors at the doors. The listless instructors within. After school, I’d return home to sleep for a while. Then out with friends after dark. We played basketball under the water tower. We rode our bikes to the Mobile refinery to race down enormous gravel piles. Or out to Billingsport, to steal Magic cards.

In the evenings, my parents wanted dinner around the table, as a family. But they were tired. They’d bring back bagels and cream cheese. Sliced tomatoes. We were all sick of it. One night, I woke after midnight. I could hear them talking in their bedroom, and I snuck downstairs and stood in the kitchen, eating a raw slice of bacon. I wasn’t even hungry.

The next morning, a new customer came in. She sat at the counter and drank an espresso. A twist of lemon. She chatted with my mother, and I watched her in a way I’d not watched a woman before. Her hair was tied back, and her eyes were dark with mascara. Glitter on her face and hands. Beneath her long coat, a sheer pink halter and skirt. She was probably in her early twenties, delicate in her movements, and confident. Smiling beside the middle-aged men in their Carhartts and ball caps. Her eyes an aching blue.

The next morning, she ordered lox with her espresso. I brought it out, the warm plate smelling of salt. She told me she’d not had it in years, and when she spoke, I saw the glimmer of something on her tongue. A tiny bead of light, like a little eye looking out.

“What’s in your mouth?” I asked.

She seemed surprised and laughed.

“Hold on,” she said, leaning forward in an aura of floral perfume and alcohol.

She held her ponytail to one side and opened her mouth. Her tongue was pierced with a stainless steel bar, each end tipped with polished spheres. She worked the bar between her teeth. Click, click.

“Pretty cool,” she said, sitting back. “Do you have any capers?”

I brought her one of the opened jars, and she spooned the little buds onto her plate.

“Did it hurt?”

“Oh, yes.” She saw me watching her mouth. “Do you want to see it again?”

I nodded, and she showed her tongue a second time and leaned close.

“Touch it,” she said, voice muffled by her strange gaping posture.

“Go ahead, you can touch it.”

I brushed the end with a finger. My tiny, distorted reflection looking back from the mirror finish. Smooth. Warm. Wet. Her silken tongue trembling like an eel, pinned on a diver’s spear. She said she got it on her eighteenth birthday. A lifetime ago. I asked if it was hard to chew. Hard to do a lot of things, she told me. She said I looked older than my age, that I was sweet and more confident than most grown men. I just listened and watched her eat.

She left with her coat open, her pale legs sparkling in the dawn light. The sky outside was red and gold. My father pulled me aside and asked what she and I had talked about. He clapped my shoulder when I told him, and the men at the counter smiled. Little Casanova. Can’t beat a free show. Boys got instincts. I filled their mugs, and they ruffled my hair. By then, it was six thirty, and I washed my hands and shouldered the school bag. Mom kissed me goodbye.

I waited months to see her again, watching the door each morning, but it was too late. The following spring, my parents closed the cafe. They couldn’t afford the taxes. The numbers didn’t work. It’s hard to give people what they want, and we moved south to be with family.

For years, I thought of that little light and her open mouth. Living in the darkness of it. The image marked me. Her soft and creased lips. Her glossy, white teeth. The way she moved and looked at me. But I never saw her again.

Except in my dreams, where she lives forever.

My hands were stained black. I hadn’t bathed in days.

I drove away from the campus without a destination and eased onto the interstate. Wanting to disappear. Semiconscious. I hallucinated the back of a tractor-trailer morphing into a giant man. The monstrous form drifted down the interstate, watching me, his tongue dragging sparks on the blacktop. I should have been sleeping, but it seemed so undeserved.

It was winter, and I could see my breath. To stay alert, I hung my hand from the window and stuffed it down my pants. I bit my wrist and slapped my face, open-mouthed, intoning. The Sephia shook when I took it over eighty, and air rushed through the ill-fitted doorframes. Low discordant tones in the greatness of that black night. My teeth hurt. I thought I might be dying. It was a strange time.

South for over an hour. The sporadic cars and long-haul truckers speeding by. I thought I was driving home. Down to the city where all my friends were gone. Into the trees where no one could find me. The streets were empty. I had come on a Tuesday, and everyone was away. All sleeping and dreaming of their futures, of lovers in their beds and terrible magics. I thought I might drive to my girl’s house. She lived in the city and studied education, and we saw one another every weekend. I knew already that I couldn’t love her well. The way she needed. She wanted to marry. To have children and grow old in the country. I knew it then.

I passed through the city and over the elevated expressway. Then southward toward the coast. Another hour and I was out of the hills and down into the floodplains. Not a soul on the road. The blackness of the open sky and the fallow fields about me. Gnarled sweetgum and wax myrtle hugged the roadside, like malformed parade onlookers. All of them watching me. It was my first blush with absolute solitude in weeks. After a while, I saw signs for the port and then the coastal city. The beach. When I turned off, the moon came out, and I drove slowly. My limbs were heavy. The blank fog of my mind all encompassing.

I used to dream of a black lake where the stars shone not in the sky, but in the depths of the water, and a lake house where a bride lay in the bathtub, singing, and the floating dock hovered above the water, like some alien spacecraft. The pontoon floats dripping and green with algae. Everywhere a hum. In those days, I believed dreams gave me access to something profound and sincere. Unknown truths about the world and self. I had no idea where I was going, but I followed the signs. I could smell salt.

I parked on the street and followed the roar of the waves. The beach was lined with houses, all encircled by white picket fences. Pastel boxes on stilts. Wrap-around porches enclosed in mosquito netting. There was soft music from a house nearby. Surfboards under the deck. Golf carts in the drive. One yellow light in the upstairs window.

I passed through the yard and out onto the boardwalk and over the breakwater dunes. When I saw the ocean, I thought I’d discovered something for the first time. This moment. The flakes of moonlight on the choppy sea. Cresting waves far out, where the sandbars heaved up from the ocean bed. So much blackness. The flat darkness of the horizon.

The tide was low, and I lay in the sand. I was sure something would happen.

I slept for almost three hours and woke shivering with the red dawn and the gulls circling. The beach was empty and white. The tide came in surges, and the dark sand was closing in. I sat for a time, listening to the rising traffic, and then stripped down to my briefs and walked out into the surf. The sand was sharp with broken shells. The currents, cold and tugging. Blinded by saltwater, I floated weightless with the periodic waves. Up and down like a living buoy. It had to mean something. Anything. When the sun broke in a thin gold line, I thought about swimming out to meet it.

I walked back to the car barefoot, with my clothes clutched to my chest and my sandals dangling. Salt water dripping from my two-week beard. I had to stop for gas on the way back, and I dressed at the station and bought a coffee. Sipping as I drove north. I arrived at campus midmorning, having missed my first class, and then fell onto the studio couch.

A knock on the door woke me hours later, my head pounding. The room was dark, and I snapped on the light and opened the door to a dozen students and my professor. He told me it was my turn for a group critique, and everyone looked in at the shambles of my studio. I collected the canvas scraps and the strange, woven tapestries of my ruined paintings. I laid them out in the hallway. Little patchwork fragments of color. The sliver of a smile. A finger. A peach. All cut to ribbons. He studied this display for a moment as if puzzled. He watched me. Then, he sent the other students away.

“We’ll try again next week.”

After that, I lay back on the sofa. Looking through the window. Everything so distant. When I slept again, I didn’t dream of the beach or the black lake. I didn’t dream of the bride or my hands or my future. I dreamt of nothingness enfolding me. A single thought coming again and again.

Take me.

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I stirred the bacon while my wife sat at the table working on her computer. A large picture window overlooks the table, and she was cast up in the glow from outside, where the wind was blowing and a frosting of grey clouds skimmed just beyond the naked trees. As the bacon darkened, I tossed in the pasta and sauce and stirred.

The spider meandered across the stovetop in little brownian skitterings. Alone. Without purpose. It paused, as if contemplating a great moment, and darted beneath the pan where the noodles bubbled softly. A moment later, it emerged engulfed in a tiny blue flame, like a diminutive phoenix. It sprinted on tiny, flaming legs. Scissoring in that staccato eight-step rhythm, as if toward some unseen destination. Black pearl eyes aflame. It has been transfigured into a flake of light, nearly invisible in the greater light above.

All at once, it stopped. One limb hovering as if it were a conductor anticipating the first note of a grand performance.

It had been reduced to nothing more than a carbonized husk. A spider-shaped shell. A void.

I plated the meal, sprinkling the pasta with cheese and setting the table. My wife ate without comment. I wet a dish rag from the sink to clean the stovetop, but the spider was gone. Its ephemeral remains, carried away in the wake of my passing. What had been a spider was somewhere else now. A part of the air. Reduced to dust.

“This is so much better with the bacon,“ my wife said, already finishing.

After a while, I too sat and ate.