I was burned as a child.
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.
This was really good, and a great closing line! Keep writing, fellow writer!
Very nice. Do you submit your work to lit mags?