(From The Big Book of Chilling Ghost’s, by Annie Mathiowetz, age 8.)

Once there was a kitten that loved to play on graves!

One day she was walking on the graves like she always did when whack! Something was pulling on her!

“Meow!”

She was very scared. She cried and cried for help, but every house was asleep! So that was the end of the cat, or . . .

“Meow!”

Was it?

She finally freed herself and she still didn’t learn her lesson!

The very next day she did it again!

And the next day there was blood on the grave! But it wasn’t the kitten’s! Then the next day she saw the blood began to rise!

She went out and chased it all around the yard! And she finally caught it!

But the blood didn’t stay on the ground! It began to sink with the kitten on it!

The kitten tried to free herself but couldn’t! Not this time. She cried, she howled, but no one heard her!

“Meow!”

And no one ever saw the kitten again! They searched the graves in every graveyard, but all they found was the blood that took the kitten in!

So the next time you see blood on a grave you better not walk on it!

R.I.P.

(Image taken at the Mpls/St. Paul Zombie Pub Crawl. Full album: here.)

“I hate feeling incapacitated,” Janaka said — on his third round of the flu in as many months.

“What was that? You hate living in this house of tears?”

He was beautiful: his hair was long and feathered. He was the fifth boy I wanted to kiss, the second boy I actually kissed, and the first whom I loved kissing. His smile took up half of his head and his teeth were whitewashed bricks. The first time we noticed one another we were at a playground near someone’s parents’ house. I had just jumped off a slide and landed inelegantly in a pile of wood chips. He said to me, “Adrianne, you look kind of like an egg.”

Then he grabbed my scarf and ran. My friend said to me, “I think he likes you.”

“Hmmwhat?” I said. “Who?” I watched him running across the field, my white wool scarf billowing behind him like some kind of ridiculous fantasy. My heart barged into my throat, where it remained for days.

Three months later:
He would break up with me in the school auditorium (a Teen Magazine quiz I’d taken just days before had asked: “How important is it to be a good girlfriend?” “Pfft!” I’d scoffed, confusing indifference with feminism, and circling not at all). I wouldn’t cry until the doors had closed behind me.

The first boy who’d kissed me would look up from his copy of Inherit The Wind. “What’s wrong!” he’d cry, running to me.

Four years from then:
I’d be visiting home on winter break from college and we’d go to the same New Year’s party — to ignore one another as we mixed drinks in the kitchen, then dance together near the DJ, and then pull one another deliriously toward a hallway. I’d giggle as he threw my shirt on the floor. “Why do you keep laughing?” he’d ask. “We just went farther in five minutes than we ever went in three months of dating,” I’d reply, still tittering. He frowned.

“What? . . . Isn’t that kind of crazy? I’m just sayin’.”

Twenty minutes from then:
I hit my fist into the top of his head as hard as I could, stood up in disgust, knocked on Melissa’s bedroom door, and asked her to drive me home.

“. . . Adrianne? It’s late.”

“I know, I’m sorry. It’s just . . . I can’t sleep next to that guy. Doesn’t feel right.”

She wandered through the dark of her room, pulling on layers of clothing, while I stood a few feet away from his already slumbering form. He was still snuggled on the floor, dimly outlined against the blankets by a streetlamp’s light shifting through the venetian blinds. All grey and softness. I couldn’t tell if I wanted to punch him in the head again or hold him like a velveteen rabbit. We tip-toed around him and out the door: that was the last time I saw him.

But first, I was sixteen and he was fifteen, he had just grabbed my scarf a few days before, which I had spent filling a diary with declarations of his beautiful face, and now there was a party in a friend’s basement after we’d all gone sledding: our noses red with cold, bowls of chips on the coffee table, a movie on the TV, our friend Brendan sitting by the CD player and singing along. If man is five, if man is five, if man is five . . .

“Who is this?” I asked. “I love it.”

Everyone was distracted; musical instruments were brought out, Cheetos thrown. Melissa and Joel, married eleven years later, were possibly flirting. Nate was probably playing a keyboard or a bass or whatever he played. I’d loved him too, but earlier, and unrequited so whatever. What movie was on? I can’t picture it. I walked near the couch and the boy who called me an egg suddenly grabbed me around the waist and pulled me onto his lap.

And thus began a new happiness.

I’ve never been a person who touches other people. I didn’t hug my friends or cuddle with my family. My little sister used to try and snuggle up to me when we shared a bed as kids and I’d shove her away, pressing a jagged line into our sheets with my finger. “Do not cross this,” I’d say, “or I’ll kick you.” And as I grew up, it wasn’t that I didn’t want that natural touchiness my friends had with one another; I just felt like it was too late for me by then. I didn’t know how. I was a bundle of limbs and sharp angles. I didn’t have the right. To touch was to potentially invade, and I was nothing if not respectful of space.

But when the boy with the beautiful hair and whitewashed teeth reached out his slender arms and pulled me onto his lap, I melted into the couch.

In retrospect I was probably crushing him. He was like 5’2″. Still, he managed to surround me, fold me in. I was mute for the rest of the party, overcome with his closeness and warmth. He didn’t let go. Time stopped, everything was feeling. No other firsts would compare with that first time of being held.

Melissa drove me home and could tell I was trouble. I beamed and stared dreamily out of her car window.

“I just . . . don’t want you to get your hopes up so high,” she said. “It seems like this meant a lot to you, and maybe it was just . . . a passing thing for him.” Her eyes darted off the road to meet mine. “You know, I hear he’s kinda slutty.”

“I know, I know,” I insisted. “But I don’t care. We could never talk again. Anything terrible might happen tomorrow or months from now, we could date or break up or he could ignore me forever. It doesn’t undo tonight, nothing can.”

When I got home I opened my CD player and slipped in my Rufus Wainwright album. I lit all the candles in my bedroom (it was the late 90s, we had a lot of them) and I curled up on my bed and I made a line of pillows and I wrapped my arms around it. I felt overwhelmingly safe. The warmth of his arms remained in my elbows, and I thought it would never leave. Loved! Loving! Happy, happy, happy.

Sure, easy for us, then. I didn’t know the sting of loss; I couldn’t dread that yet. I hadn’t built a library of ways to be hurt, evasion strategies, plan b’s. No bridges had been built to preemptively cross. Just me, on my desert island, an ocean shroud all around, with its mysterious creatures lurking beneath.

The main thing was, back then present happiness wasn’t predicated on the assurance of future happiness.

Last night I was walking back to my boyfriend’s apartment from at party at 4 in the morning. It’s been snowing and sleeting and raining pretty much nonstop the entire month I’ve been here, and the streets were a labyrinth of rutted ice and deep puddles. The wind rattled in the trees. And then, everything was quiet. No cars on the road at that hour, no bicyclists, no other pedestrians. Just the ice and wet streets, the gentle chatter of my boots. The party had given a glimmer of a feeling: that envelopedness, that excitement of something new, the ocean all around. I thought about being sixteen and wedged between pillows.

Also other tendernesses, other surprise sweetnesses — other ways to have been suddenly held. None of them lasted forever; each had its tip-toe out scene, its sting or regret. But so far, none of those endings have been what has stuck. When I think of you, I think of how we met.

You’re leaning over the counter top, your sleeves covered in sawdust — “Actually,” you say, “I forgot to ask — do you want to grab dinner sometime or something?” You’re sitting on top of a bronze turtle at the zoo, one hand raised to the sky in victory; I snap the photo. I’m wearing taffeta and your sleeves are cut off: the bottle points to me. We’re laying on a conference room floor surrounded by popcorn kernels and our shoulders are connected by an electric current: I lend you my sweater for a pillow and afterwards it smells wonderfully of your hair. (I know this because I brought it to my own face, to inhale; I know this because I hoped it would.) Your hand is on my waist and you’re spinning me around the room, telling me this is how your parents met. We’re on your porch and it’s getting cold — I say “I’m going to just scootch next to you, if you don’t mind” and your hand naturally falls on my shoulder, like it had always been there. It still is.

Warm, assuring, close, whatever might happen later. We could live this way.

I awoke assuming it was probably just a remnant from some dream, and stumbled blearily to the jewelry box. Empty. I wandered around the apartment like a headless ghost searching for its heart.

“I can’t find all of my rings!” I mourned to Janaka. “I may have . . . hidden them from myself.”

“Did you try the bathroom shelves? The living room table? Did you look under the couches?” He looked askance at a slumbering Michael Dracula. “Maybe the kitties got to them.”

Everywhere. The pockets of all the clothing I’d brought. Purses, drawers, ziplock bags for make-up and shampoo. I crawled on the floors and slid my hands into cushions of dust beneath side tables. In the days that followed, I looked underneath every object I picked up, examined every possession as if it were something new: a clue, a code, a breadcrumb to another breadcrumb, a trail. I thought, “if I just see the right thing in the right light, I’ll know.”

Forks jumbled sideways and upside down in the silverware organizer. That painting, slightly askew on the wall. The uplifted corner of the rug. Don’t change anything! I’m trying to remember something.

The clarity of the few seconds preceding my ring set-down have been relived to the point of fiction. Okay, I think. I am pulling each one off my fingers — each ring associated with a different place, a different person, a different memory, each ring a thing I would twist around its finger during times of duress, boredom, the replacement for my “uh”s in speech. This is for high school and the slow, enchanted retail job with the snowy windows. This is for Portland, a mailed birthday present opened in an attic room. This is the stone that symbolically cracked in half. Yes. I am in my pajama pants, wool socks, a long sweatshirt. I take each ring off its finger. I stand there, clinking the rings around in one hand like fated dice, looking deviously around — what room, what room was I in? I’ll never find them here!

“Were . . . you sleepwalking?” Janaka asked. “In your memory, is it dark in the house?”

I closed my eyes and tried to think. “I don’t know,” I said.

It’s been two weeks. Where the rings once were I still twist, shift, clack. I barely even notice their absence any more; this is the new habit, a lot like the old habit. Most days now I forget to look, forget to examine everything, forget that something once so integral to my history is missing. My hands are empty totem poles. The jewelry box contains two barrettes.

Shining black passageways, white in the air. I’d followed strange handsome men back to their apartments and spoken (sympathetically and with surprising vocabulary range, I congratulated myself) of aqua alta. I’d sliced my finger open while rinsing an empty tin can of tomatoes; it was still drunkenly bandaged with rolls of translucent toilet paper, bits of white that would heal into my hand. I’d fallen in love during that trip with my roommate, because like any self-respecting female friendship I had found her horrifically annoying until that moment we were left alone together and asked to survive. We invented code words, communicated in glances, wore each other’s clothes, I told her almost everything.

But now, suddenly: it was over. New York surrounded us like a shifting black bear. “Bard?” A man called. “Bard College?” And he took our luggage and opened the door and everything was warm and safe and planned for us, like it was in those days. I grabbed the front seat.

Of course we’d all noticed there was something a little off about the driver immediately, but no one was concerned. He wasn’t scary off, he was just . . . quiet. Intense, wild eyes. A thick accent I couldn’t identify. He sailed us onto the highway, and as the city began disappearing behind us, he reached forward and abruptly punched the play button on his tape deck.

“Oh!” I turned to him, clasping my hands in delight. “I love this song so much!”

Our driver slowly turned and looked at me with inexplicable rage. He said nothing. Then he creaked his head back onto the road, which was twisting eternally into the darkness.

I was in pretty high spirits with all this snow fluttering around the car, so I shrugged it off and snuggled happily against the window, sighing with romance and tragedy and foreign languages. And actually, as the song ended, with just a few seconds of silence before the violins restarted their sweet song, I again turned to him, seemingly undeterred. “Oh!” I cried. “We get to hear it again!”

No one else in the shuttle had uttered a word. The driver didn’t even look at me this time, but grit his teeth and stared stonily ahead. The social understanding part of my brain was reluctantly kicking its rusty parts back into gear. Not . . . new . . . friend . . . be quiet. I shut my mouth for the rest of the ride.

Four hours long, that drive back to college: with this song repeating, over and over. Our driver had apparently made a tape of nothing but Offenbach’s Barcarolle on both sides. One side had allowed the song to end completely, so that there was about half a minute of silence before the deck whirred and clicked, began again. The other had the song end a few seconds short, before the clickity clickity, clunk.

Needless to say, I. Loved. It.

Each time as the song ended, I held my breath. Would he tire of it? Would this be the ending that ended everything, not that he would murder us all (although frankly that thought wasn’t entirely out of everyone’s minds) but my reverie, this perfect moment trapped on repeat for as long as he allowed it? If he hit stop, I decided, the snow would stop falling. If he hit stop, Daria would wake up in Jared’s lap and he would stop caressing her hair. If he hit stop, no one would look out the windows any more and someone would clear their throat. If he hit stop we would all just wish we were home.

But he didn’t, and so it all continued: the swirls of snowflakes against the darkness, the black fur of the grumbling New York bear shifting beneath us. Jared caressed his girlfriend’s hair while she slept in his lap, safe. In the seat behind them, Kelly pretended not to watch, envious. Jesse’s neon sneakers sprawled beneath the seats of Matt, Tanya and Theresa. My roommate dozed against an icy window pane, unaware that the prettiest freshman anyone had ever seen, next to her, was cuddling a boy whom I had viciously lied about to another. (“I didn’t want to kiss him!” I had claimed desperately to the new interest, two years ago. “He got me high, and then made me! I tried to get away!” As soon as the words left my mouth I regretted them, felt a new history develop that I was powerless to correct. And, terrified, I would never confess to him or apologize, so when he made fun of my roommate two years later there in Venice, the comebacks would stop in my throat.) The prettiest freshman cooed her pretty coffee tinted lips against his neck, and if it were today, I would have easily been happy to see someone I’d done wrong happy again. But back then all pretty girls were trespassers; and there was a limited amount of happiness in this world, and anyone else’s was less for me.

Still, that song was playing, and in that moment my youth was blissfully transcended. My mistakes, my wretched manipulations, the hierarchies we’d constructed, the love we had and the love we tried to get, transcended — they were all just fleeting, details of a bigger thing. The black highway was infinite, the endless snowflakes melting upon impact, the driver staring straight ahead, and the opera played on, and on, and on.

“You’ll what?” I asked delightedly.

You tilted your head in confusion. “I said, ‘I love you.’”

“Oh.”

“Oh gosh,” I said to Paige tonight. “Uh, how long does chicken stay good in the fridge, anyway?”

“A couple days?” she responded.

Throwing this chicken away is maybe the most morally abhorrent thing I will do. The idea of seeing its body: this creature I nurtured for a day, apologized to over and over in my head, whose warm feathers I felt and whose insides I washed from my hands — this, in the trash? With coffee grounds, cheese wrappers, crumpled chip bags? I can’t even think of it. It’s ridiculously terrible. World, I am so sorry.

I’d thought once I killed an animal, eating it would be easy — the reward, a final intimacy, even, a thanksgiving. I felt we had done everything respectfully and as kindly as we could. Afterwards we soaked them in brine and rubbed them with spices. But then — I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t deal with any of the aftermath. Every day, I put off eating that chicken.

In the end, it had nothing to do with ethics.

World, I am so sorry.

Image by Dennis.

“I guess . . . we need to talk about this now?” Dennis said.

“No, we don’t have to do that yet.”

“I would like,” I said, “if we could just drive home in silence. I don’t want to think about it, or talk about it, or talk about anything, or hear or see anything. I just want . . . to sit for a while.”

“Yeah.”

We rolled down the windows and drove. The wind in our hair. The hum of the engine. I closed my eyes to feel the sun on my eyelids, the shadows of trees, and there was nothing to want or not want; there was no memory, no planned future, no expectation or dread. Just this, for however long.

Image by Dennis.

“Really? But they’re like, small and stuff.”

“They’re the worst things to kill and dress. It’s disgusting. They bleed and bleed and bleed. You chop off their heads, you watch them bleed it all out, and then you pull out their intestines. Don’t do it.”

“We pull out their intestines?” I wobbled a bit in my chair.

“Exactly. And that’s not even the worst part. Don’t do this.”

“What’s the worst part?”

He just shuddered.

“. . . I feel like I need to do it if I’m going to eat meat again.”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t get why people say this.”

“People say this?”

“Look. It’s traumatizing. I’m worried about you. I think you’ll be traumatized. Just don’t do it. If you can back out now, back out.” I took a gulp of my beer. “Please,” he said. “Don’t do this.”

Image by Dennis.

“You feel like . . . the Grinch?” he said.

“Oh, at the end of the story,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.