the rise and fall.

part one.
A taxidermied zebra was the first thing you saw upon entering the Bellflower’s mansion. It was situated in a corner of the always dim, cold foyer between a potted palm and a portrait of the family. Before he died, Father Bellflower wouldn’t let anyone walk past the thing without relaying the tale of it’s capture and kill,
“Africa,”
He would stammer, his voice rattling with age
“Damn hot place. Went there on safari, nearly died of heat exhaustion. Shot the bastard from my jeep, in those days no one at the airport gave you shit for having a dead animal.”
The zebra was not the most unusual thing about 77 Gregory Avenue, nor was the ancient swimming pool caked with green sludge being used as a pet cemetery, or the bedroom on the third floor which contained thousands of toothbrushes, so a new one could be used every time. The residents of the house were what made you look twice. The Bellflower family. They weren’t always this way, their toenails weren’t always curling over the lips of their sandals, their eyes weren’t always glazed over and blood shot. It’s hard to say when they all went over the cliff, these things usually happen when we aren’t paying attention. They bred dogs, Greyhounds specifically, and this is how I came to know them. When you buy an animal from a good breeder, they usually want to keep in touch. When you buy one from the Bellflower’s, they want you to move in. They insist upon it. I was thirteen and there was nobody to tell me not to.

I consider this as I pretend to examine a stack of filmy x-rays Susan Bellflower, the middle daughter, has dropped into my lap. At just forty years old she has accumulated a mysterious assortment of ailments, including selective sight and hearing, debilitating joint pain and multiple personalities.
“This is where the growths are,” Susan nods slowly, with a sage wisdom that I almost believe.
“They aren’t showing up in the x-ray, but their right here.”
She jabs her bony index finger into the pale flesh of her neck.
“What growths, like a tumor?” I ask, distracted by her eye twitching.
“No, like a twin.”
“You don’t have a twin.”
“Exactly. But I was meant to, she just didn’t get to finish growing. But I can feel her hands under my skin, you know? I keep telling the white coats.”
I look back at the x-rays, Susan’s bones are ghostly and brittle looking, but there are no extra limbs or rogue fetuses. I could never tell her this.
“Well, sometimes it takes a while to find the right doctor.”
She wrings her hands together, each finger is covered in rings. Some wildly expensive pieces with diamonds like ice cubes and strawberry rubies are mixed with a couple of gaudy plastic things and the occasional rubber band wrapped around twice. Gold bangles encase her scrawny, freckled arms up to the elbow. She wears no shoes, but has a band-aid stuck on each toe. Her dress is white, I thought the hem was lace from far away, but can now see it is just moth-eaten. She has her nicotine yellow hair wrapped in a turban, the teal fabric is worn and has a wilting sunflower stuck in the center. Susan’s false eyelashes are slightly crooked and give the appearance of being either half-asleep or drunk. She has, as usual, given herself a beauty mark with eyeliner and painted her lips with concealer so they blend into the rest of her gaunt face. Her mouth spreads into a slow, medicine-sweet smile,
“You know, when I was young I looked a lot like you.”
“Really?”
I wonder to myself if that means I will look like her in thirty years.
“Jesus lord, my neck hurts…so about my twin, I haven’t told the family about it..”
At that moment a blood rattling screech erupts from the kitchen, which is adjacent to the dining room we are sitting in.
“FOURTH OF JOO-LIE, EVERYBODY!!!”
Susan’s face hardens, her knuckles tighten.
“That’s mother.”
“GET YOUR FIRE CRACKERS OUT OF THE ATTIC!!!”
A small, round woman tumbles in through the swinging door. She wears a white hospital gown festooned with red, white and blue ribbons and blinking American flag pins. She wears a red and white striped party hat, and waves a paper Israeli flag on a wooden stick.
“Mother, I’ve told you to stay in your chair.”
Mother Bellflower stares directly at me,
“Susan doesn’t believe in the fourth of July.”
“Mother, get back into your chair.”
I study the old woman, her bare feet are bulging with purple veins and her yellow toenails are thick, wavy and dangerously jagged. Her face is mottled with sun spots and metallic star stickers. She turns slowly and hobbles into the kitchen, muttering. Susan turns to me,
“Let me show you something.”
I follow her past the zebra, then through a narrow corridor cluttered with hospital supplies. She touches the walls as she walks, as if feeling for a pulse, then stops at a crudely painted green door.
“This is where I keep them.” She swings it open casually, we are flooded with a cacophony of hysterical barks and howls. She switches on a light, at least fifty grey hounds are clustered at the bottom of the basement steps. Susan shouts over the din,
“I told my sister, if she ever comes back here to take anything from me, I’ll shoot each of these dogs and THEN myself!”
She slams the door shut, I say
“What’s wrong with your sister?” Which really means, what’s wrong with you?
“Oh…Vivica…”
“That’s her name?”
Susan sighs and stops in front of a mirror propped up against the wall in the corridor, she adjusts her eyelashes,
“She was always sour, I hated her even when we were little girls. Mother told me she was sick with jealously over me when I was born so she tried to smother me in my crib one night! Can you imagine! Then when I was just a toddler she left me outside in a snow drift, then went off to school. I think there must be lemon seeds in her heart, that’s how sour she is. I’ve warned her, if she comes back here I’ll shoot myself. She always comes at night, looking for things to take, trying to smother me in my sleep.”
She smoothes the front of her dress and looks at me for a long time,
“Excuse me. I need some air.”
She disappears into the gut of the house and I know she won’t be coming back. When I wake up in the morning there is a gaunt, sallow-skinned man sitting on the edge of my bed. I am more disturbed by the fact that I am not even surprised by his presence than the idea that he has probably been watching me sleep.
“Hi.” He says flatly
“Who the fuck are you?” I say, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and pulling the quilt around my shoulders. His eyes, spinning and dark like uncontrollable saucers, widen.
“Raphael.”
“Do you live here.”
“I’m Susan’s brother.”
“I thought you never leave your room.”
“Did Susan tell you that?” I nod and pull on a pair of shorts under the sheets.
“Well, I am writing a book. It consumes a lot of my time.”
“What’s it about?”
I pull my hair up into a bun and reach into the drawer for my toothbrush, Raphael smiles slightly,
“I disposed of your toothbrush for you.”
“Why would you do that?" He appears alarmed, even slightly offended.
“We adhere strictly to a one use policy concerning oral hygiene.”
He produces a new toothbrush from his pocket and hands it to me, “Use this one. I have hundreds.” He sits cross-legged on the foot of the bed while I get ready.
“It’s a memoir. My book.”
“Really?”
“It can only be published after I die, or after they die. Suppose Vivica read it. Do you know about Vivica? She’s our sister, she’s mad. She would slaughter me if she read it. I write my transcripts in invisible ink.”
“Bullshit.”
“I must take every precaution.”
“Susan said Vivica tried to kill her.”
Raphael nods, “Several times.” He squints his eyes and really looks at me, “Are you Yvonne’s daughter?” I nod “You look just like she used to.”
“You know my mother?”
“Oh, she bought dogs from us before you were born. How old are you now?”
“Thirteen.”
“How did you end up here?”
“I didn’t really feel like being home.”
“You can stay until you feel like leaving. You can read my transcripts.”
“I thought they were written in invisible ink.”
Raphael stares at the wall behind my head for what seems like hours, there is an ambulance siren in the distance, there is a fly crawling on his hand and he doesn’t notice.

“We lost one.”
Out by the pool Susan is lying on a rusty deck chair in a zebra striped bikini, even though it is overcast and the clouds are pregnant with rain. A small white box rests at her feet,
“Will you help us with the burial?”
“Is that a dog in there?”
She nods, flipping up the brim of her white sunhat and staring at me through smudged Jackie O glasses, “That was Uncle Houlihan, right there. We found him this morning. He was old.”
Raphael and Mother Bellflower appear at my side holding a leather bound book and a bundle of red poppies.
“Let’s get started.”
Raphael and Susan lift a green tarp off of the pool, Mother Bellflower grips my hand and we walk to the edge. It has been drained of water but there is a thick layer of green sludge caked to the sides, nine white boxes identical to the one I just saw are arranged in rows at the bottom.
“Justine, would you like to read from our book of blessings.”
“Sure.”
Raphael hands me the journal and I open to the first page,
“Just say Uncle Houlihan’s name where it says ‘the deceased’”
I clear my throat and squint to read the sloppy letters scrawled across the tattered page,
“Uncle Houlihan left us today. Even though his earthly body is gone, his spirit will never leave the walls of this home. Today, he will begin his next journey through heaven’s poppy fields and we must rejoice in knowing that Uncle Houlihan will return to us one day, in another lifetime.”

Susan, Raphael and Mother Bellflower nod solemnly. Without speaking we each take a corner of the box and lower it into the pool, I throw the poppies into the pit and it occurs to me that all of the other thirteen year old girls are at camp, and ballet and the mall. They do not wake up with strange men in their rooms, they do not bury dead animals or deal with the mentally ill. The thought blows through me like a torpedo, the sky splits open and the rain pours down.

Decatur.

3AM i dreamt about explosions, plumes of dust and gravel and the odd limb careening out of the debris and landing next to me, I was sitting with my cassette player listening to what to do during such an explosion, but it was so loud I couldn’t hear the instructions. 7AM it occurs to me, I need to see something blow up. I brush my teeth and think of sound and how heavy it is, and how heavy the sound of an office building roaring into oblivion would be, as opposed to a copper beech tree or an aluminum trailer. then there is a mushroom cloud in my coffee mug, my frozen sausage links are really sticks of dynamite. 10AM I decide limestone would have a delicious weight to it, but I will settle for marble or even gypsum. in the car I understand it must be fate, rock quarries exist for this very reason. i bring a bag, a zip-loc bag, for the errant chunks of limestone that will inevitably gravitate towards me, I will save them in the bag and bring them to thanksgiving and tell everyone I did it with telekinesis. I sit on the ledge with my bag open for several hours, and for several hours nothing moves. the sun goes away and now it is too dark to see the explosion coming, anyway. 7PM I accuse myself of purposefully locking the keys in the car. that, I hiss, is something you WOULD do out of desperation. I say the word ‘sabotage’ aloud, and since no one is here I yell it I walk to the edge and scream SABOTAGE, it echoes off the rocks and comes back to me and I chuckle, I have sabotaged myself, I am getting dehydrated and my zip-loc bag is still empty so I toss it down into the quarry then think that now there will never be an explosion of any kind, because I have littered. 7:30PM is this a spiritual experience? I tell myself I am having a spiritual experience while I am walking down the road which is narrow and dusty and looks the same at the beginning and the end. five miles there is a farm house, pick up trucks collecting water a confederate flag three furious dogs a mailbox, a fish mailbox I do a practice knock on the aluminum door, ready for the owner of the gape jawed fish mailbox to open up. I imagine him to be Ed Gein, he will open the door and pull me in he will make soup stock from my femur, I will probably be made into a lampshade. 8PM inside the house I am looking at photo albums of cy and alma’s Canada vacation they have three children they moved from Nebraska they remember the prohibition have a sodium free diet and lost fifteen pounds with weight watchers no I am not lost, I lie, I am becoming a minimalist so I left my car with all my things in it. I want to fall into sleep and wake up one thousand years ago I want to see people gathering berries I want to see an antelope shot with an arrow i want to see cy and alma in loin cloths, emerging from the quarry explosion. 6AM instead of mushroom clouds, I see the fish mailbox in my coffee.

Deadhorse.

Deadhorse, Alaska is the furthest North anybody can go to live without dying, but it isn’t guaranteed you’ll survive. You could freeze, of course, and there are bears, but due to the isolation it is also possible to go for several months without speaking to another person. And this is sometimes enough to push you over the edge. It is populated almost entirely by oil workers and hookers, there are some registered sex offenders on the outskirts and possibly some good, solid people who just appreciate nature. There is a motel called, “The Almost There Motel” which can be funny if you are in the right mood because Deadhorse is the last stop. But this could also be what kills you, because it will remind you that you are living in a perpetually grey area. It will remind you that since you were born you have been almost there, and why not just jump already? I work at this particular motel, I also live in it because we are never at capacity. I guess I came here originally to write, I was certain there would be something really heart-breaking to tell everyone about, and I was right, the whole place is your worst nightmare. But I haven’t been able to leave yet, so no one knows about it but the oil men, hookers, sex offenders, and possibly the good nature folk. To actually get here I had to take a special bus that could go over the ice, it was painted bright orange and I assumed this was for optimal visibility should we plummet into the water at any point. We stopped overnight in a place called Cold Foot and I didn’t sleep at all. This is because I am not accustomed to the phenomenon called ‘Midnight Sun’ which, as you could probably guess, involved long periods of daylight, sometimes as long as several months. There is also something called ‘Polar Night’ which is the opposite, and involves going around in total darkness for days at a time. The motel in Cold Foot had no curtains and I imagined this to be a test of our resolve, to weed out the pushovers from warm cities like Dallas where the sun and moon are reliable things. This is the only place in the world where you cannot even trust the pull of the universe, the only thing you can be sure of is the fact that every day you are getting closer and closer to THERE. I brought this up with a very nice stripper named Goldaline who lives in the motel, and she told me her THERE is the cockpit of a commercial plane,
“I am the pilot” she told me,
and I said
“Maybe you could go to flight school.”
And she just smashed out her cigarette and looked at me like are you fucking crazy. And that is where the conversation ended, as you probably guessed. I am one of three people employed at the Almost There. There is the guy who owns it, his name is Ishmael and because of this I think of whale harpoons and biblical looking men when I see him. Then there is his wife, who’s name may or may not be Aggie, this is what I heard when she introduced herself at my interview which went basically like this
“We don’t usually take outsiders.”
“I wouldn’t either.”
“Are you an upstanding person?”
“I like to think so.”
“Can you use a vacuum.”
They gave me a key to room number seven, and told me I could live in there if no one else needed it, the carpet smelled of menthol and there were curtains because I had proven I was rugged enough for the routine of gravity to be pulled out from under me. I sat on the starchy floral bedspread and thought about the worst things I had ever done and how they would never come back to me because somehow, I knew I would probably never leave this place.

1.I was crossing the street in Philadelphia and saw a man get hit by a car, he was shot up into the air like a champagne cork and the awful cracking sound that happened when he came back down made me throw up on the sidewalk, so instead of calling 911, I went home and laid down.

2.I compulsively stole toothbrushes from people’s homes as a teenager and feigned confusion when they stood at the sink, baffled. I hoarded them in the back of my closet.

3.I poured a box of sugar into my male super’s gas tank when I was nineteen as initiation into a radical lesbian separatist group. I am not really radical and probably not a lesbian, but I liked the idea of forging into oblivion with a group of women who were really sure of something.

Aggie knocked on my door and said
“Folks aren’t gonna check 'emselves in!”
So instead of the bedspread I sat behind the counter and measured my distance from these things.


The second day we entered a period of Polar Night, Ishmael came to my desk post with an orange bottle,
“When night starts up for more than a day, we take a couple of these. Makes time pass easier.”
My level of gratitude for the pills was disproportionate to the act of his giving them to me, I felt like a daughter I felt like a cancer kid or someone who works very hard at their mediocre job. He gave some to Goldaline also, and I felt betrayed. At some point a man and a woman walked into the lobby. I was completely unprepared to accommodate them in any way because they were the first people to patronize the motel since I began working, and I had spent the past week proving my adept vacuuming abilities and taking baths in the dark.
I said “Welcome!” a little too loudly.
They were both dressed in a way that suggested wealth but also an awareness for things like the environment and worker’s rights. Sleek down coats with real shearling trimmed hoods and durable boots. The man wore round tortoise shell glasses and I could see a turtleneck peeking out from under his socially responsible jacket. Cashmere, probably. He smiled like a professor and said,
“We’d like to check in, not sure how long we’ll be staying.”
I nodded, again, too fast, too eagerly. His wife was beautiful in such a way that required no assistance or upkeep, you found yourself thinking that you too could be beautiful in that way if you left everyone’s toothbrushes where they belonged. You look at her eyes, which are light grey and enormous, and think of hand knit sweaters and places like Nantucket or the less commercial Cape Cod. You think of her and Turtleneck cooking things like couscous and quail eggs in their tastefully rustic kitchen. Her hair is the same color everywhere and is graciously, bashfully wound into a loose knot at the base of her genuinely modest neck.
I say,“What brings you folks to Deadhorse?” and immediately feel like an imposter, a professional cordial hostess impersonater, someone’s sexually repressed mother, Paula Deen in bizarro world.
“Just passing through.” they say and
Grey Eyes smiles serenely, like she is perpetually slipping into a warm bath. She probably came out of her mother with this smile on her apple-white face. I want to choke her with an umbilical cord and wash her hair patiently, like a withered Irish nanny, at the same time. Turtleneck speaks,
“I see your having a Polar Night.”
“Seven days now.”


They left early the next morning with their cameras hung around their necks, they carried a map and asked me where was a good spot to see the aurora borealis, I didn’t know because frankly the whole phenomenon terrifies me, so they asked Ishmael and I was at least able to suggest a scenic foot trail, but then remembered it was too dark out to go on a hike.
“Nice couple.”
Aggie croaked from her stool by the window.
“Wonder what theyre doing all the way up in Deadhorse.”
Adopting an Inuit baby saving seal cubs making a religious pilgrimage finding his biological mother seeing the finback whales before they all go extinct probably becoming enlightened like people with effortless beauty do, sometimes.
“Just passing through.” I say
Aggie takes a slug of coffee from her mug which has OVER THE HILL printed on the side in big pink letters.
“Why don’t you go clean up their room.”

I vacuum Turtleneck and Grey Eye’s carpet even though it doesn’t need it, I wipe off the sink with Lysol and fold the end piece of toilet paper into a perfect triangle and wonder how much further I can possibly go. I start to change their sheets but find myself cocooned in them on the floor with the duvet over my head their pillows clutched in my hands like they were the last things I would ever hold, like they were my hands, my hands as a child, my five year old self holding on over the edge of a cliff and all of the sudden I am speaking out loud
DON’T LET GO DON’T LET GO DON’T LET GO,
and the curtains are saying YOU ARE ALMOST THERE
YOU ARE ALMOST THERE

Everyone I have ever known is under this duvet cover on the floor and they are all clapping and saying this has been a test you have passed the test. The couple is there and they have their Inuit baby in their slender, long arms they have a photo album of the finback whales and pictures of the aurora borealis, and I am not terrified of it anymore. My old super is there and he says, The car was a prop! Don’t worry!, The radical separatist lesbians are there and they say This guy is our best friend! The man who got hit by the car is there, It didn’t hurt at all! I have Dysautonomia, I feel no pain! Ishmael and Aggie are huddled together with a candle between them and they say this is our light, this is daylight, we have a sun we have a son he is giving us light. Everyone has their toothbrushes back, they had extras anyway, Goldaline is wearing a pilot’s hat and command bars on her shoulders she says I am 30,000 feet away we are somewhere over the Atlantic and we will be THERE shortly.

pennsylvania, 1998

Nothing in the house actually belonged to them, they bought it from a hysterical widow named Olivia Hensel who refused to take anything with her but her cat and some clothes.. So my grandparents were left with more than they bargained for. A huge, drafty old house full of Victorian curiosities and heavy, musty smelling furniture. A hair wreathe was my favorite thing. It was kept under a thick panel of glass, and you would never give it a second look if you didn’t know what it was. And most people didn’t. It just looked like a decoupage of dried flowers. In actuality, it was a mourning ritual. Something women did in the 1800’s when their husbands died. They would chop off their hair and his, weave it together into a pattern and keep it on their bedroom walls. When they died, their children would weave their hair into it, and so on. The house came with this, a box of a whole dead family’s hair. There were some archaic educational videos played in health classes in the 1950’s, scratchy film which one could still play on a projector warning against the dangers of homosexuality and rock music. This was when my father dropped me off there one day in July, I had just turned twelve and had seen his side of the family only once before, years ago. Now I would live with them for the summer. On our drive my father appeared agitated, his ears were turning red which was something reserved for real atrocities.

“This is some genuine horseshit, Justine.”
He would exclaim this, his hands firmly gripping the wheel, his teeth clenched.
“What state are we in?”
“Pennsylvania, god dammit.”
“This is where they live now?” I was amazed by the flat landscape and over abundance of Waffle Houses.
He shook his head, becoming more aggrieved by the second.
“Your mother, godammit. Thinks it’ll be good for you to stay with them. Thinks its no good you haven’t seen them in six years.”
“What do I call them?”
“Eugene, that slimy bastard. You call him by his name if he ever comes out of that office of his.”
He didn’t mention his mother, whose name was Darla but back at home was more commonly referred to as ‘that backstabbing cunt’. I understood my father’s grudge against them both. I had pieced together the story from eavesdropping, snooping through desks and sometimes from things I had been informed of directly, usually by way of large doses of painkillers, something which my family dispensed liberally. I understood the constant abandonment from his mother and the abuse from the steady string of “stepdads” and boyfriends who came and went. I understood it was her fault.

“Are you going to get out of the car?”
We were parked outside of their house, my father was hunched over in the front seat. Breathing heavily and nodding slowly.
“You can just drop me off. I get why you don’t want to see her.”
He looked at me very seriously.
“It isn’t easy for me to leave you with her.”
“She feels too guilty about what she did to you to hurt me.” I answered, surprising myself.
He counted out three little blue triangles from his alligator skin pill box and swallowed them dry.
“God dammit, I drove all the way up here and I will go into that house. Make sure there’s no fire hazards in there.”

I find myself sitting under the dining room table with the cocker spaniel while Darla the backstabbing cunt and my father scream obscenities at each other above my head. Someone slams their fist and makes the table shake, I trace circles into the damp orange carpet with the toe of my shoe.
“YOU HEINOUS BITCH, YOU RUINED MY LIFE!”
“I WAS A CHILD, RODGER.”
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO ME WHEN YOU LEFT ME THERE?”
The screaming stopped for a moment, the air swelled and blistered with tension.
“Do you know what was happening to us when your father was still around? You were too young to remember any of it. Be grateful.”
Now they both sob. They cry until the sound has run out and their body has no more tears to give them, so they just heave their chests and gasp for air.

When I wake up in the morning my father is gone.
I don’t know what to do so I climb out the bedroom window and sit out on the roof until Darla finds me and tells me we’ve got to go visit someone called Catie. I have no idea who she’s talking about. I follow her through the house, every room we pass through has a radio playing full volume in it. Each tuned to a different station, the effect is unsettling as we pass through each of the four stories. Darla looks exactly as I remember her, pale and startlingly thin with a torrent of wiry black hair brushed into a puff on top of her head. She wears a threadbare t-shirt with a basket of kittens emblazoned on the front and highwaisted jeans. I can see her long, yellow toenails curling over the edge of her grimy flipflops. Without eating breakfast we climb into her burgundy Cadillac, the springs have collapsed under the seats and I cannot see above the dashboard which is festooned with stacks of receipts, taped down in groups of eight. I look around the car, there are eight gallons of water in the back. Eight cans of soup, eight family sized ketchup bottles and eight road maps, carefully folded into neat squares. She is an erratic driver, throwing her weight into the steering wheel at random and executing sharp turns onto the wrong streets. She uses the horn liberally and reacts with utter shock and offense when someone honks back. I clutch the sides of the seat and say silent prayers as she careens down winding roads and tries to make it through train tracks before the gates snap shut. Suddenly she stops,
“Okay now we’re at Catie’s,”
I look around and see nothing but grass and an enormous hill in front of us. We are a long way from town, the place is desolate and lousy with mosquitoes and rag weed.
“Where is the house?”
“Catie doesn’t want anybody coming up the drive way, makes everyone walk up there. Up this godamn hill, can’t hack it with my arthritis anymore.”
We ascend the hill and I finally ask her,
“Who is Catie?”
She appears crestfallen, and her wrinkles crease deeper into her face.
“Catie is your Uncle Cal.”
“What? How?”
“Your Uncle decided he didn’t want to be an Uncle anymore. And now he is an Aunt.”
“Did he get a sex change?”
Darla looks shocked that I am aware of such an operation, but nothing really surprises me anymore.
“No. He just wears dresses.”
“Okay. What should I call him.”
“Catie.”

Uncle Catie’s house looks tired. The roof has slouched into itself, the windows and doors look exhausted. The paint has peeled off in long strips, revealing a dusty yellow underneath the dirty white. There is a pile of old bicycles in the front yard that has been there so long the surrounding grass has turned a rusty color, too. There is a bathtub collecting rainwater next to the doorstep, a drowned black bird stares placidly up from the bottom. From inside the house I hear a person’s voice and a scratchy record. The person, who I assume to be my Uncle, croons along with the music, his pitch fluctuating violently. His voice reaches a horrific crescendo before dropping down to a low bellow. The words are totally incoherent. My grandmother knocks on the window. The record screeches, then stops and I hear a patter of footsteps rush down stairs. The door is swung open dramatically, Uncle Catie is wearing a moth eaten wedding dress and thick makeup, garish against his ghostly complexion. He has some stubble, and his Lee press-on nails have begun to pop off his fingers. His body is delicate and hungry looking
“Well Hello….” His voice is breathy and low, but tinged with suspicion.
“You’ve caught me at a very special time…I’ve been practicing my opera.”
Darla pushes past him into the house, nearly knocking him over.
“Well, continue your practice later. Your niece is here and I’ve come to collect the things you took from me.”
She disappears into the living room, Catie stares vacantly into the endless expanse of open fields in the distance and says
“I’ve taken nothing of yours…I haven’t left this house in months, Darla!”
“Stop it now, I know you’ve got my Dutch oven.”
He looks at me.
“You must be amazed by my sudden change in appearance.”
Catie arches a crooked, penciled eyebrow.
“I have undergone a transformation.”
“Yeah, I can tell. Did you divorce your wife?”
“Tanya! Heaven’s no. She is in Iowa, on a spiritual journey with her lover. We write letters to each other.”
“Oh. Do you have a lover now, too?”
Catie’s eyes soften, he brings his hand to his throat and speaks softly,
“Yes. Arthur. He is an artist, a grafitti artist. A wonderful man. I would love for you to meet him, his theories on the spacetime continuum will astound you.”
There is a moment of silence
“How old are you, Justine.”
“I just turned twelve.”
“Darla thought you may be too young to understand about me. But what nonsense, your practically an adult. Come inside, now. I made sweet tea.”
The kitchen is yellowed with nicotine. A time capsule, holding it’s breath somewhere around 1963. I am wary of the cloudy jam jar brimming with amber liquid that has been set in front of me. Catie drinks several glasses, and eats crumbs off the table top.
“My son has been kind of enough to bring Justine to see us this summer.” Darla says curtly.
“Yes, yes. Must be quite a shock for you, coming from the city. As you can see, there is not very much out here.” Catie motions out the window to the barren landscape littered with rusted trucks and dead trees.
“I like the quiet.” I tell him.
Darla clears her throat,
“I trust you’ve gotten rid of your jars, Catie.”
“No. I’ve told you, the jars will stay there. They belong to mother.”
“Mother has been dead for years.”
Catie’s body stiffens,
“Excuse me…” He stands slowly, then goes upstairs. I hear his record come back on.
“Well, that’s the last we’ll be seeing of him for today.”
“What jars are you talking about?”
“When Mother died, Catie locked himself up in this house. He kept all of her things, even the food of hers that was still in the fridge. It’s been in there for years. He won’t get rid of anything she ever touched. That dress he’s wearing? Yeah, it was her wedding gown. I’d bet my life the lipstick on his face was hers too. Anyway, she used to make fruit preserves when she was still alive. She made her last batch about a month before she died and stacked them up in the basement. The thing about jarred fruit, you can only keep it for so long. After a while, it starts to produce a poisonous gas, which builds up in the jar and finally the pressure of the gas makes them explode. The gas will make you sick, it could even kill a person. Catie’s got hundreds of them down there, we’re just waiting for them to blow.”
I stare at my grandmother in amazement.
“Let’s go home.” We drive away, no one has seen Catie since then.


“WHERE YOU BEEN?? WHERE YOU BEEN??”
Eugene is standing on the doorstep, flailing his arms dramatically and stamping his feet.
He is even shorter than I remember, but he is wearing the same green sweater that I have always seen him in, which is no surprise. Eugene is my step-grandfather, the fourth and final one to join our family. He only moved here from China ten years ago after spending his entire life in Bejing, so his accent is heavy and the American food still makes him sick.
“I WAKE UP AND THERE IS NO ONE HOME, YOU NEVER TELL ME WHERE YOU GO!!!!”
Eugene is delusional and has severe obsessive compulsive disorder. That is why there is eight of everything in the car. That is why he taps the doorknob eight times before turning it, taps each key eight times before pressing down, blinks eight times and never washes or takes off his green sweater which he believes will extend his lifetime indefinitely. He often wears a gas mask and has eight orange cats which he keeps in a special room painted green, for good luck. Eugene plucks out eight strands of his hair every night and keeps it in a special box under his bed, he believes that they will one day be of great use to him. He makes his living through the stock market, like my father. Also, like my father he is controlled by the fluctuating numbers and prone to bouts of ecstasy and dysphoria at their whim. Unlike my father, however, he is utterly mentally ill.
“Put a lid on it, Eugene. We just went to go see Catie.”
“Yeah, yeah. Whatever.”
He storms back inside. I see my bike helmet sitting on the swinging porch seat where I left it, but now it is cracked in half. Completely destroyed.
“Oh my god, what happened to my helmet??”
Darla purses her lips,
“Eugene did that last night. He was worried you may have an accident and he would get in trouble. Besides, he told me to tell you not to go outside anyway, the bees will kill you.”
“I’m not allergic to bees.”
“You don’t know that.”
I feel my chest folding up inside itself
“My helmet would keep me from getting hurt in the first place. This isn’t fair.”
I follow her inside the house, through the piano room with the potted plant which reeks of urine and alcohol. She picks up a newspaper and fans herself with it, we reach the dining room and sit down across from each other at the table. It is late afternoon and the yellowed lace curtains flutter indecisively in the breeze.
“You know, I used to have a job at the animal shelter.”
“Yeah?” I respond, still irked about my ruined helmet.
“Yeah. You know what my job was?”
I am wary of her answer, my youthful naivety has been irrevocably tainted by adult’s propensity to tell me all the sordid and grim details about their pasts.
“My job was to euthanise the animals. It was very relaxing.”
I dig my nails into my palms, leaving pale nervous half moons indented in my flesh.
“We’d drop them into these jars. Sometimes, if it was a kitten we would just use a plastic pretzel barrel. I would pump the gas through, and they would get so peaceful. Their bodies would just melt and sometimes I could hear them purr very softly as they floated out of themselves and went wherever it is you go when your time is up. You know, I would like to die that way.”

At that moment, I hear the loudest sound I have ever heard in my life. It is louder than the most violent thunder, and heavier too. The sound has a weight to it, a supernatural boom. The furniture is pulsing, the chandelier shakes. I am sure it can be heard over the entire planet. I know my grandmother has heard it too, her eyes are enormous and her knuckles have turned white. She clutches the table. Her mouth is moving but I can’t hear anything, only a dull ringing followed by a dim static. The crash was so powerful it’s temporarily deafened me. I see Eugene run from his office, a cat in each hand. He, too, is screaming but the sound gets lost somewhere inside the sonic crash. Everything is eerily quiet and I feel like I’m underwater. Out the window on main street I can see people running from restaurants and gas stations, Bishop is brewing with panic and confusion. Ambulances and police cars whiz by, their lights are on and my hearing is slowly beginning to come back to me. I can make out the faint sounds of a siren blaring, in time I can hear the hysterical din outside. Eventually, I can hear my grandmother. She speaks slowly, but her eyes look wild and there is a white light in them that makes me nervous.
“A meteor has fallen outside of town on the Carson’s farm. That was the sound you heard.”
Eugene is running to and from the house and garage, bringing back eight light bulbs, eight gallons of water, eight transistor radios.
“Your grandfather will be out of sorts for days after this. I wonder what he’ll do…” Her voice trails off, I know she is thinking of the irrational measures he has taken after incidents in the past. A fire in the old apartment building, he ran into the blaze and took my father with him claiming it was their fate. He once bought eight satellite dishes and placed them in a special formation out in the yard, claiming he would be in contact with extra-terrestrials.
Now Eugene appears in front of us, his green sweater is spotted with grease stains and cat hair. His comb over is especially oily, and he too has that formidable white glint in his eye. I have a sixth sense for psychotic breaks, I can feel them coming like birds sense an earth quake.
“We are under siege.”
He is holding a hammer and a bucket of nails.
“The meteor men have arrived.”
There are planks of plywood propped up against the dining room wall.
“We must secure the house.”
Eugene begins boarding up the windows and doors, tapping the head of each nail eight times. There are five windows in the room, in half an hour each one is covered and the house is getting darker as Eugene boards them up. Darla and I struggle in the dark to find lamps, we hear Eugene's voice booming from the parlor,
“”NO LIGHT. NO LIGHT! We must not give them any sign of our location.”
After all of the exits have been boarded, Eugene gathers every electronic in the house and stacks them up in his office. There are walls of radios and TVs and prehistoric computers on top of each other, he plugs in the televisions and tunes them to a static station. He sits in front of the wall, staring at the eight screens showing nothing but black and white snow, we hear nothing but the eerie electric hum and the occasional siren outside.
We live like this for three days, hearing Eugene preach about the apocolypse and how this is the end. We eat oyster crackers and drink tap water, I steal food from the refrigerator in the night even though it is forbidden. And after three days, I almost start to believe him. I almost believe that we are all going to return to the earth, that it is only a matter of time. On the morning of the fourth day I am in the kitchen, relegated to the task of making an egg salad sandwich for Eugene. I have a festering mass of dread growing in my chest, my hands feel heavy and I miss the sun more than I could ever imagine. The static from the wall of televisions is grating on me, and it dawns on me that I need to get out. It occurs to me that outside of the stale air contained in this house, the world is still turning and the sun is out there, too. I feel empowered, like I’m on a plane and about to hijack it and not a soul knows. I take the finished sandwich on a plate into Eugene’s office, he is sitting at his desk, pulling out his hair and arranging it in the box. I hurl the plate at the wall above his head, it splinters into a million little pieces and the egg salad plops tiredly onto the shoulder of his sweater. His mouth drops open, his eyes grow wide and turn into spinning black saucers. I am grabbing his hammer and turning on all the lights, I am prying the nails off the front door and I don’t care at all that he is screaming at me. I am pulling back the plywood plank with strength I didn’t know I had.
I step outside:
The world is still turning.