Summer! Vibrancy! Snapdragons! The bleached daytime moon!
The fish jumped in the blue sky!
The clovers cuddled the beetles and bees!
The ice cream truck chimed “I Saw Three Ships” The swan crested sailboats with chocolate fudge, popsicle, and neopolitan cargo glided over the sunny hills.
And! The grandfather’s clock stopped heralding obligations and turned into a silly gadget! t! t! t! t! The clock and time itself meant music.
And the lake was swelling with rain for swimming.
The kids screamed and the cicadas screamed and the wind hollered and the clothes stripped and the steam splashed and the cannonballs dunked and the acrobats dived and the clumsy dared and the champs competed and the wimps waited and everyone and everything cheered and repeated and cheered, screamed, hollered, stripped, splashed, dunked, dived, dared, competed, waited………… and……………….
The neighbors on the other side of that hill had a floppy eared mutt scruffy and sprinkled with ticks. Roosters crowed every morning. And darn that radio signal. Lonely sounds arose out of the hills through the waves of air. Some say it’s the final cry of hope and the first cry of remorse. They were rallying cries. War Waged.
Ode to Joy!
The speakers rattled, blasting this joy past their limit. The sound beat her ears. Malleted them. The music grabbed the mush between her ears and shook it like a coca cola bottle, a maraca. And fizz and glass shards split the air. The world could explode, the steeples could snap from the force of this sound. It pounded her ears with some sort of weapon that made her feel more alive. There was a scream. Wait! There is life! There is joy!
She ran with the dog up and down the hills with the cry “For Narnia!” gallivanting
There was Beethoven’s sixth, the Pastoral Symphony. the music seemed to swing her about without any will of her own. She could see the pastel bluebirds and mythical creatures. All mythical species, all instruments played with each other in a differing roster of the same performance. First the satyrs and unicorns played hide and seek, then a family of pegasi played see-saw with gravity, Their coats shimmered like donut glaze in the soft sun by swirling clouds bigger than mountains. The fledgling fillies and colts somersaulted into a lazy river that rippled under the waterfalls. Cupids played matchmaker with the centaurs and with the arrival of Bacchus, everyone played together in streams of rose red wine.
With the peaches and aerial silks hanging off of trees, she swung and flipped into starlit pools.
She found a song on the radio called the hippy hippy shakes. Before she had heard bird songs and leaf songs and wind songs but this song felt like lightning and wild dogs. And then Sugar Pie Honey Bunch sounded like the timer dinging and a man singing that apple pie was hot and ready,
When she first heard jazz! beat pounding jazz! Bom! Boom! Twist! Twang! Ziggy ziggy zig zag! Ticka tee Tockety Took a Tooka Womp Badomp Brarzampedy!!! She abandoned the world, even her own life! Her feet twisted dangerously! She contorted like a triple jointed paper doll. The couches and rugs were kicked softly as her legs deftly grazed the furniture. She didn’t know who was playing but she felt like he and herself were the same person. He played and played back and forth overcome in spirit, unrelenting back and forth. Wooden table lamps, wool colored loveseats and the rest of the sun damaged house from the picture framed embroidery to the walls revealed deeper colors. She danced until she got rug burns. Her mind permeated wakefulness. and then she heard for the first time, the real hymn, the one that sounded like the deepest essence of music, echoing off the mountains in a glorified cry: When A Man Loves a Woman
Jazz Days, Neighbor’s dog days, Big Rock Candy Mountain days were here.
“Jenny! Get dressed! And shut that music off! This is not the night for that!” It was five o’clock. The sun hadn’t begun to set. That feeling threatened to leave Jenny. But she knew it would come back. Just like she always returned to her own sanctuary, her bedroom. The transition from the rest of the house to her part was like the land of Oz. She put on a haphazardly smock-ish dress haphazardly, the buttons half in half out because they were too big for the holes. While mother worked in the bathroom, tirelessly shaping her curls, Jenny entered her full body mirror, Her loosened pigtails looked even more wonky than usual, with her thick black hair frayed like a rope that also felt like one when she gathered it in her fist. Dressed up like Minnie Mouse, mother griddled leftover breakfast omelets dressed to go to Wednesday night church. There was an unspoken rule among the faithful baptists that revivals (communion with the holy ghost) could not be confined to one day of the week. “Zealousy” was an eternal competition. Mom talked from the bathroom. “Go brush your hair.” with a flustered expression and tone. “And I told you to turn the music off, Show some respect.”
She knew who she was referring to: the Cosmic Lord, the mysterious old man, who wrote his puny stick people’s lives onto a bullet pointed spreadsheet schedule. They had to be on time to his house.
But mother wound up turning off the stove and brushing Jenny’s hair herself with those metal bristles, poking her scalp in the bathroom, the yellow medicine cabinet of a bathroom, yellow from the sulfur stained light bulb.
“I don’t like pigtails, can you braid it?”
“Would’ve had time if you had dressed and brushed your hair yourself.” She grumbled as she pulled out a knot. That jazz rang back and forth in her ears, she bobbed her head to the rhythm she could still hear. “Keep your head still!” and her hands tightened around her skull. “Feel this tangle Jenny.” and she yanked on a matted clump, took Jenny’s hand and made her touch it. “It’s like a rat’s nest, brush your own hair next time and quit rough housing getting your hair all nasty.”
Jenny slumped in her chair.
“Say yes ma’am.”
“Yes… ma’am.”
The Lord demanded her hair be perfect. He owned time, life, everything. So clear and murky was comprehension of him he was invisible, but sometimes his reflection was revealed on vague walls where the sunlight met ashen concrete. There was something about her mother’s furniture, the beige rug burn carpet, the corn starch, the decapitated dust bunnies, that felt like… “Him”, that distant, empty minded entity who controlled everything.
The burnt carpet smell mixed with the scrambled eggs
All Jenny could think about was jazz, and summer.
Hundreds of hymns and oh how pastors, teachers, demanded she harmonize with them! Shout! Cry! (He ain’t nothin but a hound dog, cryin all the time) To save her soul! But she’d rather cry for something real! Real! Real!
Garbled in bleeding frequencies, way beyond Lynchburg Valley were hundreds more odes to joy, odes to humanity secrets hymns, reality.
Table mats and fake flowers, Easter baskets… (Church Hymns) Why do people cry out and devote everything in them to something that isn’t real?
(Jazz) Volcanoes, sharks, stars, ancient gods.
A veil over reality ripped open. Ripped around the phantom monolith fingers that pried it open. There were eyes. Larger than life eyes. Looking at her. ‘Finally, someone to listen to me.’ she thought.
“So, you’ve come for my assistance?” said the eyes.
She could say so much in her silence.
“You’re lost.” They responded, “You’re jealous too,”
“I am?” she said
“If anything, you’re curious, and you’re desperate. You want to go to summer camp don’t you?”
She didn’t bother asking how they knew that. “Yes I do!”
7pm. Her mother signaled for dinner. The voice garbled inaudibly like the parents from Peanuts. The veil snapped shut like a spell broken.
It was starting to get dark by the time Ms. Carter was satisfied enough to sit down at the table. “If casseroles grew on tables” she mused softly.
“Mom, can I go to Summer Camp?”
“You are.”
“Oh, cool.” So she didn’t need that djin or whatever it was.
“Can I try coffee?”
“Sure.”
“Ech, it tastes like death!”
“Don’t talk that way about other people’s food!”
“It’s… a drink.”
“Don’t be a smart elec.”
The teacher passed out glow sticks to the kids. They turned the lights off, they had the kids sing this little light of mine.
And then she was back in her room again, trying to figure out how to get back to that dark echo-chamber. Where was I? I was asking that shadowy figure for help. They said ‘So you’ve come for my assistance.’ and as she thought it their voice crossed over but it sounded like the garbled frequencies: recorded.
“I can tell you the secrets you need.” it said. She hid in the shadows. “You must be present to understand.” The eyes glanced over her as though they had already forgotten she existed. “When you fade away, so do I.”
A trap door opened under her feet. After a second of hovering in the air she fell through the hole. She fell down to land on a blood colored neon empty plane. Blood colored grass grew on the ground and black budlets of flowers squished their faces.
10 pm, the spell broke. Darn it, not again… Jenny thought. She slept and dreamt about clubhouses that went on for miles with waterfalls pouring off the side in low gravity.
Jenny began to feel something was wrong. Mother told her not to listen to “secular” music. That music caused her to dream. Mother had a superstition towards secularism, and mysticism as well. Jenny would never tell her secrets of magic but hiding it made Jenny despise her even more.
“You’re just like your father” Rosalyn said miserably
For some reason, Rosalyn talked about her father like he was both dead and alive at once. Rosalyn never told her about her father with finality as you would a dead person. She sounded in denial that he was gone like an old pet.
All of these limits on reality meant everything was getting more difficult with the immaterial not being material, fiction not being non-fiction. Any decent moment outside of fiction was truly divine.
The fireflies were one.
Before the sun had fully set, she had already gotten out her jar, cheese cloth and rubber band. They glowed, they didn’t flicker like light-bulbs, they crescendoed and decrescendoed in light with a musical cadence. One time she took out a flashlight, ran outside and around the neighborhood holding it against her butt singing “I’m a firefly! I’m a firefly!” She’d turn it on and off. The little butt beacon might have drawn a crowd of children had they not been watching The Twilight Zone and The Addams Family which she was restricted from watching by the one who also scolded her for making such an embarrassing display. “Put the flashlight back, and don’t do that again, do you want people to laugh at you?” said her mother.
She liked watching the fireflies dance anyway. So she sat just before the tall grass, safe from chiggers. It grew dark, her mother called her about something but she wasn’t listening.
Fireflies gathered into shapes she imagined like the divots on a ceiling at night. A carousel of horses and zoo animals bore thousands of little glowing pin lights assorted like scintillations. Lights along the bodies blossomed in a respiratory rhythm.
The shattered fire, the moon, the stars above and the radiant mixture between, they called and answered.
She couldn’t help but immerse herself in the fireflies. She went deep into the tall grass. Ferns crawled up her legs. They tugged her down into the ground gently like friends dragging friends outside. An unpleasant sensation pulsated in rhythm up her legs. She stung all over in a rage. With her boots covered in damp caked dirt, she walked back home. Rosalyn took a look at her daughter’s mess and ordered for the boots to be left at the door. “Mommy, I got bit.” Jenny said softly through grit teeth.
Ms. Carter led her daughter to the bathroom. “You should have stayed next to the house.” The half bath felt like a very large medicine cabinet, tightly packed, Mom switched on the light over the skinny sink. Above was a small rectangular mirror with a real medicine cabinet behind from which she plucked chamomile ointment. “By the way, your food’s cold, and we don’t have time for a bath tonight.”
“Didn’t you say that tobacco keeps them away?”
“So what? You want me to just rub that on you? You’ll stink.”
“You did when you were little.”
Rosalyn shrugged. “We’ll have to find something handier when you’re around other kids at camp.” Rosalyn then remembered that mosquitoes weren’t the only type of summer plague. “Let me check you for ticks.” Jenny had three. two on her legs, and one high up on her underarm. “You were practically swimming in the tall grass weren’t you?” Actually there was a fourth. Rosalyn pulled up her frilled top and there was one tiny one on her back. “Goodness gracious! They’re mean!” Jenny had never seen a tick before, so she asked her mother to see. She had already washed the bugs down the sink hole but she checked herself. “Aha!” She held her leg out in front of her, just above her ankle, one had buried its head into her skin to drink out of her body with a drunken gluttony. It looked like a blackout drunk who had submerged their head inside a punch bowl. “Ah!” said Jenny as she ran out of the bathroom. Rosalyn removed it silently. She got up and walked back to the kitchen to find Jenny stirring her mashed potatoes even more tight-mouthed than usual.
“You’ve got to eat more vegetables,” Rosalyn said primly. “It’s because you’re practically made of sugar. that they keep biting you”
It’s because I’m cursed to live in a world where there’s mosquitoes, Jenny thought
After dinner (and no dessert),
She tucked herself extra tight under the covers and dreamt of bugs crawling up her legs.
For the next few days under tightly fitting full sleeved shirts and stockings and skirts, a terrible itching covered her thighs. In the morning, her mother granted permission to wear pants at camp. Jenny had one pair of shorts she was only allowed to wear with swimsuits, but she could finally wear pants for the first time.
It was pink like strawberry ice cream with a pale yellow dot in the center. Scratching did not make the itching go away at all. She tried spitting on it and rubbing, it felt a bit more dull.
One afternoon she left a plate of honey in gratitude for the bees, who mother told her made the flowers blossom, even though they scared her. The honey only attracted ants.
Mom sent her to the red room to think about what she did. Grandfather clock room.
All she could think of was the walls. Blood red.
She could stare at the dusty lace all day.
She probably had to.
That was all she could do.
Or else the pain of not being in that place would scathe like a rug burn.
The moon faced grandfather clock had thick eyelashes.
She found herself half standing, half lying in plaster up to her neck so that it looked like her head was sitting on the ground in a crooked angle.
There were patches on her skin, and blood underneath
There are demons in the air.
There are demons in my skin
Now Jenny knew something was wrong, really wrong. She wasn’t sitting under the wisteria from her children’s books, or riding a Pegasus, not only that, but mother got very upset when she tried to simulate such things. She could hear the music still in her head, banging her head on wall. Please let me out, please let me join you? She uselessly prayed to the air.
The pale face like a full moon with shadow black pits for eyes squealed. It opened a third hole, a mouth wide enough to swallow her so all she saw in a flash, was the growing of pitch black and that shrill raspy screech I will kill you!
She smacked her head.
There were eyes in the walls. That creature was whispering to her again. It had followed her when they changed houses.
“Jenny.”
“Hi…”
“Not much of a beekeeper are you?”
“Well what are you then? Any better?”
“They’re attracted to flowers, not honey. Honey’s just their excrement.”
“It is not their poop!”
“I don’t care to know about bees regardless. But I know many things. Do you know what I speak of?”
“The secret passages?”
“Oh much more than that, honey. he,he,he,he, excuse me.”
She pouted yet cracked a smile.
“You will have to travel to receive this information of course.”
“I hid some snacks in the pillow case, I’m already packed.”
The walls’ corners foiled and rippled into impossible angles then opened.
“You know of the rare flowers of course.”
“Yep, Fire breathing Snapdragons, Pitcher plants, lily of the unknown valley- I wonder which valley?”
“I know. Perhaps they will appear on our tour.”
Speechless.