Fear

It’s easier when you’re young, when fear can still be delicious. Think about the ancient, sacred rite of campfire tales. You and your friends sit around a flaring, crackling fire, conjuring ghosts and ghouls and monsters; you tell each other in hushed tones about noises in the woods – the crunching of leaves, eerie wails, words whispered just beyond understanding – and the darkness around you enters within, pounding, threatening to burst through your chest and eardrums. Then the story is done and the throbbing darkness recedes, leaving you terrified, exhilarated, replete with satisfaction. You can think of yourself as brave then for not trembling or jumping at every little sound as the tales were told, or begging that the stories end. When you are a child, you have the luxury of playing at fear, particularly when your childhood was more or less uneventful and you were raised by parents who kept you safe and free from harm. 

But then you grow up, and one bright day, you are walking down the street with your own son Matt, only half listening to his six-year-old chatter, your mind on the list of grocery items your wife has just texted you to pick up on the way home. You hear him call to you, “Hey, Dad! Dad!”, and you realize he has fallen behind you. You turn and see him pausing before a store window, pointing at some video games displayed within. Your eye is caught by an old woman shuffling up the street towards you, looking down at Matt, and the instant you notice her smile the side of her head leaps off in a gush of crimson, chasing the shattered fragments of the store window as they fly inwards in a thunderous crash. You hear a loud pop! pop! pop! from the street and the sound of more glass bursting, and you find yourself lying face down at the bottom of a stairwell to a basement door, eyes shutting away the light, burrowing your head into your arms. You hear screams and yells and more pops and dull booms, and then the slamming of car doors and the screeching of tires, and then the keening of sirens in the distance, coming closer, becoming shrill and maddening. The screams continue, from several quarters, and after an eternity in the darkness, a flicker of a memory rouses you: you have a son; he was with you.

By sheer dint of will, you open your eyes, unlock your frozen limbs, and drag yourself up the four steps to peer into the street. You see Matt still standing where he had been, on a slick of blood, the old woman lying prone at his feet. His tiny body is enlarging, sucking in air like a bellows, then blasting it out in a piercing, wrenching howl. His cheek is spotted red, his face contorted in complete and utter terror. You try to stand up but fail, and so can only start crawling towards him. A flash of dark blue rushes past him and jumps through the open, broken window – and Matt is gone. A gargling, guttural moan escapes you, and another dark blue shape suddenly appears, looking down at you. You see his face mouthing words, but though you hear the sounds, their meaning will not settle in your churning mind. He lowers himself on one knee, puts a hand on your back, stays beside you as he scans the street, his drawn pistol pointing to the ground.

More sirens, and other figures in a lighter blue come running up, and they crouch around you in a circle, and more hands are touching you, prodding you. They bring you to your feet and guide you towards red trucks with flashing lights. You can barely feel your legs beneath you as you stagger forward. In time, Matt is brought to you, wrapped in a blanket, smudges of blood still smearing his face, and you find yourselves clinging to each other desperately, wailing into each other’s ears, the two of you a single creature convulsing with fear and grief.

Speech and wit return to you, in fits and starts, and the putting together of the story begins. Words begin registering again; you hear them from the police, the emergency personnel: bank robbery, automatic rifles, shootout, multiple fatalities. And you start speaking your words, telling your story, what you can piece of it; first to the police, then to the doctor at the hospital, then to your tear-stricken wife, who cannot let go of her tight embrace of Matt. And then you tell it to Dr. Johansen, in weekly sessions in a cozy room with dark, paneled walls, with sunlight streaming in through the slits of green, Venetian blinds.

* * *

Dr. Johansen has reassured me over and over that my reactions on that bright day were perfectly normal, and I have come to believe it, for the most part – though I am still apt to start at sudden noises, my throat still constricts whenever I walk past store windows, and I sometimes still imagine I see flashes of contempt in people’s faces – in my wife’s, most painfully. Matt is doing fine; the currents and eddies of childhood and a blessed forgetfulness have long swept him away from that street, so that the memory of it has no more hold on him than a story of ghosts and goblins. I in my adult circumspection am denied this solace.

It’s a little death, isn’t it?, fear: a touch of oblivion that foreshadows the void awaiting us in the end. Before the fear you are yourself; but while it has its grip, you are gone. You disappear. And you tell the stories afterwards to try to come back to yourself, to find yourself again. Sometimes it is not so easy. Before that day, I was sure of who I was: a devoted husband, a good and decent man – and most of all a loving father who would give his life for his son in a heartbeat. Since that day, I have lived with fear's bitter aftertaste in my tongue, knowing this is not true.

(May 2012)

The White Book

by Emily Isip and Glenn Ricafrente

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door. The book had been forbidden to her, but Kayla had read it anyway. She had not finished it, because she was afraid of how it would end. Nevertheless, the book had already started working its magic and things began changing.

It was snowing outside, though she lived in a small village that had never seen snow – and anyway, it was the middle of summer. The landscape and the buildings were the same, but the people were no longer her neighbors, the villagers. They were exactly like the characters she had just been reading about. They were all playing in the snow. Their jaws, mouths, and noses were stretched out in foot-long, downturned beaks – like the protective masks people wore during the plague in medieval times – only the beaks were outgrowths of their faces. They were all wearing silk – the men in stockings and tunics, the women in long dresses with long sleeves that flowed past their arms – and some of them were skating on a frozen pond on ice skates made from animal bones.

A man on a flaming black horse came up the road, and everyone stopped and turned to him – then began running in all directions. Within seconds, everyone was gone. The man, who wore a black cape and black armor (with a helmet that extended outwards to conform to his long beak), rode up towards her. She was petrified. “This is impossible,” she said, “how could the book have come to life?”

She rubbed her eyes, and suddenly felt something push on her hands. She opened her eyes, and saw that her mouth and nose were elongating. She was growing a beak of her own. The black knight drew his sword and spurred his horse onwards, charging directly at her. She screamed, but it came out a loud squawk.

She leaped back inside her house and shut the door. Her beak disappeared, which allowed her to holler, “MOM!!!”

Her mother suddenly appeared right in front of her, a look of alarm on her face. Kayla ran to her mother’s arms, and her mother asked, “What’s wrong?”

Sobbing, she confessed to what she had done. Her mother held back her anger and said, “I told you to never open that book. And yet you did. I can see you are really upset right now, so we will talk about your punishment later.”

Kayla said, “How could you keep such an awful, horrifying book? How could you put a spell on it so that anyone who read it would see all those horrible people come to life? That black knight almost killed me!”

Her mother, who was the village sorceress, stared at her, then said, “It’s not an awful book. It’s just that anyone who reads the book writes the story. Here, let me show you.”

Her mother let her go and took the book from the table. She started opening it. Kayla backed away in fear. Her mother reassured her, “Nothing will happen. I removed the spell for now.”

Her mother opened the book and showed it to her. The pages were blank.

(March 2012)

A Lakeside Tale

I watched the water pour through the jagged crack in the hull and lap on my feet, feeling chagrined more than anything.

“Are you all right?” she cried out. I turned and saw her standing on the dock fifteen, maybe twenty feet away; saw her face, finally, and thought to myself, Holy shit, she’s pretty.

“Yeah, I’m fine. The water’s great.” It was crawling up my ankles now.

She looked at me quizzically. “Are you getting out? Your canoe looks like it’s going to sink.”

“Nah, I’m good. Hey, listen, will you do me a favor?”

“You want me to throw you a line?” She cast about the dock, searching for a rope.

“No. Will you sing something?”

She turned back to me. “What?”

“Sing something. Anything.”

She looked at me blankly. “Umm, why?”

The water was up to my calves. “Is this any time for explanations? C’mon, just sing something.”

She peered at me anxiously. “Why don’t you have a life vest? You can swim, right?”

“Nope. That’s why you have to sing. Now. Before I go under.”

After staring at me a few seconds, she gave a half smile. “You can swim. You wouldn’t be so blasé otherwise.”

Blasé. I was liking her more and more. “Are you going to sing or aren’t you? Look, my canoe’s slipping into the water.”

Her smile was full on now. “You’re insane, you know that?”

The water was starting to soak my cargo shorts. I’d be in the lake in half a minute. “Yeah, and going down with my ship fast. What, you won’t grant a dying man his last wish?”

She shook her head in mock exasperation. Then, after a moment’s thought, she sang:

My Bonnie lies under the ocean

My Bonnie lies under the sea…

Her singing voice was clear, melodious, tinged with mischief – I noted with satisfaction the slight, playful change she made to the lyrics. The canoe, filled with too much water to retain its buoyancy, slid into the depths. I grinned at her as my head sank beneath the waves.

* * *

I had seen her from afar as I paddled along the lakeshore. She was sitting alone on a dock, leaning against a wooden post, her face shaded by a wide-brimmed Havana hat, her eyes by turtle shell sunglasses, her nose buried in a book. Yes, yes, her body was what caught my eye at first. She was fair and long limbed, and the cut-offs and aquamarine bikini top she was wearing revealed and concealed her figure in all sorts of enticing ways. But – honest to God – what drew me in was her face; that is, curiosity over what she looked like, since all I could see were the parts not hidden by the book, the sunglasses, and the shadow cast by her hat. I came in closer to get to a distance and an angle from which I could her face clearly. Since she didn’t even glance up at me as I glided by, I gave up on any pretense at nonchalance and was unabashedly staring at her – so intently that I failed to see the orange warning buoy I had inadvertently steered towards, not noticing it until my canoe had already crunched on the rocks just beneath the surface and scraped over them, mortally wounded.

I hung suspended in the cold water ten feet below in silent contemplation, until my chest began to tighten in its desire for air, and I started swimming up.

* * *

I broke surface with a gasp and with a few strokes covered the distance to the dock. I reached out to grab the overhang and looked up to see her relieved face looking down at me. She said, “Damn, I thought you were dead.”

I combed my dripping hair back, shrugged, and held out my hand. “Would you help me up?”

She crossed her arms, head tilted to one side, lips tightening around a suppressed smile. “Umm, I don’t know. I’m not sure I want a strange guy up here who, one, scares the shit out of me making me think he had drowned, and, two, makes me sing. What was that about?”

I sighed and retracted my hand. “Well… I felt stupid. I was – and I say this totally shamefaced – I was looking at you and didn’t see the rocks until I’d hit them. Since ‘idiot capsizes canoe ogling pretty girl’ makes for a fairly ridiculous story, I thought if you sang to me, I’d at least be able to embellish a little and make it like it was, you know, your singing that made me crash into the rocks.”

“My singing,” she repeated, uncomprehending.

“Yeah, you know. Like the Greek myth.”

After a pause, she said hesitantly, “You mean like the Siren? The Siren’s song?”

I smiled. I was really, really liking her. “Yeah. Stupid, I know.”

Her brow furrowed. “But you crashed before I started singing.”

“Blah-dee-blah. Details are meant to be fudged.”

She looked at me sidelong. There was an almost imperceptible shift about her face, the kind that comes over women when it starts dawning on them that power over a guy was being slipped into their hands. “So, I’m a Siren then? Enchanting seafaring men into a watery grave?”

I gazed up at her, nodding my head slowly. “I think so. I’m still kind of drowning right now.”

“Uh-huh.” She uncrossed her arms. “Okay, good line. And I’ll give you points for creativity. You’ll have a good story to tell your friends.”

“We’ll have a good story to tell our kids,” I said, “about how we met cute.”

She arched her eyebrow. “Oh, really now? And what makes you think that this goes even one step further?”

I grinned. “Because I’m your Bonnie; you said so yourself. And here I am, brought back to you from the sea. Now, will you please help me up?” I said, extending my hand to her again.

(May 2012)

The Siren by John
William Waterhouse