Bluebeard

I’m in my house, upstairs and frightened. Darting, hiding — scary things keep happening: the dogs bark, lights flicker and dim, yet my younger sister and I keep going back to the room this ghost is haunting us in.

This specter is energy or a person, a murderer, but we can’t see him (and he’s a him). He taunts, and we continue to return to his room.

I’m outside, alone. He’s kept a picture of his wife’s corpse, blown up as a big poster and hung under our tree.

What’s left of her body is wrapped in a white muslin cast, placed on our old wooden picnic table. Every so often, I go out to paint a layer of white glue over the muslin on her torso.

I finish and look around to see if anyone is watching, or if he is watching; I spin and spin and when I don’t see anyone but dark birds in dark trees, I go back inside.

I forget what I have just done.

Clues are left: together on my bed, my sister’s eyelids are sewn up around them — the black thread like a doll’s, outlining, she can still see, while next to her my back is tied up to the ceiling with a thick rope. I hang, a wilted flower, the rope cutting into my stomach. We help each other out of our predicaments and laugh that it wasn’t that hard this time, last time was much worse.

My work computer is infiltrated with threatening images and upper case emails from my ghost. I’m more embarrassed by having to explain it to my coworkers than I am scared by this thing that wants to kill me. I close my computer.

I run to my neighbor’s house and I can’t get into it, they can’t/won’t help me, I look at them having dinner from outside on their front lawn, and suddenly a fat black woman appears and says we should call the nice police station if we’re gonna call one at all. I look on her phone as she looks up the number and it has zero stars on its Google location description. I don’t trust it, but she insists.

We go and never get in the door. Nobody is there.

I’m outside, walking down the street and I see him. He’s following me, slowly, he knows where I’ve been. He looks like every white male serial killer does, nondescript beige jacket, stringy hair. I don’t run, but I do scream. I scream and scream, I’m rooted in tunnel vision.

He rushes me, mute. I fall and he gets very close to my face, there are now people gathering around us. I continue to scream and they watch, unsmiling. He hands me a large glass bottle of what looks like pink kombucha, smiles and pushes into me a torrent of warm, positive energy. Just for a moment, I question if he’s really so bad.

Something makes me pitch the bottle, I remember who he is and reject his gift — he laughs and disappears as it shatters and pink kombucha floods the cement. I stand up, sticky.

This essay is part of a project where as often as we can, Nora Molinaro and I choose a prompt and then write an essay.

The prompt for this week was “Write about when you’ve been duped”.