THE JUDGEMENT
1965
The theater grows dark but for a single lamp illuminating just me.
I sit at a desk anxiously anticipating my chance to say,
“Here look at this, an A, I am smart!”
From behind me, a skirt hung from wide hips brushes my shoulder and a corrected test paper lands on the desk before me.
I look down as the spotlight moves from my head, down my torso, and onto the test. With a wave of her evil pen, my desktop becomes a sea of blood, and I in the center, sit screaming,
“No, no, it cannot be!”
Before me, embossing my writ of execution is a distinctively cruel italic F. Aghast, I look up and the vengeful Monarch, Bartholomew, looks down and ever-so-slowly, extending her hand, her thumb turning downward.
1990
It was a perfect day, one of those days we occasionally have here in Maine. I was headed southbound along 295 toward Portland when I glanced up at the road sign, a new one, I- 395; it connected 295 and 95.
The next sign made no sense at all: Roefpet/Dranplot. I looked, again and again, I saw Roefpet/Dranplot. Had two towns been renamed in dedication to Indian tribes? I studied the names again and right before my eyes, like a cheap carnival trick, the letters rearranged: Freeport/Portland.
At the moment I sped past that sign, a bitter and forgotten memory lunged forward, like an appendage nearly atrophied suddenly pressing against my awareness.
2000
It must have started out with number and letter reversals, but now, thirty-five years later, it was hell. I had forgotten that on that fateful day in 1965, my sentence was never carried out. It so happened, the actor, seeing no alternative, dashed for the curtain as it closed. He abandoned the theater and ran for the hills.
He ran until all the color had faded into an overcast autumn day. There on the border between Pain and Oblivion stood an empty farmhouse. This refuge was the antithesis of an oasis, a waypoint between the underworld and the living. His ashen footprints passed by an iron gate rusted silent, crossed a lawn of dust to a porch that creaked and snapped from its unsettled sleep.
One, two, impacts of his shoulder against the front door and he fell into the house and hid amongst the shadows which paled one into the other. At night, he trembled when lightning ripped the darkness from the sky, and thunder chased him from room to room as something clawed the door and the howling began. His peaceful days were only interludes.
The actor hid for many years; he had fled to protect them. The 3rd grader sorely missed and hated him for it. One day a bell tolled, and letters rearranged on a sign, a journey had begun, it was time to find the actor.
