A blue page fluttered bat-like, impaled by a pushpin on a rippling latex wall. It read, “Not for me the Grinding.” An off-key dirge from a harmonium blared from a tiny speaker.
Flickering images, cross dissolving:
A cookie crumbling on a torn paper plate.
Bedsheets knotted, twisting.
Sobs, raw and jagged.
Pendulum shadows, keeping time.
And always the open window
No!—not the window!
My eyes snapped open. My throat burned from screaming a name I didn’t know.
I gasped in sharp, stuttering breaths, my body locked in Nightmare’s goblin jaw. I rubbed my stubbled cheek, yanked an eyelash free from the glue of sleep. In the dark room, a grave of black stars pulsed, denser than shadow.
Was I still dreaming, or marooned in hypnagogia, where the unconscious unravels its horrific secrets?
I reached for the void. Resistance. I pressed through its membrane into a shifting panorama of slick and melting vinyl. The soft ground yielded beneath me.
What I saw… all wrong.
A red fire engine, an Etch-a-Sketch, those beloved childhood toys, but soft, cast in gelatin, shivering at the slightest tremor. A bone-chilling cold blasted through an open window so distant it seemed a discarded dollhouse frame. The persistence of a memory.
Here’s another oatmeal cookie. Our secret. We won’t tell mom and dad. Pinky swear.
“Hello?” My voice wavered. “Who’s there?”
Silence.
I shrank, helpless, a serf to an ambiguous yet demanding ID.
A figure loomed in the window, head tilted unnaturally, eyes bulging, mouth frozen in a silent howl. She reared back and flung something at me. It hit with a dull thwack. I yelped and staggered back, expecting worse.
I searched and found it near a heap of rumpled bedsheets. My pudgy toddler hand groped through bubbling laminate, closing around a crumpled blue paper ball.
Dizziness overcame me, a hideous memory clawing to the surface, while a violent negative pole of willful ignorance shoved it down.
I read a torn page from a journal, the writing jagged and unsteady.
I once met my future self
Her face was bone and ash
I plied her with questions about my choices and my past
But she just kept screaming.
Such a strange meter! Part of a longer lament? Or a Tarot that went revoltingly wrong?
The voice squirmed through my thoughts again.
How many years have you denied I was HERE, Jonathan? I watched over you. Played silly card games with you while your mom and dad guzzled Mai Tais and nibbled Swedish Fish past midnight. You were too young to know. It was the grind, Jonathan. The pointless repetition, the Jello mold of ennui… the lazy, narrow deer path to oblivion.
I pressed the heel of my palm to my forehead. Cookies. Card games. Why couldn’t I see it?
The sea pulled back before the tsunami of recollection. I tried to hold it off, but it consumed me with devastating force, dragging me under while I groped for the wreckage of repression.
An old black and white movie flickered and rolled on the TV. A man played chess with a hooded figure while people in burlap collapsed with pustules in their armpits. A breathy, reedy instrument wheezed in the background. It frightened me, but I refused to show her.
She watched, entranced. Halfway through, she hit pause. Her lips tightened in resolve; a tear quivered at the rim of her eye.
“Your mom and dad should be home soon,” she’d said, staring past me at a shuttered window. “You ought to be in bed. Not that they give a damn.”
Back then, I didn’t question my parents’ laissez-faire child-rearing. I did whatever I wanted.
She went into the kitchen. Hinges squeaked, then the whoosh of pouring liquid. She returned with an oatmeal cookie on a paper plate and a glass of milk. The plate had a tear at the rim, as if she’d ripped it from the package in frustration.
She set them in front of me. “Be a good boy. Wait here ’til they come back.”
“Where are you going?”
She rubbed her palms against the side of her jeans. In hindsight, her eyes seemed weary and distant. “Just stay here. Don’t move. And eat your cookie.”
Even now, fifty years later, I can still taste the cookie’s rough sweetness, the dry crumble, and the sludge I made by taking a sip of milk and rolling the whole mess around in my mouth.
Upstairs she wept, sounds so raw and relentless that they unraveled into a ragged cough. She’d told me to stay, but curiosity—or was it concern, or both—pulled me up the staircase. At the landing, the linen closet stood open. Fresh pillowcases and mattress covers lay scattered across the floor. The crying grew louder.
I followed the sound to my room, eased the door open a crack and peered inside. My red fire engine lay on its side, its ladder splayed like an insect’s wing. Beside it, an Etch-a-Sketch, a capuchin monkey engraved in graphite on a gray screen. The crying had stopped, but a frigid breeze crawled over my skin from the other side.
“Jilly?” I called. “Are you here?”
I pushed the door open. Wind surged through the open window. I hugged myself against the cold.
No one was there. Had she vanished? I was young enough to believe in magic; a disappearing lady didn’t seem impossible.
Then I saw the rope of knotted bedsheets stretching from the bedpost out the window.
Now why would Jilly escape from my window? Golly, she could’ve just used the door. Silly Jilly!
In that moment, in my waning years, I finally faced what I had known as a child but would not accept. The grain of sand that had formed the pearl of my trauma.
The sheets leading from the bedpost out the window were taut, and a thick pendulum of shadow swayed in the moonlight.
