Category: Nonfiction

Seeking the Dead

DW McKinney

The nursing students lived in Meadowlands residence hall with a baby’s ghost. He wasn’t really a baby, but of an indeterminate age lost to the longevity of his tale. When I first heard about him, my womb quivered at the thought, and I believed the dead to be an infant.

  “Let’s go find Blue Boy,” Julia said one night.

It was a foolish idea only made possible with the helping hand of Smirnoff. It wasn’t surprising either—Julia had dropped out during our freshman year due to personal and financial problems. She returned every few months to pick me up so we could spend a weekend together. 

We often talked about mortality when she visited. Her interests were spurred by debilitating pain from an ongoing genetic disorder that had worsened over the past two years. At the time, I was given to risky behaviors and morbid curiosities. 

Prior, on my twenty-first birthday, Julia had taken me to the Winchester Mystery House. It was a mansion in San Jose, California, that underwent ceaseless renovations for thirty-eight years to protect Sarah Winchester from vengeful spirits of people killed by Winchester rifles. Staircases ended in windows or walls, doors opened to nothing. 

As we entered the mystery house, exhilaration couched in mild fear pulsed through me.  During our tour, I waited until our group left the ballroom to marvel at the ornate architecture alone. As I approached a set of closed doors with windows, I saw one of the brass knobs slowly turn. It could not have been someone on the other side trying to get in. There was no silhouette against the sheer curtains, but I had to be sure. I peeked past the curtains, but I didn’t see anyone. I ran out of the room and smacked into Julia.

“The doorknob turned on its own,” I sputtered. 

We peered into the room, and we could hear the knob rattling. We fled, certain that we had narrowly escaped a ghost. 

That experience must have lingered with Julia, a faint itch she couldn’t satisfy. Searching for Blue Boy was her attempt to scratch it.

Julia and I strolled around the university campus, stars twinkling in the night sky. It was eerily quiet, the soft rustle of fluttering leaves an invisible audience watching our every move. Vodka burned through veins as we stumbled across the creek bridge toward Meadowlands.

The university’s crown jewel was an iron-grey mansion. It sat at the head of a sprawling green lawn ringed with verdant gardens and mulberry bushes. Acacias dropped blossoms on the bordering pathways and during the day, the sun swept across the residence hall as if it were in constant receipt of divine blessings. In the shadows, ivy strangled its walls.

Once inside, the floorboards creaked with whispers of the boy’s death. Campus ambassadors skirted mention of the child to prospective students and their parents as they toured the Wicker Room, the dormitory’s common area that frequently sat devoid of human presence. Parents snapped photos of the lattice windows and marveled at the architecture. Their questions disguised their excitement—they wanted their high school seniors to register for this specific dorm, the best dorm. 

The dorms at Meadowlands were often the featured image on the university’s brochures, the glistening red apple color to tempt the naive. It exuded a faux elitism that followed everyone who lived within its walls. When I stared at the glossy images on the brochure, I searched the attic windows, hoping the unsuspecting photographer had captured a tiny silhouette. 

Before it was subsumed by academia, Meadowlands’ countless leaded windows brought light into the Victorian summer home of Michael H. de Young and his family in the early 1900s. I imagine when the nanny wasn’t washing adventures off the children in the grand bathtubs, the children scampered down the wide staircase spine that curved from the great entry hall to the second floor. Their exuberance thudded across the sun-kissed floorboards, their laughter lifted the curtains and carried through the house like a gentle breeze. The building was later converted into dorm rooms with walls and floors so thin that residents couldn’t clear their throats without their neighbors hearing them. 

Julia and I dragged each other through Meadowlands’ main student entrance and tripped up a flight of squeaking steps. A thick hush blanketed the hallways, the faintest movements behind the series of closed doors startled us. It was quiet hours, which meant Blue Boy could rip our throats out or frighten us to grotesque, disfigured corpses and we’d have to endure it in silence or risk receiving a noise violation. 

We lingered in a study alcove hoping to coax unsuspecting nursing students into telling us more about Blue Boy. Julia had heard about his existence before she left school, but she didn’t know the full story. Filled with equal parts bravado and reluctance, and keeping my voice low for fear that Blue Boy would hear me speaking ill of him, I gave the details.

The legend, or its patchwork frame that I had stitched together from various storytellers over the years, was that the boy’s mother or his nanny, depending on who told it, submerged him underwater in a rage and drowned him in a bathtub. He died blue and bloated, succumbing to the strangling hold of the bathwater. After his death, the family quarantined the tub in the attic and never used it again. Who is to say why M.H. de Young sold the house to an order of Catholic sisters for ten dollars, but his son’s murder, the tub still slick with his young life, might have played a role. The bathtub stayed abandoned in the attic along with the spirit of de Young’s son who became Blue Boy.

Resident Advisors claimed to hate it when it was their shift to monitor Meadowlands. There was too much paranormal activity, the television in the RA office turned on and off on its own volition. The room became frosty on cold nights despite the heater being on, and sometimes the heat rose exponentially until the radiator clanged in protest and the room blistered. Wet footprints appeared on the hardwood floors in the entry hall, disappearing without a trace in the middle of the foyer. No one was ever sure if Blue Boy was malevolent, but they wanted to keep their distance all the same.

When I finished speaking, a thick presence clung to the air. Thinking of my grandfather’s folktales, I believed it was the remnants of a haint—recalling Blue Boy had churned up parts of him in the atmosphere, giving him the power to materialize and harm us. I held my breath so that I wouldn’t accidentally inhale Blue Boy’s essence and tether him to me. But his name burrowed under my skin, forming a connection that unsettled me.

“I don’t know if I can do this, dude,” Julia said with a nervous giggle. 

We cast furtive glances over our shoulders, expecting to see the worst we could imagine lurking in the corner. Julia and I waited in the alcove a minute longer and when no one appeared, we choked back our fear and scurried down the hallway to explore the rest of Meadowlands. 

We blustered into the Hunt Room where students gathered for murder mystery dinners and study sessions. A mirrored bureau rested against one wall near its entrance. I walked over to the fireplace and tried to pry open the metal grates sealing it shut. The metal whined as I pulled but did not give. Mismatched wooden chairs surrounded a rectangular dinner table. The cool wood delighted my fingertips as I ran my hand over its surface. In the wall’s faded paintings, red-coated hunters and their hounds chased prey across the grounds. The flooring popped and crackled as Julia and I walked across the room, and I entertained the feeling that at any moment, it would open up and we’d tumble into some long-forgotten basement, dragged to our deaths by devils. 

We crossed into the great entry hall and circled the large oak table at its center. We called out to Blue Boy, beckoned for his presence behind titters and muffled laughter. We dared each other to be louder, to bark out Blue Boy’s name as if commanding the dead. I imagined a pearl-white, claw-footed tub filled with water, a boy lying peacefully at the bottom. As our words rose toward the attic, the tub frothed with greying bathwater that spilled over its edge as he emerged. We had awakened him, the burning intensity of our voices attracting him like a moth.

Julia and I walked into the Wicker Room. Lamps lit every corner and the overhead lighting cast the room in an amber glow, yet a general discomfort pervaded the air. We shook our heads and scampered back, and after finding another staircase, we paused to catch our breath.

“What do you want to do?” Julia asked.

I wanted to find the attic. I craved something more than just an aging tale of a dead boy.

“Let’s go,” I said and jutted my chin upward.

Julia trailed behind me. The twisting staircase swallowed the light and muted sound from the hallway below us. Our clunky footsteps echoed in concert with the sorrowful groans of the stairs. We wanted to go higher. To see him. Yet, our excitement puddled into trepidation and we paused every two steps.

“I dare you to go first.”

“Come with me.”

The stairs stopped at a closed door. Whoever entered had to step up into the room, or whatever exited would fall directly out of it and onto us. We stood a few steps below, eyeing each other and the door. Julia’s unsmiling face peered back at me in wide-eyed recognizance—we shared the same thought. There we were again, another door and another ghost.

“You go,” Julia said.

“No, you,” I exclaimed. 

We giggled at our absurdity and peeked over the railing to see if anyone was coming to reprimand us or save us.

“I dare you,” she said.

“And what do I get if I do?”

“I’ll give you five dollars.” She held the ‘s’ until it hissed between her braces; I was Eve being tempted toward an unknowable fate. 

I clasped her clammy hand in agreement then shook jitters from my body. I inhaled, letting the exhalation propel me to the top step in two bounds. 

“Get ready to run,” I said over my shoulder. 

I grabbed the knob, turned and pushed. It didn’t budge. I shoved my shoulder into the wood. Nothing. I looked back at Julia and then fueled by adrenaline, bent down to peer into the keyhole. I had to at least lay eyes on the bathtub.

I nestled my eye into the keyhole and as I focused, a grey figure brushed past. I cried out and stumbled back down the steps. My nails dug into the lacquered railing as I steadied myself. Julia screamed and hobbled down the staircase. I jumped over the rest of the stairs to the landing and trailed behind her, restraining the urge to push her out of my way. As I glanced upward to see if Blue Boy was in pursuit, I caught sight of a moth fluttering toward the buzzing fluorescent light. 

Months following this adventure with Julia, during my senior year I would request to live in this residence hall. I could think of no better place that befit my suffocating loneliness than a haunted mansion. When night washed over the campus in a velvet wave, I turned off my bedroom lights, cracked open my window blinds, and crawled into bed. My breath blunted by the comforter pulled to my mouth as I stared out the window, waiting for a specter to play at the foot of my bed on the moonlit carpeting. I was moored in a melancholic depression, eager to embrace the dead rather than sit upright to eat with the living.

DW McKinney

To Carry a Stone

Jordan Brown

Wisconsin.

I miss the smell of her hair. Greasy and warm, archaic, like something discovered, smelling of dirt or bones or first love. Her hair is like silk, satin, some smooth ribbon, soft and gentle as it falls from behind her ear. She tucks it back again, and what I would do to tuck it for her. To feel it slip behind her ear, hold my palm against her neck, and smile as she lifts her eyes. It’s late summer of 2016 and I’m thirty-one years old. I haven’t drunk a drop or done drugs in over two years. It’s not bad really. 

I left Amanda or lost her, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. But I got my driver’s license back and I got this room and I’m going to school again in the fall. I’m really trying to do my best, I’m trying to do things different.

My room is in the basement of an old building just off campus in Oshkosh. Built in the style of Spanish Renaissance, it’s made from old stones and light-colored mostly tan brick. It is three stories tall and has apartments that run from six to eight-hundred dollars. That’s more than I can afford but the ad I saw said, “Ask us about our sleeping rooms.” So I did—three hundred for a big room with a rug in the middle and a fridge, a bed, a dresser, couch, chair, table, more chairs. I lost a lot of things on the way to sobriety, so here I am, plus a desk and a hot plate and a bookcase and I think it’s a pretty good deal.

There’s a slick, rich floor underneath the rug, some fancy cement from Italy full of chips and colors. Two of the walls are just plaster, and on the other side of one is this lady who’s always in bed. It’s right against the wall and I can hear her there, all the time, and I can’t help but wonder if this has always been her life.

There’s a toilet and a shower in the hallway, and a slop-sink down in the laundry room where I can wash my plate and my cup and my pan. That’s all fine with me except that I have to go by this other lady’s room to get there. Her name is Kim. She stands behind her door and swears at me or about me as if she were talking to someone else. 

“That goddamn kid, in and out, Jesus Christ. What the fuck,” she says. 

I guess she’s used to Debbie who hardly goes out in the hallway. When she does and I see her there, not in her bed but standing up, wide-eyed like she’s looking real hard at something behind me. She’s friendly. 

“Hi Debbie,” I say. 

“Hey,” she says. And then her eyes kind of bug out and she smiles so her teeth show.

But Kim’s not like that at all, she hurries to get back in her room and I never get the chance to try to be nice. I don’t want to live here anymore so I put in a notice and I got a different apartment that I move to next month. In the meantime, I’m going west with some buddies and we leave tomorrow morning so I guess Kim will always think I’m bad.

Minnesota.

Four crows are on a telephone pole as we head to the border of the state. The clouds are layered like an oil painting, blue to white and back again. A silo stands up against the fields and sometimes it seems that if I blink or sneeze this could all crack apart, like a wooden frame falling to the floor. The paint-crusted canvas would be left flapping stiffly in the breeze. I think about the smell of her hair again, and the feel of it under my nose as I kiss her forehead and her freckles burn beneath my lips. 

A little stream runs under the highway like a bead of sweat down her back. It’s easy to miss. The pine trees are lined up and skinny to the top. I anticipate that the waterways will widen as we go west and maybe some magic will be revealed. As we get toward the Mississippi, the scrappy bushes turn to thick ferns and the trees fill out but when we finally cross the river, I see that it’s just a bunch of water.

North Dakota.

When it’s my turn to drive, everyone goes to sleep and I’m left with nothing but thoughts. It’s after midnight, it has been storming for hours, and there’s construction on the road. We rented a car that is big and fast and heavy—it’s nothing like my loose old minivan at home. It makes me nervous, and so do the rivers of rain around me, running through the ditches. The traffic barrels and cut up concrete that narrow the lane make me nervous too. Lightning flashes, now so far in the distance of the night that it lights up stretches of fields farther than I thought I could see. 

I try to remember the last time I saw her. I think it was in the doorway of her grandmother’s house after she left rehab. We didn’t know what to say so we stared at each other. And then I held her, my hand against the thin cotton of that yellow dress, sweat sticking it to the small of her back, fitting her to me. 

Montana.

When the sun comes up, I see that things have changed. Hills are all around me, small bumps on the horizon turn into large rocks and plateaus. Sometimes I see these dead trees, black and broken. I can’t look away and when the car hits the shoulder of the road again, my friend wakes up to find me steering with my knee and hanging out the window, trying to take pictures.

On the far side of the state, we stop and camp near a great wide river. It’s shallow and I walk into it, my pants pulled up to my calves. I find a flat stone under the surface, smooth and soft like the palm of her hand. It calls out to me and I pluck it from the water and put it in my pocket, like a little secret. I fish a dollar from my pants and leave it at the bottom of the river under a larger rock. An offering to something, an exchange maybe.

In the morning we find out that Brandon lost his wallet sometime last night. He thinks it was when we stopped for firewood. Everything about this trip depends on his credit cards. Brandon calls the local sheriff and I roll my eyes. The chances of someone finding and returning his wallet seem one in a million. It’s unlikely that we’ll find it either, but we look anyway and discover a twenty dollar bill in the grass near the on-ramp. Taking this as a sign, we spend hours walking up and down the highway, him on one side, me on the other. I keep going across the bridge, hundreds of feet above the river we camped next to. I can see the rocks in the shallow water, they look like grains of sand so far below me now. I don’t want to do this anymore. They look so soft. I take off my hat and hold it over my face and breathe in, deeply. Just the smell of hair makes me think of her. Brandon comes running up the highway, his cellphone in his hand. The sheriff called. Someone found his wallet. One in a million.

Idaho. 

I’m happy to be in the back seat again. The mountains are incredible and it feels like the earth has opened up. Every road is the edge of a plate, on the edge of a table, and I can’t tell if my hands are shaking or just my heart. We won’t be here long. I remember now, the last time I saw her. We were naked together, on the couch in her new apartment. She was lying on top of me and we were sweaty and sad to see each other again. Then, standing in the doorway, was the man she left me for. 

“What the fuck is this,” he said. 

I got up and scurried into the bathroom. I must have taken my clothes because I don’t remember worrying about that, just putting them on monotonously, like I’d done this before. I had done this before, been naked alone in someone else’s house, hiding, while she tried to explain it all away while her lives intersected. Standing alone, embarrassed, frightened, thinking. Thinking now what? I went into the living room and I stood between them. He was still in the doorway, blocking me.

“I don’t suppose it would make me feel any better to hit you?” he said. 

I thought about that, thought about my answer. “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s up to you.”

Washington. 

We’re staying in a hotel that was built in the ‘70s and the gal at the front desk acts like that was a long time ago. I think this is the best bed I’ve ever slept in and I don’t want to leave it. The sheets are thick and cool, the comforter calm and heavy. They lay over me like darkness and I feel so safe. Before we left on this trip, I met someone new. When I get back home, I’m going to go out with her because I’ve decided to open up. I can talk myself into anything. We have a lot in common, but she’s much younger than me and quietly hopeful. Maybe she’s got a past too. Maybe we’ve all got stones in our pockets.

Jordan Brown

little girl we lost two days old

Britton Minor

Responding to the poem “Annabel Lee” in ninth grade felt urgent, even though I struggled at first to understand its meaning, and had been hesitant to call attention to myself by asking my teacher, “What does sepulchre mean?”

Familiar. Like a scent on the wind, or a face you can’t forget. 

“Sepulchre” felt visceral and would eventually stick to my consciousness like a piece of chewed gum smushed against the underbelly of a table. I recognized this word, I just didn’t know why. 

Tall for my age; tall enough to see inside the casket.

Inside the funeral home, eight-year-old me is on tip-toe. An alternative memory has me waltzing my bravado right past the white Jesus on the wall and peering inside the raised rectangular box, reacting just as indifferently toward my grandfather’s dead body as I had to his live one. 

Another recollection (the kind people have when they know themselves pretty well and have done some therapy) reveals a clenched heart and stinging tears pinched back. 

Puffed, buttoned, cream-colored satin lined the dark wood casket and inside lay a man I only remembered as a quiet, chair-sitting person who always had a whole coconut sitting next to him. He ate his peas with a knife and opened letters vertically. But these are pieces of knowledge, not actual memories. 

I was young and he was old—he was eighty-two when I was born, and ninety when he died. Too young to know their history, my mother’s and his. I was also too young to know that my sweet, skinny, donut-making grandmother had endured more than her share of an angry man. Forty years of sobriety had not erased the hell my grandfather had put his family through, but neither had it erased, one can only assume, the memories of little girl we lost two days old. 

This is where my sympathy lies—in a great stone sepulchre of generational history, memories and feelings—of sadness and forgiveness and love.

 nevermore: adverb. At no future time; never again.

“I order you gone, nevermore to return.”

Pain never works so well—it’s not possible to send it off. Yet Poe’s dark love, the way he painted his feelings onto the page so vividly, allowed me to place my own history of loss into Annabel’s tomb, to feel less alone in a world that had already pulled me close to far too many caskets.

sepulchre: noun. A place of burial, tomb.

“To lay or bury in or as if in a sepulchre.”

Over a hundred years ago, after the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, my grandmother placed a thin locket of blonde hair, labeled and tied with string, into a small, pink cardboard pill box—a tiny sepulchre, her baby’s memories floating on the sea of her ever-aching heart.

Britton Minor

Windows of Stone

Birdy Odell

We visited the old stone house on a sunny day at the end of autumn.  The weeds had grown long in what was left of the yard and my skirt swished through the stalks catching now and then on burrs and thistles.  I was wearing an authentic skirt from 1905, fitting for the film we were about to shoot.  

My daughter was about 14 months old.  We were there to re-enact the story of the house.

From the highway, the house had looked beautiful and solid in the morning light but as we got closer it was apparent that all that was left was a shell.  The door frames were rotted and peeling, the wooden floors thick with dirt and remnants of cobwebs hung from the rafters like lace. All of the windows were broken or missing.   All except the windows on the south side. Those had all been filled in with stone, for good reason.  

The story went that the house was once owned by a young family.  They were new to the area and excited to put down roots. The kitchen window looked out over the train tracks.  The woman liked to look at the train rushing by. Perhaps she dreamed of climbing aboard and going on an adventure.  Her husband was only too happy to oblige her. They had a young daughter just over a year and a half old and life was good.  

One day the young mother was rinsing linens in a washbasin just outside the back door.  Her little daughter was contentedly trying to ‘help’ by shelling peas. A difficult task for tiny fingers.  But she was determined. “I’ll be right back,” said the woman, and she went inside to leave the basket on the counter.  She’d hang the linens to dry on the clothes horse when the little girl went down for her nap.

The woman felt the rumble of the train in the floorboards beneath her feet.  She’d pick up the baby and go to wave at the engineer. Or if it was a passenger train, to all of the travellers on their way to the city.  She was about to step back outside when something caught her eye. A flash of white. Likely a bird but she glanced out the window to be sure, hoping it wasn’t a deer or some other poor creature caught on the train tracks.

What she saw was a horror she would never forget.  A jagged scream tore itself from her throat. The baby was on the tracks toddling in front of the rushing locomotive, her white dress standing out in the sun. She was smiling, unaware of the beast huffing behind her, bellowing steam and about to devour her whole. That was the last time the young mother saw her baby girl alive.   

She couldn’t bear to look out the windows after that.  ‘Never again,’ she told her husband. He covered the windows on that side of the house one stone at a time.   

We were there to re-live those moments.  The tracks were no longer in use. But as I stood in the derelict house in my antique skirt, pretending to hold a basket of linen and watched my baby girl totter down the tracks,  I felt sick to my stomach. She was never in danger. Her father was right beside her, just outside camera range, but the story had become all too real. As soon as they had the shot I snatched my baby up and clung to her.  Two mothers, two daughters, separated by time with only the love for our babies in common. 

We went to a cemetery afterward to film the scene of the mother at her daughter’s grave.  I wandered through the rows until I found a child’s headstone. I knelt in front of it and the tears flowed easily.  I wondered if time had played one of her cruel tricks and if the tears I was crying were even my own or that of a young mother who never recovered.   

I never saw the film.  A copy was promised to me but never appeared.  It’s just as well. 

The house still stands, and where the light shone through, there is nothing but stones.

Birdy Odell

Dangers of the Trade

Mitchell G. Roshannon

For many years now I have made my living creating joy from thin air, at a carousel. Giggling children grin at their mothers while traveling in circles on horseback. This may be the only time any of them set foot on a stirrup or saddle. 

I have often wondered if there is something horrifically magical about all carousels, or if it is only this one. It’s an old carousel, horses carved in the 19th century entombed inside a protective building with a long sloping ceiling. Supportive bars push upwards towards a spade-like decorative hanger that encompasses the contrived internal structure. It’s much like standing underneath a spider. 

During its day, the carousel was much to behold. “The last beating heart of an era,” it was called, beautiful and awe-inspiring with brass furnishings that sparkled in the sunlight, bright colors spun pleasantly. When the sunset and the brightly colored bulbs were all extinguished for the night, the darkness of the carousel allowed a different view. The horses’ eyes followed me and their mouths seemed to scream in pain, the reigns pulled too tightly. The carvings seemed almost sinister. That scene followed me to my dreams. 

I dreamt of watching the carousel from across a covered bridge. The carousel was ablaze, spinning, and the screeching whinnies of hooved creatures echoed, the silhouettes licked by oranges, yellows, and blues. Some of them itched slightly and changed in position as if they were trying to escape. But they were still wood, their hooves still nailed to the floor for children’s pleasure. Children could be heard giggling, dreaded giggling at the pain of other living things for their own amusement. 

The dark side of joy, I thought to myself. I meant to say out loud but in this world, my lips wouldn’t move, they were forced silent. I was meant to watch, not participate. The horses quickly turned to ash and a heart murmured, stuttered, and stopped. 

I awoke. Drenched in sweat, I checked my surroundings and listened closely for whinnying. I heard nothing but the normal ticking of the clock on the wall of my small loft, placed near my bed to lull me to sleep. I remained up, drinking tea and listening to the Victrola until dawn. 

“Just comes with the trade,” I said to the rising sun. I continued onto another day at the grandest of rides, the carousel.

Mitchell G. Roshannon