by Aimee Pogson
The Sadness of Spirits
The spirits gather around the Ouija board. They never know which one of them will be called, but they are hopeful. They have messages, words of advice, theories on life that they have spent thousands of years perfecting. They are still working toward spiritual actualization, but that is a long process, often involving the silent voice of the Almighty whispering in their ears. The Almighty is not an easy entity to understand. “And then you will eat the lonely fruit of absolution,” he seems to say. “And the prairie dogs will roost, and the buzz seals will sweep to the skies.”
“What?” they reply. “What does that even mean?”
The Almighty tends not to repeat himself. He will share the secrets of the universe only once.
They could always reincarnate, get back to the earthly plane they know and love, which seems to be a pretty sweet deal until they remember all the pitfalls of being human: migraines, traffic jams, parking tickets, insane neighbors, long workweeks, tofu cooked by well-meaning vegetarian friends, newscasters in loud clothing, food poisoning, allergies, in-laws, Judge Judy, the entirety of adolescence, hormonal imbalances, foot pain, knee pain, the pain of being around fools, malls on Saturdays, not-so-flattering mirrors, hospitals, their own death.
Clearly, the better alternative is to stick it out on the spiritual plane.
They hover near the Ouija board even when it is not in use because they know that the second a human removes the board from its box, there will be a virtual stampede. Every spirit from the seven closest planes will come elbowing and kicking and pushing his or her way in, clamoring to be the one to speak. Some spirits go so far as to encircle the board with their energies, draping themselves around it in the only way they know how.
“Hey,” the others say, “you can’t do that.”
“Yes, I can,” the encircling spirit says and only clings tighter.
The spiritual plane is beautiful, but they have no qualms with leaving it to congregate in the closet of the Ouija board owner. Pterodactyl-sized butterflies and waving fields of poppies are only so enticing. They can watch only so many romantic sunsets and dance across the galaxy so many times before they grow bored. Instead, they wedge themselves between coats and shoes and shirts and wait. They vibrate at different intensities, each unique pattern signifying their spiritual development. They come from different planes, but their needs are the same. They vibrate together. They vibrate apart. They wait.
Finally, a human comes, a little boy about nine years old. He pulls the Ouija board down in the darkness—forbidden, no doubt, by his parents from using the board. He tucks it under his arm and tiptoes back to his room, and the spirits follow in droves. Back in the safety of the bedroom, he arranges the board on the floor with painstaking care. Then he rests his hands on the pointer, closes his eyes, and thinks of his question.
The spirits lean closer, waiting. One pushes another out of the way, and his vibration slows, a spiritual regression.
The boy flicks on his flashlight. He whispers, “Is anyone here?”
The spirits scramble—there are so many of them here—but the pointer is seized by a spirit of medium vibrational intensity who has been wrapped around the board for months. Carefully guiding the boy’s pointer, she says, “Yes.”
The boy draws back, looks down at the board as if he doesn’t know what happened. Then he replaces his hands on the pointer and asks, “Who are you?”
The other spirits move closer. There are so many ways they might identify themselves: by previous names, as ghosts, as aliens, but the spirit brushes the others away and spells out f-r-i-e-n-d.
The boy mouths the word to himself. “If you’re my friend,” he says, “then what is my favorite food?”
The spirits exchange glances, their energies rising and falling rapidly. They are exposed to many ideas and emotions on their journey to spiritual actuality, but food is basically off their radar.
Spaghetti, someone volunteers.
Macaroni and cheese.
Rather than being wrong, the spirit with the pointer says nothing. The boy is quiet and then asks, “Are my parents going to die soon?”
He has no reason to think this other than the fact that he is nine and his parents are important and death seems large and terrible. The spirit could question him, ask him about the meaning of soon. Is soon tomorrow or ten years from now? And what exactly is death, but a trip to this new plane and time spent in his closet if they so choose?
She could also tell him that years are unimportant, that time coils and uncoils, and what matters are the events in between, the depth of each experience. She can give him specific dates and times, but it is his journey to figure this out, just as it is her journey to allow him to figure this out.
“What about my dog?” he asks.
Again, the spirit says nothing. The silence is deadening.
“Should I be afraid of death?” the boy asks, and he is a small, somber person squinting into a board, searching for an answer he can’t have.
The spirit can’t help herself. Even as her vibration slows, she wraps his hands in her energy, caresses him with her being as she would her own child—but the boy only falls back, feeling nothing but the bitter cold.
Uncle Rumpelstiltskin Will Teach You to Dance
When he’s not finagling babies, he is dancing. He dances where no one can see him, behind the closed doors of his bathroom. Rising on tiptoe, spinning, spinning, he is a small man with good intentions. His hands brush the sink, the towel rack, the handle of his door. The bathroom is really too small for his antics, but that doesn’t matter. He is concerned with the moment when he stops and the world keeps moving.
He has been dancing and stopping, dancing and stopping for as long as he can remember, and this is what he knows: the dizzy moment that remains is everything.
He puts his hands to his face and closes his eyes. The air is vibrating and the mirror is vibrating and the bathroom tiles are vibrating, but when he peers closer through the darkness of closed eyes he sees atoms, strings playing a song, and that song is material: earth, air, water. If he concentrates hard enough, he can tune those strings, recreate creation.
There are other spaces, too. Spaces tucked and twisted within the strings, other worlds, but he can’t reach those yet. They are tantalizingly close but just out of his grasp.
He knows this because he is intuitive—he can listen to what others won’t hear—but he also knows this because he is empty and can’t be filled. He is empty because his mother left him for plague and his father left him for plague and everywhere there are bodies destructing from the inside out, and what he needs to know, what he can’t know, is why, and what happens next.
He peers into molecular fabrics and can change plastic to steel, glass to stone. He knows how to do this now, but what he doesn’t know is how to root through the ground and recover carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and weave them back into a whole person.
The answer is there, though. He only has to be patient and listen.
His emptiness takes him to the bar. The world is still spinning, but it is a quiet hum against the band playing on the stage. He drinks an ale and orders another. He watches the bartender, the other patrons, eyes their drinks. If he concentrates enough, he can change what they are drinking—turn every glass to water, grape juice, Kool-Aid—and they would never know what hit them, but that would be a frivolous use of his skills. He considers himself a scientist even though no laboratory has ever hired him, no school has ever had the privilege of his insight. He is purely self-taught, a student of consciousness and quantum theory.
A woman sits down next to him. She doesn’t know that he is both myth and mortal. She only knows that he is short.
He considers changing the color of her hair or turning her purse into a rat, anything that will show her that the world is never safe, although he’s not sure why he feels like she needs to know this lesson. He is considering other cruel ways to tease her when she turns to him and smiles. “T
his is a good song.”
“It is,” he says and suddenly wants to tell her how it appears to him: shivering atoms twisting like a snake. He wants to tell her how hypnotically that snake dances, how he wishes he could fall into its movements and be a part of it, although he’s not sure he could get himself out again. There is all this to say and so much more, but what he says is, “Can I buy you a drink?”
She agrees, and he orders another ale. He has never wanted to share so much with someone before, except that he has, but it’s been a while and maybe this time will be different. He asks her what her name is, and she asks the same. “Rumpelstiltskin,” he says even though he’s not supposed to give it away.
She laughs. “Does that mean you can spin straw into gold?”
“Yes,” he says, his eyes all seriousness. “I can definitely do that.”
And she moves closer, asks him to tell her more.
There have been babies and there will be more babies. In the past people believed that he ate them, but that was before he learned to be subtle. You don’t want to draw too much attention to yourself when you’re carting babies off to the woods.
He had to move to another continent to reestablish himself: America, the land of opportunity. He went about his life in an orderly and businesslike way. He courted women, struck deals, and traded firstborn children. When a woman—grief-stricken, weeping—tried to back out by saying, “But I know what your name is,” he said, “I know it, too, and no, it’s not a free pass.” He currently has no children, but recently he had two and before that he had twelve. It had been an especially tumultuous year and he found himself with more babies than he could handle, and so he rented a ground-floor office building, loaded it with cribs, and opened a preschool. He told his neighbors and his neighbors told friends and before he knew it twelve babies became fifteen and then twenty. There was so much crying, so many diapers.
He will never forget that year.
He dispersed those babies far and wide, wrapping them neatly in blankets and leaving them at fire halls and hospitals and, once, on the doorstep of a kindly old woman. Then he returned home, poured himself a tall whiskey, and drank in the silence.
He has his cravings, though. It is a hunger he cannot satiate, and so there will be more, many more babies in the future.
Daisy, the woman from the bar, comes to visit on a Sunday morning. She is bearing a bottle of champagne and flowers, yellow daffodils that make him think of his mother so long ago. He sets the flowers in the center of the dining room table so they catch the light of the sun and tells Daisy to take a seat. He is cooking omelets, flipping them expertly in the pan. They don’t talk much, he isn’t a talker, but he’s aware of her presence behind him, the effect she has on the air, this day’s particular song.
Loneliness is the price he pays for his abilities. He has seen his parents die and a brother and a sister and two wives and pets, so many pets. He misses them all and sometimes imagines he hears the patter of their feet around him, their bodies a breath passing by, a wave of warm love. By touching existence he has somehow extended his own, but this doesn’t impress him.
Sometimes it occurs to him that he has done things all wrong. He was supposed to go to them, not try to draw them to him.
He finishes the omelets and brings them to the table. He sees the straw Daisy has placed beside her plate, but he doesn’t let his disappointment show. “I was curious,” she says. “If you don’t mind showing me.”
“Of course not.” Outside the window, the sun is shining and it is just an ordinary day after all. There is no magic here.
After breakfast, he takes her to the bedroom and drags the old spinning wheel from the closet. It purrs softly as he pedals, and he takes the straw, feeds it along. He closes his eyes as he works, listens to the straw. He can feel it changing in his hands, stiffening, growing heavy, but he doesn’t care. He’s done this so many times before.
Daisy is ecstatic. Really. She can’t believe her eyes. She takes the straw-turned-gold from him and dances around the room. He wants to catch her and command her to close her eyes, to listen to the vibrations, but who knows what she would do with his knowledge, and so he lets her go, studies her face, and tries to find something redemptive there, but all he sees is a woman who would give a baby for a few pieces of former straw.
“Thank you,” she says, coming to him and kissing him on the cheek. “I’ve never believed in magic before, but now I feel like anything is possible.”
Nothing is possible, but he only nods. If he concentrates on that smile, he might be able to feel for her. If he can get her to see beyond that golden straw, he just might fall in love, but he has his doubts. He’s been here too many times before.
Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, and maybe he is insane, dancing alone in his bathroom, chanting his own name. Maybe he is crazy when he spins straw for love or when he dreams of the next baby he will bring home and place in his old oak crib. It will be Daisy’s baby, perhaps. Or another baby. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that he will be changing diapers and tickling tiny feet and heating up bottles. He will make up stories to tell the neighbors: his sister’s sudden trip to Europe, his cousin’s need for informal foster care, and he will laugh good-naturedly about teething, tantrums, all the technicalities of having a young child.
And at night he will lift the baby from the crib and hold him or her close. “You’re here with Uncle Rumpelstiltskin,” he will say, and the baby will look past him. “Uncle Rumpelstiltskin will teach you to dance.”
He will cradle the baby in the crook of his arm and think about the void the child came from and the adult he or she will become. If he can stare into the baby’s eyes long enough, he might be able to locate the life beyond this life, those other worlds bent and wrapped around our own where his parents and wives and pets reside. If he is a good parent, he might earn this child’s love and start a family.
These are just dreams, though, and dreams are not reality. Reality is nitrogen and oxygen and carbon and iron, and magic is what breathes life into them. He can listen and search, but the only breath he knows is the wind in winter, the rustle of autumn descending on leaves, and the babies he holds but can’t comprehend. But maybe that’s a start. A baby. A breath. An insatiable urge to dance.
The Key Maker and His Kin
The sky here has a way of rising up, up into mournful melodies, as does my mother, as do I. I don’t know where the music comes from, only that it is organic, a product of heart and breath and mouth curving into shapes I can’t control. “We are simply open,” my mother told me once. “We absorb so much of what is around us.”
There is slate-gray sky and moss-coated trees and darting shadows recording our every move. There is history and the way our history undoes us, chord by aching chord. I wish I could close myself off, but there is something within me that stretches and opens. And I sing. I sing for myself, and I sing for all the others. I am pure, pained voice.
This is the woman within me: I imagine her at her bedroom window, curtain pulled aside, staring at the night sky. There is no moon. There are no stars. Just emptiness waiting to swallow. The sky has already begun its haunted song, but she has yet to accept the reality of this place. She tells herself the songs are just her imagination, a product of her now-disturbed mind, and not the landscape trying to claim her piece by piece.
She rests her head on her hands, her dark hair drawn back over her shoulders, and plans her escape. There is a high fence that conceals this house, but where there is a fence, there is a key. The key could be anywhere. In a box with another key. In her husband’s desk. On her husband’s person.
Her husband is the key maker. He possesses all the keys and always knows just where to find her, how to fit the exact-sized key in the door and swing it open to reveal her.
She imagines her footsteps across the dewy grass, slipping her own stolen key into the gate, her two children in tow, a b
oy, a girl.
The gate will creak in the night. Its solidity will crack, and her husband will see it.
She begins again. There is a fence, and she can always dig, can always climb. Beyond the fence, there is a stream she can follow at least until daylight. There is a forest to get lost in, but her husband has dogs.
The surrounding landscape is a map she has done her best to memorize, and in her imagination she retreats back into the house, tries again. There is a way out. There has to be a way out.
This is me: I carry a key in my pocket and can’t stop singing. It is an old key, rough around the edges, spotted with rust, lacking the smooth lines and symmetries of contemporary keys. The songs I sing are the songs of the sky, except they ache. People tell me they never heard a sad song until I came along, and I know they’ve never met my mother or my grandmother. They ask me where the sad songs come from, how someone so young can be so weary, and I tell them I don’t know, but I do—or at least I’ve heard the stories.
Unlike the woman within me, I know this is a haunted place. The world has somehow gathered its darkness in this very spot, and the air is heavy with foreboding over what has already happened, over what is still to come. I’m not afraid, though. I walk the forest paths and sing, and the trees lean close. They alone seem to understand I sing in registers that aren’t mine: the voices of men and women and children.
They say he opened the door to reveal her one night, the woman within me. The door to her home. The door to a sitting room where she was playing the piano, singing her songs. The light from a candle caught her features. She had long black hair and green eyes. As did my mother. As do I. She may or may not have smiled. She may or may not have followed him willingly.