The Freak Observer

by Blythe Woolston

  Like dream dictionaries. A dream dictionary is a one-size-fits-all-palm-reading-astrology-column-in-the-newspaper-carrot-equals-penis secret-code decoder. On the plus side, the next time I need to write an essay for Ms. (Heartless) Hart, I could probably just plagiarize from a dream dictionary like this, “I think the Nazis in the book represent an evil and merciless force that cannot be reasoned with. They represent the sorts of people who put other people down.” It might be an interesting experiment. I can see a couple of possible outcomes. Maybe Ms. (Heartless) Hart would be happy with an essay like that. It would prove that she was getting through to me. Or maybe she would break out the red ink to circle those prepositions at the ends of the sentences. But that is about the only use I can imagine for the handy-dandy dream dictionaries. They are useless as tits on a tomcat when it comes to getting rid of The Bony Guy.

  I’m not interested in doing literary criticism of my dreams. I am the poet here, and I know what it means when I find Asta’s slipper in the snow. The snow in my dreams isn’t about “isolation” or “innocence.” It was February when my sister died. I live in a world where it snows.

  . . .

  I find it weird that nobody teaches us about dreams in school. You’d think it would come up at some point, like maybe in health class or something, but it doesn’t. There was that inspirational speaker who tore a phone book in half and told us to dream big, but his message had nothing to do with our dream life while we sleep. He was all about goals and, I guess, dislike for phone books.

  It’s like everyone is living this other life, full of creepy shit, and the whole thing is totally ignored.

  As far as that goes, thinking, in general, is pretty much ignored. Nobody ever said to me, “We are going to learn about thinking, now. We are going to learn how to learn.”

  I mean, they told me stuff like “Chicken, airplane, soldier” to help me learn to swim. There were little movies about how to wash my hands and brush my teeth. They provided step-by-step directions on—duh, duh, DUH!—using tampons, but as for the care and feeding of my brain, nothing.

  I’m on my own.

  . . .

  It’s pretty new science, the science of dreams, and there isn’t much consensus.

  Still, there are some facts: At least 25 percent of trauma victims have repetitive dreams of the event with feelings of intense rage, fear, or grief. About the same number of children have nightmares with frightening, detailed plots.

  Adults don’t have nightmares as much, unless they have “thin-boundary creative personalities”—or they are batshit crazy. It’s nice to have options.

  I’m not sure where I fit in all of this. I don’t know where to put my data point on the chart. Am I a normalish child turning into a screwed-up adult? Am I “creative”? Or crazy? Maybe when I can read these research papers without feeling like a dog in high heels. . . . It appears to be English. I mean, frequency, magnitude, and correlation are all English words. Lucid usually means “clear and easy to understand,” but not when it comes to dreams. Here it means that the person dreaming is aware that they are dreaming. I think. People can even make stuff happen in their dreams. I think. So I guess the point is, I should just keep having nightmares because there is a chance I might be able to be a lucid dreamer someday. Lucky me.

  Reba slides into the bus seat beside me. This is the first time she has sat beside me on purpose since we were in sixth grade.

  Reba never had any identity crisis. Her mom’s been dressing her like a wanna-be buckle bunny since she was eight, and Reba is OK with that. Reba loves her momma. They dance to the same music, share clothes, and they’re both trying to stop smoking by using the patch.

  I know this because Reba talks a little loud on the bus. She can afford to. Everybody on Bus 32 loves Reba, especially J.B. the bus driver. What’s not to love about a girl who pushes her jeans down to show you a nicotine patch? Especially when she announces that she put it on her ass so nobody would see it. And I love Reba too, because I remember when we were in the Mother’s Day Tea program when we were six and we dressed up like mice. She helped me pull out my first wiggly tooth. What’s not to love about the girl who was brave enough to reach in and jerk a baby tooth right out of my mouth? And whatever anybody says about Reba, she has all her shit kicked into a pile. I can’t say the same about myself.

  “You know that gay guy you were hanging with?” Reba asks.

  “You mean Corey?”

  “Whatever, that guy, you know.” She pulls her phone out of her jeans pocket and flips it open. She lowers her voice and leans a little closer so I can see the screen.

  There on that two-inch screen is Corey. Not just Corey.

  “This guy I kinda know found this on the net. That guy, Corey, had tagged it with our high school and a bunch of other shit. It was like he wanted the whole school to see it.

  I’m just staring at the little tiny screen. I would like to be disinterested, but I really need to see this. We are on the pool table in his basement. Those night vision cameras work, but Corey’s eyes shine like the eyes of a lion eating a gazelle by a dark waterhole. The camera angle doesn’t show my face.

  “Who does he think he is? Paris Hilton? Or is she supposed to be Paris Hilton? That’s not Paris Hilton. That girl’s thighs are ginormous.”

  “Is there more?”

  “Not that I know. But this is just skeezy. That guy is skeezy. He might not be gay, but he is skeezy as hell. I’m glad you’re not still seeing him.”

  “Thanks. You don’t have to worry. He’s gone. Completely gone.”

  In a moment, Reba will hop from my seat to a better one. J.B. the bus driver never yells at her not to change seats while the bus is moving, but he takes his eyes off the road and stares in the interior mirror to watch her ass while she moves to the back of the bus.

  When we get to my bus stop, I get off, and I and my ginormous thighs start the hike up the hill toward home.

  . . .

  I’m waiting for the other boot to drop. You know, waiting for weird looks and whispers or for a copy of the image Corey posted to get taped to my locker—some such shit. It still hasn’t happened. Nothing’s happened. Yet.

  What’s Corey’s deal?

  When I get some time on the library computer, I Google myself. Next to nothing. A couple of mentions for last year’s state AA speech and debate, that’s it. There are 5,610 results for chiffon wombat. There are 21,200 hits for hydraulic bandana. There are 14,500 hits for ginormous thighs, but none of them are mine.

  . . .

  The chickens are all dead. The predator in some of the cases is open to debate. It might have been a weasel or a mink that got into the pen and killed the first three. Mom got the rest.

  The smell of burning feathers sits in the air.

  Mom is near the woodshed with a pile of dead birds by her feet. When I was little, she explained that they don’t feel it so much if you just whack the head off fast, with a sharp ax. I guess she still believes that, judging by the bloody heads scattered in the chips by the chopping block. She has a tub of water boiling, waiting for the next chicken to scald. She throws handfuls of feathers into the garbage barrel. The feathers don’t blow around or do any of the other things feathers usually do, they are just wadded-up, soggy gobs that stick to my mom’s hands.

  Feathers get wet when you butcher chickens.

  You hold the headless chicken by its feet and lower it into soapy boiling water for a quick dip. This loosens the feathers, but you have to be careful to make it quick. If you go slow, the bird will start cooking. That would be just nasty. When you pull the bird out, you have to start pulling the feathers off. Wet feathers stink. But burnt feathers stink worse. You have to use fire to singe the last little feathers off. It is handy to roll up some newspaper and use that since you don’t want a real hot fire. Again, you don’t want to cook the bird. That would be just nasty.

  Once all the feathers are off, then it’s time to open the bird up and get rid of the guts. Mo
m likes to eat the hearts and livers, so she sorts those out and sets them aside like slimy little treasures. I guess the hearts are OK but chewy. I have nothing good to say about the livers.

  “Some god-damned thing got in the chicken house,” says Mom. “I’ll be damned if whatever the fuck it is is going to get any more of my god-damned chickens.”

  It occurs to me that my mom is pretty drunk. She is having a bad day.

  “I’ll go change clothes, and then I’ll help you.”

  “You can start by cleaning the dead ones out of the pen.”

  “Will do.”

  . . .

  Little Harold is sitting in front of the TV eating a bowl of cereal. On TV a cartoon cat just noticed it has run over the edge of a cliff. Gravity never applies in cartoons until the cat looks down.

  “I am never eating anything but cereal again. And milk,” says Little Harold. “Cows don’t mind about the milk, do they?”

  “Don’t worry,” I say, “It doesn’t hurt the cows.” I love him too much to mention how most cows live these days.

  How could a boy who spent his summer poking around in the entrails of little trout to see what they had been eating get so squeamish all of a sudden? I think it has something to do with seeing Mom out there, flecked with blood and with wet feathers stuck to her arms. That’d do it, seeing Mom looking all crazy and murdering her own chickens.

  “I have to go out and help now.”

  “I’ll save you some cereal.”

  “Thanks.”

  . . .

  I reach into the mailbox and pull out the junk mail and bills. It’s my job to pick up the mail. The bus drops me right by the row of mailboxes, so I take it home with me. Junk mail and bills—and a postcard addressed to me.

  It is weird how much that girl on the postcard looks like me. Nobody ever says I look like anybody. I do not resemble any TV stars or cover girls or the weather girl on the local station. I don’t even resemble my Depression-era ancestors staring out of the pictures on the walls at home. But this painting, that face, it looks like me. I have those full cheeks, that round chin. I have a frown around my eyes most of the time. I’m not the smiling type.

  The girl with a face like mine is wearing a white turban and a shiny white dress tied together with strings and ribbons, but not too tied together. It looks like her boobs are going to fall out if she takes a deep breath. The girl with a face like mine is mad as hell. She has a hammer and a big nail in her hand. A poor old refugee from Cozy Pines is sitting behind her, praying and staring at heaven. She reminds me of Anna, who sits by the big window all day catching flies and eating them. At the very back of the painting, there is the face of a dark man. He looks mildly amused.

  On the back, it says that this is Jaël of the Old Testament, painted by Salomon de Bray in 1635.

  Fancy meeting you here . . .

  Love,

  Corey

  Nothing about little pictures of sex on the pool table. Nothing.

  . . .

  When I do a search on Jaël on the library computer, I learn she drove a tent peg through a guy’s head as an act of hospitality. The drift of the story is that he deserved it. It isn’t clear how Jaël would have known that. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she just got lucky, and the one time she decided to nail some guy’s skull to the dirt, God approved.

  . . .

  I wish I were Jaël—or even looking at her picture in a museum far away, but I’m not. I’m here. I’m in a school bus full of noise and the smell of dirty wool hats. When I walk through the hall, I avoid Mrs. Bishop’s eye because my grades are slipping and I’m pretty sure neither of us wants to talk about it. All I have in my future is pulling another murdered chicken out of the freezer and turning it into soup that Little Harold won’t eat.

  Last year Little Harold begged and begged to go into town to go for trick or treating. Trick or treating around here sucks for a little kid. It is way too cold and dark to walk to anybody’s house, and once you got there, they probably wouldn’t know it was Halloween.

  “Trick or treat! Isn’t that nice, here’s a dime.”

  “Want a beer, kid?”

  “Get the fuck off my porch or I’ll sic the dogs on you, you little shit!”

  When I was twelve, I went into town with Reba and her mamma one Halloween and I got a whole pillowcase full of candy. It’s no wonder that Little Harold thinks trick or treating in town is the Holy Grail. Or at least, he thought so last year. This year he hasn’t mentioned it.

  Yesterday, I asked him what he wanted to do. I made it clear we probably couldn’t do it, but I was just interested.

  “I think I outgrew that,” he said.

  He outgrew Halloween? I didn’t know what to say. It made me feel terrible hearing that, but it’s not like I can tell him he should get his hopes up. It’s not like I can say, “Hey! Halloween is going to be great this year.” It’s going to suck. He knows it. He’s over it.

  He dumped some cold cereal in a bowl. There wasn’t quite enough milk. He spilled what there was on top of the cereal, and then he put in a little water and stirred it around. I guess he’s got things figured out. It makes me sad to think that. I realize I have been using him as a source of optimism. I’m like some greedy vampire who just noticed I sucked a corpse dry. There isn’t any little-kid happiness left in Little Harold. I can’t live off his cheerfulness anymore.

  . . .

  Today I exercise my privilege to leave the school grounds at lunch. We have “open campus”—doesn’t that sound more dignified than “open prison”? Oooo, fancy! But I never left school during the day before. Not even when I was hanging out with Corey. He thought it was weird that I wouldn’t even leave the school to find human food alternatives to the cafeteria chow. I thought it was weird to want to leave. I would have gone crazy worrying about being late for my next class.

  I guess I’m a little braver now, or stupider. I cross the street to the Quickee-Mart and choose a big sack of fun-size candy bars.

  “Binge and purge, huh?” The guy at the counter thinks he’s funny. He doesn’t deserve an answer.

  After I get home, I wait until Little Harold is deeply plugged into the TV. The picture rolls and flickers while he squats in front of it like a frozen frog. We have a crappy old TV, and we can’t afford the satellite hookup anymore. Little Harold spends equal amounts of time twiddling with the antenna and the inactive dish. Sometimes, if the clouds are just right, it sort of works, like it does tonight.

  I stand there and watch my little brother watch TV.

  It’s a cartoon about Death the Grim Reaper. Weirdly, in the cartoon, The Bony Guy sounds like he came from Jamaica. And he’s enjoying a bubble bath. Given my experience with The Bony Guy, I don’t think it is very realistic, but then, gravity doesn’t even work in cartoons. When a commercial comes on, I walk over and dump the bag of candy bars over Little Harold’s head.

  “Trick or treat!”

  His smile is so big I can almost see reflections of the TV screen on his teeth.

  Then I sit on the floor and watch cartoons with Little Harold. He doesn’t know why the Grim Reaper talks like a Rastafarian, but it doesn’t worry him. Why should it? Pretty much everybody in cartoons talks funny. That’s part of the point.

  The TV is working pretty good. We have candy to eat. Lots and lots of candy. I’m not actually eating my share—I got sick to my stomach almost immediately. I’m not used to eating chocolate, and I didn’t eat any lunch today. I won’t be eating any tomorrow, either. I spent a week’s worth of lunch money on candy.

  It is wrong to buy love with candy. It is wrong, and I’m really glad I did it.

  . . .

  It’s the day after Halloween. The Day of the Dead, as Ms. (Heartless) Hart cheerfully informs us in class. She even serves cookies shaped like skulls. I pass on the cookies because they creep me out.

  “No thank you.”

  “I think Loa’s trying to lose a few pounds.”

  General hilari
ty ensues.

  Score one more for Ms. (Heartless) Hart.

  Two postcards in the mail.

  The first is a picture of a bunch of people in a very dark room full of shadows. The faces are pale in the lamp-light. There is a man in red watching as another man writes something down. There are two little kids. The kids’ faces are the brightest; they shine like full moons in the light. They look really happy, those two little kids. There is also something, I don’t know what, made of copper arches. That is what everyone is focused on, that thing made of metal bands.

  I turn it over.

  It’s Corey’s half-assed messy handwriting again,

  So that’s how the sun works. Who knew?

  Love,

  Corey

  And the note says:

  A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery

  in which a Lamp is put in place of the Sun,

  painted by Joseph Wright of Derby, 1766

  It’s an orrery, that’s what those metal bands are all about. It is very different from Mr. Banacek’s orrery, but I get it. I see how it works now.

  The other postcard picture is similar, but instead of an orrery as the focus of attention, there is a white bird in a glass jar. This time, the man in red is standing in the center looking straight out of the picture, right at me. His hair is wild and silver. He looks a little crazed. He can’t be Isaac Newton, and he sure isn’t Einstein—I don’t know who he is supposed to be. I do know that the picture is creepy. Most of the room is very dark, and one of the little girls in the picture seems to be crying.

  On the back, the notes say that this is An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768.

  And, of course:

  I’m making arrangements for your escape,

  my little cockatoo.

  Love,

  Corey

  When I look at the picture again, it’s clear that the bird in the glass jar is dead. There will be no escape. It isn’t going anywhere.

  . . .

  When I look up the artist, this Joseph Wright of Derby guy, I find out that people used to invite scientists into their homes to give demonstrations. They would bring along an orrery and explain how eclipses happened, or they would bring along an air pump and suffocate birds in front of children, or they might bring along a body and do an autopsy as after-dinner entertainment. Sometimes they sold tickets.