Dimly, Through Glass

by Knight, Dirk

  The moon’s face was somewhat smoother and more appealing than was Cirril’s, truth be told.

  Cirril’s hair was thinning and too long at the same time. The lack of washing had given the long, wiry threads, which sprung from his scalp like dog whiskers, an extra weight and they sagged into his empty eyes and down the back of his neck and into the collar of his ragged flannel shirt. Blackheads swirled around his face, between and within the craters of his untreated acne, like black holes. They were so numerous and large that they appeared to consume all of the remaining white flesh as well as sucking up a considerable amount of grease.

  But not enough.

  The grease that remained was enough to remind her of a fresh baked pizza. She pictured the grease swirling and swarming across his dermis and into the black holes and became nauseous. His skin was producing new pizza grease at a rate too rapid for the singularities to compensate, so he was still nearly dripping. If Cirril’s face were a pepperoni pizza, it would be the one you laid a doubled-up napkin over and blotted gently before it crossed your lips.

  But who needs the empty calories?

  His Paul Bunyan flannel shirt and splotchy, frayed denim pants seemed to be something he had grabbed from a pile of discarded laundry outside a hobo’s cardboard box shanty, under a sign that read, “For the less fortunate.” His shoes were old, black-leather combat boots. They were still shiny and supple, though not from care. It is more likely that he had gotten a fresh coat of grease on them as he stood inside a dumpster, rooting around and fighting with the rats for the food that the roaches and maggots refused to eat.

  Just more empty calories, you could say.

  What she couldn’t understand was how the man Cirril, whom she had never met, could have written so many journal entries that were addressed directly to her. It was not probable that he would have known that she would find the journal, that she would venture further still and read them, yet here is was.

  “Ellen wore a yellow blouse today. It flapped in the wind while she awaited the bus, and her nose was pink with the chill.”

  Hence, her infatuation with and subsequent haunting by the man Cirril’s day-by-day accounts of hers, and many others’, lives. Sure he lived downstairs, but only for a little while, since her mother’s funeral, and she’d never actually seen him.

  Ellen isn’t an uncommon name, or anything, but she knew it was her. She was actually wearing the same yellow blouse now, which raised her hackles. She knew that the Ellen referenced was her, and not some teacher in Benton, Ellen. Or some waitress in Pine Bluff, Ellen.

  She was the only Ellen mentioned in all the journals. She pored through them in search.

  It was her story.

  No one else would ever want to be in this story, no one named Ellen or Barbara or Claudette or Norma Rae or Coleen or Suzy. Certainly no one named Victory or Forgiveness, Fidelity or Justice. No one would want to be who Ellen was reading about.

  ***

  It had been a hot summer day in Arkansas, Ellen remembered, because she had been out of school and was playing with the neighbor kid, Sean. Sean lived next door to the crumby walk-up apartment that her father had crammed them into after her mother passed. She had met Sean at a neighborhood-cookout-type of gathering in the street, where everyone was loaded and still handing out beers, clearly not a Sunday in Arkansas, when you couldn’t buy beer. The Southern hospitality and neighborly spirit dies down from about midnight Saturday to roughly 8:00 AM on Monday, when the chains come off the beer coolers at Seven Eleven. There used to be a lot of those types of shindigs in North Little Rock, in the Mid-Eighties—-everyone drinking, talking about sports, making plans to go to Burns Park and play volleyball or toss a Frisbee before it got hot out. The men were always drinking, and once they started, they began to hatch plans to go drinking elsewhere. Some of the women were rallying other mothers to take the kids to the rocket slide, or the tiny little play-land across from the putt-putt, where the kids could ride the tiny train, complete with a conductor in an engineer’s hat. Fewer still were expressing desires to go grab a shaved ice along the way.

  It must get boring to drink in the same place all the time, Ellen thought, since people are always looking for new places to swill beer, smoke, and listen to Hall and Oats blaring from the opened windows of an El Camino.

  Things had gone sour pretty quickly after the block-party-cookout day, as they often do when massive amounts of Miller Highlife are introduced to the situation. It was usually about 11:47 pm when someone announced, “We are going to need some Sunday beer,” and suddenly the remaining cans were discreetly tucked away and rationed, hoarded like dense crackers on a lifeboat adrift for days in the ocean. It always seemed to astonish Ellen that the grown-ups never had any idea that they needed this “Sunday Beer” in advance. At this point, everyone decides that they have waited too long to purchase any Sunday beer and, therefore they will spend the next day, not at Burns Park, but at a local bar where they can continue the consumption. Directly following this revelation comes the unnerving stage where the grown-ups consume as much as they can, racing the other adults, to get as much of the remaining Saturday Beer as they can before their peers. This resulted in the kind of atrocities Ellen hates.

  Like Sean’s mother becoming extremely flirtatious and grabby with the men who sat on coolers, guardians of the supply. She assumed that her flirty, over-the-top groping made up for her face, which had the opposite effect. Ellen’s father once said that she killed more wood than termites. Still, that didn’t stop either of them the night Ellen’s father perched atop the Coleman cooler. The Southern Oracle, as it was.

  Ellen’s dad had been respectful enough of Sean’s mom’s boyfriend when he was around--they were neighbors after all--but her beau hadn’t made it that night. And you know what they say about cats and mice and when they play.

  They play when copious volumes of Miller Highlife are introduced to an ugly, flirtatious woman and a widowed carpenter.

  Not only did they fuck, but also they made a spectacle of it, in front of the neighbors. They didn’t actually ball in the street, mind you, but they certainly left little else to the imagination.

  When the cat’s away, the mice may play, or when drunk or lonely or bored, but the gossip of a southern town always makes its way back around.

  Sleeping with Sean’s mom would turn out to be yet another event sponsored by booze that Ellen’s dad would have to pay for.

  He had to fight her boyfriend the very next night that beer was involved, but this time it was payday, and thus a Budweiser night. There was a lot of shouting and a lamp was broken in the carport. Why there was a floor lamp sitting in the carport, Ellen never thought to ask. She was too terrified to tremble. She was as petrified as the desert she’d read about in school. She would later note in a journal of her own how frightening it was for her, and therefore must be to other children to watch so-called grown-ups fight. She commented about the entire event (other than her neglecting to question the lamp’s presence) in great detail, and then tore the pages out and tossed them atop the stove, allowing the pilot light to catch them and send the ashes asunder. She did this without knowing why, but it wasn’t the first or last thing she would burn in her lifetime.

  One of the details she harkened back to repeatedly, though, was the need for a child to have a stable and safe place, somewhere to feel protected, or so she had read, and that it had been impossible to feel safe and comfortable while the men were spilling blood out all over the patio and lamps were being slaughtered needlessly.

  In the end, the men picked one another up, no one bothered with the lamp, and Ellen’s dad presented a joint as a peace offering. The other, bloodier, man decided that Sean’s mom wasn’t worth all the hassle, what, with her offensive face and all, and sat down to smoke his half of the doobie. Sean, who had watched the entire skirmish from his own vantage, just beyond where the lamp probably should have been, wore a look of shame and injury. The words the men had shouted were only audib
le, and not intelligible to Ellen who was on the second floor, looking down through glass, but a mere screen door and ten feet separated Sean. Ellen felt bad for him that his mother was unclean.

  “If I had a dog that looked like that—” Ellen’s dad started.

  “I’d shave its ass and teach it to walk backwards,” the second man said through his exhalation of pot stink. They both laughed and this sent Sean running back into the house proper. Ellen never spoke to him about the fight.

  In another letter Ellen would write, she would note that the men who were demeaning Sean’s mother had both slept with the woman, and transferred their guilt into her lasciviousness. She noted in the letter that each of those men seemed far more unclean than the woman, and that the woman hadn’t reduced herself to pettiness and violence. The letter would go unanswered, but she was confident her father had read it. Prisoners rarely get mail, so they read even if it’s hateful or cruel.

  What Ellen wouldn’t know, couldn’t really, was that her father would read the letter only once, memorize it, and then burn the paper and scatter the remnants—an act that would land him in the hole for a month and get his lighter confiscated. Had Ellen have known she and her father shared this odd behavioral quirk, it might have saved everyone a great deal of time and probably a few lives to boot.

  Though they never spoke of it, Ellen was sure that Sean was still ashamed of the whole ordeal. In the letter she burned, Ellen ruminated on how poor a choice it had been for her father to sleep with the girl next door … especially when the girl was a walleyed fish-dog that would keep inviting him back over for dinners. Her dad had to see her every day for as long as he had to, and what made it worse was that she and Sean were joined at the hip that summer and every time he saw her father, he looked at his own feet. He did the same with his own mother, though Ellen wondered if that wasn’t just to avoid seeing her hairy moles or to keep down confusion as you tried to decide which of her wandering eyes to attend to.

  Ellen sensed that her and Sean’s constant proximity was a sort of shield for Sean, and it was no doubt how they ended up in the downstairs apartment together, inside Cirril’s home, and rifling through his shitty shit. The apartment, which was a home that had been broken up into an upstairs and downstairs duplex, was stuffy and dank. Her apartment, the upper half, was small but pleasant. The lower quarters were nonesuch. There were potatoes on the windowsill with two-and three-inch eyes growing out of them, sweet potatoes that had gotten so close to the edge of rot and decomposition that they had taken on the responsibility to father new life. In a letter that Ellen did not burn but should have, she wondered if they had actually mothered new life, and if so, if she knew who the father was. Her psychoanalyst would eventually burn the letter, though not intentionally, but when her office spontaneously caught fire some three years after releasing Ellen into society with a clean bill of mental health.

  There were dozens of boxes of cereal, but not full sized; they were the little child-sized individual serving boxes that they gave out at school breakfasts and shitty hotels as part of a continental breakfast. They had served them at Rivendell Psychiatric Hospital, too, but Ellen was always too sedated to eat in the cafeteria, plus she was on a watch list for threatening to incinerate her psychoanalyst’s office (no, it wasn’t her).

  “Why does he have so many of these?” Ellen had asked Sean, who ignored her while stuffing as many of the boxes of Frosted Flakes and Fruit Loops into his over-shirt as he could carry. By the time he stood again, there were a mountain of blue and green cartons with innumerable tigers and toucans peering out over the cotton.

  “Who cares? Grab the rest,” Sean said, but Ellen was still concerned with the cereal’s origin. They seemed so out of place in the dump apartment with the rotten tubers. Ellen’s mother had been very cautious about foodstuffs, especially on Halloween: Searching each individually wrapped portion, before they were known as “Fun Sized,” in search of razor blades or syringe holes or dynamite or a human head.

  Fun Sized.

  Ellen’s mother hadn’t died from tainted Halloween candy. Perhaps she should have been on the lookout for drunk drivers instead of Halloween terrorism. Perhaps she should have been more cognizant of her husband’s copious consumption of Miller Highlife. It was the 80’s… they weren’t about to make Ellen Ward of the State in order to send her father to prison, even though that also may have saved us some time and potentially saved a few of the girls. Ellen wrote this into a letter as well. The letter was a vehicle to indict the system that had let her father remain in charge, and on the road behind the wheel, and had left her in an unsafe environment, where she became a danger to herself and others. She condemned, by name, law enforcement officials, judges and her psychoanalyst for their parts in covering up what they knew about Ellen and her father. She didn’t burn the letter, she shoved it into a plastic bag and then into her vagina, where it remained until recovered in a strip search and added to her file. Ellen was satisfied by the look on the guard’s face, but disappointed by the lack of long-term consequence.

  Aside from being ineffectual, the letter was not written until years after her mother’s funeral and after Ellen had been forced to see her father’s smiling face day after day, while he swilled beer and her mother composted. She would hate him if she could, if she had anyone else besides the timid Sean to lean on.

  Now, with her gone, Ellen was beginning to display more and more characteristics of her mother, and borrowing traits she had seen displayed therein. She was, for example, very apprehensive about consuming any of the foodstuffs they had found within Cirril’s abhorrent domicile.

  But still, she opened the refrigerator.

  Some people go for the medicine cabinet—most, actually—when no one is looking. They excuse themselves at dinner parties and lock the door behind them, relieve their bowels or bladder or both, and then run the sink loudly and pretend to wash up while cataloging the contents of the mirrored box. They felt nothing in the way of apprehension or discomfort, as though this was assumed and therefore acceptable for all guests. In that same fashion it is a wonder more visitors wouldn’t go through hosts’ chest of drawers, or under their mattress. The end result of this horrendous betrayal of trust would, no doubt, be something along the lines of, “Did you know that Susan is on Valium?” being uttered at the next dinner party, while some other scavenger was no doubt riffling through some other party thrower’s medicine cabinet, and the mixed company at the shindig would respond with gasps and whispers. Amidst “oohs,” and “ahhs,” and “you don’t says,” the news of the contents of the medicine cabinet would spread through the town like a virus at a kindergarten, and yet no one would even stutter a bit, or question what illness had led this individual to pilfer through someone else’s personal artifacts. They would, instead, speculate at length that Susan’s husband must be alcoholic, or abusive, or both, or perhaps that the mortgage was past due and the stress had eaten away at poor Susan’s sanity, or that their oldest son was a homosexual, or something equally as embarrassing and had therefore driven her to the pharmacologist’s.

  By the next dinner party the swell would have consumed all the chunks of gossip and beaten them into a ridiculous chum of insane untruths to attract further more sharks and remoras and parasitic succubae who would smile to her face and boil her otherwise. And the poor Susan will have forever regretted taking the valium prescription from her physician, who’d offered them to her when her sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and she’d taken to insomnia and worry.

  Even more common than searching for telltale medications in the bathroom cabinetry, Ellen supposed, was the compulsion to sort through someone’s refrigerator. “What are you looking for?” someone might ask you after walking in on you snooping into his or her cold-box. And then you would say something like, “Oh, I’m sorry. I was just thirsty and looking for a soda or tea.”

  “Let me get that for you.”

  “Oh, no thanks, really,” you might then say, and so on
.

  Sean neglected to ask Ellen what she was looking for, as he knew they were currently on a Goonies-level treasure hunt in another man’s garbage. Neither he nor she seemed concerned that they had no justification or alibi as to why they were inside. If they were to be caught, Ellen thought, they would have no choice other than to run and smash through the plate-glass window and fall into the holly bushes outside. I wonder if the draperies would protect me from the glass as well as the holly thorns, she thought. In essence, they were burglars. Small innocent-looking children, but burglars nonetheless. Now they were in the fridge, Sean already having a sizeable lump of cereal boxes protruding from his abdomen like a pregnant Captain Crunch.

  Though the refrigerator remained plugged in and the compressor could be heard thrumming and humming like a dying something or another, the inside of the box was warm and dank and the bulb didn’t light. That the bulb hadn’t come on was, perhaps, something for which they should’ve been thankful. If there had been something to eliminate the odor, in lieu of the bulb, that would have been a spot better. It was the distinct and unmistakable smell of a cat, who had died no less than one week prior, and was now festering and decomposing somewhere under a stairwell somewhere never to be found. That was Ellen’s take on the whole thing, anyhow. How that smell had come to be emanating from Cirril’s icebox was somewhat a mystery to her, as she had no light other than the natural sunlight that had oozed its way past the layer of fry grease and into the tiny apartment.

  The light gave her enough vantage to see that there was, in fact, something hairy in there, but that is was not a cat. It appeared to be what was left of a pork chop, and the hair was a layer of mold that was cultivating on the bone, creating new life from old, as it sucked out the marrow. Life sometimes sells just like death, Ellen thought in that moment.

  She would think it again some years later when she was giving birth to twins, one of whom was born still, and both of whom were taken from her without so much as a second to hold them, and she was summarily placed back into her cell to recover and mourn behind glass, the iodine on her episiotomy stitches not yet dry, before her face was wet with remorse. Even a rape baby should get to be held, she thought and wept herself to sleep with the help of her morphine drip.