Halloween 2000

Fall fell in October when I became less brave next to ghosts than I had been as a child. On the 31st Mom's cancer was back to kill her. For me, it didn't feel like anything--a deep empty sea of knowing.

That night, after the trick-or-treaters, I lay in bed breathing and listening. Outside, black, naked branches shiver in the wet wind and, beyond that, in the inky night, winter creeps forward like a slow, giant boulder, like the pressing heavy dream of Mom's thickening cancer. Like November itself--nothing but cold and darkness beyond it.

Head vacant as the surface of the moon, I walk in the night, against traffic, south on Highway 33, head down and listening, toes kicking air.

A raccoon twists itself in the dirt at the side of the road, half dead, fresh-hit by the whizzing traffic, mud-blood damp in the fur. Crazed with pain and the short prayer of death, yellow eyes beg--spitting black gums and pointed small teeth, it hisses like piss on a campfire. With a boot on its throat, I help it strangle until it stares back at me, silent, still angry but quiet after all.

Alone, on my couch, thinking that nothing but the sight of you can move me. But you're dying and I'm not, and that's that.

"I'm good at staring," I say to the man in the t.v. "I'm good at keeping my eyes burned open." But the man says something else, not even talking to me.

Outside, the dark and the wind and the blowing rain rattle the house. Makes me small, dares me to listen. And I do, to the branches, scratching the windows and the tin of the gutters, the noise like a memory of everything lost--yet to lose. A gray basement fear grows in my stomach and spreads outward, warm like alcohol, under my skin. The black sea of knowing flooding in.

She'll be dead soon and no prayer can stop it. And no sin.
If nothing is sacred, everything isn't.
My right boot has blood on it from the raccoon, dark like chocolate. But I don't taste it. I just think about it. But I don't do it. I never do it, just keep thinking about it.

-parnell