Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast.



Ghost has never been in my vocabulary. I am a scientist devoted to exploring the frontier of nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My mind follows natural laws of cause and effect. I do not dwell on speculative hypotheses, mysteries, or notions that trample logic or reason. However, I recently faced a bizarre episode that forced me to stretch my imagination beyond normal. 

It began one morning in December at work. When I arrived at my lab on campus and greeted my assistant, Dr. Dennis Chang, a sudden piercing pain assaulted my head. I checked the air in the laboratory but found no toxic fumes or any element that explained my pain. I invited Dennis that day for lunch, but the same debilitating pain struck my head as we stepped into the car. I had to cancel the date abruptly. No other person in the laboratory triggered such a reaction. I had hired him, a California Tech graduate from Taipei, Taiwan, about two months ago. 

I consulted my primary care doctor, who promptly dismissed Dennis as a factor for my migraine. She referred me to a neurologist at Massachusetts General. MRIs and other advanced brain scans followed. They observed something abnormal in the trigeminovascular system (neurons that innervate cerebral blood vessels), causing neurologic inflammation. But they had no clue why or how to treat or cure it. 

The symptoms worsened. I couldn’t come within three feet of Dennis without experiencing pain. He’s a model scientist, intelligent and dedicated. He doesn’t wear any offensive cologne. I tried to push away the notion that he had anything to do with my migraines. 

A troubling new malady surfaced. Whenever I smelled the cooking oil for Egg Foo Young or Sweet and Sour Soup, which I used to love, acute pain twisted in my temple like a corkscrew; I had to bypass the take-out joint on Main Street. Even the simple storefront sign induced nausea and vomiting. 

My troubles multiplied. Even at home, I couldn’t escape the sharp discomfort when I heard any news related to China, like reports of Beijing’s potential ambition over Taiwan. I could no longer bear to watch TV and avoided newspaper articles about China. Could I have developed a China-centered allergy, with severe reactions to the people, the food, and even the simple mention of the country’s name? Is that even possible? I questioned my sanity. How? And why? 

Amid my confusion and restless sleep, an image of my deceased father, suffering from migraines, massaging his scalp with his prosthetic hands appeared. I called my ninety-year-old mother in Tokyo to ask if she knew anything more about his illness. 

                                                                          ***

Hiroshi Sakakibara, my father, was an optimistic, physically strong, yet gentle youth from the countryside of Akita prefecture. Even though he was a newlywed, the Imperial Army conscripted him in early 1937. He served as a foot soldier in China. According to the veterans' organization, he played a critical role in the battles over Shanghai and Nanking in December 1937. 

During the peak of the Japanese offensive, my father returned home with both of his upper limbs amputated. The War had changed my father into a prematurely old and lethargic man. His spirit was sucked out of him, my mother used to tell me. Not only did he lose his arms, but his once-sparkling eyes turned dull, his shoulders slumped. As a toddler, I remember being scared of his artificial arms; they looked menacing. My father rarely smiled and talked little. His health deteriorated, and the poor man died of stomach cancer before he reached the age of fifty. 

My father kept the details of his war experiences close to his chest, perhaps because he wanted to forget them. His hardships in China must have contributed to his physical and mental deterioration. Even though it wasn’t logical, I wondered if his trauma-infused blood passed onto me and was causing my migraines. I decided to dig deeper into his past heroic acts. 

Casual research produced a wealth of information. The archives of local newspapers, magazines, and scholarly research at the Harvard East Asian Research Center referred to atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers on the continent. Some liberal media in Japan in recent years began referring to a hitherto taboo tragedy called “The Rape of Nanking,” the holocaust committed by Japanese soldiers in China in December 1937. Over 350,000 lives perished in a matter of days.

An alarming article stood out about the looting and torching of homes. It had graphic descriptions of random killings of civilians, grandparents, children, babies, and women raped by the thousands.

There emerged a contest among the foot soldiers to see how many heads of Chinese prisoners they could lop off using the legendary sharp samurai swords. Black and white photographs of severed heads rolling on the ground and the headless bodies, arms tied behind their backs, crumpled down nearby in the ditch, accompanied the article. The gruesome images were overwhelming. I had to avert my eyes from the pages. My stomach churned in the acidic fluid. 

A newspaper article of December 1937 listed the top winners. “Lieutenant Yoshida counted over 100 on one day!” The same reporter celebrated three officers the next day, each exceeding 120 victims. The executioners carried a hint of grins on their faces.

Those barbarians!  I thought. Am I from the same evil species, only a generation apart? Insane? Blood-thirsty? I was dismayed, exhausted. I had to take a break from my research for a few days before recouping energy to push on. 

Sakakibara, my father, was not listed among the “winners” of the head-chopping contest. Still, the disturbing speculation at the time was that some Chinese villagers organized underground resistance, captured stray enemies, punished them by chopping off their arms, and then released them as a warning. Could my father have been one of the captured?

Nineteen at the time, my father was thrown into hell by the crazed military leaders. He came out alive but, alas, seriously damaged. Based on what I saw of the man at home, he relived his crime repeatedly. My father ended up one of the victims of the War's insanity. He could not escape the nightmare for the rest of his life.  

I did not fight in a war. I never witnessed the cruelty of War. I discovered, however, the possibility that my father’s trauma, due to its magnitude, could have been passed on to me through epigenetic changes. The memories of tragedies within his DNA survived in me, his offspring. If true, his remorse is now mine. My episode began in December of 1997, the 60th anniversary of the massacre. My migraines are an echo of the crying voices of victims. 

                                                                        💀💀💀



Born in Tokyo and educated at ICU in Japan and Brown University in the United States, Akira Odani wrote for many years for the Japanese media. Today, his interest has turned to writing in English and subjects related to his experiences interacting with the two cultures. He is a member of the Florida Writers Association (FWA) and Taste Life Twice
Writers’ group. Some of his recent works have appeared in the pages of FWA Collection, Volume 8: Hide and Seek (2016) and Volume 10: Where Does Your Muse Live? (2019), and Editor, Randell Jones Personal Story Publishing Project, Twists and Turns, Sooner or Later, and Lost & Found (Fall 2022 – Spring 2023).

​

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast.



House: If you come near, I’ll tell you a story. 
 
Narrator: Her voice, faint and distant, enters the car through the open window. 
 
She barely holds herself together, like a hurricane ran through her, rattling her bones, stripping her of clothes, burying her shoes deep in the ground several plots away. What’s left of her body is brown and black; her skin, aged, wrinkled and splintered. Large holes open in her side; prairie grass and trees grow through her. The land offers no mercy, neither embracing nor cradling but instead spreading out flat and dry and hard, the horizon eternally distant, the sky ominously broad. On extremely rare rain days, clouds in perpetual variation and motion streak the sky counties and miles away in one direction and allow slivers of sunshine in the other. 
 
It's overcast here in the town of Ezana. A soft blanket of light saturates scattered spots - a couple sunflowers intensely orange, spiderwort shining like amethyst, a few blades of grass, peridot, an old, twisted Coke can, glowing strikingly red.  
 
I park, get out of the car. The air is parched like my white skin that won’t rub off. My body is sticky from the heat, my lungs stiff from the dust. I’m only a traveler passing through, but I’ve been here before. At the time of the O.J. Simpson trial, I drove across the tabletop flatness of Oklahoma and Kansas from one all-Black town to another, meeting many people as a researcher trying to piece together ignored history. No one I met was younger than 72 years old. They are ghosts now. Their small frame houses in –Clearview, Boley, Nicodemus, and Ezana -- were falling apart back then. But in my mind, they stayed together, settling into a mental landscape like colonizers, their presence reverberating in an echo chamber where hot breezes pass endlessly through fallen roofs, sparrows nest in broken eves, grey squirrels scamper through split, disintegrating timbers. These vanishing homes in all-Black towns became part of an artificial village, taking up residence and cohabitating through some odd neural phenomenon with Southern shanties, small houses of minimum wage workers, cargo containers for the houseless. 
 
Narrator/Historian/House: This is only a dream.
 
House: I woke from the earth to the touch of hands -- 20 hands, ten people, women, men, and children. From soil and prairie grass they molded me, their skin calloused, their grasps strong, sweaty, and confident. Pushing, patting, and forming to make my body, they gave me structure, two windows and a door. The first sounds I heard were their voices, birds, crickets, and the wind. I could have survived just as I was, a sod dwelling – there’s so little rain -- but when some money arrived, wood was purchased, and I was reconstructed with a frame. 
 
I come from the earth, I know that. And it’s to the earth I will return. In the end, I will be a memory, a shell collapsed, and nothing will have depended upon me to survive. 
 
Narrator: Her voice carries a weariness that seems to come from her bones. Renowned scholar of African American history, can you tell me why? Why are we so tired? Did it begin with the first Europeans, or start before that?  
I wait for a reply.
There’s no response. 
I walk toward her. A rusted truck is parked about half a mile off under a lone tree. A squirrel emerges from the dead engine and runs into a parched field. A screen door shuts in the distance. The clouds are rapidly clearing.
Where are you, scholar? Are you also weary? Tired of my questions?
 
Historian: History is complicated.  There are many points of view. 
Narrator: There you are.
Historian: For example, at the time of the Revolutionary War, the Delaware signed a treaty with the colonial Americans. It was beneficial to both signatories: the Delaware strengthened their position in their new lands; the Americans gained the Delaware as allies to defeat the British. But the fate of local Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kansa, Kiowa, Osage, Pawnee, and Wichita people was influenced as well, and without their participation.[i]  
 
Also, impacted was the fate of fugitive slaves. In the fourth article of the treaty, the Delaware agreed to arrest and extradite “criminal fugitives, servants, or slaves.”[ii]  
MUSIC:  Home on the Range, instrumental only 
 
House: I’m tired.
Narrator: I pass an anemic row of once flowering plants to meet her behind a broken window. We are unprotected by walls though her heart still holds a stone fireplace; and her belly, a wood burning stove kept as a memento. The stove smells of sweet squash. The shell of two small bedrooms complete her.  
 
Historian: Ezana was founded over twenty years after the Civil War ended and four million slaves were freed. For a sweet minute, African Americans from the South believed there was hope of independent prosperity in lands west of the Mississippi, in Kansas and Oklahoma. Those who were self-determined took advantage of the Homestead Act or purchased plots of land from promoters: they were “..actively searching for promised lands…(that could offer) the greatest potential for their dreams of freedom to be actualized.”[iii]
 
Narrator: I am dreaming, reconstructing a house. 
 
House: The land where I live was purchased for $5. My family, like the other first settlers, came from Kentucky. The new migrants arrived on horseback, in stagecoaches, on foot, dragging small amounts of luggage, wearing worn clothes -- over 300 of them, though many left after setting foot on the hard, inhospitable land. 
 
Those who stayed worked hard, sustained by an abundance of hope. I was always freshly painted, immaculately clean, furniture adorned with hand crocheted doilies and needlepoint pillows. I even had an oil painting of a cross made of red roses placed on my hearth.
 
Three generations of a family breathed life into my lungs, and in return, I held them in my embrace, near my heart, loving them as they loved me. The children tickled my floorboards with their toes, brightened my walls with their laughter. Even though at times I felt like I was only a corridor to the street where the children played games and met others on their way to school. My belly heated the winter rooms with smells of soups, corn bread, an occasional turkey, and simmering greens. Cards were played, jokes told, arguments had, growing up done. The neighbors gathered around the upright piano and sang hymns some evenings and Sundays. When the community got the first gramophone, it came to me, its rollicking sounds rocking my walls. 
 
I can hear their voices still. The slim, tall, educated town founder spoke softly, his voice quivering with pain, when recalling life in the South…“White devils killed my brother. God will punish them. There will be no mercy for their souls.” And then his voice quickened with decisiveness, “We will build here, make this home...a thriving community with doctors, lawyers, journalists, and educators. We’ll teach our children in all areas of knowledge…and again live independently. In this land of John Brown and abolitionists, we are finally free. “  
 
Narrator: I sit on a weathered plank; it was once her polished floor. A Black Walnut branch falls to the ground beside me. A small sparrow appears/disappears, carrying a string of white worsted in her beak. Perhaps she is wondering why I am close to her nest. 
 
House: Of those who lived with me, my favorite was Emerald. She was only four when her family arrived, and she stood out. Thin and pretty, her hair neatly plaited, self-contained to the point of being diminutive, she was silent and uncrying. Her brother was her opposite; he danced boisterously around his baby sister singing, playfully poking and teasing, making her laugh. But he couldn’t make her talk, no one could. She never talked to anyone…except her mama.
 
 “I love you to the moon and back a million times,” she’d say, her child’s voice sweet and high, as she crawled into her mama’s lap on the small bed covered with a quilt patched in squares of history. She pulled her small legs to her chest, and pressed her head against her mama’s heart. 
 
She grew tall and narrow bodied, her cheekbones high, her eyes bold black, her hair falling in long ringlets, but she hid this beauty inside her shoulders, like a broken princess, stooped by a weight others knew as well. Her curls masked what I thought was her best feature -- huge ears, like elephant ears, which may have grown large so she could hear what others could not. 
 
Many nights, she curled into herself on the old quilt, her mama sitting nearby, and explained the pain of being locked in her prison of silence. Her mother would reach over to caress her cheeks, the back of her ears, her bent neck. When Emerald lifted her face, her eyes seemed to look in and out at the same time, with sadness but also with light. The thing about Emerald was that she shone. Her smile, her laughter could turn the wind, wakening the leaves and branches and birds. She was magical…and strange, but never was she treated as an outsider. There were no outcasts in Ezana. 
MUSIC:  Home on the Range, instrumental only
 
House: By the time she was six, Emerald knew I listened along with her, and sitting cross-legged on her bed, she would lean her warm body into my wooden strength. Together, we heard everything.
 
One warm summer evening, the town founders and stakeholders, about fifteen of them, gathered.  A tall, slim man brought news: ‘The promoters are talking of tens of thousands who could pour into Kansas from the South, a second, larger wave,’ he said. ‘The question is should they come here? Should Ezana be one of the towns advertised as a destination?’  The townspeople discussed through the night, some leaned on the hearth, others next to the door, coffee made the rounds twice, the women often controlled the conversation. But stern Elder Jones, the town doctor and First Baptist Church minister, had the final word, “We must reach high. Let the other towns welcome these poor farmers.” 
 
Narrator: I can see the crowded living room in my dream, the activity and talk that waned and waxed, the heat that drifted out into the fields as night progressed. She rocks me gently by shifting her broken timbers, her broken bones. Like Emerald over a hundred years before, I lean into her, look through her eyes, out her windows. And then I see them, another group of people who will arrive in the future, ragged and tired, migrants and refugees.
MUSIC:
Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam 
and the deer and the antelope play
 
Historian: This quintessential American song was recorded and published by John Lomax, but it was first performed and most likely first written by a black saloon keeper and cowboy from San Antonio, Texas.[iv]
 
House: Emerald read every book she could get her hands on, from neighbors, from school, by mail order. But it wasn’t book smarts that guided her. I watched her stare at nothing and could tell she was catching sight of people in other places like a gem capturing the sun’s reflected light from the moon. When she was 15, she heard a girl crying for help. The girl, she told her mama, had long black hair and wounded eyes. She huddled alone in the icy field, tiny in the broad expanse of white under black sky. The girl was losing her home – a home where she and her family, also from the South, had been forced to move. Now it was being taken away, along with her relatives. Night after night, the girl called to Emerald. No one else heard the cries. Still, the men went looking for the girl, only to futilely search the empty fields. 
MUSIC
The red man was pressed from this part of the West,
He's likely no more to return
To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever
Their flickering camp-fires burn.


Historian: The Dawes Act passed in the US Congress in 1877, taking away reservation lands from indigenous people and subdividing them into individual plots. Unlike the Homestead Act which required five years of successfully working the land to gain full ownership, The Dawes Act required indigenous people to spend 25 years working the land and they had to behave like White Americans to gain ownership and citizenship rights. Native Americans lost 80 million acres through this allotment system, and in the American scrum to survive, African Americans, like white Americans, laid claim to their land. 
MUSIC
Where seldom is heard, a discouragin' word
And the skies are not cloudy all day. 
 
House: It wasn’t just the girl in the field whose story turned out to be true, Emerald also predicted what would happen with the railroad. The townspeople knew that if the railroad came to Ezana, they would prosper, and so they painstakingly raised a $15,000 bond as a lure. Emerald said no matter the amount of money, the railroad would never come to them, and she was right. 
 
To some of the townspeople, Emerald’s clairvoyance was spooky; to others, calming. But her silence seemed to confuse everyone: her neighbors speculated about its cause, predicted its endurance. Many said Emerald would never speak, especially after what happened to Ray. 
MUSIC  
How often at night, when the heavens are bright,
With the lights from the glitterin' stars,



House: Stocky and strong from the time he was born, Ray lived two houses down and, once his legs would carry him, he visited every day. When the kids were little, he’d leave grasshoppers in Emerald’s bed; as they grew older, he and Emerald’s brother would sit on the porch dreaming of marriage, becoming doctors, owning their own homes and then they’d run into the fields, hollering with the uncontrollable exuberance of youth. Ray’s favorite pastime was playing with Sponge, the tabby cat. He would twirl a strand of white worsted in front of her while sitting on my front porch. 
 
Because the prairies offered little beyond sustenance, the people of Ezana had to travel to white towns to buy some items, like the wood used to build me. Ray began asking to make the treacherous trek when he was 14.  It took three years until his parents and the community agreed to let him go. He knew the rules, of course he did, and followed them…at first. He walked to the white town during daylight, running much of the way in his excitement. He purchased fabric, nails, a muffin tin, and other items on his list, and headed back toward Ezana as the sun began its descent. He stopped halfway for the night at the dugout, pulling the door shut and latching it from the inside. According to what Emerald told her mama, the dugout felt too constricting. He became restless, wanted to go out into the infinite openness of flat land and curved sky, smell the grasses as the temperature dropped, listen to the heartbeat of crickets, watch for a slinking coyote, gaze at the stars. He wanted to feel his freedom.
 
Emerald said the white men found him because he glowed like moonlight. She wouldn’t say more than that, but the knowing was in her body. Mention of Ray caused her to convulse. 
 
The townspeople panicked when he didn’t return. The men went looking for him day after unresolved day. His body never came home. The only remnant of Ray was a strand of white worsted in a buckthorn bush by the dugout. There was no proof he was murdered. Still, everyone knows why someone like Ray who loves his home doesn’t return. 
 
Once the initial intense sorrow passed, the family focused on me, as if I were the answer to recovery. They repaired my tired porch and painted me white again. But after Ray’s disappearance, most of the younger people took their strong sense of community and good educations and left Ezana. Within the year, Emerald planned to go to Tulsa with her brother and a friend. She told her mama white hate was too virulent for my walls to withstand. She was also keen to the agitation underground below my foundation where shovels had bumped into the bone dust of the original peoples.
 
On a quiet spring day, Emerald took a sharp, grapefruit spoon from the kitchen drawer and found a spot of me turned soft by years of steam from boiling pots. She dug into my porous skin and carved out a round groove the size of a tiny acorn. She placed that piece of me in her small, stiff, grey suitcase, clamped the suitcase shut, grasped the oily handle in her slim, delicate hand, and pushed my front door open. The screen door, which ripped the next month and would never be repaired, bounced shut behind her. Through my windows, I watched her disappear, tiny puffs of dust rising where she stepped. I wonder about that piece of me that she took: was it for remembering or forgetting, to carry along or deliberately leave behind?
 
Our once vital town was soon overtaken by ghosts. My bones began to ache, my muscles tighten, the skin holding me together sagged, weather beaten and tired.  
 
Narrator: I interrupt her to tell her that we’d met before, many years past when she was still standing. I was visiting two of the remaining fourteen residents -- a 75-year-old woman, who smelled of rose water and sat properly stiff-backed on an embroidered piano bench, and a wiry, nervous man a bit older than the woman, who leaned toward me from a worn green fabric chair. The door was open that day; the hot, thin air so still it remained on the doorstep like the sleeping cat. 
 
House: Yes, I remember. There were already few of us then…the First Baptist Church’s white paint had scaled like fish skin, the hotel, which once bustled as a post office, stagecoach stop, and schoolhouse was hollow and boarded. Only a patch of the wooden walkway remained in front of the old ice cream parlor. The few white plastered homes had blistered; those made of wood worn to thread. 
 
Narrator: The couple I met also seemed translucent, or at least in my memory. Sitting in the unlit room, blinds drawn, doilies mustard-colored from age, plastic furniture coverings yellow, brittle, and cracked, they bickered about the town’s history as if conflicting memories could keep their dying town alive. The skinny woman handed me a tired file folder with tattered newspaper articles, a browned pamphlet printed many years before, a list of the first families. The papers had been touched by so many hands the fingerprints glowed iridescent. 
 
House: We thought you would tell our story, but never heard from you again. 
 
Narrator: Your story is not mine to tell.  
 
House: Remember it’s only a dream.
 
Narrator: In the dream, you disappear in my rearview mirror, like Emerald disappeared and the older woman and man sitting in half-lidded light, and the cracked, abandoned homes, everything melding with the horizon into dusk and the open plain. The sky has returned to its incessant, undisturbed blue, now paled by late day. I drive the ten miles to the highway that parallels the railroad tracks, that vein of life along which all-white communities flourished. I pass the shadows of hundreds of people moving north, looking for homes, the dead like the living.
 
House: Maybe one shouldn’t grasp for hope but rather allow for redemption[v] … at least when reconstructing a house.   
 
Narrator: The action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil; of regaining or gaining possession of something in exchange for something else. Why redemption? scholar of Black history. Shouldn’t redemption be sought only by the white Americans who built hate into the landscape, the houses, the bodies, the souls?  
 
Historian: It's never a simple story. 
Narrator: I wonder if we will all be refugees, like the people of Ezana, forced to live differently, outside what we are familiar with, but in the future carrying luggage that holds redemption.
 
House: I have no door. No walls, no definition. The lids of my eyes are gone. More migrants may arrive, more hands build together, and I may be constructed anew. But for now, I rest in the earth.
MUSIC:
 
Have I stood here amazed, and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds that of ours?
Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play…

End notes
[i] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/why-very-first-treaty-between-us-and-native-people-still-resonates-today-180969157/
[ii] Smithsonian Magazine A Brief Balance of Power—The 1778 Treaty with the Delaware Nation written by Dennis Zotigh
[iii] Alwyn Barr, Black Texans: A History of Negroes in Texas, 1528-1971 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973) …. Footnote 6 page 4.
[iv] https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2022/03/black-cowboys-at-home-on-the-range/
[v] Like the character of Furiosa in the film, Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015



                                                                      💀💀💀


Anne’s been writing, in one form or another, all her life, most recently focusing on fiction. She’s written news articles, book and art reviews, blogs, documentary films, podcasts, and for radio. She has two blogs, echolaliaredacted.com, which meanders through life's joys and sorrows; and countriesandcobblestones.com about traveling for a year with her daughter. Her writing can also be found on Canada's National Observer. Her first book,Thin Lines of Broken Time, represented by Anne Depue, is looking for a publisher. She’s currently working on a second book.

 
 
Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai podcast.


If walls could talk, maybe they could have alerted someone as Alex lay sprawled out convulsing on the carpet spewing saliva across his face as his eyes rolled back into the black depths of his poisoned skull. If walls could talk perhaps he would’ve been saved from flopping around percussively—his arms striking the carpet like heavy drum sticks to a pair of tom-toms—and gasping for air like a blankly staring, shored crappie. The mop-haired carpet could have been saved from soaking up the sudsy vomit overflowing from his gurgling mouth. 

A court-ordered stay at the sober-living house couldn’t save Alex. Nothing could truly save Alex because there were two opposing things from which he needed saving. Drugs and alcohol saved him from having to deal with the horror of life; drugs and alcohol, killed him.

Damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. 

A plastic baggie of leftover smack was smushed in the back pocket of Alex’s jeans under the weight of his bouncing ass. That shit couldn't save him, either. He kept flailing around until he finally stopped for good. 

The sober-living house didn’t seem to help many of its residents, the walls probably thought. The bushes lining the house hid within their bulbous canopies an ever-growing pile of booze bottles; the most popular choices: 40oz. Budweisers and pints of Wild Turkey. Those bottles lay there, under the bushes, clinking together like chimes on windy nights when the weather shook the foliage. The tossed bottles lay there until one of the residents, desperate for a little cash, would collect them—anxiety and mental anguish building as they gathered into a large trash bag each of those chiming bottles—to haul them off to be recycled, hoping not to be seen by the landlord, a cop, or their sponsor. 

If walls could talk, they could have communicated to the subsequent resident of Alex's former home, when they found hidden in the back of that deep closet, cold as the grave, a child’s water-color painting that said ‘To Dad, Happy Father’s Day.’ The walls could have, maybe, explained that the artwork wasn’t left there by an apathetic father moving out of the house. Alex wasn’t apathetic in a paternal sense; he cared—he was anguished at the reality of his shitty parenthood. No, he wasn’t apathetic. He was merely an uncontrollable junkie who had managed to get himself killed before making it out of the sober-living house. The walls could have explained that Alex didn’t want to leave his kids painting at the house, he had just fucked up. Again. This time for the last time.

If the walls in that small rectangular bedroom could talk they could have explained that it wasn’t a piss stain dripping down the side of the wall, it was a dark yellow candle that had overflowed—much like Alex’s vomiting mouth—after he had passed out and then perished. 

That candle had burned for hours, the smoky aroma of Birchwood Beach fusing with the growing scent of bodily fluids and death. The Kentucky spring breeze blowing in through the open window couldn’t mask it; that stench would eventually fill the rest of the house, after which Alex’s roommates would come and find him lying lifeless, staring upward at them with the vacant eyes and opened mouth of an expired toad. 

They would cry, not entirely unselfishly. They would know that Alex could have been them; they would know that they, too, could soon be dead. 

In the back of their minds they may have even felt angry at Alex. They might have been planning to get buzzed later that evening, loading up a pipe or sniffing a pill or throwing an emptied bottle of Turkey into the bush. They wouldn’t be able to do that now, not without further regret and self-loathing, at least. 

The hangover would now be worse.

If walls could talk the new resident (the owner of the sober-living house had decided during the pandemic that the place was unprofitable and sold it) the new resident would have known as he painted coat after coat of foamy satin white over the candle wax stains and ripped up the carpet that this was a room that had seen pain. The walls could have explained as he assembled the crib that decisions are important and loneliness can be deadly. 

If walls could talk they could have alerted that subsequent homeowner, called Oscar, of the reason for the new baby’s continued crying. Those walls could have told Oscar, a first-time parent, that the baby wasn’t being unreasonably noisy. The baby wasn’t simply reacting to a new experience. The window—that one in the bedroom above the singing bushes—was blowing in with its breeze the specter of a lost father. A spirit with a clear job to do though no way of doing it. 

The baby wailed and shook the brittle old crib, one likely too old to again reuse, but one Oscar had gotten recycled because it was all he could afford. Oscar would enter Alex’s former bedroom and comfort his newborn, his head throbbing as he remembered the bottle he had thrown in the bush earlier that afternoon. He had heard a soft clink as the bottle landed, but he didn’t look at why. He hadn’t noticed the entirety of the collection.

If walls could talk they could have told Oscar. Or the baby, if it could talk, could have explained that it wasn’t the wind; it wasn’t the child being unreasonable—it was Alex darting around the room, bouncing off the newly painted walls and screaming through the restlessness of an unquiet grave. 

If walls could talk, they could have told Oscar that Alex was aware of the painting in the closet; he knew it was still there. He simply couldn’t tell Oscar about it. He couldn’t explain his situation. The baby noticed him, but he couldn’t explain to the baby, and the baby couldn’t yet talk anyway.

Alex had no way of lifting the painting. He had no method of delivering it to his son. His son, who gazed out his own window every evening, inhaling the crisp breeze, fragrant of both earth and fuel—both nature and construction—his son wondering where his dead father might now be, if anywhere. 

If walls could talk they could have told Oscar what to do with that painting when he finally found it deep in that cold closet. Walls can’t talk, though, so Oscar, shaking his head at the neglect of some parents, threw the painting in the trash. 

The painting featured a family holding hands, a house, and a sun. Several bushes surrounded the house.
​

                                                                         💀💀💀


Robert Pettus is an English as a Second Language teacher at the University of Cincinnati. Previously, he taught for four years in a combination of rural Thailand and Moscow, Russia. His short stories have been published in numerous webzines, magazines, podcasts, and literary journals, including previously on Kaidankai (The Shrine and as part of the Unpleasantville series). His first novel, titled Abry, was published this spring by Offbeat Reads and is scheduled for republication this March with Flick-It books. He lives in Kentucky with his wife, Mary, his daughter, Rowan, and his pet rabbit, Achilles. 

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai podcast.


"It's almost over," said Anna to no one in particular, because there was no one to talk to. There hadn't been anyone to talk to for weeks now.

Not since the monsters.

Everyone hears about the midnight sun and forget the polar night. Not that "night" meant what people thought it did. Yes, the sun didn't breach the horizon, but it wasn't steeped in inky darkness twenty-four hours a day, either. Much of what would have been day became a hazy-blue twilight that faded to black. It just didn't last long, and let's be honest, it didn't make any difference. 

The monsters had the run of things so long as the sun couldn't scorch them. But it was almost over. Anna wasn't sure, but weeks had past, and soon the night would end. She just didn't know exactly when. It wasn't that she couldn't keep time or tell dates, she had been in the third grade before her world had effectively ended. She'd just never had to before. Mom would remind her, or Ms. Hanson at school. But the her phone had died more than a week ago, and she wasn't even sure what day it was.

Anna looked at the odd blue sky that held no sun like peering up through an ice cube. She glanced at her watch - it was actually her mother's old watch. She remembered making fun of her for wearing it - Why don't you just use your phone? she had said. The memory made her want to cry. The tiny arms pointed out that it was just after noon and soon what light there was in the sky would drip into darkness. 

Anna didn't look like a nine-year-old. She looked older than that, despite her size and pink sneakers and shirt with the cute hearts and kittens. It was her eyes. They looked tired and slightly feral. Her pale brown hair was greasy and matted, and her hands had a rime of grime on the palms of her hands and pads of her fingers, but she didn't hesitate as she scooped the tuna fish straight from the can into her mouth.

Weak flames flickered in the hearth. She knew she had enough wood because the monster kept leaving her wood. The generator had lasted a week after they cut the power. Her mother had finally been forced to search for food and propane in an effort to keep her warm. Temperatures outside were 50 below.

She'd watched her go, promising to lock the door. Promising to stay inside. She went out once a day to empty the bucket and bring in the supplies the monster left. Today, she was late doing it, because going outside meant seeing the faces. But it was time.

She licked the oily fish from her fingers, and upended the juice from the can into her open mouth. Being mindful of the ragged edges, she licked some errant bits that clung to the bottom.

"Waste nothing," she whispered. Then pulled on the snowpants and boots and shoved her arms into the thick parka. And her hands into the thermal mittens. The hat covered her ears and was lined with fur.

She managed to pick up the bucket in one hand and looking out into the yard made sure it was clear - or seemed clear - and stepped out. Even with all the layers, the cold hit her hard, like hammers that pulled at her inside, sucked her breath out of her lungs and burned her skin where it could touch.

The faces stared at her as she went, and she did her best not to look. She used to love some of those faces. Jenny from school. Mrs. Briggs and John Jenkins from the store. They were mostly eaten, but their faces were still there. Why couldn't they eat the faces? The skulls were nothing. Just bone. But faces could be loved.

She quickly upended the bucket and tossed it in behind her, not minding the spatter. Because what really mattered was the supplies. She picked up the gallon of water, that was frozen and pushed it through the open door. Then the box - she could see inside that there was a variety of food. She saw a green bag that meant vegetables, and felt tears spring to her eyes - she remembered vividly a time when she hated vegetables.

A noise shifted all the hairs on her body. It was a low hiss, guttural and animalistic and she saw the thing moving towards her on all fours, as she scrambled backwards. The ice, her hands being full, something made her fall as she crossed the threshold and banged her knee. Despite the thick pants, pain exploded, and Anna gasped and tried to regain her feet. But she felt the claws tearing at her down parka.

The thing used to be human. Its limbs were frozen. It was still able to move, and it was better able to tear through things like clothing and flesh. Its eyes were white like the snow - frozen and frosted over - but they could see. They could see enough. The teeth were the worst - nothing like human teeth, thin like needles or those fish from deep under the dark waters. Anna was sure they were made of ice, but it didn't matter, because the blood didn't melt them.

"Mama! Mama!!" she screamed, not even hearing her words.

Another form exploded into the house. Hands, pale and blackened with frost, gripped the thing that was savaging Anna around the neck. It raised the thing up and slammed it into the floor. Once. Twice. Three times. It had stopped moving by the second impact.

The second creature picked up the first and dragged it out of the house without looking at the sobbing girl on the floor. 

Anna, still whimpering, managed to heave the door shut. Pulling a mitten off in her teeth, she threw the bolt. She could see the monster tearing apart the body of the one that had attacked her. Still shivering and sobbing, she made herself watch the thing - it had shanks of long, brown hair - parts had been ripped out. It's fingers, blackened by the cold were scraped to raw bone talons.

In the right light it still looked like her mother, even as it slowly took bites of the other creature. The monster's pale eyes were fixed on the door, and Anna knew it could see her. She knew it could get in if it wanted to. Knew it was bringing her food. The food!

The box had spilled its contents all over the floor. Boxes of pasta, some cereal and a box of toaster pastries. And a note, the monster always left a note.

Sun rises tomorrow. Run, baby. Run.

                                                                     💀💀💀
​

Katy England has been writing for longer than she likes to admit. A journalist and communications expert by day, modder and fiction writer by night. She spends much of her time in the great expanse of the Maine woods with her husband, triplets, and select fish. Her greatest accomplishments, to date, is that her children like her stories and that the crows come to her yard when she calls them.