by: m. gantee

I’ve been here before.  The music plays – a drone in the key of whatever pitch the fan’s rotating at.  Some harmonic of 60 cycles per second.  Music and fan, music and fan.  Whir and drone.

The man stands in the yard.  Mechanic’s garb.  He’s holding a screw driver.  A long one.  He stands under the only outdoor light.  The light is a 200 watt mercury vapor bulb.  Casts everything in an indigo hue.  The man’s coveralls are stained in something that looks black in that indigo hue.  The light flickers.  Then off.  When the bad wire cools and settles back into place, the light comes on again.  Then the man is gone. 

I am still here.  The music plays on in the background in a key that matches the pitch of the fan humming upstairs. 

Flies cover the windows here.  They are drunk with age.  They buzz across the windowpane, guided only by that light out in the yard.  Their biology sputters and rants under their hairy carapaces: If only, if only, if only…  They bump and buzz off of the glass, struggling for a way to reach that light.  A dozen or so at any one time have landed upon their backs upon the sill and are scuttering their feet against the air, forgetful of how their once-youthful bodies flew with purpose.  They are old.  They are dying.  That is what flies do in October.  They have come here for death.

The music – a cultural anthem of 1934 or ’35 – drones and croons and, at the requisite groove of the vinyl, the needle bumps and scratches its way back to the beginning.  A peculiarity of the machine.  Or of the record.  Or of the interraction between the two.  And the singer (surely long-dead) begins his reminiscence of love and moonlight.  His voice has come here for rememberance.  The song plays on in a pitch that matches the drone of the fan blowing upstairs.  Record player and fan.  The only two machines still working in this house.  They keep me company.

I came indoors at the preappointed hour.  The preappointed hour changes every night but, also, it doesn’t ever change.  It is the hour of sundown.  I work in the field and woodline every day until the sun reaches the horizon and then, sweat cooling upon my brow, I store my tools inside the shed and quickly move to the house.  And she was there again – the woman on the roof.  My eyes are not so good these days and I never look her full in the face, but as I scurry to the front porch, to the stairs that will take me to the door, to the door that will take me inside, to the inside that means safety, I see her shape – dark and slender, black hair the length of her body – upon the peak of the roof.  Standing against darkening sky.  Standing.  She can hide if she wants.  At times, she moves through the woods behind me and at other times, she appears in front of me.  And yet, she stands there on the roof, against the sky, because she wants me to know that this place of safety is not a place of safety.  I don’t look at her.  I see her shape and that is enough.  And I am inside.

And I sit, listening to the flies buzz against the glass, listen to them complain about their aged bodies and whatever aches they have in their hairy knees (so many more knees to keep track of than I do).  The fan and the vinyl stutter in their synchronous congress.  There is a hitch in the flow of 60-hertz-cycles.  And then they move again together.  The moon hangs low through the front windows.  In the back yard, the mercury vapor lamp glows as if in parody to lunar tranquility. I cannot sleep.  I must scribble.  The page before me grows cramped with spidered letters and so I draw another blank sheet from the stack.  There are so many more here.  So many more besides me.  Not blank sheets – so many more others.  There is something dragging a game leg along the wood plank floors upstairs.  I can hear that.  I know he is up there.  There is something too that is rotting in the basement – its smell comes up through the planks beneath my own feet.  Oh, hallowed spirit, protect me.  My eyes are so, so tired.  And the night is so very long.  And I must awake.  I must or these stories will envelope me.  The sound of my scratching across this paper mocks the silence of the night.  That young crooner, now dead, warbles on forever in the dark grooves of the vinyl, haunting forever the material of this world because the void of what lays beyond is too daunting.  Scratch, scratch, scratch, my pencil across paper mocks the silence, parodies the buzz of the flies.  Buzz and scratch.  Crooner and the fan that hums upstairs.  Man and woman.  Moon and bulb.  Flesh and blood.  Field and forest.  I cannot sleep.  This sentence must carry me through