Living near a creek, we occasionally do get visitors. These fine ducks decided to take a break in our front yard on their way back home. They were enjoying the warm weather.
A few years ago, I was walking around the neighborhood when I realized that someone was watching me.
After saying goodbye to my new friend, I kept walking. A few blocks later, I realized that I was being followed.
As soon as I turned around and looked at him, he ran away.
It’s been years but I still think about the two of them whenever I go for a walk around the neighborhood, the proud cat and the curious dog. I’m glad that they both had a home and happy lives. I’m glad the cat enjoyed staring me down and I hope the dog enjoyed following behind me. Human don’t deserve animals but I’m glad they put up with us.
I stood out on the front porch and watched as the sky went from being blue to being dark and gray in a matter of minutes. That was the year that fall came early and almost all the leaves were gone by the end of October. But just as the leaves fell early, so did the storms arrive ahead of schedule. It rained hard during the afternoon and probably panicked everyone looking forward to spending the night collecting candy.
The rain stopped before evening came and that night, costumed searchers and their parents walked up and down the sidewalks, running up to houses and shouting, “Trick or Treat!” I was alone that Halloween so I dressed up like a cat and handed out candy. Everyone was extra grateful because they knew that if the storm had started just an hour later, there would have been no Halloween that year.
I don’t believe in ghosts but I may have seen one when I was 18.
It was the summer after I graduated high school and I was in Italy, discovering what the world outside of both high school and America looked like. That night, my sisters and I were staying at a hotel in Rome. I had a room to myself. The Vatican was nearby. At two o’clock in the morning, I could still hear the sound of motor scooters roaring past on the streets below my window. I naturally wanted to go outside and see what was happening but I had promised my sisters that I would not leave the hotel and wander around Rome late at night. As they pointed out, I didn’t speak Italian so, if I got lost or into any sort of trouble, there would be no way for me to ask for help. As well, we were visiting the Vatican tomorrow morning. I didn’t have to sleep, they knew better than to ask me to do that. But I did need to stay in the hotel.
So, I took a shower, I put on my usual late night outfit of a t-shirt and underwear, and I lay in bed and I listened to the scooters outside. When I got bored with the scooters, I turned on the TV and I watched an episode of an American soap opera that had been dubbed into Italian. I could follow the plot just fine and I found myself wondering if maybe my sisters had been exaggerating the language difference.
Finally, I decided that, even if I couldn’t go outside, there was no reason why I couldn’t step outside of my room and walk up and down the hotel hallway. It would give me a chance to stretch my legs and work off my restlessness. Plus, it was two in the morning. Every other guest at the hotel was probably asleep. I’d have the hallway to myself.
I stood up and walked over to the door of my hotel room. As I approached, I felt a chill in the air and I shivered a bit. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, figuring it was due to me being underdressed and that maybe there was just a random cold spot in the room. I put my hand on the door knob, turned it, and slowly opened my door.
There was a woman standing directly across the hall from my room. She appeared to be in her forties, short and slightly heavy-set with long, jet black hair. She was wearing a shapeless brown dress and her dark eyes narrowed at the sight of me. What I immediately noticed about her was that her skin was an ashen gray.
I stared at her for a few seconds, not knowing what to say but fully aware that she was glaring at me.
Slowly, she asked, in perfect English that carried not a trace of an accent, “What are you doing here?”
I still didn’t know what to say.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!?” she snapped.
I tried to say something but the words wouldn’t come.
“I OWN THIS HOTEL!” she yelled, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE!?”
She started to move towards my room. I slammed the door shut and locked it.
I stood there for what seemed to be an eternity, listening for her. I was expecting her to start pounding on the door and screaming at me to come out but she didn’t. Instead, after I shut the door, I didn’t hear anything in the hallway. I didn’t hear her breathing. I didn’t hear her walking away. I didn’t hear anything.
Finally, after what seemed like an hour but was probably just a few minutes, I open the door a crack and peeked outside. The hallway was empty. The woman, whoever she had been, was gone. Still, I wasn’t going to take a risk. I closed the door again, got back in bed, and I didn’t get out of bed until the next morning.
When I asked my sisters if they had seen the woman, they had no idea who I was talking about. They hadn’t any seen any woman fitting the description at the hotel. They told me that I should have called them or the front desk for help and they were probably right but, at that moment, I had been too frightened to do anything. I had seen enough horror movies to know that calling for help was usually the least effective thing you could do when confronted by a maniac. It was my sister Erin who told me that the woman was probably a ghost, maybe the former owner of hotel demanding to know why I was in her home at two in the morning. Maybe she was. I don’t believe in ghosts but if I ever did see one, it was probably her.
Some days, you are lucky enough to wake up and discover that your entire neighborhood has changed over night. Though it looks like snow, it’s actually just sleet and ice. The roads are slippery enough to justify staying home today. I still went outside and snapped a few pictures. Outside, it was very cold, very still, and very quiet.
His name was Zac and, for a few weeks during my freshman year of college, I thought that I might be very deeply in love with him. He was a tall, muscular 23 year-old with thick blonde hair that fell clumsily down to his shoulders. His face wasn’t really handsome. The sight of his pink lips surrounded by his messy blonde beard always left me wanting to buy him a razor. I often told myself that, whenever we had grown close enough, I would talk him into shaving his beard and revealing his true face, scars and all. I assumed he had scars though, in retrospect, I guess the beard could have just been there to try to disguise the fact that he actually had the face of a 12 year-old.
Zac wasn’t handsome but that was his appeal. I was 19. I was away from home for the first time and I was desperately trying to not to let anyone see just how scary that was for me. I’d already given the socially acceptable, alcoholic frat boys a try. I’d had my flirtations with the painfully sensitive types who wore their hearts on their sleeves and cried whenever I said I didn’t see myself getting married before I was legally old enough to drink. I’d had the fantasy men. Now, I was ready for a real man and I was convinced that reality was hiding underneath Zac’s grotesque mask of a beard.
I sat directly behind him in Intro. To Creative Writing and the first day of class, I sat there and I stared at the blonde hair cascading down over his shoulders. Over the winter break, I’d had a very brief fling with an aspiring screenwriter who, even at the age of 20, already had a bald spot. It had reminded me of the importance of a thick head of hair and, if nothing else, Zac had that.
The first day of class, each student took a turn going up to the front of the room, sitting on top of the teacher’s desk, and telling the class who we were and what we hoped to express with our writing. When Zac was had his turn, he told us that Jack Kerouac was a major influence on his life and that “No one is going to tell me how to write!” His nostrils flared as he spoke. When my name was called, I briefly stopped fantasizing about running my hands through the thick head of hair in front of me and I went up to the front of the room. I hopped up on the desk and I immediately mentioned that my ancestors came from Ireland, Italy, and Spain. No one appeared to be impressed by that unique combination. I said that I was a city girl with a lot of country inside of me. I paused and waited for a reaction that did not come. In my usual rambling manner, I continued to go on about myself. I was already feeling awkward and it didn’t help that it was obvious that, despite my best efforts to be cute in a flighty way, none of my fellow classmates were really listening to a word I had to say. Some were talking amongst themselves, some were looking over the class syllabus, and a few were just staring blankly at the wall behind me.
No one was paying attention to me. No one was looking at me as I spoke.
Except for Zac. As I rambled through my introduction, Zac never stopped looking at me and soon, I felt as if I was talking to him and him only. Of course, looking back, I also remember that I was wearing a short black skirt on that day and Zac wasn’t quite looking me in the eye. In retrospect, it’s probably a lot more realistic to assume that Zac was more fascinated by the color of my panties than anything I had to say about myself. If I remember correctly, they were hot pink. I always made it a point to wear colorful underwear whenever I was otherwise dressed in all black. It was my way of embracing the duality of nature.
But, on that day and at that moment, I wasn’t thinking about the duality of anything. All that mattered was that he paid attention to me and after that one class period, I decided I was in love with him.
As the semester continued, I would look forward to every Tuesday and Thursday because I knew I’d get to sit behind Zac and stare at his lion’s mane of blonde hair. Some days, he was very talkative in class as he would tell us why another student’s story was or wasn’t honest. Other days, he would sit in a sullen silence and I would wonder what inner darkness he was wrestling with. As the days passed, I wondered when he would finally read us something he had written. What mysteries would be revealed when he finally opened his soul.
One day, he came into class, turned around in his chair to face me, and held up a thick bundle of papers.
“I wrote this last night,” he said.
“Are you going to read it?” I asked, trying to hide my near-giddy excitement.
“No,” he replied before suddenly ripping the pages in half, “a true artist has to be willing to destroy what he creates.”
I sat there, shocked. I wondered if I would have the courage to be a true artist. I wondered if Zac would ever trust me enough to let me know what he had just destroyed. Yes, I decided, he would trust me. If I had to, I would spend the rest of the semester earning that trust.
Unfortunately, at our next class, Zac did read us the story he had previously “destroyed.” It was about an angry, rebellious, bearded 23 year-old who, one night, spotted a dead dog in the middle of the road and it caused him to reconsider everything that he felt he knew about his girlfriend, his friends, and the father who never understood why his son didn’t want to take over the family hardware store. It was a long, angry narrative about crushed idealism, spiritual ennui, and lots of profanity. The main character had a habit of responding to every comment with an angry one-liner and no one could ever refute his arguments, which I guess is the advantage of writing about yourself. It included a lengthy sex scene between Zac’s doppelganger and a high school cheerleader who was secretly fed up with being popular and I had to swallow a giggle when Zach hit the line, “His hands found her breasts,” as if they had previously gone missing. In short, it was really, really bad.
That was pretty much the end of things for me and Zac. The beard, the intensity, the self-righteous anger; it was all kind of annoying without any talent to go with it. Still, it was a good few weeks.
Zac read a few more stories over the course of that semester, all of which were about the same angry and profane 23 year-old who didn’t get along with his Dad and who spent his time “telling it like it is.” Usually, I zoned out whenever he was reading. Occasionally, he would still talk to me about his artistic insights and I would nod and smile without actually hearing what he was saying. He mentioned Keroauc a lot but I couldn’t help but get the feeling that Zac would have been one of the fans that Keroauc complained about in Big Sur, always dropping by unannounced and demanding to know if Kerouac had written anything else about Dean and Sal. About halfway through the semester, I think Zac finally figured out that I was bored with him because his stare became a bit less intense. I caught him rolling his eyes once as I read a story about an angry 19 year-old who always knew the perfect thing to say and who spent a lot of time considering the duality of nature. After the end of the semester, he disappeared from campus. Whether he graduated or dropped out or transferred somewhere else, no one knew. Actually, to be honest, no one cared.
I do sometimes wonder what happened to Zac. Is he still writing or did he eventually take over the family hardware store? And did he ever shave that ridiculous beard?
Through the Shattered Lens 