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Fear by Cheryl
Snell My
little brother was afraid of the house on the corner, the one with the round attic window
that followed him like an eye. Neighborhood kids stopped to heckle the house every day
on their way to school. -They say it’s haunted, my brother told me.
-Why? -Because nobody seems to live there. We ring the doorbell, and nothing happens.
And sometimes lights go on in the empty rooms. We can see them turning off and on through
the windows. -Aren’t the kids scared?
Why don’t they run away? -Nobody wants
to be a chicken, he said. They’d rather be bullies. One
day he came home shaking. -What is it?
-The guys were throwing soda cans and dirt at the house, trying to smoke out who or what’s
in there with firecrackers. Burns and dents and stains all over the place.
-Better remind them that kids get arrested for stuff like that these days. A
few days later he came in so upset he could hardly get his words out. -The ivy outside
the house climbed up overnight, all the way to the attic. Now it’s covering nearly
half the front of the house. There
had to be a logical explanation for the speedy growth. No living mass could swallow a whole
house so fast.
Then I thought of how quickly a cut brings its edges together.
Not the same, not the same, I whispered. My
brother had to pass the house to get to school, so I looked for other routes
for him to take. There weren’t any. I expected the other kids would lose their false
bravado, admit they were afraid, and stop over-compensating. Stay away. Any sane person
would, right?
-I’ll walk with you to school tomorrow, I said that night.
I was the elder, and before our parents left us, they had taught me to be responsible enough
to protect my baby brother.
My brother and
I walked to the school together the next morning; my idea was to ignore the haunted house,
not give it a glance. But my little brother suddenly stood stock still in front of it and,
tugging my hand, gestured at the house. I looked and saw what he saw: a face in the round
attic window, someone waving. I let go of his hand and started to run in the other direction,
stranding him on the sidewalk with his fear.
Of course I turned back, but by then I knew I too was capable of abandonment. Cheryl Snell’s books
include several poetry collections and the novels of her Bombay Trilogy. Her
latest series is called Intricate Things in their Fringed Peripheries. Most
recently her writing has appeared in Gone Lawn, Sleet Magazine, Necessary
Fiction, Pure Slush, and other journals. A classical pianist, she lives in Maryland
with her husband, a mathematical engineer.
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