…not scared as in ‘a bit frightened’ or ‘something went bump in the night,’ but full-blown, run for the hills, screaming terrified! I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life, even when I was a little kid and my dad pulled his belt off, doubled it up, and said, “C’mere boy,” in that voice he used on me thirty-plus years ago, before his heart kicked a flip and he went on to wherever he went—burning in hell I hope, so I’ll never see him again (cause I’ll be somewhere else).

It started with an insignificant thing: milk.

On Thursday I went to the fridge to get some milk. I like a few drops with my raisin bran, you know? Well, I’d just bought the milk Wednesday, but when I opened it, it was curdled—not just sour, you understand, but reeking curdled, with chunks floating in it. I almost puked all over the kitchen.

That wasn’t all the weirdness, though. When I looked at the expiration date I got a little freaked, cause the day was June 23rd, but the year was 1997. No big deal you think. Somehow it got shoved to the back of the freezer at the store and just hung around for more than a decade.

Not damned likely, but I guess it could happen.

If it had ended there, I might have believed it. I might have been able to go on like the world wasn’t a blender filled with chaos and despair.

It didn’t of course.

That evening I went to watch TV, but I could only get four channels instead of the seventy-some the cable company gouges me for. All of these were in black and white.

It wasn’t TV-Land either.

The cable connection was good, and if I unplugged it I couldn’t even get those four stations, but the cable company told me nobody else in my neighborhood had reported any problems. One of the stations was airing a program called Your Show of Shows. I didn’t recognize any of the others, but I bet they went off the air years ago too.

A fluke, right?

I didn’t know what was happening, but I felt sick.

Now, for the next part, you need to know about Janey. Janey was my wife, and we haven’t spoken in fifteen years.

When we were last speaking it wasn’t very nice, so I remember it pretty well. We got divorced and she sent me the papers in the mail, but they never arrived so she had to deliver copies in person. There was a big scene, of course, and I never meant to hit her the way I did, especially not so she’d bleed, but anyway, the first ones she sent never came so she’d brought me duplicates. On Friday, those papers showed up in the mail, just like it was happening right then and not ancient history at all.

What’s weirder, I looked at the envelope and the stamp. The stamp was only a thirteen cent one and the postmark was from fifteen years ago, but the paper and envelope were like brand new. There wasn’t the piss-yellow tinge paper gets when it’s old, and it didn’t even look like it was mangled in transit as mail often gets. The glue on the envelope smelled like it had just been licked.

I just kept asking myself why the post office would even deliver it without sufficient postage. Then the first long chill crept up my spine, slow and deep, taking its time and lingering at the end just for kicks.

Still, it’s all circumstantial, and you might guess that, like the milk, the letter got stuck someplace and just hung around. It had picked someplace nice and dark where it wouldn’t turn yellow and get creased or stepped on. I told myself that all Friday afternoon and most of Friday evening, but when it finally got late and I was tired, just lying in the dark trying to go to sleep, I couldn’t get the fresh smell of the glue out of my nostrils. I thought about horses being led into the killing house, their hooves being ground up, the way mucilage used to smell, and the way it smelled on the letter.

I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep that night, but can’t say I was really scared…just troubled...just freaked.

Now, I live in my parents’ house.

Janey and I had moved in there when we got married and lived with Mom until she passed on, about ten years after Dad bit the dust. After Mom went, I quit drinking and repainted the place blue (with purple trim—colorful, like those Victorians, you know); Janey hated that old green color, and she dug up all the petunia beds and planted perennials, tulips, carnations, delphinium and the like. Mom used to have to put down petunias every year, and Janey couldn’t be bothered with doing likewise. We got new furniture and carpet for the hardwood floors. We painted the inside too, getting rid of the wallpaper altogether. Janey knew how she liked things, and I tried to make her happy; but it seemed like, somehow, nothing I did was ever quite enough, even though I was good to her.

I was!

“The car’s five years old,” she would say, “I’m embarrassed to be seen in the thing. It’s a beater!” or, “You always have money to go out at night,” or, “Why can’t I ever get a new dress?” She would go on about clothes morning and night (taking noontime off to complain about other things), “You never get me any clothes!” Then she would start in on why I didn’t have a better job. “It’s cause you’re a lazy bastard,” she would say.

But I’m getting off the subject. It’s easy to do that when I think about Janey, cause sometimes I can still hear her bitching in her shrill, harpy’s wail.

On Saturday, petunias came up in the flower beds. They hadn’t yet bloomed of course, but they were petunias alright. I couldn’t forget what they looked like after growing up in that house and watching them come up every year after the seeds were planted, as reliable as welts on your back after a beating.

At this point I was done. I’d had enough of trying to convince myself all this stuff just hung around.

I knew better. I was getting scared—not full-blown, run for the hills and piss in your pants petrified like I am now, but nervous…anxious…sweat on the top of your lip, and eyes glancing around like a lizard scared. It was the way you might get on a dark street at night when a stranger is walking behind you and there’s nobody else there—pretty sure something’s wrong, but not certain, you know?

I’m sure you know.

I was lonely then, which I almost never am because I like myself and like keeping my own company. But I felt so alone that night I went out into the back yard in the blackest part of the night to look at the stars and ask them why this was happening to me. It was dark as a lawyer’s inky soul and cloudless, so the stars should have been as bright as a saint’s halo, but I couldn’t see them. Only when I saw dark fingers hanging down scrabbling at the night did I realize the old willow had come back; where the rotten stump used to be, the chopped-down tree stood firm and tall blocking out the sky.

I almost screamed, but didn’t. I went back inside…shaking.

Yesterday, Sunday, when I went out to get the paper, I picked it up and turned to go back into the house. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m going to tell you it was a paper from ten or twenty years ago, and had hung around long enough to turn up on my doorstep and scare me shitless.

No such thing.

When I turned around to go back into the house, the whole left side of the porch was green, not blue the way Janey had me paint it. It was the nauseous, puke-green Mom and Dad kept it all those years while she put up with him and his drinking: sick green, like a moldy soul waiting for hell. She kept it the same color even after he was feeding worms in a box. It was oily green right up until the day I climbed atop a board propped on two sawhorses and painted it with Montgomery Ward ‘Robin’s Egg Blue’ acrylic. Not the sides of the house, or the back, only the porch and the front of the house under the porch were the old color, and only on the left side.

Just the left side! Now I was really scared.

And don’t try and tell me it was a prank some kids, or maybe Janey’s new husband, used to get back at me by painting half of the porch green, cause I know that’s bunk. The line between green and blue was too straight—weirdly perfect. I went right up to it and looked real close, even picked at it with my finger where it ran into the blue the rest of the house was painted, the blue over the top of it.

Over it, you get it? Like the blue was painted over the top of it, only the job hadn’t been finished yet.

The green paint was old and peeling real bad. Chips came off and stayed under my fingernail when I scraped at it. The thing was, I’d scraped it all real good before I painted the blue, and I’d had to repaint since. I’d scraped it, you understand! It couldn’t look like that. It just wasn’t possible, but there it was.

It hadn’t hung around; it had come back.

Now I’m scared. I’m feeling like some fucked up Billy Pilgrim; only, instead of hopping around in time, time’s hopping around me, in little bits and broken pieces. Life’s become like a shattered pot, and I keep stepping on shards I didn’t know were there.

They leave me bleeding.

I can’t get my breathing to slow down and I keep looking at myself in the mirror, but I’m no different. Everything else is changed. I can’t blink the panic from my eyes.

“You’re good,” I tell myself. “You don’t deserve this.” The guy in the mirror ain’t convinced.

This morning the old wallpaper was back in the bathroom and all the original fixtures too. I’d go somewhere if I could, but Dad didn’t leave much. Mom used most of it before she passed, and Janey sucked up all the rest. I never really amounted to much myself, so I had nowhere to go. I have to stay here in the house with the half-green porch and the antique fixtures and peeling paper in the bathroom. I’d worry about what the neighbors might say, but none of them really talk to me since Janey left. If I tried to tell them anything about this they’d only think I was lying anyway.

So I pad around the house listening to the sound of my footsteps on the hardwood floors now that the carpet has gone.

I’m feeling very small now, and I’m starting to hear things. For instance, I keep hearing the old refrigerator with the coil on top my folks had when I was a kid. Mom always called it the ice box, even though it wasn’t one. Old even then, the noise it made is burned in my memory. I keep hearing it, but when I go in the kitchen the new Frigidaire is sitting quiet in the corner. I hear the old dog, barking like when I was ten and not stopping, even if you went out and kicked him. He was Dad’s dog and I can’t remember his name, but I remember his howling.

Of course I’m drinking again.

Dad’s bourbon showed up under the sink, so I’m drinking. My hand shakes so bad I can hardly pour, and the cheap stuff burns just like it did the first time I ever stole some. I took the bottle into my old bedroom today and just stayed there. It’s the only room that won’t change, cause Janey used it for storage and we never fixed it up. We just left it like it was when we moved in. It has the old wallpaper with the horses and cowboys from when I was a kid, and only the light fixture is new cause the old one broke.

It’s the only room I can stay in now…the only one that doesn’t change.

I just sit on the floor, pouring bourbon into the glass, but no matter how much I swill I don’t get drunk and I just keep shaking all over. It’s cause I know what’s coming next, you see.

I’m bad…must’ve been bad, so when it comes I’m not surprised.

He sounds just like he used to thirty years ago, just like he did before he died, and when I hear him bellow up the stairs, “C’mere boy, get down here and take your medicine!” I know he’s pulling the belt off his pants and doubling it up just the way he used to then.

I really do piss my pants, but I get up and go.

I think maybe I have it coming. 

The End