The author of the book, "The Dance of Rotten Sticks," teaches creative writing and film production at Delta College in Bay County. It is available on Amazon.
Chapter 2
By J.C. Vande Zande
A creature rustled under the lilac bushes out beyond the edges of the screened-in porch’s halo of light. Vaguely sweet with ozone, the humid air foreshadowed a rain shower or coming storm. Isaac took a sip from his tumbler of whiskey. The liquor burned soothingly sliding down his throat. The animal out in the darkness stirred again in the leaf litter. It was the only sound in the still night aside from the hum of some distant air conditioning units in his neighbors’ windows. Whatever the animal—a possum or raccoon or even a skunk—it bothered Isaac that their nocturnal foraging went on undisturbed even as they moved in the shadows of what he considered a house of mourning. Things just go on, he lamented, even though it didn’t feel like they should. He took a longer drink.
The sound of wings flapped through the darkness. Something landed in the branches of the maple tree above the lilacs. It sounded too big to be a nighthawk. Murmurous among the leaves, it steadied itself on its perch. He guessed that by the sounds it was probably an owl waiting for the chance to kill whatever animal was foraging on the ground. Isaac shivered with a sudden chill.
An insect—large, iridescent, and green—ricocheted off of the screen in front of him and back out into the darkness. Many of Isaac’s nights were spent watching bugs trying to get to the light coming from the kitchen behind him. Two years before, it had been Gwen’s idea to screen in the back porch. She’d barely had the chance to enjoy it. Just one full summer, really.
His phone’s screen glowed with an incoming call. With a local area code, the number looked vaguely familiar … something about the three sevens in a row at the end. He answered.
“Is this Isaac Fletcher?” a woman’s shaky voice asked.
“Yeah,” he said. Calls that started that way were never good in his experience. “Who is this?”
“Who I am isn’t important, but what I know is—”
“I’m hanging up.”
“No, don’t. Please.” She cleared her throat. “My name is Madame Zara, and I need to tell you something. It’s urgent.”
The medium? He rolled his eyes. That’s why the number was familiar. He’d hung up on her when she’d called three weeks after Gwen’s funeral to ask about her health.
She sounded like she might be drunk. Probably had to drink to muster the courage to cold call widows and widowers. She’d likely spin some yarn about how she could help him contact Gwen from beyond the grave … for the right price. There was enough of that going on in his house already. “Seriously, it’s after eleven o’clock.”
“You must protect your mind,” she said. “Do you have iron nails on your property? You’d need only three.”
“Jesus Christ. What the hell are—”
“You’re going to lose her.”
There it is, Isaac thought. He squeezed the phone. “What, you’re seeing my wife dying in your crystal ball all of a sudden … six months after the fact?” He took a drink. “Calling me like this is pretty twisted shit, bitch.”
“I only want to help.”
He snickered. “Yeah … yourself. To my money.”
“No, I’ve seen … I mean, if he takes an animal’s life, your thoughts will not be your own—”
“Do you even hear yourself, lady?”
“Please. You need to listen to—"
“Piss off and don’t call here again,” he said. He blocked her number and then set the phone back on the armrest.
Isaac stared out into the darkness and took sips from his drink. His heart rate slowed with the passing minutes. How many calls had he already taken from life insurance people trying to get him to purchase a supplemental policy. The children only had one remaining parent, they argued. Being a widower had put a target on his back for all kinds of salespeople, including phony fortune tellers. Even a few churches had reached out, expressing how he could find family within their congregation.
Leeches … all of them leeches.
Hearing small footfalls shuffling across the kitchen linoleum, he reached to set his drink on the floor. He hoped it wasn’t Carson. Ever since the accident, his son had started sleepwalking, though a doctor said the two weren’t related. Isaac knew that as a sudden single father, he hadn’t been doing very well with keeping up on the kids’ checkups. In Carson’s case, a visit to the doctor was unavoidable. He had started getting out of bed a couple hours after Isaac made sure he was asleep. Most nights, Isaac would be on the screened-in porch, and he’d hear his little boy opening and closing drawers in the kitchen. The first time he tried to tell him it was too late for a snack, but Carson didn’t seem to hear him. He kept up with his routine of drawer and cupboard opening, and sometimes calling out heartbreakingly for his mother.
On other nights, he just mumbled gibberish as he wandered around the kitchen. The doctor had called it “sleepwalk babble” when Isaac asked about it. Gwen had been a sleepwalker herself as a child. For a few weeks, Carson came into the kitchen almost every other night, and Isaac would sit with an amused smile, sipping his drink, and listening until he’d hear his little guy wander back up the stairs. Then, one night, a tinkling sound sent Isaac bolting to the sliding glass door to witness Carson with his pajama bottoms and underwear around his ankles. He was urinating into the vertical space between the refrigerator and pan drawer.
Isaac made an appointment with the doctor the next day, only to be told that Carson would eventually grow out of it. “You don’t see a lot of sleepwalking in kids after they turn eight.”
Isaac rubbed his palm over his stubbled cheek. “He’s five. We’re talking three more years of this?”
The doctor had told him to childproof the house. “Just move anything breakable or sharp away from table edges.” He recommended too that maybe Carson should try naps again.
“Naps? Are you sure this isn’t in any way related to … I mean, with his mother?”
“I really don’t think so.”
Holding his son’s hand, Isaac had left the doctor’s office with few answers and the new fear that Carson could possibly hurt himself some night. But then, as though out of pity for his weary father, the boy suddenly stopped his “somnambulistic excursions,” as the doctor had called them. It had been nearly two months since Carson had left his bed to haunt the house with his sleepwalking.
Isaac sat in the porch’s stillness listening for drawers or cupboards being opened.
“Daddy?”
He jumped and turned. Emily, his ten-year-old, stood framed in the sliding glass doorway, a silhouette sandwiched between the light of the kitchen and the half-dark of the porch. Isaac’s hand lay splayed over his heart.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?
He exhaled breathily. “Nothing, honey. You just startled me.”
The bird out in the darkness lurched. Its wings sounded like sheets of paper caught in the branches.
Emily stepped back into the light of the kitchen. Her blonde hair was disheveled, and she wore a fairy Halloween costume from years ago. Only one of the glittery wings was still attached, and it was creased with folds from being stored away for so long. “What was that?” she asked. She stared out into the blackness of the backyard.
“I think it’s an owl, but I’m not sure.” He forced a smile. “You can come out here. What are you wearing?”
She stepped onto the porch and peered tentatively into the dark yard in the direction of the bird. “Mommy made it for me a few years ago. Remember? She wanted to see me in it again.”
Isaac took his glasses off and rubbed his fingertips into his eyelids. Still with the ghostly visits crap, he thought. It can’t be healthy. Sighing, he slipped his glasses back on and patted his good leg. “Come here and sit on my lap. Don’t worry about that owl. He’s not going to do anything to us.”
Emily leaned her upward gaze out toward the darkness one more time, and then turned and walked toward him. She climbed onto his right leg and rested her upper half against him. Her head laid against his sternum. The fragrance of some fruity lotion wicked up from her skin.
Isaac stroked his fingers softly over her long hair. “So, what makes you think Mom wanted you to wear this? It’s awfully small on you.”
“She told me.”
His hand stopped stroking. “Honey …”
“Daddy, she did. In a dream she told me.”
He started stroking her hair again. “Baby, those are just dreams, though.”
Her arm came up, and her little hand clutched his left shoulder. “They seem real. It’s like she’s with me for a while.”
He shifted all of his weight onto the leg pinned under Emily. Lifting with his hand from the underside of his knee, he stretched out his bad leg on the glass tabletop. He closed his eyes, waiting for the throbbing to subside. “Dreams can feel like that,” he said between clenched teeth. “Is that why you’re up? Did the dream wake you?”
Her head shook back and forth on his chest. “No, the dream was last night. I just woke up tonight. I don’t know why.”
“Yeah,” he said. He leaned down to kiss the top of her head. Her hair smelled like her mother’s, and it left him speechless for a moment. “You’re usually my sound sleeper,” he finally managed. He cleared his throat. “And you hardly ever pee on the kitchen floor.”
She giggled. “Daddy! I never do.”
“I know you don’t,” he said, smiling.
On the other side of the fence, a yard light came on casting a jaundiced glow. It was soon followed by the sound of Isaac’s neighbor wheeling a garbage can down to the road.
Shit, he thought, garbage night. The idea of going around the house gathering up from the various receptacles and replacing bags instantly drained him. His hand groped along the floor for his drink until he remembered Emily sprawled over him. He brought his hand back up again and rested it on the top of her head. Something about the solidness of it – her soft hair, the scalp, the bone underneath – rooted him for a moment. There was something there worth the effort of being a better man. This little girl, his daughter—Carson and Ashley too—they were why he needed to keep going and get out of his rut of self-pity. Maybe even knock off the booze.
Then, too, the skull under his hand terrified him. It was as fragile as it was solid, as though his fingers might involuntarily seize up, squeezing in and shattering the bone. Unable to shake the image, he lifted his hand from her head and dangled it over the arm of his chair. They needed him to be a man that he wasn’t really sure he could be.
The neighbor’s yard light winked out again.
“What are we going to do for my birthday?” Emily asked. Her voice was half muffled from talking into his shirt. “It’s next week.”
The news sent something churning up from his guts and into his throat like heartburn. His forehead flushed with a sickly heat. “What?” he asked, though he knew what she’d said. Gwen had always taken care of the birthday party details and remembered specific dates. Three months ago, Ashley’s birthday had been easy. Believing that most men were either predators or parasites, he’d bought and wrapped for her a dispenser of mace. “Always carry it in your front pocket,” he’d said, “just to be safe.” She’d taken it with an ironic smile, humoring him, and he guessed it would probably just end up in a drawer in her room. He also sprung for her and her friends to go to the mall, eat in the food court, and then go to a movie afterwards. Finally, he’d upgraded her phone, which had been a big hit.
Carson had told her happy birthday. Emily drew her a picture. Nothing to it.
But that wasn’t an option with a soon-to-be eleven-year-old. Not a kid like Emily. She’d want a party of some kind … something special with the family. She might even want to go out to the cemetery to visit her mother’s grave.
It was August already. Why hadn’t his brain put two and two together? Get it together, man. Forgetting your kid’s birthday is next level checked out.
Emily pulled her head from his chest and sat up. She pointed. “Daddy, look,” she said, her voice a whispered excitement.
He looked in the direction that she was pointing. The wing span of a large moth lay silhouetted against the porch screen. It would have easily filled the palm of his hand.
Emily slipped off his lap and started tiptoeing towards it.
“Careful. It will fly away.” He watched it intermittently close its wings and then open the spread of them again against the mesh of screen. Its body was off-white, but the wings were chartreuse like the color of the green snakes he and his brother used to find under boards as kids. He absently touched his fingertips down the side of his cheek until the word surfaced from memory. He snapped his fingers. “That’s a Luna moth,” he said. He pointed at it. “It’s pretty rare to—”
“It’s Mom,” Emily said. She reached to touch a single finger against the screen.
He sighed. “Honey…”
She turned and looked at him, her eyes bright with what, to her, was the absolute truth. “Daddy, it is. It’s her,” she said. She turned her attention back to the insect.
The moth didn’t fly away. It spun a circle around Emily’s fingertip like a pinwheel in slow motion. She had read somewhere that butterflies and moths were the returned spirits of the recently departed. Damn internet, Isaac thought. What was the harm, though, in letting her believe it? It was probably a comfort. He studied her standing at the screen. She was getting bigger, and would likely soon withdraw from him as her body started to go through its own metamorphosis. She needed her mother now more than ever, maybe even just the idea of her. Emily could be anxious, and sometimes fixated on the smallest thing, like a hypochondriac. Unlike Ashley and Carson, who would take nasty falls as children and get right back up again, Emily was sensitive and had no tolerance for discomfort or pain. She’d always cry and want to be held.
He couldn’t get his own life together. How could he possibly help her cross the bridge ahead on her path? Even with the question lingering in his mind, he had trouble imagining her coming into puberty while wearing an ill-fitting faery costume with its one deformed wing.
After a moment, the moth launched away from the screen and disappeared into the darkness.
“That probably was Mom,” he said.
She turned towards him quickly, her face alert. “You think so too?”
Isaac nodded. “I do.” Then he smiled. “And since that was her, she got to see you in your costume just like she wanted. Now, when you go up to bed, you can change into something that fits. You wouldn’t be comfortable sleeping in that anyway.” She probably had been trying to sleep in it. He guessed that the constriction had woken her.
Emily reached and rubbed her sides up into her armpits. “It is tight under my arms.”
“Well, there you go. Change out of it when you get up to your room.”
She walked to him and spread her arms. He did the same, and she fell into him for a hug.
“We’ll do something special for your birthday, too. Don’t you worry about it,” he said into the hair above her ear. He kissed the top of her head.
“Okay,” she said. “Night and love you.”
“I love you too. But get up to bed now and get to sleep. Chop-chop.”
Emily left the hug, crossed through the sliding glass doorway, and disappeared into the kitchen.
Isaac listened to her soft footsteps that soon faded out altogether. He dropped his arm over the side of his chair and groped until his fingertips found the cool rim of his drink. Raising it into the half-light, he studied the ice cubes melted down to slivers. He set a few more cubes afloat. The result was too watery for his taste, and so he added some whiskey for balance, nodding his approval at the next burning sip. He’d have to put something together soon … some kind of birthday gift and some kind of party. I’ll figure it out, Isaac thought. He took another, longer drink.
A sharp twinge jolted the muscles of his left thigh. He grimaced through the act of setting his foot on the porch floor and massaged the heel of his palm into the sore spot. The pain ebbed slowly. After a minute, he straightened the limb out onto the table top again. Every night was a routine of constant adjustments. He couldn’t remember how long it’d been since he’d quit going to physical therapy. He’d only gone to two or three appointments. That was a mistake, he thought, shaking his head. But then, what wasn’t?
The animal rustled again on the ground. “Go to hell,” Isaac muttered. Gwen had always made sure to throw overripe apples or stale bread into the backyard for “the critters.” How did they thank her? By carrying on as though she weren’t gone … as though she hadn’t died. He remembered a poem about some painting. Icarus’ Fall or something like that. Was the painter Auden? No, maybe that was the poet. Some bit of a line stuck in his thoughts: “…how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.” He shook his head and took another sip of his drink.
He’d been introduced to the poem in some literature class he had to take back in college. The professor projected the painting in the front of the room and then read the poem aloud, his voice coming disembodied from the darkness at the edges of the lit screen. Isaac could still picture the farmer in the foreground, bent to his task of plowing, unaffected by Icarus drowning in the dark stain of water nearby. Closer to the tragedy, the fisherman on the shore didn’t look up from his angling. He had to have heard the boy’s screams. The men climbing the rigging of a nearby sailing ship paid no attention to the flailing legs sinking through the surface. Even the daydreaming shepherd’s skittish sheep took no notice.
If the themes of how we are so often alone in our misfortunes hadn’t meant much to Isaac in his early twenties, they certainly made palpable sense given the last six months. At the time, the only thing about that literature class that had made much sense was sitting next to Gwen.
He took another drink, and his mind drifted. Stopped at a red light just days before, he had watched a couple strolling up to the crosswalk. They were smiling, and from his first glance, he loathed them for their happiness. The man had leaned down and said something to the blonde woman, and they’d both laughed as though nothing bad would ever happen to them. Worse, Isaac thought, more like nothing bad ever happened to anyone. He was drowning in his own misery just ten feet away, unacknowledged. So close, how could they not feel his pain? They had to have felt it. They just didn’t care.
Soon, the light turned green, and he lifted his leaden foot from the brake to the gas. Ten minutes later, parked outside of a grocery store, knowing that his kids needed his inert body to bring food home, he’d sat motionless, his blood a stagnant syrup. His fingers gripped the door handle, but did nothing else. He had waited for the deadening lethargy to pass. He knew that he should have felt bad for flipping the middle finger to the couple at the crosswalk as he’d pulled away, but there’d been something satisfying about shocking something sour into their goddamned perfect day. Waiting another five minutes in the Meijer parking lot, he’d shifted his car into reverse and picked up fast food to bring home. Again.
He gulped another mouthful of whiskey.
A sliver of light shone from under his upside-down phone on the armrest of his Adirondack chair, like light coming from under a door into a dark room. He picked it up to find a text from his younger brother, Adam. He squinted into the brightness of the screen, trying to adjust to the sudden light. Only two words: “You up?” Probably just checking to see how I’m doing, he thought.
“Shitty,” he said aloud. He set the phone down again.
Against his will, as it often did, his mind went to the idea of a raven. He could still hear the deputy that had spoken as Isaac had drifted in and out of consciousness on the gurney. “A seat belt and airbag failure is bizarre enough. What the hell was that raven doing out there?” the deputy had asked a fellow officer on the scene. The cop wasn’t wrong. Something had been off about that bird. It had careened out of the darkness into Isaac’s windshield like a missile. If he closed his eyes, he could still see the blinding Rorschach of blood and feathers. He purposely didn’t close his eyes, didn’t want to see it. Even with them open, he could hear it. He spent many of his waking hours trying not to hear it, trying not to remember the sound of it, but it was lodged in his head like some kind of colossal tinnitus ringing his ears. The metal collapsing in on itself. The thunder of the splintering oak. The shattering windshield.
The final gasp from the passenger seat.
He tilted his drink to his lips, but felt only the ice and a trickle of watery whiskey. He fumbled his arm over the side of his seat and groped his fingers along the floor until he found the pint bottle. Holding it in the pale light, he assessed the contents through the green glass. He’d already finished more than half of it. Setting the tumbler on his armrest, he reached down again, found the ice bucket, and retrieved several cubes. He dropped them into his glass and opened the bottle. He listened to the liquid settling over the ice – a miniature, discordant concert of tiny chimes.
Isaac had started buying pints rather than fifths. If he had access to a fifth, he was damn near useless in the morning. He’d tell Ashley that he was having a migraine. Then, through the pounding of his hangover headache, he’d listen to her getting Carson and Emily up and ready for school. “Come on guys, the bus will be here soon,” he’d hear her announce. His guilt would never let him go back to sleep until long after they’d left the house.
The pint kept him honest, or at least kept him from blacking out. One Saturday in June, his son had found him sprawled out on the floor of the screened-in porch. Fortunately, the youngest had discovered him, and not one of the other kids. Isaac had explained that he wasn’t sleeping but listening closely for the sound of termites. “I can hear them better if I close my eyes.” Isaac’s remorse coiled in his chest when Carson lay on the porch floor next to him and pressed his ear to the wood. “What do they sound like, Daddy?” he’d asked. He closed his eyes to listen. That night Isaac had devised the plan to only purchase a pint each day. He knew the liquor wouldn’t hit him so hard if he could ever drum up enough of an appetite to really eat.
His leg stiffened painfully again. He pulled it from the table and set it flat-footed against the floor. Kneading, he twisted his knuckles as deep as he could into the tissue. The pain though, as it did some nights, felt more like it was in the bone than the muscle. Isaac picked up his phone to check the weather app. Sure enough, the forecast called for an all-day rain starting at about four o’clock in the morning. Ever since the accident, his body had become like a human barometer. His leg throbbed its own prediction of precipitation.
He thought of the metal in his body. Open reduction internal fixation - that’s what the surgeon had called his procedure. He had a rod through the bone, and screws holding a plate that helped everything heal in place. “The rest falls on you,” his doctor had said. “You’ll have to be diligent with everything the physical therapist wants you to do. It’s not a quick recovery.” Isaac took a sip of his drink and pressed the heel of his palm into the muscle. I’m just sitting too much, he decided.
Shivering again, he guessed that the coming rain was dropping the evening temperature. He took a warming sip of his freshened drink. The owl, or whatever it was, flapped its wings a moment, adjusting itself for better purchase. Isaac set his head back and closed his eyes.
