A Quiet Tuesday

Sitting in my favorite chair, reading Edgar Allan Poe, I become overwhelmingly aware of the silence in our home. The grandfather clock's heart beats in the hallway with the speed of a humming bird.  It's ticking and pounding mimic my imagination when I have a good story idea, pounding away at the weary keys on my computer.  It's funny how slothful I can be on a lazy, hot day in a Phoenix July.  The sun creeps through the windows and beams of it reflect off the dust in our home. It's almost as if hands are reaching into my home.

As the strangeness of the light begins to get to me, and quite frankly, the strangeness of Poe's imagination, I decide that there's got to be a place in our house I can go to get away from phantom specters in the middle of the day.

My wife is an interior designer and always believed that a view of nature was important to sound mind, body and soul.  I have to hand it to her, she makes me feel incredible, not to mention her sexual prowess would intimidate rabbits, but to the tormented mind that I so well disguise, she comes across to that part of me as invasive as the gaunt and yearning solar fingers that plague my diseased mind right now.  Don't get me wrong, to look at her, you'd say what a lucky guy and I do feel that way but she's slender with perfect shape, filled with energy and joy and my demons could plague and darken the skies of Neverland were I to let them freely express themselves like they wanted.

For the time being, it is not my demons I fear but those demons that exist in reality: heat, UV exposure, the eerie feeling that I am not alone and death himself walks amongst the hydrangea that so neatly moat my home.

"What am I reading for anyway?" I tell myself.  "There's articles to write and bills to pay.  Suffer the writer who doesn't infest the world with the insanity of a deranged mind through his tortured drivel."

Looking down at the story of Annabel Lee, the irony of the preceding thoughts are not lost.  I admire Poe but people make him out to be a god.  As if he never scratched his butt when he arose from a lazy boy in a Phoenix July.  The desert heat sticks to you.  It surrounds you like a warm blanket when you think back to New Jersey where you were raised but after living here for some time, that warm blanket becomes a noose and just as maddening as the still beating heart of the dead old man beneath the floor boards or that damn grandfather clock that won't fucking shut up with its incessant ticking of the seconds that whine through time in a never ending loop that goes on to infinitum till the ticks become a hum and you wonder why there's never a tock?

"It adds character," my beautiful wife would say.

It adds character like the windows everywhere and the bony sunshine fingers that mock me and scratch the floor...

There's a scratching noise from somewhere.  Where is that coming from?

I head into the garage; Yes! At last. The garage where there are no lights and no peep holes for the heat or sunshine.  If only it were air conditioned in here because it's like one of those "rejuvenating," clay sweat lodges out in the desert.

Scraaaaaatch... Scraaaaatch... Scratch scratch...

There it is and it's coming from outside the garage door.

I pull up the segmented pieces of chained wooden door links like a serpent into the top of the garage and a cat, as if startled jumps directly into my line of sight.  Being the dumb ass I am, I actually get startled and bump my head on the garage door which I have not fully lifted yet.  Well! The weight is more than I can bear on my head so it knocks me down to the floor but this brilliant ballet ends with all segmented heavy wooden pieces crashing down on my neck as I watch my own demise.

When I come to, I can clearly see the chaos that has become of me and my head barely hangs onto my neck through pieces of lacerated skin.  Behind me, there's a man with wings and a rather cro-magnon brow.  He looks to be Mesopotamian or something middle eastern but is that even possible?  Mesopotamian?  How do I even know what that looks like?  His smile looks devious and yet at the same time proud as if he'd just figured out how to make some incredible Rube Goldberg machine that ended in...

"Aw shit... I'm dead..." I say aloud.

I can tell he's speaking Aramaic but for some reason I can understand him as he says, "Yes, my good sir, you are indeed."