Scary Movies

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying, and I keep expecting some enormous black-and-white B-movie Cyclops to appear at the edge of the horizon, to come striding over the ocean and drag me from my kitchen to the deep cave that flickered into my young brain one Saturday at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless between my older brothers, pumped up on candy and horror—that cave, the litter of human bones gnawed on and flung toward the entrance, I can smell their stench as clearly as the bacon fat from breakfast. This is how it feels to lose it— not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is that helps you get up in the morning and actually leave the house on those days when it seems like death in his brown uniform is cruising his panel truck of packages through your neighborhood. I think of a friend’s voice on her answering machine— Hi, I’m not here— the morning of her funeral, the calls filling up the tape and the mail still arriving, and I feel as afraid as I was after all those vampire movies when I’d come home and lie awake all night, rigid in my bed, unable to get up even to pee because the undead were waiting underneath it; if I so much as stuck a bare foot out there in the unprotected air they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me under. And my parents said there was nothing there, when I was older I would know better, and now they’re dead, and I’m older, and I know better.