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Dandelion Dome
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October 14, 1993
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My mother's ashes are forever held captive in the glass dome of a paperweight. Painted on the smooth curve of the weight is a dandelion, which personally I feel is slightly dumb given the fact that the white fluff of the flower's head is hard to distinguish against the smoky gray surface. Some of the dandelion's fuzz is floating in the space above it, having already been separated from the stalk by the non-existent wind, and these specks of the painting are even harder to see. It's supposed to symbolize her soul finally being set free, or something like that. It was my sister Heather’s decision to split the pile of dust between us, not mine. She was the one who thought it would be cute and clever to put my share of Mom's disintegrated body in a paperweight with a painted dandelion, not me. But Heather has always gotten her way. So I’m not at all surprised I ended up going along with her morbid idea.
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For your beautiful manuscripts, she had said when she told me her plan. The whole thing is hilariously ironic, really. The pages Mom sits like a rock upon would never have been called beautiful by her. Nothing I ever wrote was good enough in her eyes.
Of course, the logical thing to believe is that it doesn't matter now, almost two months after her death. Her disapproval can't reach me from where she's at. But this logic slides off my brain like water off a slicker when I hear the whispers. If anything, her disapproval haunts me even more. Now she's constantly sitting there, atop my works, and I feel the judgement drifting toward me like dandelion fuzz, the kind that won’t go away no matter how much you swat at it.
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Sometimes, and with increasing frequency, I can hear her whispers from across the room at night.
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She says, This plot is weak.
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She insists, Your antagonist is a bore.
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She laughs, Why don't you change your title to ‘Beware: Ending is Completely Predictable’?
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Tossing and turning in my rough blue comforter, shoving my thickest pillow over my ears, I want to shout, Then don't read it! But I know if I did, I'd be screaming at glass and dust. Though I may feel like she’s driving me crazy, I’m not that far gone.
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Not yet, anyway. I might get there at this rate. Isn't it a commonly held belief that all writers are a little off their rocker? And Mom's whispering ashes are pushing the limits of my sanity. Hence my need to write down my thoughts somewhere. I’m afraid that, eventually, I won’t be able to tell which thoughts belong to me and which are Mom’s.
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I could put her away. Lock her inside my drawer or in a shoebox on the top shelf of my closet with the rest of the dust. It's hard to believe that would make a difference though. Her words will get to me from anywhere. What would be worse: listening to the ruthless critiquing, or trying to block out the sound of the demands to let her out of her cardboard prison?
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When I'm sitting at my desk trying to get words on the page, the answer to that question isn't as simple as it may seem. In my view, writing well is only possible in absolute silence so the ideas won't be scared away right as you're about to snatch them out of the air. The options I'm presented with are my Brooklyn apartment, top floor of the rather shitty complex where the racket of restless residents rarely reaches me, or the library. The latter space is where I’ve had to go since one of my dead parents became my roommate, and it’s where I sit now.
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Even here I can't escape her anymore, maybe because I finally found the strength to write this. The whispers are three blocks away, but it’s as if she’s right behind me, watching me move my pencil to string together words not for a fictional tale but for a confession. The confession that I still hear her; that just because she stopped living doesn’t mean I’ve stopped hating her; that my mother has now taken over everything I write because I can’t seem to think of anything else.
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What terrifies me is the possibility that it’s never going to end. And then? What? Do I stop writing to be rid of her voice? Would that make a difference? A part of me wonders, and trembles as it does, if the disapproving words from beyond the grave will eventually begin to talk of failures unrelated to my writings. Just like she used to, my mother will find a way to put in her two cents, no matter what I do.
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The paranoia flooding through my body at the thought of the possibility adds to the case against my sanity.
November 9, 1993
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It’s been close to a month since I first recorded the issue of my mother’s whispering dust, and that’s because I stopped writing. Partially because the act has begun to lose its appeal to me (understandably, I would think) but perhaps equally as partially to test the hypothesis proposed in my previous entry. If I didn’t write, would I still hear her?
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The answer was no. The voice from beneath the dandelion dome set aside its snarky comments and judgements when I set aside my pencil. A burden heavier than Mom’s paperweight was lifted from my chest, as I had started to fear the words would enter my dreams, darkening them like ink on a page.
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In the weeks that followed, I wasn’t sure what to do next. My day job as a bookstore manager downtown kept my 9:00 to 5:00 hours occupied, and Heather brought the kids to visit one weekend, but every hour I spent alone was full of uneasiness. I should be writing, I would think as I sat by the kitchen window watching the clouds float outside. What about my latest project? It needed only a few pages more. Was it supposed to remain unfinished forever?
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The one about the young couple taking their last breaths as they freeze to death in the wilderness? Mom asks now. I find myself missing the time when she would only whisper when I was at a desk. She judges me whenever she pleases now, as if she were still alive. The story you haven’t been able to touch since you saw me, cold, pale, and motionless in a white silk coffin? The one you’ll never be able to complete but deep down you think that’s okay because you know it would have been nothing but a sad and cheap attempt at trying to invoke emotions?
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Some days, it’s hard to remember if she was always this cruel with her critiques or if dying has made her extra callous.
Maybe this was her plan all along, I would tell myself as I made my way to the sink, pouring half a mug of cold coffee down the drain because I came to realize I was jittery enough without it. She always wanted me to get a real job like Heather, to stop wasting my time with stories. Unsuccessful in this life, now she was taking advantage of her place in the next one to annoy me or scare me into ceasing. And she had won.
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I had let her win.
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It took me a few days after realizing this to put the pencil to the page again, knowing that the second I did the paperweight sitting on the desk would begin its unwanted song. But eventually you just have to say screw it and start writing, no matter what anyone says, even your dead mother. So here I am.
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As I scribble down these words, the dandelion seems to glow, alive and bright against the cloudy gray background, and I can’t help but grin a little at the irony. Those fluffs meant to symbolize her soul being set free have trapped her instead. I think I’ve come to genuinely believe that: my mother’s spirit lives underneath the dandelion dome.
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Of course, the ashes are now saying. Of course that’s where I am. How else could you hear me so clearly, as if my lips were right next to your ear? So constantly, as if I were an old record you keep spinning? But don’t tell anyone that, her spirit is warning. People will look to send you straight to the madhouse.
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The doorbell chimes, ringing throughout my empty apartment. It’s Heather again, this time without my nephews. I know this without getting up to answer the door or peeking out the little window next to it.
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Mom told me.
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*To read the full story, check out my debut book "Dandelion Dome and Other Stories" on the Barnes and Noble website! Find the link under "Publications".
It lives in your vent.
You’ve suspected since you moved into your studio apartment that not all the bumps and thumps come from your upstairs neighbor. The creaking has always been closer to you than that, and it is best heard when you’re lying in bed at night, sneaking glimpses at the white air vent over your closet door across the room to your left. Sometimes it’s not even the noises sneaking through the skinny black slits that keep you from falling asleep. Sometimes, it’s the fact that you keep opening your eyes and glancing in its direction. You can’t help it. If the thing is watching you, you’re going to watch it back.
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You haven’t seen its eyes, but something deep inside where the fear lays makes you think they’re orange. Glowing, like a cat’s. You just never see them because the thing that lives in your vent always seems to be one step ahead of you. Maybe it only watches you during the day, when you’re studying your psych textbook or cooking ham and egg sandwiches or on the phone with your mom. Or maybe it can sense when your eyes are open and closes its blazing ones until you shut yours. Watching you dream is its favorite. You’re sure of that.
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It won’t watch your slumber tonight, though. Tonight, you will catch it. You’ll see the eyes. Then it will leave, because it will know you have seen it. Its fun will be over.
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As the numbers of your microwave clock tick up to your usual bedtime, you ready the supplies. The coffee pot is heating up on the counter, and as you wait for it to drip you put on your thickest pajamas. They’re blue, fuzzy, and have matching wool socks. You put these on too before turning up the thermostat. You can’t sleep when it’s too hot.
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A couple energy shots and cans of soda line the edge of your nightstand, and there’s an open bag of Pixy Stix near your pillow. You doubt you will need all of this, but it’s nice to have the ammunition out anyway just in case. Who knows how long you’ll have to fight this battle before you win?
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The small television in the corner is playing a show you’re not familiar with. The characters are loud and obnoxious but not interesting enough for you to be tempted to put your eyes on the screen, not even for a second. Tonight, you wish you didn’t even have to blink. Any moment your eyes aren’t searching the dark abyss beyond the white rectangles of metal is a moment it can take to watch you again. You are physically and mentally tired of being watched.
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Pouring your dark roast into an orange-striped mug, you notice the shaking of your hands for the first time. You expected this, but you’re still upset by it. The night is way too young for that deep fear to rise enough to tremble your body.
“It’s okay,” you tell yourself aloud. Then, in your head: It hasn’t left the vent before.
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Taking the coffee over to the bed and closer to the vent, you wonder if the thing has ears. You imagine it does, maybe just little penny-sized holes on each side of its head. Other than the eyes, you haven’t really painted a clear picture of your roommate. Thinking about it more than you have to is dangerous, because then the deep fear rises up past your shaking fingers and all the way into your mind and makes it feel heavy but like it’s floating away at the same time. You don’t like it. So you try not to think about what the rest of the thing looks like, try not to even wonder how many legs it uses to crawl around in there, or how flexible they must be to fit comfortably in the tiny space. It’s not a small thing. Small things don’t creak and thud that loudly when they move.
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It probably has two legs and two arms, like you. Occasionally, a scratch—more like a click—will echo in there, so it might have nails like you, too. If you didn’t know better, you may admit to yourself it’s something human. Humans can’t contort their bodies to fit in such a space, though, and those who can are traveling with the circus, not crawling in your vent. More importantly, humans don’t have eyes that blaze a deeper orange than wildfire.
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Sitting on your bed, resting against the hard wall opposite the vent and making sure not to get comfy, you try to push these thoughts away, but you know it’s going to be a challenge to ignore them tonight. Staring into the vent is staring into the half-known, a place you should avoid lest your imagination continue to try and make up the other half.
The coffee burns your dry tongue and the back of your throat as you take a long, empowering chug. You follow it with a deep breath, fix your eyes into the blank spaces of the thing’s hiding place, and let your mind slip into a quiet region outside of you, far away from the deep fear that’s shaking Pixy Stix dust into your sheets. If the eyes appear, your eyes will see them, but the part of you that thinks will be distant enough to hopefully avoid a direct impact of the sheer terror sure to come. This is probably your only hope of making it through the night without having to spend the next in the asylum across town.
Your mind stays gone for a time, far away enough that it doesn’t quite notice when the coffee drips down your chin and into the collar of your thick blue night shirt when you bring the mug up for shots of caffeine. But now your eyes are growing tired, and the heaviness of your lids steadily drag your mind from the quiet region. It would be nice if you could dart your eyes to the face and hands on the wall by the door telling you the time, telling you how long you’ve been at this, but you can’t. Remember, even blinking is time wasted. Hoping the coffee (cold when it rushed down your throat and chin last time) will push away the heavy feeling, you bring the mug to your lips once more. Four or five black specks of coffee grounds stick to your mouth, but nothing more.
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You realize you did not bring the pot onto your nightstand with the rest of the liquid energy. It’s at least a quarter full of your greatest armor against sleep and, therefore, the thing in your vent. And you left it sitting across the room.
Trying to hold back the tears of rage that come with realizing you’ve made a horribly stupid mistake, you blindly reach out to the left for one of the sodas. If you don’t do this carefully and accidently knock over a can, it is likely going to create a domino effect, and your whole row of soda will be out of reach. Just like your coffee. Then what? Pixy Stix alone won’t cut it.
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Without moving your eyes, you focus on the corner of your vision and see the blur that must be your hand moving. It hovers over a smaller red blur. Just as you snatch the red thing gently with your fingertips, a small boom echoes in the vent in front of you. Your aching eyes strain to see even the faintest movement behind the grate, but there’s nothing.
It’s getting smart, you think with rising panic. Or maybe it always was. But it has been quiet as a shadow all night. That booming was no accident.
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It was hoping I’d drop my can.
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Your teeth click together twice when the shiver goes up your spine and spreads down your arms. Slowly, you pull the can up off the nightstand and bring it to your lap. The crack of the tab and hiss of the carbonation create their own echoes in the apartment, much louder than whatever show is on your TV at this hour. Probably some rerun of an adult cartoon.
Your mind is wandering from the mission at hand and you know it. You need to focus. Another night of this is something you never want to experience, but you may have to if you don’t pay attention. It won’t stop watching until you beat it at its own game.
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Concentrate, you tell yourself. The large gulps of soda fizz down your throat and you feel them continue to fizz in your stomach. Then slowly, your mind begins to escape again, into a space in which it is numb to fear.
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It’s almost there. You’re almost calm again. But something stops it before the last shakes leave your body. A sensation you can’t quite explain yet fear you will be able to soon. You wait, the suspense holding you like steel chains.
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Then out of the silence comes the blaring of what sounds like sirens alerting people to bad weather, to danger. Dread forms in your gut, spreading its cold throughout your stomach at the thought of cutting the night short because of a storm. You’ve made it so long, come so close to ending the nightmare by looking it straight in the eye. The thing in your vent is a bigger problem than any weather phenomenon that could be going on outside your walls to set off the alarm.
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Something clangs to the floor of the vent above you. There’s some rattling and a little scratching before the blaring ceases. The cold creeps up to your chest and clutches your heart. There’s no bad weather setting off sirens. Only something in your vent controlling an alarm clock. Your alarm clock? You don’t dare check the nightstand to see. The creature is up there, trying to get your attention elsewhere. What if you look and miss something?
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Worse, what if you look and the spot where the clock always rests is vacant?
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A minute ticks by without motion or sound. Another, then another. Until a faint whisper floats down from the vent. Not a whisper formed with mouth and tongue, but the kind that comes from skin gliding over metal. It’s a quiet sound, hardly noticeable, but it’s enough to roll the scene in your mind’s eye: its slender body writhing through the vent slowly, slowly, closer to the grate. It’s trying to be quiet, but your mind has snapped back from the blank space and all your senses are magnified. Soon the thud-thump-thud-thump of your heart will drown the sound of its flesh sliding inch by inch towards you. The organ is drumming so fast and rising with the deep fear so high, you think you’ll choke on it. The soda can is warm and damp with sweat between the fingers of your left hand, and your right is gripping the soft squishy cylinders of Pixy Stix as if they’re a bundle of dynamite. Your tongue can taste the coffee on your breath and the fear that’s risen with your heart into your mouth. The fear tastes slightly like blood. Your eyes, so wide and strained they throb in their sockets, are moments from seeing the glowing orange orbs staring through the dark slits. Any moment now.
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But then, your eyelids close, blacking out your world and the thing in your vent as you faint and fall to the pillows.
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As you dream, you can see it: a long, black body with faint patterns of iridescent purple. It’s not quite as tall as you expected, it would probably come up between your hip and shoulder if standing next to you on its back legs, but it’s very thick. Its cylindrical shape takes up nearly the whole width of your vent. The tough (and scaly? you can’t really tell) skin scrapes the ceiling and sides and floor. You find what could be called pleasure under different circumstances in the fact that it seems to be struggling to wriggle through. It has four legs, as far as you can tell. They’re short, stubby, and end in dog-like paws with talons welded into them. The noises you sometimes hear at night must be from those talons dragging across the vent floor when it gets careless. The thing is too wide, its legs too short, to walk towards you. Instead, it’s writhing through your vent, closer to the grating, closer to where your unconscious body lay.
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The thing doesn’t let you see its face in your dream. The eyes remain a mystery. You can’t decide between relief or disappointment as you’re pulled back into the waking world.
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The first thing you notice upon waking is the stickiness on your torso and left hand. The soda. It spilt everywhere. You sit up in the mess. After annoyance comes immense frustration. You had all this caffeine, all this sugar, and still couldn’t help but fall asleep.
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Then comes the numbing terror when you remember why you passed out, and what you saw when you did. Your throat closes up. With oxygen not coming as it should and your heart hammering like it is, the dark outline of your tunnel vision pulses. You’re dizzy, and it doesn’t help that your head is swaying back and forth on your neck.
You don’t want to, oh Heaven knows you don’t want to, but you begin to shift your eyes upwards. Up towards the vent. Up towards its face.
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The fiery orbs holding fat black pupils are exactly as you imagined, down to the fact that they have a tint of yellow to them. But you hardly notice what you’ve been waiting to see all night. Something even brighter in the darkness of the vent, something even more chilling, rests below the eyes: a wide, glistening smile. The rows of teeth aren’t pointed like fangs or spiked like a shark’s. They are neat little squares, just like a human’s. Just like yours.
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The thing in your vent has its large, terrible face pressed against the grating, so hard you wonder if the black you see is really just its skin pushing through. Like it’s coming out to you.
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Is it coming out to you?
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“Go away,” you say, voice trembling with the earthquake of terror shattering your mind. “I caught you. Now you leave.”
The face doesn’t move. The white Cheshire cat smile doesn’t waver, the eyes don’t even twitch. The only sign that it’s alive is the sound of deep, rattling breaths reaching your ears from between its teeth.
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The world goes dim again. You’re on the verge of blacking out, fighting against the gray fuzz taking over your vision like you’re watching TV with a bad signal.
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“Go... away,” you try again, but the effort you have to put behind the words gives your weakness away. It knows you’re almost gone. It just needs to wait a few moments more. “I... caught you.”
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You’re too far out of your body for it to even jump when the metal grating of the vent clangs to the floor. You stare, helpless, as the face comes out of the vent. Its neck follows, stretching as far as it can before the creature swings its head down. It is dangling from your vent, swaying back and forth, like a dark pendulum ticking down the last few seconds of your night. Two arms escape the vent next, and the talons below them press against your wall, digging into the plaster. Then, once the creature feels stable enough to bring the rest of its long body out of its hiding place, the right paw rips itself from the wall and moves down a few inches before getting a good hold again with its claws. The thing in your vent, it’s climbing down. The climb is going to be slow, but it will happen. And when it does, the creature will be in the room with you. You’re hardly able to process this fact over the terrible sound of its nails digging in and ripping out, digging in and ripping out of your wall, leaving a trail of dusty holes as it descends. Its back legs are out now. All of it is out now. You can see the whole thing. It’s worse than the dream the creature gave you. So very much worse. In the vision, as the thing moved, you believed the grating of the vent was the stopping point. The barrier. Now, there is none. It is coming.
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Soon it is off the wall completely, and it is stealing across your carpet. It’s silent now. There’s nothing to hear as the black, ugly being slowly makes its way to your bed. The orange eyes are frozen, unable to blink. Something you would have been jealous of only a few minutes before. They are staring directly at you. The smile is unchanged as well. You’d think it was painted on if it weren’t so white and bright. Blinding. Sneering. Drawing closer. It’s all you can focus on until the creature has moved so close to the edge of the bed it's disappearing from your view. Then you feel the thing more than see it. It’s right next to you. You can hear those teeth-filtered breaths as they blow your hair, feel the heaviness of its body making your mattress sink. But the muscles in your neck are too weak to turn your head and see the thing that has escaped your vent.
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“I caught you,” it says. The voice it uses sounds familiar.
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Then you realize it’s yours.
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There’s a sudden hot pressure in your stomach. Your eyes give out. A dull ringing sounds in your ears. All thought ceases for a moment. Then, painfully, it comes back.
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You think you’re shivering now and wonder if someone could stop by to put a blanket on you, you really are cold. Miserably so. This is a different kind of cold than you’ve ever felt before: the kind you feel when your warmth is soaking the bedsheets.
The creature glides back across the room, scurries up the wall, and writhes back into your vent. From there, it watches with those orange eyes and its pearly grin, like it has so many times before. Its deep breaths are even more rapid now, more rapid than your own as your damaged lungs go into overdrive. It’s excited.
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It has a strong feeling you won’t make it through the night.
Venusian
Art by Juana Garcia
Surface pressure from the atmosphere: 90 bars
Thick and toxic clouds trap everything on the planet, including our knowledge of “out there.” If we have a satellite, we cannot see it. Just as we cannot view the sphere of fire and gas around which we move or the other burning orbs in the invisible galaxy. How do we know these things exist? We do not. They are simply legends, the origin of which we do not remember. We often wonder if the dark rotating sulfuric fluff piles up to infinity, and there is nothing beyond. It is a sad thought. The pile is heavy, and we cannot go out into the open after being in the caves without feeling the weight on our limbs. This is good for when we need a reminder that we exist. But it can also be dangerous for staying out too long. Because every cloud is shadowy, every cloud’s belly is full, the storms come without warning.
*To read the full story on the Cooglife Magazine webpage, click the Venusian tab under "Publications" or find it in my debut book, "Dandelion Dome and Other Stories"!
Something New
“What’s mine is yours,” Lila told me the day I moved into the 1050 square foot apartment; the one I shared with the girl who would soon prove to me that these first words were a life-altering lie.
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My arms ached from carrying all my belongings up to the fourth floor earlier that afternoon. The sun had only been absent for maybe an hour, but my first class of the semester started early the next morning, and I just wanted to shower and crawl in bed. It was a relief to see the roommate I’d been assigned seemed nice, but her talkative nature was exhausting. Hoping she’d eventually take the hint, I stayed silent and nodded as she pointed out and asked my opinion on the decor she had accumulated in the week since she’d moved in.
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“It’s not much, I know,” she chatted on with a wide white smile. Flipping her strawberry-blonde hair over a bony shoulder, she seemed completely comfortable sitting in her swimsuit in front of a stranger. She had come in from a welcome party at the campus pool when I was unpacking my last box; there was little doubt in my mind she had walked all the way back with nothing to cover up but her beach towel. I found this fascinating and slightly annoying. “I figured we could spice the place up together, right?”
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“Yeah totally,” I said, trying to match the peppy cadence of her voice, though I’m sure my body language gave away the fact that I didn’t want to talk for long. I was slumped in the corner by the fridge, which displayed two pink magnets: a peace sign and a smiley face. I wondered what she thought of the skull pins I had stuck to my backpack, none of which were pink.
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“But yeah, you’re welcome to, like, all of it. Everything but what’s in my room, of course.” Here Lila grew somewhat bashful, as if her one rule demanded too much, and she laughed away any awkwardness before it could creep in. “I’ve never had a roommate before, I just commuted from my parents’ house last school year. This is all so new and exciting! What’s your first class tomorrow?”
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The way she jumped from topic to topic made my head spin. “Uh, it’s called Minds and Machines. It’s an intro class for philosophy. Starts at 8:00.”
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I’d included the last bit to perhaps enlighten her to the fact that I wanted to turn in, but Lila either didn’t catch on or didn’t care. “Oh, awesome. Yeah my classes are more like late morning, but I usually get up really early anyway. Early bird and all.”
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“Not me.” I tried to laugh. “I’ll probably sleep until the last second. I prefer staying up late.”
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I regretted the words before they finished stumbling out. Lila didn’t need to know that. Why did she care about my day/night preference? Why admit that I was lazier than her? Who said I had to share personal things with her just because we were going to share a few rooms?
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It would be nice to have a friend at the start of the semester, which means I better get more comfortable opening up, I thought. But another part of me, the cautious part, was hesitant. Don’t forget what Rousseau says about trust, it warned. “Nature never deceives us; we deceive ourselves.” Don’t deceive yourself. You don’t know who she really is yet.