To eat from the thing I spied upon
I crept around the edge of the porch. I admit, it was a silly thing to do—completely inappropriate, and it would certainly get me in trouble. But there I was, creaking up the wooden steps that bowed under my weight. I tugged on the rough brass handle of the screen door. The resistant creaking made me flinch; I looked around to see if anyone had heard. There was the street, bright daylight kissing the lilies-of-the-valley and the head of the dog and the big beautiful maple tree. A car drove by, the driver distracted by their phone. No one was looking. I tried the front door. It was unlocked.
The air of the house hit me first. Dusty, yes, but heavily spiced—like someone was cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I froze. Was it some peaceful, elderly person heating up their lunch in the privacy of their own home, yet no longer private, as I had already stepped a trespassing foot through the doorway?
For a moment, I listened. There were no sounds—not even the creaking of floorboards. When I tried to call a gentle “hello,” my voice involuntarily came out as a whisper, inaudible. I cleared my throat but did not call again, as I thought it gentler to knock. Three soft raps on the inner door frame. Again, my body seemed unable to make a moderate sound. The raps were barely audible, but they gave me confidence that I had done some sort of due diligence. On I crept.
Haunting, chilly in the way old houses are. Messy, dark, stumbling. I did not stay long.
As I sat back down in my apartment to write what I had witnessed in that house, my fears were quelled. The anxieties that had plagued me for months, maybe years—beginning when I first moved into this neighborhood—quelled. Nothing unusual was in the house, and after I had peered over stacks of bills on the table, piles and piles of receipts and coupons and magazines, seemingly endless fabrics folded in piles on chairs and futons, I no longer feared whoever lived next door.
I should not write ‘feared’—I simply was no longer curious. The house obviously belonged to some old and lonely hoarder, who may not even be alive. Or perhaps the house had been delegated to a remaining family member after a funeral, and that was who had turned the lights on and off occasionally as they surveyed the massive work ahead of them, wondering if cleaning it all was even worth what the house would sell for.
And then, as I was writing, the light turned on. I dropped my glass of water onto the carpet and rushed to my hiding spot next to the window. With my living room lights turned off, I pulled the curtain slightly away from the window ledge. Night had fallen, and the light from the neighbor’s house shone like the sun. Someone was sitting on the couch. The owner, a hoarder? A family member of the deceased? A debt collector, police officer or personal care aide?
Just a vague silhouette could be seen, like a smear on the glass. But then, the arm reached up and moved and readjusted—exactly as someone would do when turning the page in a book. It was a familiar movement—the casualness of someone who lived in that house and had lived in it for years. I dabbed the water out of the carpet with a paper towel, unable to let go of the burning curiosity that had beset me once again.
August ended before I was brave enough to trespass again. I waited until the lights had stayed dark for several days, then crept across the pavement and up the painted wooden steps. The brass door handle was still rough against my hand and the hinges still creaked. When the cave of the mouth opened before me, the house’s air swirled in the late summer wind: all dust, cardamom and lead. I stepped inside.
As it was my second expedition, I took greater care of the details: a splitting upholstered chair covered with Christmas ornaments, a brass step stool with an intricate design of camels inlaid, piles upon piles of beautiful carpets with ornamental and geometric designs, cardboard boxes with the bottoms rotted out, cases of unopened bedsheets new from the store, books with titles such as America’s National Parks, The Road from Home, Moby Dick, Daredevils of Sassoun, Perelandra, The Left Hand of Darkness, Watership Down, Great Expectations, Fahrenheit 451; stacks of cookware, piles of baking sheets, towers of Corell dishes, mounds of pistachio shells, a single well-polished spoon. I took note of these items and continued on to the kitchen.
A horrible thrill ran through me as I spied them—knotted and fibrous with flesh, hundreds of dessicated spines hung drying around the home. Twine was knotted through the top of them, hoisting the hard red flesh into the air. I stumbled back, knocking into the wall behind me.
But as I gained the courage to look closer, the shriveled skin of spineless beasts was, in fact, the shriveled skin of fruit.
Wrinkled hands, knobby knuckles and an old, worn shawl that slipped onto her elbows. White hair, streaked with black, which no longer grew much more than five inches. Her back was hunched, her figure stout. She stirred foaming black grounds in a copper cauldron—three times she let the water come to a boil, like a spell or incantation. Three times she cooled it, reassured it, spinning the grounds round and round. A light in the stove was turned on and buzzed. The light illuminated her surroundings so that, from my perspective, she was a shadow among whiteness. When she turned her head, her profile was visible to me. A large, hooked nose, deep-set eyes, a low forehead. If she had been painted green, she would have been an excellent witch. I smiled at her.
“Come, sit,” the old woman said. I followed her to a small table stacked high with postcards and extension cords. As I cleared these off, she placed down two miniature coffee cups in miniature saucers.
“Drink, drink,” she urged. I drank. The coffee was not espresso exactly, but equally bitter, and I coughed when thick, sand-like grounds slipped into my mouth. When we were finished, she turned her empty cup over onto the saucer and looked at me expectantly, wild white eyebrows raised. I turned my cup over the same as hers.
“Give me,” she said, reaching for my saucer. We traded overturned cups. She raised my cup, concave side towards her eyes and spun it in her hands.
“Future,” she said. She turned the cup so that I could see. Black sludge smeared against the side of the cup. “Future, in grounds. Come see. Tidings, hopeful.” I gazed into the cup. The mud-like grounds were like watching clouds. At first, I saw nothing, but as I gazed further, I began to see. There was a hopefulness in the design, a positivity.
“Do I do yours now?” I asked. She shook her head, shuffling away with my cup toward the sink.
“Your cup, future. My cup, my past,” she said.
I had learned to trust my curiosity. I carefully overturned the old woman’s cup. A coffee and mud painting flashed inside the hollow—starvation, death and strange lands. I clinked the cup back down on the saucer. Either by fear of what I had seen, or a conscientiousness that I should not take up too much more of her time, I left.
In my apartment across the driveway from the hoarder’s house, I microwaved shredded cheese between tortillas. I drank energy drinks before work in the morning. I searched the internet for tickets to crowded pop concerts and for bootlegged copies of Nosferatu (there was something familiar in his eyes). I sat before the red light of the computer camera on Omegle, across from somebody across the world, not speaking, not moving. Just sitting in silence. The lights of my home turned on and off, and I stood in the corner by the curtain so that I could watch the old woman in her home. Her lights turned on and off.
From the outside, nothing had changed. The house was still dilapidated, and the windows still revealed piles of things that blocked the light. But because I had been inside it, I could reason which room each window was positioned in, and therefore, could possibly reason what the woman was doing when the lights were on. The window to the left was nearer the kitchen, so perhaps she was washing dishes. The window to the right was nearer the living room, so perhaps she was reading.
A few days before the end of October, I visited her again. I had been in her house several times by now, and sometimes would catch sight of her in the stairwell or the doorway, but did not bother her. This particular day, when I opened the door, she beckoned me in as if she had been expecting me. I followed her, trance-like, towards the back of the house where the kitchen was. A pot was on the stove, and she took from it. In my hands, she placed a warm bundle wrapped in a leaf. She looked at me expectantly, with eyebrows raised, and I ate. Oily rice filled my senses with cinnamon, pepper, currants, brine, lemon and allspice. In the comfort of food, I asked her a question.
“What are you?”
Though she did not answer, she offered me another kind of food. Thin meat, like jerky but much softer, and heavily spiced. I ate this, and in my mind, I suddenly saw a young girl from an older time. The old woman handed me a fork pierced into a pickled cauliflower, and I ate, tasting the sour and spiced brine. Gunshots startled me and the young girl in my memories—though they were not my memories—cried out.
I ate the stringed white cheese with black seeds, mild and salty, and witnessed horrors I had the name for, but no comprehension of. Dessicated, starved bodies laying in pits. I ate the soft, thin, bubbly bread and saw vast oceans pushing and pulling for days and days and days and days. I ate the sweetened rice and dried fruits in the warm orange shell of a pumpkin, and when the terror ended, the girl was in a land she could not recognize, where no one said her name. I gripped the arm of the old woman, afraid, and she held my weight.
“Look now!” she said.
She turned towards a dusty mirror. My senses electrified at the sight of two people, one old and one young, whose features could not be separated from each other. Two pointed hairlines: one black, one white and black. Two hooked noses, two sets of deep-set eyes. Four hands—the elderly hands knobbled and leathery and bleeding from nail-wounds—and my hairs stood on end! The young hands bled, as well.
Were they mine?
I rushed away from the sight of it, tripping over lampshades and candles and drycleaning bags and collectable figures, reaching for the door. The evening sunlight blinded me as I burst from the house. I ran to my apartment, and there I stayed for weeks that may have been years.
I creep from bedroom to bathroom, from kitchen to stairwell. I turn the lights on and off. I have begun to cook meals, constantly, laboriously, for no one to eat. The holes that my hands bleed from are red like wine, and I follow after myself, tracing the trail of droplets. My teeth glint in the light. The shadow of darkness covers my face, but a horizontal streak of light from the blinds illuminates my eyes, cheekbone to cheekbone.
I know the neighbor across the hall in our apartment complex has been spying on me. He is the grandson of Dr. Kevorkian—or so I heard through the walls. He will come to see me, I know. I must prepare something good for him to eat.
