annihilator (Chapter 2)

the narrator has a bad time

(here’s chapter 1)

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Mother hissed under her breath.

The car ride had otherwise been silent. After three days in and out of jais and courthouses,l the judge decided this was all due to the trauma of having lost a brother and that I would be better off with my family than in a cell. But my family was still ordered to pay for the damages.

“Have you lost your goddamn mind?” Mother’s voice roiled beneath the sound of the tires against the asphalt.

“Let it rest, sweetheart,” Father said, impotently.

“Let it rest?” mother said, snapping at him from the passenger's seat. I watched my father wince in response. “After all the pain she’s caused us?”

“We’re all suffering, dear,” Father said, a little more emboldened now. “Drop it.”

My mother went silent. An angry, fuming silence that she knew would poison the car ride and likely, home as well, once we got there. She sometimes reveled in making everyone else feel bad without a word. You could see the pleasure of it in her beady eyes. Schadenfreude or something.

I was not looking forward to time with them. But they insisted. No, they demanded I stay at home for a few days before releasing me back to my private life.

In the three days in jail cells, that string connecting my dead brother and myself faded into the periphery, the way one’s nose does. You never even think about it being there. Only I could only ever think about what the hell it must have meant.

In my three days in jail, I determined that I must have lost my mind. That, or my twisted evil brother was haunting me from the beyond. But it seemed more likely that I had gone insane. I accepted it, in fact, there was something liberating about it. The possibility of being locked away in a padded cell with no one to bother me but the few carers tasked with bringing me food and water seemed more like a dream than a punishment. If I was in a bad mood I could hiss at them or stare with a blank, holy, placid expression at the wall when they asked me dumb questions like “Do you remember your name?” “How old are you, sweetie?”

I could do whatever I wanted in this fantasy. And I wouldn’t have to care about the consequences. In the back seat of my parent’s car that still felt like a distant dream though. They all treated me like I was sane. Too sane to be acting so insane.

We pulled up to our house and dad ratcheted the shifter into park with a sigh. Mother sat impatient, tapping her toes with crossed arms, as if waiting for permission to get out. FInally dad spun around to face me. His eyes were tired in their sockets and for a moment I felt bad about everything. I felt bad about spitting on their son’s face and then breaking into the crematorium. It was the first time I had felt bad about any of the stupid havoc I had reeked in the last few days. Then again, it wasn’t all me, was it?

“Love,” he said to me. “We’re not holding you hostage, alright?”

He forced a sleepy grin that reminded me of when he used to tuck me in as a little kid. I almost cried. Almost. But I was a resilient little shit and kept all my guts inside me where they belonged. I glanced away, out at their yard of brown California-drought grass. Eventually, he continued and I thanked him silently for that. The space between words was flooded with memories gone sour.

“We’re a family,” he said, his voice cracking under the strain of the last few weeks. “We’re all we have left.”

There were tears in my dad’s eyes that, again, pushed my stomach into my throat. But I didn’t let it pry into me. Their notion of family left a battery acid taste in my mouth. I had been waiting for that demon brother of mine to croak since he first betrayed my trust when I was just a little girl. A better fate couldn’t have awaited an incestuous baby-fucker. Every time I imagined him blackout drunk, choking on his own vomit, the last little vestiges of consciousness clinging to life as he gagged I felt chills up and down my spine. We were all the family we had left, sure. But what good did that do me? Family is supposed to listen when you’re hurt, right? They’re supposed to be the only people you can trust when you need them, right? They never listened to me.

To my parents, family was a symbol of stability that they never had when they were just grubby latch key kids from broken homes. Their children were never people in their eyes, but abstractions of whatever the hell it meant to them to be grown up and adult. Children were no different than a handshake to them.

I know this because they would have listened to me if I mattered to them.

They should have helped me.

And in a way they should have helped my brother. They should have taken him somewhere to get better, to get conditioned out of evil by the Pavlovs of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

My father turned away and pushed open the driver’s side door. For a moment, my mother stayed inside and I wondered if she was about to lecture me about how horrible I was and how it should have been me who died instead of my brother. But she didn’t say any of that. After a decade’s long silence, where we heard nothing but each others’ long, strained breaths she did finally have something to say.

“I’m sorry,” she said, forced out from between her clenched teeth like a spoiled child might sound, stamping her feet for candy. Then she unfolded her arms and shoved her door open, practically leaping out into the yard. She said it like that so that I would know she was still mad at me. She said it like that so that she could accomplish her motherly duties without having to actually be committed to them.

“I’m sorry,” but I don’t mean it.

I stayed in the car for a moment watching my mother and father fumble for their keys and filter inside. Even after all that mess about being family and sticking together, they still left me in the car. Alienated. Compartmentalized.

It was nice, though. Quiet. Reasonable. No conflict. No nothing. Just the smell of leather, that toxic upholstery glue, and the faint hint of old coffee that was maybe spilled once. And the sound of silence.

Then mother came back out and pried the driver’s side door open with a mechanical kerplunk. One of her eyes said she was trying to make amends, the other eye peered only with disdain. Looking at her gave me a headache, I could never have imagined what it must have been like to be her. But she had no idea what it meant to be me either.

“Come in if you want food,” she said simply and closed the door without waiting for a response.

I did want food. As nice as jail was, I missed a good meal. But I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to pretend we were at some civilized dinner party as mom always did. I just wanted to eat and then fall asleep and then hopefully wake up realizing that the past five days were all just a weird dream. Except for the idea of my brother being dead. That one could stay true.

Eventually I opened my door and went inside. They had hardly cleaned since the wake. The living room was still littered with empty plastic cups and half finished sandwiches. It was clear that at one point they had tried to organize all the trash into piles, but I could see where they gave up, where they likely broke down into uncontrollable sobs.

Like I did every night before I would see my brother.

Poor, poor baby boy. Our poor baby.

In some ways, life is fair.

Mother set the dinner table, half-heartedly, while father heated something up in the microwave. Neither spoke, neither looked around at the other people in the room. So I just watched them curiously. I wondered if they had forgotten me or maybe I had become a ghost. I sat in the seat I always did when I was a little girl living at home. The seat next to my brother. Slowly, my attention faded away from my immediate surroundings and I found myself staring up at that string in my forehead. Now, the string was taut and pointing up the stairs, through the ceiling. Presumably my brother’s ashes were somewhere up there. Presumably in his old room.

Insanity, I told myself. Insanity was ok so long as I didn’t start seeing ghosts. The silk was fine, it was just enough insanity to be tolerable to me.

But the longer I stared at it, something started to take form in the corner of my eye, where my brother should have been sitting. I glanced over, feeling sweat start to bead on my brow, but the seat was empty.

It didn’t feel empty though.

I plucked my fingernails, unable to take my eyes off of the vacancy beside me. Ants crawled up out of my nerves and scattered beneath my skin. Soon I was clawing at them, kneading my fingers together and tearing the top layers off the flesh on my knuckles with my fingernails.

He’s not here, I told myself. He’s dead.

But I was still attached to him, wasn’t I?

What did that mean?

And I stared at that hole. I watched the empty space in the chair beside me, looking through the cable that attached me to that box of bone dust. The air was thicker where he should have been. I winced at it as stars danced around the space that would have made up my brother. The light throbbed in my vision and my head blared. I was certain I was going to pass out, but I pried my eyes open, unwilling to face the darkness just yet. I needed to see what was becoming of that vacuum. That hole.

I raised a trembling hand, now buzzing with invisible creatures beneath the skin. Cockroaches now, flapping their wings inside me. I reached for that void until it felt like I was touching it, until it felt like maybe there was still flesh and blood there, and maybe I was trapped in some nightmare hypnagogic state that I couldn’t escape and the reality was that my brother was alive, but I had only killed him wishfully in my mind.

“Dear,” a faraway voice said as my fingertips stroked the void.

“Sweetheart,” It was my father.

I blinked.

The light returned to its normal dull haze. And the space beside me was just space.

My brother died, is what I told myself.

Then I turned and found my mother sitting on her side of the table, glaring at me. Beside me, my father was holding a bowl of spaghetti with a concerned expression. He was barely visible through the rope that went directly through his neck and through the ceiling above him.

“Are you okay, sweetheart? How are you feeling?” he asked, gently.

I nodded and wiped sweat from my face before reaching up and taking the spaghetti from his hand.

“Fine,” I said.

Just insane.

He set a second bowl down in front of my mother and then returned to the kitchen for his own. When he arrived at the table he sat with a sigh, addressed mother and I, raising his fork.

“Eat up,” he said and began slurping up his meal.

I watched my mother eye her food, then her husband.

“Love, could you open a bottle of wine?” she asked in a way that feigned culture and wealth she didn’t actually have. How she trained herself to be like that, even in the privacy of her home. I will never understand but it made my already itchy skin crawl. I could see right through the ruse. I knew all about mom’s unstable trailer trash upbringing. She married into upper middle class security and finally got to fulfill her Cinderella dreams of playing debutante.

Dad stood and marched dutifully to the kitchen, pulling a bottle from atop the fridge.

As he mosied back to the table with three clinking glasses, mother wiped her face with her cloth napkin and looked at me with a tight lipped grin.

“So,” she started. “Were you able to get ahold of your work when you were arrested?”

Dad began pouring mother’s wine, but stopped to throw her a warning glance.

“Sweetheart,” he groaned through clenched teeth. She shooed him away and took her glass of wine.

“Uh - yeah,” I lied. “I talked to them.”

“Interesting,” mother continued. I realized where this was going and sunk into my seat. “I thought they only gave one phone call.”

I cleared my throat awkwardly and looked at my dad, who was staring down at his bowl grasping the wine bottle. He hadn’t poured for either of us yet. Then I turned back to her.

“Well, they made an exception for me.”

“Hm,” mother said, looking at her spaghetti and twirling rungs in between the tongs in her fork. Father took a deep breath, stood and walked over to my side, pouring a little wine into my glass. I thanked him with a quick smile like he was a waiter, mom should have liked that, and he returned to his seat, pouring himself a glassful that was comically larger than mother’s or mine.

I took a sip. I never understood the appeal of wine. Or beer. Isn’t the point of drinking to get drunk? Wasn’t that always my brother’s philosophy? Why should we pretend to enjoy our poison? Then again, looking at my parents, they were steeped in poison weren’t they? Of course they loved it.

My mother placed her fork down noisily with a deep breath. Her face twisted into a snarl. She turned to me, leaning across the table.

Father reached across and touched her arm but she swatted him away. I leaned back in my seat, away from her hideous expression.

“I know you don’t have a job,” she barked. “I called that little boutique you said you worked at the moment after you called us from the police department to do you a favor and inform them that you would not be at work this week and you know what they told me?”

“Sweetheart,” dad said, impotently, dropping his head into his hands.

I just stared at my mother. Why she was bringing this up now felt nothing but vindictive.

“They said you hadn’t worked there in three months. That you just stopped showing up,” she hissed. “So, tell me. Have you just been burning into your savings this whole time?”

I opened my mouth to tell her no, that I had been on unemployment for the last three months and hadn’t once even dipped into my savings. But I knew that for some reason, that answer would be worse for her to hear. I knew that to them I would just be some lazy, irresponsible leech on society. I closed my mouth and nodded.

She sneered.

“That’s great. That’s really great,” she started.

Finally, my father freed his head from his hands and dropped them down heavily on the table, not quite slamming them, but both my mother and I turned to him.

“Enough,” he said quietly.

But mom shook her head and pointed an angry, trembling finger at me.

“She has been lying to our faces for the past three months, and doing what the whole time? Getting high? Doing drugs? Getting drunk?”

No mom, that was your son doing that.

The one who drank himself into a coma and died, remember?

Not me.

I was hiding in my dumpy studio apartment, desperately trying to convince myself every morning that getting out of bed would be worth it and being proven wrong every time I tried.

I said nothing and stood.

They both turned to me, frozen in silence. Mother clenched her fork like she was ready to stab me with it. Father’s eyes drooped as if to express that he wanted all of this to end as much as I did.

I wanted to leave with a big speech, something they would remember but I couldn’t gather my words enough to even spit out a throaty “fuck you”. So I turned and marched towards the door silently.

“Get back here right now!” my mother howled.

I ignored her and walked through the dining room to the living room and placed my hand on the doorknob. I heard frantic shuffling behind me and knew they would be coming to stop me. I twisted the doorknob and pushed through the door as fast as I could out into the street. I was not fast enough. My father’s hand wrapped around my wrist and tugged me to a swift stop. I spun around, ready to read him the riot act but again, opened my mouth and found myself with nothing to say. He stared down at me, his face obscured by the silk, but I could feel his expression.

“Listen,” he said softly. “She is just upset. We all need time. Stay here with us tonight.”

“No thanks,” I said and tried to turn but his hand tightened. Something about this made my heart churn in my chest. I wanted to bite down on that soft, aging flesh.

“Please, sweetie,” he said. “We just want to make sure you’re safe.”

“I’m not crazy,” I lied. I don’t even know why I said it. Maybe it was the look in his eyes, the look saying I was a head case and they needed to wrap me up in a straight jacket. It made me want to spit in his eyes the way I spit on my brother.

“Let us take care of you,” I watched him struggle now to keep a hold of me now.

Now was my chance. I yanked my arm out of his grasp and tumbled backwards. Before he could reach out and snatch me back into his claws I spun and ran. Just as I had done the other day.

It felt all too familiar darting down that street. It’s today. It’s Yesterday. It’s tomorrow. it’s the same day over and over. It’s the same day that never ends. But running in that direction now, I couldn’t see the string that attached me to my brother. It felt liberating almost to be sane for a moment.

In my periphery I watched my surroundings. Dawson and Raena were out again tonight, watching me. Calling for me. It was as if they could sense any time anything exciting happened in my family.

I stumbled past the park and craned my neck to see if anyone had followed me. No such luck. Out onto the main drag I stumbled, wondering how many times I would have to run from my childhood home before everyone would leave me the hell alone.

I considered making my way to the crematorium again to check on the window, but realized that was probably a bad idea. My parents might have been calling the cops to have me brought back, but I bet that I could make it to my apartment before anyone spotted me. Then again, they might send someone to knock on my door.

No escape.

Just as I began thinking I was on my own, as I approached Crenshaw a car pulled up beside me. I sighed, thinking how quickly it took them to get their clutches around the local police department. I prepared a middle finger, but as I turned, I locked my hands down by my hips. It wasn’t a squad car. It was Dawson and Raena. Dawson smiled and waved. Raena just blinked at me.

“Am I being detained?” I groaned.

Dawson’s grin widened.

“You seem to be getting a lot of exercise lately,” he said. I said nothing but the comment left a bad taste in my mouth. He cleared his throat and continued. “Need a place to stay tonight?”

I shook my head, no.

Dawson frowned.

“We have an extra guest room and we don’t need to tell your parents about it,”

All I could think of was the decade of piano lessons. Always seeing them both at home like neither of them had a job but somehow maintained themselves on magic. Tonight, Raena’s gaze felt like a glare, like jealousy. I wanted nothing to do with it. She didn’t look at me like that when I was a little girl, but presumably, now that I was older, I became a threat.

I learned later I was entirely wrong about that. But in the moment it made me want to burn and run. On the other hand, my legs were exhausted and my guts were killing me. The smell of spaghetti alone wouldn’t cut it for an evening meal.

Dawson leaned out the window a little, leaving his wife in shadow. His face became somber, and something inside of me told me to prepare for a sob-story. Something to make him feel more relatable. Something to get me into the car.

“I lost my kid sister when I was 16. Leukemia,” I was right. He continued. “I had just gotten my license, just gotten my car. I disappeared for two weeks before they found me and brought me back.”

I nodded without sympathy. Though, I wondered how nice life might have been for me if I had died before turning 13. Everyone loves you when you’re sick. You have an excuse for every behavior. And the fear of death was not worse than the reality of life. My life, anyway. Maybe I would have gotten to meet Spiderman or something.

Then again, when you’re sick, no one leaves you the hell alone.

“Why are you telling me this?” I demanded, coldly.

“Because I understand the urge to run,” he said.

It worked.

Even after seeing through it, after reading the scene before it played out. It worked like a charm.

“If they call the cops you’ll have to tell them where I am,” I threatened. “And I’m sure they have at this point.”

Dawson shrugged.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” he responded.

I half expected them to drop me off right back at home. But they didn’t. I got in their backseat, feeling suffocated like it did in the back of that squad car. But the AC was on and it felt nice against my sweat drenched skin. I closed my eyes and breathed it in.

No one said anything to me at first. I appreciated that. But Dawson eventually opened his mouth.

“Where were you headed?” he asked.

“Don’t know,” I said. “Away.”

He nodded.

“I fought with my parents for years after my sister died,” he said. “It’s natural I suppose. Everyone blames everyone else, when in reality it was never anyone’s fault.”

In my case, it really was someone’s fault though. They didn’t know the inner workings of our family. Like everyone else on every cul de sac in the country, you see cardboard cutouts of people, impressions, then that’s all they ever are. I’m sure to them our family was the perfect family, the untouchable, blue-blooded Americans that people who don’t know better dream of becoming. Just images flickering on a TV screen, Images, hollow, going through the same motions and repetitions for all eternity, but there’s nothing really behind that. Nothing really but the lie of performance, which is the lie of civility.

I decided I had nothing to say to him about that. The rest of the ride was comfortably silent.

We pulled up to my neighbor’s house. Their garage door slid open, recognizing their car. I glanced around the inside for sheer curiosity’s sake. Two not-recently-used road bikes, some woodworking equipment, a few spider infested pool noodles and some crusted life jackets. All presumably from lives they hadn’t lived in a while.

The one interesting thing I spotted was hanging on the back wall of the garage.

A shotgun on a rack gleamed eagerly in the evening moonlight that snuck in from a window.

Or at least I assumed it was a shotgun. It was long, bulky and spooky looking, and to me, knower-of-nothing-gun-related it could have been a bazooka. But it felt like it should have been a shotgun.

I stared at it for a long time as they pulled me out of the car. It was a handsome mechanism. Handsome in a scary way like bears and wolves.

They guided me inside from their cold garage. Their kitchen was decorated with red chile ristras and paintings of dusty roads with one or two lonely indians making pots, or praying to whatever gods the Indians prayed to. All of their furniture had this matte, natural wood-looking finish. All of it felt familiar, but in a far-away way. Like seeing someone you swear is someone you knew in kindergarten but haven’t seen for decades. In the corner of their little living room, tucked away behind their leather couch was the old keyboard I had learned to play on. A thick layer of dust coated her surfaces and she had likely lost her plug ages ago by the looks of it. But it was still nice to see her again.

I continued to peer around, trying to discern what was there when I was a child and what was new. It was a nice distraction from the strange silvery rope coming from my head, pushing aside atoms to pull through the walls. One decoration in particular caught my eyes, as I meandered aimlessly through their home. I stumbled upon it as Raena stepped beside me and handed me a cool glass of water. I thanked her with a nod and then returned to the piece.

It was a Dream Catcher, wrapped in leather with thick plumes of feathers leaking down from the central ring. It was almost as big as me. In the sinewy netting of the middle web was a crudely carved, blocky looking spider made of turquoise. I leaned closer, mesmerized by it and saw that it had a dozen eyes of onyx in its little head.

“Spider Grandmother,” Raena’s voice cracked as she spoke, as if she hadn’t spoken in years. I turned to her. Her eyes troubled me. Like she wasn’t looking at me, but looking through me. They couldn’t focus, not on me anyway, and the expression hiding in the blacks of her pupils looked something like awe, over which she plastered a plain, placid expression. “In Hopi legend, Spider Grandmother made the worlds, and helps undercreatures up to the surface.”

“Is that what you are?” I asked. “Hopi?”

She grinned but didn’t tell me.

Something about her face unsettled me. Like she was more animal than woman.

Then she nodded, which gave me the opportunity to look away. I seized it.

“A spider made the world?” I asked.

I felt her nod.

“She’s something like Prometheus, in a way,” Raena said. “You know Prometheus?”

“Yeah,” I said.

Then Raena reached out and stroked the spider’s bumpy turquoise back, with an uncomfortable reverence. I watched her wondering if she was always this weird when she was teaching me piano. But this behavior felt disturbingly unfamiliar. Perhaps she was losing her mind and I just never recognized it until that moment. Perhaps she was seeing strings coming out of her head.

I stepped away, sipping my water. I could hear the clattering of pans and dishes as Dawson prepared something in the kitchen. I loathed the idea of being forced by the invisible gods of sociality and civility to eat whatever he was making. The last thing I wanted to do was politely accept a meal. But I needed to eat. I knew that much.

When I finally smelled the meal, my mouth began to water.

It was something spicy. Something deep fried.

My days old empty stomach growled at me with a vengeance, and the moment he stepped out with those plates full of beans and chile rellenos, all of my irritation at social norms and civility were gone.

I grew up on a generally standard diet of white girl food, ranging from spaghetti to grilled cheese to chicken nuggets. But growing up in California, I learned that my true weakness was Mexican food. And in this case, any Mexican food would be like finding the Holy Grail of dinner.

Dawson wandered over to their little four seat, square dinner table and put a plate on three of the four sides. Pulled in like a magnet, I found myself being dragged by the hips to a place setting. Choosing arbitrarily, I sat while Dawson returned to the kitchen for something else.

Raena sat directly next to me with that odd grin on her face.

“You ever had one of these?” She asked.

I nodded, but as I glanced down at them, I saw that beneath the layer of chopped chiles, the chile rellenos, rather than being fluffy and yellow, they were crispy and blue. Blue like the turquoise spider all coiled up in her web. Grandmother Spider. I frowned, but before I could ask about mold or contamination, Raena spoke, reading my mind.

“Blue corn flour,” she said. “A little hard to come by out here, but it’s everywhere in New Mexico.”

“Where you’re from?” I pried again.

She nodded to the kitchen, where Dawson was still gone.

“He is. My tribe is from North Dakota,” she said. “Standing Rock Sioux. He’s a Hopi.”

“Huh,” I responded, wanting to eat more now than ever before.

To this day, I don’t think I’ve felt hunger like that, or had the power to restrain myself from eating the way I did then. I decided to keep my mind busy. I should have known more about these people anyway. I came into their house once a week for years.

“You had the pipeline debacle, huh?” I said. “Sorry about that.”

She shook her head.

“I was in favor of it. It was destined to happen eventually. Fate’s kind of good at strong-arming all of us into her will. Why bother resisting?” The first human expression crossed her face. It was something like wistful sorrow. Something that made my stomach drop, like we might bear hug and sob onto each other’s shoulders.

I raised my eyebrows at her, though. I admit, I didn’t expect her response.

Her eyes shifted and she began to look through me again. It made me wince this time. Even though I had said nothing to her about her feelings, I felt like I had, somehow, telepathically placed my hand on hers for that moment. This felt like receiving a backhand in response.

“We don’t all think the same, you know,” she said.

I flushed and turned back down to my meal.

“Dawson was against it though,” she said with a little bit of an agitated sigh. Still, something about her every motion, her very demeanor felt inhuman. Like an alien in a human body. “We don’t agree on everything either.”

“Yeah,” I said.

The smell was tickling my nostrils, I thought I was going to smash my face into the plate and start gulping it down like a pig in slop. I restrained myself, though.

Finally, Dawson returned, clapping his hands together with a greedy smirk. He pulled open his chair and grabbed his fork and knife.

A strange thought crossed my mind. It didn’t take him long to prepare these, though generally this process would probably take more than the five or ten minutes I was in his house. That meant he must have prepared them beforehand and simply heated them up when we arrived.

He must have prepared three, even though there were only two of them in the house.

Like they knew they would be collecting me that night.

“Sherry always says that the only people who don’t love Mexican food are people who have never had it from the Southwest,” Dawson said with a kidish grin. Raena flashed him a look too fast for me to register, but my guess it was a glare. The look stripped his grin away, and he peered down at his meal, fork and knife hovering over it for a moment.

“Sherry?” I asked, knowing I probably should have let that sleeping dog lie.

Raena turned to me before Dawson could open his mouth.

“Sherry is one of Dawson’s coworkers,” she said.

At last, my time had come to put the eternal mystery to rest.

I turned to Dawson and he looked up at me with sad, sleepy eyes.

“Where do you work?” I asked.

“Right down the street,” he said and began cutting open one of his steaming chile rellenos. “The refinery. But I work from home.”

“You can do that?”

A sad look splashed across his face for a moment. He wiped it away with a forced smile.

“It’s mostly management and watching meters. Anyone can do that from anywhere.” He smirked at his wife Raena who smirked back, it felt scripted. It looked like theater to me. Just like my parents.

“So how do you interact with coworkers?” I asked, prying.

“Zoom, Skype and good, old fashioned phone calls,” he said. “They all know me as a floating head.”

“You’ve never gone to the location?” I asked.

He chuckled but it felt unnatural.

“I go a couple times a year.”

“Enough talking, let’s eat!” Raena announced and began prying into her meal.

I didn’t think to question her motivations for interrupting. I remembered how starved I was and dug in without relent.

It didn’t take long before I had a clean plate in front of me and I was leaning back in my chair groaning in pain. When I glanced over at Raena and Dawson, they were doing the same. We had all eaten like starved dogs.

Finally, after a long silence, while Dawson collected the plates, I thanked them. I thanked them for the meal, and for waiting to eat so late in the night, and for preparing a chile relleno for me. I said this because I wanted them to give me an explanation before I slept in their house. I wanted to know I wasn’t going to be murdered in my sleep and disposed of somewhere. I should have considered that before eating, but a chile relleno to a hungry girl tends to trump all logic.

“So why three chile rellenos?” I asked. “Were you expecting a guest?”

Raena frowned in the corner of my eye, but Dawson smiled at me. A genuine smile. Then he shrugged and cast an admiring gaze at his wife. I watched this, feeling like a child watching my parents when they still loved each other.

“Raena has a magnificent sixth sense,” he said. “Sometimes she can see the future.”

I turned to her frowning face.

“Why did you prepare one for me?” I asked.

She steeled herself with a long, slow sigh.

“It wasn’t for you,” she said. “We had an extra chile and was afraid if we didn’t cook it tonight, it would never get cooked.”

Ok. Not a bad excuse. But I didn’t believe her.

Still, it didn’t feel dangerous. Just curious.

When they showed me to my room I found a gray and black futon with a mossy green blanket folded atop it. There was a small TV, which is more than I ever had in my room, and a little night stand with two bottles of water sitting on it. It was like a hotel.

On the back wall behind the futon my eye caught something that didn’t sit right with me. It was a corny painting of an ancient American Indian woman with braided silver hair spinning webs in her hands. In the web I could see the cosmos spiraling between her fingertips. It was, by no means a good painting. Too digital. Too hokey. But it nevertheless made me want to sleep in a different room.

“I hope you don’t mind the size,” Dawson said, and I realized I had just been standing in the doorway staring. I forced myself to push through into the room.

“No,” I said. “It’s wonderful, really.”

“Well, we figured we’d give you some alone time, but if you need anything from us, we will oblige,” said Dawson Twin Horse.

I smiled at them from the center of the room, and they closed the door, leaving it only slightly cracked so that my room light seeped out into the hallway. I watched them walk away to be sure, then listened to hear their own room door close. It didn’t for a while, so I listened up close to the door. I heard shuffling and whispering, then a wine bottle popped. One of them shushed the other. Then they disappeared into their room and I finally heard the door close.

I wondered about that moment for a while. But it was ultimately obvious. My brother died from drinking himself to death. Offering me a drink would be in bad taste. I’m sure they discussed this before they set out to find me. Before they made me their third chile relleno.

When I finally fell asleep, it was to the sound of TV cable static. And that night I dreamed the house was full of spiders with the faces of old women. They all spoke at the same time and never said the same thing. For the most part their words were indiscernible. But they wanted to talk to me. It wasn’t frightening then. It all happened in that odd dream space, where everything nonsensical just simply makes sense. It wasn’t frightening until I could pluck out one of the phrases these spider women were saying to me. And moments after I heard her speak I woke up, gasping to catch my breath.

The old woman stared at me, like the rest did, her gray brow pinching her eyes into black slivers with sparkles of glowing turquoise, her cheek lines cut deep into her face and jowls. She appeared sweet, even charming to me, but her words were venom. Venom echoed from another real life nightmare.

The Feast of Spirits is soon upon you, sweet child.

Then words my brother had said long ago, when I was barely fifteen as he loomed over my petrified, quaking body.

Don’t be afraid, your pain is more meaningful than you think