The Cucuy

It was midnight. Everyone was asleep in the three bedroom housing unit of the Penumbras Projects. I had the top bunk-bed where I could look out the window to the comings and goings of the graveyard shift workers. I had tried to sleep, but the snoring from the bunkbed underneath mine kept me up. I knew I wasn’t going to get any sleep tonight, so I sneaked out the window and sought out my companions for a late night trek. There was Willo, the youngest of the three at fifteen years of age, Andre, who just turned sixteen, and BB, the oldest at seventeen. BB was short for Bob Blake. We gathered when the Shadows, as we fondly called the projects, were at their darkest. At midnight, police and gang member alike feared the projects; they feared running into old ghosts, victims of the bullet and blade, the trail left by a blood-feud between the hoods. We wore our dark clothing to blend in with the Shadows under the new moon tonight.

When I got to BB’s unit, Willo and Andre were already there. BB was playing some Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company softly on the stereo. The clicks and pops of the vinyl crackled over the hiss of the worn out record. BB loved his Janis. The wall over the stereo was covered with family pictures. There were baby pictures of BB at age eight or nine with his mom and a guy in a Marine outfit. Since he never mentioned or discussed his dad, I assumed that’s who the soldier in the picture was.

Suddenly, the stench of death entered the room. Even though the factories were miles away, the smell of cows and pigs being slaughtered wafted into the projects late at night. BB’s mom worked the late shift at some meat packing factory on the southside of Downtown. I closed the door and sat on the sofa by Andre.

BB passed me a Michelob. I twisted off the cap and tossed it on the coffee table with the Soldier of Fortune magazines. He loved those mags and often bought handguns from their catalog, using his mother’s credit card. Since he paid the bills for his mom, she never knew about the guns in his room. It’s safe to say that I felt safe at BB’s place. He had no dad or siblings to worry about and his mom wouldn’t be home till morning. It was the one bright spot in the projects that even the darkest of nights could not touch.

Once we got a good buzz going, we chipped in to replace the beer that belonged to BB’s mom and turned the conversation to topics worthy of the night.

Willo started, “Oldies but Goodies kick Rock and Roll’s ass.”

BB shot back, “Fuck your oldies. Janis rules. Hendrix is god. Zeppelin is bigger than all the oldies put together.”

Andre added, “Zeppelin! Sabbath! Blue Cheer!”

I nodded my head and said, “Fuck that shit. What’s your favorite monster movie?”

Willo raised his hand.

“Just say it, stupid,” I said loudly. “You don’t have to raise your hand. This isn’t school.”

Willo used his raised hand to throw me the middle finger before lowering it. Then he said, “Frankenstein.”

Andre laughed, “Compared to Blood Feast, Frankenstein’s a pussy.”

BB shook his head, “That’s not a monster movie.”

“Kinda,” I said. “He puts that girl together from dead body parts, like Frankenstein. I say it’s monster.”

“What do you know?” BB scolded me. “Godzilla’s a monster. None of this dead body crap counts. Night of the Living Dead ain’t monster.”

“What about ghosts?” asked Willo. “Are they monsters?”

“Depends on what you consider a ghost,” I offered.

“Ghosts,” Andre explained, “are the spirits of people that die. It’s like the soul leaving the body and floating around the earth until God takes it up to Heaven or sends it down to Hell with the Devil. They usually hang around their old neighborhoods and watch what their old friends and family are up to. If the ghost scares someone on purpose, then the Devil gets to have its soul, but if it does a good deed, then God takes him to Heaven.”

“You’re drunk,” I said sharply.

“No way, man,” Andre said defensively, “it’s in the bible.”

“What bible you been reading?” spat Willo. “But that’s kinda right. A ghost is a dead person’s soul, but it doesn’t do good or bad deeds. Only an idiot would believe something like that. Ghosts can’t tell the difference between good and bad. God decides that stuff. There is a place called Limbo, where the new souls hang out until they are called to Heaven or Hell. It’s like a big waiting room. But Limbo is not on Earth, that’s for sure. The ghosts that are on Earth cannot find Limbo. They’re confused and think they’re still alive; they don’t know where to go, so they go around acting like they’re still alive. I think they’re like poltergeists or something like that.”

BB exploded in anger and stood to speak, “You guys are full of shit. “Ghosts aren’t anything but projections of ourselves, our memories, the residue of life-particles left in space over a period of time. It’s like when you have a clock on your dresser for a long time and one day someone moved it, but you see it for a moment like it’s still there. You see the residue of its former presence. The image is the ghost of the clock.”

“And you say I’m drunk,” Andre said, shaking his head.

BB continued, “I once read that people who saw ghosts always said the same thing, that the ghost was only visible at the periphery of your eyes, but when you looked at it square on, it vanished. The same thing happens when people live in a house a real long time. They leave particles of themselves behind. The longer they lived there, the more particles that are left behind. It never leaves enough particles to be looked at straight on. It evaporates. That’s why you can only see it at the corners of your eyes. Years after the people move out of a house, the new tenants begin to see the old tenants walking around the house at the periphery. They’re washing dishes or watching TV or just sitting around the spot where they always sat. The old tenants aren’t dead. They just moved somewhere else. It’s their residue in the house. But if they died, it’s the same thing. It’s just residue. No God. No soul. No Heaven or Hell. Just people who left their image behind.”

After he finished speaking, BB looked at each of us, anxious for one of us to disagree with him. Cautiously, I spoke up, “I don’t believe in myths, whether it’s Odin, God, or Superman. When a person’s dead, that’s it; they’re dead. The mind and the brain are the same thing. They both die at the same time. It’s chemical death. The body and the spirit are the same thing. When life is over, they all rot equally. There are no ghosts of people, or of rocks, or of trees. Superstitious people made up the bogeyman, the cucuy, to scare kids who wouldn’t go to sleep. We’re not kids anymore. There is no cucuy.”

The Janis Joplin record had finished, and the phonograph needle slid across the record label screechingly. Rather than turn the record over and play the other side, BB turned off the player and returned to the conversation with a seriousness that I had never seen on his face before tonight. “Go on,” he told me.

“Alright,” I agreed. “No spirits like religions teach. There are just too many religious points of view of what ghosts are, you can’t just pick one and say that’s the right one. If you want to believe that we have a soul, like Willo and Andre say, that’s cool, but I say we’re just live meat getting ready to be dead meat. The chemicals and electrical impulses stop churning. It’s over. You’re dead. You’re not handed a harp as your spirits ascends your corpse like in the cartoons. Maggot time, bro. Not even residue. Nothing.”

Willo shook his head disapprovingly. “You’re going straight to Hell for talking like that.”

Andre nodded in agreement. They were both joking, of course, but they were taught by the priests to fear God more than love him, so there was some particle of belief in their jest.

“I know one thing,” Andre said, “if I ran into a ghost, I wouldn’t care if it were a lost soul, a residue being, or a figment of my imagination. I’d run the shit outta there.”

“That’s for sure,” Willo agreed.

BB shook his head and asked, “Why run? Residue can’t hurt you anymore than a memory can.”

“You’re wrong,” Willo added. “Some ghosts can hurt you, and the ones that do turn into demons in Hell.”

“That’s fairy tale crap,” I argued.

“You’re going to Hell,” Willo said with mock seriousness, “and I won’t be able to visit you while I’m in Heaven, so you better behave.”

BB, however, fended off the humorous direction the conversation was taking. “When you die, I’ll still see you guys sitting in this room because you’ve done it so many times you’ve left enough residue to create an image of yourselves. You will be sitting there by the door like you always do.Andre, you’ll be there between the speakers so you can hear the stereo effect of the music. And Willo will be at the refrigerator looking for something to munchie.”

“I know when I’m being criticized,” Willo tried to joke.

“There’s only one way to settle this argument,” Andre cut in. “There’s an empty unit a few rows down from my place where moaning and groaning can be heard at night. I overheard the maintenance men telling my mom about the noises. They said that a few nights after the old tenants moved out, the noises started coming from the place at night. Some of the neighbors complained about it, but the guy that they sent to investigate says that there weren’t any noises. Why don’t we go over there right now and see if we can find out what it is. Maybe we’ll find the residue of the old tenants or the ghost of some dead gang banger, or maybe nothing at all.”

We all agreed to go. We finished the beer and headed for the haunted unit of the Shadows.

#

The Penumbras Housing Projects were at one time an army barracks, according to local legend. No one ever confirmed or denied this, but the layout of the projects themselves pretty much told the whole story. Each complex contained four units, each unit had four rentals with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen and a living room. Four complexes created an unconnected square shape, and long rows of these semi-squares stretched across each block. The projects consisted of four blocks in the form of another square. To the north was Birch Road, to the south Maiklyn Avevue, the main street that the buses traveled, with Barbosa Street to the east and Mine Road to the west. On each block there was a long cement walkway dividing the complexes into two rows. The southeast block had the Mary Maiklyn Elementary School, named for a neighborhood nurse who served and died in World War Two. The southwest block contained the Barbosa Bridge Park. The northwest block had the administration building where tenants paid the rent, and the northeast block housed the maintenance building and the town meeting hall. It was by the maintenance building where we were headed, to the unit with the moans and groans.

Tonight, for the first time since we started hanging around at midnight, we were leaving our block to visit another. We may as well have been heading for another planet as we drunkenly crossed the streets into territory unknown.

BB was the only one who carried a gun. He offered us a gun each, but we refused. Andre said that a bullet can’t kill a ghost. BB retorted, “It’s not ghosts I’m worried about when we step off our turf. Willo nodded in agreement. But we did agree to carry some sort of weapon. Willo carried a steak knife from BB’s kitchen. BB warned him not to lose it or his mom would kill both of them. Andre had a crow-bar slung over his shoulder. I warned him that he’d probably need a tetanus shot with that rusty piece of metal. He said it was better than the short toilet pipe with a nail sticking out of one end that I was carrying. I considered the weapon for a throw and run encounter than for face to face combat since we’d experienced more of the former than the latter on our midnight treks.

When we reached the haunted unit in question, we assigned Andre to the look-out post, which he was glad to accept since he didn’t want to be the first one to enter the place. He was still under the impression that an evil spirit bucking for a demon’s role in Hell was waiting behind the wooden planks that boarded up the windows. He wholeheartedly believed that the odds were against us meeting a good spirit because only bad people died in the projects. Forget that innocent bystander crap. If you were in the line of fire, you were up to no good, he reasoned.

To get into the unit, we had to remove the boards the maintenance men nailed over the windows to keep young punks like us out. Not tonight.

It took BB a couple of minutes to remove the two planks to the rear bedroom window, using Andre’s crowbar. He seemed very anxious to get inside and find his residue beings. I tiptoed and peered through the window into the darkened room, and seeing nothing, pushed open the window. With Andre bringing up the rear, we entered the unit.

Once inside, Willo struck a wooden match and held it up. The room lit up. I blew out the flame and admonished him, “What if someone sees the light. Wait for your eyes to adjust to the dark. Just wait, like at the movies.”

After a few minutes, we could see the room was filled with painters’ equipment: paint cans, brushes and rollers, a small scaffold, and rolled up tarps covered with droplets of white paint. Half of the room had been freshly painted; the other half still had the old paint yellowed by cigarette smoke and nicotine.

“Now what do we do?” I asked, not wanting to take the leadership role.

“We wait for the moaning to start,” BB said matter of factly, “and then we follow it to its source. Simple”

“But what if ghosts are invisible?” Willo asked. “Have you ever thought of that? There might be one here right now in front of us and we don’t even see it.”

“We’d probably here it,” I said.

“Or smell it,” suggested Andre.

“Maybe we should just go home,” Willo sighed, probably feeling the buzz of beer wearing off. “Maybe we’re just wasting our ti—“

“No way,” BB interrupted. “We’re staying until the moaning starts. Then I can prove to you that ghosts are nothing more than the residue of living people. The people who lived here before lived here a long time. They must have left enough residue for us to see them.”

“Maybe enough to hear something,” I said. “Concentrate on the periphery. If they did leave some trace, we should be able to see them at the corners of our eyes.”

“Right,” agreed BB. “Concentrate on the corners of your eyes.”

Andre and Willo made cross-eyes and giggled till BB shushed them. I participated with some reluctance. I figured that if I didn’t try to see a ghost, I wouldn’t see one. But deep inside I kind of hoped that I would see something. BB, on the other hand, truly expected to see one. There was not a single trace of doubt on his face, which was tense with concentration.

“I’m starting to get a headache,” joked Willo.

No one laughed.

Suddenly a flash lit up the room for a split second, and we saw ourselves standing there bug-eyed like frogs, smiling at ourselves self-consciously. Then the darkness returned.

“Maybe it’s a residue being,” Willo mocked BB.

“Shh,” I hushed him. “There’s someone outside.”

Something at the window cast a shadow against the tarps on the floor. Then there were voices, low and whispery sounds that vanished into the gust of wind that pushed its way into the open window. We shivered but remained still. Again the voices outside sounded, this time low and rapid, then loud and forceful. I couldn’t make out the exact words, but I thought it was a good time for us to move to another room, away from the view from the windows. We edged along the wall and slipped quietly into the long hallway where the voices were acoustically louder and clearer.

Outside two people were in a heated discussion. “There’s no one in there, babe. Some stoners must’ve took off the boards just to look inside to see if there was anything to steal. But I checked inside with my flashlight and all my equipment and paint are still there. You know how expensive that white paint is. If someone did break in, they would’ve stole a few cans of the white stuff for sure. Now come on, girl, let’s go inside. I got the key again to get in, and our sleeping bag should be just where we left it last night in the front room.”

“Okay,” agreed the girl, “but first make sure and check again.”

The older guy searched the room with the paint cans with the flashlight until the girl was satisfied that the room was empty. Then we heard the boards being nailed back in place. We were trapped inside.

Seconds later, the front door creaked open and slammed closed. The clack of the bolt slid shut, locking the door. BB pulled the gun from his waist as we gripped our weapons, expecting to be confronted by the couple. The sleeping bag’s zipper chirped open and the girl giggled.

Then the moaning started. There were a series of grunts, a rhythmic thumping, more giggles, and the sound the cross between a siren and a brat’s whining. “You know what they’re doing?” Willo asked innocently, although we all knew the answer. The old dude was forking the teenaged girl.

We tip-toed back into the paint room.

“We should sneak out now while they’re busy. They won’t notice us,” Andre suggested.

“Sure,” I whispered sarcastically. “How could four guys walking by bother a screwing couple?!”

Willo grinned his most mischievous grin and said, “Why don’t we just scare them out of here?”

“How?” BB asked.

“Like this,” he said, quietly prying open a paint can with the steak knife and brushing a coat of white paint on his face. “We’ll pretend to be cucuys.”

We slopped on the paint until we each covered enough of our face to pass for a ghost. We used the tarp to cover ourselves so that only our ghostly faces were showing. We looked each other over and nodded in approval. We slid our weapons under our belts and walked into the front room where the moaning had reached its highest levels. We had to be quick.

“Ooooo, ooooo, ooooo” we chorused, one hand holding up the tarp, our faces bearing expressions as scary as our limited imaginations could come up with. And there they were. Naked and coupled. And they knew we weren’t ghosts.

“Fucken punks,” the old guy screamed as he rushed us with his boner still glistening in the weak light in the room. “That’s my fucken paint.”

He rammed us and we fell together bundled in the tarp. BB’s gun fell away. The naked guy picked it up and ordered us to stay down and not to move. He rushed on his pants, released the safety on the gun and aimed it at us.

“Get up,” he growled. “You broke in to steal my stuff. I saw you and followed you in. You attacked me and I shot you. I’ve worked here for over ten years. They’ll believe me. Your stupid punks. Who’s going to believe you?”

Then he laughed. “What am I saying? You’ll be dead. Who’s going to believe dead thieves? Get up!”

He told the girl to leave, that he didn’t want her to see him do what he had to do. The tarp slid off our shoulders and we stood there like stupid cows waiting to be butchered, our weapons useless in our hands. “Perfect,” he said. “You attacked me with those toys. Idiots. You think you can fuck me up? Do you?”

We nodded no. Willo started to weep. Andre looked down in shame. BB was staring at the gun. I followed his line of vision. He was looking at some writing on the side of the gun: HELL FROM ABOVE, it read. The girl dressed quickly, unlocked the door, and opened it to leave.

“Which of you wants it first?” the old dude asked us in all seriousness.

Then the girl gasped.

In the doorway stood a guy in a Marine outfit. It was the guy from the picture on BB’s wall of photos.

The girl screamed and ran past him.

The painter turned to face the soldier. “Benny? I thought you were in Nam.”

“That’s my gun. That’s my brother. You still a child-molester, Eddie?” the Marine asked with a stern accusation that sounded more like a threat than a warning.

Eddie aimed the gun at the soldier. “You got no right to be here. I know about you. All the gang knows about you.” He leveled the gun at the sharply dressed military man who walked toward him. His gun hand shook. Then he pissed himself. And then he fired the gun. We heard the sound of a rock hitting a side of beef.

The soldier smiled. “With my own gun, Eddie?”

He fired again and again. He ran out of bullets just as Benny reached him and removed the gun from his hand. He passed his other hand into the painter’s chest and twisted his wrist about, as if he were fishing for something. Eddie’s head bobbled like a broken toy. Then Benny found what he was looking for. Eddie dropped to the floor, his face frozen in fear and death.

“Bobby,” Benny said to BB, “you have to be good people. Mom needs you now. I’ll see you later at home. Take my gun.” Then he walked out the door.

I walked quickly to the doorway. There was no one outside. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I said. And we did just that.

#

We washed off the paint from our faces with warm water from the hose in BB’s backyard. Most of the stiff, dry paint came off easily, but a few flecks stuck in our hair. We tried combing them out but quit after painfully yanking out small clumps of hair. BB sat off to one side of us, silent and sad. Willo made a few attempts at making fun of the painter and his girlfriend, who didn’t even bother to cover up her tits while we were threatened, but no one cared to pursue the topic. It didn’t seem like the time for joking about what just happened. So we simply stopped talking for a while and let the whole thing sink in.

Minutes later, Andre said to BB, “I thought you were an only child. I didn’t know you had a brother.”

“His real name was Benjamin. He used to take a lot of acid and mushrooms, so everyone in his unit called him “Peyote’.”

“Used to?” I asked.

“Yeah. He died in Viet Nam about a year ago of an overdose. It was before I knew you guys. Anyway, you guys are like brothers to me now.”

“But I saw him. We saw him,” said Andre. There were tears in his eyes. “He saved us. He said you’ll see him at home.”

“And I will,” BB agreed. “so I guess I’d better head home. See you.”

“Yeah, see you tomorrow, BB,” Andre said. It was doubtful that BB heard him since he went inside his house so fast.

#

As I walked home, I thought about the words, HELL FROM ABOVE. I thought about how the police would ignore the painter’s death. Just another dead homeboy in the projects. I sneaked back into my bedroom through the open window and undressed for bed. I slipped between the covers. The snoring returned from the bunk under mine. I looked down at the empty bunk-bed and listened to the steady snores coming from the pillow area. “Goodnight, you residue being,” I whispered, choking back a sob. As I turned down my eyelids and drifted off to sleep, a final thought nudged me: ‘Just another dead homeboy in the projects’.

 

Funereal Plots

Horror Cinema reviews

Matthew M. Bartlett

Shelby Oaks

Writer/Director: Chris Stuckmann


Horror movie junkies like me have different moods that dictate what we want to watch. Sometimes you’re in the mood for a faux-documentary. Found footage hasn’t yet worn out its welcome, apparently, so, sure, one of those can be fun every so often. Sometimes a missing person yarn is just what the horror-doctor ordered. Sometimes you want to watch a group of ghost hunters get picked off one by one. Other times you want a tale about a demon wreaking red-eyed havoc. Or, one of my favorites, a movie about occult rituals. Ooh, sometimes a ghost-town story is good. Or what about an abandoned amusement park? Spooky! Rarely, but sometimes, you might even want a prison-horror piece.

Shelby Oaks wants to be the movie for all of these moods, and instead is overstuffed, like a turkey bursting at the seams with a variety of different, incompatible kinds of stuffing.

The faux-doc premise, in which a woman named Mia Brennan (Camille Sullivan) is interviewed about her missing sister Riley (Sarah Durn), part of a group of ghost-hunters with a popular YouTube show called Paranormal Paranoids, is unceremoniously abandoned after the late-arriving opening credits. Maybe a good move, because in this day of a proliferation—maybe even a glut—of documentaries and documentary series, it doesn’t take a keen eye to pick out the wrong kind of acting. By which I mean dramatic “movie” acting when the scene calls for naturalistic acting that might easily be mistaken for a real person uncomfortable in front of a camera. If you like the documentary aspect, worry not, for it reappears for maybe one full minute somewhere in the last third of the movie.

Anyway, a fella shows up at Mia’s door, says “She finally let me go,” and shoots himself in the head. He has a tape with him to augment what we’ve already seen Mia look at in the Paranormal Paranoids footage, this one showing the killing of the co-hosts. It transpires that the man is a former prisoner, Mia does some research at the library using, I think, microfiche (throwback!) and then finds a book about occult rituals which the filmmakers purport will provide the necessary information to help us figure out what exactly is going on. Upon going to the abandoned town of Shelby Oaks to investigate, Mia finds a house in the woods in which a creepy old lady named Norma lives.

Bingo! Mia unadvisedly descends into a basement labyrinth in which she finds the disheveled Riley…with a baby. Norma, the mother of the suicided prison inmate, intervenes in the rescue attempt and performs a quick ritual with the baby. The demon Tarion, whose name was in the prison cell and in the occult book, makes a cameo appearance. Mia brings her sister home and, despite her muteness and odd affects, leaves Riley alone with the baby, and Riley tries her hand at infanticide.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. Shelby Oaks isn’t necessarily awful all around, it’s just too reminiscent of a hundred other movies. The performances are adequate and the screenplay does the heavy lifting. Let’s just add that there are hell hounds, in case you’re in the mood for hell hounds on top of everything else, and leave it at that.

 

Syndromes & Delusions: 
From Real Pain to False Memory

Compiled & Narrated 

by Anthony Servante
& Priest Bobue Horaguchi

Being replaced by duplicates

Introduction:

What I have is called "Disassociative Amnesia". There is no brain damage caused by physical trauma, but because of a psychological trauma, my short-term and long-term memory play tricks on me. Between my vivid dreams, my childhood and young adult memories, and the experiences that are being formed in my head as they happen, I'm pretty damned confused about what came first, what happened before, and what just happened. Case in point: That lengthy article about my clinical death and floating in the operating room. It seems to have happened yesterday, but it happened when I was 13 years old. I turning 56 this year.

The meds my Shrink gives me keep me in the present moment, which is quite honestly, fucking boring. She tried to get me on antidepressant pills, but I took her advice personally and told her that I wasn't depressed. She tried to explain that that's what the pills are called, but that's not what they work on; they control the wandering mind, the fluttering memories that crash into one another. I tried to explain that a good strong cup of coffee keeps me grounded in the present, so all I really need is something to keep the frazzled nerves of being wired all day in check. Thus, she prescribed Xanax, an anti-anxiety med; it prevents my frail nerve ending from triggering an anxiety attack, you know, like when the air-conditioning on the public bus goes on and you think your core body temperature is dropping, so you must me dying. Yeah, that. Without anxiety, such thoughts as "Am I dying?", "Is this a heart-attack?", "Is that trio of thugs going to kill me?", and other paranoid triggers, don't have any response. With Alprazolam, the answer is always "No" to any paranoid question. I guess with anti-depressants, the answer is always, "Who cares?!"

But enough about me.

Update 11B was all about me and the long-winded analysis about why there's always two sides to the same memory. Which I've been giving a lot of thought to given the fact that my iphone has become my back-up brain, my memory retrieval. What was the name of that movie? Google it. What was the name of that barista at the Starbucks. Check your iphone notepad. What song are these the lyrics to? Search them on YouTube. That's how I remember things now. But the Shrink promises me that once the anxiety and paranoia stop triggering my reliance on my back-up brain the iphone, my memories should return normally. I need to access a normal memory to string together a series of memories, the way one remembers the annual seasons of your favorite basketball team: When you can remember one season, the following season falls into place, creating a string of memories. This string is what is strengthened by recalling the seasons rather than any one player and his individual statistics; the stats will become part of the string as one remembers more and more. That is, remembering without the iphone Google search, which atrophies the brain function of remembering. Anyway, that's the plan. That's MY therapy. Taking happy pills, noting the events in my community (the weather, the homeless, the butterflies, the deaths of our hill animals and birds), and talking with people about the old days of our little town. Connecting the past, present, and predicting the future strengthens the string of the history of my city. It's the base of my memory for the time before I moved in here and what has happened since.

Just as I have my trauma and therapy, so do all the volunteers who share theirs with us here on the blog.


Syndromes & Delutions:

Before I turn the column over to the volunteers who have shared THEIR therapy with this blog, I thought I'd go over the main conditions that trauma creates in the troubled mind. For me it's "disassociative amnesia". I can't distinguish things that just happened from things that happened a long time ago (plus, I confuse dreams and books and movies with the plot of my own life as well). Here's a look at other disorders.

1. Thought Insertion--The feeling that one's own thoughts have been inserted by outside forces and that these memories are not of one's own making.

2. Erotomania--The delusion that a stranger is in love with you. The most publicized cases involve people believing famous celebrities are in love with them, but anyone can suffer from this delusion.

3. Capgras Syndrome--The belief that one's friends, coworkers, and family have been replaced by duplicates or actors.

4. Fregoli Delusion--Like Capgras, Fregoli syndrome holds that one's friends, coworkers, and family are in fact one person, changing disguises to pass themselves off as many people.

5. Intermetamorphisis--Often called "reverrse Capgras", this syndrome holds the belief to trauma sufferers that friends, coworkers, and family are in the process of changing facial features and personality traits, often right in front of the sufferer; many times these morphing people have no faces as they are in the process of changing to another face. One cannot distinguish facial features; instead, they see blank faces.

6. Syndrome of Subjective Doubles--The belief that a doppelganger, an exact duplicate of the sufferer, exists somewhere living a parallel  life; they may or may not have similar character traits to the sufferer. Often they feel that they may be living the doppelganger's life by mistake or that the doppelganger has moved into the sufferer's life while they're at work.

7. Reduplicate Paramnesia--The belief that an entire town, city, or neighborhood has been duplicated and replaced with one's own place of residence. If one travels to New York, say, one believes that they are still at home in Los Angeles, that their neighborhood has been changed just enough to seem different.

8. Truman Show Delusion--The belief that all public surveillance cameras are following only the sufferer, that they exist only for them.

9. Cotard's Syndrome (lycanthrophy or birds)--The delusion one believes that one is dead, and that their organs have been harvested and they are in fact empty vessels. Ironically, given the fact that they are dead, they also believe that they are changing into another form, a bird, a small rodent, or even a werewolf.

10. Ekbom's Syndrome (contagious)--The belief that one is covered with bugs that one cannot see; symptoms include scratching one's skin sore, washing clothes and bedsheets constantly, and trying to keep bugs out of the home. This is the only syndrome that is contagious to nondelusional people close to the sufferer.

11. Disassociative Amnesia--Taken as discussed. 


Trauma Patients

Foreword & Summaries by Priest Bobue Horaguchi:

Thank you, Professor Anthony Servante, for providing me with the list of syndromes and delusions that would precede the patient updates. I am quite confident that these descriptions will help readers to better understand the symptoms that trauma sufferers display during their daily lives, symptoms that are certainly taken for granted by the general community who are unaware of the mental conditions that our patients endure and the effect that they have on family and neighborhood. Too often have I been told by parishioners that these "sick" people should not be allowed in my temple, or that they should have a separate service; they worry about how their behavior will influence the children. Well, I can most certainly assure any concerned parishioner that the effects of trauma are not contagious or dangerous, and that Temple, Church, Synagogue, or Mosque, is the best place for our patients to be in their time of mental turmoil or doubts. 

It is never my intent to segregate the sick from the healthy, be it mental or physical, and I would no more turn away anyone with cancer just because a parishioner felt uncomfortable or believed their children would be frightened by the patient's appearance. I cannot say with absolute certainty that we are all equal in the eyes of the Almighty, be it Buddha or Christ, and I do recommend that anyone with the flu or extreme depression spend the day with a loved one at home lest he cause undue stress to the parish, but only in matters where it is best for all that any disease be kept at bay. 

With that in mind, allow me to update your readers on the latest developments with the patients who have volunteered to share their trauma and therapy with your readers. As always, bless you, Professor for giving the traumatized sufferer a voice and a platform to use it. 


Summaries: 

Ms. M lost her job with the bus company after the small city busline where she worked was taken over by San Gabriel Valley busline; she refused the cut in pay to drive for the SG Foothill line. Although she has lost her faith, she finds comfort with the parish on Fridays and Sundays. She attends Paint Therapy after services on Sunday. She draws ocean vistas and often depicts dolphins along the choppy water of the shoreline talking to her. She refused Dream Therapy as she claimed that the creatures in her nightmares did not like being talked about. Her accounts were noted in her file, but her dream log was returned to her. 

Ms. E started Sunday services as community service for shoplifting. She attends Paint Therapy also, in addition to Dream Therapy. She was suspended from her job when the store manager noted that she worked with the Sheriff's office as a Community Safety Representative. Since she pocketed only packets of cough drops and aspirin, the manager didn't pursue charges and turned the matter over to her superior. She is serving three months community service at the temple and can return to her job only after completing her therapy. She insists that someone placed the cough drops in her jacket pocket and often finds items in all her pockets when she gets home, but does not remember putting them there. Her paintings depict her Siamese Twin with handfuls of cigarettes and lighters--other items that she has found later in her pockets.

Mr. S was in an car accident and fears driving. His partner does the driving now, but the patient feels that his partner will one day deliberately drive the car into oncoming traffic to teach him a lesson. Since his job requires driving, Mr. S now attends community service at the temple on Fridays. He comes to Paint Therapy on Sundays. He refuses any other forms of therapy. He insists that his driving is in control. But his partner reported that he always turns on the windshield wipers for no reason, though he insists that bird poop is all over the glass. He suffers manic depression and has been referred to a Psychiatrist, but he says he's only there for the community service classes. He paints his partner over and over in different suits. He says the ones in the black suits do the driving. The blue suits are the passengers. All the drawings have blue suits.

Mr. W completed his Dream and Paint Therapy but refused to return to work, though his community service was completed. He demanded the return of all his drawings, but I had to take photos to keep for his records to show his finished his therapy and three months of CS. The drawings depicting Mr. W being followed by clouds. Then he said they were jets. He dreamed often of flying in jets above the clouds, but then denied it. He was almost relieved to be done with his CS and did not return even for temple services. It was rumored that Mr. W committed suicide, though this has not been confirmed. He spoke often of returning to his home country to be with his sick father. As of today, we have no further word on Mr. W.

Mr. D communicates by email. I forward the email to Prof. Servante. He last wrote about writing a book about the causes of his trauma but was having trouble finding a publisher or volunteers to interview. That's when I put him in contact with the professor.

Mr.M attended two months worth of Dream Therapy but began showing up drunk. He was referred to the local AA. He has since been rehired by his former employer. He asked that we minimize sharing his story with the blog until he is settled into his job. We will respect his wishes.

Ms. E suffered a schizophrenic break during her Paint Therapy sessions. She is now under the care of a County Psychiatrist. Last we heard, she was taking her medications and doing well.

Ms. B avoids crowds. She was referred to a County facility. Only her close friends and family visit with her, though we heard that she limits her communication to nods and smiles. She sleeps up to fourteen hours a day and drinks vitamin juices rather than eat solid food. A nurse attends on her once a week.

Ms. S assists me with the therapy five days a week as a means of her own therapy. The other two days, she does Paint Therapy and attends multiple services. Once shy, she is now very talkative. Originally, I thought she was proselytizing, but found out later she just likes talking about Buddha very much. She always asks me questions about reincarnation and is fixated that death may be permanent. Her drawings are of Buddhist gods and demons.

Ms. N does not hide her anger, frustration, and anxiety very well, but she tries. She tries every therapy, attends services here at the temple, and sees a County psychiatrist. She has begun writing to Prof. Servante of late about possible breakthroughs in her memory, information she will not share with me.

An Email from Ms. N to me here at the blog:
To Anthony Servante
You haven't responded to my last email, but I saw my email on your blog. I guess that's a start. Therapy is so limited in what it can do. It gives you a name for what you have, as if that is a cure. What if the disease doesn't have a name, even if you give it one? How will that help? We come up with names for unexplainable or unnameable things. The word "thing" itself raises the question of why it doesn't have a name, other than "thing", and what is to be explained by replacing a nonexistent object or concept with the name "thing" as if that is an answer to a unasked question. Other names like ghost, god, supernatural, demon, also perform this function. Such names beg the question that if the word exists, the object of the word must exist as well. But just because the paranoid man may believe he is being followed doesn't mean he isn't being followed. The therapist must leave room for doubt when giving a name to the syndrome or delusion suffered by the trauma patient. As creepy as some of these delusions may seem, just because one believes that there exists an alternate reality doesn't mean our reality is not someone else's false belief.

I will continue to send you emails. Please respond. 
Thank you.

P.S. There is a cure. 

Update: I have contacted Ms. N by email and we exchanged phone numbers. It turns out we know each other from Facebook (small world). 
Anthony Servante


Thank you, readers, for following the Trauma & Therapy series. Next time out, I hope to turn to Music Therapy and Crafts Therapy. We will continue to post updates from Priest Horaguchi and emails from others who contact me directly. 

 

Hide and Seek

Summer had finally arrived and we were glad to be through with the fourth grade and headed for the fifth. With school out for three months, playtime was in again, and there was nothing we enjoyed more than a good old game of hide and seek.

Our small group of players included the Mojave twins, Beanie and Stevie, me and Catch-up, who was being kept back in the third grade again. He said that someday he would catch up to us in grade and ever since he said it we have called him “Catch-up.” He grew so fond of the name that whenever we couldn’t find him and had to yell, ALL YE ALL YE EXTRA ALL GO FREE, he would yell back, ‘Catch-up free,’ instead of using his real name, which was Ernesto.

Catch-up was a pro a hide and seek. We must have called him free in every game he ever played with us since he first moved into the neighborhood two years ago. Whenever he was called home free, he would always pop up out of nowhere. Now you don’t see him, now you do. It was spooky. He was either the best player in the neighborhood or he was cheating us. That day when school let out, I came to the conclusion that he had to be cheating. There was no other explanation. I refused to waste my whole summer playing hide and seek with someone who was cheating. There was no other explanation. We never found him or his hiding places so he had to be using other ways to win every time. The time came to kick Catch-up out of our group of players. We could still play with only three of us. We didn’t need four players, especially when one was a cheater.

The next day I met with the Mojave twins to discuss the matter of kicking Catch-up out of the group. We held the meeting at my house since my Dad was at work and my Mom didn’t speak English and wouldn’t know what we were talking about. I really didn’t want her to know that we were about to kick Catch-up out of our group. She liked little Ernesto, as she referred to him in Spanish, and I doubt she would have approved of our move against him.

“He has to be cheating. How come we never find him?” I asked the twins.

“Maybe he’s just a good player,” Beanie suggested, trying to defend him. “Just ‘cause we can’t find him doesn’t mean he’s cheating. We almost found him once. Remember?”

“I remember that night,” Stevie beamed as if it were a day of legend or something short of a miracle. “His mother called him in ‘cause it started to rain and he didn’t have his jacket on. We were getting ready to yell ALL YE ALL YE EXTRA when he came out of nowhere. He just appeared right behind us. All we had to do was turn around and we would’ve caught him. We almost did catch him that night.”

“Yeah, almost,” Beanie sighed, and the memory brought a smile to his face.

“Well ‘almost’ don’t count,” I whined. “You either find him or you don’t. And we didn’t. We didn’t see where he was hiding. For all we know he might have been following us around. Maybe he didn’t even have a hiding place. That’s against the rules, isn’t it?”

“I never heard of that rule,” Stevie protested modestly.

“Maybe he was hiding inside that apartment that was behind us. The rules say that no one can use the insides of houses to hide or go across the street to hide—only the outsides on this block can be used as hiding places. You guys remember those rules, don’t you? We’re the ones who made them up way before Catch-up even moved to our block. I say he’s cheating. And how long should we stand for it when we know we’re never going to find him? Why bother even looking?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t give up either,” Beanie said. “I don’t want to be a quitter.”

“It’s not quitting to stop looking for a cheater. It’s quitting to keep looking for him when we know we’re never going to find him. Understand?” I stared Beanie down until he nodded his head that he understood.

“Kind of, but what about Catch-up? He never did anything to us. Don’t you think we’re going to hurt his feelings?” Beanie tried to but couldn’t suppress another sigh.

“He should’ve thought of that before he cheated us,” I said.

Stevie avoided meeting eyes with me but managed to agree somewhat reluctantly. “Well, I guess I don’t want to end up looking for him forever either. But I don’t want to be the one to tell him, that’s all.”

“Me either,” Beanie added. “I like him too much.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll do it.” I rubbed my sweaty palms on my pants. “Tonight he’s out.”

#

Catch-up’s jaw fell open when I told him that we didn’t want him to play with us anymore. He looked to the twins for some sign that it was all some kind of joke, but they avoided his gaze. “You guys don’t want me to play with you anymore, really? he asked the twins.

“You shouldn’t be asking us,” Stevie said, pointing to me. “Ask him.”

“You don’t want me?” His wide-eyed look fell clumsily on me.

“It’s just that we can’t find you,” I said. “You’re too good to be playing with us. The guys across the street play better than us. Maybe you should play with them.”

“My mother doesn’t want me going across the street. She wants me only to play with you guys.” He wiped his runny nose with his dirty sleeve as he fought to keep the tears from flowing. “I could let you find me, if you want. I just want to play with you guys, not anyone else. I’ll let you find me, I swear.”

“It’s not the same thing,” I insisted, ignoring the pleas in his voice. I had hoped that after I had told him that he was out that he would simply leave without a word, that he would merely accept it and walk away unfazed. I didn’t think he’d get tears in his eyes. I had to counter his tears somehow. The twins looked like they were ready to change their minds and back Catch-up. I had to act quick. “You go play with someone else. You’re too good for us. We can never find you.”

“How ‘bout I don’t play but just go along with you? My mother likes me to play with you. Come on,” he begged, and the tears broke free.

“No,” I said, interrupting Stevie who was about to say something. He was quiet now. And Beanie stared down at he ground, pretending he wasn’t there, never once looking up at us.

Catch-up wiped the tears on his cheeks, and composing himself as best he could, he said, “That’s okay if you don’t want to play with me anymore, but I still want to be friends with you, okay? Okay? I don’t have to play. Really. I just want to hang around with you until my mother calls me in at night. Okay? Please?”

I said ‘no’ again and in anger pushed him back. “Go away. You’re a cheater.”

“I’m not,” he sobbed. “I won’t get in your way. I swear I won’t.”

“I don’t care, you cheater. Come on, guys, let’s go and leave this cheater alone.” I walked off and the twins followed.

“I’ll see you guys maybe tomorrow,” Catch-up shouted after us. “Okay? Okay?”

“Yeah, m-m-maybe,” Stevie stuttered.

“No,” I countered. “No way. You go play with someone else, Ernesto.”

“Okay then, if that’s what you want. My mother says that you know what’s right and wrong and that I should always listen to you. ‘Cause then maybe I’ll catch up to you in school.” His sobs calmed to gentle sniffles and a few whimpers. “You were the best friends ever. Bye.”

He waved at us, turned and walked away.

And for the first time in over two years, we played hide and seek without having any fun.

#

The next morning the twins demanded that I let Catch-up back into the group. I agreed. They were surprised but glad. I told them about my dream where Catch-up was all alone in a forest at night. The trees were petrified, and there were no insects or birds or anything living anywhere around. Catch-up was hiding somewhere in the forest, waiting for us to come and find him, but he didn’t realize that we weren’t going to search for him anymore and waited so long for us that he turned into one of the trees. I woke up shaking and crying, and felt alone and afraid. I suggested that we go find Catch-up so we could apologize to him. No, not ‘we’. Me. The twins hadn’t caught my mistake: It was me who owed him an apology.

When we got about halfway to Catch-up’s apartment complex, we saw his mother walking toward us. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days. She walked right up to us and stopped. Her eyes were red and glazed; they seemed to stare right through us.

“My son is dead,” she said emotionlessly. “Why wasn’t he with you? I told him to only play with you because you know better. You get skipped ahead in school, and my poor boy gets held back. He liked you so much. No brothers, no father—you were the men in his life. You were supposed to take care of him. Where were you? Why does everyone abandon him? I work, you know. I couldn’t watch him all the time. That’s why I told him to play with you till I got home. Where was he going? I told him never to cross the street. The truck driver said he didn’t even see him. My poor boy, where were you going? Where was he going? Tell me. Where?”

She reached over and grabbed a handful of my hair, but she immediately relaxed her grip and stroked the top of my head.

“You were supposed to take care of him He liked you so much. Said that he wanted to read all the books you read, see all the movies you see, and have all the friends you have. Where was he going? Why? My poor boy.”

There was crying in her voice but none in her eyes. She seemed drunk, but I knew she wasn’t. But she was drunk of a different kind that I didn’t understand. She walked away, glancing around as if she expected Catch-up to appear out of nowhere. After she turned the corner, we remained quiet for a few minutes, waiting for someone to break the silence but not wanting to be the one to do it.

It was Beanie who finally spoke up. “What do you think happened?” The question was directed at me.

“I don’t know. Something about a truck, I think.” I tried to sound like I didn’t hear it right. I didn’t want to be the one to sum things up.

“I know where he was going,” Stevie said. “He was going to play with the kids across the street like you told him to.”

“Yeah,” Beanie agreed.

There, it was out in the open.

The twins glared at me with expressions of dishonor on their face. I could feel the resentment surging through them. But the hatred was short-lived. ”It’s our fault, too,” Stevie said to Beanie. “We should blame ourselves too for his being dead.”

“Wait a minute,” I cut in. “How do we know he’s dead?”

“His mother said,” Beanie answered.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” I argued. “His mother always acts weird like that. Maybe she just thinks he’s dead, but he’s really alive.”

“Maybe he ran away,” Beanie suggested.

“Maybe he’s lost,” Stevie added.

“Maybe he’s hiding,” I said with a wide grin on my face.

And after I said it, we all grew quiet for a moment and let it sink in.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” I asked sarcastically. “Let’s go find him. Only this time we don’t quit. This time we find him.”

“Yeah,” the twins chorused. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

#

It was early afternoon, and the brightness of the sun made hide and seeking too obvious and easy. Hide and seek was a game for the night. Under the daylight there didn’t seem to be too many places to hide, and soon we went over all the possible hiding places. But Catch-up was a pro and must have found the impossible places to hide in. We had to search where we wouldn’t even think of searching. It would be there where we would find him hiding. And everything would be back to normal.

We searched the garbage cans, the trash bins, under cars, between the long bedspreads hanging out to dry, behind bushes, up in the trees, under porches, on roofs, almost every square inch of the block. And the same thought kept occurring to me: Maybe Catch-up was cheating. But no. He was hiding somewhere. He was somewhere. We continued searching even as the sun went down, and the long shadows stretched like black carpets laid out for the night.

We were exhausted, but we kept going. We split up and renewed the search. I must’ve looked in the same places a dozen times each. I checked the locks on several garage doors to make sure Catch-up wasn’t hiding there inside. They were all securely locked. I saw Stevie standing by the clothes-lines and went to join him. “Where’s Beanie?” I asked.

“Right here,” he said, stepping out of a shadow made by the telephone pole.

“You scared the hell out of me. I didn’t even see you there. With those dark clothes on, you looked like part of the shadow. Don’t ever….” Then it struck me. “Beanie, step back into the shadow.”

He did, and vanished into thin air. I could make out his face a bit in the dark, but that’s because I was squinting and trying to see him. If I wasn’t looking for him, I wouldn’t even know he was there.

“That’s it. Don’t you see? Catch-up was using the shadows to hide in. He wasn’t cheating. He was there right in front of us the whole time. Don’t you see?” I pulled Beanie out of the shadow and stood in it myself. “Can you see me?”

“Yeah, with that white t-shirt on I can,” Stevie answered.

I yanked off the t-shirt and stood still for a moment so my brown skin could blend in with the darkness.

“Hey, that’s pretty good. I can see you but not completely,” Beanie said. “Let’s hide. Stevie, you try to find us.”

And the game began. We found literally hundreds of shadowy hiding places all over the block. Anything that could cast a shadow was a potential hiding place: a parked bus, a tree, bushes, buildings, garages, almost anything. We ran around, screaming for joy when we found a new shadow to hide in, finding each other with ease as we became accustomed to the new game at hand. Catch-up was playing a different game of hide and seek than the twins and I were used to. How could I think he was cheating. We were cheating ourselves out of a better version of the game. Yet he looked up to us.

Completely exhausted, we fell on the moist lawn of Mrs. Garcia’s front yard. We sat there, trying to catch our breath. Suddenly, four teenagers walked menacingly up to us. We stood up, readying ourselves to run off if one of them pulled out a knife on us. When they moved under the street light and I saw their faces, I recognized them as the high school drop-outs who lived across the street. I had seen them many times spray-painting their nick-names on the walls in our neighborhood.

“Did you know the retard kid that got killed last night?” the one nick-named Puppet asked.

“”We don’t know any retarded kids,” I answered.

“Yeah, sure you do. You know, the one that got run over by the truck last night. He lived around here somewhere,” Puppet said, glancing around.

“Why do you want to know?” Beanie asked.

“’Cause we’re going to rob the place when his mother’s at the funeral,” the one called Jughead answered.

“Shut up, pendejo,” Puppet scolded him. “Don’t tell them everything.”

“I didn’t tell them nothing they can do anything about,” Jughead apologized half-heartedly.

The other two drop-outs stood like sentries in the background.

“Well, where’s the retard’s house?” Puppet demanded to know.

“His mother doesn’t have any money,” Stevie tried to explain. “She lives real poor.”

“Not from what we heard,” Jughead said. “We heard that she earns her money on the streets and on the sheets.”

“I told you to shut up, vato,” Puppet growled. “So keep it shut. Now, you kids, I’m going to ask you one more time: Where does she live?”

“Nowhere. And you leave her alone,” I warned them. “We know who you are and where you live, and we’ll tell the cops what you told us. So you better get out of our neighborhood and forget about robbing anyone.”

“We have a hero here, vatos,” Puppet mocked. “What shall we do with the big hero?”

“Kill him,” Jughead threatened.

“He’s all yours, Jughead, my man,” Puppet said, taking a step back.

Before I could run, Jughead swung a fist that caught me square on the shoulder. I punched him back, and he laughed at the feeble little hits. He grabbed me by the neck with his hairy gorilla hand and lifted me off the ground. Then Puppet snapped his fingers and the two sentries attacked the twins. I could hear their grunts as the bullies pummeled them. I felt dizzy as Jughead tightened his grip on my neck. Suddenly the porch-light went on, and Old Mrs. Garcia, the widow with all the cats, ordered the seven of us to go play somewhere else.

I took advantage of the startled Jughead and kicked him below the belt. He dropped to his knees in agony, releasing me. I landed on my feet and charged the sentries, knocking them off balance. I yelled at the twins to run. We darted into the alleyway with the drop-outs right behind us. Jughead seemed to have recovered quickly and led the pack. But we were younger and faster than them, and soon we outdistanced them enough to elude them in our new hiding places.

They searched all our old hiding spots. Puppet sent the sentries to look for us on the opposite side of the alley, while he and Jughead checked the trash bins, closing up the exits from the alleyway. They kept walking right by us. We remained calm and quiet, still in the shadows, watching them as Catch-up must have watched us while we searched for him. I fought back the giddy excitement that was welling up in my belly. But now was not the time to laugh.

Jughead took a knife from his back pocket and unfolded it.

“Good idea,” said Puppet and readied his own knife. “I’m going to cut them slow, the way heroes should die.”

Jughead cackled as if killing were not new to him. “They’re in here in this alley somewhere. They can’t get out. They’re trapped como ratones, vato.”

Puppet dragged the blade of his knife along the cement wall by the telephone pole shadow where Stevie stood hidden. The sparks from the knife lit up Stevie’s frightened face for a split second. “What have we here? Looks like dead meat.”

Stevie didn’t move as the drop-out leader raised the weapon above his head. As the shiny blade whooshed downward, the shadow swirled around Puppet’s arm and crushed it. I heard a big crack and then a bunch of little ones. He opened his mouth but didn’t scream. The blade dropped with a clang to the ground. But the shadow was not finished; it slithered like a snake into Puppet’s mouth and broke off all his teeth and carried them down his throat into his guts. I could hear him choking on the little pieces of his own teeth. He moaned as Jughead tried to figure out what was happening.

“Get over here,” Jughead yelled to the sentries, who came just in time to see the darkness burst out of Puppet’s stomach. Teeth and blood and vomit struck the sentries’ faces. Then the other shadows in the alley joined in the attack. Some had claws, some had fangs, others had black blades. The sentries swatted the darkness with trash can lids, but the shadows cut through the metal and twirled like black chainsaws into the scared faces of the two bullies. Their cheeks and noses and lips and eyebrows flew all over place. Blood and snot ran out of the places their noses used to be. Jughead swung the knife in front of him, but a shadow covered his hand and the sound of breaking sticks echoed in the alley. The black snake returned and tore into one of Jughead’s ears and came out of the other. Lumpy stuff poured out of his ear and his jaw kept moving up and down like one of those wind-up skulls. Suddenly his jaw stopped and he dropped to the ground. Then the shadows came together and made the shape of a little boy. He waved to us. And then the shadows went back where they belonged—on the walls, on the ground, under the trees. I didn’t even notice that the shadows had put all the pieces of the four drop-outs into a pile in the middle of the alley.

It all happened so fast. I stepped out of my hiding place and looked at the pile of flesh steaming in the alleyway. The twins each grabbed one of my arms and told me to move, that we had to get out of there. As we ran by Mrs. Garcia’s front yard, we heard her screams coming from her back yard by the alley. She must have found the bodies. We stayed quiet in Mrs. Garcia’s front yard and wondered what had just happened to us.

“The shadows saved me,” Stevie said.

“They saved us,” I corrected him.

There was an awkward pause as it all sunk in. Then Beanie said, “We should get back to looking for Catch-up.”

The words caught me off guard. I sat on the grass and sobbed till my body was sore. Stevie dropped to his knees and wept. Beanie knelt on one knee and cried as well. In the background police lights spun and police car radios buzzed with static voices. It seemed that we would never run out of tears, but we did. The search was over. We were beat by the best in the game of hide and seek, and our friend protected us. He appeared out of nowhere again and helped us.

Throughout the neighborhood we could hear parents calling their children home from this night of violence and death. I heard my Dad calling. The twins heard their Mom shouting out their names. We stood up, wiped the tears and cleared the sniffles from our runny noses. Then together we shouted, ALL YE ALL YE EXTRA ALL GO FREE, and ran home without waiting for the reply that we knew we would never hear again: ‘Catch-up free!’

 

Time is a Spider Web

The eyes of the spider never wander

It sits alone inside a cave of silk

Neither does it form a plan or ponder

A group of one as many of its ilk.

The eyes of the housefly see all around

It flies alone above its source of food

It forms its plans in flight and on the ground

At once the source and captive of the brood.

The eyes of the human are blind and vast

It lives alone in thought among the crowds 

It plans its place for first but comes in last

A cog in a machine up in the clouds. 

All three believe that they master the web

But they are prey to both the tide and ebb.