From The Other Side: Two Stories Read online

From The Other Side: Two Stories

  Geoffrey Kruse-Safford

  Copyright 2011 by Geoffrey Kruse-Safford

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  Table Of Contents

  1 - Drawing Down Dark

  2 - From The Other Side

  Drawing Down Dark

  ****

  Christy lay in his bed, aware only that he felt safe from the sights and sounds. The darkness was his friend. The quiet, too. Sometimes, if the sun peaked through curtains gaping ever so slightly, he would awake screaming. The voices that came made him scream more. The faces and things and hands and voices would blend and his head would feel like bursting. He would scream and grab his head because screaming made it worse, oh so worse. He wanted it all to stop, just stop, and he would scream with no voice to demand an end to it, and it would all spiral down until he felt a stick in his arm and the sleep would come.

  How long had Christy only liked the dark? He didn’t know. All he knew was that in the dark, the faces and things that hit his eyes didn’t hurt. He could look at them and they didn’t make his head feel like something was filling it, like it would pop like a balloon. In the dark he could look in the mirror and not be terrified of the face that looked back, a face made so strange because it didn’t look like all the other faces. He hated mirrors almost as much as he hated the light, but at night he could look in the mirror and be less afraid. The face just looked back.

  The quiet, too, had been his friend because sounds were like the things the doctors had. Christy hated the doctors, with their lights and their voices and most of all with their sticks. That’s what they called them, “Just a stick, Christy, it’s OK.” Voices and music and dogs and little children laughing and the soothing words of the lady whose face he couldn’t look at even though he wanted to – they were like those doctors’ sticks, poking his ears. He would cover them but it didn’t help because the sticks were small and got between his fingers and poked and prodded and the pain, oh my, the agony. He would scream and he hated himself because the scream would be a whole handful of sticks, and so he would cry. Sometimes, he would bite himself because then the pain in his head would go away for a moment, just a moment.

  There was one sound he liked, though. It was the only sound that didn’t have sticks. This one and only sound made him feel even safer than lying in his bed, his eyes open in the dark. There was a box by his bed and if he pushed a button on the box, the sound would fill his room and he would close his eyes and the sound would take him away, give his faltering feet the strength to walk straight, give his crooked mouth a smile that spread from ear to ear.

  Tonight was a special night. The lady had whispered something this morning. Most words came and went, just sounds to be feared. These words, though, stayed. One of those words gave the sound from the box a name.

  Tonight, Christy would hear the whippoorwill.

  ****

  “Do you hear that?” Christy was sitting on the ground, leaning his head back against his Mom’s breasts, feeling her warmth, feeling her arms around him. The forest around them was so full of sounds, Christy wasn’t sure which one Mom wanted him to hear.

  “There!” she exclaimed. Christy had heard it. A bird song. Simple. Plaintive. Not quite beautiful because it seemed a song of pain and loss. Not that he could have told his Mom that. It seemed, over the past year, he had more thoughts like that, thoughts that he wondered might be adult thoughts. Sitting here, camping in the woods of central Wisconsin with his mother and father, his Mom holding him the way she always had, Christy didn’t want adult thoughts. He wanted to hold off being an adult for as long as possible, as long as his Mom would hold him like this, as long as his Dad would ruffle his auburn hair and smile and tell him, “You’re my good boy, aren’t you, Christy?”

  He nodded, pushing away the thoughts that tried to intrude on the moment. “What kind of bird is that?”

  “That is a whippoorwill, honey. Because of the call.” Christy listened, and he could almost make out “Whip poor Will”. Over and over. What a horrible thing for the bird to sing with such beauty.

  “They say the whippoorwill is a bad omen,” his father said. “They say if you hear it close, it’s waiting for you to die.”

  “David! That’s a horrible thing to tell your eleven year old son!” Christy could tell Mom wasn’t too mad, because she was laughing. He loved it when Mom laughed. Dad, too. Christy knew he was pretty lucky, because his Mom and Dad laughed a lot. His best friend, Greg, had parents that only yelled. Once, when he was spending the night with Greg, they could hear them fighting, then the fighting stopped, then some other sound started coming from their bedroom and Greg kept trying to leave but Christy wanted to listen because he knew, just knew that Greg’s parents were doing it. He wasn’t sure what “it” was they were doing, but he had heard a seventh grader talking about people doing it, and the way that older kid had talked about it, well that’s just what Greg’s parents sounded like.

  “It’s just a story, Karen,” his father said. He smiled. “My Dad used to tell me that when we’d come up here hunting. I always thought it was kind of sad, but not scary. You know, the idea there’s this bird that is here with us when we’re getting ready for whatever’s next.”

  His mother wrapped her arms around Christy. “Don’t listen to you Dad.”

  “Why not? I like it, too. It’s like guardian angels or something. They come around and sing to us and tell us it’s going to be OK.” He turned to look at his father, seated across the fire from them.

  His father nodded. “That’s what my old man always said, too. ‘Don’t be afraid of the whippoorwill, Davey. They’ll keep you safe when you cross over.’”

  “Can we talk about something else now?” Christy’s mother said. “This whole conversation is bumming me out.”