Empty Rooms and Hallways Read online

Empty Rooms and Hallways

  Copyright 2016 by Roman Theodore Brandt

 

 

  Table of Contents

  A Happy Family

  I’m Coming Over, She Said

  The Savior

  I Might Have Been a Great Veterinarian

  Phantoms on the Horizon

  The Tiniest Point of Light

  You Look Like You Just Climbed Out of the River

  The End of the World, Minivan Edition

  I Live Alone

  Wisconsin

  About the Author

  Dedication

   

  A Happy Family

  Mom started freaking out as soon as the Dad turned the car down the drive to Grandma’s house. “Oh god, oh god,” she said, gripping the arm rest between the front seats.

  Dad took his hand off of the steering wheel and put it on hers. “It’s only a couple hours.”

  She took a deep breath and exhaled, looking out at the woods on either side of the car. “Yeah, well,” she said. “For you, it is.”

  Dad patted her hand. “You want to just do it next time?”

  Grandma’s house appeared from around a curve in the drive, a run-down cape cod in a clearing at the end of the driveway.

  “No,” she said, finally. “We’ve put it off too long. She nearly killed that toll booth kid.”

  “She shouldn’t be driving,” Dad said.

  “I don’t know if we ought to go taking all her freedoms just yet,” Mom said bitterly, gripping the door handle. “It was just the one time,” she added.

  “The poor toll booth kid was pinned in the booth,” Dad said.

  “Oh Frank, really. Anyone could have mistaken the gas pedal for the brake; it’s not like she killed anyone.” Mom sighed and started gathering her latex gloves and her spray bottles. “I’m going for the kitchen as soon as we get there,” She said. “I guarantee the stuff in her fridge is expired.”

  “Mom, don’t make her mad,” I said.

  “You just mind your own business back there,” she told me, shoving all the spray bottles into her tote bag. “I should have done this before we left.” She sighed, unbuckling her seat belt. “Seatbelts off, tuck and roll.”

  “You’re hilarious,” Dad said.

  Grandma’s house was a sad, white cape cod box, two big square windows and a wide black door watching our approach. If Grandma were a house, she would be her house.

  We got out and Dad stretched for a minute. “I hate that drive,” he said.

  Mom rolled her eyes and pushed past him toward the front stoop. “Don’t start that, Frank.”

  “I’m just saying,” Dad continued, “That it’s a really long drive to have to make every week.”

  Mom was already at the door, ringing the bell and then straightening the front of her sweater. Grandma answered the door looking like a pile of dirty laundry and said, “What?”

  “Can’t we just come for a visit, Mother?” Mom smiled at her.

  Grandma looked at mom and moved her dentures around a little in her mouth. “What?” she said finally.

  “Can’t we come for a visit, Mom?”

  Grandma squinted at her. “I heard you,” she said. “I’m not up for company.”

  “Oh, come on, Mother,” she said.

  Grandma shuffled away from the door, moving back to let us in. “Well, whatever,” she muttered, and Mom and Dad pushed past her. She and I stared at each other for a second, and then she said, “You coming in or are you just gonna stand out there?”

  Once she was inside, Mom went right for the kitchen. She flung her tote onto the kitchen table and snapped a pair of latex gloves onto her hands.

  “How old are these eggs?” she asked, holding open the fridge door.

  “They’re still good,” Grandma said, shuffling around in the laundry room.

  “Mother, you’re going to kill yourself. Would you come sit down?” Mom picked up the egg carton. “Oh my god. These eggs expired five years ago.” She looked back at me. “Put some gloves on,” she said to me, her voice like steel.

  “I can still use those eggs. Don’t throw those away,” Grandma told her.

  “They don’t even weigh anything anymore,” Mom said, shaking the egg carton. She tossed it in trash.

  “Do whatever you want,” Grandma said from the laundry room.

  “Mother, would you sit down?”

  Grandma shuffled around the house for a while, actively avoiding questions from Mom about her health, her urine and her insulin levels until finally, she said, “I’m fine,” which was the end of all questioning.

  Mom sat at the table, massaging her temples. “Mother, if you don’t sit down …”

  “The world can’t stop just because you show up,” Grandma said.

  “Go help your grandmother before she kills herself,” Mom said to me, putting her head down on the table.

  I got up from the table, still pulling a pair of gloves on, and went into the laundry room.

  “I don’t need help,” Grandma said, struggling to put the laundry soap back on the top shelf.

  “I can get that for you,” I told her.

  “No, I got it,” she said, practically creaking. She strained, the box of powdered laundry soap shaking in her bony hand.

  “Let me put it up there for you, Grandma.”

  She sighed, putting the box on the dryer. She leaned forward against the washer, breathing hard. “I can get it,” she mumbled.

  “If you say so.”

  She turned and looked at me and smiled a little. “I know, I know. I look stupid.”

  We stared at each other for a long time.

  “My goodness you’re getting big,” Grandma said absently. She reached over with a feeble old hand and pulled the string of the blinds toward her, and the blinds creaked and squealed up the window frame, but the room got no lighter. “I wish the sun would come out,” Grandma said. She dumped some soap into the washer without looking and shut the lid. The washer kicked on, and Grandma heaved the box up to the top shelf, spilling it. “Damn it,” she mumbled.

  “Mother, you need hand soap,” Mom called from the kitchen. “Would you come sit down in the living room.”

  Grandma stood there for a minute, looking at her feet. Eventually she said, to me, “Don’t ever get old. It’s not worth it.”

  She shuffled out into the kitchen, and I stared up at the top shelf.

  “Why are you here?” Grandma asked once Mom convinced her to sit down with us in the living room.

  Mom sighed and said, “Can’t we just talk like a happy family? Can’t we just sit around and talk about the weather?”

  “The weather’s awful. What do you want?”

  Mom and Dad looked at each other and then Mom said, "Mother, don't you think it's time…" Her voice trailed off.

  Grandma sat in her recliner, a menacing lump of clothes and horn rimmed glasses. "Listen, I'm not going to an old folk's home. I don't know how many times I have to tell you."

  Mom sighed. "Jeez, Mom. Just listen to me."

  "I'm not!"

  "Well why not?" Mom blurted, and then the two of them glared at each other for a long time.

  Grandma made some noise with her dentures and said, "I get by just fine."

  "You have ten-thousand-year-old eggs in your fridge."

  Grandma moistened her mouth for a few seconds, and then she looked up at the wall clock. “My program comes on at six. Are you leaving soon?" She wanted to know.

  "Let's just go," Dad said.

  Mom's snapped her head around to look at him. "Are you kidding me?"

  "Look, she's obviously going to fight us on this. Let the old broad fall and see what happens,” Dad told
her.

  "She’ll hear you," Mom whispered.

  “I can already hear you,” Grandma blared from her chair, startling them both. “If you’re gonna stay, I want you to shut up. I got television to watch.”

  Dad stood up and walked out into the kitchen, shaking his head.

  "Just think about it, alright?" Mom said, defeated.

  "What?"

  "I said think about it."

  She laughed a little. “Oh, I’m thinking about it, alright.”

  We sat around in silence for a while and I heard Dad say, from the kitchen, “Linda, let’s just go already.”

  “Don’t have kids,” Grandma said to me, flipping the channel. “They try to put you away. Look at these vultures circling,” she added, gesturing to Mom, who looked indignant.

  “Mother, I swear,” Mom said, getting up from the couch.

  Grandma chuckled and said nothing when we got up to leave. As Mom closed the door behind us, I heard the volume on the TV climb to deafening levels, the roaring of a TV audience blocking out any sign that we ever existed.

  Mom sat down on the stoop and just stared out at the car, her eyes not registering anything. After a few minutes of that, dad sighed and helped her up and took her to the car with neither of them saying anything.

  On the way back down the drive, though, I listened to Mom and Dad fight about what happened.

  "I don't see why your brother can't come help us with her," Dad said.

  "He's all the way in San Bernardino, Frank. What's he supposed to do? Get on a plane every other day?"

  “I don’t know,” Dad mumbled, gripping the steering wheel.

  “You’re a real asshole, Frank; you undermined my authority in there and I want to punch you in the face. You really made me look stupid.”

  “Your authority,” Dad mocked her.

  As we neared the road, I watched Grandma's house disappear around the bend. Suddenly Grandma was just a figment of my imagination again, a tale to be told at family gatherings, and I wondered if she was actually real to begin with. She existed most of the time in my memory, a spilled box of laundry soap. Sometimes, being able to reach the top shelf is all you have left.

   

  Table of Contents

  I’m Coming Over, She Said

  It was half past three when the phone rang. The children were outside, and Betty had just started to vacuum the stairs. She let it ring twice, knowing at once who it was. She sighed and dropped the cord and went to the phone. She sat down on the chair and picked up the receiver. "Yes?"

  "Betty, you won't believe what the children are playing with," said the voice of her neighbor, Doris.

  "What is it? Have they got the dog tied up again?" Betty heard the sound of the dog barking far in the distance on the other end of the line.

  "No, no. It's just bizzare. It's so strange. It's like… Here, give me that," she said to one of her children, followed immediately by a barrage of screaming children and a crying toddler. "I'll give it right back, go wash up. Heathens."

  Irritated, Betty reached for the basket of clean clothes and began to fold them, right there in the living room. "Well, what is it?" She wanted to know.

  "Betty, it's the silliest looking thing. It's some kind of metal. I can't tell."

  "Well let's have it; what's it look like?" Betty started a stack of folded towels.

  "Well, it's shiny and kind of shaped like a… well, it's like a rectangle, I suppose. Oh!" Betty heard the sound of something hard hitting the linoleum of Doris's kitchen floor. "Oh my gosh," she said in Betty's ear. "Hold on one second." She heard Doris put the phone down and seriously thought about just hanging up. After all, she had work to do.

  "Oh, Betty, it's the strangest thing."

  "Listen, Doris, tell me what the silly thing is or I'm getting off of here. I've got floors to do."

  "It lit up, Betty. It lit up and I dropped it. It's glowing."

  Betty looked up at the wall, at the picture her mother had made for her of a house with "Home Sweet Home" in script under it. "What do you mean, glowing?"

  "No service. What on earth?" Doris's voice trailed off.

  "What?" Betty looked down at her feet.

  "That's what it says. There's like a… I don't know, a read out I guess. It says 'no service.' Oh… well, it's gone. It went dark."

  "Listen, I'm coming over there. I've got a pie you can have anyway." Betty put the clothes aside.

  "Oh my goodness!" Doris dropped the receiver on her end. Betty could hear a metallic rendition of Battle Hymn of the Republic playing over the distant sound of Doris's screaming.

  "Doris? Doris?" Betty heard Doris's screams retreating further into the background and finally the little metallic song ended. She waited a minute, and then she said, "Doris, I'm coming over." She hung up the phone.

  She left the clothes in the basket and the vacuum on the stairs and hurried into the kitchen where she scooped up the pie in its pan and went out the back door, not bothering to close it. The screen door slammed, and all the appliances in the house were left to wonder where she went.

  Table of Contents

   

  The Savior

  It wasn’t the first time I’d killed a man. You had to have been there to understand though, because it looked like any other day otherwise. In fact, it was a really nice day, full of sunshine and cars rushing past the exterior of the house on Bentley Street. There I stood in the picture window, sleeves rolled up, hands dripping red. I don’t remember much about how it happened, but I knew it happened. I didn’t do it, but I did. I guess that’s hard to understand. I remember he came to the door, selling magazines or some shit like that, and when I saw him, I heard the faintest buzzing, like a florescent light humming in a distant room. The light was on, then. So I opened the door and let him in, this kid. He couldn’t have been eighteen yet. He was all new muscle and sculpted hair, smiling lips and blue eyes shining. I wanted to put that light out. I know I did. I go through buildings switching off lights and the lights inside the minds of strangers are no different, because where there are lights, there are shadows. So I put the light out.

  I remember flashes of bubbling, wet red and his gasping mouth, fingernails tearing away across the hardwood. I remember him screaming some name, his mom maybe, and then just his sad, little noises. I can only imagine what he must have thought of me.

  It doesn’t matter now. He’s not alive anymore. I cleaned him out. I took all his human parts and made room for love, but as usual, as it always does, love killed him. Love is lethal. It kills everything it touches. I tried to find out what made him live without love. I drained his blood, swabbed his saliva, pumped out his semen into a red solo cup as he cried, and none of it was very useful. In the end, he wasn’t empty enough for love to save him.

  So now, I watch the cars rushing past the house and I dream of tomorrow, other boys, other people waiting to be loved, waiting to be made ready to love. I can help them. I will help them. I can take them from their empty lives and their Styrofoam families and show them love, even if it kills them, because in the end, we all die. Better to be dead than to feel all this pain.

  Table of Contents

   

  I Might Have Been a Great Veterinarian

  This Melinda creature had shown up to the restaurant wearing a bed sheet with a red rope for a belt. That ought to have been a sign. Hannah stayed, but only because Melinda was blocking her exit.

  "I said to my mom I might die if I can't go out tonight," She cackled loudly once they were seated, so loudly that the other diners glanced over from their table. "I told her I might fall down dead into a lake somewhere," she continued. "I might end up homeless, a bag lady in the street, you know? Looking for nickels and peeing under bridges. Missed opportunities. I might have been a great veterinarian if she'd only let me go out."

  "Are you always like this?" Hannah wanted to know, trying not to look directly at her.

  "Like how?" Melinda looked out the window ne
xt to them at the night sky as she unwrapped her silverware. "The sun sure is pretty."

  Hannah decided to change the subject. "What do you think of children?"

  Melinda's eye twitched, and she looked down at her fork, hovering just above her empty plate. "Listen," she said again, "I haven't had my pills, so let's not talk about having kids just yet, alright?"

  "No, I mean…" Hannah stopped talking when she saw her dinner companion ball up a napkin and shove it into her mouth. She blinked as Melinda began to chew. "What was that?"

  "What was what?" Melinda asked with her mouth full.

  "Are you out of your mind?" Hannah cried, shoving herself back from the table, the wheels of her wooden chair squealing. "What are you doing, anyway? What is this?"

  Melinda's eyes bulged. "Stop making a scene," she said, and little bits of napkin fell from her mouth onto her plate.

  "You're eating paper!"

  "Yeah, well, I'm hungry." She swallowed the napkin. "Listen, are you wanting to come to my place after this or do you want to, like, rough up some old people or what?"

  "Rough up some old people?" Hannah said the words, but they made no sense, until she looked again at the bed sheet rope dress. I need to get out of here, she said to herself, and she started to excuse herself from the table. "Look, this has been nice--"

  "It has," the bedsheet beast said, interrupting her. "So don't mess it up."

  Right then, the waitress came to take their order. Melinda ordered fries and told the waitress that Hannah didn't want anything.

  "What? You don't know--"

  The woman in the bed sheet interrupted her again. "We'll share my fries."

  Hannah stopped talking and just sat there, looking for the fastest way out of the building.

  "Alright, rules." Melinda said. From somewhere, she pulled out a red leather notebook that matched her rope belt. "Alright," she said again, opening apparently to a random page. "One," she told Hannah, "Don't ever touch me unless I want to be touched. I am like a cat, and if you touch me when I don't want it, I'll bite you and claw your eyes out until you bleed."

  "This is nuts."

  She shut the notebook. "I don't want to, but I'll compromise on the second rule because you're so pretty, so I won't even read it." She put the notebook away and said, "Come to think of it, I don't want you knowing anything. I guess you'll go in blind and come out deaf."

  "I need to get out of here," Hannah mumbled, no longer trying to be subtle.