Excerpt: "Heaviness Comes With The Night"

1

Casper ducks through the window.

We met in the woods between our houses, late at night. I’m not sure whose idea it was, but we wore an orange bandana around our necks. It was our signal. The path was bare for most of the year, but when the leaves fell you could hide the signal for half a mile if you chose the right place. It started as a game between neighbors.

I’m sick.

“You look terrible,” she says, pushing through the things on my desk, trying not to make noise.

“What are you doing here?” I could be on a different continent, far away; I could leave without a note; I could bury myself deep in the earth, pave it over and build a house and Casper would still find me.

“I brought you supplies, dummy. God knows you don’t have any- thing you need up here in this” – she crouches over a stack of crumpled homework – “hole.”

My room is a sink full of matted hair.

“I’ve managed just fine, thank you,” I say, coughing.

“Right. . .” she says, plowing a collection of used tissues into the trash. “You don’t have to; I can get it tomorrow.”

“What can I say? I like to help,” Casper says. “. . . and right now, you need the most help.”

She looks at the bed but decides to sit at the desk instead. The night air is light in the room, pushing the old sick air out. My head is heavy with fluids and I fall back into the bed. “What we have here is everything you’ll need to recover. This is the good stuff.” She comes from a long line of naturalists. “Ginger, turmeric, black pepper. It burns going down, but it’s worth it.”

“I probably won’t even taste it,” I say, trying to lift my body without coughing.

“Oh, you’ll taste it.” Casper’s always right, which is how we got to where we are now. Distant from each other, existing in silence. I did taste it that night, and for many nights after. Casper laughs; the room brightens. I close my eyes and the fogginess of my entire body lifts. She laughs, I cough, and the world became clear.

2

We’re trespassing in the Harris House Garden, after hours. No one’s watching, so we creep through the front gate; the hinges creak. We laugh in small whispers to each other. We lie in the grass. The chrysanthemums are Casper’s favorite. There are so many of them here.

“Whenever I was sick,” Casper says, cradling the bright flowers, “my grandma used to bring them over in a small jar of water. She said: keep them by your bed and when you start to feel better, burn them in the yard.” She presses the petals into her notebook and writes something I can’t see in a small, tight cursive. “Then the sickness would be gone too.”

Ahead of me, touching the budding ends, soon to bloom, she whispers to herself – or maybe to me, but I can’t hear her. A light comes on in Harris House. People appear at the windows. We didn’t hear them come in (maybe they were always there). Jumping in the hedges, we land clumsily on top of each other, our legs entwine, our arms hold tightly. I can feel the edge of her ribs through her shirt; I try not to touch too much. We lie there for a minute, calming ourselves, trying to breathe softly.

“I think we’re supposed to kiss,” she says, moving slightly so our eyes meet.

I try not to breathe. I try not to move.

“In the movies,” she says, matter-of-factly, “this is where we’d kiss.”

3

“I think this is a mistake,” she says, deep in the forest between our houses. Soon, it will be winter break. Casper was graduating early.

“What do you mean?” I say, almost imperceptibly. “Don’t do this,” she says.

My body feels the end. If I could move, I would take the snow and the rocks and the roots with me. Don’t do this, I tell myself. She moves from one section of the forest to the next, towards her house, away. I try not to follow her. Soon, guests will arrive for a Christmas party I didn’t want to have. Everyone will ask about Casper.

The signal is lost between us. I think this is a mistake, she said, don’t do this. I use the last of my strength to collapse into the house. Later, when guests arrive, I’ll be mistaken for a pile of coats, having never made it past the entryway.

4

There’s a pattern in the cement around the pool. Something that might have been flowers once but wore down into hazy circles. The fence is dark, it blends into the hillside. She’s waiting at the gate. We’ve been fighting for days. About nothing.

Bethany spies on houses in the summer. As the homes empty, and the people escape to the even smaller towns along the coast, she tests the gates and looks through windows. It’s a game I don’t like to play. Or at least, it’s a game I don’t like to play anymore.

“Why don’t you just go out with her again,” she says, tired.

A dark wall of trees surrounds us. For a moment, I consider playing dumb. Who? I’d say. I don’t know what you’re talking about. When Bethany and I met, we talked about Casper leaving (she knows everything), and when we started to date, I felt like I finally had someone I could talk to about all the things I was feeling. For Casper, for love, for loss. At some point I allowed resentment to grow between Bethany and me. It would’ve been easy to avoid, but I didn’t.

I try my best not to sigh and say, “It’s not that easy.”

“Have you tried?”

After Casper left for college, she’d send letters packed with trail maps and brochures from strange museums. She made friends fast and talked about late nights by the campfire over summer break. I put the maps and pictures into a drawer; they became an accordion of colors and time. In my last letter, I remember asking about love and relationships now that she was away from our small town. I tried to make it funny, so it wouldn’t be weird. But it wasn’t that easy.

“I think you’re a good person,” Bethany says, as we turn into her driveway. There are lights on in the house, and windows open, but I know it’s empty.

“We should stop seeing each other,” I say.

“Obviously,” she says, smiling in a sad way I haven’t seen before. “I’m just saying: I think you’re a good person, but you need to figure this Casper thing out. You need to talk to her, or do something, because it’s going to keep getting in the way. Trust me, it’s ruined most of my mom’s relationships. And it’s just...” She ducks to meet my eyes and says, “. . . really painful to watch.”

Bethany pats me on the shoulder and walks to an empty house.

I’m going to tell everyone you’re an asshole, her message says.

I laugh to myself and the forest laughs back. The road is long, and the cars pass in quiet domes of yellow light. I can feel the shirt on the skin of my back, wet and uncomfortable.

5

I wake up alone, in the room where I’ve spent my entire life.

When I was born, my parents bought a small house on a large piece of land by the lake and started building. The original house lives deep in the heart of what stands now. In the living room you can see the boards change color with age.

The lake became our evenings. My father, who worked many jobs, took dinner on the porch, no matter the weather, so he could smoke cigarettes and watch the sun set on the water. In the warmer months we’d join him, if we felt like it. He didn’t mind either way.

When school ended, and Stephen was getting married, my father accepted a job in Albany. At the time, I was looking for a place of my own, so when they offered to leave the house to me, at least for now, I had to say yes. My job at the bookstore wasn’t enough to pay the bills, but they said they’d help. I could get roommates, they said, if I wanted. To not be so alone.

When Casper left, I tried my hand at old cigarettes. Of all the people in town, my father spent the most time on the lake – standing ankle deep looking around, fascinated. In winter, wearing a long coat, he’d return to the warmth of the house, making it smell stale like wet, burning wood. Christmas, for my father, was watching the storms bring the water into the house and batter the windows until it got through, leaking down the sill. And when it would flood, you could hear him laughing from a mile away.

Alone in the house now, loneliness is here with me and the storms. I build a fire and open all the windows just to watch the water pool along the floorboards and seep through, into the space between the house and earth. Wind-torn leaves and the ends of trees come in with the birds to scar the windowsills. When it floods, which is more than before, I comb through the sounds of the night, and the next morning, listening for my father, laughing.

Heaviness Leave The Body Chapbook is available on Gumroad in both physical and digital editions!