karen > Books: upstairs-neighbors‎ (156)

Looking back, it made a strange kind of sense—an absurd kind of sense, one could say—that they should be the ones who ended up killing Marcie. They wo

Looking back, it made a strange kind of sense—an absurd kind of sense, one could say—that they should be the ones who ended up killing Marcie. They would have died for her if the situation had been reversed.

If you looked at it like that, killing Marcie was really the least they could do.

Still, there were some unanswered questions.

Like why did they dismember Marcie’s body after they killed her?

The first book in a

The first book in a can't-put-it-down, can't-read-it-fast-enough action-thriller trilogy that's part Hatchet, part Little Shop of Horrors!

Petra knew from her dad that the little hospital was already overloaded. For most people, it was like having a really bad cold, or the flu. But some people had much more severe reactions—or life-threatening asthma attacks—and needed to be transferred to Victoria or Vancouver—where the hospitals were also packed.

A few people hurried from their cars into the shops, sneezing, covering their faces. A lot of people wore masks—a very common sight since the pollen started flying. Petra had even seen a few people with those scary heavy-duty things with the canister filter. Like in pandemic movies.

I hate Vignette’s pieces. They are dreary word puzzles I’m always too bored and annoyed to solve. Each paragraph is a half smile, half frown, way up its own asshole. Also, they beg questions like: when on her perilous, pirouetting journey from Interlochen to Barnard was she ever in a trailer?

”What do you think, Samantha?” Fosco asks me.

That it’s a piece of pretentious shit. That is says nothing, gives nothing. That I don’t understand it, that probably no one does and no one ever will. That not being understood is a privilege I can’t afford. That I can’t believe this woman got paid to come here. That I think she should apologize to trees. Spend a whole day on her knees in the forest, looking up at the trembling aspens and oaks and whatever other trees paper is made of with tears in her languid eyes and say, I’m fucking sorry. I’m sorry that I think I’m so goddamned interesting when it is clear that I am not interesting. Here’s what I am: I’m a boring tree murderess.

But I look at Vignette, at Creepy Doll, at Cupcake, the Duchess. All of them staring at me now with shy smiles.

“I think I’d like to see more of the soup too,” I hear myself say.

She shivers at the view of the grand trees, as if they’re not trees at all but something truly vile, like all the rosy-blond light that seems to forever bathe the campus is about to punch her in the face like a terrible fist of rich.

As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You’re no longer afraid of the things you had absolute faith in as a child: that you’d die in convulsions from inhaling the gas from a shattered light bulb, that chewing apple pips brought on death by cyanide poisoning, or that a circus dwarf had actually bounced off a trampoline into the mouth of a hungry hippo*. You stop believing in the things my uncle believed in. Even if your mind wants to go there, it has lost the nimbleness needed to make the leap. That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out - or worse, you steal it from yourself. It gets embarrassed out of you by the kids who run the same stretch of streets and grown-ups who say it’s time to put away childish things. By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.

In the black-and-white photo taken ten years before I was born, my father and mother look like movie stars. They stand in a field, wind whispering through their hair. The photo whispered in my ear, “See how they smile. See their eyes shine. They have no worries yet, your parents.”

The headstone stood in front of me. It wore rocks on its head. It watched me shift from foot to foot in the cold, watched me jam my hands deep in my pockets. It saw my lips moving and heard sounds come out, but it didn’t understand language. My eyes were red and filled with tears. The headstone just stood there, waiting for me to leave: It’s the same thing every time. He just comes up here and stands right in front of me and his eyes turn red and sounds issue from his mouth. Where are the rocks on his head? Where are the words carved into his chest?

Across the border, in Vineland, New Jersey, I chased fireflies around on my aunt’s lawn and tried to put them in a jar with holes punched into the tin lid. I looked at them more closely and saw they were tiny ambulances with their lights flashing. My aunt came out to call me for dinner and found me crammed into the jar instead, my curly hair poking up through the breathing holes. “After we eat,” she said, lifting up the jar that held me, “we’ll go to the casino. I go to the casino every Saturday.”

A boll weevil curled up into a tiny grey ball on the grey curb. It rocked slightly in the warm breeze. A 1966 blue Ford station wagon rolled by. Neither the boll weevil nor the station wagon was aware of the other. A sprinkling of rain began to fall. Soon the entire road looked like it was covered by shadow.