The Oggalu family
has lived atop Crestal Hill for as long as my memory can stretch. There's a
window on the east wall of my bedroom that frames the peak of the incline where
their house perches. The sun likes to take twice as long to come up because of
it. It hides its bright self like a flaming coin in the pocket of the valley,
lingering on the horizon. I bet their backyard is always afire in the mornings.
I bet they draw the curtains during breakfast. I'd have to expect they feel
blinded, and imagine their school-aged children molding darkness from fabric
and shielding themselves from the sunrise.
I am content living
in the looming shadow of such a monstrosity. It is harder for me to wake up at
dawn, but easier for me to rest my eyes on the weekends. When my eyes do rush
to open, I'm met with the sight of the Oggalu mansion, which is at times more
intriguing than any vibrant phenomenon of nature.
The reasons behind
this are unnamed, but at various times during the day, I see a man standing
under the grove of willows to the right of the porch. He might've lived there,
except I don't think that is the case. He lurks suspiciously around the
property, head bent like those of the trees. From this distance--about five
acres away--he looks to be in his early twenties. He doesn't wear a coat, even
though the vegetation sports a permanent layer of frost at its tips, and there
is only about a month left till the wintertime.
His cheeks are
frost-bitten, and if I wake up early enough, I will catch him peering through
the second-floor windows of the mansion from afar. He remains out of sight from
the front door. There are a few familiar things about him, but I can't tell
what they are.
I suppose I'll
probably quit staring; Mother says it is rude, and it by no means helps with my
emotional condition.
--
There's a flannel shirt tucked into his back jeans
pocket. It's cross-hatched in a faded brick red and blue like the sky. It
smells like lavender. He knows because it's the smell he can't rid himself of,
no matter how hard he tries.
He lays in bed sometimes in the mornings, just to
hear himself breathe. It makes a sound like a whistle in a bathroom stall,
echoing and reverberating in his lungs like they're made of tin. Kind of an
empty feeling. A horror movie flicka-flicking through the scope of his chest.
Desiring some kind of accompaniment or voice by the bedside, or a few more
lungs.
He gets up and mindlessly organizes the labeled boxes
on the floor. He hasn't yet had the chance to put them away. Afterwards, he
takes the ten minute jog to Briony Avenue. The air chills even the most
warm-blooded of the town's inhabitants, but it doesn't bother him much. He is
accustomed to the cold.
He stops by the place her mother insisted is hers.
The strange thing is that it doesn't look like the house he imagined for her.
The backyard is a vast pasture, and the house is naked and open-faced on the
east. A broad cobblestone walkway sticks out from the porch. There is nowhere
to hide if not for the trees, which line the front yard in miraculous
abundance. He imagined her to live in a carnival funhouse, decorated with
winding wraparounds and a fenced-in yard; dark and welcoming to adventurers.
The big house is admirable, nonetheless. At ten of 8
o'clock, a young girl gallops down the driveway to catch the school bus. The
man has figured that this girl must be Her younger sister, though he'd never
heard Her mention anything about siblings. The girl is bleary-eyed, with her
hands embedded deep in jacket pockets. The man likes her immediately.
--
"Dragon Pearl
or Pomegranate Oolong?" It is my mother's new favorite question, as those
are the only two types of hot tea she keeps in the pantry.
"No tea
today," I decide, mostly because my bedroom is stifling. Heat rushes up
through the floor vent and clouds like steam in the craters of my ears. Unlike
the mothers I've seen on television, mine does not prod nor insist, and instead
leaves me alone. Her soles patter down the cherrywood steps as she leaves.
She has developed an
adhesive habit of talking on the phone. She indulges in lengthy conversations
about the Oggalus, which I find somewhat odd. She likes the prospect of
describing their house. I must mention that we have never even met the Oggalus.
The only one of them I have ever seen is the man who loiters in the yard, and
I'm not certain that he is even related.
The man comes more
often now. He has spent hours staring at the mansion and memorizing it like
scripture. There is something so familiar about him. I still can't place it.
I'm beginning to have vivid dreams about him, and it only occurs to me now that
maybe they are memories. Each vision takes place on the same narrow street.
We're riding in a car. I know the car is small in size, because we feel close
to one another. When he turns to face me, his nose is rosy and his fingers play
with the dials on the radio, static humming over the radiator. There is no
music; I get the feeling that he doesn't like music. Instead, some type of
podcast or commercial comes through the clunky speaker in jarring intonations.
I know there's a
scar just underneath his navel, and I can almost feel the contours beneath my
fingertips--though I am not touching him in the dream, nor can I see the scar.
He starts to laugh suddenly, a barking cackle that stirs happiness in the pit
of my chest, and I begin to smile. Then I am looking out the window. We pass a
pizza joint with a convex window and then Rory's, a food store that I've seen
before. We are approaching a red light. Suddenly, I have this burning desire to
ask him a question, though I cannot find the words.
I turn to him, my
lips parting, but it's then that the dream slips from my grasp.
I've had the dream
twice in the past two days, which leads me to believe that it isn't a dream at
all.
Yesterday, my mother
caught me watching the man through the frame of the window. I asked her if she
knew what he was doing on Crestal Hill. A plaintive and wistful expression
crossed her face, and she told me again that staring is rude, and sardonically that
she hopes the coma didn't eradicate my concept of manners.
--
The best time to cry is in the daytime, which the man
has learned from a book he read. It's when the noise of the town grows to a
joyful disquiet; submerging sounds of mourning in the mouth of a delta swarming
with exchanged vernacular. The night is worse for many reasons. The moonlight
is toxic to recovery, and the silence is only conducive to publicizing grief.
Instead, the man uses the pitch black of nighttime in
other ways. He's had the same dream for three nights straight. The dream about
the car; the car that isn't his own, the one which coasts through the
intersection and hugs his headlights,
bone-crushing and as if they are reunited at last, collateral damage spreading
in glass spores and whiplash.
He supposes it would be fine, if he did not remember
what happened before the collision. But he has seen everything, and he
remembers everything. He does not feel as lucky as he should.
He's had raging stomachaches of late, and they twist
and squirm beneath his diaphragm. Today it is worse. He peers through the
windows of the upper floor of Her house. An onlooker would think he'd lost
something, the way his eyes wander aimlessly.
He waits as he did the day before, wishing the
curtains would be brushed aside and a familiar face would be looking through
the glass. All he wants is a smile from her lips; some signal of recognition.
All he wants is the girl he asked to marry him to remember his face.
Mustering strength, he ambles towards the oak front
door, breeze piercing his cheeks. His breath leaves his mouth in thick smoke,
curling towards the sky. Removing his hands from his pockets, his hand finds
the routed wood of the door. There is a
light on inside. He goes to knock.
She will not remember me, he thinks.
--
The man does not
come anymore. There are no longer lean silhouettes plodding about on the
Oggalu's front lawn. The last he appeared was two days ago, but he only stayed
for a few moments. He embarked on his usual walk, shoes shuffling in the snow,
what looked like a colored flag flying from his back pocket. The flag reminded
me of a shirt I used to own. I searched for the shirt in my closet after I'd
watched the man come and go, but to no avail. I must have lost it, though I do
not remember how.
My mother has
stopped talking on the phone. When I ask her about the Oggalus, she feigns
confusion and pretends not to know what I'm talking about. "What about
those people asking about the house on the hill?" I ask her.
"What, the
Oggalu mansion?" She questions in return, and then waves her hand.
"How should I know?"
Yesterday, I was
filtering through my sock drawer for a pair of striped cabin socks I own, and
something sliding towards the bottom corner of the drawer caught my eye. I
reached down and wound up with a golden ring caught in the crook of my
forefinger. There was a single diamond embellished on the front. I squinted at
it and rotated it in my hand. I did not remember having owned such a piece of
jewelry. I contemplated hiding it from Mother, but she caught me with it in the
palm of my hand. She took it from me then, telling me it must have come off her
finger when she was folding the laundry.
I didn't mind much.
The ring isn't mine, anyway.
It's strange, but I
think I miss the man who hid outside of the Oggalus. There is something about
the dreams I had of him; something alluring and oddly nostalgic about his
presence, even if all I ever saw of him was the shape of his body through the
frame of my bedroom window. I do not know him, but there is still something
very familiar about him. I think that if I see him again, I might slip outside,
sidle to the edge of the property and try to strike up a conversation.
Upon further
thought, I don't believe he'll be back. The settling of the shadows where the
sun cannot reach bids goodbye to night every morning, just as the day before
yesterday bid goodbye to the man.
Strangely, I am sad
about this fact. Mother allows a lamenting sigh to escape her lips, says I will
be fine, and asks me what type of tea I'd like to drink. After she exits the
bedroom, I peer through the frame of the window, wishing there were more to see.
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