If you live in Portland, come and get boozed up.

Hello everybody. Thank you for reading. My second book is out now. If you want to see more about it, just continue down the page. It has links to order if this book sounds like something you'd feel pretty owning. I'm having a book release party in Portland in mid-November, and touring in December. But more about that later. For now:

Based out of the beautiful city of Portland, Oregon, PATIENT, FOLDED HANDS PUBLISHING is proud to announce its first release, a lonely tale by Corpse On Pumpkin photographer JARET FERRATUSCO.

AVAILABLE HERE NOW:

- Amazon

- Patient, Folded Hands

patientfoldedhands.com

I GREW UP IN AMALTHEREY HILL

A Novella by Jaret Ferratusco

A young boy drifts listlessly between the steady blur of his day-to-day life and the intrusive allure of nocturnal dreams as an ideal. Amidst the insistence of ordinary life in school custom there seems something both more reasonable and modest behind the next corner, turning the simple process of waking up in the morning into a search for something to hold on to. Thinking to himself will the school dance ever come, will next week sort itself out, won’t it just pass by . . . his hopes and well wishes emanate the growing promise of coming despair.

Rendering youth as a languid fever dream, I Grew Up In Amaltherey Hill is a bleak examination of the fury bred of neglect and the misguided idolization created of  hopelessness.

Born in New England in 1977, Jaret Ferratusco is a devoted photographer and also the author of the short story collection, Please Don’t Leave Me. He lives and works in the city of Portland, Oregon.

In Our Sleep and In Our Absences
22 Ethereal Nudes by JARET FERRATUSCO

Sept. 1st - 28th | RECEPTION on First Thursday
Sept. 3rd | 6pm-8pm

Portland Coffee House
603 SW Broadway | Portland, OR | 503.243.6374
Live music by Cinema/Minimal

In an effort to appear calm and collected, it’s an ordinary thing to cover up fears and worries both rational and irrational. This is what we show to other people. But there is an undisclosed place inside the body that will be of some distant unclear dimension, possessing a cruel quality to expand. It is a shapeless thing perpetually overpopulating the inner contours of quietly shapeless thoughts. It’s where all of the lonely, abandoned things live, in private, and grow. What if our fears and our worries were to stop sleeping away in that unknown place in everybody you know, and it took on a much more physical form, bigger than that secret place inside the mind and body, and it turned us inside out? In Our Sleep and In Our Absences concerns a small, hollow place inbetween, where it’s difficult to imagine what can happen and when.

Photographed entirely on b/w film.

At A Time When We Were

Eight b/w portraits by Jaret Ferratusco

A tiny exhibit for a tiny café, ‘At A Time When We Were’ is a brief arrangement of the haunted beauty that sews up the confines of the body. Shot on b/w 35mm film.

Bumblekiss
3517 NE 46th Avenue & Fremont

Portland, OR 97213

503.282.6313

June 1st through June 30.

Mon - Fri 8am - 2:30pm

Sat - Sun 8am - 3:30pm

Corpse On Pumpkin Photography

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Patient, Folded Hands Publishing

Hello. If you live in Chicago, I will have three personally framed art nudes hanging for Art Restores: A Sexual Assault Survivor Benefit on Friday, May 29. Information below:


'Art Restores: A Sexual Assault Survivor Benefit'

Mars Gallery
1139 W. Fulton Market
Chicago, IL 60607-1220

ph: 312.226.7808

Increasing awareness of and preventing sexual assault are at the core of Art Restores. Through displaying artwork & written work, performing music, dance and writing, survivors and supporters of the cause display the empowerment and positive effects that creating something can have on recovering from & preventing sexual assault.
Feel. Participate. Change.

All of the proceeds resulting form Art Restores benefit Rape Victim Advocates (RVA). RVA is a non-profit organization located in Chicago providing free and confidential services to those effected by sexual assault.
The services include:
*Medical advocacy
*Legal advocacy
*Counseling
*Education & Training

Art Restores Facebook Event

CALLING OUR SKELETONS HOME
14 art nudes by JARET FERRATUSCO

Hosted By:
Corpse On Pumpkin Photography

When:
Reception on Sunday, February 01, 2009 / 6pm-9pm
SHOWING ALL THROUGHOUT FEBRUARY.

Where:
Opposable Thumb Gallery + Cafe
3312 SE Belmont Street
Portland, OR 97214

Description:
14 framed black and white nudes by JARET FERRATUSCO.

Click Here To View Event

'The Mass on the Ceiling'
By JARET FERRATUSCO.


The house in Molliville Park where we agreed to spend the night had been vacant for I couldn't even say know how long.

Belonging to some other time, chained to some other history, it sat undisturbed almost at the lowest part of Cavender Street, where all the dirt washed away from the rainwater would rush toward during storms, sometimes flooding the yard where the paved walkways were torn up for some inexplicable reason and the gutters effectively ceased in directing the flow. What didn't soak the soil around the house turned into a puddle at the end of the road and would take a week or two to dry up. People didn't go that far down Cavender Road, so the puddles—sometimes deep enough to drown out a car—were paid no attention to.

The house itself was only paid due attention by being avoided. So it just sat there, all year, quiet and abandoned. It had been that way at least for as long as I've been around.

I could have passed up every opportunity to go anywhere under such circumstances, but that opportunities were not exactly easy to come by. Opportunities were awful rare, actually. I think the only reason I'd been invited at all was because some other kid found out that I had a spare key to the corner market nearby that I'd found outside one afternoon in the gutter by the sidewalk and kept for a whole month or two before brainstorming one night and deciding to go back to that market at night and fitting the key into the lock to see if it fit. It did fit. So I had a key to the market, to be put to glorious use whenever the lights were out and the night was mine, which put me in a rather uncommon position that set me apart from the other kids.

Since that time I'd made extraordinary use of this providential discovery fairly often, always way past midnight when the streets were utterly deserted and the world was asleep. For glorious purposes. To lift microwaveable pizza and cans of beer. Occasionally to snack on candy and read skin magazines or just even to bring my own book and sit there in the small empty office room and drink beer in silence and extraordinary peace of mind. To silently take from the world while it slept, things that would keep me company while the world was asleep.

Sometimes I felt like the luckiest guy in the world with that key. The empty aisles of the corner market were solitary fields of gold in the vacant shadows coming in from the moon or the buzzing street lamp, unabashed luxury in a small black pot that shone from the other end of the rainbow.

Pizza and beer became wings and a halo, and while the neighborhood slept I lorded over them with these angelic properties and sang songs of love.

In these lonesome getaways I sang a song of contentment, with a full belly and a fuzzy, exciting buzz in my head, back in my bedroom later with the broken color television on that showed me everything in a drained and dull black and white if I could get the antenna positioned the right way.

Because secrets are not always meant to remain secrets, this industrious solemnity afforded me an invitation to share with some kids I went to school with but didn't know too much better than anybody else in the neighborhood. Its potential prodigy provided the means to an opportunity to explore legend.

And you could have asked any two random people and the chances were that their stories of the house in Molliville Park would not match up very well. The house was not necessarily an eyesore either, the way you'd hear it described by others if you hadn't the nerve to go see it for yourself, though it was damp and sullen, sometimes muddy or, if dry during the summer, overrun with a thick green wilderness of grass and weeds, but not more or less than the rest of the housing development; Molliville Park was more run-down than most parts of town. Over the years, dilapidation had become somewhat more derelict in this particular house than in the state of those houses positioned around it up and down the street. Utterly deserted, not even used as a secret hideout for the neighborhood children, it was just a silent, empty house and you could see it as darker and more suspect if you wanted to. Or you could just avoid it altogether, like people really did. The front door had a padlock on it that might have been there before I was born, but the locks in the back door were still in place if not actually utilized, and the knobs turned easily for us, and we got inside and locked the door after us. It was like we lived there. And factually, I'm betting, we had likely been its only inhabitants in decades. Nobody ever went there. Well, no one had ever spent the night there. Except for us. That we knew of.

I'm not sure exactly how they all knew about the key to the market that I had because naturally I was pretty possessive of it, and anyway, I didn't have any friends. Probably since I was always on automatic pilot while talking to Terry I'd said something to her about it without realizing, while waiting for the bus to school, and she'd gone and told somebody else, and then somebody else related the information on down to someone who mattered, and one day during study hall in the library they all approached me and asked me to come along to an experiment at the house in Molliville Park.

The lawn hadn't been touched for as long as I'd ever been around to see it (though I'd only come all the way out here to view it maybe three or four times that I could remember), but it had stopped growing at the waistline of my slacks. Weeds and wilder plant life had taken up in most of the grassy areas, so that there could have been dogs hiding in there and they could have chased us as soon as we hopped the fence. But, dark as it was, we hadn't heard so much as a rustle in the bushes. It was dead silent. Christmas was coming up soon, so the chill had driven out even the mice in yard. All the mice were probably inside the house. Or not, if you could think twice about it and believe what you were thinking about.

The key to the market still worked after almost a year in my possession. Apparently no one had thought to change the locks when it was lost. I'd lifted I don't know how many pizzas, and beer. But I didn't drink a whole lot of beer, so it was mostly missing pizza that could be attributed to me. The sandwiches were always kind of stale, so I tended to go for things that I could cook no matter how long they'd been waiting for purchase. Some of the stuff I took had been there forever, caked in frost dust from the inside walls of the freezer. And there never seemed to be a short supply of old, seemingly forgotten stuff anyway. I doubt anyone noticed.

Not enough to change the locks.

Molliville Park was a quiet little neighborhood. People went to bed early. Lights went out before midnight and would not be lit again until early the next day. It was awful quiet, and really dark. The streetlamps only lit up corners and intersections. None of us bothered to be too quiet hopping the fence, and we did it from the front instead of crawling through the backside neighbor's yard to get in. It just wasn't necessary to hide. Or maybe we wanted to feel bold.

We passed the huge black padlock on the front door and made our way to the back.

At the market just moments earlier, Terry and the two other guys had gone along the aisles, digging at the shelves aimlessly. I could tell as soon as I saw their eyes light up that this would be my last time robbing the market; they were like bears pawing at picnic baskets, knocking shit over and eating fistfuls of potato chips from the bags on the shelves. At that point I duly regretted that I'd told Terry anything about the key, but that was not something I could take back now, nor was this something I probably wouldn't do again if time could be reversed right in front of my eyes and the moment re-lived with the hindsight intact. Because when she asked me what kind of beer I liked best and then came off with a six-pack in her hand, offering it to me, I figured there would be a first and last time for everything and that it shouldn't be mourned, and that—moreover—coming to a private, casual and totally conversational eye to eye with her for the first time since I met her—what, five years ago now?—I would replicate this first time a million times over.

Despite the frosty climate, her shorts were still riding up far past the middle of her thighs, and the fluffy bomber jacket she'd taken from her brother looked so cute and inviting on her that I felt like she was some fantasy from the movies, made into reality for the next six minutes before I wake up and find myself nowhere near her plain of true-life proximity anymore. The jacket was half unzipped and it was kind of dark in the room since we were literally thieves in the night, and before I knew that I was doing it she caught me looking into the jacket at the front of her shirt, which looked ghostly in the pale, dim grayness and almost like she wasn't wearing any shirt at all. And the thought of Terry wearing nothing but that tiny pair of shorts and a bomber jacket two sizes too big for her made me forget about the key to the market altogether. Then I looked up and Terry was smiling right at me. I expected her to say something like, "Aren't we here to look for beer?" But she didn't say anything. She didn't have to. I put my head down and kept searching the shelves for stuff we could take to the house. And Chance probably kept the key for himself, I suppose, because once we got into the building I didn't see it again for the rest of the night. It's possible that he would have given it over if I had asked for it back, but when Terry handed me the six-pack of beer, the key was all but forgotten. She was still smiling, but it was faintly antagonistic instead of friendly, like she knew something about me that I wouldn't want anyone else to know. And I suppose she did. I looked over at the other two and they were happy as deaf toddlers watching a specialist play peek-a-boo for them, and I figured we all just better pack up and get along to the house and start this thing.

Since I kind of knew this would be a last time, I started stuffing my pockets with other things, stuff I thought I might use but probably would always go without if I had to pay for them. I took some pens, a couple packs of gum, some batteries for my camera. And I was surprised to find that I grabbed some toothpaste and a new toothbrush and a bar of soap. I don't know what made me grab those, but then after I also grabbed some headache medicine and some lip balm, I realized that I was actually taking care of myself. Like I was shopping.

It shocked the fuck out of me. I'd never in my life lifted something from a store shelf that could be something I needed, and here I was grabbing toothpaste and a brush and some random items my parents had always just sort of left in the bathroom for me to grab at when I felt like it. And then I clasped my hand around a box tampons, really getting into this personal responsibility thing, and I thought I might grab these for Terry, in case she needed them. Didn't I know that no one likes buying these sort of things? Maybe others do, but not me, because I know how to act right. I would take care of her. I could take care of all of us. It suddenly seemed so clear to me. I wondered if she might actually go steady with me if I only asked?

Chance popped around the corner and slapped me on the back, scaring the shit out of me, pointing to the small pink box in my hand accusingly and told me I may as well take a second helping because it was going to be a long night, and I was so embarrassed that my hand unfisted robotically and the box of tampons fell to the empty white tile floor while my face went just as white as the tiles, and I said, "I didn't know what those were."

But Chance didn't care. He was already ten feet away unloading cartons of cigarettes into his bookbag. I looked to either direction and didn't see Terry either. So while I had the time I shoved the toothpaste and the brush and everything else from this section of the small store back onto the shelf and moved away before I could further embarrass and resultantly disappoint myself.

Inside the house there were a couple of dead squirrels on the dust-covered kitchen table. Inside the kitchen, there was a table with no chairs. In the other bottom floors, there were a couple more tables. None of them had chairs. No more furniture than that.

When we left the market, each of us carrying our weight in beer and food—which was all handled easily because we'd double-bagged the entire lot—I remembered that Terry had been more lithe on her feet than ever, and that she was only really talking to me as we made the trek toward the abandoned house. The other two, Lans and Chance, barely bothered to look at the two of us straggling along behind them. Chance led the way to the house, and when we got there he climbed over the fence first, and until we had managed to haul every last one of the shopping bags over the fence to him, no one else had crossed. And then, when we were all loaded to spend the night at the empty house and our stuff was anchored there in the yard on the wrong side of the neighborhood and there was no turning back, the rest of us climbed too; Lans first, and Terry second, with my help. I couldn't offer much in the way of help, actually, because hopping the fence seemed something she'd done a thousand times, practically flying over to the other side. Trailing behind her but barely managing to touch her leg and shoe, I just lifted my arms and kind of held them up pretending that I was holding her foot while she doubled over the top bar. I don't know if I was trying to show anything to anyone or just convince myself that I was needed. It only took half a second for it to feel as stupid as thinking I would look pretty classy nabbing a box of tampons for a girl while we were on the way to break into an empty house and spend the night.

She probably didn't even notice me standing there all alone on the other side. The other two sure didn't. They'd long since grabbed what they could and headed inside. I watched their backs grow less and less visible, swallowed up in the gloom as they approached the house.

Then I looked up at the black enigma in front of me. Three floors and an attic window that looked like an eye.

It turns out that it was the last night any of us would ever even see that market up the road again.

--

Chance walked over to me in the kitchen after making a round of the first floor and declaring it both empty and safe. The place was run down, for sure, but it wasn't a shithole like one would think. Homeless people had not pissed on the carpets, nor had stray animals for that matter, and, remarkably, there were no empty bottles strewn about, anywhere. Other than the dead squirrels, this place looked utterly forsaken. No one had been here for a very, very long time and that made me feel pretty good. If no one we knew had ever actually been here . . . how was anyone to know what it was really like inside here? It wasn't bad at all.

We could sweep this place up, haul in a sofa bed, light up the room with a candle and the house would be no less inhabitable than the one next door. Finding this quietly fascinating, I looked about the house as if I were peeping in through the gates of Heaven, opening and closing the kitchen cabinets like I were a prospective buyer.

Obviously, a full inspection of the house would have to be made to be absolutely positive on our being a foursome, but a full investigation of the house had been our main goal anyway.

We could just have easily robbed the market and gone to Lans' house, whose parents were both dead, whose older brother never really woke up much or cared about anything when he was awake. Lans didn't live so far from the market. We could have gone back there if we wanted to.

But staying here tonight, on a whim, was somehow special. By next week people would probably know who I am, I guess, which would be pretty neat. They'd whisper as I walked down the halls, and it would feel not a little empowering. No one had ever stayed in the house in Molliville Park since it was abandoned, I repeatedly reminded myself, in solemn awe, opening a closet door, admiring the breathing room allowed for a possible family of heavy winter coats or running jackets. No one had ever stayed here at the house or even come up to the house close enough to peer inside its windows, because although the rumors were vague they were grimly persistent: the reason nobody ever came to this house is because it was haunted.

Flatly, just haunted. No real information beyond that which could much beat yearly ghostly subplots in comedic television sitcoms on Halloween. People didn't even go near this place on Halloween, let alone try to do something with its legend. That we were here on a frosty winter night as Christmas lights blazed and twinkled red and green far down the street was something that suddenly itched at me. We should have done this two months ago during Halloween. But who cared anyway? We could have even made an effort to find out exactly when this house was abandoned and done it on the anniversary, which would have nailed us to the legend without a doubt, but our plans weren't that deep, as they'd only come into fruition maybe sixteen hours ago. So it was a better time than ever, then, to just start drinking the beer.

Chance popped open a can without looking at what it was and he handed it to me, taking one for himself and Terry too and popped those open.

"I wish I'd have known about your key sooner," he said. Then, "Thanks."

I smiled at him and raised my beer and we were joined by Terry and Lans. We all raised our glasses, laughed or mumbled cheers, and took our first drinks slowly and thoughtfully.

Obviously, it would not have made any difference if Chance had known sooner about the key. After what we did in the market tonight, they'd be forced to change the locks. We'd basically rioted. And we left the beer cases open. And the freezer door was left open. And probably the back door too. If Chance didn't still have that key, it wouldn't matter. One night of this is all we'd ever get, whether we'd done it tonight, tomorrow or last week or last year.

Then everyone thanked me all at once, a chorus of praise that sounded a bit distant as I played the scene at the market through my head once again. Terry and her jacket, the six-pack of beer in her hand and the smile on her face; Lans and Chance pegging each other with bits of candy, stamping on cartons of milk to see who could shoot a more refined spray of milk the farthest; my one true friend—the quiet night market and its peacefully empty aisles and free pizza—being taken from me simply because I couldn't say no to a girl.

All I said in reply was, "My pleasure."

The rounds of applause died fast as gradually we dispersed throughout the first floor, inspecting the place again. I think everyone was privately awed and just as privately scared. But no one said anything about it.

I'd never hung out with any of these kids before tonight. They were just random kids from school who didn't amount to much, just like me. Lans was kind of a trouble-maker sometimes, but no more than your average kid who couldn't help but get caught every here and there, only it was a little more than here and there for him. Detention on Wednesday afternoon might have been his only real experience with punishment, but he practically lived there. Chance was a little of the same; the kid who never dressed out for gym class so he always had to walk laps, which is no punishment at all for someone with no desire to participate anyway.

Terry and I had never talked much. I'd always thought her pretty, but what's the use when she won't even look you in the eye? She lived a few houses down from me and we didn't know the first thing about one another. I think that, at school, you kind of stayed on mumbling terms with those around you who are at the bottom level of the life cycle, with no real desire to actually know them; the retarded kids all said hey to each other, and the nobodies all said hey to each other, but no one really hung out. The other two seemed rather disinterested in Terry, and I couldn't understand that one at all. How could someone not be interested in Terry? But I had a feeling that everyone was more trying to keep a steady sense of indifference in the face of what it meant to stay the night in the house in Molliville Park. Probably they couldn't pay too much attention to her because they figured she'd sense they were actually quite scared. Which is perfectly understandable. But still, I guess I had to look at how everyone else was acting to tell if I were acting any different, or much the same, and when she drifted into the room I had a fittingly difficult time not paying attention to her because once I started that's all I wanted to do or could do even if I didn't. Wonderfully, between the four of us we had no hard facts about this place, but people didn't need hard facts. I watched the ghostly simmering of Terry's legs glowing in the fuzzy pool of the moon's glare and I knew that if I were anywhere else on this planet that would still be my main focus and concern.

Suddenly I thought of that padlock on the front door again. Look at the padlock on the front door, I had wanted to say. Look at how long this place has been empty. Look at how many people haven't trespassed here in that time.

We were actually doing this, and it thrilled me. I could lose the corner market for this, I realized. Easily. Good-bye market, hello legends.

Nobody would have believed us the next day, I'd bet, but it didn't matter. We'd be the only ones to have done it. And we'd be doing it with lots of pizza and beer. And if no one else knew it, we would. That's legend enough, I wagered, but at the back of my head, I kind of thought we'd be the talk of the town anyway. Doing something great has got to be recognized.

Lans came in from some dark part of the house.

"Found a fireplace," he said and grabbed the bag with the charcoal and lighter fluid, and some pizzas. We figured we'd have dinner first, and then drink a lot more and explore the house only once we'd all experienced an appropriate buzz. How this was supposed to aid us into an accurate investigation of the haunted aspect of the house didn't sit well with reason, but it would have to do. If we passed out, we wouldn't remember a thing, probably. But that was the risk we were all apparently willing to make.

Our point and our plan, the object of the night, was to spend at least half an hour in every room of the house, and sit there and try to absorb or conjure whatever haunt might possibly be restricted to the room or damned there or however it goes, and to drink all the beer we'd stolen before we could make it to the attic, and to pass out in the attic to see if we were all still alive in the morning. We all listened for footsteps that did not belong to us. I already knew that a six-pack would do me if I went too fast, so I tried to moderate my intake. The four of us had our ears and eyes on the look-out, and so I felt that we'd begun. I'm not so sure about Lans or Chance, but I wanted to hear footsteps that were not ours. And I wanted Terry to as well. For some reason I felt like her and I were a lot closer, like we'd been old friends for years.

I suspected that a six-pack would do the rest of them in too, because I didn't really take any of these three to be experienced drinkers, so in my estimation, we'd end up in the attic in three hours if were to do it at all, and we'd be almost too drunk to walk by then. And I wanted Terry to crash into my arms and I wanted to curl up in the corner and fall asleep with her and maybe see some kind of vague shape moving in the moonlight and not be able to explain it, and I wanted to tell them all about it in the morning and have them hanging on my every word. And Terry and I would be pretty good friends after that, and who knows, maybe all four of us would, and we'd be legends. We'd tell everyone at school and we'd forevermore be the luminous kids with nerves of steel that no one is going to say no to.

Terry sipped at her beer and poked Chance in the side, curling her arm around his waist. To myself I whispered, "Make your move tonight or you're an asshole." My stomach answered for me with a low little growl, and I could practically see myself in this situation, just a spirit floating over the four of us, watching me not make a move. I'd be an asshole anyway, I reckoned. I always would be. It seemed likely that this is why I had to close my eyes when Terry's informal embrace didn't fall away from Chance's hip, and Chance hadn't done anything to stop it either. With my eyes closed, the dancing flames from the fireplace turned the darkness behind my lids to a deep, molten pink, swimming with gray splotches that were either light spots in my eye or the other three moving about in the brilliance of the firelight. A dreamy, disconnected memory swirled about in the splotches, coming together as Terry in her shorts and bomber jacket, smiling in the aisle at the market raid. When I opened my eyes again, all three of them were helping to get the food going. Terry and Chance sat there, one huddled on his haunches and the other with her legs splayed out, warming her feet close to the fire, with Lans sitting cross-legged between them. They were all either readying plates and arranging more drinks, or talking about how great this was going to. What a nice thing to open your eyes to, I considered. What a nice thing indeed.

With stolen barbeque tongs Lans flame-broiled slices of pizza for us, and we only lost a remarkable few slices to the fire due to his valiantly shoddy maneuvering. He laughed brazenly every time a slice went into the flames to die.

He took a few very deep swigs from one can and crushed it, tossing it behind him while he concentrated on the pizza. Chance popped a new one and slid it into Lans' waiting palm, the kid's fingers closed on it and I laughed because I was having such a great time. This must be what it's like finding your place in the world. Terry laughed too and I heard her say thank-you when Lans peeled a paper plate off the top of a thieved batch from the market and served her a slice, and lazily, I sipped from my second beer, listening to Terry's sweet, unassuming laughter play like a pretty music box. In the firelight I watched our shadows climb the wall, feeling that I definitely was never going to make a real impression on Terry tonight, but all the same, feeling good about things. I was actually spending the whole night in the fabled house in Molliville Park, and I wasn't afraid of doing it. Lans ripped open the cardboard slips and tore through the plastic wrappings on the small round individual-sized pizzas and in the glow of the fire these pale cheese pizzas looked like huge white, featureless eyes, staring at us from within the fire as Lans played chef. I watched our shadows dance and sipped again, drinking half the can similarly to how Lans had conquered his first.

But underneath the skin of this simple gazing, what I looked for were five shapes reflected on the wall instead of four. I really wanted to see five shapes.

I don't know if I really believed in the house being haunted yet, but it couldn't not be just a little scary. Anyone would have been a little spooked in the house. It was just that kind of house. But I don't think I really believed that it was haunted, or if I did, then I didn't understand what it was like believing in it because I was tearing it apart so badly in my head to try to figure it the fuck out. But I think I needed the house to be haunted more than I wanted to know what it felt like to kiss Terry on the lips. It would solidify us, and I wanted for all of us to be friends afterward because this was fun and it shouldn't have to end, and I wanted Terry to think I was brave and carefree, which I was maybe a little of both, but definitely a little. More so than anything, I was just willing to go along because it would be stupid not to. I wanted to hold Terry's hand sometimes at school. I wanted to smoke cigarettes with these kids if they were smokers, which I hadn't done before but hey, I'd try it if they all were. I wanted the house to be haunted. The more I thought about it, I wanted to run away from home, too. And I wanted to see five shadows flickering on the wall instead of just the four.

So I kept my eyes peeled.

Lans having got the fireplace going was something I totally would have bet against if any one of us had been carrying cash. It was great. A lot like camping, not that I'd ever been camping before. But I saw it plenty on television, and this old haunted house was every bit as mysterious and dark as a night out in the woods appeared from my side of the screen so far as I was concerned. We all had some pizza, but it turned out not to amount to more than a quarter of what we'd lifted from the market. As for me, my appetite was a little noncommittal on account of a whole hazy cloud of things: the house, these kids who were basically strangers, the thought of having to drink all that beer and still make it all the way up to the attic; this really pretty girl Terry who didn't seem to be anyone's girlfriend even though she looked hotter than any girl in the neighborhood.

Lans had two more slices of pizza past the final straw for Chance, Terry and I. Then Chance said, "Everyone grab a six-pack, we're going up."

--

We spent an hour in an empty bedroom, drinking. Time passed pretty quickly—we were fucking giddy with excitement. Between the four of us we went through two six-picks in the first hour. Then skipped the other rooms and we moved directly to the second floor, totally unable to stick to our plan. I could barely walk. The house was getting darker and darker with every sip of beer, but my slightly impaired perception was still rather well adjusted by now to the gloom. The house seemed both smaller and bigger at the same time, and the hallways of closed doors never ending. When we passed rooms with open doors, sometimes the moonlight would brighten up the place, then we'd pass that and it would grow darker again. Darker then lighter, and lighter then darker. Terry was getting hotter and hotter.

I think we spent twenty minutes, at best, on the second floor, all of which was walking and talking, not exploring and conjuring.

On the flight up to the third floor, I felt Terry's hand on my stomach and I nearly fell back down the steps. Her fingers were soft and warm, pressing firmly against the tightened muscles in my belly, worming their beautiful way underneath the bottom of my shirt. I felt dizzy and electric at the same time, explosive with my options for a return gesture. But because it was the first time any girl had ever touched me that close to the zipper of my slacks, I coughed and actually pretended to lose my balance just so I could step away and clear my spinning head.

I did step away. Two steps down, to be exact.

But almost automatically in the same move I lifted my head in an apologetic smile that I hoped looked cool and easy, and I saw that the group—inclusive of Terry—was already up on the landing. They presently entering the first bedroom on the left, almost ten feet away from me. Lans was tailing behind and he turned and said, "Come on, man."

I had no time to dismiss it as a probable attachment to the slightly rising drunk I was riding like a rodeo horse before I felt the fingers on me again, and the warm hand pressed flat against me, and I looked down and saw my shirt ruffling, pulled up, and my skin moving underneath the pressure of fingers I could not see, because there was no hand.

I took another step back and tried shoving away whatever entity might have been embracing me like that. Unseen fingers pressed at the top of my pants again and suddenly they dug in with unnecessary force, jabbing me almost, like insinuating that I should leave. Suddenly my bones were ice cold and suddenly I knew things were not right and so I ran upstairs and followed the three into the first bedroom on the left. When I entered the room I could see nothing, but something hit me very hard in the face and I felt not just fingers, but whole hands grasping at my stomach and squeezing my shoulders together so that I felt my body would crack, and I fucking screamed as loud as I thought I ever had before.

The beer dropped from my hand and thudded down the first couple of steps and I grabbed for the hands at my pants and twisted them away.

I walked closer to where it looked like everyone was standing, but I was wrong, it was just shadows. Then I felt hands on me again. My mind had had enough. I took a good hold of whatever it was, finding a firm grip instantly, feeling good about that, and I twisted, hard.

Chance screamed and the hands in mine squirmed out, doubled up and shoved me away. "Fucking quit it," he yelled. "It's just me. We have to get out of here." Yeah, it had only been him this time. I tried to apologize but could not find the words. The now sour-memory warmth of the hands on me on the staircase, creeping over my stomach with so much delicateness at first, when no one was there but me, started to revolt me. What if my eyes had closed and it had kissed me, because I would certainly have thought it was Terry and I would have kissed back. My stomach began to turn.

I couldn't see very well in here. Terry stood motionless by the window, her torso seeming to be puffed out with shoulder pads even though it was just the overlarge bomber jacket. Dimly, I thought she looked like a huge blacked-out lightbulb.

"Let's get the fuck out of this room," Chance said abruptly, commandingly, and then he left without making sure we listened to this instruction. I couldn't see any reason to question his sentiment and so I followed him. Midway across the landing, I looked back and Terry was being led out of the room by Lans, asking what happened. Then when I turned around again Chance was nowhere to be seen.

"I don't know," Lans whispered unsurely behind me. "Somebody just twisted Chance's arm and he ran. I saw it happen, his arm just twisted."

Terry whimpered, and I put one hand each on Lans' and her shoulders. "That was me. I thought someone was touching me so I twisted his arms."

"No, before you got in here it happened," he said back, hoarsely, now positive of it beyond any doubt. Terry whimpered again, squeaky like the sounds from a guinea pig.

Someone had touched me on the stairs too. That's it, I thought. Not rumors at all. This is why no one comes to this house. It's haunted.

Then, are we in trouble right now? I sincerely fucking hoped not.

Chance cried out from the attic. We figured it was the attic because there was only one room up above the third floor, and we followed him up the stairs, but he was charging down the narrow corridor as we made our way up. "No, go back!" he screamed.

"What the fuck happened!?" Lans shouted back at him in the dark. He was already beyond his limit too. I knew that because they way he looked, I felt. Terry was still whimpering. Something had happened and it happened very fast.

"Nothing," Chance whispered to us, trying to calm himself but riling us up in the process. "But that's the attic. We have to—we just have to go down."

Lans grabbed him by the arm. "Then why did you run up to the attic?"

"I fucking didn't, Lans. I went downstairs. But I ended up there in the attic instead. We have to get out of here, and I'm going."

Before any of us could try to figure that out, I was shoved violently from behind, pitching me into Lans, who fell into Terry, and Chance disappeared again. He sprinted right up the stairs again, right back up the attic, two or three steps at a time, into the darkness from which he'd just fled.

By what little light was available, I wasted not a single fucking ounce of it and I grabbed Terry's arm and told her to run, and we followed Chance up toward the attic. I didn't grab Terry out of any reason that I felt I might have if the situation were under any amount of control. It wasn't because I wanted to kiss her so badly, and it couldn't have been to try to brave out and lead the pack, because I felt more scared then than I thought humanly possible. I grabbed her because she was in the way, and I shoved her up the stairs like a useless stubborn door I needed to blow through and I yelled for her to run, but Lans darted up the stairs ahead of us, knocking us both into the wall. "Stop it you guys, fucking run!" he yelled, and I didn't need him to say it but it broke Terry's paralysis and she hugged me, pinning my arms to my side. "Fucking run!" I pleaded in a voice impossibly unlike my own, splintered and raw and scared as it coughed up from my throat. I was so shocked by the viciousness and the power of it that I flinched. Terry cried out, shrilly, starting to shake very violently. I thought she may have a heart attack. There was no fucking way I wanted to be the last in line, but Terry was in the way so I shoved her even harder, then again, and told her to fucking run or I would climb the fuck over her. I screamed at Lans who wasn't even there anymore. Then she finally ran. We all ran.

Up to the attic.

Lans was crying when Terry and I made it up there, and a dark, crumpled shape at Lans' feet looked like Chance. I stepped ahead of her and tried to get closer to them to see what was going on, when Terry screamed and she hit me from behind. Our heads smacked and I went down.

"Something touched me!" she screamed. She threw herself against the attic door and smashed it shut. Just as she did this a thunderous barrage of fists sounded from the other side of the door that lasted for just a couple of seconds but shaved a good ten years off my life. She fell and squirmed backward away from the door on the balls of her hands, kicking at the floorboards with hard, frantic thumps. I rushed over to her and dug my hands underneath her arms, pulling her up.

I couldn't take my eyes from the door until Lans pulled me over to where Chance was lying down, dragging Terry along in my grip. Chance was sobbing so heavily that I knew he was not simply scared, but in physical pain. We tried to pry him apart but he was curled so tightly in a fetal position that neither of the two of us could make any sense of him. He'd become somewhat of a pretzel. I began to suspect that it wasn't Chance at all, but dismissed the notion as paranoid. Lans stood up and put his hands in front of his eyes, trying to wipe away the alcohol.

I was dead sober. I couldn't see how any of us could still be drunk. "Hey Terry," I nearly whimpered. "Are you okay?"

Chance looked up at us then and said, "Please help."

His voice was so pained, terrified and distant and half solidified it touched my ears like frigid air. When he uncurled himself, he proffered the palms of his hands out to us. They were black in the gloom of the attic. I reached for him, thinking he only wanted help to stand up again, but that wasn't what he was doing. He was trying to show us his hands, which were both soaked in blood up to the elbows. His blood. When I tried pulling him up, his slick skin slipped out from my grasp and he fell onto his back.

From this position we could see that his entire mid-section was soaked and gleaming in the moonlight.

As Lans and I watched, a gigantic handful of flesh and bone was torn out from between Chance's legs along with a good portion of the front of his pants and it rose in the air and then came down again, hard, on his face. We saw the motions, as if someone had physically ripped out his midsection and tried to smother him with it, but nobody was there. Whatever was attacking us was invisible. Or, Jesus, not invisible per se, but a ghost maybe? Couldn't that be the only possible explanation? I didn't want to ask it—I couldn't.

The back of Chance's head thumped into the floor and his body stopped moving. His stomach convulsed and we watched as his whole body lifted a little off the floor again and another massive chunk of Chance was torn out in mid-air while we all stood horrified and watched, the section of his body removed from him hovering effortlessly in the air trailing ropes of intestine, so ribs and sagging organs, and as before, came back down again, slamming on his darkened face, entirely obscured now by tissue and flesh and strips of his pants and shirt. Incredibly, Lans and I were both watching, and neither of us screamed as something we couldn't see flattened Chance's whole head. The top of his skull bulged out for a split second before it burst like the top of a banana if you stepped on it, spraying darkness and fluid across the floorboards. It looked not unlike how Chance himself had looked stomping on the carton of milk back at the corner market earlier tonight, bursting milk from the swelled end of the carton.

I felt fingers at my back and lunged around, swung, unintentionally striking Lans in the face.

He fell backward but didn't lose his balance. He was too shocked to have flinched, too traumatized by this to have fallen. His feet were rooted to the floor, and he stared down at Chance's brutalized corpse. I tried to apologize but then something took hold of his arm and bent it so far back that it tore from his body at the elbow and flew across the room, crashing against the wall. All three of us screamed, but Lans didn't move or topple for that either. He swayed, dribbling saliva, his eyes filling with tears. For a moment he looked up at me. I thought I saw a few questions flit across those blank eyes, questions like Why? and What the fuck have we done?.

Terry had gone down on her hands and knees, staring blankly at Chance, wide-eyed and panting in short, heavy bursts. Chance was very, very dead, that was a given. His death was real, and it was remarkable just how easy it was to accept this. I yelled the single remaining word in my vocabulary. "RUN!!"

And I did, except I didn't wait around for anyone to follow. Crossing the room, past Terry, hauling her up with a brute strength I didn't care to analyze, she only fell down behind me. I dragged her toward the door and it looked like I might actually have to drag her down three more flights of steps, through three floors of whatever was happening here, and I would have to drag her out the door and out of the yard. I had a lot of dragging ahead of me. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes for a second to collect my thoughts and get ready to go for real, and pulled.

"We can't go that way!" Lans screamed, seemingly not having noticed that one of his arms was now lying against the floor molding of the wall six or seven feet behind him. And then his stomach bulged out wide and pregnant, as a large clump of his insides pushed out through his body and through his shirt and jacket, splitting the zipper, then doubled back and went into him again, shoving itself through his back, pulling him away as his tethered body chased after its own bowels, and the tenseness went out of his face while his inert body slapped against the wall. A fast series of convulsions shook his body, one of them dancing through his leg so that he kicked his own severed arm a few feet back, into the shadows. Lans looked dead after that. I think his stomach blowing up and then pushing in and out of his body killed him before he even hit that wall. It was just a body now, standing up, thawing off the last of its post-mortem epilepsy. Before it could fall there, dead as Chance's body was, something flattened him even more effectively that it had Chance's skull, bending him backward. His entire five-foot-something length fell down to one or two feet and the floorboards creaked under the pressure as Lans spilled out across the floor in an explosion of bones and blackness.

He was simply folded up and squashed.

Time was clearly running out. I rushed the door and swung it open, diving down the stairs, not caring if Terry followed or not. There was no time for this kind of shit, to be dragging someone if they don't want to run.

But when I reached the bottom of the thin little corridor staircase and hit the entrance to the landing, Terry hit me from behind, whimpering now because that's the only sound she could make, and I backed up fast, not wanting to be shoved out into a blind spot. My hands shot out for the railing and I buoyed myself there as Terry's frenzied momentum took her out ahead of me. She looked back, wide-eyed, shaking, her arms held our wide and fingers splayed like she wasn't sure if she were floating or standing.

She started to say my name, but the word was cut off, stoppered as if choked off forcibly. The front of her stomach bulged and elasticized, the jacket wide open now, zipper torn, like some massive unseen hand was tugging an unborn child from her young womb. I put my hands over my belly, still feeling those phantom fingers.

And she shot forward into the recesses of the landing, disappearing from my vantage point at the end of the corridor. I heard a rush of wind, the sound of her gurgling on sound and fluid alike, followed with a horrified scream crushed off again in the hollow of her throat, and then a massive final crash shook the corridor. I stepped out onto the landing, trying to adjust to the gloom to find the stairs. Something thick and wet sprinkled lightly down on me in a fine mist and I opened my palms to see the warm, greasy drops of color fill my hands and I looked up. From the landing, the only place the moon really did cling was the ceiling. I looked at what was on the ceiling, spread out above me. A small bit of soft white fabric separated from the pulp and paste of it and fell down into my open palm, drifting coolly down like a lazy snowflake.

Except it wasn't a snowflake at all. I stared at it for what seemed like an eternity, my heart skipping beats and my feet cold and shriveled underneath my balance. A mixture of terror and resigned faithlessness coursed through me. I closed my fist, to melt this thing that was not a snowflake, and opened my hand again. It was still there, soft and bloody and awful. Then I looked . . . up . . . again.

My legs took their own initiative and before I could realize what I was doing or where I was going, they were pistoning forward, toward the staircase. Instead of climbing down, though, I just flew right off the landing, involuntarily, my legs still pumping like the revolutions of vehicle tires as a car breaching the edge of a cliff at ninety miles and hour slams right over the edge and sails through the air.

And I was exactly like that. I never touched a single stair. Brutally, I hit the fucking second floor landing and skidded against the wall, still pumping my panic-stricken legs, the wind-up springs still churning energy and movement.

Whatever might have been broken—if anything—in that implausible plunge from the third floor to the second, I didn't feel anything but the very real sensation of fingers digging into my chest. I pushed something away from me, but nothing was there. My ribs felt tampered with. Something had tried to pull my ribs out. Like it had done to the bodies of Terry, Lans and Chance.

I treated the second floor's flight of steps just like the third's and flew down to the first floor on inappropriate, terrified wings. This time when I hit the bottom, not only did I feel something in my foot snap when I landed in a barely rolling ball, but I couldn't stand up anymore either. The front door materialized, strong and promising, mere inches from my face. I pulled my body across the floor as if my deadened legs weighed nothing, like it wasn't anything at all to do this. So what if my leg was broken? I was getting out of here. I clawed my way to the door, dragging myself now.

I dragged myself up and stood on my good leg and pulled at the knob. With no success forthcoming I turned the lock and pulled again, harder. Then again, and again and again. The front door wouldn't budge. I wanted to kick the fucking thing out, but with only one good leg that was completely impossible.

Just a second of silence was all I needed. To think of two minor details in short succession. The padlock on the other side of the door. And the hands closing in at my hips like the strongest lover known to man, crushing the bones, squeezing me shut. I fell instantly.

I knew I'd never walk again. But I wanted to see tomorrow anyway.

Plunging my arms into the darkness ahead of me, I followed the outline of the windows against the side of the living room, through the kitchen to the back door, digging at the floor. I raised my arm, scrambled at the lock with a flash so fast it was like lighting, and I got the door open and the cold December air poured down on and froze the sweat on my face, and I pulled myself out into the weeds and the high grass in the backyard, screaming gutturally, spitting fear and blood and bile, my throat hitching and throwing up on the grass, and I dragged myself over it, clawed and dragged and fucking dragged myself away from the goddamned house, and the door to the house slammed shut behind me with a chilling, muffled thud, issuing no echo in the night.

I was no longer in any pain; that last agonized stretch out of the house had obviously been my last. Even if there were still a few last brilliant blazes of life left in my body, there was none in my will, and I turned over on my back and I screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed.

When I could not address to the artic night a single note more, my throat kept on hitching, my chest rising and pushing out air. Soundless air. Then I coughed on blood, spitting it out sideways, gawking up at the black sky, mystified and thunderstruck.

Up in the forever and the limitless, up above me, spread out across every black direction and seemingly covering it up, tucking in the night for bed, the moon's pale light was bright. Above in the colorless pool of that starless sky, round and white as an eye with no pupils, no iris, no cornea, the moon hovered and silently watched over everything. It gazed down in its milky stare, high above, painting the top of the sky the way the mass on the ceiling in the third floor had . . . how it had painted the ceiling from end to end, how it tucked in the lately disturbed house in its own despondent, limitless way.

When I'd felt the wetness dripping down on me and looked up, I couldn't see the red in her blood right off the bat but I knew what it was I was looking at. It had been Terry's obliterated body, all right. Smashed into the ceiling the same way Lans had been smashed into the floor in the attic, and the way Chance's head had been crushed by the same indiscernible force. The moonlight had played harshly on the bright shards of exposed bone, and a small pale bit of lace that had either been the top or bottom of Terry's underwear, hung down in a ragged strip.

A small, creased, blood-spattered bit of this fabric had floated down into my hand like a snowflake. The closest I would ever get to touching her.

I could still feel those fingers pressing into my belly. Haunted movements played across my body; angry touch and dismal connections. I probably still had the snowflake fragment of Terry's underwear, as red with blood as the sky was black with absolutely nothing. The moon flared. That white eye in the night looked down upon me relentlessly but didn't see a thing. It just bathed me in its gaze as I whimpered soundlessly, staring emptily the way the blind black eye of the attic had, down upon me when I'd first stepped into the yard of the fabled house in Molliville Park.