Moody Street

Funny, the things that come to mind as you're on the edge of sleep. The immersive flashback, the vividness that emerges from fatigue-frayed reality.

In my memory, we are walking down Goodwin avenue, my husband, our kids and me. It's mid-October, and we're on our way to the pumpkin patch at the church on Moody street. It's not very long since we'd moved to the gold house, and it's nice to be in walking distance, though our youngest is still inclined to complain. The late afternoon air is cool and crisp and all the neighborhood is decorated for Halloween. Wrought iron and gingerbread strung with scarecrows and lights and leaves.

It's all so beautiful, and yet. I am sad.

It doesn't matter. I laugh and run ahead. My misery is like distant thunder on a clear day, conveniently ignored until it's too late.

 It's a fraud, of course, but then we all have our role to play.

At the church, we pick a number of suitable pumpkins, bearing in mind that we'll have to carry them home. I remember how the orange stripes in my sweater coordinate with my chosen gourd as if I'd planned it, how the boys' forest greens and maroons all pull together as if we'd conspired to look like an ad.

I'm lucky. I know I'm lucky, even my jeans proclaim it. The silver four leaf clover jingles as I walk. My hair is in two long braids (to quote Collette) like reins. Oh, yes, the symbolism is amusing. As if my jeans are chiding me for my unhappiness, as if my hairstyle hints at how little control I have over my own life. Moody street, indeed.

The truth is that I have secrets, which are both not as bad as and also worse than anything you are thinking. They weigh on me as I trip along in my braids and boots. I laugh and chat and feel so heavy I wonder if I can even make it home. But I do.

At the house, we line up the pumpkins on the front porch steps, one for each of us. After dinner, it's time for homework and baths and bedtime, and eventually I find myself back outside, alone. My secrets make me reluctant to sleep, if only because I don't want to wake to face them.

I stay up late reading under the hexagonal light, and when I finally do sleep, I dream of a dark hallway with a broken mirror at one end. Bloody Mary has escaped, as well as her sister in white. The are coming down the hall in their old-fashioned dresses, their faces veiled, hiding a horror of which I can't speak.

White Mary stands in front of me, silent and eerie, her veil moving with her breath. She reaches toward me and I wake just as the world turns red.

I sit up knowing my future, the shape and color of it, at least, the same way that secret sorrows are sorrows because you already know how they end.

There is some knowledge you are not allowed to escape, not then and not now, even in the frayed edges of your sleep.


Note: the events described occurred in 2006.

That night, I'd been reading a zine called Bloody Mary's Cool Little Sister, which no doubt inspired the arrival of the Marys in my dream.