tl-os

[tl-os]

Le Palais du Feu

[tl-os]

The Other House by The Sea, Interior View: The Dining Room. (Helen had Beritrace and Beritrace had Helen, for succor, for comfort. Thus, Pandora grew to know that every home had rafters in which hung a Papriky; hers was a position neither special nor unique.)

[tl-os]

[tl-os]

In Pursuit of The Establishment of Motive?

Pandora is so tired of running,

Tired of keeping 5&½ miles ahead,

Far enough that Vourdoulaka

Is a tiny dot of need and rage

In the distance.

Stitch in her side,

Pandora must stop and rest.

Ever closer comes the squat monster.

“No rest for the wicked!”

She hollers as she closes in,

A length of rope over one shoulder.

(If only she could tie her up

And keep her in a box.)

But Pandora would rather

Be strung up upon the gallows

And hanged

Than belong to her.

[tl-os]

[tl-os]

Each night, Somebody

Boards the conveyance

Between two lands.

Dramas ensue.

Battles and hallways,

Deaths and hallways,

Hauntings and hallways.

Always then,

For better or worse,

“Farewell, farewell…

‘til we meet again.”

Ever without end?

Pandora swims up through

The Aubergine Pond

And pulls herself

Onto the patio,

Slinking, sopping wet, and

Dripping streams

Of her dreams

Behind her

As she pads into

The poolhouse

And they crystalize

As they dry

On her skin,

Like tears.

[tl-os]

Like a Broken Bridge

Helen sits at the kitchen table smoking. It is too early for a drink. She has not planned dinner as Paris will not be home for dinner. He will not be home for the next three weeks. He is in San Jose and has been for a week already. And when he does come home it will be for just two days, and then he will leave again for three more weeks.

She will take Pandora out to dinner. That will be good. She enjoys watching the waitstaff slowly become acquainted with her little girl over the course of the meal. Why is she bringing a child that age here?; or, Why isn’t this kid ordering off of a child’s menu? There’s no way she will be able to eat all that food. She is preternaturally polite and well-mannered. Well, look at that - she ate it all! And is ordering dessert! What a charming, smart little girl, more like a tiny grown-up… And her mom is such a good tipper!

What time is it now? 5 minutes later than the last time she looked. Still too early for that drink. She smokes and thinks about how empty the house is, how big the house is. (She won the prize, lucky her.) So much space, all the little corners, nooks, drawers, and cabinets. All full of their own spaces.

She smokes and thinks about how she has been left alone to manage all of that space.

To say nothing of the doors to the house that lead to all of that space. (Anything could happen.)

She smokes and thinks about doors, about that closet in her last apartment. Back in The Old Inland Valley. She has lived all over the country, literally, from Manhattan to Honolulu. But always with other girls. That apartment was the first time she had ever lived alone. And she did not like it. She had more than not liked the closet in the bedroom with the door in the back wall. It was a locked door that she could not open as she had no key, and she had never been able to confirm what was on the other side. The landlord had insisted it was nothing to worry about. And Helen had not pressed, she did not want to seem like a hysterical female. But Helen had seen Rosemary’s Baby, and so she worried.

Helen smokes and considers that door in the back wall of that closet and how she had run away from it at the first possible opportunity. She could now see that she had run straight into marriage. So that she would not be alone.

And now she is alone again, having to protect herself. And a little girl. A strange, scared, clinging little girl who fusses and cries when separated from her. She feels like throwing up when she thinks about how vulnerable her little girl is.

Helen looks at the clock. Just ten more minutes and she can get up, fill a tumbler with ice, pour herself a nice big vodka, and retrieve 5 fat, pimento-filled green olives from the jar for a garnish.

She smokes and stares angrily at the back door and the rays of late afternoon sunlight shining through all that space between the flimsy, hollow door and the jamb. Just one little, fiddling lock in that doorknob. Not very much protection against all that dark, tree-filled space out there. How was she to protect herself and the little girl? This was not part of the bargain.

Or is she just not up to the task? Either way, she has no choice and her dread of the coming darkness outside will somehow slowly transform as it melts into the overwhelming relief of letting go as the glass with the ice and the vodka and the olives is in her hand, being raised to her lips, and soon she will be somebody else.

[tl-os]

The Common Denominator

[tl-os]

“My mother said you’re a manipulative brat who always gets her way; you’re a pathetic little baby that should be forced to grow up.” Vourdoulaka sneered. “She said that your mother is stupid and that if she were your mom she would have forced you to go. She said that it was just a little blood and that it’s not a fever until it’s 101 degrees.”

“You refuse to tell that mother of yours what happened in the house three doors down the road when you were five and a half years old because you know that she hates you so much that she would find a way to blame you and use it against you for the rest of your life.”

But she never said it because she was too afraid, it was too mean, and once said, it could never be taken back. So she swallowed the words for the millionth time and they landed with a dull thud in her stomach for the millionth time, where they became infected and festered until, for the millionth fucking time, she could stand it no longer and55130—

[tl-os]

The morning that Pandora set out for The Fire Palace…

By the time that the call placed in Kansas City, Missouri at 05:30:0555 AM on June 3, 1944 is routed through The Old Inland Valley and then on to the phone sitting in the cupola outside the bedroom only the bravest dare enter on the 7th or 9th floor of Alternate Location #2 of The House by The Sea (50 miles NE of Pasadena, sometimes an estate on the historical register run by a 501(c)(3), other times, a hospital), to the phone on the counter behind the register in the giftshop 1/18th of a mile away, to the phone in the library of the rambling, old, low-slung house crowded with the possessions of previous owners on an enormous piece of land one town over that her father bought that raised the ire of Vourdoulaka because it was not as nice as the house her mother bought and she was jealous, to the phone on the Chippendale drop-front secretary in the Penthouse of Alternate Location #5.5 of The House by The Sea which sits empty and lifeless for months at a time, the only movement inside those of the dustmotes that lazily drift on invisible currents of air in the shaft of sunlight that peeks through the heavy crimson velvet drapes that have not been fully drawn, to the wooden phone built in 1906 that hangs on the wall of the little telephone hall in The Old Dark House (gutted of its wires and workings long before Helen acquired it, Paris kept his bottle of Crown Royal, nestled in its purple and gold velvet bag, inside its cabinet - perhaps once a year he had a drink), to the dirty yellow rotary phone that hung on the wall of her grandmother’s kitchen in The House by The Sea, to the china painted pink and blue phone in the chintz-clad parlor of Mrs. Bird’s bungalow (could the inhabitant of the attic hear that phone ring?), to the phone that Pandora carries in her pocket on a hike up in the hills, to the phone on the desk of the office of her boss in the huge building where she works all day as an assistant and all night as a skivvy, to the phone in that blood-soaked hotel room out in the desert, to the little blue princess phone that once sat next to her Aunt’s side of the bed on the second floor of The Other House by The Sea, to the phone submerged in the murky green waters under a pile of rubbish inside The Sealed Glass Chamber on the floor below, eventually emerges from the mirror that someone gazes into inside the tower of the island where she sits, cursed, weaving what she can out of the colorful vapors, all language has dissolved and she cannot get There from Here.

[tl-os]

If it was so beautiful, then why are you so broken, Helen?

[tl-os]

The moment between The Acceptance of the Invitation and The Undertaking of the Journey.

[tl-os]

🔵YOU ARE HERE

[tl-os]

[tl-os]

On a home visit like any other,

Somewhere on the journey

From the pomegranate tree{SBLCB}

To the avocado tree{THM},

Plaster Rebecca appears

— rosy and alive!

“Take this,” she proffers an axe.

“The magpie left it for you.

NOW-

feet in the air

and head on the ground.”

“Familiar,” says Pandora.

Somewhere Menemonie smiles.

Whilst Honeira heavily sighs

And composes

Something more effective

For the following night.

[tl-os]

The Courtesy Of A Reply Is Requested, or Pandora Considers The Convent Life.

[tl-os]

1:5&½

Pandora considers the invitation.

She has been trying to work up a timeline. When was she first aware? Can she remember a time before? Uncertain.

Never has a hand been laid upon her in aggression, not that she recalls. And there was a time when she did work to recall. She was at her worst, her most neurotic, when recollection became something of a psychiatric sport. Days were wasted sorting through vague, reactionary, emotional memories that she could not explain. Nights wandering from room to room in the Old Dark {ramshackle, disordered} House {of her mind}, wrenching open dusty chests and hat boxes full of blurry, frozen flashes. She gave them time to develop, to animate. She prodded, she sculpted. Nothing.

She consulted a professional, even pushed a bit. She was tactfully and authoritatively rebuffed. She considers herself quite lucky for that. She has long made peace with all of it— indeed, she is indebted, beholden, and obliged.

So from whence had it sprung? Never a witness. But forever surrounded by victims.

She knew η φωτιά παλάτι predated her. Perhaps the seeds of struggle predated even her mother? What had her grandmother endured? Her great-grandmother? How long could it lurk in the bloodline?

She knew that her mother’s father had been a cruel, careless man. In his free time, he hunted helots for sport. The day that Helen lay at his feet, bleeding, he had laughed. Was that the start of it? Her grandmother, hearing her daughter’s cries, had flown down the stairs to the basement, scooped up the little girl, turned and fled. They ran away, as far and as fast as they could, from Sparta, just the two of them all the way to The Old Inland Valley.

Cassamnestra had been headstrong and brave to do that; "good wives” did not behave like such. She and Helen had suffered for it but that suffering was nothing compared to what might have passed had Pandora’s grandmother been meek and obedient.

The Old Inland Valley was populated by long, dark, menacing shadows for Pandora. She had heard too many stories. Visiting was fraught with what might befall her there. This was where Helen had been chased through the orange groves at night by the old man who lived in the house next door to the toilet factory. Wasn’t there some story about the little girl up the street— her father crawling around the neighborhood at night, peeping into windows? And then there was Helen’s best friend’s older sister, Rhonda. Poor Rhonda. She had been the subject of much whispered talk in the neighborhood. A pageant queen who “modeled”, Rhonda ran with a fast crowd. Boys on motorcycles would pick her up and take her out on dates. Before her 18th birthday, Rhonda was found dead and “interfered with” out behind Cement Mountain. Then there was that Pyanopsia when Helen had been out driving her brand, new Nineteen Sixty-Five and a Half baby blue Mustang. The doors were unlocked. And, as she pulled up to the red light just beyond the RailRoad tracks, Z den ekDine Zden ekD ineZden ekD i neZden ekD i neZden ek Din eZdenek. Dine Zde enkDi neZdene kDineZ. dene kDin eZ denekDi ne. ZdenekD in eZdene kDi neZden. ekDine Zdenek DineZd enekDine Z de nekDineZ. denek DineZde ekD.

But somehow by the end of that story (a story Helen had presented to a 12-year-old Pandora on the way home from a baby shower thrown for her aunt) nothing had happened, and she had returned home in one piece to Cassamnestra. The grayer Pandora gets, the more she puzzles over this last story. But when she gets into a car she never forgets to lock the doors.

Because, despite her mother’s best efforts, Pandora is more sure than ever that it was inevitable; something foul and evil, some kind of frog-moth, had taken root, festering, waiting for Pandora. She suspects that some horror had been suffused into her being before she had even begun. She was cradled in the womb of Oizys and formed from the memory of trauma.

From birth, a clock commenced its inevitable tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, winding down on her. (Why are there so many clocks in The House by The Sea?, she asks herself.) A life of chronic blind fear, an ever evolving state of alarmed presentiment.

And now Mrs. Bird expects this? I am no architect. Is it my destiny to tear apart the matter of my own neurons and reconstruct all 2,000 floors into something less made of leaves and more of flowers?

But I cannot make the dead love me.

And who is to say what such provocations might do?

What did Aunt Edith say to Pet? “Prepare yourself to defend yourself, and you just might find yourself with something to defend against.”