Wildes Writing

Tim Wildes

1

Silverbrook Court was a quiet neighborhood. It was a small cul-de-sac bordering the city on one side and a cornfield the other. The residents of Silverbrook Court were demi-youthful and too, there were those in the neighborhood approaching retirement-age. Children played in the streets as their neighbors clambered into their oft dated (yet reliable) vehicles to work each day. Young couples tended their garden, aspiring to color the neighborhood with bright-palleted flowers that their bairn would grow alongside with. 

A senior woman lived alone in her large ranch style home on the entrance to the block. Her husband of 52 years had died late the year previous to a degenerative disease of the brain; she watched him get chiseled away at everyday until he was mentally gone. He died shortly thereafter. The woman married her husband when she had just left high school and never knew adult-life without him. He provided for the family via his government job, it paid well enough to put food on the table every day and then some, leaving behind him quite a small fortune via a monthly pension stipend and social security. The woman too, had worked, just never a job more formal than secretarial work across a few different fields. This being said: her husband’s income, former and continuant, was of the utmost importance to her continued existence.

            Despite this co-dependency, the woman remained thoroughly independent. She cherished her home, now empty, but still hers. She functioned within the auto-determined confines of her day; she started each day taking a shower, medium temperature. Subsequently, she read the local paper alongside her bowl of oat cereal in 2% milk. She spent the remainder of the day playing mobile games on her tablet, watching television, typically whichever of her favorite TV-cop dramas were playing at the time. The woman would tell you that she had seen them all;

“They only play reruns now; I want something new.”

            The woman relied on her surviving family to navigate bills and taxes. This process was something historically always done by her late husband, leaving the woman now feeling in the dark as to their procedure. It was that despite the woman’s independence, there was a scaredness or timidity towards self-care outside of routine; the “muscle” simply had never been trained. This scaredness evidently passed into her own routine too, she required more affixation each day from her children. Everyday had its own new obstacle that only the woman’s daughter could remedy. Each week delivered new insight that the woman’s son must unto provide counsel. Admonishment became deeply personal to the woman, criticism or earnest advise became hurtful. The hurt created a divide that only the woman had means to cross, this bridge was built upon the pillars of the woman’s necessary survival function. Without her children, the woman was helpless and alone.

            The woman grew to dread the nights she spent in her alone living room; she swore she heard tapping and banging from outside of her home. She’d fixate on these for some new entertainment. The tapping seemed to coincide with her watching the 6 o’clock and 9 o’clock news every night. The woman would sometimes ask her neighbors if they had heard the noises too,

“I thought a gun went off! You’re sure you didn’t hear it?”

“Yessum, I was home and dint hear a thing, maybe a cat?”

“Oh…!” exclaimed the woman, defeated. “Okay.”

The woman was frustrated at the dismissal from her neighbors but shrugged it off. The noises continued but the woman began ignoring them, figuring it must be the doing of a different set of neighbors, or pesky squirrels dropping nuts on her roof.

“That’s gotta be it.” The woman would think to herself after coming to this conclusion.

That night the woman noticed a car parked outside of her home on the crowded street, her neighbor across the street seemed to have people over.

“What are they doing?”

Who is at my house? And why?

“They shouldn’t be here.”

“They want something from me” the woman thought repeatedly to herself, the words newly emphasized each time she thought it.

The woman that night heard a new noise, one that bedreaded her to a sight unseen. She heard voices about herself, she heard a scrummage beneath herself and unto her dreams. The woman heard the motions of motion and the sounds of sound that would belay her to fear incarnate.

Something is in my house.

That night was fraught with terror; the woman was unable to move and afraid to breathe.

2

The woman woke. Very quickly she considers to herself if what she had felt, what she had lived, was all within her own mind. She questions her own sanity, if that hadn’t been real,

“What could it be?”

The woman passes off her experience as a dream, it’s the only solution that provides even a feeble gesture of mercy. The woman does, however, conclude her daughter must know of this half-recognized horror.

“There was some- something in my home.”

“What? Mom are you sure? Are you alright, is anything missing?”

“I’m alright, nothing is broken.”

“They just, broke-in and left? Without touching anything, did they know you were there?”

“They were only there for me.”

“Mom, what are you talking about?”

“They came for me.”

“Did they hu-”

“They didn’t do anything to me, I guess. I think the neighbors have something to do with it. They had people over and I just knew something was wrong! Somebody parked in front of my house, in front of my home! They wanted to scare me I know it. They knew I was alone; they knew I was little; they knew they could hurt me. They’re up to no good! I bet they’ll come back too; they know I can’t stop them. Don’t you understand that? They’ll do it again because they can! They’ll do it again because they want me afraid and they want me gone, they hate me! Don’t you get that?”

“Mom, what are you saying, what are you going to do?

“They’re crazy!”

“Mom… they’re just a young couple. P- please sit down; you’re scaring me.”

The woman looked down to realize she stood up minutes ago, her face was drenched in sweat, she tasted the salt on her tensed lips. The woman realized she had been shrieking. The woman had spilled her drink in her frenzy, her lap covered. The woman was crying, but for how long, she did not know.

The woman examined her daughter before her.

A woman examines her aged mother above her.

3

The woman spent the following week shut in her home. Leaving her home brought on an anxiety previously and yet unmet. By staying home, the woman had the agency to temper the forces that had been tormenting her so. The woman was happy here too, with her new reality. She could live each day as she had, reading her newspaper, watching her programs; now she was able to escape the macabre and malicious poisons of the world outer.

I’m safe here.

The woman pleased, sat in her living room with the lights off and windows drawn, she found this lessened the noises.

“Probably b’cause those dang neighbors can’t see me in here.”

The woman had taken to keeping a 10-inch chef’s knife on her table beside her.

The woman watched the Friday night news in her dimmed cell. One night she heard the unmistakable slam of a car door outside of her home.

“Ginny!”

Since last Saturday, the woman hadn’t spoken to her daughter. She felt partially responsible for this yet was determinedly sure that she was justified in her reaction towards the neighbors. It was true, it had hurt the woman when dismissed by her daughter so, yet the woman remained wholly convinced of her experience. The woman knew this split could be healed;

 “She’ll come ‘round”

She’s gotta.

Having all this in mind, the woman climbed out of her chair to spy out the blinds to see her daughter. The woman gasped out from the bellows of her figure; she quickly drank this air back in as if she hadn’t drank in days. Outside, parked again outside of her home, was a man she had never seen before, but she recognized his sedan. It was burned into her retinas. Branded by adrenaline, marked by anger, the woman’s fear practically dripped out of her temples.

The woman grabbed her knife and ran out her front door, she closed the gap between herself and the man. The man turned his head in shock, hearing the frantic shrieks from the woman, her face was twisted into a spitting knot of red hate. The woman flew at the man and pointed the knife at him with a threatening poise,

“You! You! It was you! You came into my house! It was you; you know you did it!”

“Mam what’re yo-“

“Shut UP!”

The woman advanced on the man, and he quickly ran across the street as fast he could from her. He ran towards the house across the street that had hosted the party a week prior and pounded ferociously on the door. The man’s brother opened the door.

“Raph – what’s wrong? What is i-

“Let me in! Move!”

Raphael shoved inside and the door slammed behind him.

“That’ll show him! He knows I mean business now!” The woman finally felt a wave of relief unlike anything she’s felt since she had these night terrors. She finally tasted peace again. The woman walked proudly back into her home, prepared to call her daughter, to tell her that her suspicions had been well-had all along. The woman dropped the knife on her counter and picked up her phone, dialing her daughters’ number with a satisfied conduct.

4

“Mom, what have you done; how could you?

            The woman sat in the cool presence of darkness, sunken into her armchair, phone in hand. The static surrounding her was soggy, sitting damp alike the saliva in her mouth. The women’s brow felt the extreme heat of shame, of received disgust.

“You attacked him? Just because you had some… some sort of dream? Mom, what were you thinking? This is- you’re out of control.”

The woman was still, burning into her chair; angered or hurt, it wasn’t clear. The woman crossed a boundary between her daughter and herself, she knew this.

She thinks I’m crazy. Why- how could she? She needs me, I’m her moth-

This moment too, the woman first recognized the reality of their relationship.

“You’re lucky nobody called the cops! What would happen if some-”

The woman hung up the phone on her daughter and then unplugged her landline.

            The woman was split in her entirety between her daughter’s words and opinions and then her own self-righteousness that she knew. The women had been in-danger and actively stopped this evil from infiltrating her further. The noises were gone yet the aura of malintent that she sensed so, remained in her periphery, painfully omnipresent. The static that tormented this woman grew and grew, sprouting from within, thus able to cause more damage than ever before. The air of cruelty was ever more terrifying, as she was the sole patron of its strength, of its flame, of its spirit whole.

I need her.

The woman glanced at the stack of bills on the table next to her.

But she hates me.

She stared deeply into the photograph of her husband on her wall.

I lost him too.

“If only, if only he told me. Told me what to… what to do –  if he told me… told me how to be. What now? What do I do now? What can I do now? Maybe Ginny wi-… no… no.”

They’re gone. They’re… they’re gone.

The woman locked her doors and shut her remaining closed blinds. She was determined to act – what could she do to get her life back? -before this blizzard of the sensational, before he left her. The woman was unsure of what constituted truth, the only thing she trusted was the life that she knew comfort within the confines of. She leavened the television a staple of the real and true – her last confidant, but despite this confidence in blind noise, she was particularly alone. The woman was engulfed by the bizarre and ununderstood – her face painted with the murmurings of a place unearthly and ghast, one where the calls of the grim sing sweetly as saccharine to the beings who need-be subordinate to terror and ignorance – where pain is king and fear is rich. The woman sat in this fetid dimness for time untold, the world passing by without her. The machinations of her own mind entered a place of impotence and wished deception unto their mistress. The woman sat within herself too, a deliverer of a presence detestant and inherently vague, even eluding the very regard of God, in this terrible presence, the woman remained. All-encompassing her was the smog of fear and the stink of anxieties. There was little room to move, and littler room to breathe. In the room, the woman saw the face of her fears painted onto the inside of her skull and reflected like a beam of light throughout the entirety of the world relevant. This beam of unadulterated dread stabbed the woman’s mind repeatedly as to leave naught but foundation, a foundation that would be blown into the wind by her own systematic brutalization of self. The woman succumbed to the angry static field that desired her inhabitance with such a vicious will. The woman ate the despair of our world and the next, even those prior, all resultant of her very own cognitive being. With one last glance into her lap, filled with the noise that desperately cried to her so, she admitted herself into its newly warmed embrace, to fall in love with the shame she had come to see before her. With an unrealized breath of forgiveness, the woman entered the darkness anew; a prisoner of the shattered, a victim now – a victim of the abhorrence that is her master.

The woman was found 15 minutes after she finished her phone call with her daughter.

The woman suffered an attack of the mind, likely unaware how much time had passed, or even where she lay upon her demise. The woman died with a smile on her face, despite her cardiac arrest being hypothesized to have derived from fright.

The television playing a rerun was subsequently turned off, and the neighborhood stayed silent.