Tilting the Void

"It's been vacant for some time," Mrs. Granger said as she unlocked the door. "I didn't really have time to give it a good airing out. I hope you don't mind."

"I don't think it's a problem," I said, glancing around at the spotless little living room. Mrs. Granger was that particular type of elderly lady one finds with disheartening irregularity these days--petite, tidy, scrupulously fastidious, with perfectly permed silver hair and a crisp beige pantsuit and pearls. I imagined that the only dust I would find would be along the tops of the door frames.

"You won't have anyone to bother you out here this time of year," she said. There was a closed-in air of old woodwork and stale furniture polish, but that was about it. The decor was sixties modern, worn but clean. I hadn't seen amber glass lamps like that since I was a kid and visiting my grandparents' house in Cleveland. "All the summer people have gone home, of course. It's too dark and rainy for them."

"I don't mind," I said. "I'm not interested in entertaining, and I like the rain." I could put my typewriter on the table in the bow window. The bedroom--there was only one--was small, but the windows were tall, letting in as much light as possible. The kitchen was painted yellow, the fixtures avocado green. I smiled at the shining chrome dinette set, the plastic space-ship shaped ceiling light. A hipster's ironic dream. "I'll take it."

"Well," Mrs. Granger sighed. "I suppose in all honesty, I should tell you that we've had some rather unusual complaints."

I laughed. "Don't tell me it's haunted."

"It is," she said in all seriousness.

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Corinne didn't go home after work as she usually did--it was her birthday, and she felt it wasn't fair to feel every day of her thirty-eight years and not have a drink, if not exactly in celebration, then just for the hell of it, since nobody else was going to do it for her. She went down to the bar and grill on the corner across from her office building and ordered a vodka tonic, wondering all the while why adults even continued to celebrate birthdays, unless simply out of sheer gratitude for the gift of another year of existence on a planet teeming with six billion more members of the same species, where another birth was merely a melting drop in the ocean.

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"Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It's been twenty-five years since my last confession."

"Mac?" He peers through the grille, startled and pale. "Heavens, Mac, is it really you?"

"Come on, Patrick, let's get this damn thing over with."

Father Bannion takes several deep breaths. "I don't think I can do this in a confessional box," he says. "This is too special."

"Well, don't I have to do it here?" I'm embarrassed and annoyed. "How else am I supposed to do it?"

He looks at me again, making a decision. "Come with me, you great sinner," he says, and snaps the sliding window shut.

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"Anthony, Tony, Antonio, my main man," I croon. "I shoulda known you were behind this. Though I thought it was a wolf thing."

"We're combining forces," Anthony says, the slightest Florentine accent in his cultured voice. He sits with extravagant elegance in a folding chair and crosses his long legs like the effete idiot he is. "I thought you should know."

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I don't know how, but I'm home.

I barely make it to the bathroom before I start throwing up; pink-tinged watery vomit, nothing on my stomach since the night before--unless you count booze and cigarettes, and I don't.

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