Rich Boucher

It’s Okay to Be Afraid Sometimes

My bedroom shares a wall with my neighbor, a woman I don’t know and have never seen. The headboard of my bed is right up against a wall through which I hear a lot of things I can’t understand. Sometimes, I have to tell myself to remember that Heaven is supposed to be a nice place. Beverly at the rental office told me the new neighbor’s name was Myrna, and that she’s new, just moved in a week ago, and that Myrna sure seemed like a nice girl, and that I should look forward to some peace and quiet after all that stuff with the last neighbors. I only know what I know about Myrna because I went to the office yesterday to ask about the noises I’ve been hearing for the last several days. On Myrna’s first night here, seven days ago, I heard the sound of a match being struck at about 1 in the morning, and the sound was so loud that I turned around, thinking someone had snuck into my place. But it was her, and just after the match strike I heard a laugh so bitter as to make me feel ashamed of myself for no reason. I remember when the priest told me it’s okay to be afraid sometimes. On Myrna’s second night here, six days ago, again about 1, a power drill revved up for a second real loud, then that laugh, then a whimper from a different voice from the first. I was scared, but I banged on the wall to remind her of the time, and at that I heard a fast gasp, and then I heard nothing. The clock on the wall watched me not sleep the rest of the night. The night after that I heard shattering glass, like someone took a big pipe to a mirror. Another bitter, resigned laugh. Each night since then, a match strike promptly at 1 a.m., more hateful laughter, more whimpering from the voice that wasn’t the one doing the laughing. What am I supposed to do. I’m only ten years old, and I shouldn’t have to deal with this and I can’t do everything by myself. I wish Mom and Dad would come back to me from Heaven.

There Is No Pleading with It

I remember you could hear the thing, way off in the distance across the desert, that ungodly roar of its horn - you could hear it for a while before it ever got even close to town, that sound like some turn-of-the-century locomotive whistle but darker in malevolent decibels, slowed down to a backwards-masked howl. And then I remember that somehow, the moment you heard that mighty golem’s gasp, that thing could close the distance between the horizon where it was and you where you were standing in just seconds. How can anything move like that? It just doesn’t make any sense. I remember headlights that looked just like eyes, metal and real heavy-lidded: sleepy almost, not angry, not raging, but implacable-like, no emotion. They were headlights but they were also the eyes of something you knew you couldn’t beg for mercy from: the dead steady stare of something you couldn’t plead with, eyes that saw you there but also saw right through you, as if the thing was already looking for the next one down the path to die after you. And I know this thing doesn’t listen to you, same way cancer doesn’t listen to medicine, same way bad news accompanying the rain on a Friday morning doesn’t listen to hope. And I remember it had a roof so low to the frame that there was just no way a man could be at the wheel of the thing; I remember the body of the dark sedan so massive that if it was a child driving it, that child would have to have been the son or daughter of the Devil. And it had a paint job so black that when you saw it at night, the feeling was you were watching something made from the black sharps and flats of a piano gliding past you; like the only way you were sure something was really there was the way the wind and the temperature changed when it cruised by, reflections from the street lights glancing off of nothing at all. Deadly like raw shadow, forever like 1977. And I remember thinking no factory could have built this thing, and no law would have ever allowed this thing to be sold and driven. You can ask me as many times as you want; I know the windows were some color between night and red and I’m not going to change my answer. You can keep me locked up in here for another night; I don’t care. I know I saw the driver’s side window lower down for a second and I know I saw no one in that car at all. You pray all you want. Me? I’ve seen what that thing can do.

The Angry Spoon

She kept a long-handled wooden soup spoon in the kitchen, but she kept it in the junk drawer. The reason she chose to do this was because one day she lost her temper and took a pen and drew an angry face in the concave curve of the wood. This was the birth of the Angry Spoon, and whenever one of her three children committed an infraction bad enough to make her blood boil, she would call her child into the kitchen, order him or her to look at the angry face in the spoon, and she would harshly rap it against the child’s knuckles. Never hard enough to draw blood. No resulting bruise would last more than a half-hour, but the smack was potent, and invested with enough frustration to make the memory last in someone for a lifetime. And then one night, ten years to the day she last summoned one of her children for a meeting with the Angry Spoon, the mother got up in the middle of the night. Terribly thirsty. Everyone else in the house was asleep, and the only sound was the stoic hum of the Whirlpool refrigerator, beige sentinel to the countertops and tiles, and to her. A morphing trapezoid of light from a car passing slowly on the road by the house crawled across the cabinets in a diagonal path just then, and then the light was gone. She reached for a drinking glass in the cupboard but in her half-awake state her grip slipped and she dropped the glass on the floor. The glass smashed noiselessly in slow-motion. She was about to tiptoe to get a brush and dustpan when she saw the front of the junk drawer shuffle open, forward and back, opening itself, beckoning one to come look. She crept cautiously across the exhausting, long miles of the kitchen floor until she got to the drawer. She reached for the handle in the dark and opened the drawer. Some things just can’t make sense. A sparrow flies into a window and dies. Snow falls on the first of May in Fresno. You can hear a calliope in the distance somewhere but you know there’s no circus in town. She looked down and saw the Angry Spoon looking up at her, meeting her eyes with its own there in the gloom. The spoon grinned at her, and told her with a whisper she would get very sick very soon, that she didn’t have much time left.

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy, Menacing Hedge, Drunk Monkeys, and Cultural Weekly, among others. Rich recently served as Associate Editor for the online literary magazine BOMBFIRE. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me, a collection of poems published by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications. Peep richboucher.bandcamp.com for more. He loves his life with his love Leann in the perpetually intriguing Southwest.