Haunted, and: Two Months before My Son Leaves for Belgium, We Visit the Zoo, and: My Mother the Mannequin

Abstract

Haunted, and: Two Months before My Son Leaves for Belgium, We Visit the Zoo, and: My Mother the Mannequin Angela Voras-Hills (bio) Haunted Living alone, I'd call my mom, make her listen as I moved room to room looking in closets, behind doors, under the bed, anywhere a man could fit. I plugged my curling iron in each day before showering, imagined identifying a man in a lineup by his melted cheek, his missing eye. By then, I'd seen enough Law & Order reruns to play each scene out until sentencing. Ever since I was a kid, I've wanted things to be fair, believed hand-on-my-heart in liberty and justice for all, but I've also been so afraid. Mostly of a death I'd have to live through— drowning, fire, kidnapping that ends with me tied up in a hole filling with dirt. My daughter is scared of ghosts, believes they're in each corner of her dark room. I tell her they're not real, but once playing Ouija at the cabin with cousins, we contacted The Blue Ghost [End Page 116] and the light above us flickered blue/ burned out, left us in dark woods alone. So who's to say? I've never walked through a haunted house, staged or otherwise, but my cousin pissed her pants inside one, left a puddle someone had to clean. One year, the gun club sponsored a haunted hayride, and I rode through the forest, hay splintering my ass through jeans, and when a man jumped out of the dark with a chainsaw buzzing at us, I thought, "God, who knows if this is really part of it? Who gets paid to behave this way?" This was years before a man shot into a crowded concert from a hotel window in Vegas and before so many defended his rights. I watch tv, try to believe "these stories are fictional and do not depict any actual person or event." My daughter asks about monsters, and I say they're not real, but news breaks, and she knows I'm lying. If ghosts are real, what do they expect [End Page 117] from a four-year-old? By now, you'd think we'd all have heard the unsettled dead. You'd think something would've changed. Two Months before My Son Leaves for Belgium, We Visit the Zoo And a few months before that, the airport is bombed. I get messagemessage message: am I letting him go? And maybe I'm to blamebecause I never told them I'd once caught him running on the roofof our third floor, that he was once hit so hard by a car his shoesflew from his feet into the air (a story I heard as his friends jokedabout the lady who'd hit him, who'd cried and hugged him in the road,making sure he was ok), or that just three days before the bombing,a high school kid scrawled plans to shoot everyone on a bathroom stall.And so, two months before my son boards a plane to Belgium, we feedgiraffes, and he poses with peacocks. He wants to see reptiles and primates,his sister wants elephants, crocodiles, never stops running until she sees a babykangaroo—we all stop and watch him hop around his motherwho lays on the concrete floor, bored. He cleans her ears, jumpson her head to engage her in play, and she swats him away. He is alreadyhalf her size but clearly still a baby. He doesn't give up until finallyshe stands, and I say I think he'll climb into her pouch! My son doesn'tbelieve the joey will fit, and I tell him he will fit, and then, an illusion—the pouch one minute tucked against the kangaroo's belly, stretches,touches the ground as the joey climbs in headfirst, shuffles and turns,settling in. After that, there is little to see. Black paws peek from the belly.The mother nibbles her fingers, drags her baby toward a food bowl, and Ifollow her eyes down the dark...