The Bower Ghost

14Jun09

I crept through the opening worn into the bushes.  Entering my little copse, my enclave, I slumped immediately against the wall and looked straight up along the flat, red surface to the bell tower.  Into the coolness of those bricks my back pushed hard while every fiber of flesh and bone listened—both eyes closed, turning black—I waited for darkness and the screech of the Rambler door.

Between these two walls—one brick, one bush—this wink of wilderness endured.  A place where small animals came to hide, nest, die.  This was where I belonged.  On the soft damp ground for a long time, I kept from thinking anything at all.

Blood had stiffened the hair of my temples when again there was the sound of a screen door but no footfall, no car door, no calling of any name.  Just a smell I identified with these bushes.  A masculine muskiness or even a rotten-dead smell.  My nose burned as if someone had struck a match too close.

I heard a plane fly over and very faintly the sound of a woman’s voice.  A singing voice.  Someone, in the church, practicing.  It seemed possible I was hearing the wing beats of small birds as far away as the cemetery.

How long until it would be dark?  I had no way of telling.  Not until the pole light went on, and I felt things stir again.  The thought, the memory turning my stomach, my reliance, my disregard… inside out one last time.

What had been vague in the thicket, some light-colored debris, slowly began to move, became dirty white fur and a long hairless tail—a pointed face.  The creature walked timidly, not like a ghost at all, but stiff as though suffering rheumatism, and his tail held up off the ground as if it must not get dirty.  A barn owl’s face, the tail of a serpent, and a soft mammalian body.  He sniffed the air and, walking away along the far edge of the bush, disappeared.

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