Episode 4.4: The Poltergeist

“Vonix? No.  They were always a bit outside our price range…but why do you ask?”

            

“Oh, uh no reason.  They’re just…pretty cool I guess.” Lyle looked at me with an odd expression but made no reply.  My mind briefly wandered back to Jeff, the weirdo who wanted to force me into his schemes to repopulate the world.  I smiled softly as I remembered the sound my hammer made as it shattered his arm. 

             

Lyle’s car was parked at the very back of an underground parking lot outside of the grocery store.  The lot itself looked like most other places—headless bodies thrown around everywhere, pools of blood, bags of food that had been discarded in the chaos.  All the death and destruction that was splattered on every wall and littered in every street had kind of lost its affect on me, but Lyle the baker? Lyle the family man?  He looked like he was going to barf—which got me thinking of my dad.

             

For as long as I could remember, my father was a ghost.  Not a quiet, brooding ghost that silently wanders through old hallways or shows up randomly in a Polaroid.  Dad was the kind of ghost that throws shit around and draws bloody pentagrams on your mirror while you’re sleeping.  A poltergeist.  That’s what my father was. 

             

He was tall and skinny like our new friend Lyle, but dad’s eyes didn’t look back at you.  They were like one of those two-way mirrors—you looked into them and you knew there was someone looking back at you, but you had no idea who it was.

             

It wasn’t just the abuse and pain that got to mom and me.  Bruises healed, blood could get cleaned up.  It was the Fear.  The Fear was a constant houseguest.  Each moment of each day was tainted with the knowledge that at any moment, the poltergeist could creep up behind us and sink its teeth in.

              

My mom always talked about leaving.  She came up with an escape plan and everything. 

             

“We could pack up and go stay with my sister up in Midvale,” she’d say, “She hates the bastard as much as we do.  I’d find work and you could go to school up there.  It’d work, by damn.” She said this at least once a week for five years.  Five years of dangling a vulgar hope in front of my nose and then backing off.  But one night, by damn, she made it.  She got out of that haunted house, even though it meant forgetting something that I thought was very important to her: Me.  Little Marla.  I woke up on the morning of her departure with the Fear already perched at the foot of my bed as it always was.  I went downstairs for breakfast like I always did.  But instead of walking into the kitchen to see my mom pouring me some Rice Chex (like she always did), all I saw was the poltergeist hovering over the kitchen sink, grasping a butcher knife.

            

“Your mom’s gone.” He spoke without any tinge of emotion.

              

“Where is she?” I asked.

            
“She’s just gone.” 

Gone.  

 I was eleven.  

 My chest filled with acid and I felt like I was going to dry heave.  How could she leave me? I thought bitterly.  This whole time, all those plans, and she left without me? Tears filled my eyes as I thought about the many long years that stretched out before me, the years that I had to spend alone inside a haunted house.