#also I never imagined myself drawing my Larson hot
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capesch-arts · 19 days ago
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The difference with these two is that I genuinely think Arthur can change the KiY whole Larson and Yellow would still be barreling down the stairs together.
I think I'm gonna choose one of these two to make a fully colored piece on Kofi for December for you Jarthur and Yellow/Larson freaks.
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theouterdark · 6 years ago
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Dream: This Old Creaking Thing
This one turned out to be half a memoir. Part of me wanted to make cuts until it looked like something completely different, but I didn't. It is what it is. D
I wake with a thirst in the room under the attic of my father's childhood home. It is a thirst that leaves my mouth dry with the taste of silver,1 and the taste is not one that can be ridden by the scraping of my tongue or washed away by salivation. The room is not one I am comfortable in, and has made for many sleepless nights, like this one. I don't care for the itch of the fibrous duvet against my skin, nor do I care for the conventional artworks that adorn the walls, all of which have fallen quite démodé, like the architecture of the old place—which you can tell is old by the smell and feel of the sagging floorboards under your feet. The house is full of vacant places for darkness, and cold air, and through these channels bats scurry across timbers and insulation in the wintertime to find warm places where they can sleep soundly, but this house was not built for any creature's comfort.2 Indeed, the only reason it exists at all is because our home on Briar Lane has already been sold, and the foundations of our new home on the lake are being poured and constructed when there is open sky, and the thick flurries coming off Lake Michigan are not smothering the slope of our newly owned land. I should not say our, for in every legal sense, the land belongs to my father, and this wretched place that we reside in—only while father's new house is being built—belongs to his father. I don't know where father's father's father lived, though I'm sure I was told. The present alone concerns me, and the past is where it belongs. The grey, cubic monitor on the desk in the corner hums, and I wish it had the screensaver with the funny drawings of cows and sequined fat ladies on for me to watch, or that of the bison floating over impossible hills with strings drawn tight around their middles, suspended by colorful balloons.3 But it only makes that droning sound that it does, and instead I find it more interesting to look out the western-facing window at the lot across the street from father's father's—which has a sign that says Beeler/Gores Funeral Home—whose parking spaces I've only ever seen empty. The place never struck me with morbid curiosity, and this night is no different. Though I am young, and only experienced it extemporaneously, I know of death, and that people die, and I know that when they do they aren't here anymore. Beyond that, I've no other regard for it, though the man's bedroom I'm sleeping in belonged at one time to my father's brother, who is one of the dead people who are not here anymore. He died before I turned one-year old, and they put him in the ground somewhere across the river, and staked a plot for the rest of the family. There, in that stretch of grass about forty feet from the service drive and the pine trees would be my father's father and mother's spot. Diagonally from that, my father's, and mother's. There was even a place for me in the grass. In truth, even at this age, I find it refreshing to know that my death has been planned for. All roads, I know, will lead me there.4 I never met father's brother in the flesh—as my earliest memory is that of a cat attack in Seattle5—and I doubt I would remember his face as it was when it was alive. I've imagination enough to envision his form climbing the east side of the house to stare at me through the windows, and tap lightly on the glass, egging me to let him in. His eyes are dark and sallow. A loose navy tee-shirt hangs over his bony shoulders, and there is a bulge in his breast pocket, with a tobacco stain along the bottom. Does he have a mustache, or doesn't he? A naval officer's hat or none? Some times I imagine him differently, but always his visage makes me shudder. I don't know if these images are flights of fantasy from the mind of a scared child, or misremembered dreams. A man called Jewett joins him in time—when he dies, we live in the house by the lake, and I come running down the drive with my hands drawn tight around my backpack straps (as I never know what to do with them), and inside my mother and sister are full of tears, and I ask why, and neither can say so I ask how my frog is,6 and they say he is fine, but this man called Jewett is dead, and I know then when my stomach doesn't knot over and the tears don't fall so readily like they are down my mother's face and my sister's face, that something is different about me—and together Jewett and my father's brother tap on the window, and grunt passive suggestions to me. No one joins after Jewett, and I'm glad for it, for the window is too narrow to pack so many dead faces into view. In the future, when I write this, I only see them in my memory, because they aren't here anymore. I am putting it off. What I need is water, and where I can get the water is the kitchen, down below. Down a stretch of stairs that are steep, and made of wood, or carpeted—and if they are, it is thin carpet, in dark browns, reds and strands of yellow—but I don't want to go down there, because the Ragged Man lives under the stairs, and if he steals my voice I won't be able to stop him, and now as I stand poised on the threshold of father's brother's door, I test my nerve and take another step, and I feel the urgency rise in my calves like a surge of spiders' legs, and before I can stop myself I am bounding down, down, down the steps, and I don't care how loud because if I'm fast enough the Ragged Man can't grasp my ankles through the grate, and I leap the final three and roll, lumbering into a shaky-legged run into the kitchen, and hide behind the island. My sister and mother must think a possessed fawn is scrambling through the halls, but if this is what they think, they must not care, or perhaps I have not made as much noise as I thought I must have, and I fetch water that stinks like matches from the sink. It goes down well enough alone, but I seek another, and another. Going up is the harder part. Because the Ragged Man has full view of the dining room, if I were not behind the kitchen island, he could see me now. Were it not winter, I'd steal away to the sun room, where the screens protect me from the world and I can watch lightning bugs from under the table which is my forteresse secrète, where I play spy games like slipping in and out of disguises before the next coupe passes, or testing my plastic gadgetry on the unsuspecting occupants of le ménage Hamilton. But as I'm shivering now, the sun room should be christened anew, perhaps the snow landing or the ice temple, as it is not a place for comfort, just like the rest of this old creaking thing. Again, I move before I can convince myself a coward, and the sweat chills my legs—and how these pajamas could ever keep me warm falls on my mother for picking them out, they feel like stage fabric, more at home on Peter Pan's head than clinging to my legs—and I walk by the table, knowing that if I don't look at the grate in the stairs, the Ragged Man won't steal my voice. It is only in those few moments between standing on the floor and bounding up that he can get me, but his eyes sparkle like polished silver dollars, and my sweat is gripping me too cold to continue, and I steal a glance as I slow down and my stomach lurches into my abdomen and I can see him smiling. Always his hair is silver and oiled, and spills over his shoulders in tangled wires. The hollows around his eyes are black but the pallor of his skin makes me long for the days I spent home with the Chicken Pox, because at least then I didn't have to go to school, but this man, in his tattered rags and silver smiles, paralyzes me where I stand. My next breath drags stagnant across my tongue. I can't breathe in, and my sinuses grow hot, and thick. He smiles, silent.7 I call, Help, help... but the words fall deaf even to me, and he drifts toward the grate, smiling that haunting smile. Help... I wake with a thirst in the room under the attic of my father's childhood home. But at least the sun has risen over this old creaking thing. Perhaps today I'll go into the orchard of pears, peaches, and apples, and saddle the limbs of the Pirate Tree until it's too cold to stay out of doors. There are strawberries in a thicket of weeds and thistles, wild and prickly. And raspberries too. I check the insides for worms before I eat them, and play in the cellar. Until dad tells me about the snakes, then I stay away.
1 Blood. Copper. Pennies. Like I'd been running too hard and too fast.↩ 2 Mother's father is also not here anymore. But once in this old creaking thing he caught a bat with a shoe box and a tennis racket. Or was it a bird?↩ 3 The Far Side, by Gary Larson. It came on five floppy disks. And on this computer I played moon lander and Myst, and King's Quest VI.↩ 4 Only later did I think I could change this.↩ 5 My mother's brother's cat, Baba. Baba bit me. Blood ran in rivulets down my arm.↩ 6 His name was Mister Frog. And he had two snails for friends.↩ 7 Almost positive this is the Creature of Darkness from The Tale of the Quicksilver episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?.↩
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