At the drop of a spoon

Halloween folktale (fiction) 
By Bernie Paquette

A late fall day found me sitting with an elderly Vermont man at his kerosene lit rustic home while watching trees lose their leaves. As he placed small pieces of wood into the woodstove careful not to place his hand beyond the dark iron entrance, he told me a tale so scary, I hoped I would never forget.

 It seems forgetting runs in his family. His great grandfather down to his grandfather and onto his dad- if not early on, than later in life lost memories as well as things in that soupy swamp of tangled spider web of neurons. Today such effect might be diagnosed as dementia due to the attack on the hippocampus and surrounding areas of the brain.

"Therefore it was no surprise" he began, "when my wife kindly noted how often I ’misplaced’ items like tools, watches, eyeglasses, and especially for some reason, our everyday silverware. Fortunately, most of the items would turn up right where I left them. Except for the silverware, which once lost, stayed lost. This was but a mere annoyance until  silverware once belonging to my wife’s grandmother, which we used only on special occasions, began turning up missing one piece at a time.

No surprise was my awakening with a shiver one very cold winter night as I shook the cobwebs from my head wondering what I had lost (in my head) overnight. An hour later, sitting on a chair staring at the china cabinet with the remaining silver silverware as though waiting for a piece to jump up and run away, I fell asleep.

I should have known then - real life seldom mimics sci-fi horror stories. There is less drama, more rational explanations, and unlike horror stories, the shock in real life is by far, diminished by the  pain, sometimes excruciating pain, that lasts well beyond the initial shock birthed by its unexpected and gruesome delivery.  Yet it is easier than facing your own demons head on. Living is sometimes harder than dying."

He speaks now as in a fog, "Awareness partially illuminated again. Thunderstorm raging, rain-hitting windows so hard sounds like hail pounding against the glass. Electricity is out. I am making, (more like fumbling in a drowsy half-dreaming stupor) a cup of tea on the gas stove. The match spark in the dark nearly spooks me as much as the lightning flashes. The tiny kitchen is even darker after a brief multitude of lightning flashes end. I Drop the sugar spoon.  Dredge through the kitchen cupboard drawers for a flashlight. Potholders can opener, lid opener, gravy ladles, hammer, nails, screwdriver, finally a flashlight. Switch on, nothing.  Flicking the switch on/off, on/off to no avail-nothing.

A slight scratching sound breaks my awkward silence as I try to figure out what to do now. One of the dogs scratching a flea I assume. I pound the flashlight against my leg as the scratching continues sounding more like something trying to get in or get out. The dogs are yipping now apparently sensing an intruder, something to chase at the least. The flashlight comes on dimly, flickers a couple of times but barely provides enough light to see the dogs at my feet. They are now adding to the scratching sound as they paw away at the floor next to me. It dawns on me, my wife’s remedial consternation about batteries. “You can’t expect them to be, ‘good to the last drop’, like Maxwell House, dear!”

I'm despondent, staring at a crack in the floor remembering there is a crawl space beneath, an area accessible only through a small opening outside. My small frame has allowed me the past honor of fighting off cobwebs, dust, and crawling over mouse and chipmunk remains in order to insulate the cavity.

I Shine the light into the hole. Shinny reflection….piles of silverware with a dropped spoon at the pinnacle. The scratching has stopped. The dogs, unquestionably still interested, have nonetheless backed away. They quietly watch, moving their eyes up towards me than back to the proximity of the earlier scratching sound.  If they had been bird dogs, I would have expected their tails to be standing upright and their noses solid on the trail pointing to the prey. Our dogs only lay prone, pointing to me.

I feel compelled to retrieve that spoon. The mystery of what the rest of the cache of silver is doing piled up below the floor. How it got there. What is causing the retched stench? Are there bodies buried or worse yet unearthed beneath our kitchen? What caused the scratching sound and why was it scratching? All have become secondary to the overpowering need to retrieve that spoon. 

I reach down to feel for and grab the spoon. Light a candle. The faint light gives no sign of the shimmering utensil but instead cast an eerie shadow in a shadow. I look toward the corner where the tiny crack is-or was. Now there is a larger hole seemingly carved or whittled open, wood shavings surrounding the now fist size hole.

I feel the hole as if that would give me some clue as to what was beneath me. Finding no clue, I lower my fingers through the dark hole. A candle light flickering wildly as I move it closer to the floor gives only a faint hint of what is about to hit me. The stench of rotted and rotting carcasses, somehow unnoticed by me while standing, now hits me at full force as I peer into the gullet of the kitchen floor. 

 I immediately yank my hand back not because of the stench which in and of itself nearly drove me back in repulsion, but because of a splinter lodging itself into my wrist. The bite of the thorn becomes a black swarm of stinging bees coming out of the abyss. A thick black smokescreen rises up from the whole in the floor. Bees, hundreds and hundreds of buzzing swarming, angry bees looking for someone or something to take out their revenge upon, bees on a solitary kamikaze pilot mission; sting and die, kill and be killed.

A Jurassic park era centipede follows, with multiple legs beyond count of which the first pair is poisoning fangs the size of Dracula’s.  Fangs are only the opening ante. To back up the threat, under a rippling lip, lay rows and rows of shark like teeth.  This nocturnal predaceous creature crawling up into my kitchen looking for a snack stared up at me and I swear smiled at me like the Cheshire cat.

There is a time loss gap then I find myself sitting again. I tried to move from my chair but my arms and feet felt like they were made of sand as though some viper had struck and not killed but merely paralyzed me. I could only watch, envisioning my entrails   pulled from my body like a spool of thread unwinding into a sewing machine.  Even before the last of this centipede’s feet reach the surface of the floor, I pulled and pulled trying to lift myself from the chair. It was as if I had stepped through a loose floorboard, worn, and ample enough to let my foot through but upon reverse course bound and held tight neither releasing my foot nor showing any of its prior forgiveness. The harder I pulled the tighter the noose held me.

 I begin to imagine my rotting flesh giving way to dusty bones joining the ancient remains of the rodent skeletons in the crawl space. Will my wife think I lost myself entirely, wandered off somewhere and never discovered? Suspecting my wife slid the silverware down through the crack in the floor depositing them into the crawl space, I become angry. She hid them. She hid them. She hid them, I bellowed out."

As the old Vermonter pauses to feed the fire more wood, I recall that the memory loss, the hallucinations, the confusion, the aggression, the repetition, and sundowning (more confused and agitated in late afternoon and early evening) are all common behaviors of people with Alzheimer’s disease. These behaviors can be addressed through compassion and non-judgmental attitudes like those of my wife.

The old Vermonter continues with his story, "My other self –not my wife, had slid the silverware down through the crack in the floor dropping them into the crawl space. My hallucinations caused me no bodily harm. However, the shiny silverware in the crawlspace had become a glistening coveted stash of treasure for a demonized-rabies infected raccoon.

Now, as you can see I am very careful about placing my hand into dark caverns of any sort and I use only chopsticks as eating utensils. Moreover, I focus on remembering every day how blessed I am to have such a caring, patient, and giving wife."

In Memory of Beatrice Martin and in honor of her caring grand daughter, Barbara.

Authors note:

For those of us that do not have a disease like Alzheimer's there is no excuse for dropping littered trash where it does not belong. Put trash in its place and be thankful you know where it belongs!

Happy Halloween. See Halloween menu at: http://litterwithastorytotell.blogspot.com/2010/10/halloween-menu.html

You can share this Halloween short story with others by using any of the icons below.