SaucyVox, Juked, Double Dare Press, and
has work forthcoming in Defenestration, The
Sidewalk's End, and The Dogwood Journal.
By Michael Leone
The house she lived in looked dead. A boarded-up window, a crooked banister, paint that flecked and even flew like
little birds when the wind blew. She'd been living there for years and my mom had never liked her, never liked the yard,
never liked the house.
"There's just something wrong with it," my mom said one day. "And there's something wrong with her."
Even before the Rataczaks moved in -- before Mr. Rataczak left the house on a gurney and never returned -- the
house half-sagged, as though tired of itself. The realtors worked hard to pretty it up. A new coat of paint, a trimmed
yard. But after the Rataczaks moved in -- the house, as though done with the charade -- seemed to surrender itself.
When Mr. Ratczak died the old widow lived alone for years in the house. We never saw her, just the braying laughter of
the television, as though getting a kick out of its own jokes. The yard, now grown to mini jungle-size, became a
collection of debris: snagged plastic bags, soda bottles and beer cans, an automobile tire, and strangely enough:
somebody's lost shoe.
Then came the smell, a faint odor that pinched when the wind blew.
"Time I spoke to her about this," my mother said, glaring out the window – they lived right across from us. "This is
getting downright embarrassing."
She marched over, up the crooked steps, knocked on the door, heard only the television blaring.
She came back, puzzled. "She is positively deaf that old coot. I near banged that door down."
But one day when Al, the mailman whose belly was almost as big as the sack he lugged, could no longer insert his
letters in the slot, we found out the truth. He bent down, opened the slit and peered inside. He bolted upright, pinching
his nose and staggering down the steps like a drunken man.
"Letters…lots of letters," he said to my mom, who was of course, watching from the window. "That smell—"
We called the police. They came, forced their way inside. They came back out. One of them buried his nose in a rag.
The coroner arrived. A thin man wearing a tweed cap, he whipped his cigarette in the weeds as he hurried up the
steps, clutching a big doctor-like bag. He came back out with rubber gloves on. The policeman barked into his
microphone. The ambulance arrived. By now the street had gathered – fathers, mothers, kids, grandmoms and
granddads, a few curious dogs. We watched as the emergency technicians clambered inside -- through a tunnel of
unopened letters -- and emerged carrying a blanketed form, long petrified and dead.
"How long you think she's been dead in there?" I asked my mom. I was thirteen years old.
She didn't answer, only stared at the ambulance as it swallowed up the corpse and lumbered down the street, her face
as white as a field of snow.
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