Rebecca Lilly

Uncle Lowry was self-taught on astrology and other esoteric subjects, and nobody bothered him much. Truth was, his inviting in the out-of-body crowd and his death reenactments in the cellar frightened me and my brother. But nothing scared Lowry that we knew of.

He had his castle in Malibu designed after Poe’s House of Usher.

“For the Flower of Life, I’m preparing the soil,” he told us at his housewarming party, his astral body like a dolphin’s circling our planetary shoal. “No soul is an island!” he shouted.

“It’s a goddamn phantom hotel,” joked my brother, Arnold, “with all his spooky talk and prophecies.” And our uncle out-of-body, ‘in development.’

Lowry, of the otherworld intelligensiia, had all sorts of recipes for spells, but immortality was, as he put it, “an obvious subtlety.”

"At a terminal velocity, black holes can be deadly. As if you’re dropping in a well, the trick is to imagine you’re a flame, a test pilot on an odyssey of possibilities.”

Dive-bombing from the astral realm, oceanic, star-spangled, Lowry offered us a glimpse. The worst is, he kept us waiting for him, speculating on his mission. "Our kaleidoscopic cosmos is his free range," Arnold insisted.

“Still,” I replied, “we don’t know his shape: a circle or a straight beam. Or, as you put it, out of space entirely.”

Throughout our dialogue, I felt an Eye watching Arnold and myself: some part of me watching my own life and Arnold’s, and I wondered if this was my Overself, and if my Overself was Lowry.'s..

...if in fact, we were time bombs rocketing around in the dark, spin-doctoring our bodies.

Our Family Business

The sundown on our family funeral parlor makes me chilly with nostalgia, the meadow shadowed with headstones like Dowager’s humps.

Aunt Martha with her calla lilies and forget-me-nots, her vase of white hydrangeas...

“God saw to it that you two met, the gravedigger and my sister’s daughter! It’s an awful shame you haven’t joined our family trade.”

“Martha, that’ll be the day!"

Jacob Arnold understood my dilemma. “See no evil, speak no evil,” he muttered, as if a corpse’s hair were tweaked, shivering on dolled-up man-nequins in coffins of mahogany.

His shovel washed clean, Jacob Arnold dreams of those he buries: mammoth creatures unbidden. "But that's not all!" he whistles softly, leaning on his shovel. A canny listener, with a mischievous smile...at times, our conversations gave me the creeps.

“If you're a proxy for the dead, how do you pre-vent disturbances?---not theirs, but your own."

Jacob Arnold chuckled. "If a dragon smokes, it’s only through a hole! Let it alone.”

I admired him, watching over those Procrustean beds.

Walking home alone amidst the hedgerows, I often talk to myself, watching the moon, an enamel-white jewel on blue cobalt, its shadow like the dream of an ocean; the clouds, handker-chiefs of silk.

Other nights, the clouds are ghosts' eyeballs in dusty windows with curtains half-drawn. The scent of camphor, my Aunt Martha’s touch; the tile floor swept clean under coffins of mahogany.

The dead are no more than found objects, calling forth memories out here among the leaves.

Near home at dusk, late this October, our parlor roof rises past boxwood and Southern magnolia, its top limbs glimmering with frost.

Whether it’s a dream or a shadow, no monster's lurking in the woods as I approach---those dumb jokes of Jacob Arnold! All is well as an owl whistles from the forest edge to the field.

Steadying her crystal vase, Aunt Martha’s at the window arranging, her head tilted. It’s as if I’m invisible, standing there. It’s the twilight and it’s not, a clarity almost diaphanous...

The horned owl's calls repeat. Once a house, now a parlor, keeping itself to itself. Every flower wants to bloom alone on such an evening.