Caitlin R. Kiernan by The Red Tree

Author:The Red Tree
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-10T13:53:41+00:00

July 15, 2008 (1:27 p.m.)

Constance has borrowed my car to drive into Foster for groceries and some things she needed, art supplies, and so I have a little time alone to try to set this down before she returns. I don’t believe that I could ever manage to write it with her here in the house with me. Hell, I’m not sure that I can write it with her out of the house.

It was almost two a.m. before I was finished at the typewriter last night—this morning—and so much has happened since then that I suspect I’m never going to get back around to writing about that part of yesterday after the kiss on the rocks. Maybe it all follows from that kiss, or maybe these events were set in motion the day we got lost trying to find the tree, or the day she arrived here. Maybe it all began with Amanda’s death. It’s a losing proposition, a futile game of infinite regression, trying to guess at the particulars of cause and effect that led to my waking up this morning in the attic on Constance Hopkins’ futon.

And, of course, there’s the problem of the “new story” I am supposed to have written, the one that she brought up yesterday in the market in Jamestown. It’s lying here on the table, right next to the box with Dr. Harvey’s unfinished manuscript. Seventeen typed, double-spaced pages, apparently composed on this machine, using the same onionskin paper I’ve been using for these journal entries. It is titled simply “Pony.” I’ve read all the way through the thing five or six times now, and if it wasn’t written by me, then someone’s done a damn fine job of forgery. There are numerous corrections on the pages in what I cannot possibly deny is my own hand. That is, I cannot deny these things, unless I am willing to suggest the perpetration by Constance of an elaborate hoax or practical joke, and unless I am also to assume that she possesses the skills required to actually pull the hoax off successfully. That she could perfectly ape my voice and forge my handwriting, and that she could have managed it on this noisy fucking typewriter without my knowledge, when I hardly ever leave the house. And then, with these assumptions in mind, I must try to conceive some motive for the hoax, what she might possibly have to gain by gaslighting me. Of course, here I may be falling prey to the assumption that she needed anything like a rational motive. And, somehow, I’ve already gotten ahead of myself. I’ll clip the seventeen pages of the story to the end of this entry, though it’s another thing I know I’d be better off simply destroying.

Last night, after I made the entry, and immediately after I’d put those pages with all the others, in that hiding place I will not name here, I went to check the front door before brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed.

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