Stage Fright by Garrett Boatman

Author:Garrett Boatman
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2020-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

20

Helen stopped before her parents’ house and put her hand on the wrought-­iron gate. Fifty-­six was the number in the lighted transom. It was one of the middle houses in a line of neat single- ­and double-­family brick row houses. A few were painted white or yellow or red, the rest natural, some with their doors and yards and house numbers lit by porch lights, others dark. It was an old neighborhood, nothing fancy; there weren’t any mansions, but the yards were trim, the sidewalks clean and well-­lighted.

Her parents’ house was white with a green door, the wrought-­iron fence green to match the trim. Rose bushes (thornless) took up most of the tiny front yard.

As a girl, she had played hopscotch in front of this gate, drawing the familiar squares in chalk, replacing the lines after a rainy day. And she had played jump rope out here and in the small backyard that was half-­cement and half-­vegetable-­garden. And up and down the block—in the front yards and behind the trees and cars—she and her friends had played manhunt and hide-­and-­seek and tag.

Allee-­Allee-­home-­free-­all!

The childish voices still echoed under these streetlamps, calling out through the early evening dusk, “First one to see the lights go on!” as, one by one, the streetlights began to flicker on.

The ghosts of the past murmured around her, haunted her as her fingers curled through the cool iron loops of the gate. Then she pushed the ghosts away.

She stared at the snug little house that swam like a mirage in the light of the two brass lamps on either side of the front door. She realized she was crying and wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand. Her left eye throbbed.

She sagged, leaned on the gate for support. She couldn’t go in there with a black eye and face her mother and father, and she couldn’t just stand here where one of them might look out and see her. She wished she could be in her old room upstairs sobbing silently into one of her mother’s cedar-­scented pillowcases without having to go through the lighted downstairs where they were probably watching TV.

She pushed herself away from the gate, away from the house with its neat garden and its warmth and memories, away from the questions that awaited her if she rang the bell. Away from her car, wanting to walk, to sort out the buzz of thoughts in her head.

Helen crossed streets, turned corners, not heeding where she was going, nor caring. She kept to the less-­populated streets, avoiding crowds of teenagers still hanging out in front of closed-­for-­the-­night candy stores and old men walking their dogs, terribly ashamed of anyone seeing her black eye. The thoughts, possibilities, doubts, fears, heartbreak, crowded in on her so that her thinking was strained and cracked and no longer able to follow a straight line. She tripped on a broken slab of sidewalk heaved up by a tree root, stumbled, then stood stock-­still. She took in her

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