Ladies & Gentlemen! Boys & Girls! Welcome to my Haunted House!

(after Alden Nowlan‘s “We Found Him Kneeling”)

The first time I saw snow; crisp drifts dancing down overnight, hidden in the dark, covering all with a covert dusting of white so that when we awoke, we looked out of our windows to a clean, new coating where there was once dry, familiar land. Our world, the world we knew, had been transformed into something alien and exciting. All night, all morning, all day it fell there and lay there, marked only by our trudging footprints, side-by-side, two-by-two; footprints permitted to mark only one route; footprints soon hidden, archived by fresh flakes. Indoors while we sat tortured in the teasing warmth, coats and hats screamingly redundant on hangers, I swear I could hear it land. The sound it made, gentle breath on gentle breath. When twelve o’clock came around we were - maddeningly! - told we were to stay indoors. "It’s too cold for you". And so began my hatred of the classroom.

At three we were let out; released! We ran and screamed and kicked and slipped. We shrieked and yelled pained frosts of delicious delight. We dived in drifts and savoured the unknown pleasures of icy numbness. I thrilled at being unable to feel my feet; my chest was tight, it was packed with ice. My head was red raw with paralysis and sweat and glee. We jumped feet first into clumps up to our knees. We pelted each other with poorly packed fistfuls; inexperienced, not yet versed in the snowy art. We howled as hard ice hit our young faces, we gasped as it was stuffed down our necks. We were crying, we were laughing and we were all feeling the high, the breathtaking, giddy sensation of discovery that only something truly new can bring. We rolled over and under and in and around the great field until our numbers were slowly depleted; some, exhausted, made their way back home unwillingly but defeated. Others were called in by their mothers and fathers, forced to leave their warm, comfortable homes in order to retrieve their offspring; in order to feed them, wash them, complete their family.

We stayed until all the others had gone. The field was a slushy, slimy mess of whites and browns and fractured greens. We trudged through the debris of a scene that had been untouched and unbroken just hours earlier. We walked a different way home that evening through the quiet, unacknowledged back streets, where people - our people, the people we knew - didn’t go when it was bright, much less when it was dark. We went a different way in order to walk in the perfect snow again, to hear the soft crunch of our feet upon the gently yielding ground. To feel ourselves sinking slightly with each step.

We found him kneeling up against the back wall of the house where no-one ever really goes, praying to the flaky paint job. We found him eyes to the sky, head tilted, ear to the wall, listening so tightly, so closely to what was on the other side. We found him, one glove on, plastic bag in hand, with a stash of sheet music and an expired bus transfer inside. His hair was a dull grey, long before it should have been. Overlong strands peeked out from his hat; his face was framed beneath by a half-styled beard. He looked tired. I thought he might have been some kind of musician, some kind of man. Somewhere, somewhere behind here, he left an instrument; an accordion, a flute. His dead skin left behind too, forever gracing some keys somewhere.

The doctors, the ones who came in the ambulance said that he must have been there all night, that he must have simply collapsed and fallen. They told us, they told me, that he had probably died before it started to snow - that he hadn’t felt anything - but perhaps they just didn’t want me to think that he had to live and breathe as he knelt there, waiting. I believed them, then. I didn’t want the impossible sensations that I’d had that day, the ones that had made me feel so alive to be the same ones that had closed his eyes.

I do not want to die kneeling so now, many years after, every night I stand, every night I pray. I ask god; some god, any god to do whatever he wants to do. Starve me, bleed me, pump me full of drugs until I’m good and ready and fit to burst. But please don’t let me die kneeling, listening to the sounds on the other side.