the_places_that_scare_you ovenbird One of the drop ceiling tiles in your kitchen has been shoved aside and sits askew on the T-bar grid which tries to impose order on barely contained chaos. Through the resulting gap I can see into your attic, a brightly lit space with pine walls. Elegant fur coats hang from a costume rack and I think how luxurious it would feel to wrap my body in ermine. The kitchen itself is dark and dingy. The stove is so caked with grease that I doubt it would even turn on. There is a sudden scurry of caudate creatures, their claws screaming shards of chalk writing destruction in the walls. I startle at the noise above my head and stumble into your arms, which you wrap around me protectively while gauging the threat from the attic. You back us both out of the kitchen to the relative safety of the hall and then take me upstairs where your bed is made up with pillows in red cases with a red sleeping bag I recognize from my youth unzipped and spread over the mattress. You tuck me in and turn out the lights, promise you’ll be back soon, and leave me to try to sleep in the unfamiliar dark. As soon as I close my eyes, I hear voices. I sit up in bed to find that a door has opened from your room to a den. The old plaid couch that graced the living room of my very first home sits threadbare and abandoned in a corner. There’s a low bookcase with a stereo on it, above which are mounted two stadium sized speaker arrays, the tweeters pulsing. A woman’s voice emanates from the dark though her message is too garbled to make out. I get up, turn the sound system off, and step blearily into the hall where I find you coming up the stairs. I try to tell you about the voice, but words won’t form in my throat. You pull me to you, and kiss me softly. Your lips taste like a candy I last ate to excess in childhood. Back in your room I crawl into bed, accidentally knocking three blue pills from your bedside table, each clearly labeled with the numbers “915.” I think that I should retrieve them from the floor because you might forget to take them otherwise and everything could unravel, but I’m too tired to search and the dark is crowding the thoughts from my mind and your voice is a caramel soporific leading me into surrender. When you climb in beside me the pills leave my mind, though they glow subtly from the nightmare space beneath your bed and the rats, with their sharp faces, are gathering somewhere above us in the attic where we stashed our fear, smelling of mothballs, in a locked steamer trunk, hoping it will never find its way back to us. 260509 what's it to you? who go blather from