The Accidental Siren Read Online Free PDF

all waited. But
the song was over.
    The night seemed suddenly defiled by the
absence of music, as if the silence itself was injecting a sickness
that only another song could cure.
    The mustached boy snapped out of his trance.
He stopped the recording, held down the rewind button, then pressed
“play” and brought the device to his ear.
    I careened my head and watched as he
meandered past the other four boys. There was movement deeper in
the woods–shadows–as if the trees were slowly multiplying. As my
eyes adjusted to the new darkness, I saw them, all of them ,
aimless, ghostly, like faceless children lost in Limbo.
    I squinted to find my friend. He was twenty
steps away and facing a tree. Again, I narrowed my brow and
attempted to distinguish bodies from branches... then I saw them:
wooden planks nailed like ladder rungs to the trunks of a dozen
trees. The mustached boy began to climb, a spindly, monotonous
silhouette, until he disappeared into the canopy of leaves.
    One by one the others followed, and when they
reached the top, they spread sideways along the thickest limbs.
    Branches rustled and someone screamed. “No!”
    “ Move over!”
    “ Get your own dang–”
    “ Hey, shut the hell up!”
    “ Shhh!”
    “ But he–”
    “ Son of a–” Then a branch snapped and
a boy fell–knees and palms first–into a patch of ferns.
    I watched him stand. I watched him slap dust
off his pants. Then he grabbed a wooden rung on a different tree
and climbed back to the top.
    I looked at the house. In a second-story
window–eye-level with the boys–a light turned on.
     
    * * *
     
    Her name was Ms. Grisham and she answered my
knock through the two-inch seam that the chain allowed. “You know
the rules, little boy. Off my porch or I’ll eat your fingers for
dinner.”
    “Ma’am!” I said before she could slam the
door. “I’m James Parker! I called you about the camera!”
    Her colorless eye studied me through the
crack, then she removed the chain with cautious enthusiasm, checked
the street over my shoulder, allowed me in, and bolted the door
three times behind us. “Jaaames?” she said. “I mistook your voice
for a woman’s. Silly me!” She was old; a-hundred-and-two I assumed
at the time, but probably closer to sixty-five. She wore a
strapless dress with a pattern like bathroom wallpaper, cream and
blue flowers, sagging low enough to expose pursed, overly tan
cleavage with a melanoma-worthy mole that danced on her right
breast with every word. “My you’re a big boy! Have a seat on the
couch and I’ll find you that camera.”
    “Thanks,” I said, still a bit shaken from the
absurdity of the evening. The couch was pink velvet with pleats,
buttons, ruffles, pillows, and hose marks from a vacuum. I sat.
    The living room was an ecosystem of pastel
kitsch; resin and porcelain figurines that probably came to life at
night, kept alive by a compressed atmosphere of bitter perfume that
dizzied my senses. There were shelves on every wall lavished with
doilies and candles and frilly dolls with lifeless eyes. The room
was like a haunted antique store with peacock feathers, torn pages
from a coloring book, collectable cards with saints instead of
baseball players, frames with yellowed photographs, a row of
encyclopedias, jade animals, rosary beads, angels, birdhouses,
clowns, lamps, silverware, crucified Christs and more, all spotless
and painfully free of dust.
    The woman hummed an unfamiliar tune as she
rummaged through a pile of junk on a game table. Behind her, a
light-green stairwell ascended into plush darkness. On the third
step, a discarded bandaid.
    The room’s centerpiece was not a TV, but one
of those ancient phonographs with a brass crank and a speaker like
a tuba. Was that the source of the beautiful song? An odd
and intrusive platform stood beside the record player. It was
narrow–only two feet wide and three from the ground–and draped in
blood-red velour. Protruding from the center of the