by Christopher Mohar
Had David ever before visited a shrink? And did he call her a shrink to her face? Did he practice dutifully the Cognitive Behavioral exercises in visualization? Did he complete the worksheets? How old was David when he entered the condemned house? Did he remember it well? Had the parents warned the children not to enter? Was there an occasion on which he popped a foot through a rotten floorboard as he walked, catching himself with arms outstretched like a face-first snow angel? Was he current on his tetanus vaccine? Did he use tweezers or a needle to extract the splinters? Were the floorboards so decayed that weeds sprouted from the wood in shafts of sunlight cast through the insubstantial roof? Could David have identified the weeds as spurge, nettle, or purslane? Did he visit the place in his nightmares? Was he familiar with the concept of the Id? How had the house come to be abandoned? Who’d lived here, who farmed the land? How big had the fields been and with which crops planted? How many condos now stood in place of that single farmstead? How common was it for such houses to have a cellar door leading from backyard to basement? Why might a homeowner brick off the cellar door? Had the cellar doors ever been locked? Had the lock rusted off, or had the eyebolts or chains crumbled free? Did David like to be choked during sex? Or held roughly by the wrists? Was he sure? Had he tried it? Why had David entered the stairwell? Curiosity? A dare? Had the children believed in ghosts? Treasure? Buried bodies? How many children had been in the group? Did he consider himself a leader? An introvert or an extrovert? An insider or an outsider? Which child had stood atop the cellar doors, holding them closed as David pounded his fists raw on their undersides? Did David remember this person’s name, the one who stood atop the doors? And this person David’s? And did she or he feel guilt, not continually, perhaps, but on occasion when she or he remembered laughing over how tricky it had been to balance while surfing on the slippery inclined metal doors as they shook with the blows David inflicted from below? And might she or he have any inkling that, years later, David awoke in the middle of the night gasping for air? And did she or he generally forget, as might be expected, these youthful indiscretions as she or he came of age as a social worker or a locksmith or a refrigerator repairperson or whatever and got married, bought a house of her or his own, had a child, etc.? Had David forgiven this person? Had he tried forgiveness, in general? Did the house this person bought have a cellar? Did David’s? Did he find his mood varying in proportion to sunlight? Had he tried Vitamin D supplementation? Did he experience inappropriate outdoor erections? What did he think it meant? And did David, in his helplessness, curl up on the basement stairs with the pillbugs and the crackling leaves and give up pounding even after the other children ran off, leaving the cellar door unlocked and unhindered, laughing and yelling into the copse of sumac, down the trail to the creek, where they would streak warpaint on their faces with the clay from the banks while David lay still in the darkness still believing himself buried alive and glimpsing for the first time his own mortality, unaware of how such a moment might forever alter him and stick with him?
And if so, did it? Stick with him?
Christopher Mohar is the author of The Denialist’s Almanac of American Plague and Pestilence, winner of the 2017 Etchings Press Novella Contest. He is the recipient of a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship, and his work appears in The Mississippi Review, North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, and Arts & Letters.