Someone Was Burning Incense in the Room - Carol Arnold

Johnny always lit a stick of incense to cover the smell of decay when we went over there. The house didn’t just smell like decay, it looked like decay. Sometimes it’s hard to know the difference between a smell and a look, both of them contributing to the overall feel of things. And that was for sure. Things felt like something had spent the last hundred years rotting its guts out right there.

It wasn’t just the furniture, although that was pretty bad, with the ancient overstuffed chairs and day beds and cupboards filled with old clothes. The walls themselves reeked of decay, like the plaster and joints and rafters had been soaked in something so foul even a termite would run away. Old grease dripped from the kitchen ceiling, left there from every meal ever cooked in the house. When we took down the clock off the shit colored wall, we saw the old cuckoo bird had frozen at four o’clock with its beak open outside the little door, its body encased in a coffin of grease. The pink circle that remained behind when the clock was removed looked like a sun riding a cow pie sky.

Johnny hardly knew his great-uncle, Uncle Bunny, they called him, God knows why. He told me the story about how when Uncle Bunny got cancer of the prostate, his sister had to explain to him how the male organ worked. He didn’t have a clue what it was for really. I guess he just peed out of it all those years and forgot about doing anything else with it.

They had all lived together, Uncle Bunny and his sisters, Willa and Kaitlyn, holed up there in the Seattle rain like hermits. They rarely ventured out, although Willa, the one who told Uncle Bunny about his organ, was a bit more social than the others. She at least would go to the doctor, dragging Bunny and Kaitlyn with her when she thought they should go too. That’s how Uncle Bunny found out he had cancer. He’d been complaining he couldn’t pee for months and Willa finally convinced him to go the doctor. He took the news hard, although God knows he didn’t have much to live for. He went back to that house and never came out again until the day they rolled his body out on a stretcher.

We had convinced Willa that she and Kaitlyn would be better off in a board and care. That was hard on them, that move, but it was over with. They were poor as church mice, but the County took good care of them, at least Johnny said so. Myself, I wouldn’t say that, but I couldn’t worry about it too much. It’s not that we were doing that good either. Johnny had been out of a job for eight months and me, well, I had never been too good about working. When we met down at Art’s Bistro so many years ago, both of us drunk and telling stories, we decided we would get married and get rich, in that order. Well, we did the married part, unfortunately, but not the other, which is even more unfortunate.

Johnny talked a good story, like he was a rich man just waiting to happen. Big joke. And that wasn’t his only problem. Johnny must have inherited his great-uncle’s know-how with his organ, like he didn’t have any know-how, if you know what I mean. So we were just squeaking by, from a financial and marital point of view that is, when Uncle Bunny died. Johnny was left the old house, but it was falling apart and the real estate market was just about zero in Seattle. Thank God for food stamps, was all I could say. And a drink or two at night didn’t hurt either.

So there we were going through all the junk in the house. It was good it was me cleaning up the attic that afternoon although I almost went crazy doing it. It was raining and all I could hear was drip, drip, drip on the roof. You couldn’t have dreamed of a better way to drive me crazy than to stick me up in that rotting attic on a rainy afternoon in Seattle. It would make even Jesus commit suicide.

I was going through boxes of stuff from their childhood, toys, clothes, books, shoes, all kinds of things. They kept everything, and I mean everything. There was even a box of old talcum powder their mother must have used on their little bums when they were babies. It still smelled good, kind of like violets. Every so often I’d take a big whiff to cover up the other smells. One of the dolls was porcelain, that old fashioned kind with real hair. One eye was missing, the remaining one so real I got scared sitting there next to it and had to turn it on its stomach.

After I finished going through the toys, I moved the box to the other side of the attic. And that’s when I saw them, the loose floorboards. I thought “just another damn thing to repair” but then something told me to pull them up. They weren’t even nailed down, like someone had just stuck them there and forgot about them. It was so dark I could hardly see what was under them, but I tell you, my stomach did such a big flip it felt like I was an astronaut flying through space. There was something glinting in there and when I reached in my hand I knew it was more than one thing. I pulled it all out and saw it was a pile of jewelry - a gold chain necklace with a diamond and gold filigreed pennant and earrings to match, a couple of rings, one at least a caret diamond surrounded by emeralds, the other a big ruby in a nest of seed diamonds, a gold linked bracelet that weighed more than even my hefty Navajo silver one did, a few other items equally enticing. I ran that gold through my fingers and it didn’t take me long to decide.

But that porcelain doll, she had to have the last word. As I stood up, my foot kicked her and she rolled over. There it was, that eye, accusing me. I couldn’t just leave her there like that, alone under that rainy roof, so I picked her up and stuffed her in my purse with the jewelry. Thank God it was a big purse.

I told Johnny I was going down to the store for a pack of cigarettes, and that’s the last I saw of him. I grabbed a bus for Palm Springs and here I am. No more cow pie walls for me. No more frozen cuckoo clocks. No more burnt incense. No more drip, drip, drip. No more Johnny. Just me and the one-eyed doll, farting through silk, at least until it runs out.