(Note: This really is an oldie. First written when Bill and Monica were an ugsome item in the White House, it has seen many changes over the years. I had high, high hopes for this once; it felt like it could have been something more, but never quite made it. I learned things are what they are destined to be–Leila)

The cataract sky saw not, yet watched; the wind moved not, yet listened; God spoke not, yet instructed. The day simply was and would be until the last mind summoned the strength to stop thinking about it. A low slung blotch of scuzzy radiance, which Amy assumed was the sun, slouched west within the ashes.

Amy gazed out the living room window. Only a double thickness of glass lay between her lungs and the poisons of an imagined alien atmosphere.

The cul-de-sac that had always been Amy’s home lay beneath the depthless sky. All around the remnants of happier times rotted like the crabapples that not even the crows would eat: Cheerful summer barbecue grills tucked under blue tarps held in place by cinder blocks; formerly lush and profuse gardens, now forlorn mudholes; abandoned toys sporting mossy growths, and what had gone unraked of the fiercely luminescent October leaves lay bunched in the gutters and storm drains.

Even at just sixteen, Amy knew this time of year well. It was the annual “Pause” that came over the well-fed cul-de-sac between the termination of Halloween festivities and the agreed upon going up of the Christmas lights on the Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend. There was something affected and childish and selfish about this collective mood; something which Amy and her like-minded friends cleverly disparaged. With just enough education in their heads to make them annoying, the kids had wonked-up several alliterative titles for the event: The Morbid Malaise and the Enormous Ennui had been Amy’s contributions to that year’s gathering at the Round Table—but, alas, the others had favored the lowest common denominatorish, Poopy Pout.

The grandfather clock lashed four tones. This startled Amy out of her thoughts. Each chime had landed on her soul. Until that moment the grandfather clock had always been a benign friend that had never behaved rudely. Something about this feeling made Amy feel like a stranger in her own home.

She had purposely left the house still upon her arrival. Under normal circumstances, Amy felt ill at ease in places where darkness, silence and contemplation were the chief components. She had even gone to the extreme measure of turning off her cell—which, for Amy, was tantamount to plucking out an eye.

With a reluctant sigh, Amy performed her one and only chore; an action that she could be relied on doing about three times in five: she flipped the porch light on for her parents, who’d be home from work within the hour.

Amy’s bedroom lay adjacent to the living room and faced the cul-de-sac. Unlike the rest of the tidily kept house, her room was a disorganized mess which resembled an open archeological dig over-topped by a pop culture village. It was a mixture of the distant past and the oh-so-now. Here and there were fissures in the debris field that allowed forgotten toys and games from Amy’s deeper childhood to emerge like trilobites for the picking. Items such as realistically dead virtual pets and dogeared Pokemon cards lay intermingled with current issues of celebrity scandal sheets and the spent husks of no less than six cellulars—Oh, and there was a weird, fruity smell in the room too. Amy had theorized that the odor was caused by a known perfume spill interacting with the upending of an older fragrance. Theorizing on the subject was as close to doing something about it as she got.

The splay of the room was simple enough: bed, desk and stuff. The first two were constants, the third was ever-changing. Atop the various variables which are important to a young lady of Amy’s social status and economic circumstances, lay a smattering of pamphlets. She had gotten those that very afternoon. Amy had hurled the pamphlets at her room when she got home in vain hope that the accumulated ghosts of her childhood might do something about them. No such luck. In the feeble light cast by the perpetual gloaming, Folic Acid And You (a way too happy-clappy missive which extolled the virtues of the gross bean family) stood out like a missionary who had entered the jungle with a cross in one hand and a rifle in the other.

“No, no, no,” Amy hissed as she performed a backwards dive onto her bed. This was an ancient action of hers which sometimes toppled perfume bottles, and had recently earned her three stitches in her left elbow because Amy had forgotten about the (alleged) coffin nails Ty had given her on their first date. Amy had heard that some guys bring flowers and/or candy along for that sort of thing; but, alas, Amy was attracted to guys who saw the upside in gifting (alleged) coffin nails.

There was a row of school pictures starring, naturally, Amy, hanging below the crown molding in Amy’s room. The queue of ten portraits ran left to right and ranged from the first grade to Amy’s sophomore year in high school. Daddy had hung the first seven or eight, but toward the end of his conscription Daddy had cracked-clever forty times too many about the possibility of quicksand that she had to drop him from the portrait hanging team.

Lying in the gloom, Amy took stock of the Ghosts of Amy’s Past. Outside business transacted with the Tooth Fairy, Amys One through Three were basically the same person; slightly round in the cheek and grinning shyly, each of Amy’s earliest incarnations had bobbed bone-blond hair and had been installed in a jumper that had been designed to be girly and rugged at the same time. Four had a touch less fat in her cheeks and her hair had begun the long process of extracting what’s right about red from the sun and including such in its sheen; these trends progressed further in the faces of Five and Six.

To be frank, Six had been the final Amy to show her portrait taker a scintilla of respect. Six was the last Amy to grin shyly for the lens. Seven had concocted a goofy, off-kilter grin that suggested that she might have been high on something (which hadn’t been the case). And Eight, well she just flat out sneered at the camera. Amy recalled the photographer asking Eight if she really wanted to come off that way, and she also remembered him shrugging in a Okay-kid-I-don’t-give-a-shit way when Eight had replied, “Oh, yes indeedy.”

Nine had been high on something. A member of Amy’s coven had relieved her mother’s purse of excess Vicodin that Picture Day. Glassy-eyed and neither grinning nor sneering, Nine was the least there in the queue.

Something had gone wrong with Ten. Only Amy was aware of the problem. No one else looked beyond Ten’s neon pink hair or the mascara and foundation that had been laid on with a trowel (now, no one is suggesting that girls who look this way aren’t what they should be). No, what had gone wrong with Ten lay scattered throughout her face like a sky composed of cremated bones.

She shuffled herself up onto her elbows to get a better look at Ten. Unlike Seven through Nine, the expression on Ten’s face was honest (even snarly Eight had shone a little light in her eyes that told that she wasn’t as put out as she pretended to be). Yet there was a ruthlessness emanating from Ten which Amy couldn’t understand; an incipient hardness that had no business being in the face of a cul-de-sac kid. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened that Picture Day, but for the life of her Amy couldn’t remember the actual taking of her portrait—which was odd, for Amy never forgot anything about her life. Some persons are that way, you know; some persons who fail at turning a porch light on  twice in five can be the same kind of person who has total recall in regards to where they were, what they had worn and who said what about whom on a meaningless day that had come and gone so many ends of the world ago.

When Amy was four, she had stolen a cranberry off the table at the grocery store. She recalled expecting a flavor similar to the sugary concoction that came out of the can, and was unpleasantly surprised by a ferocious bitterness. This had happened on a Tuesday afternoon, right after preschool.

When she was seven, an ambulance came to take Amy’s former next-door neighbor, Mrs. Carlyle, away from the cul-de-sac for good. Until that July 23rd, a Thursday, Mrs. Carlyle had been a friendly pest who punctuated her every observation with a tittering laugh. Though Mom had tried to keep Amy from gawking at Mrs. Carlyle as the old lady lay on a gurney, it had been too late: Amy had seen the feverish, insane mania in Mrs. Carlyle’s face as well as getting a clear look at the horrible sores that covered her hellishly white fishbelly thighs. And there had been that wonderful, magical October Sunday morning, two years back, when a blanket of ground fog suddenly contained the head of a deer poking up like a submarine’s periscope at the treeline behind the cul-de-sac.

A voice spoke up from the mists of Amy’s mind as she lay in the increasing darkness. This voice was composed of the worst things in life. This voice had its own weird, fruity imagined smell; a breath which wasn’t the mingling of divergent off-brand perfumes forming a third, uneasy scent, but was the decaying stench given off by a car killed pet. The timbre of the voice matched the dusty click made by sun-broiled Scotch broom pods. And this voice gave birth to unwholesome visions such as “green-rimmed fiery pustules forming on fishbelly thighs” (that was written by Amy in her second discarded attempt at a diary, not by her author). Amy thought this the voice of Ten.

“You can still beg for a do-over,” Ten said. “It’ll be like the story you didn’t get in Lit class: ‘they let the air in.’”

There was something beguiling about Ten’s suggestion. Something practical. But the more Amy turned it over in her mind, the more she found herself thinking cold, reptilian thoughts; thoughts Amy equated with the suicide of the soul.

The grandfather clock spat out the half. A ghostly pattern cast by a set of headlights formed on the bedroom wall and slid away.

Amy rose off the bed and went to the full length mirror which was attached to her bedroom door. She stood sideways and ran her hands from her shoulders to her hips. She then laid her hands on her flat belly. An expression of horror formed in her eyes; it stood out like a flame in the twilight.

“No,” Amy said breathlessly. “No. The air is poison.”