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after Eric Puchner
I know why you assigned me this poem, and it’s not funny. You might think it’s cute to ask the misfit girl to write about Emily Dickinson, but just because Dickinson writes about doom and gloom, that doesn’t make us kindred spirits. Maybe you know I’m in a hardcore band and that people like to go around saying stuff about my family being in a cult, or maybe you heard rumors about scars on my wrists and you think you can “scare me straight” with this poem. I want to be clear, though: I will write about Dickinson’s poem, but it’s no life-changer for me. I’ve read the poem in every English class I’ve taken, and the meaning never changes.
So here’s my thesis: Emily Dickinson’s persona in this poem is undead. I will argue that, although the narrator is not a vampire or a zombie or a skeleton, she is in fact a post-life being that retains human consciousness; specifically, a poltergeist.
The way I know the narrator is undead is from the line “Since then ’t is centuries; but each / Feels shorter than the day / I first surmised the horses’ heads / Were toward Eternity,” so she has a conscious mind hundreds of years after the carriage-ride with Death, meaning she is either immortal or post-mortal. We can rule out immortality because at the beginning of the poem, when Death invites her for a ride, Immortality is already in the carriage. So in the carriage there are three passengers: Immortality, Death, and finally Undeath. She becomes Undeath after she is taken from her mortal life—where “children play” and “grain grows” and the sun rises and sets.
At first I thought that the narrator was a boy because she talks casually about children who “play at wrestling in the ring.” She treats rough-housing like it’s normal. Most girls think of wrestling as bad behavior, like it’s uncivilized or something. I grew up with three older brothers, so I think of wrestling as normal, but that’s not how most girls are. I learned that the hard way when I had a friend over in grade school, Karen Stark, and out of nowhere I tackled her and pinned her, and she started screaming, like I’d just strangled her kitten with her ponytail. She was the one who started telling rumors about me and my family, because she was the first friend I had ever had over to the house. She told everybody that me and my family were all Satanists just because my parents had a collection of South American and African masks from their travels around the world. They also liked candles and incense, so they weren’t exactly in the mainstream in Greenville. The truth is that they are Baha’i, which means they believe in all the world’s religions simultaneously.
Nowadays I have friends over to the house all the time—like all the time—but it took me a long time to find my people. My band, Hellion Horde, practices three times a week, and lots of times they just crash on a sleeping bag or on the couch in our basement. Larry Belmont sleeps over like every day, and keeps a toothbrush in our downstairs bathroom. I think he’s avoiding being at home because of his mom… but I don’t want to get into his business. I’ve gotten used to seeing his mussed hair and his face looking like he’s just been smacked, walking through the kitchen every morning on his way to the bathroom, dragging his feet like a cartoon yeti.
Now that I’ve established that the persona in the poem is undead, I will argue that she is specifically a poltergeist. There’s nothing in the poem to suggest that the narrator is a brain-eating zombie or a blood-sucking vampire (“eating brains” and “sucking blood” would be foremost on the mind of these types of undead), and while her high level of awareness suggests a ghost, a wraith, or a lich, those types of undead are free to move around the land, whereas the narrator of Dickinson’s poem is trapped in a house, suggesting a poltergeist.
Since all my secrets are already out there, you might as well know that I play Dungeons & Dragons every weekend (and sometimes on weekdays) with Larry Belmont and Austin Beck. Our dungeon master is also in your class, but I can’t reveal who it is. My character is a Lawful-Neutral Dwarven Priest, which means he obeys the will of the gods, but he doesn’t believe it’s his duty to take sides in struggles between good and evil. The Dwarven Gods are demanding, and he has devoted himself totally to their will, and doesn’t trouble himself with pesky moral questions.
But my knowledge of poltergeists doesn’t come from playing Dungeons & Dragons. It comes from first-hand experience with a poltergeist in my house. That’s one reason why I have my friends over all the time. With my brothers gone away to college and work, it’s spooky to be in the house all by myself, and having even one other person around makes me feel better. That person is usually Larry Belmont, but recently our keyboardist Harold Kelner stayed over and we stayed up all night on the couch talking about alternate realities. In one of these alternate realities, Rold and I were a conventional married couple growing bored with our semi-successful careers and mediocre children; it was a big joke, but I felt a tingling when Rold took my hand in his and pretended to be my bored husband.
The next day Larry talked to Rold about how he was “playing with” my feelings. I thought it was a bit overprotective of him, but I can’t get too worked up about Larry caring too much for me. With my brothers all gone from the house, and my parents always traveling, Larry has become like a surrogate family.
How do I know there’s a poltergeist in the house? A million ways, but I’ll focus on just two incidents: the time when we were all high, playing D&D, and we walked upstairs to get some late night snacks when suddenly all the kitchen cabinets opened all by themselves. My therapist says it was a hallucination from being so high at the time, but if so then it was a mass hallucination that affected Larry and Austin and our DM too. And my parents believed me—they’d seen some strange things themselves—so they hired a shaman to commune with the poltergeist. They believed in exorcisms too, but thought that an exorcism would be too violent for a poltergeist that, so far, hadn’t done anyone much harm.
The other time was when water started to appear on the floor in strange places. It hadn’t rained in more than a week, and we checked and double-checked all the plumbing and appliances, none of which had sprung a leak. But there they were, puddles of water in the hall, in the living room, in the bedrooms. I propped the amplifiers up on crates so they wouldn’t touch the floor. I wedged a few shims under the legs of the couch. There was nothing to be done about the mattresses on the floor, where the guys from the band would usually crash. They got drenched, then mildewed, and for a couple weeks afterwards, no one would crash in our basement. I was alone in the house, and it got weirder from there.
I kind of get the impression from you, Mr. Haley, that you don’t believe all this stuff. These phenomena can be explained rationally, you’re probably thinking. You said in class that Dickinson wrestled with the idea of God—that she came from a family of believers, and received a religious education, but that she read widely in science and found it difficult to reconcile the two. That’s why I’m even more convinced that Dickinson is writing about a poltergeist. You don’t have to believe in God in order to believe in hauntings, which I’ve personally witnessed.
In her poem, Dickinson describes her narrator’s clothes this way: “For only Gossamer, my Gown – / My Tippet – only Tulle –” When I looked up all those words for this essay, it was late at night, and a picture started to take shape in my mind: a thin woman, her head tilted to the side and hair frizzled on the top, like from static electricity, and as she comes closer you notice that her gown is made of dewy spiderwebs, and her shawl is like netting. She looks like something that just crept out of the ocean, or out of the ground. Then I swear to God I looked up at the doorway and there was something glowing within the frame. I shut my eyes tight, but I could still see the spiderweb lady hovering in front of me.
I called out for Larry and then all of a sudden he was right there next to me. I opened my eyes and the spiderweb lady was gone. I turned over and held onto Larry. His body went limp; his legs were askew on the bed. I had the strange feeling that we were on the wrong sides of the bed—like we had been married for years and we’d chosen sides a long time ago. Larry slept next to me all night. I didn’t worry about him trying anything, because Larry confided in me that he’s gay (I figured it’s okay to talk about this stuff with you, Mr. Haley, because you’re a teacher). In the morning I had these lines in my head: “House that seemed / A swelling of the Ground / The Roof was scarcely visible / The cornice in the Ground.” This is the point in the poem where I realized for sure that the narrator is both female and undead. But I don’t know if it was a dream or a vision or what.
The weirdest thing that happened though was just a few weeks ago, while I was tuning the drums in preparation for our show at homecoming. The fluorescent lights cut off all of a sudden. The one basement window was covered with a black polyester banner with an Anonymous mask stenciled on it, torn at a corner where it had come loose from the pin. One beam of dusty light shone from the tear, and it lit upon an imperfection in the cement floor, a discolored squiggle that was raised from the surface the shape and color of a centipede. The light wavered, and the thin rope of shadow cast by the centipede began to quake. The first thought I had was absurd. I thought that the shadow was somehow in pain.
A cloud must have come in front of the sun then, because the light turned brown and the shadow grew. I heard a deep, sustained groan that sounded strained, just loud enough to register over the ringing in my ears. I covered my ears, but I still heard it, even louder now. Just then I felt a faint tug on the scruff of my neck, like a kitten getting lifted by the jaws of its mother. My instinct was to play the drums to scare away the poltergeist, or at least to drown out the noise, so I started up a light, speedy jazz beat. But for some reason I did double-time on the kick drum, hit the bell of the ride cymbal over and over again with the fat of the drumstick, rolled the snare and attacked the tom-toms on fills with the speed metal fury of Hellion Horde. It sounded demonic, and I began to wonder for the first time if I was actually possessed—if this is what it felt like to have one’s mind turned over to another host.
When I gained control of my body again, I kicked the bass drum, threw the hi-hat stand across the room, and knocked over the floor tom. I didn’t even notice Larry had come down the stairs and was standing in front of me with a horrified look on his face. I started to cry—the kind you can’t control—and Larry held me awkwardly, saying, “Hey, hey, take it easy.”
You have to tell me, Mr. Haley, if you think I’m nutso. Whenever I talk to my parents about this stuff, they tell me it’s all real, but they believe in everything. Larry listens to me and says he believes me, but he and I have this thing where he treats me like I’m delicate, like I’m just going to vanish if he doesn’t hold onto me and reassure me. The rest of the band talks about the poltergeist like it’s cool to have a ghost in the house, even though they’ve stopped staying overnight. And the Dungeon Master doesn’t talk about anything but the game.
My therapist is the skeptical one, insisting that it’s all mental, but she’s paid to treat people with mental problems, so of course she thinks it’s mental. She suggested that I talk to someone other than my misfit friends, and see what they think. So now I am writing to you, Mr. Haley, hoping that you can provide some perspective on what’s happening. I hope that’s okay. I’m really bad at knowing whom I ought to trust. For example, the person I went to first about my poltergeist problem was Karen Stark. She was the exact opposite of a misfit. She was sitting in the cafeteria with her usual lunch of a banana and a diet coke, and before the rest of her crowd could file in, I invited her to come to the library with me.
As we walked in the near-empty hallway with endless beige walls, Karen kept looking around like she wanted to be anywhere else but walking next to me. I was carrying on a monologue in my head, practicing how I was going to tell her what had been happening at my house.
You know how Karen has these thick eyebrows? Well, they were pulled together like she was worried to even walk next to me. She wore a red barrette that day, and hugged her unopened diet coke in her arms. Her overloaded backpack looked ridiculous on her. I didn’t even have my backpack with me that day.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m walking,” I said.
“You’re staring at me,” she said.
We stopped in front of the library. I turned away. The double doors were wide open, and close to the entryway there was a semi-circle of computer screens.
“What is this about?” Karen said.
“I think I saw a ghost,” I said, and she took my arm, leading me the other way, out of the building to the loading dock where smokers congregate between periods.
When Karen found out that it was a vision in the middle of the night, her eyebrows pulled together again, and she frowned.
“Do you think it was a ghost?” I said.
“What you saw wasn’t a ghost,” said Karen. “It was the devil, tricking you into thinking he was a ghost. You invited him in with your demonic games and your demonic music.” She actually smiled as she said this.
“Okay…” I said. “So what do I do?”
“You have to get right with Jesus,” she said.
“You know I was born Jewish, and raised Baha’i,” I said.
“But Micah, it’s so obvious the devil is making his claim on you. Come to church with me on Sunday.”
I shrugged. “I’ll try anything.”
You said in class that when Dickinson says, “Because I could not stop for Death / He kindly stopped for me,” she is being facetious, but I don’t think so. Death is being really kind to go out of His way for Undeath. All Death wants is to send the recently departed on to the next world, and Undeath wants to linger on in this world. So Death’s carriage-ride is a service that goes against his natural desire to keep life and after-life separate.
The only other time I’ve been to church was for a funeral for my uncle, when I was ten. So I can’t help but think of them as gloomy places, where people weep openly and others grind their teeth, and everyone else averts their eyes. They always fascinated me.
First Baptist was so large that it could have fit that other church inside of its worship center. Mundane objects looked suddenly unholy when placed in what was supposed to be a sanctified space: speaker wires, a folding chair, a whiteboard. Looking at these tools, I couldn’t shake this feeling that, by ascribing everything to God, we were all taking for granted the scientists who had developed them.
When the sermon began, I couldn’t tell whether it was any good because I had nothing to compare it to. Pastor Simon drew upon the bible as much as I expected him to, and chewed his words like a goat. But the whole affair was more interactive than I’d assumed it would be. He dressed like a businessman, and called out for “Amens” and “Halleluias” with a confidence in the support of his flock that was irresistible.
“There’s a young lady here,” the minister said, “who has come amongst us today to turn herself towards God. She was facing away from the Lord, but now she wants to turn back toward His light.” Now I saw what the folding chair was for. He lifted it up, and turned it around towards the whiteboard. The whiteboard, in this analogy, was supposed to be God.
“It’s as simple as that, folks,” said the preacher. “Turning in the direction of God, committing yourself to his path, letting Jesus into your heart.”
After the sermon, Karen brought me up to meet Pastor Smith. He had been engaged in a discussion with an old woman with a pronounced hunch. When he turned toward us, he pivoted his whole body and smiled with teeth as square and white as chiclets. He opened his arms, but it was only to squeeze both our shoulders. He possessed the skill of making you feel alone in the room with him, even in the thick of a crowd.
“I don’t mean to take up your time,” I said. “But I’m looking for help.”
“Well, your search has brought you to First Baptist,” Pastor Smith said, “and I believe we can help.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Thank the Lord,” he said. “Every blessing is on His account.”
“There is some kind of curse—” I started, but the Pastor interrupted me.
“—I believe what you are really looking for is healing of the spirit. Your soul is sick from the absence of Christ, not from voodoo.”
The pastor said “voodoo” with an exaggerated Southern inflection. My stomach felt heavy. My ears felt hot. I was suddenly seized by the unshakable impression that everybody in the room was possessed, the way I had been possessed at the drum kit, ready to descend into a violent frenzy. My chest hurt, and I had to sit down on the stool.
“Are you okay?” a red-haired woman asked. I imagined a hyena totem looming over her, chuffing wickedly. “You look pale.” She turned to the pastor. “She looks pale.”
It occurred to me that I hadn’t taken a breath in a while, so I started breathing quickly to catch up.
“I think she’s having a panic attack,” the woman said.
They moved me to a couch in the pastor’s office. Karen stood back, looking embarrassed. I can only imagine what she is saying about me right now. A paper bag and a glass of water seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Their care seemed more oppressive even than the chintzy décor.
“I need fresh air,” I said. “I need to get out of here.” And just like that, they let me go.
When I got home, I couldn’t muster the strength to enter my own house. I spread out on the porch sofa and took an epic nap, which was only interrupted when the sun was about to go down and the long light of the sunset shone directly on my eyes. When they opened, there was Larry sitting in the armchair, staring at me. It would have been creepy if I didn’t know that Larry was only into boys that way.
We had a D&D session that night, and in the game the Dwarven Gods were angry because the sacred forge had been used by elven hands—the previous session I had to allow Larry’s wizard elf, Elduran, to make a blade for Austin’s warrior to wield—a mithril sword that he named Dwelf (as the only sword ever made by an elven blacksmith on a dwarven forge)—because I forgot to take blacksmithing as a proficiency. My punishment was a curse that caused my character Gallrath insatiable hunger. He had to eat constantly or suffer crippling penalties on all his stats. So we burned through all our rations by the time we reached mount Selukadur, where the red dragon Uwan awaited us. Even if we defeated him, we would have thirst and starvation to contend with, since we were far away from home and Elduran never bothered to learn a teleport spell.
So we did something we’d never done before. Instead of attacking the red dragon Uwan, we knelt before him and offered him the sword Dwelf to add to his treasure, in exchange for the knowledge of how to lift the curse. He accepted our offer, but not without the humiliation of haggling for more of our items to add to his hoard. As it turned out, the curse could only be lifted by undertaking another quest, this time to battle Tiamat, the five-headed queen of dragons.
After our session ended, I thought a long time about alternate realities, and wondered whether there wasn’t some connection between the Dwarven curse in the game and the curse on our house. Maybe I needed to undertake some previously unheard of quest that challenged the limits of my powers? Or maybe I just needed to get the heck out of my parents’ house for a while.
Larry stuck around as usual after the rest of the group went home. He must have sensed that I was in a fragile mood because he put soothing music on and started to rub my feet, then my legs, then my back. At first the pressure was too much. Then the sensation was so strong that I lost control and started crying. What was happening to me? I hadn’t cried like that since I fell out of a tree and broke my arm in the fourth grade. But I went over and over the events of the past few weeks and I became scared, started to wonder whether I was losing my mind.
I was brought back to myself again when I felt Larry reach around and cup a breast. I laughed, because he went suddenly from massaging to tickling, but then all of a sudden he was unzipping his pants. “I’ve never been with a woman before,” Larry said, pulling down his jeans and boxers to expose his pink, upwardly curved erection. “Maybe I’m not gay. Maybe just haven’t tried it.”
I was so accustomed to Larry’s presence—my gay best friend—I hadn’t even been paying attention to the reality of the fact that I was alone with him in my underwear, in the bedroom. “Oh shit,” I said. “Can’t we just go back to the massage?”
“I think I might be attracted to you, Micah,” Larry said. “This is a big deal for me. It means I might not be gay after all.”
“Can we just get dressed?” I said. “You have some shit to figure out.”
“Maybe you can just touch it,” he said, and crawled onto the bed.
I stood up to my full height and faced him, despite the fact that my bra was hanging loosely from my chest and my old-lady panties were fraying and ugly. “Get the fuck out of my house,” I said, in my most dramatic voice, as though I were speaking to a spectre. “I disinvite you. You are no longer welcome here.”
And as if I had cast some sort of spell, Larry got up, pulled his pants on, and left—a sneer on his lips but his eyes full of regret.
That brings us to today. I’m going to give Harold a ride from school, and the band will meet for practice, and I don’t know whether the poltergeist will show up tonight. But it has been more than a week and nothing creepy has happened. Even if the haunting is over and done with, I’m frustrated that I don’t have any answers. I hate to think that my home was in the process of being taken over by a malign spirit that wished to vent its restless rage upon the living, but I also want to trust my instincts, which told me something supernatural was afoot. What do you think, Mr. Haley? Maybe the poltergeist was never really after me, and was just trying to chase Larry away. Maybe my house has been cleansed of all evil and maybe it’s Larry Belmont who will be haunted from now on.
Phong Nguyen is the author of the novel The Adventures of Joe Harper (forthcoming from Outpost19 in 2016), and two short story collections:Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2014) and Memory Sickness (Elixir Press, 2011). He teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where he serves as editor of Pleiades. His stories have appeared in more than 40 literary journals including Agni, Boulevard, and Iowa Review.