A Head Full of Ghosts

by Paul Tremblay

Passage of time as a prop to the story, the story that has been told and retold so often it has lost its meaning, even to those of us who lived through it.

In a way, my personal history not being my own, being literally and figuratively haunted by outside forces, is almost as horrible as what actually happened. Almost.

It was so dark it was like nothing was there in the room with us. Only the nothing was actually something because it filled my eyes and lungs and it sat on my shoulders.

Her hyperactive pitch was layered and schizophrenic, imploding down into a singularity, then going big bang, expanding and exploding all over everything. These dizzying changes in her voice were instantaneous and hallucinatory, as if she were somehow atonally harmonizing with herself.

There’s nothing wrong with me, Merry. Only my bones want to grow through my skin like the growing things and pierce the world.

It sounded like the saddest of sad songs with notes floating down the staircase and into the foyer like dead leaves; red, brown, and purple.

“Gloomy Sunday,” originally composed by Hungarian pianist Rezsõ Seress in 1933.

I like to imagine her as being possessed by the vast, awesome and awful monster that is popular culture. Possessed by the collective of ideas!)

Come Closer by Sara Gran; Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory; Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin. For nonfiction I point out The Exorcist: Studies in the Horror Film; American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty; God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; and even the laughably bad Pigs in the Parlor: The Practical Guide to Deliverance.

Marjorie is our doomed hero. John Barrett was and is the wicked father, the wickedest of fathers. The show did succeed in one aspect: John was indeed a symbol of decaying patriarchy.

(*Satan’s Window Treatments is the name of my punk band*)

These men all blamed the breakdown of their once-ideal family on something outside their control, something outside themselves.