Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Human Bone Found In Neighbor's Backyard
My next-door neighbor found a human bone in her backyard. Let me rephrase. She thinks she found a human bone. They were putting up a fence in their backyard. They’ve been digging and shoveling and leveling posts. I unloaded some boards to be a Mister-Rogers-kind-of-neighbor. And she was still talking about the human bone she’d shown me the day before.
Yesterday, while walking down the driveway we share. We live in a historical district. My neighbor’s house and my house were built in 1910. They are identical. So, like I said, I was walking down the driveway, and she called me over to look at the bone.
“Don’t you think it is a human bone?” she asked.
Now I’m not an expert on human bones. I’ve never set eyes on them. I saw a picture of them the other night on Desperate Housewives. Somebody cut that woman up and put her in that trunk that floated to the top in some lake on the set of the show. So this was a first for me. I could tell it was a bone. Some kind of a bone.
I put my foot on it and rolled it around, inspecting each side. It’s about the size of a small child’s bone. I took my foot off it and said in jest, “You should call the authorities. Tell them you found a human bone.” We both stood over it, looking at it, concocting our own beliefs about the bone.
“You really think I should?” she asked. The whole scene had my neighbor talking in a high-pitched voice.
I’d pitch the thing. I wasn’t ready to call Cold Case and have that blonde-headed chick come out to put us all under surveillance. Ask us twenty questions. “How long have you lived next door, Mr. Stofel?” Then she would investigate my boring life.
To pursue something like this is to invite too much drama into your life. They’ll bring in a backhoe. Close off my driveway. Keep me from getting any work done with all the noise going on outside my window.
It just makes your backyard seem like a graveyard. Then you get to worrying about the house. You’ll start hearing footsteps on the boards or a heart beating beneath the floorboards like in that Edgar Allan Poe short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Remember the story? The narrator kills the old man because his pale blue eye, like a vulture’s eye, is driving him insane. Everywhere he turns there’s that eye, until finally he can’t take it anymore.
He inches his way into the old man’s room each night until he finally springs on the old man who shrieks. The narrator throws the mattress over him. Suffocating him. Waiting for his last heartbeat. It happens. Then he dismembers him, like that body in Desperate Housewives. He raises the three planks of the floor of the chamber. The old man is gone. Elation.
Then a knock upon the door. Three policeman stand at his door. A terrible shriek coming from his house has been reported. But the narrator fears nothing. He’s performed the perfect crime. He throws open the house. Slings his arms into every room. They are satisfied that it was indeed the narrator yelling in his sleep. The police pull up chairs and chat.
At first it's exhilarating for the narrator. He's getting away with murder. Then it gets old. They will not go away. And it isn’t because they are suspicious. They're not. Just tired. Just feel like talking. But this is when the heart begins to beat beneath the three planks, up under the three policeman’s feet.
But they cannot hear it, only the narrator hears the sound of the heart beating from beneath the three planks. He starts talking in a crazy, idiotic way—his voice reaching crescendos. But the heart beats above the sound of his voice. Louder and louder. Until the man cannot stand it any longer. And he pulls up the boards and reveals the old man's corpse.
And the narrator shrieks, “Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—It is the beating of his hideous heart!”
Maybe I’m taking my neighbor’s archeological dig too far. But it got me to thinking about Edgar Allan Poe and that zany story, and about how it bleeds into my story. I’m that way. Everything bleeds into a story for me. We are stories. You and I. Stories.
So, as I said, it got me to thinking about my own heart. How it was hidden beneath the floor, inside this skin and bones that the Apostle Paul calls “the old man.” That old sinful nature inside.
I thought about how my heart was the first thing to respond to God on that day in a 1,000-member church. And the wild thing is—the evangelist speaking that day—he heard my heart. It must have been beating in his ears the way the heart beat in the ears of Poe’s narrator.
Louder and louder it thumped, as if a low-rider was sitting at the red light at the corner with the bass thumping against the moment. It beat in his ears until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and the evangelist shrieked, “Someone here; your heart is about to beat out of your chest. You need to get up and come down here to the altar and give your beating heart to Christ.” I can remember his words like a mantra, even after twenty-three years. Word for word. True story.
And it freaked me out. I was new to all of this church stuff. I went to church as a small child, but I can’t tell you anything about it. I can’t remember much before I was ten. But I can remember what that man said to me at the age of eighteen.
I could relate to him somewhere deep inside my soul, underneath the three planks of the chamber. My heart beat. It pounded. Louder and louder. So I jumped up, went down to the altar, and shrieked, “I am the one with the beating heart. Me, this heart. It beats. I did it.”
Of course, we are all guilty. We killed the most precious thing. The One thing. The One heart that took its last beat here, only to come back and beat inside everyone who listens. Louder and louder. And with each beat a new beginning for some poor soul whose heart has taken its last beat here, only to utter his first eternal hello there.
www.stofel.com
Yesterday, while walking down the driveway we share. We live in a historical district. My neighbor’s house and my house were built in 1910. They are identical. So, like I said, I was walking down the driveway, and she called me over to look at the bone.
“Don’t you think it is a human bone?” she asked.
Now I’m not an expert on human bones. I’ve never set eyes on them. I saw a picture of them the other night on Desperate Housewives. Somebody cut that woman up and put her in that trunk that floated to the top in some lake on the set of the show. So this was a first for me. I could tell it was a bone. Some kind of a bone.
I put my foot on it and rolled it around, inspecting each side. It’s about the size of a small child’s bone. I took my foot off it and said in jest, “You should call the authorities. Tell them you found a human bone.” We both stood over it, looking at it, concocting our own beliefs about the bone.
“You really think I should?” she asked. The whole scene had my neighbor talking in a high-pitched voice.
I’d pitch the thing. I wasn’t ready to call Cold Case and have that blonde-headed chick come out to put us all under surveillance. Ask us twenty questions. “How long have you lived next door, Mr. Stofel?” Then she would investigate my boring life.
To pursue something like this is to invite too much drama into your life. They’ll bring in a backhoe. Close off my driveway. Keep me from getting any work done with all the noise going on outside my window.
It just makes your backyard seem like a graveyard. Then you get to worrying about the house. You’ll start hearing footsteps on the boards or a heart beating beneath the floorboards like in that Edgar Allan Poe short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Remember the story? The narrator kills the old man because his pale blue eye, like a vulture’s eye, is driving him insane. Everywhere he turns there’s that eye, until finally he can’t take it anymore.
He inches his way into the old man’s room each night until he finally springs on the old man who shrieks. The narrator throws the mattress over him. Suffocating him. Waiting for his last heartbeat. It happens. Then he dismembers him, like that body in Desperate Housewives. He raises the three planks of the floor of the chamber. The old man is gone. Elation.
Then a knock upon the door. Three policeman stand at his door. A terrible shriek coming from his house has been reported. But the narrator fears nothing. He’s performed the perfect crime. He throws open the house. Slings his arms into every room. They are satisfied that it was indeed the narrator yelling in his sleep. The police pull up chairs and chat.
At first it's exhilarating for the narrator. He's getting away with murder. Then it gets old. They will not go away. And it isn’t because they are suspicious. They're not. Just tired. Just feel like talking. But this is when the heart begins to beat beneath the three planks, up under the three policeman’s feet.
But they cannot hear it, only the narrator hears the sound of the heart beating from beneath the three planks. He starts talking in a crazy, idiotic way—his voice reaching crescendos. But the heart beats above the sound of his voice. Louder and louder. Until the man cannot stand it any longer. And he pulls up the boards and reveals the old man's corpse.
And the narrator shrieks, “Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—It is the beating of his hideous heart!”
Maybe I’m taking my neighbor’s archeological dig too far. But it got me to thinking about Edgar Allan Poe and that zany story, and about how it bleeds into my story. I’m that way. Everything bleeds into a story for me. We are stories. You and I. Stories.
So, as I said, it got me to thinking about my own heart. How it was hidden beneath the floor, inside this skin and bones that the Apostle Paul calls “the old man.” That old sinful nature inside.
I thought about how my heart was the first thing to respond to God on that day in a 1,000-member church. And the wild thing is—the evangelist speaking that day—he heard my heart. It must have been beating in his ears the way the heart beat in the ears of Poe’s narrator.
Louder and louder it thumped, as if a low-rider was sitting at the red light at the corner with the bass thumping against the moment. It beat in his ears until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and the evangelist shrieked, “Someone here; your heart is about to beat out of your chest. You need to get up and come down here to the altar and give your beating heart to Christ.” I can remember his words like a mantra, even after twenty-three years. Word for word. True story.
And it freaked me out. I was new to all of this church stuff. I went to church as a small child, but I can’t tell you anything about it. I can’t remember much before I was ten. But I can remember what that man said to me at the age of eighteen.
I could relate to him somewhere deep inside my soul, underneath the three planks of the chamber. My heart beat. It pounded. Louder and louder. So I jumped up, went down to the altar, and shrieked, “I am the one with the beating heart. Me, this heart. It beats. I did it.”
Of course, we are all guilty. We killed the most precious thing. The One thing. The One heart that took its last beat here, only to come back and beat inside everyone who listens. Louder and louder. And with each beat a new beginning for some poor soul whose heart has taken its last beat here, only to utter his first eternal hello there.
www.stofel.com
© 2007 by Robert Stofel
1 Comments:
Wow! Great writing! I could not stop till I finished reading to the end! This is a gift!
