Four Deaths of Despair
Poem; not quite a ghost story
Two old sisters died in a fire on October 1st. They did not burn up; there were no flames glowing In the early autumn night. They choked on the Smoke in their beds, suffocating silently In the dark, alone in the world, with no One left to mourn them. They lived in the house Across the street from mine; a cursed place, sordid With the misery of despair. No one knew they were dead Till the lights and sirens began to pour Down my quiet road, filling the silence with Panic and light. No one called them; they must have Responded to an alert from a smoke alarm. When they got there the sisters were already dead, And they dragged their bodies into the street, And then it was all over. Now the house is empty, Marked off by yellow police tape, and this and The broken windows from where the firemen tried To rescue them is all that shows they’re gone. Three years ago, an old lady lived in the house. She was handicapped, so her two sisters Moved in to help her after her husband died, And they lived there quietly together for a while, Or at least I never saw them, and no one else Seemed to know them either. And then one day, When we were all hiding from the fake and gay virus, One of the sisters tried to kill another, who then shot Her in self-defense. The cops and the ambulances Came this time too, and dealt with the problem, Hauling off the dead body of the third sister, And I guess they asked some questions and did Other legal things; I’m sure there were lawyers Involved, and a district attorney, and a police statement, And all the rest, but eventually Everything went back to the way it was Before, except that one of them was dead. And before that, in the house, the handicapped Sister lived with her husband. They lived alone, Recluses, and no one really seemed to know them. One time my brother knocked on their door to Ask if they needed someone to cut their yard, But they said they already had someone, So he left them alone and never saw them again; I never saw them at all, like everyone else. The one thing that everyone knew about them Was that the husband was in some sort of poor health. Ambulances would arrive at the house On a pretty regular basis to Take him to the hospital with some ailment Or other. Everyone knew it was only A matter of time. Sure enough one day Several police cars and ambulances Drove up to the house out of nowhere, and We knew what was finally happening: He had died, leaving his handicapped wife Alone. It was only later that we learned That he wasn’t sick: he drank himself to death. And now the house is empty, having swallowed A whole family. When I drive by it I can Feel the emptiness and silence of death Hanging over it like a shroud of fog, The knowledge of the four hopeless lives that Ended in those walls seeping out into the street In a radius where everything seems more Silent, the birdsongs hesitant, and even The sun seems to filter more mutely through the Neighboring trees, as if falling on the house With some sort of celestial fear. I Cannot mourn them because they did not Exist for me. Maybe I could have tried, But I did not. Their ghosts will not haunt me, And I will not be kept awake at night Thinking of the ways I could have known them. I will think of them as a somber parable, A warning about how bad things can get If you let them, and I’ll try to live my life Differently so I don’t end up like them. And their echoes will haunt the empty house For a little while only, drifting through The dim abandoned halls with the same Despairing gloom that they had in life, Till some other naïve soul buys the place And wipes their tragic memories away.
Notes: I wrote this poem for an Ars Poetica competition, responding to a prompt from
to write a ghost story for Halloween. Perhaps this doesn’t quite fit that bill, but it’s what I got. Unfortunately, the events this poem deals with really happened.