“Guess what I did yesterday while you were at the Murphy’s?” Dad asks.

“Did you cut the grass?”

“No but that’s a good guess. A bunch of my friends and I got together and recorded some music out in the garage.” Your Dad takes a hand from the steering wheel and fumbles with a tape and gets it into the stereo. An unholy noise comes from the stereo. He punches the rewind button. “That was a little later in the night. We tried to make scary sounding things.” He hits play and the beginning of a song starts up. “Yeah listen to this. Isn’t this the funk?”

You aren’t really sure if the song is the funk or not, but you know that you shouldn’t have answered by telling your dad that he still had some egg in his mustache.

When you visit Matt Murphy’s house, all Matt ever does is play Nintendo. You get quickly bored watching. You wander upstairs to his older brother’s room and start to look through his old toys.

John catches you. “What are you doing in here?” he asks.

“Just looking at your toys,” you say.

John tells you that the house is haunted. He says that you shouldn’t wander around upstairs alone. John says that at night the Murphy’s hear crying and banging on the walls. Once, he says, when he was using the bathroom, the toilet paper flew up from the roll on its own and he felt someone grab him by the neck. The lights went out and he heard someone laughing, he says.

You tell him that his story is bullshit.

“Yeah but you’re scared,” John says.

“No, I’m not,” you say.

“Oh yeah,” John pushes you. “Then tell me something more scary.”

So you tell him a scarier story.

You are never invited back to the Murphy’s house again.

Mr. Waldon lives outside of town about fifteen minutes, but it always seems to take half a day to drive there. He has an open invitation for your family for weekend cookouts all summer long. He lives in a small cottage on the edge of a large green lake.

Mr. Waldon was a friend of your grandfather. When you Dad was a child, they’d visit every weekend. After a bottle of wine or so, Mr. Waldon will get out the old photographs, pastel photographs of your grandparents and your father as a fat blonde kid with a buzzcut. “I used to run down the entire path – along the cottage, through the backyard and down to length of the pier – as soon as my father parked the car,” says your Dad. He’d be a cannonball in the lake before your grandparents’ even rung the doorbell.

The lake isn’t safe for swimming anymore and the pier has long since rotted through. The view is still there, though, along with lounge chairs, a large above ground pool, and a hot tub. You spend the afternoon switching between the cold swimming water and the searing steam in the hot tub. You stuff yourself with nut mix and hamburgers and mustard-based potato salad. Mr. Waldon plays an oldies station on the radio.

Later you shiver in your wet swimsuit as you walk through his dim air-conditioned cottage to use the toilet. One entire wall of the bathroom is a picture of a sun setting off a tropical island. There’s so much to look at in Mr. Waldon’s house. This time you notice a picture of a pale woman with short brown hair in a poka-dot bikini. She’s smiling from the deck of a boat. You imagine that she was Mrs. Waldon.

Mom has to work late tonight so Dad orders pizza from the place in Boone Village. You go with him, but you aren’t going to wait in the pizza place for the pies to come out of the oven. You want to go into the video store and look at the VHS cases. “Okay,” he says, “but we can’t rent anything tonight.”

The employees at the video store are always showing movies that you can’t watch. Once, and only once, your parents let you stay up to see Happy Birthday to Me while it played on a local tv network and you had screaming nightmares for days. As you look at the covers of all the movies that you won’t rent, a strange science fiction movie plays on the screens mounted around the shop. The future is shiny leotards and florescent headbands, large pieces of unwieldy computer equipment and flippant robots. Travel between stars has made the universe’s vastness comprehendible. A menacing alien presence stalks a heroine down a tiny hallway.

Why would the aliens build the hallways in their ships so small when they are so big? Your mind asks you. This is the beginning of you not being able to enjoy blockbuster movies.

Just as you forget that your time is limited, you hear your Dad’s voice behind you. The pizza is ready and getting cold in the car. You take one last look at the tv screen. There’s something about toaster-shaped spaceships and odorless disintegration mist and difficult interplanetary politics and furry posable tentacles and the unpronounceable greeting of the U’thkath. As the glass door swings closed behind you, the soundtrack of the movie fades away but the glimpses of the movie stay forever in your memory. What the hell were they watching in the video store that day?

Before dinner you walk home from piano lessons. You’ve been learning arpeggios and can just now barely play both hands together. Most of the lesson is spent doing your homework from the week before. You always forget to practice and your teacher always knows.

You mean to practice. You think about the music from the lessons a lot afterward, but the actual songs get confused in your head. Some of the parts speed up and other parts slow down. You hear the songs the way that you whistle them and then new parts to the song start to come into your head. When you sit down with the music, entire aspects of the melody seem to be missing.

It’s nearly summer. The neighbors are grilling their yard. The street smells like charcoal and chicken. You climb into a creaking swing on your front porch and watch the fireflies as they mingle with the leaves of the elm trees.