Between the Eaves

 I thought the tapping on my roof all winter was branches, 

until one day between the eaves I saw him.

A bony man, more a thing, slid back to cower in darkness, under the beams.

I told my older brother, who owns the property. 

He brought a ladder and a box.

He climbed to the hollow spot, shone a light in, saw nothing. 

So he crawled in.

I waited a minute, two, then called out, shouted. 

There was no reply, no change, only quiet dark.

My brother had always been stolid. 

It was impossible this was a joke.

I went up and thrust a rake toward the darkness that took him. 

 Right off the rake struck a wall of black moss.

As if the shadowed space had only been an illusion.

On the other side of the wall, in the attic, I found nothing. 

And nothing has come through the mossy wall since.

The Trick

 In a blink, as she steps on the path,

she sees her hand letting go of her little brother’s hand, forever.

That day, she was sure her brother was tricking her, trying to scare her.

Hours later, she was still sure.

And eleven years on, she’s back here, where he was last seen, alone.

All their searching found not one trace.

She’s clung to the same belief, though, ever since,

what they called denial, then fixation.

That her little brother is only tricking her.

Or perhaps, she sometimes thinks, the real trickster is life’s director.

He’s laughing at us all behind the curtain.

She used to take a boyfriend here and squeeze his throat during sex,

each time harder. Until, bruised, he left for good.

At twilight, turning to go, she glimpses a flash between a white oak’s roots.

Her brother’s eyes, unchanged, twinkle at her, then disappear.

Gifts

Small giftwrapped boxes were left on every doorstep in our neighborhood, early one misty morning.

Most of us refused to touch them, wondering who brought them and why.

Neighbors watched those who opened their boxes from outside windows, anxiously anticipating.

The folklore professor recognized the markings on his box as the runes of a lost people.

He drew down a tome and read aloud how these people schemed to give deadly gifts.

But this warning was ignored or unheard by the bitter widow, and the rest.

Inside the boxes they each found a mirror cut in a unique shape. And they each gazed into it.

The widow saw in hers a lost youth in a life she thought she should have had. 

For this life, she offered the mirror her face, by cutting it off and laying it in the box.

Screams heard all along the streets told us the mirrors commanded no less of the others.