The Yellow Crayon

This time, when he returned to their parents’ empty house, circled to the back and slid in through the kitchen window, he knew exactly what he was looking for.   He could picture it in his sister’s little bag of tricks, that’s what she called the collection of stray, found, peculiar items she kept in the wooden toy chest, along with the old Monopoly set in its flattened box and the rusted jacks and the broken Pick Up Stix that they had played with once, so many years ago that the number has lost meaning.

The Yellow Crayon was not so much a toy as a thing: naked, mottled, misshapen, so ugly it seemed to suck the air out of the room.  He never knew where it really came from, whether its true origins were separable from the elaborate tales his sister would spin to amuse or terrify or sometimes deceive him into doing her wishes.  Like the Merry Dustmen, a long-running, serial fantasy about an army of children with dust cloths, in which he would happily enlist on Friday afternoons when it was supposed to be his sister’s turn to wipe the furniture before their mother’s weekly vacuuming. 

The Yellow Crayon may have started out simply as something found in the yard or left behind by a friend, but over time it became enmeshed in so many layers of speculation that the mere sight of it made them both wild with fear and excitement.  After listening with crawling flesh to her stories of homicidal maniacs with pockets dripping severed fingers, or of vast underground ant civilizations secreting waxy monuments to their conquering queen, he would often be unable to fall asleep at night or else have howling nightmares when he did.  Finally, their mother decreed that they couldn’t play with that horrid crayon any more, and back into the bag it went, never to come out again.

Their parents had died a long time ago – first their father, abruptly, and then their mother, following a long and painful decline before the final departure.  For months, maybe years, he would visit them in dreams, and even occasionally in the quiet moments of the day.   But gradually they faded to a thin, stringy mist that wrapped around certain objects that reminded him of them.  Even after the accident, which changed things in so many ways, they remained mere wisps of memory, a presence hinted at but always unfulfilled. 

So he grew accustomed to it being just the two of them, his sister and him, like all those childhood afternoons when they had played together while their mother shopped and their father was at work, when his sister was responsible for his care and entertainment, and the toy chest slowly emptied as the hours went by, and she would be down to the very last item in her bag of tricks, the Yellow Crayon.  She kept it rolled up in Kleenex at the bottom of the bag, and when he grew too bored or restless or cranky to be enticed by any of her usual ploys, she would bring it out and begin the slow, ritual unwrapping of the horrid thing.  He remembered dancing around her as she slowly peeled away the tissue, which on warm days would stick and tear away in ribbons, his heart pounding madly, terrified to watch yet unable to look away.  And when the last of the tissue came free, it would sit there, exposed, malignant, not rounded and neat like a Crayola but half-squashed and bulbous, yellowish grey with sickly dark spots.  He could tell by the light in his sister’s eyes that it scared her, too, that its alien ugliness exceeded the stories she told to contain it, and her fear made him frantic.  Then she would jump back, as if it had moved on its own, and this would be too much for him.  He would run screaming from the room and hide in a corner behind the couch and cower there, shivering, sometimes for hours.

But things were different now.  They were both grown, she had her own family, and, ever since the change, he couldn’t get around to visit any more in the old accustomed way.  Still, they could be together, if he managed to channel his drifting memories for long enough.  He found that if he thought about the old house and their afternoons there, he could relive those times, and in those moments of intense remembrance, break through somehow, project himself out to her – not as she was now, but to the memory of how she was then.  And not through words but in a kind of silent understanding, acknowledged only by a look of recognition on her pensive, childish face.  Through these memories, he became adept at returning to the old house, which had in fact been cleared out and sold off in the summer after their mother had died.   It was the remembered house he visited, the house of their childhood together, not the stripped and sold and no doubt reoccupied one; and though it was uninhabited, all the furniture was intact, all the closets and cabinets and drawers were filled just as they had always been.  He would wander through the vacant rooms in fear and anticipation, just as he had done long ago in those first lonely months after his sister had departed for college, when his parents went out for the evening, and he was left alone to explore.

When his sister got sick, he found himself returning to the old house more often, not to play with her as a child, or to wander through the rooms as a lonely adolescent, but to grieve for those memories, as a kind of companion memory himself.  She had cancer, an ugly, malignant thing inside her that wanted to live so badly it would eat her up and live off her.  He tried to visit her in the hospital, but it was so hard, with all the doors and elevators and complicated corridors, and the hovering doctors and nurses and her own family always in the way.  Only once, near the end, was he able to sit quietly and alone by her bedside as she slept, her blanketed chest struggling to rise and then falling abruptly, rise and fall, again and again.  He reached out to hold her hand but doubted that she ever knew it.  All he wanted was that look, the imagined, longed-for look, just once; the recognition that they were both still here together, that she, at least, understood.

Attending her funeral was the hardest thing he ever had to do.  To navigate those gates, those narrow paths, to keep himself rooted among the small, dismal crowd of mourners, to try to block out the disgruntled murmuring of the others – it left him quivering in every fiber.  But afterward he felt a release, a mounting sense of freedom, like a balloon let loose from a child’s hand, ascending toward the clouds.  He shut his eyes and floated blissfully – until he sensed a vague disquiet, a question left unanswered, a tug on the string. 

So he stayed on, tethered by the slightest and most unforgiving of threads to whatever still held him, to the old house, whose empty rooms he continued to wander, whose cobwebbed cabinets he rummaged through repeatedly, leaving always unsatisfied, knowing it wasn’t finished, that he would be back again. 

This time, however, as he approached the front door and tested the lock, something happened: the air itself seemed to clarify and shed its persistent shroud of fog.  It came to him with the shock of surprise – it had been so long since anything had surprised him – and he actually smiled, sending forgotten warmth through his limbs.  He circled to the back and entered through the kitchen window, moving swiftly, eagerly for once.   

He made his way up the creaking stairs and along the hallway toward his sister’s room.  The door was half-open, and as he entered, he saw that the door to her closet was also ajar.  The toy chest had been dragged out toward the center of the room, and she was sitting on her knees on the floor behind it, a thin, pensive girl in a plaid dress with puffy sleeves, bouncing a little red ball and scooping up jacks between the bounces.  He said her name, and she looked up at him intently, and at last that look of recognition, of understanding, shone plainly on her face, in her eyes, in her slow smile.  She looked down.  On her lap in the pleats of her skirt was a crumpled tissue, with the outline of something inside.  He smiled back at her, his second and final smile, and then she showed him, after all these years, what it really was.

Bio: Mark Deitch lives in Ossining, New York and is a member of the Hudson Valley Writers Center. He has contributed stories to The Westchester Review and The Foundling Review, and was the 2009 winner of the James Nicholson Political Poetry Prize.