Celestial Inventories by Steve Rasnic Tem Read Free Book Online Page A

the nose and eyelids, and the various skin rashes are of any particular aesthetic appeal.
    Only at the end of the Johnson film do we hear any clear statements from The Disease Artist. At one point he is heard to say, “It is our need to be remembered, to let other people know that we once walked this world.” And at another, “To tell them how it was, how it used to be, how it felt to be there.”
    Clearly, we must take this as an artist’s statement about what it must mean to be an artist in a world that does not always appreciate one’s chosen art form. It is unfortunate that like the fictional Hunger Artist before him, who never found his defining food, our own Disease Artist passed from us without ever discovering his defining disease.
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    128 The AIDS epidemic ran its course some fifty years ago. With the exception of The Disease Artist’s final performance, there have been no reported cases since that time.

HALLOWEEN
STREET
    Halloween Street. No one could remember who had first given it that name. It had no other. There was no street sign, had never been a street sign.
    Halloween Street bordered the creek, and there was only one way to get in: over a rickety bridge of rotting wood. Grey timbers had worn partway through the vague red stain. The city had declared it safe only for foot or bike traffic.
    The street had only eight houses, and no one could remember more than three of those being occupied at any one time. Renters never lasted long.
    It was a perfect place to take other kids—the smaller ones, or the ones a little more nervous than yourself on Halloween night. Just to give them a little scare. Just to get them to wet their pants.
    Most of the time all the houses just stayed empty. An old lady had supposedly lived in one of the houses for years, but no one knew anything more about her, except that they thought she’d died there several years before. Elderly twin brothers had once owned the two centre houses, each with twin high peaked gables on the second story like skeptical eyebrows, narrow front doors, and small windows that froze over every winter. The brothers had lived there only six months, fighting loudly with each other the entire time.
    The houses at the ends of the street were in the worst shape, missing most of their roof shingles and sloughing off paint chips the way a tree sheds leaves. Both houses leaned toward the centre of the block, as if two great hands had attempted to squeeze the block from either side. Another three houses had suffered outside fire damage. The blackened boards looked like permanent, and arbitrary, shadows.
    But it was perhaps the eighth house that bothered the kids the most. There was nothing wrong with it.
    It was the kind of house any of them would have liked to live in. Painted bright white like a dairy so that it glowed even at night, with wide friendly windows and a bright blue roof.
    And flowers that grew naturally and a lawn seemingly immune to weeds.
    Who took care of it? It just didn’t make any sense. Even when the kids guided newcomers over to Halloween Street they stayed away from the white house.
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    The little girl’s name was Laura, and she lived across the creek from Halloween Street. From her bedroom window she could see all the houses. She could see who went there and she could see everything they did. She didn’t stop to analyze, or pass judgments. She merely witnessed, and now and then spoke an almost inaudible “Hi” to her window and to those visiting on the other side. An occasional “Hi” to the houses of Halloween Street.
    Laura should have been pretty. She had wispy blonde hair so pale it appeared white in most light, worn long down her back. She had small lips and hands that were like gauges to her health: soft and pink when she was feeling good, pale and dry when she was doing poorly.
    But Laura was not pretty. There was nothing really wrong about her face: it was just vague. A cruel aunt with a drinking problem used to say