The Haunting of James Hastings by Christopher Ransom Read Free Book Online

house .
     
    This house. This bedroom, our bedroom, the room I could no longer sleep in. I went to the dresser and opened a drawer. Stacey’s socks. Little balls of pink and yellow and white. And then her ‘winter’ socks, the plain athletic socks that used to bunch up in piles at her ankles as she padded around the house when January subjected us to fifty degree mornings. I closed the drawer. The next was packed tightly with what I had come to think of as house shirts, old t-shirts that began their life as mine, were adopted by Stacey, and eventually belonged to both of us. The kind of shirts you put on to paint a chair on the patio. I unrolled a black one featuring a cheesy airbrush-type painting of a nude woman standing on a tree limb in a mystical forest, her back to me as the full moon swelled yellow in a faery sky. Wolfmother, it said. One of Stacey’s favorite bands. I pressed it to my face and inhaled. It smelled like dust.
     
    I dropped it and closed the drawer, opening another to the top right. Here was a collection of my underwear. I stared at them, trying to make sense of the order, the neat way they had been folded and stacked. Did a certain portion of women in the world fold boxers in thirds, sides in, and then in half, top to bottom, until they were a perfect square? I always thought Stacey wasted her time folding my underwear this way.
     
    ‘Just wad them into a ball and shove them into my dresser,’ I had told her on at least a dozen occasions. ‘I don’t care how they look, save yourself the trouble.’
     
    And she would always frown at me as she continued folding, her movements growing more graceful and yet somehow robotic as if she were defying me by playing the role of laundry geisha. ‘It’s nicer this way, James,’ she would say.
     
    That was another of her Stacey-isms I had forgotten about.
     
    It’s nicer this way .
     
    Stace, why do you always put the same Otis Redding CD on when we have company over for dinner? It’s nicer this way. I would catch her using her special bottle of lemon polish on the wooden coffee table-trunk despite the fact that Olivia had sponge-cleaned it earlier that day. Why don’t you just tell Olivia to do that next time? And Stacey, my wife, my little imperfect, white-haired wife would double-wrap the cloth around her middle and pointer fingers and massage the oil into the dark knots and, almost beneath her breath, say, ‘It’s nicer this way.’ I made fun of her for the way she misted the bedspread with her pouch of jasmine water right before we crawled in to have the sex (that one was a James-ism, ‘the sex’), treating our ordinary, Crate & Barrel bedroom like some boudoir, and she would lift her chin and look away from me and say, ‘It’s nicer this way.’
     
    I realized that I was holding a pair of my boxer shorts, the orange paisley one that only days ago I had worn and left in the plastic basket that served as my downstairs hamper, and I realized that I was crying again. Somehow, in the past three days, they had made the trek from the laundry room to this dresser, where they were folded into thirds, then in half, a perfect square. That was some kind of magic, a trick that broke my heart even as I began to shake with fear.
     
    She had been right. Always.
     
    It was nicer this way.
     

5
     
    Saturday I bought a gun.
     
    Actually, I didn’t buy it. My neighbor, Hermes, gave it to me. He worked out of his Navigator at the end of the block, on the corner in front of his green shingle. The house was in his mother’s name, but it belonged to Hermes. A man named Jaysun kept an office with a view out the third-story turret, where he could spot po-po coming from six blocks in any direction. The rest of the crew usually clustered in a circle, dealing, texting, chilling, waiting for the action, soaking up the heat and arguing about sports.
     
    Before our driveway was repaved and the garage rebuilt, Stacey and I had to park on the street. This