No Trespassing

No Trespassing

            Every night it’s the same dream—it is dark, the kind of blue velvet dark of summer that you feel on the tips of your shoulders. The house she lived in for 20 years sits sleepily between two oak trees. Out beyond are barley fields her father harvests each year. The dusty dirt road leading up to the house is quiet now, and though it is blue velvet like the rest of the world she remembers the real color—red, a red you could taste when you ran down the road too fast. She was always doing that, her mother used to say, stirring up things. But she couldn’t do that now, now she’s just a giant eye in the sky, a spectator cringing on the edge of her seat. She sees the last light in the house go out; the blue velvet is complete. She wants to go knock on the door; she moves invisible feet, invisible hands—she can feel it in her bones.

            Caroline Davis has met with me for two months. Each time she sits on the edge of the couch, her bony hands folded in her lap. She always wears a red flannel shirt and blue jeans. Her hair is short and uneven, as though she did it herself. She is young and her blue eyes are like broken glass. They say: No trespassing.

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            On the side of the house, a window opens—silently, quickly. A girl shimmies out and down the oak tree in the blink of an eye. The girl leans against the side of the house, as though someone might be looking for her. The girl looks side to side, then steps back to the tree and leans against it. The girl strikes a match, holding a cigarette to her lips—her face flashes out of the blue velvet, and then slinks back in. The girl blows smoke up to the moonless sky. Another drag of the cigarette and a car pulls up—red. The girl tosses the cigarette down and runs to the car.

            The car drives away, but she doesn’t follow. She just hangs there, the giant eye in the sky—white, huge, stuck; a giant button sewn into the blue velvet.

Each time we meet, I tell Caroline what happened to her family; get past her sad blue eyes. Each time she looks at me blankly, but her aunt and uncle tell me that she is having night terrors every week. I will get her to face her past.

 This is the part where she tries to wake up. She stretches and pulls, but the black velvet holds her tight. She yells out to wake them up. “MAMA, PAPA, ALLIE! GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!” But even as the words are coming the cigarette is already blooming; a giant sunflower shooting up through the house, whipping the seams out of the black velvet which is now red, red like her shirt, like the car, like the road. The windows are blocked—she can’t hear their screams. Nobody did. But she knows she can’t hear because she wasn’t there—that’s why now all she gets to do is watch because when she could have stopped it, she didn’t. Now she can only be the eye—white, bleached like her mother and father and sister’s bones, rattling each day inside her heart.

Just a quick explanation of my movie: in the movie itself, the story flips between Caroline's past/her night terrors and her present, where she is getting analyzed by a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist speaks in the first person, and Caroline's story is always told in the third person.