A/N: A short story writing sample... looking for detailed feedback/responses. I know lots of you are waiting for me to update Hostile Kisses... I will as soon as possible. I'm finishing up applications for grad school and it's taking forever (luckily deadlines are coming up). Warning... a little darker than normal.

Black Barn

I watched my mother go crazy.

That’s why I’m sitting here in this white-walled room with two green backed chairs and a mounted camera that’s there to “protect” me. I’m here to talk about my feelings, to express myself through painful memories that this man in front of me will crack apart and piece back together to make me a whole, well-functioning member of society. I’m here to heal.

You can’t heal crazy.

I pull my knees to my chest and he stares at me over the thin rim of his glasses and waits. Waits and waits and waits. We do this every week: I stare at him, he stares at me, and in the span of an hour very little is said. What’s there to say? I’m crazy just like she was and he knows that, he prescribed me medications for it. But he wants me to elaborate, to—go deeper.

“Tell me,” he says gently. “You’re safe here, you realize that don’t you?”

My eyes flicker to the camera. I’m not safe anywhere, not even medication will take away that edge of paranoia.

Finally, annoyed with his steady stare, I shrug my shoulder. “She was a spastic and she went crazy, like normal…”

“No,” he interrupts, “tell me everything.”

“Not much to tell.”

“I’m sure there is.”

“Not much to remember.”

“Try.”

My chair creaks as I settle back in it. My hands tremble as I pick at a thread on the hem of my sweater. I don’t have to try to remember anything—I know the story well. I replay it in my head every day, and I think about the what ifs and other questions. What if I hadn’t found her? What could I have done differently? How could I have changed my future? Was there a key moment when I could have rubbed her off my skin and led a normal life, or was one touch my downfall? We sit in silence, like we always do. He twirls his wedding band around his finger while he watches me with this intensity that makes my stomach hurt. I avoid his eyes and look at the wall until my mind finds something new to think about—spending some quality alone time in my solitary room.

“Close your eyes,” he says. “Tell me what you see.”

I stare at him with uncertainty and he nods his head in encouragement and pushes down the ball of his pen. I hear it scribbling something on the legal pad resting across his knee. He writes ferociously for about a minute; I can’t see what he wrote. With a heavy sigh, I close my eyes. This is ridiculous.

“What day is it?”

“Saturday.”

“How old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“Good… tell me about it.”

I think about it for a moment. “It’s pretty out.”

He’s quiet for a moment, I hear his pen scratching. I rest my head against the back of my chair and let my body relax. He’s asked me to relive this day several times in the past, but I haven’t been able too. It’s not that it’s still raw in my chest and hurts to talk about; it’s just easier to avoid. The back of my eyelids are like little movie screens as that day slowly plays out again in my memories. I see colors first and then the smells of bacon and eggs, and the sound of laughter—from my mother.

“She’s laughing,” I say. “I don’t remember her laughing that day.” His pen stops scratching. I suppose I always think about the moment she went crazy and not what happened only hours before. For a few minutes, my mother might have been normal. This resonates inside of me. Happiness—and that even a crazy person could experience it. “She didn’t laugh very much—” none of us did “—it was nice to wake up to it.” He doesn’t speak and his pen doesn’t scratch, and finally, I feel like talking:

The sun sits high in a nearly cloudless blue sky so brilliant in color that it seems strangely purple and green around the edges of the sun. The air is crisp and blows at comfortable 74 degrees, which is just warm to run around barefoot without worrying about returning home with toes that feel like ice cubes. The air carries the scent of the corn stalks that sprawl across grandpa’s soft swelling farmland, located about 95 miles west of Omaha, Nebraska, and a touch of damp dirt from the morning’s dew. I’ve spent the entire morning playing by myself. First I ran through the stalks and then hid behind the tractor to spy on my brother Calvin who was smoking cigarettes behind the shed. After that, I chased Lucy, grandpa’s mean chicken, and then located our barn cat Tibby and her kittens. The majority of my morning was spent collecting dead bugs fallen from corn ears that had been doused with fertilizer two nights prior.

Despite the beautiful weather and the shade from the stocks hovering over my head, running around has made me hot. My shirt sticks to my damp skin and I feel sweat creeping down the small of my back; my brown hair sticks to my forehead and dirt rolls gritty on my arms. I’m starving. My belly burns so much I feel like throwing up. It’s well past lunch and my mother hasn’t called for me. Sometimes she forgets, so I start home to remind her. As I walk through the cornfield, my mind tricks me into believing that the dead bugs squished to the palm of my hand might be good to eat. So, under the protection of the green stalks that tower over me three feet, I curiously nibble a few only to spit them at my feet with a cringe of disgust. Holding my aching stomach, I run the rest of the way home.

I hurry through the open back door and find my mother leaning against the kitchen counter, staring out the window with a vacant expression is not at all unfamiliar. Her hand, twitching lightly, rests at her side; her fingers slowly curl and uncurl around the soft threadbare cotton of her nightgown, which hides her skeletal ankles and brushes over the top of her oddly shaped feet. I can hear her muttering under her breath, words that are incoherent and infantile; words I can’t understand. Her head shakes back and forth quickly as if she is uncertain, confused, and apprehensive. Several emotions all balled into one element of crazy play across the side of her face only slightly visible through strands of oily hair. It’s not unusual to see her like this: still in the house coat she put on three nights ago, her brown hair is matted, lying limply across her shoulder blades, which are hunched forward so her back bows. She is oblivious to my presence and trembles visibly. Her beautiful face—and it always was beautiful with her pale skin and golden brown eyes—has smudges of what looks like lipstick over her chin and her cheeks are splotchy from crying. Her nose, red at the tip and around the nostrils, drips snot down her lips. Her eyes are wide and stare out the window at something that may or may not have been there. She whispers more words that I can’t hear and then moans.

I am scared to move closer. Scared to touch my hand to her arm so she will know that I am here; scared that if I touched her, something will smear my palm and I have a little bit of her stuck to me. I had seen her like this before, but in small concentrated doses. We all had—dad, grandpa, Calvin, and me. Most of the time, I would watch her with curiosity and perhaps a small twinge of concern. I wanted to help a lot of the time, but they said it was hopeless. They said that there was no point in interacting, so we didn’t. I would leave whatever room she was in and find something else to occupy my time. It was how my family dealt with things. I played in corn. Calvin smoked and drank in dark shadows. Grandpa tinkered in his barn. And dad stared at the TV mindlessly—when he was around. So, I can’t comfort her today, I don’t know how.

Fear and the steady warm breeze on my back push me into the kitchen. I stop at her side and nibble on the corner of my lower lip. I really want something to eat, but I’m not sure that she’ll understand me. I’m standing right beside her and she doesn’t see me. She never does. She wipes her nose and mouth on her bare arm and blindly extends her hand to reach for the faucet. I watch her hands carefully, because I think they look like mine, and see that she has chewed her fingernails raw. Dry blood crusts the sides and the cuticle area of her nails making her pale fingers seem work worn and battered. I curl my own fingers into fists and watch as she wraps her hand around the lever for the tap. She jerks it upward at a force that is unnecessary. The water spits and gurgles until the well outside can produce a steady stream; the tinged-brown liquid runs for a moment before she forgets it. She turns away from the sink, startled by something she has seen in the window—perhaps a low flying bird or a glint of silver from grandpa’s work tools. Her hand shoots out across the counter top, scattering a collection prescription pill bottles that tumbled like bowling pins before she manages to grab one.

Her chewed fingers wrestle with the child-proof pill cap. I can hear what she’s muttering now because she’s facing me. In a hush above a whisper she murmurs: “Black barn, black barn, black barn” over and over and over.

Of course this makes no sense to me. Grandpa’s big barn, visible through the open back door and the window over the sink, is as red as a cherry and lined with white trim. Because she says it’s black, I stare at it through the open door wondering if perhaps I’ve been wrong my entire life and red is actually black. If I stared at it long enough, just like she did, would it become black? I want to question her, but before I can she yelps triumphantly. The cap of the pill bottle pops and an explosion of pills fan the air. They fall slowly, like heavy snow flakes, and tinkle against the old wooden floors, scattering about like fallen Skittles out of a ripped bag. I step back slowly and watch the tablets roll, rock, and bounce across the kitchen floor. Two pills hit my dirty toes and settle before me like two miniscule eggs. My mother drops to her knees with a wail of panic; a terror-stricken look consumes her face as dozens of little eggs fan out before her knees. She screams at me to help her and begins sweeping them up toward her skirt. I watch her hands again. Her fingers splay and cup and scoop so frantically pills bounce off her knees and scatter in other directions. Her eyes dart after them just as quickly as her hands do. She looks like Tibby when she scoops litter to cover her accidents. I bend to help her pick up the pills. But before I can she swats at my hand—fingers nearly touching mine—and screams at me never to touch them.

I only wanted to help her, so her reaction brings tears to my eyes. I step back so my back is against the warm breeze and toy with the idea of finding something else to do instead of having lunch. Maybe I’ll play with my dolls in the bedroom, or take them out to the stalks and bury them alive. Maybe I’ll spy on Calvin a little more. Despite all my alternatives, I can’t leave when my belly burns so badly. I start to ask her about lunch, when she spots a pill by my big toe and grabs it. I move my foot back out of her reach. Calvin says that the crazies are infectious, that I will get them eventually. But I don’t want to be like her—an abandoned crazy person with desperate eyes. I don’t want to be alone with no one to help me. I don’t want her to touch me.

“Help me,” she whispers. She looks at me only briefly. It is the first time I’ve seen her eyes in months, and although fleeting, the look of anguish and fear sparks something deep inside of me. She speaks no other words and again forgets that I’m there standing in front of the place where she kneels picking up pills. She begins to shove them back into the bottle, pausing briefly to put one, two, three, four, five in her mouth. I know instantly that this is wrong because I always watched my father give her medication every night: only pill one from each bottle and a glass of water poured from a frosted bottle that he keeps in the freezer behind the bagged peas. She would swallow the pills with little sips of water and when they were gone, she sat catatonically cradling the glass as if it contained an elixir of life. When the glass was empty her head would fall to the side and the glass would roll from her fingers and settle in her lap. Now she swallows pill after pill with nothing but a dry mouth. And I know this is wrong, but I don’t want her to be upset with me when I take the pill bottle away. As her trembling fingers push pills back into their home, I hear her mutter again about the black barn, whimpering on occasion as she glances over her shoulder at the cabinets under the sink.

The fear pools heavily in the middle of my throat, tasting of vomit and dirt. My blood pulses through my veins, thumps in my ears, and pushes up the hairs along my arms and neck. I shiver as I watch her drop the pills one at a time into the bottle. She puts another one on her tongue and suddenly I feel an overwhelming surge of energy throughout my body. This is different. It’s like one of those horror movies that Calvin watches; the kind that makes you sick all over and fear nighttime for months. I move closer to her and reach out for the bottle, but she drops it allowing four or five pills to escape. Again she scoops them up like Tibby and puts two more in her mouth.

“I’ll get grandpa,” I say.

“No!”

Her eyes lift, but she doesn’t see me. They stop somewhere around my nose and stare vacantly before she shakes her head. It’s hard to hear her, but I think she says, “Not him.”

And then, one after another, just like I do with my Skittles, she put pills into her mouth. But unlike me, who chews the little candies into one huge lump of sweetness, she just swallows them down one at a time. Behind her the water still runs; for some reason it’s all I can hear.

I don’t waste time watching her go crazy. She doesn’t want grandpa so I hurry up the stairs to the second floor of the farm house and knock on Calvin’s door. Behind the wood, the room hums with deep vibrations of hard, screaming rock and roll. Screaming demons, my mother calls it. She usually cries when Calvin plays this music. Maybe this is why she’s upset today. I pound on the door until my fists hurt, and then pound some more. He probably knows it’s me, or someone worth ignoring. It takes him three minutes to shut off the screaming. The vibrating door stills but doesn’t open. In the slit beneath the door I see shadows move and know that Calvin’s standing there waiting for me to leave. Before I can say his name the door knob clicks and turns; he peers out at me. I only see a strip of skin, one shaggy eyebrow, and the curve of a scowl.

“Something’s wrong with mom.”

He pulls the door open more. A plume of sweet, white smoke escapes into the hallway. I frown at the stench, which is nothing at all like the cigarettes he steals from grandpa. Calvin doesn’t say anything for a minute or so, he blinks several times before he actually sees me. I repeat myself, louder, incase he didn’t hear me the first time. “Something’s wrong with mom!”

Calvin’s black eyes narrow suspiciously and his lips purse together to form a straight line. He wears no looks of compassion or worry—in fact, he shows little surprise at my words. He pulls himself back into his cloud-filled room, but not before reaching out to flick me in the forehead. As he closes the door, I hear him say: “No shit.”

Such a response from him isn’t unusual, but I guess I hoped that he would take me seriously this time. My brother’s response is just like what the rest of my family gives me when I expressed worry for her. Grandpa would just grunt and flick his cigarette butts on the kitchen floor while eyeing me oddly. Calvin would leave the room rolling his eyes. And dad would just look at mom and then look at the TV. I am not a dumb kid. I know my mom has problems that are different from other moms; problems that other adults whispered about. Problems that I just don’t get. But they can be fun problems. She’s taken me deep into the corn fields where we looked for hidden bugs, fairies, and escape routes. She showed me all of her favorite hiding places when she was a little girl like me. She made up stories about the monsters that she hid from, and she taught me all I would need to know to survive alone. My mother was fun once. I don’t understand why people in my family don’t care about her more. Why didn’t Calvin care when I told him that something was wrong? Why did he close his door in my face? Why is the music screaming again? Why doesn’t he love her—why don’t any of them? Why don’t I?

Back in the kitchen, my mother is on the floor. Her fingers curl loosely around the empty pill bottle. She looks at me again and smiles. The bottle rolls from her fingertips and approaches me before the momentum slows and it freezes a foot away from me. She extends her hand and smiles again. Stepping over the bottle, I touch her fingers. Her skin is warm, like the outside of a mug of hot chocolate. She feels nice, so I wrap my fingers around hers and hold on. She tells me to turn off the water so I do.

“Can I get grandpa?”

“No,” she laughs. “I’m fine.”

She always says she’s fine.

I want to sit with her, but she doesn’t give me a chance. Her fingers slip from my tight grasp and she points to the backdoor. As I turn my face toward it, I feel the warm air, and smell the corn and the dirt and the sun. I do want to run out and play. I want to ignore the fact that all of those pills are gone now. I want to escape, but I can’t. She touches the hem of my shorts as I move toward her. Her warm hand wraps around the back of my knee. She lifts her head to look at me—her eyes, honey brown, are wide and glisten with tears. I can see my reflection in the large black circles.

“Don’t go in the black barn,” she whispers. “Okay?”

I nod.

“Play in the corn.”

I nod again.

Her eyes droop and her head tilts forward so her forehead briefly rests on my stomach. I wonder if she hears it growl and churn. I put my hands on the top of her head.

“I can call Dad.”

“No.” she pulls back and licks her lips with a white tongue. Her head slumps to the side. “Just… find an escape, Sammy.”

She gestures to the back door and I leave her there. I walk down the steps. I don’t look back over my shoulder. I head for the corn thinking of escape routes, faeries, and adventures in the stocks. As I walk from the house to the edge of the green rows, my empty belly long ignored, I notice grandpa coming out of the barn. He notices me too and stops. He holds a bucket in each hand; his overalls are covered in cow manure, mud, and flecks of hay. He puts the buckets down and motions me over to him. I don’t stop; I head for the corn like my mother told me to.

“Samantha!” Grandpa shouts. He’s not angry; he just wants my attention. I stop because it is polite to do so and turn toward him. He motions me toward him again. “Come here, girl, I want to show you something.”

“What?”

“It’s inside the barn.”

My chest squeezes sharply as he steps to the side and points to the open door of the barn; the insides stretch with blackness. I know that he keeps animals and supplies inside, but for some reason that strip of black seems never ending. The shadow is blacker than any color I’ve seen. It stretches across the inside of the barn and not even the bright sun in the sky can penetrate and show me what was inside. The longer I stare at it, the bigger and blacker it becomes. Slowly, as if a cloud has passed over the sun, the bright red paint begins to fade, chip and peel, and I can see blackness beneath it.

Grandpa pushes open the doors a little more, his smile says that nothing was amiss, but a part of me—a deep part—knows better. I know that if I touch that black shadow, it will inhale me whole and never spit me out. Grandpa takes a step toward me and I turn and run straight for the corn. I don’t stop, not even as the leaves of the plants whip my face and palms, not even as grandpa screams for me to come back. I run deep, deep, deep into the corn to a place that my mother once showed me. I run to a place where the monsters can’t see me. I drop to my knees and press my cheek to the ground, listening to the sound of the wind in the corn and the hum of the earth beneath my ear. I don’t emerge until the sun sets.

By the time I reach the back porch it is well after dark, I notice several things. The house is lit up and bright against the dark country sky and I don’t smell dinner cooking. The back door is still open and as I approach it hesitantly, I see Grandpa sitting at the table smoking a cigarette. I see Calvin leaning against the doorframe staring at the floor in front of the sink. My father is home too; he stands at the counter looking at my mother’s pill bottles. Beside him sits an empty glass and the frosted bottle from the freezer. I step into the kitchen and no one looks at me; no one says anything. My father shakes his head and pours water into the glass. He swallows it in one gulp and then pours more, which he takes with him into the living room. I can see him settle into his chair; he takes up the remote in his left hand. With a blank stare he began flipping channels, the colors of the TV flashing in his eyes. Calvin grabs one of our dad’s beers and walked outside, and grandpa put out his cigarette and throws the butt on the floor near the place where I left my mother. Finally he sees me. He gestures me forward, but I don’t move. I don’t need to.

“You’re the woman of the family now, Sammy,” he says as he slowly gets to his feet. He approaches me slowly, his brown eyes burning into mine. His hand moves against my shoulder and his fingers squeeze and rub. “You’re gonna be a good girl and do what I ask, aren’t you?”

I stare at him with uncertainty.

“You look just like your mama, you know that?” He takes his finger and caresses my cheek and touches my lower lip. “You’re gonna be good—just like her.” He touches my brown hair and then sweeps his knuckle against my neck. “I want you to come out to the barn with me Samantha, you hear?” His knuckles move down my shoulder toward the little embroidered logo on my chest. He moves past me chuckling and steps out into the dark night to tend to his cows in the barn.

--------------

I lift my head off the back of the chair and open my eyes slowly. He’s not writing on his pad anymore; he sits relaxed in his chair watching me very closely. He doesn’t say thank you for me telling him. He just sits and waits. I pull at the threads on my sweater again and shrug my shoulder.

“The day my mom went crazy was the day she died,” I tell him. “It only took five days for me to understand what she meant when she talked about the black barn—why she was so afraid of it. He didn’t even wait for her to be put in the ground. I was getting dressed for the funeral and he came into my room and told me that if I didn’t go into the barn with him, he’d beat me. So I went. It lasted five years—and ended with the fire. You know… I often wonder if I hadn’t let her touch me that day, if I would have been spared the craziness.”

“You’re not crazy, Samantha.”

He always says that. I don’t believe him. I often look at my palms and wonder if she did rub off on me that day. I did turn into my mother. I can’t completely escape it, and I don’t think anyone can. I do have something that she never did, however. It’s something deep inside that urged me to do something that my mother never could—I stood up for myself and burned the black barn to the ground.

I set the fire and watched it and everything inside it burn to nothing but black, jagged pieces of wood, crumpled metal, and charred cement. I sat in the corn, a few rows from the edge and watched black plumes of smoke rise high into the air. I watched the red paint turn black from the smoke. I watched the animals flee. I watched the flames dance and spew smoke and ash into the air. I watched it burn and I smiled because I was free. I am free.

“You’re smiling.”

Blinking, I pull myself together and look at him. “Was I?”

“Yes… what were you thinking about?”

I shrug.

“Must have been something, Samantha.”

“Nothing,” I say easily. “Just glad to get all that off my chest.”

He clicks his pen and begins to write. I see him glance at his watch. Our time is almost up. “Do you think you’ll go back to Nebraska?”

Hell no, I think. I won’t go back there even with the barn burned to the ground. There’s no point. The corn is gone, and the air is different. Ash from the fire still remains pinned under pieces of debris, and occasionally a strong wind or tornado will churn it up into the air. The sky will dance with the black and gray particles.

“You’re smiling again.”

I look at him and laugh lightly. “Sorry….”

“Don’t apologize, it’s a nice change.”

He wouldn’t think that if he knew what was really going through my mind. I don’t let on that I am thinking about my grandpa dancing in the wind alongside the ash, because then our sessions will never end. If give him the slightest hint that I’m not remorseful for my actions, I’ll be stuck in this stupid green chair, in this white-walled room, stared at by a camera of protection, talking about my feelings to a man that occasionally stares at my breasts for another six months. I’m ready to get out of here. Ready to go home and forget all about the things I remember: the smell of corn, the taste of the air, and the look of a perfectly cloudless sky on a warm summer afternoon. I will forget about the adventures and the fun, the innocence of not knowing what made things so black and evil, and how it was before evil touched me.

He writes something down and then looks at me and smiles. “Thank you for telling me.”

I shrug. “What’s the point, I’m still crazy. I am my mother’s child,” I stare at my hands for a moment and then take the nail of my thumb between my teeth and begin to chew on it. His brown loafer bobs in the air as he stares at me again. I think about all that I’ve told him and then sigh heavily. I actually do feel a little better. I look into his gray eyes and shrug my shoulder again. “I am my self too… you know?”

He nods and unfolds the pages of notes that he has been taking during my story. “I think you learned something very valuable today, Samantha.”

I can’t imagine what. I stare at him for a moment and wonder if I’m not the only crazy one in the room. With a snort of laughter I stand up and stretch my back. “I guess.”

He stands and walks me to the door, “Until next time.”

Not like I have any choice. The door opens and a security guard steps inside, he’s holding arm restraints, which he makes a point to show me. We stare at each other for a moment and then he speaks with his vibrating voice.

“Do I need to use these again, Samantha?”

I shake my head. He may have had to use them to get me in here an hour ago, but I feel calmer down, more in control. The guard walks me down to my room. I step inside and wait for him to close the door, but he doesn’t. A moment later a nurse arrives with my medicine. She hands me two little paper cups, one with a pill, and one with water. I take the pill without water and drop my tired body onto the bed and press my face against the padded wall. A moment later the door of my room clicks and I’m completely alone, left with only memories to entertain myself.

I’m unsure of what he’ll ask me tomorrow or what other stories of my past I’ll have to relive before they let me out of here. Maybe they won’t let me out and I’ll be here for the rest of my life. I think I’m okay with that, because even though our black barn is gone, grandpa along with it, it’s still burning inside of me. I’m still covered with ash. Maybe staying here will keep me from completely following my mother’s footsteps. Maybe my hands will finally come clean. It’s hard to tell. All I know is that if I’m here, with people to care for me and about me, I won’t hurt anyone else, and I guess that’s all that really matters.

Authors Note:

Completely fictional (in case people were curious about that). Any comments on it overall are much appreciated. Get detailed... grammar, spelling, tense, story plot, timing, the conclusion, etc. I appreciate it. I hope to start working on the check chapter of HK this weekend.