Stardust

So I am standing there naked pumping gas, okay I'm not really naked, but I feel like it, standing there with no make up, flat hair and frumpy clothes. I should be in bed, that's where I was twenty minutes ago when I got the call.

She’s pushing ninety and pushing all my buttons, “Come over I hear the noise again. It sounds like someone is playing a radio in the cellar.”

Yeah, right, mom no one goes to that house let alone hangs out in the damn basement. It all started about a week ago. Mom claimed she heard a humming sound in the basement. I went over then too. Right away, because according to her there might be someone living down there. I stood at the top of the stairs and listened. Nothing, just the furnace, the washer, the dryer and dad's junk. The old sofa bed. Crap from their youth. I remember as a kid hiding down there and finding a box of old 78 RPM records from when mom was a teenager and lived for music and dancing. That’s where they met, at some big dance contest, that’s where they fell in love. Big deal, the damn things are all warped and useless now days. But what a collection. All kinds of big bands hits and non hits, too bad she didn't have the foresight to take care of them.

The clerk at the convenience store smiles at me as he tosses my pack of cigarettes on the counter. My son is older than he is. Poor kid, probably thinks I am desperate or one of those cougars he dreams about while perusing the in house pornography. Get a life, kid, I'm happy.

The drive over is unremarkable in that it took the usual thirty minutes. That’s thirty minutes I could have been asleep in my nice warm bed. Mom greets me at the door after unlocking the five billion dead bolts and sliding the chain so I can enter. My stupid idiot brother decided that she needed advanced protection from the neighborhood that has gone steadily downhill since we lived here as children. For once he opened his deep, but shallow wallet and paid for the added locks. In fact after his magnanimous gesture some five years ago no one has heard form him since. I hate this woman.

“You have anything to drink?”

“But dear, it's only ten o'clock.”

“Mom, you got anything to drink?”

“Some beer in the fridge I was saving for when your brother visits. He left it here the last time he visited.”

“Mom, he ain't been here in five years, how old is the beer?”

She shrugged her shoulders, I opened a beer and it actually tasted stale.

“You have to stand here at the top of the stairs.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

I opened the door to the basement. I hadn't been down there in years. I hate this house, hate her, hated my father, my brother. My mom and brother tortured me, to the delight of my father. Not like real stretch me on the rack torture, but that mind bending shit, that psychological torture, making me feel inferior, making fun of me, teasing me, belittling me. And my father had his special kind of torture, he use to call me kitten. I hated that. They all were bastards. I strained my ears and nothing.

“Mom, you ever think that you may be getting old? Maybe you're just hearing things.”

“Listen closely dear, you have to be quiet and listen. Get closer to the stairwell.”

Confession time, I will tell you right now the reason I don't go down in to that cellar, is because that's were daddy use to take me and teach me to be a woman. Hell, I was seven. I rejoiced when the bastard died. My mom and aunts thought I had lost my mind when I nailed his coffin shut at the funeral home and declared that now he was never going to play wedding night with anybody again. I spent several years away. That's polite talk for being committed.

To please her I strained to listen, twisting my head in to the open space of the stairwell. And then I heard it, it was sort of like humming, sort of like music being played real faint. I turned to mom to tell her as she came at me full force and pushed me down the stairs.

The beer went flying, I hate that, stale or not, wasting a good beer just seems like a sin to me. I slid down the stairs backwards landing on the floor and banging my head against the concrete floor.

I think I dozed or blacked out, you know in situations like this it is kind of really hard to determine what’s real. My head wasn't real clear when I looked up, maybe it was the stale beer or maybe the knock against the concrete floor, but the humming, the music seemed louder and coming from the front of the house, from the old coal bin.

“You okay dear?”

“Yeah, mom. Thanks for pushing me.”

“You go on and see what that noise is. I knew you wouldn't go down there on your own. Your brother wouldn't either. Don't you come back up here without an answer.”

I heard the basement door close and being locked. Shit, what a way to face your fears. There was that old musty couch still here after all these years. The music was coming from the front of the basement from behind the closed door of the old coal bin. Light was leaking from under the bottom. I took a deep breath, grabbed the handle and pulled open the door.

“Hello kitten.”