We found four seats together near the stage. The high school looked gargantuan and sophisticated compared to my elementary building, and I marveled at the endless trophy cases and lockers as we hurried toward the auditorium, with its plush folding seats and midnight blue stage curtain. She glowered and huffed as she dragged me across the parking lot, and I had to run to keep my footing. The high school parking lot was a study in chaos by the time we arrived, and Mom had to park far from the entrance, carefully guiding her wheezing old Ford Torino among clumps of slow-moving people. “No one is going to care if he looks a little tousled.” The whole thing slumped to the floor behind me. I untied the knotted string around my neck and pulled the mask off my head. “Everyone in the play is wearing costumes,” I said. “Eunice gets to bring her backpack,” I said. Mom, Eunice, and Sally stood in the middle of the stained beige carpet, Mom with her arms crossed, Eunice wearing a backpack, Sally hiding a smile behind one hand. “Come out now or you’ll have to stay home and miss the play.” “Noah, I can see your sneakers,” Mom said. A more generous soul might try to talk up the privacy such an atrium provided, but in my own experience, it was hard to ever feel anything but incarcerated on that little spread of cracked concrete. Think of it like the poor person’s version of the back porch or balcony, a patch of sky to call your own but no view of your neighborhood, or even a parking lot.

Every unit in our complex had a ten-by-twelve space, open to the elements up top and closed in on three sides by walls of the unit (in our case, it was my bedroom window on one side, the blank wall bordering my mother’s bathroom opposite, and catercorner to both, the sliding glass door to the living room), with a fourth wall separating your atrium from your next-door neighbor’s.

The living room curtains hung before the sliding glass door to our apartment’s little atrium, and I’d turned to look out at it. I was paying only vague attention to the conversation.

I’d been wearing it nonstop in the week since Sally bought it for me. We were already running late for Vandergriff High School’s production of The Sound of Music, but I wanted to wear a costume: a cheap, flimsy mask and cape knockoff produced to cash in on that summer’s Batman film. We don’t have time for this.”Īugust 1989 and I was six years old, hiding behind the yellowed living room curtains in our crappy, run-down apartment while Mom, Eunice, and Mom’s business partner, Sally White, argued about my clothing choice for the evening.

A cosmology of monsters