My mother didn't tell me she had cancer until the cancer had come and gone. So she called me and told me about her sickness, and in a couple breaths it was cured.

It’s nothing to worry about, she tells me now on an unrelated call. She just needs me to drive up and watch the dog for the night. No, it isn't possible to bring Lucy where they're going. She's 25 years old! The slightest disturbance might snap the last harried thread of her life.

So, I drive up, alone —

Out of the clutter and noise and into the space and silence and swishy trees. Past the orchards, my high school, the hunting preserve from which a cacophony of guns scored my early life, onto the road I grew up on, the long shallow pond where I used to torture frogs, then down the tree tunnel of my parent’s driveway, the wormhole that brings me back.

The sky from the driveway is coated with stars. The house’s dark shape swells from the earth with my every step.

Lucy isn’t in the kitchen or the living room or beside the baseboard heater in the downstairs half-bath. She’s upstairs in what I now remember to be her usual spot: perched upon a tuffet of silk in my parent’s bedroom.

She stares out at me through milky eyes— deathly thin and unmoving. Her upper lip caught on a protruding tooth forms a snarl as I case my dad’s nightstand for drugs.

“Be right back!” I say with a shiver. Then I take my score to the patio, figuring I’d kill some time since I cannot feed Lucy until eight o’clock. My mother was very specific.

Sitting in an Adirondack chair outside, I mix my dad’s weed with a pinch of American Spirit tobacco and commence rolling a spliff across a glossy fashion magazine I lifted from the coffee table. I light the spliff and lean back, blow out into the expanding cosmos of the night sky.

There's something I've never understood about planetariums. Why don't people seize?

Maybe I watched too many horror movies as a kid.

I hear the call-and-response peeping of the swamp, a plane swooping towards Newark or JFK. A neighbor calls out to their child or dog. "Frank!”

The new age-y family next door used to host rebirthing ceremonies in their dilapidated barn when I was a kid. My mother and I would hear the rasping cries of newborn adult humans, men and women, whenever we played in the yard. I laugh quietly to myself, remembering, and then I remember there's no reason to laugh when I'm alone, and that makes me laugh louder, and louder, until something releases inside me and I'm not really laughing, not at all. I'm screaming like a newborn at the stars.

And it’s all quite liberating until it isn’t — until I realize even though I am alone, I am with myself, too. And in the self-conscious silence that follows a crunching rises, feet stepping —

An animal off in the dark woods. The neighbor’s child or dog? “Frank-y!” the neighbor calls.

We used to walk that swatch of woods, I remember, for holiday parties. The older daughter –what's her name?– would make me play games with her: Tick, where she'd latch onto my arm and pretend to suck my blood, or Jesus Christ, where she'd force me to crucify her, shrieking, to her bunk bed.

Elizabeth?

Betsy?

Eliza?

For some reason, I think she went by all three names, at different times.

Yes — her mother used to send these notices around. If you missed her name change, Elizabeth/Betsy/Eliza wouldn’t respond unless you knew the correct variation on her name she wanted to be called in that moment.

It’s weird how you never really forget things, how these small, inconsequential memories lay dormant just below the surface of your mind, waiting for spring like a hibernating frog. Then you hear a neighbor call out, I think, and the frog comes back to life.

What else have I buried? I wonder.

“Franklin!” the neighbor calls.

For instance, I remember now, a few years ago, my dad claimed to have stumbled upon Elizabeth/Betsy/Eliza in an episode of the History Channel’s Paranormal Children, in which she explained how she talked to the trees in our woods.

“What do the trees say to you?” said the interviewer.

“Don’t kill me!” she said, exactly the way she said when we crucified her.

Her pale, long face rears out of the night – her straw-blonde hair tucked behind large, cavernous ears. Her canines protruding ever so slightly from purplish lips.

I lick my thumb and point and snuff the cherry of the spliff, thinking how it’s probably time to feed the dog —

There’s a highly specific order of operations that needs to be followed to entice Lucy to eat, my mother reiterated over the phone. But with my head full of smoke, I bring Lucy down to the kitchen and stand at the granite countertop, trying and failing to remember the steps.

Yet again: my brain fails. Yet again: I am not as sharp as I think I am. Just think of all the times I spoke with my sick mother on the phone, never once noticing she could've died.

But then a semblance of the instructions does return to me: at eight o’clock, bring Lucy downstairs, along with her tuffet. Prime rib, specially purchased at the local Polish deli, needs to be thinly sliced into six lengths and divided into thirds. The resulting eighteen bites need to placed flat on a plate (never a bowl) and smeared with the Au Jus kept jellied in a plastic container in the fridge. The cuts need to be heated in the microwave for thirty seconds. Then you stop, I hear my mother say. Even if she starts licking her chops, you refuse to feed her. You let the aroma work on her, tantalize her. You mix yourself a drink. You smoke some of your dad's grass. You wait some more, and then some more after that.

And I do just that: three fingers of Tito’s vodka, a handful of ice.

Lucy perks up a little while I drink. She rises from her tuffet, alert, and stares off into the dark corner of the room like there’s something standing there. The black squares of the living room windows seem to contain a different sort of night.

My hair stands up. How many nights had I experienced this sensation as a child? The electric energy of the devil pressing down upon me in my half-waking state as the baseboard heaters punched and ticked?

I pour myself another Tito’s. I drink.

Enough time had probably passed now: Lucy could eat. Yet the thought snags — was there something else that needed to be done first?

A succession of nonsense words comes to me; baby talk produced by my parents and often directed at the dog. It always reminded me of the evocation spoken from the Necronomicon that raised Deadites to terrorize the campers in Evil Dead.

Clatoo.

Verata.

Nicto.

Bound in human flesh, inked in blood.

Something like that, anyway.

And if not that—then close, right? Close enough. And so I say them, my version of them, and place the meal before the fragile little dog.

And the way this dog looked, I’m telling you: it’s straight out of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Her coat is so patchy, so full of knots. Her knobby spine serpentines down her back to a lifeless tail. The gums exposed by her snarl don’t have the slightest color. I barely recognize her.

I loved this dog, grew up with her. Barely recognize her now.

Nevertheless, I waft the smell up toward her nose with outward motions. I push the plate up to hear splayed paws. But Lucy remains motionless. Refusing to eat, she stares off at the corner. That shadow. Her gaze, frozen in a way that a part of me expects her to stand up, speak fluently, ask me to sign her book in blood.

Or something crazy like that.

Lucy? I say.

Lou-Lou?

Lucille?

Lucifer? And with that, Lucy raises her muzzle, flashes her few remaining teeth and lunges. Buries her head and begins to feed so ravenously that I cannot help but yelp and laugh.