Brandon Hansen

Ruth’s Tower

LEVEL 1

A bare-bulbed lamp casts tattered light from its buzzing filament, shaped like a crooked little snake that is somehow familiar to you. The light illuminates the once-stained wooden floors, scratched and rubbed white in places by what looks like the nails of dogs and the stomping of unwashed feet. The room is otherwise empty, except for the creature, standing in its center, catching most of the light, and holding, in its outstretched, rounded hands, a sword, snug in its black sheath. 

You think there’s nothing to do in this room except interact with the creature, who is about as tall as your hips. It is oblong, but humanoid, sort of a smoothed-out beanie baby. Its deeply purple skin shines, and you grab the sword from its hands. Its eyes, big as apples, are perfectly dark and staring at you.

“You shouldn’t unsheathe the sword,” says the creature, its voice like radio static.

“Why not?” you ask.

The creature stares for a moment, the lightbulb reflects off the sheen of its eyes. 

“It’s not like you,” it says. 

You look at the sword and shrug. That’s how it’s been lately. All that’s left to do is walk to the door on the far side of the room and open it. Behind it is a staircase, closed in by red walls.

Your phone buzzes in your pocket. It’s your dad. It reads:

How long are you in town?

I’m here

If you wanna drop by.

“Ugh,” you say. You begin to ascend the stairs. You hear little footsteps beneath you. It’s the creature, who, on the staircase by your feet, reaches its fingerless little hands to you and says, “My name is _____. I’ll be joining you.”

“What was your name?” you ask. “______,” he says. You scratch your head.

“Am I supposed to name you?” 

The creature nods. It looks at you expectantly. 

“Well, your name is blank. So…Blank? Blanky?”

Blanky nods, gives you what you think is a thumbs-up. 

And onward you go, both of your steps echoing up the staircase. 

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LEVEL 2

You fall. You weren’t looking and you stepped off the landing. You free-fall through blackness for what feels like hundreds of feet, and you scream, and Blanky doesn’t, and you land on a bed, bounce once, and land again. Blanky, light as a pillow, lands on you, bounces once, and lands again. Springs groan beneath your shifting weight, dust coughs into the air. You’re inside a dry-walled room, and tacked all over the ceiling and walls are tightly folded squares of notebook paper, crinkled maybe by nervous hands, squeezing and turning them over in pockets all day. There’s an open doorway to a field outside, and spare pine needles and basswood seeds and maple leaves seem to have found their way inside and have stuck themselves to the tattered carpet. The only light in the room comes from the door.

There’s a shifting on the bed, a small murmur. You and Blanky tense up – the blanketed form of a person rolls over, mumbling a little. The bed wheezes. You look again at Blanky, who gives you the “Shhh” sign with his sort of stubby paw.

You both crawl off the bed and start tiptoeing toward the doorway. 

“Are you home?” You look back, and the sleepy figure has sat up, an achingly familiar girl with bed hair, rubbing her eyes. You don’t answer. You don’t really know what to do at all. You reach up and pluck a paper square from the ceiling, like a leaf from a tree, and unfold it. It reads:

You’re lovely!

Have a beautiful day!

It’s okay if you need glasses!

You blink, blush because you think it seems familiar, something to do with runny pens and desks back in school, and by impulse you adjust your glasses, which absolutely had not been on your face just moments ago – you haven’t needed them in years, in fact. 

You start to walk across the room (you can see better now) and the girl on the bed sits up the rest of the way. The comforter falls from her. She wears a plain black sweatshirt, chewed up at the sleeve cuffs and the hood’s drawstrings.

“Are you home?” she asks again and she pats the bed next to her with one hand and rubs her eyes with the other. Something warm flashes in you. But you can’t bring yourself to sit next to her. You try to walk out the door, and she says “Wait!” and you ignore her, and as you’re about to cross the threshold, your body thumps against something hard, and you stumble, and you fall backward.

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She is taking your temperature. You feel yourself sweating through your clothes and into the blanket – the bed’s springs are relentless against your tender back. 

She slips the thermometer from your mouth and her and Blanky, who stands on the bed, shake their heads in disapproval when they read it. You open your mouth to ask them what’s going on, but a hot pain runs through your throat, into your chest, and even when you involuntarily swallow your saliva just then, it’s agony. It’s familiar, a ghost in your throat. You try to rise: a head rush, complete, intoxicated dizziness. In your blurry vision you see Blanky and the girl ushering you to lay back down, but you stumble toward the door and you try to step outside, but 

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You wake up. It’s dark. Blanky is tucked under one of your arms, the sword under the other. The girl, with her back to you, is sleeping on the other half of the bed. You are still warm, your throat still beats with pain. It’s hard to breathe, and the two lymph nodes on either side of your neck have swollen so much they’ve pressed your throat shut. Air whistles through your plugged nose, and then there’s a shifting in the corner of the room. Your body won’t move. Your body won’t move and something’s shifting in the corner and now it’s walking toward you, and you start to panic and you want to kick the comforter off and wake everyone up, but before you know it, she’s there. She’s there – your mother, leaning over you, and the tips of her long hair, wet and red with blood, drag across your damp face like paintbrushes. She presses a cold, withered hand into your forehead, onto your throat, taking your temperature, pushing the lymph from your nodes. She slurs something – something about Ambien, about Naproxen – you’re fading, the pain in your throat is climbing new mountains – and the stumbling figure of your mother walks away – and is that the smell of actual human shit?

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You burst awake with a gasp. Your arms tingle, are crossed over the sword. The bed is completely soaked in sweat, but you’re overcome with the cool relief of a broken fever. You take in a gasp of air – no pain. The girl is up, kneeling, tickling Blanky, who laughs in a radio-static way, and you almost feel good for a second. You really almost do.

The girl turns to you, smiles. “Are you home?” she asks. 

You nod. Yes, yes you are. You know this because she is your neighbor, isn’t she? And you loved her for years – even when she got you sick – even if you’ve forgotten her now – you loved her for the longest time. She smiles and walks over to you and kisses you on the forehead. Your brain explodes in a thousand little places. Half-crumbled on the floor next to the bed is a yellow medical chart. Staphylococcus aureus and mononucleosis are both check-marked. As you rise, you see scattered medical slips and little notes everywhere – and the notes all say things like “Miss you at school!” and “Get well soon!” and as you walk to the door, they rustle beneath your feet like leaf litter, and with the sword in hand, you approach the entryway. Slowly, you extend your hand until it finds the barrier. You slide it aside, an immaculately clean sliding glass door, with no frame or handle, and a rush of air blows into the room.

You turn back, adjust your glasses. 

“Hey,” you say to the girl, who is sitting on her heels, smiling, waving good-bye to Blanky. “Will you come with us?”

She closes her bright eyes and just shakes her head, and you understand. You’ll meet her again someday, on the other side. You say, “Goodbye,” and she says, “Hey,” and you turn back and say, “Yeah?” and she says, with her hands tucked between her knees, “I’m sorry about your mom,” and you don’t know why, but you just didn’t expect her to say that. 

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LEVEL 3

Bluebells, bleeding-hearts, tiger lilies, creeping Charlie, dandelions, pine trees, snowball bushes, lilacs, and stolen trilliums sway in a small breeze all around you. They surround the bricked path you walk on, and all around and between you and Blanky, garter snakes start to slither from beneath the speckled shade of the flowers, shooting across the path like deer on a highway. Blanky shrieks, jumps high enough in the air to surprise you, and latches onto you like a school backpack. 

“Oh,” you say. You can feel Blanky looking hard left and right, keeping an eye on each snake as they cross before you.

In the middle of the path there’s a watering can. It’s metal, an old one. A large snake has wrapped itself around the warm shell of the can. It flicks its tongue at you. 

“Oh fuck that,” Blanky murmurs in his little radio-static voice as you bend down and grab the can, and you think he must be picking up some of your bad habits. When you lift the can, heavy with water, the snake stays still, a perfect mold, a ring you step through as you keep walking down the path. As you walk, can in one hand, sword in the other, you notice there’s no more snakes spurting from the grass, and are the flowers wilting? This looks familiar. You stop at a patch of trilliums, shoveled, you were sure, from a wetland grove somewhere. The flowers don’t look so fresh now – no, the petals that you used to color by dipping the stalks into dyed water are turning gray. 

You don’t know why, but this panics you. You tilt the watering can and shower the flowers, and the petals are dewy and the soil seems wet, but while you yourself haven’t lived long, you’ve lived long enough to know when it’s too late. And it’s too late. Horrible, agitated heat bubbles in your stomach. Blanky presses his head into your back.

“Not the garden,” you whisper to yourself. “Please, no.” 

You get up, walk quickly down the path. Everything is wilting around you, melting in accelerated time. You stop to water the tiger lilies with the twisted cigarettes trapped in their flaking petals, you water the snowball bush with the crumbled and faded water bottle label hanging in its branches, you water the bluebells and bleeding hearts with the tiny, plastic bottles of vodka nested beneath the drooping leaves, you even water the snakes, with their tongues slowing down, but it’s all for nothing. 

You tip the can now, and nothing after nothing pours from it. 

“Hey,” Blanky says. “It’s okay. It really is.” 

You sink to your knees in the middle of the path. Before you is an archway, and under the archway there’s a bundle of clothes – your mom’s favorite yellow, cotton shirt, soaked red around the midriff. Her jeans, her gardening gloves, all spattered with blood. 

“How did I let it get this bad?” you ask, and you can hear all the flowers melt around you. You set the watering can down and you hold the sword before you, a hand on the handle, a hand on the sheath.

Blanky reaches over your shoulder and holds the sheath in place.

“Come on,” he says. “Remember what I told you.” 

Your breath shutters. Blanky points forward, and you step forward. He digs his little hands into your shoulder to keep you from looking back, from seeing the whole garden melt into mud as you proceed through the archway. 

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LEVEL 4

You step out of the door and onto a floating canoe. It wavers; you and Blanky bend at your knees and sink down carefully, grabbing the vessel’s edges until it stops rocking. You are hyperventilating. You look around. A lake stretches before you, maybe 50 acres, blanketed in lily pads and their flowers, paint-brush dabs of crimson that dot the surface of the water.

Your phone buzzes. Dad. It reads:

I’ve heard that the pike are biting on the south end,

by that floating log, where we all used to go.

You shake your head, shove your phone back in your pocket. 

“Look,” Blanky says, pointing into the water.

The water is clear – so clear that you can see the snapper turtles, trash can lid-sized snapping turtles, suctioned to the rocky bottom, the moss on their shells swaying with the action of the undercurrent, their eyes shut tight and all their dinosaur limbs tucked beneath them.

“Maybe they’re nice?” Blanky whispers.

There are paddles at your feet, sun-bleached and worn soft in the handholds. On the opposite end of the small lake, you see a river outlet that flows beneath a bridge and you imagine that this must be the next doorway. You hand a paddle to Blanky and grab one for yourself, and of course the canoe feels familiar, and the lake looks familiar. 

“Have I ever taken you to a lake before?” you ask Blanky. 

He tilts his head at you.

“I mean,” you shake your head, “Have you ever been to a lake before?”

He shakes his head. This hurts you, for some reason.

Just then, on the upswing of your next stroke, you see a white, frilled mass clinging to the blade of the paddle. You take it into your hands. A wedding veil. 

“What?” you whisper to the veil, like it’ll answer. You drop your paddle, and its handle thumps the edge of the canoe. The sound echoes over the whole lake. This veil has captured you – you can’t stop staring at its intricate webbing, the water in its silky lattice. 

“Look,” Blanky says, and he’s pointing behind you, where you started, and on the shore there are ghostly figures, a procession – your mother, you’re sure of it, is in a dress, standing ankle-deep in the water, and your father is there, too, holding her hands. 

“Blanky,” you say. “We have to go back. I have her veil.”

“What?” Blanky asks.

You start trying to spin the boat around, but Blanky counter-spins with his paddle.

“What the hell?” you shout at him. His eyes are huge. He points into the lake.

The turtles, all of them, are rising, a cloud of sand billowing behind them. Their paws, big as your hands, are outstretched, punctuated by claws that push water and accelerate the turtles upwards. You look back at the wedding. In that ghostly scene, you know you’re only a cluster of cells in your mother’s womb, but that’s all the more why you want to be there – all of you. You swing your head back to the lake – the turtles have surfaced and they’re closing in on you.

Blanky starts paddling hard toward the outlet. You set the veil next to you on your seat and you start counter-paddling against him. The canoe spins in circles. 

“What are you doing?” Blanky shrieks, and you say, “I have to be there! I have to!” but Blanky is surprisingly strong, and so you spin against each other, you spin and see the bridge to the next door, you see a blur of trees, then you see your father and your mother kiss each other. You see the bridge, you see trees, you see your mother jump into your father’s arms. There’s the bridge, the trees, the back of your father as he walks away with your mother, and all their friends in an even row on the shore, clapping for your parents. There’s a cacophony of heavy clangs on the boat – you look down, which is dizzying, and see the turtles launching their fist-sized heads into the canoe, snapping their jaws supersonically on the aluminum, loosening the rivets, cracking the hull.

“I’m sorry,” Blanky says, and you turn to realize that he’s picked up the sword. He swings it, still in its sheath, at your head. And, god, does it hurt. 

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LEVEL 5

You tumble into a grassy field. You hitch yourself up on an elbow, shake the cobwebs from your head. Blanky is there, doing the same. Everything is blurry, but you can discern a dog – a huge dog, who is familiar, who is half-Siberian husky, half-wolf – sitting before you now. The sheathed sword is in her mouth. 

She’s on the edge of your memory, this dog, but you remember when your Mom, one day, half-drunk, blazing through a cigarette while slouched like pudding in her chair, told you all about how some old boyfriend rented a tamed black wolf to come impregnate their husky. You remember her slurred attempts to recreate the howling from the back yard. You asked her if that's legal, and she chuckled. No, she said. That guy was addicted to cocaine, too, she said, and that’s also not legal. She waved her hand like she could shoo that particular demon out of the air. 

And this dog before you was one of those puppies, all grown up. You were sure of it.

“What are you doing here?” you blurt out, absurdly, to the half-wolf dog in front of you. And she opens her great mouth, and says, in your mother’s voice, 

“I will always return to you.” 

You blink, and in that tiny bit of darkness you see an ash-dusted photograph of the half-wolf dog, sitting, eyes flashing back at the camera, in front of a sleeping you in your crib. She’s protecting you.

When you open your eyes from blinking, you see only the tail of the dog, who is walking through a small door in front of you. You look at Blanky, and he nods. 

You say, “Sorry,” and he shakes his head, and ushers you through the door.

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LEVEL 6

The air through the window is fresh. Rain mists between the tiny squares in the tattered screen. You stand on the scratched wooden floor. In the room is your split mattress from childhood, your toy chest with its two little drawers. Sitting on the bed is the neighbor girl, now in a black dress. A funeral dress. She gives you a sad smile. The dog is on your left. Blanky is on your right. And directly in front of you is your dad, his hands in his pockets, looking anywhere but at you. It’s all there, just as it was.

“Dad,” you say. “You actually made it.”

He nods solemnly. Some power swells within you.

In a flash, you snatch the sword from the wolf-dog’s mouth. She yips in protest, but in an instant you’ve crossed the room, whipped the blade from the sheath, and swung an overhead slash at your dad. 

But you’re paralyzed midswing. Rather, held back. By the girl, who’s risen from the bed to push against your chest, by Blanky, who’s climbed your back and grabbed your wrists, and by the wolf-dog, who’s grabbed a mouthful of your shirt to pull you back.

Your dad looks you in the eyes. He reaches up, wrests the sword from your hands, and drops it with a clatter to the floor. It’s slick with blood. Yellow, cotton fibers, little withered flower petals swim in the blood.

Your body loses all strength. Everyone lets go of you, and you fall forward into your dad, who wraps you up. 

“Why weren’t you there with her?” you ask into his chest. “Why didn’t you stop her?”

Your dad puts his hands on your shoulders, holds you at arm’s length. 

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he says. “I just hope you turn out better than me.” 

The girl from across the street hugs you now. The wolf dog sits by your side. Blanky climbs onto your shoulder. Your dad points at the toy chest, with the two drawers. 

“It was tucked into her closet,” he said. “I think you should open it.”

You nod, sniff. You grab the wooden knob of the chest’s first drawer, black with dirt embedded  from your little hands handling it for so many years, and you pull it open. 

In it is a single, stuffed toy, grimy and sun-worn. You look through the dirt and you can see – it is purple, vaguely humanoid, oblong – you look back at Blanky, and he gently knocks his head into yours.

“I found him in the garden,” your dad says, and you turn back to him, and you feel your eyes going misty now. “Who knows how long he’s been there.” And this nearly crumbles you.

“One to go,” Blanky says.

You grab the second knob, take a deep breath. You pull. 

Your Gameboy.

You explode inside. Your hand shoots to your mouth. The girl squeezes you tight, and it all comes back to you. You wish you’d never left her. You didn’t find anything better when you moved away. It’s all the same old shit out there, you want to say. Blanky rubs your back, and you hate that you left him in the garden. Life gets so busy, you wish you could tell him. The wolf-dog scooches closer to you, and you regret being so afraid of her. You’re taught to fear strength, is your excuse.

“I don’t know why,” your dad whispers, his voice barely above the sound of beating rain on the paneling of the house. “But she was always so worried you’d lose it – that you’d lose your imagination. So worried that she hid it from you, and forgot to give it back, I think.”

You touch all its buttons. They’re sticky like you remember, you can hardly press one directional key without pressing all the others.

“I thought I lost it,” you say, sniffling. “I forgot all about it.”

“I think we forgot a lot of things along the way,” your dad says. 

And he is right. As you wipe your eyes with the back of your wrist, and Blanky lets go of you, and you and him and everyone else take a seat on your old bed, and you flick on the Gameboy’s power button, you can only think about just how right he is. When the screen, even after all this time, slowly comes to life, pixel-by-pixel, you think about all the little things you made yourself forget. And maybe it’s just because your dad, like he hasn’t in years, wraps his arm around you, but a realization strikes you then, like a jolt of remembrance before sleep, that it’s never too late to start paying closer attention to the tiny things that matter.

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Daniel Garcia