So she's not scared

Wednesday 5/6/26

Over the last week plus I've been revising "Fitty," as I make a push on There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. "Still Good" was finished the other day, after sixteen months of work on it, and "Dead Thomas" will be finished in the next day or two or three, after five years of work.

If I'm not going to be here for the natural duration, I want this book to at least exist as itself. The same goes if I am going to be here for the natural duration. But that isn't where I'm at right now. With good and obvious reasons. Not "good" like good.

What's mostly happened thus far with 2026 "Fitty" is that it's gotten about 900 words longer than it was. That's through the first two sections. We'll see if that trend continues. My surmise is that it won't to the same degree.

"Fitty" is a frame story without a fame. A ghost story without ghosts. There's nothing like it. And for emotional intensity, intensity of feeling, of how the reader is made to feel, that searing, to-the-bottom of the soul manner, there's only something like "Dead Thomas." But they're still different in that regard. "Fitty" is also a story of stairs. Its shape is stairs.

From the revised text:

“You read about these people who turn in money they found or that didn’t originate as theirs, and rather than it landing back in the hands of an elderly woman on a fixed income who’s able to get a special treat or two at the grocery store instead of only the bare minimum to keep herself alive—after she makes sure what’s on sale, of course—it reverts to this heinous corporation that makes lives worse, and the bank slaps a service fee on the returner for rectifying the matter when they could have kept the money or done something to help someone but it’s too late now.

“Maybe I didn’t have the year to give, and then it’s like overdrawing your bank account, you go negative. Your statement is this depressing, maddening mess and you’re finding out too late that you assumed too much, hoped too much, figured it wasn’t that bad too much, could somehow be okay too much, turned your back to too much because you couldn’t cope.

“When I hear the voice of the child crying in the room at the top of the stairs, I could go up there, but that will be like losing the time off my life.”

“And you stay downstairs?” Dr. Pettigran asked.

“I stay downstairs. I have to decide. If I go up the stairs when the child is crying, I’ll be no more. I’m over. Kids eventually stop crying, right? Cry themselves to sleep. Which you conclude is likely barbaric after you’ve considered this as a possible technique for yourself when you have kids of your own. Because why wouldn’t more parents take that approach? They go to the child. Including lots of bad people. They pick her up. Rock her. To provide comfort. So she’s not scared.

“The parents don’t want her to have this experience she isn’t going to remember regardless because fear in the moment is something happening to us that’ll always be something that happened. Same as a first love. Your birth. Your death. That evening you thought you were out of your favorite snack which you wanted for that movie you you were looking forward to after a hard day that makes you say ‘hard life is more like it’ and then you found a box after all.

“They all have the same standing, if not the same importance. But who can assess their significance anyway? That thing is as real as anything because its realness isn’t predicated on anything else. It is, whether we are or aren’t. We are, whether it is or isn’t. It’s what we see and think that changes. Comfort first, then sleep. I don’t have the years to give. I know I’m all out. But at the same time…”

Lately Carlene had been house sitting, but also not house sitting because she only came by at night which to her was more like house-checking and she didn’t want undue credit. She was no longer able to tell how long had passed since the event. There was no formal instruction that this should be the official terminology, but “event” was what got used.

“It’s actually enscorcelling,” Carlene continued.

“What is?”

Dr. Pettigran was amused by Carlene’s vocabulary. Sometimes he jotted down these words that were new to him on his pad. His pen had a knack for sounding like a feather of olden times. Parchment and plumes. Carlene understood these particular dry scratches weren’t related to her care. Most likely. He just liked to learn the words. Her green hair struck him as a whimsically elfin choice for a thirty-year-old high school English teacher. Dr. Pettigran was fond of Carlene.

“The voice of the child,” she continued. “Enchanting. It feels like it exists for me to hear it, or that's why I exist, though I know, rationally, that no one is up there. I feed the cats. When the crying stops, I go upstairs. Just once. It’s permitted in the silence. I’m not overdrawn. But never when I hear the crying. The upstairs hallway light has a timer. At nine o’clock, it goes off. I don’t go into her room. Fia’s room. But I check the others, the hallway closet, then I leave.”

“You’re calling her Fia again.”

“I mean Fitty. Of course.”

“Mmmhhhm. What was that other word the other day? To accompany somebody?”

“Enjoin.”

“Right. That was it.” He scratched his pad again. “You don’t feel like you should go in there while—“

“No.”

Carlene’s voice was usually soft. Fitty called it pillowous, though that wasn’t a real word. It had puffy edges, filled with temperate breath. But sometimes, it could sound that if there were a way to strike the notes it made with a piece of flint, a spark would be drawn.

“It’s not my place,” Carlene said.