Old Voices

There is a dead boy down in the wet basement. He has been there so long he is just particles in the stagnant water. “You are not to play down here!” Mama shouted when she found Sissy and me waving flashlights in the dark and squishing our toes in the soaked carpet. She poured a bottle of rubbing alcohol into a bucket and made us stand in it. The smell burned in my nose. “There’s dis- eases in that water,” Mama said, and she slammed the door and hauled us upstairs. Later Sissy said, “Oh, she’s nuts! That’s our goddamned playroom, Daddy promised me.” So whenever Daddy was away and Mama was in bed, Sissy would take me down there and tell stories into her tape recorder. One time she told me about the boy in her grade who had died. Mama took her to the funeral. “Like a doll,” Sissy said, “just lying there. I wanted to touch him.”
“What did he die of?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something wrong with his blood, like it was the wrong color or something.” We acted out a play and Sissy taped it and afterward she put it in its plastic box and lined it up on the shelf with the other tapes. I don’t know where those tapes went. Disintegrating in some box, leaking old voices into the creek. “The boy played here once,” Sissy said.
“We made a tape. Do you want to hear?” But I didn’t want to play in the wet basement any more, which smelled of dirt and old pennies and rotten eggs, like the creek on humid nights. I dream of those voices floating in the still water, of hands plunging deep and com- ing up empty.