Diana Darby ** "I V" ** Intravenous

Haunted Theatre

I am glad she is still alive.
She hadn’t written in days
and I had begun to imagine the worst.
Looking at the photo of them,
I imagined he had killed her,
stuffed her in to a box,
and driven off to Utah
or some other remote state.
I imagined her lifeless body,
her heavy lifeless body,
shoved into a trunk,
wrapped in burlap
and tossed into the Harpeth River
where it would float downstream
until a jet skier found her.
It is like that with me.
I always imagine the worse.
My brain is a constant stream of terrifying scenarios.
Last night,
when my boyfriend didn’t call
twenty minutes after yoga class ended,
I was sure he had been in a car wreck.
I was sure the next call would be from the police
telling me to come identify the body.
I imagined how he would look on the table,
his body bruised, one eye missing,
mouth frozen like a dead sea bass
trying to suck in one last breath of air.
I imagined what I would have to say to his mother.
That didn’t turn out so good either.
All these thoughts make me wonder if I am the illegitimate daughter of Stephen King.
But then I remember
my mother.
She was always sitting on that turquoise ottoman
in the den
reading headlines out loud to us.
This one was murdered.
That one was stabbed.
Another was poisoned.
A man was beheaded and found in his apartment four days later
after his cat’s constant meows alerted the neighbors.
It never stopped.
Night after night.
Looking back at it,
I think she enjoyed scaring me,
like she were some kind of weird female Vincent Price
and we were prisoners in her 5,000 square foot Haunted Theatre.
I wish she had read me the weather instead.