That November night was inky black and freezing when my family bundled into the Green Hornet—my father’s late 1960s Chevy, a monstrous beast the color of a forest at dusk.

I was eight or nine, wispy and bookish. I don’t remember where we’d been, only that it was so bitter cold in the car that my breath curled away from my face with each exhale. Dad never turned on the heat if we weren’t driving far. He’d say, “No sense in it. The car won’t warm up before we get home.”

My little sister was asleep, snuggled against the door behind Dad. I was behind Mom on the passenger side, amusing myself with a pack of candy cigarettes from my Halloween haul. I loved those chalky, thin white sticks with their tips dyed red as if they were lit. I was play-pretend smoking, captivated by how my visible exhales added to the illusion that the cigarette was real.

We stopped at a traffic light, a nearby streetlamp casting a soft glow inside the car. Mom and Dad were deep in conversation when another car pulled up next to us. The oldish lady in the backseat, all prim and proper in her baby-blue coat and matching pillbox hat, looked over through her cat-eye glasses. Our gazes met, and I wondered . . .

I took a deep drag on my candy cigarette, poised elegantly between my first and second fingers, and filled my lungs. Drawing the chalky stick to the side, I pursed my lips and released a long stretch of hot breath. It danced out in a misty stream, like the smooth languid contrail from a practiced smoker.

The woman’s face contorted in horrified disbelief. She glanced at my parents who were obliviously chatting away, then back to me. I took another draw on my “cigarette” and smiled at her through smoky plumes.

The light changed and we drove off. My parents none the wiser, while I happily continued puffing, my “cigarette breath” whorling inside the Green Hornet.

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Second in my series of haiku through blackout using a children’s classic book. This week: The Wind in the Willows, paired with artwork courtesy of The New York Public Library on Unsplash.

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She stood at the edge of the world and screamed into the void. The keening sound waved from her mouth in vibrant shades of crimson, florid echoes crashing against distant stars. Galaxies replied, showering her in a burning light until only the purity of peace remained.

(First published in Vine Leaves Press 50 Give or Take, 2024)

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(Photo by Ri_Ya on Pixabay)

3:12 a.m.: You’re awakened by Traumatized Dog climbing into bed. She’s shaking and snuggles close. You wrap an arm around her, assuming something has triggered her fear response and listen for rain, wind, or thunder because a tree crashing into your house during a heavy thunderstorm years ago traumatized her. Instead, you hear an intermittent electronic chirp signaling a smoke detector’s low battery. Those also trigger her. Other Dog sleeps soundly in her bed. Nothing fazes her.

3:13 a.m.: The smoke detector chirps “low battery” again, somewhere on the main floor of the house sending a new wave of shudders through Traumatized Dog. You consider replacing the smoke detector battery now, but you live alone. Climbing a ladder while groggy sparks visions of breaking you neck falling from the ladder and being found weeks later after the dogs have eaten your face. Other Dog would totally do that. You roll over, hugging Traumatized Dog to calm her.

3:18 a.m.: Intermittent smoke detector chirps continue, waking you and Traumatized Dog each time you both doze off. You pull the pillow over your head wondering why those things always go off in the middle of the night and hug Traumatized Dog closer.

7:00 a.m.: Your alarm wakes you. At some point you and Traumatized Dog fell back to sleep and the smoke detector chirping stopped. Traumatized Dog is no longer shaking. You snooze the alarm and close your eyes, but Other Dog, who has had a good night’s sleep, jumps on the bed and licks your face.

7:01 a.m.: You fight off persistent Other Dog, roll out of bed, dress, take both dogs downstairs, feed them, and let them outside and quickly back in since it’s a cold day. You light a fire in the fireplace and enjoy a quiet Sunday morning sans a chirping smoke detector.

10:30 a.m.: You know it’s a matter of time before the smoke detector resumes its warning chirps and decide to change the battery before that happens. You check each detector on this floor before moving to the basement. The hallway detector light is flashing red. The others are a steady green. You check the basement detector anyway and it’s also a steady green.

10:32 a.m.: You grab your 3-step folding stool and a fresh 9-volt battery. You climb the steps and open the battery compartment on the hallway smoke detector and try to remove its battery. It moves, but doesn’t pull free. Because the compartment door is now open, the intermittent chirps resume. Traumatized Dog responds by bolting upstairs to escape the sound. You make several more attempts to remove the battery, but they all fail. You climb off the folding stool and coerce Traumatized Dog to join Other Dog outside using her lead and treats to move her past the chirping smoke detector.

10:37 a.m.: You sit on the sofa and google the smoke detector model. Among the results is a YouTube video on how to remove the battery. It slides out effortlessly for the man on YouTube. You try to remove the battery on your smoke detector again, imitating the man in the tutorial. It again refuses to budge. What the hell? It’s the same smoke detector model.

10:41 a.m.: You decide you need a better look at the battery compartment to see why the battery won’t slide out, but the folding stool is too short. You haul the tall step ladder up from the basement, noting that your weight training classes are paying off. It’s gotten easier to carry the heavy-duty ladder up a flight of stairs. You swap the step ladder for the folding stool, which gives you a slightly better view of the battery compartment.

10:47 a.m.: You determine the battery compartment isn’t opening far enough and the battery is hanging up on the catch. You fetch pliers from a drawer in the laundry room. The smoke detector is close enough to the wall on the right, that you assume that the force of yanking the battery with the pliers will smash your right hand into the wall. You decide the potential pain is worth it to stop the damn intermittent chirping. You use your left hand to apply downward pressure on the battery compartment door without breaking it, and grab the battery with the pliers in your right hand. You lift the battery up as you yank with the pliers. The battery springs free. Your hand doesn’t smash against the wall. Success! You’d savor the moment, but removing the battery doesn’t silence the chirps.

10:50 a.m.: You reach for the new battery, but it’s not on the ladder. You feel through your pockets. It’s not in any of them. Only your eyeglasses, housekeys and some tissues. You search nearby and expand to the kitchen, but don’t see it.

10:52 a.m.: You curse your lack of attention and ask Saint Anthony to help find the lost battery. You aren’t Catholic, but he regularly helps you locate things. To thank him, you even lit a candle at his birth shrine when you were in Portugal last October. Judging by how you aren’t finding the battery, you wonder if he thinks you’re a cheapskate and should have lit all of the candles. You’ve been pestering him a lot lately.

10:54 a.m.: You search your pockets one more time and find the battery hidden under your eyeglasses. You thank Saint Anthony for his help. After figuring out which way to orient the plus and minus contacts, you insert the new battery. It slides in effortlessly. You shut the battery compartment door and sigh, relieved that you’re finally done and can resume your plans for the day. You let the dogs back in the house. Other Dog bounces in and flops on her living room bed. Traumatized Dog slinks into the guest room and crouches on the floor.

10:57 a.m.: The hallway smoke detector low battery chirps. You curse and wonder if the “new” battery you put in is dead, along with the rest in the cheap pack you bought on Amazon. Traumatized Dog scoots back upstairs to escape the sound. Other Dog asks to go outside.

10:58 a.m.: While letting Other Dog outside, you decide to test the next “new” battery before replacing the current “new” battery. You remember your emergency radio takes a 9-volt battery and grab it from the pantry and hook up the “new, new” battery. It works fine. You pay attention when you slip it into your pocket.

11:04 a.m.: You climb the step ladder and wrestle the “new” battery out of the compartment, once again using the same pull-on-the-compartment-door-while-yanking-the-battery-out-with-pliers technique. You double-check the orientation of the plus and minus contacts and effortlessly slide in the “new, new” battery. You close the compartment door and wait.

11:06 a.m.: The low battery notification chirps. You inhaled deeply several times and string together numerous choice words. Then you wonder if you need to reset the smoke detector. You climb back up the ladder and hit the “hush” function side of the test button. The smoke detector goes off next to your ear. You yelp, although you can’t hear yourself because the screeching smoke detector alarm is so fucking loud. You discover that all seven smoke detectors in the house are interconnected when they all start screeching an alarm while loudly proclaiming “Fire. Fire.” You panic and hit the test button again thinking it will turn them off, but it generates another excruciating round of alarms and electronic voices shouting “Fire. Fire.” Traumatized Dog goes into extra-trauma mode and scurries around the house trying to escape the cacophony.

11:09 a.m.: You usher Traumatized Dog outside since it’s the only safe place for her and determine you need to replace the smoke detector because it’s gone bad.

11:12 a.m.: You climb back up the ladder and attempt to remove the smoke detector from its mounting bracket based on the arrow pointing left to twist off. It won’t budge. You try several more times with both hands, even turning it to the right, but it only moves slightly. You slowly bang your head against the wall muttering how you’ve replaced batteries and smoke detectors before and it was never this hard.

11:14 a.m.: You climb down the ladder, google the installation instructions for your smoke detector while the intermittent chirps continue, and discover the reason it won’t twist off. The electrician engaged the tamper-proof function on the smoke detector when he installed it. You curse the electrician because what the hell was he thinking? You are a responsible single adult who doesn’t need a tamper-proof function on your smoke detectors.

11:17 a.m.: The installation instructions show a release tab that overrides the tamper-proof function. You climb back up the ladder to find the release tab. Your Oura Ring sends a message that you are close to your activity goal for the day. Only 37 more calories. It also shows you’ve been stressed a lot today. You ignore the suggestion to do a ten minute meditation and instead suggest the ring do something to itself. You refocus on the still intermittently chirping smoke detector, but you can’t get high enough to clearly see all the way around it to find the release tab. You use your phone to photograph all sides of your smoke detector to determine where the tamper-proof function release tab is located.

11:21 a.m.: Once you’ve figured that out, you reposition the ladder to access the release tab. You climb back up the ladder and attempt to push in the release tab with your left hand while twisting the smoke detector off its mounting bracket with your right hand. It still won’t budge. You try several more times, with no luck. You curse your tiny lady hands since grasping the smoke detector with one hand extends your fingers too far to have any grip strength and your other hand is occupied pushing in the release tab, which isn’t being cooperative. You curse your electrician again for creating this problem.

11:23 a.m.: You climb off the ladder and consider grabbing a hammer to smash the shit out of the smoke alarm that you can’t get down or shut up.

11:24 a.m.: You reconsider smashing the shit out of the smoke alarm with a hammer, concerned that you might mess up the electrical connection and set the house on fire. You grasp the irony of that, but decide instead to switch off the breaker for the smoke detectors to stop the torturous chirping.

11:25 a.m.: You go down to the basement, then outside and around the side of the house to enter the stand-up portion of your crawl space. You open electrical panel A and look through all sixteen of the breaker labels. None call out smoke detectors. You open electrical panel B and look through all twenty-four of those breaker labels. Again, none are labeled “smoke detectors,” although two are labeled “unknown” and one has a smeared pencil label that looks like “DB.” You again curse the electrician, because he should have known what was wired to each of the breakers and clearly labeled them. Abbreviating a label helps no one. You aren’t a mind reader.

11:27 a.m.: You begin methodically switching off breaker circuits to determine which one is wired to the smoke detectors. You realize during the process, you can hear the faint chirp of the smoke detector. Thank God. That will save some walking back and forth between the crawlspace and house to listen for chirps. You flip each of the sixteen switches on panel A, pausing a minute between each breaker and listen. The smoke detector chirps all sixteen times.

11:43 a.m.: You sigh and moved to Panel B, and methodically flip each of its twenty-four circuit breakers, waiting a minute between each breaker. You aren’t entirely surprised when the smoke detector chirps after each one. You determine that the smoke detectors must be wired to the main panel, which shuts down everything in the house. You curse the electrician for not making this easy for you, then realize he was probably following a building code requirement. You opt to not turn off the main breaker since you like the idea of having heat and a running refrigerator while you sort this out.

12:07 p.m.: You close up the crawlspace, go back inside the house and upstairs to eat lunch while you listen to the smoke detector chirp once every minute.

12:33 p.m.: Traumatized Dog has come back inside because unlike Other Dog, she doesn’t enjoy being outside all day. She hunkers down in the upstairs bedroom to be as far away as possible from the chirping, but she’s still shaking. You give her calming chews, wrap her in her ThunderShirt and close the door. That all helps when she’s like this. Slightly.

12:37 p.m.: You re-google the smoke detector manual and reread how to remove the smoke detector. You realize that instead of pushing in the tamper-proof release tab the directions say to push down on the lip at the bottom of the tab, which you couldn’t see standing tippy toe on the ladder’s top step and the photos you took didn’t show.

12:41 p.m.: You climb back up the ladder and feel around until you find a slight lip at the bottom of the tamper release tab. You push down on it with one hand and try to twist the smoke detector off the base with your other hand. Again, you curse your tiny lady hands because they just aren’t quite big enough to hold and twist off the smoke detector one-handed.

12:43 p.m.: You climb back down the ladder and look online to find a replacement for your smoke detector thinking you’ll need to have someone come and do it for you. You can at least buy the detector to save some money. After perusing replacement options, you decide to try removing the defective thing yourself one more time because it’ll cost a fortune to have an electrician come out to replace one smoke detector. And how much of a wuss are you to call someone to do something you should be more than capable of doing yourself?

12:59 p.m.: You climb the ladder determined to remove the smoke detector from the mounting bracket. You reposition your hands so you can push the release tab down while grabbing the smoke detector with both hands. You twist hard and it finally comes off, dangling from the ceiling by the quick connect electrical wiring harness. You squeeze the sides of the wiring harness, and the smoke detector drops into your other hand. Finally! You pause to revel in the silence.

1:02 p.m.: You climb back down the ladder, remove the battery (which now slides out effortlessly) and throw the smoke detector in the trash after checking the proper disposal method for that type of detector.

1:06 p.m.: You go upstairs and try to calm Traumatized Dog, but she isn’t having it. You leave her alone so she can calm down by herself, which may take several hours. You go back downstairs, order a new smoke detector, congratulate yourself on finally finishing the job, and salvage what’s left of your day.

8:00 p.m.: After feeding the dogs and eating dinner, you decide to do a collagen face mask. You deserve a treat after the day’s ordeal. You wash your face and apply the mask, then settle back to watch TV as it takes 2 hours for the mask to do its thing. Traumatized Dog has finally relaxed and is sleeping soundly next to you. Other Dog has gone back outside.

9:32 p.m.: The smoke detector in the guest bedroom emits a low battery chirp.

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(Photo by jplenios on Pixabay)

Her truck took the sharp turns of the mountain road with ease. Emma loved how her new pickup handled, gliding, at times flying. Moonlight glinted off its metallic red hood as she accelerated up a steep incline. Knowing it had been a birthday present from her father sweetened the feel of the truck beneath her hands.

He’d told her to select whichever car she wanted for her special day. The pickup, vibrant red like her favorite songbird, had been the obvious choice. She sensed the enchantment thrumming within its chassis and grinned when her father agreed, saying, “Of course I can feel the magic.”

That night as she slept, the truck had called to her—murmurs edging sideways through her dreams—until she awoke to the light of a crested moon piercing her window. Was it late? Early? She didn’t care. The truck was all that mattered.

Emma crept down the hall, the heavy, rhythmic breathing of her parents’ deep sleep eclipsing her own soft breaths. They’d be mad if they caught her, but a scolding for sneaking from her room paled against the adventure the truck had promised.

She had taken it past familiar territory, had raced toward the edges of her world. Up and up, she had climbed. Pushing the truck, pushing herself.

Now, as Emma navigated the mountainous twists and turns heading along one of two parallel ridgelines, the ground rumbled, a low growling that fragmented and sprang into rasping staccato bursts.

Terrified, she recoiled, stalling the truck. There was only one reason for the earth to issue that warning—she’d reached the threshold of the Wild Lands. The place that gnawed the edges of her world. The place beyond, where real and not-real twined together and twisted apart and time held no meaning.

She knew she should turn back. Should heed the snarling ground. But her truck held its own magic and the rumbling quieted. She took a deep breath, crossed the border and accelerated.

The further into the Wild Lands she ventured, the more the truck came alive beneath her hands until she and the truck melded into something new and wondrous. Something she proclaimed as EmmaDrive.

Powerful.

Invincible.

She raced on, wondering where the monstrous beasts with hideous yellow eyes and terrible sharp claws hid. Wondering what else might lurk in the dark, crumpled places along the ridgeline she traversed or in the valley that snaked below, separating her from the twin ridge beyond.

EmmaDrive hunched over, hugging the road. If she was quiet enough and fast enough she wouldn’t awaken what lie below its surface. Travel as deep into the Wild Lands as she had and the ground was its own kind of monster.

That thought barely formed in her mind when a boulder appeared in her path. The top of it peeled back, revealing a jet-black maw rimmed with jagged teeth that gnashed at her. EmmaDrive swerved to avoid being eaten then flinched at a deep, thunderous rattle. She yelped and wobbled before regaining control. “Oh, noooo,” she whispered, her lips drawing a circle as her eyes widened. The truck slowed to a stop.

She cried out again when the ground heaved and shifted violently beneath her, tilting EmmaDrive onto her right side, wheels spinning, searching for purchase. The ridgeline curled, lurched left and then straightened. The parallel ridge drew closer, narrowing the valley into a ravine and the magical red truck bounced to the bottom. Fear gripped EmmaDrive.

She lay still, her mouth gaping, as a mountainous troll head rose from the tremoring depths of the Wild Lands to tower above her. Riotous tufts of straggly hair ringed its furrowed crown and short dark spikes shadowed its gnarled chin. Its head wobbled while the troll struggled to crack open heavy, crusty eyelids as if it had lain dormant for centuries.

EmmaDrive gagged as the troll’s hot, fetid breath wafted over her.

When it spoke, its words came halting, thick and phlegmy, “Uhh . . . Emma? Oh, honey, it’s 4:00 a.m. Let’s get you back to bed. You can play with your truck after breakfast. Okay?”

Emma nodded and rubbed her eyes before tucking her tiny, six-year-old hand into her father’s. She gripped her red toy truck tight in her other hand and glanced back at her mother sleeping soundly in the Wild Lands.

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You “bring me my eyeglasses”. But only in exchange for treats.

You and I disagree about shoes. I prefer them unchewed.

You have bested two trainers. And my fence.

You snuggle tight to me in sleep, my arms encircling your warm puppy self.

You are perfect.