I walk into an overcrowded living room with dozens of tables. Each table is crammed full of pottery, ceramic sculptures, and mosaic portraits of all shapes and sizes: cups, mugs, plates, statuettes of dogs and cats. But there is one shape that is contiguous throughout each of the tables. It is a hooded figure, the shape of death. Its hands were either boney or human or animal or monstrous depending on the sculpture. All have a red clown nose in the center of their faceless heads.

“Whoa. You’re one heck of an artist,” I say stammering, still a little nervous about this stranger whose house I was renting. I wondered if there was even enough space for me to sleep anywhere.

“Well thank ya, thank ya. Yeah I devote a lot of time to it. It’s why I rent my place out, you know. Afford art supplies and such. This is why I stay in this old, cheap town in the mountains. Don’t have to pay much to get around up here. Used to live in the city, make money for rich people, you see. How I met my husband.”

“Oh, very nice. Is he also an artist now?”
“Him? Laz, hell no. I live alone and that bastard is dead. Or I wish he were dead.” The cigarette in her mouth raised slightly up and down as she spoke from the corner of her mouth, the thing wafting smoke up into her ceiling as her tattooed arms hung full of wisdom at her hips.

“Oh…I am sorry?”

“Sorry? I couldn’t tell you how happy I am that I don’t have to see that son of a bitch anymore. He was the worst thing that happened to me. I almost shoved him out into buses at least a dozen times.”

“So…you killed him?” My question just fell out. I got ready to grab a ceramic and throw it and run.

Tabitha looked at me with a cold glare. Her blue eyes vibrant as her white hair seemed to rise in a flame of hatred.

“He-he-he-ha!” She cackled like a rooster. “I like you Laz. You’re a funny one. No, I didn’t kill him. Wish I had, though. This was fifteen or so years ago. I left him in the boring old world he lived in. Wanted to stare at the corners of his office for the rest of his life. No kids. I was baffled. Why the hell did I get married if I didn’t want no family? What a jerk. I left him. I shoved him into another bus lane and never looked behind again, so I don’t know if he’s dead or not, but I know he’s dead to me. Came up here, which is really the town I am from and fell hard into my mosaics.”

I nodded and a silence swept in as her cigarette stunk up the crowded living room.

“I like the clown noses,” I shrugged this out and turned away from Tabitha.

“Yeah, that’s in honor of my husband. A real clown. A real laughy-Larry.”

I nodded and let the silence stay there in the room.

“Why the long cloaks?”

“I ain’t wearin’ no cloak, Laz! This here is a tank top.”
I looked at her very closely for the first time. I saw her face; its blue eyes like ice water, her hair silver. 

As I looked her over, I saw more of her tattoos. The ink was fading into the skin. On her neck were numerous snakes eating their own tails. They drifted down her neck where mountains had been drawn all along her collar line. Into her shoulders and chest there were numerous coffins and faces of skeletons. Her arms were covered with newer tattoos. There were hooded figures all with a faceless hood and a red nose.

“No, I am just yankin’ yer chain there, Laz. You’re talking about why all the ceramics, all the pieces with that red nosed-Death. Death is a clown, Laz. A fool waiting around to close out the show. Just like my husband. Why let a dark thing ruin such a beautiful life?”

I nodded and stared at the tattoos on her arms.

“Well, I am glad you chose to stay here. Beautiful place to do art, even better place to sleep. You’ll find its quiet as a tomb at night here. Sometimes I hear the horses next door, but I hardly ever see them. Don’t know why, but some days you can smell ‘em. Anyhow, I am sure you saw that big old barn and the mountains and such. Let me quiet down now and show you your room there, Laz. You’re trying to get to bed I am sure, it’s starting to get late here. Long drive for you I am sure.”  

Tabitha showed me to my room and my small bed. There was a desk and a lamp and my own bathroom. It was a good little space. She then opened a mini fridge in there showing me a six pack of Budweiser. “Here, these are on the house,” she smiled at me, flicking her silver hair like lost treasure and winking at me before she left and closed the bedroom door.

I grabbed a beer and sat on the bed, thinking about that dead deer. Its black eyes that fell from life into whatever comes after and the red stain that leaked into the soil. The huntress in her camouflage cloak. The cigarette. That tattoo that peeked out on her neck.

Above my bed was a large portrait of a faceless figure in black with a glowing red nose. I struggled to fall asleep and instead tried to count the stars I could see out the window. I closed my eyes and listened. The silence was like a weight on my ear canal. There was nothing to sense, a blind buzzing rebuking void that made my ears hum. I opened my eyes from its bloated presence. 

In the other room, through the door, almost thankfully, I started to hear the soft chatter of Ghoul meowing and lecturing in the dead in the darkness. Tabitha was clinking tiles together in the other room in some new form of creation. It was so quiet there, I could almost hear her breathing.

That red nose above me like a pestering cloud, I couldn’t sleep. So I opened my journal and began to write:

For Tabitha…

The smoke you exude

The gates to your castle,

The stones around you

Your silver hair

A goddess of something,

Both old and new

In the deep wood, in the tall mountains

Beyond the edge of memory

And the wall of reality.

You build your world stone by stone,

And reforge the path of life

Into the midst of your smoke

A ghoul of life,

Chattering your bones

Frozen in hatred of what was

And what you once created.

We are the haunted memory

Of what we peeled away from.

Your castle keeping all things out

And imprisoning yourself away.

Death is the clown that

Can batter down your doors.

I sipped my budweiser and listened as the tiles clicked and clacked and the cat spoke into the deep dark beyond. I closed my eyes and became the darkness, Ghoul’s voice the malaise of the evening.

Then the tiles stopped clicking. For a while there was silence…bone chilling silence that made my ears hum in anxiety. 

There was a knock on my door. I shuttered and spilled my beer on my lap. Cold and awoken with fright. Even the cat’s yawp offered no silence at the soft knocking. I opened the door, and before me was the pale white face of Tabitha. She was completely nude, pale as snow and silver in the dark room. Her breasts were large and white, there seemed not a growth of hair on her body from the neck down. When I say she was moonlit corporeal, I mean it.She was the freshly dead, white as swan feathers and luminously beautiful. I became her lunatic instantly and thirty or fifty, her age did not matter as I felt her cold, pale beauty radiate like glacial winds before me. It was the most overcoming feeling of lost and vacancy I had ever felt. The beauty of her somehow lifeless naked body and her soft curves. 

Tabitha’s eyes were closed and she was sleep-walking for what I could tell. 

Her hand was on the cold drops of beer I had spilled and suddenly, I felt her cold through my pants and underwear.

“Tabitha,” I looked into the closed lids, “Tabitha, arise.” I said.

Slowly, her blue eyes opened at me. They shuttered to life, and Tabitha, this pale ghost of beauty turned from my door, followed by her cat, and went into her bedroom. 

I closed the door in confusion and looked at the darkness which swallowed the room whole.