Free Strange but True by John Searles

it to the light. That’s when you’ll see that this thing in your hand is Melissa’s rose corsage from prom night, which she keeps frozen inside like a heart that’s stopped beating.
    Don’t drop it because you will wake her.
    Put it back behind the ice trays and the coffee. Close the freezer.
    There’s one more thing you’ll want to see, far more disturbing than anything so far, behind the bathroom door. But as Melissa said to the baby on the car ride home:
    Not yet .
    For now, leave it there as she sleeps and the world moves quietly around her. Mumu the cat is prowling in the kitchenette too, hunting for mice. Next door, Mr. Erwin switches off the bedside lamp and falls into a restless, fitful sleep beside his snowy-haired wife, who lies awake thinking of the way she spent her day, doing laundry, then cleaning the cluttered work area in their low-ceilinged basement, only to turn up an unexpected mess. Their refrigerator hums on and off, releasing the same pings and ticks as the engine of Melissa’s car cooling in that makeshift driveway beside the road. The wind, which blew so hard earlier, has died off, leaving the woods around the three small houses in a perfect hush.
    Across town—back up Monk’s Hill Road and through the crisscross of streets to Blatts Farm Hill, down through the intersection of Matson Ford and King of Prussia Road, up Dilson Avenue and down to the Chases’ large gray-stone colonial at 12 Turnber Lane—Philip tosses and turns on the foldout sofa in the family room while his mother sleeps soundly upstairs with the help of the pills she swallowed before bed. Again and again, he replays the conversation with Melissa, not yet considering that what she said could somehow be true, but wondering if he should have been nicer to the girl.
    When it is clear to him that he is too preoccupied and troubled to sleep, Philip sits up and turns on his tiny book light, glancing at the antique clock on the wall. The hands point to four-thirty, though it is really somewhere around three. He opens his Anne Sexton biography. The pages smell musty, like a book bought at a tag sale, which it may as well have been, since he picked it up at a used bookstore on Broadway just a few weeks before he went over the edge of that fire escape and dropped to the alleyway below. Philip turns to a random page. Rather than plodding along sequentially through biographies, he much prefers to flip around to the various periods of the subject’s life depending on his mood, mixing up the order of events, then putting it together afterward like a puzzle in his mind. When he looks down, he sees that the previous owner of the book had scratched a few lines of a poem in black pen in the margin:
    The woman wonders why he murdered their love
    But the killer in him has gotten loose
    She knows she should run while there is still time
    But she pauses here
    Soon to be dragged into darkness
    Philip doesn’t know whether it is a copy of something Anne Sexton had written or an attempt to imitate her. Either way, the words have no particular resonance to him, so he turns to another section and begins rereading a chapter about Anne’s parents, who died one after the other in March and June of 1959. After twenty minutes of reading, he finds himself lingering over a passage from a poem she wrote called “A Curse Against Elegies”:
    I refuse to remember the dead .
    And the dead are bored with the whole thing .
    But you—you go ahead ,
    go on, go on back down
    into the graveyard ,
    lie down where you think their faces are ;
    talk back to your old bad dreams .
    Philip’s thoughts return to his brother, of course, and to Missy. Again, he begins to mull over all that happened tonight until finally he is just too tired to think or read anymore. His arms droop slowly like the heavy branches of the trees outside, and the book comes to rest on his chest. His eyes shut.
    As the night passes, the