Gertrude At The Gallows

There was a man hanging by a rope in the foyer of my house last Thursday. It was offputting and instead of calling the authorities or anyone that would remove him, I spun him around like a cotton candy until he turned completely blue.

His arrival must have been fresh because the plum complexion of his was growing more and more dim. I felt sorry for him, so I grabbed a ladder, some string, and several of the tattered stuff animals from the upstairs attic. My daughter had died eight years back, in an accident where her body was severed between a car and a tree. The driver of the vehicle fled the scene and was discovered days later, holding a Pound Puppy that had belonged to her, at the bottom of a nearby canal. I demanded that it be returned to me and when they finally brought it home, I put it in the dryer and then in a box with all the stuffed animals I removed from her bed.

I pitied the trove of stuffed animals in her room and I thought that they might be lonely up there, waiting for a daily tea party that would never come. So I packed them in and closed the lid. Better to be together and in the dark than stood up, right?

This seemed like the appropriate occasion for their homecoming, so I climbed the ladder and hung each and every one of the 27 animals by a piece of green string. When I was done, I looked up at all of them smiling over at my human centerpiece. It was then that I realized I didn't have any interest in having that man leave. He looked so peaceful surrounded by all the wilted pastel colored plush in the room. They looked happy and grateful to have each other.

And with that, I put on the kettle and made them all some chamomile tea with lemon and honey. I stapled a Dixie cup of the concoction to each of them, including the man, and I ate an entire box of shortbread cookies while I counted the number of cups I'd spent on this project. I think it was 28, but then there was me, and I would need one, too. So 29. Yes, 29.

I took the rest of the spindle of string and I made a hunter green rope. I climbed the stairs and stepped atop the bannister. With one last look at the zoo in this rotunda, I focused on the marble flooring, shut my eyes, and remembered the steps to a perfect slipknot that I had learned when earning a Girl Scout badge. That was my final thought before I walked off the railing and watched my fingers go from periwinkle to blue.

In that moment, I opened my eyes once more to notice that I was spinning like a figure skater, that the pistachios and the yellows and the pinks were all blending together in this penultimate and kaleidoscopic epiphany. She loved carousels. My daughter.

She did love carousels.