Haunted House
In the beginning, it was an ordinary house on an ordinary street in Flushing, Queens, just around the corner from ours. There was an older girl, Mary Ann, who was our sometime babysitter, and a younger boy, Johnny, who was several years older than I. A cherished childhood memory of mine concerns an afternoon (though there may have been more than one) in the basement of the house, when we lay on our bellies beneath a ping-pong table, shooting arrows at a bull’s eye attached to (yes) a bale of hay. They were real arrows, and Johnny had a real wooden long bow, taut and strong, while I had a far smaller, flimsier plastic one suitable to my stature and, I suppose, my gender. He let me take an arrow... Read more...
