Dr. Galubrious and Daughters

In The Attic

Composed by Dr. G on Feb 13

There is a darkness, a warm darkness that envelopes you, moist and glowing, such as when you find yourself in the gullet of a whale, or when you are exploring Gomantong volcanic caves and find yourself sucking in the moist breath of a colony of Bornean fruit bats. This was the oppressive atmosphere we found ourselves crouching in as we crept, hunch backed, through the dark attic space that fluted the ridge space along the spine of the farmhouse. The spring sun beat down on the cedar shingles above us, and the steam sent up from Molly’s stew mingled with the wafts of maple syrup. The result was a sickeningly sweet smell of stale cedar and meat that hung dense in the air. Every few feet a beam of light pierced the darkness from a hole in the shingles lighting up and abandoned leather shoe, bundle tied rags or discarded dentures.

After escaping from the pantry we climbed to the attic, and had found this the perfect place to spy on the rooms below. Despite the darkness we paced off the distances. Lucia stopped decisively and pulled a hairpin from my head, leaving a golden wave of hair to flop in front of my face. The hairpin was a family heirloom that had been passed to me on my sixth birthday. The long silver stem was crowned with a tarnished silver ladyclock bug in the 18th century trembler fashion, this treasure had been created by the Austrian jeweler Gustav Swarovski, and the small spring and mechanisms were devised so that its enameled wings fluttered up to reveal a vivid red carbuncle with the vibrations caused by a mild breeze or the light, quick second beat distinctive to the Viennese Waltz. Before I could protest she bit down on the tip end of the pin, pulled a lace from her dress, and made a small bow with it and the discarded bone of a corset from the attic floor. At first I though she was fashioning a small bow and arrow – fit to slay a mouse – but instead she looped the pin through the lace, and placed the pin on the plaster below us – pulling and pushing the contraption set the little bug into a wild frenzy, and slowly drilled a small hole into the ceiling of the room below. She ripped a page from her pocket journal and held it some three feet above little hole – there, displayed on the paper was transferred a perfect mirror image of a bedroom below. She raised her eyebrow at me in smug silence. I snapped my hairpin back and thrust the dizzied little bug grudgingly back into my hair. We made our way along the top of the house, balancing along the beams, making sure not to step directly on the lath and plaster between, but stopping occasionally to drill, and peer again into another room.

Composed by Dr. G on Feb 08

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Composed by Dr. G on Nov 30

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The Pantry

The pantry seemed like any other –tall wainscoted cupboards painted pale green and pink held shelf after shelf of salting crocks and pickled provisions growing low as we reached the end of winter. There were sacks of flour and boxes of brown sugar and tea. Then there were the canning jars, scores of Ball and Atlas canners of languid blue, vegetable remnants of past summers paled in acrid cider vinegar and swam in the murky glow of our candle: garlic green beans, bread and butter pickles, Brussels sprouts, pinky wrinkled tomatoes and small white pickled pearl onions. As I passed the light along the shelves Lucia emitted a little gurgle – like that last bit of sudsy water disappearing down the sink. She pulled my arm back down the shelf so that the light was once again thrown on the canning jars. These were not pearl onions after all – Lucia and I leaned forward into the low shelf – distorted and enlarged by the embossed blue glass were dozens of little eyeballs, unblinkingly staring back at us from inside the sealed jar. Moving through the gloom we sent spiders scurrying as we swept aside the webs and blew dust from the other jars; there were pale blue mushrooms, crow’s feet, and bloated toads – their cloudy golden eyes reflecting back the flame of our candle. The wrinkly pickled tomatoes at second sight appeared to be some un-named organs, which we found less disturbing than the jar labeled “Henrick” in a jittery scrawl containing an oozing milky-white substance.

It was at this moment that we heard footsteps enter the kitchen. My sister and I stood as still as summer air before an evening storm, as we listened to Molly making her way around the kitchen, scraping through pans and opening cupboards. Then her foot falls made a direct line for the door of the pantry. The footsteps stopped and the iron latch lifted – then there was a pause. Lucia and I scrambled, she in one direction and I in another. In a small alcove behind the shelves I hid amongst the hay in a crate that held the last of the acorn squash. The musty smell of Timothy grass and squash bugs replaced the sulphurous smell of my extinguished candle. A beam of white morning light pierced the darkness lighting up the jars in front of me. The silhouette of Molly’s full-figured form danced in the glass of twisting pickled garlic scapes before me as it advanced into the pantry. She stopped in front of me – her soiled apron, with its pattern of pale blue and white flowers, filled my vision. She shuffled the jars on the shelf – grabbed one (Henrick) – and disappeared back into the kitchen.

I emerged from the hay, brushed the spider webs from my hair, and struck a match from my pocket to light my candle stub. The light broke out into the darkness, and the lid of the blue and white fifty-gallon crock lifted in the corner and my sister’s head emerged.

“that was close,” I whispered “lucky you found an empty crock”

“it wasn’t quite empty” she mumbled – A vinegar brine squished out of her shoes as she stepped out of the crockery and brushed damp dill from the hem of her dress.

Composed by Dr. G on Nov 30

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Composed by Dr. G on Nov 23

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frost

We stepped into the frosty morning and the grass cracked under our feet. The sun had not yet reached the fields around us. There was no sign of footsteps, save our own and the hooves of sheep, anywhere around the house and barns. Unless our father had grown hooves, or sprouted wings, he had not left the house during the night. When sun at last reached us, it lit up the billows of steam escaping our mouths and melted away the cold morning and any remaining paths in the frost. My sister and I scraped the ice and mud off our boots and passed back through to the kitchen.
The room was scrubbed clean, a pungent smell of ammonia, cider vinegar scrub and mothballs blended with a pot of something stewing on the top of the stove, a cloven hoof sticking at an awkward angle out from under a self-basting cast iron lid. Molly was gone, the rocker in the corner was still empty, and experience had told us that Mr. McCrunkstale would be busy in the barn with morning chores. It was time to do a little snooping.
As my father has stated, this farmhouse is typical of New Hampshire, In effort to avoid the cold winter winds, and to gain the body heat of the farm animals, almost all of the buildings on the farm are connected. The task of exploring room after room of the rambling homestead would be a daunting one. We gathered candles from the sideboard and started into the pantry.

Composed by Dr. G on Nov 23

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Composed by Dr. G on Nov 11

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Alone

My father is gone. Though he was eccentric and prone to colorful rages against the academic world and smelled mildly of fungi, he provided my sister and I with room for imagination, encouragement of free thought, and made fine sausages – in short I will miss him greatly. The dawn broke to reveal his bed an empty nest of knotted sheets. The flash alarm had worked, but my sister and I must have been so overwhelmed with fatigue that the flash penetrated our eyelids only to be engulfed into our fitful dreams. Now, we are left alone in the northern woods of New Hampshire, in a foreign house, in a cold room, surrounded by my fathers’ equipment and the heavy scent of maple syrup.

Despite inquiries and exclamations of concern Molly seems cooly unconcerned by our lack of guardian, instead she insists that our father embarked into the grey morning to walk off the fever of last night. My sister and I exchange a knowing glance – there is no chance that my father would voluntarily leave our room without his reading glasses, his silver twelve-chime lunar cycle pocket watch, his beloved leather-bound notebook – or his daughters. Molly skillfully avoided our piercing stares, and instead poked at the dieing embers in the Andes kitchen cook stove. She took great breaths and blew at the embers – but her eyes were focused somewhere else. Oddly absent from her usual corner was the old women – in her chair only a matted skein of moth-eaten grey wool.

Confusion and loneliness can be overwhelming emotions, but they are a poor excuse for bad manners. We ate our plates of pancakes that steamed into the cool kitchen air and set about silently devising the retrieval of our father.

Composed by Dr. G on Nov 11

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flash

We slept fitfully last night. The house itself shook from a spring storm, bringing in a torrent of rain, lashing at the windows and erasing what was left of the spring snow. As the wind howled around us my fathers fever grew worse. Near 2:00 in the morning the storm passed, and the moonlight poured in, spotted and filtered by the clouds pushing past. My eyes sprung open – and there, in the night, I felt another’s presence in the darkness. Like a solitary gargoyle torn from its heights, there crouched a figure over my father in the night, its arm extended, its hand over his mouth.

I was paralyzed by fear, my eyelids glued open, my mouth unable to open to scream. The figure turned its head to me, but in the darkness I could see nothing but a silhouette against the window. Clouds passed in front of the moon – and the gable room was plunged, once again into darkness. When the moonlight streamed in again the figure was gone. My Father’s labored breathing was left accompanied by Lucia’s. I swallowed hard and held my breath to silence the pace of my heart and listened intently in the silence of the room, I could hear only the settling sounds of the old house.

I wanted to sleep, but could not allow myself. I prodded my sister awake, and together we manufactured an alarm. We tied a string to the old Bennington doorknob, and, through a series of pulleys to my father’s metal tray of magnesium flash powder where it connected to a flint wheel. If anyone tried to get into the room – the entire space would be awakened by a blinding flash.

Composed by Dr. G on Oct 17

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Poultice

I have taken over my father’s journal, perhaps I will not prove as erudite, or as sapient as he, but with my sister Lucia’a help, and my father’s wishes in mind I take it on. The cut which marred my father’s hand only a few days ago has festered, a brilliant red spiraled our from the wound in my father’s palm and a fever took him in the night, not sleeping, but tossing and turning until the bed itself seemed to rock like a boat on turbulent waters. This morning he had grown quite still, and his side quite rigid, black infection spidered up his forearm. Throughout the day Mrs. Crunkshank has patted in and out of the room, clucking her tongue and slowly shaking her head. We are anxious, my sister and I, concerned with the medical techniques of this women – On the iron stove in the kitchen she built poultice, and I left my father’s side to note its formulation: water, clay, Anise Seed Oil, a heavy dollop of lavender honey, mothballs, cabbage and spoonfuls of what appeared to be dried and ground chicken mushrooms. She stirred this for some time before ladling it into a bowl.
I turned and rejoined my sister where she read from the Hoard’s Dairyman at my father’s side. She was just finishing an article on the proper horizontal alignment of the Jersey’s ears, and how it could be achieved through cedar ear splints, when Mrs. Crunkshank entered the room. With a large wooden spoon she scooped up a heap of the concoction and threw a wad of it down onto my father’s forearm. She smeared the brown, foul smelling stuff into the arm, then ripped off leaves from a bundle of spring burdocks and made a poultice of the leaves and mixture, finally securing the entirety with a rope of old rags.
As the evening draws close my sister and I pour over my fathers notebooks, and intend to find and implement a cure of our own.