The basement of the old gym is a good one

Sure, Sarah tells the students, the basement of the old gym is a good one, but the scariest experience she’s ever had was at the Historic Pierce Mansion on Jackson Street at the end of March a few years ago when she was part of a committee raising funds for the symphony, when she got separated from her group and ended up in a second-story bedroom filled with ceramic pigs and origami pigs and needlepoint pigs framed in pictures on the walls and pig dolls with round pink pig faces and pigtails for hair, and the room had too many chairs to be a bedroom, or, plausibly, any kind of room, and on each of the chairs was a knit afghan with a different letter in a bold color in its center, and through the ventilation system—somehow—she was able to hear what must have been every conversation going on in the house, and some of the pig dolls must have been made by children because they did not have mouths, but Sarah was convinced they were speaking to her, the way her new writing students believe the muse will speak to them, and through one vent in the floor Sarah heard a wealthy patron admit how much he would like to fuck the one with the black hair and the bourbon breath—it would just take a few dollars or drinks more—and Sarah remembered that most of the pigs she has seen in real life have not been pink or cute but dark and dirty and hairy, and the voices kept arriving through the bowels of the house—Keep those checks coming, gentlemen, says one of them: the music director—and she remembers that one of the men she loved most, early on, sheepishly admitted his preference for thick pubic hair and unshaved legs, primarily because he had never seen it in person, so Sarah offered herself up to him that way, which she doesn’t tell the students, though perhaps she should, because even this could not satisfy him—More checks, think of the Christmas program, the elementary school visits; Think of your legacy, your tax liability, your name over the lobby concessions—and in a room nearby Sarah heard no footsteps but a toilet flush, and then everyone in the house seemed to stop talking, as if they had realized that Sarah was like the house itself, big and empty and spooky and listening, but then they must have figured that couldn’t possibly be the case, no haunted anythings around here, so polite and Midwest they all were, so well-meaning and generous, so they picked up talking and begging and flushing and fucking and still she hasn’t been able to shut them all up or all out.

Brendan Todt, who writes and teaches writing in Sioux City, Iowa, has been working on a series of stories about a character named Sarah--who herself writes and teaches writing--some of which have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere.