after Edgar Allan Poe
Lovers Medley
I was dreaming of the lost Lenore when that damned bird came rat-tat-tatting at my chamber door. “Take your beak out of my heart,” I said. The wind blew, the windows rattled, the firelight flickered like writhing ghosts on the floor. I knew I was damned, and the raven kept croaking “Nevermore.” “I was a child and she was a child” in our “kingdom by the sea,” and I’ll never get her back again, my Annabel Lee. “I lie down by the side / Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, / In her sepulchre there by the sea.” Maybe I was responsible. As I was painting my beautiful young wife, “who pined visibly to all” but me, the color drained from her face onto the canvas, increasingly vivid with each stroke of my brush. I looked up and she’d crumpled lifeless to the floor. As she wasted away, Berenice grew more beautiful by the day, especially her teeth. I swear I thought she was dead. Strangely, Roderick had never mentioned an identical twin. Madeline expired, we secured the lid of the coffin, but then the winds began to rage, and at the height of the storm, Roderick heard the “heavy and horrible beating of her heart” just as Madeline began to pound on the library door. They faced each other without a word. She fell into his arms and “bore him to the floor a corpse.” “In death only, was I fully impressed with the strength” of Ligeia’s love. The fair-haired Rowena meant nothing, I tell you, nothing. Was it the opium? Was it a dream when Ligeia returned from the dead? To be honest, it scared the shit out of me.
Murderers Medley
So you think I’m mad, but in fact it was his eye, staring, staring, staring. I smothered him with his own mattress, I took him apart and buried him under the floor, but his heart kept beating, beating. Okay, I did it, I told the police, who were staring, staring, listening, listening. Listen, it was just “a series of mere household events,” nothing more. The cellar stairs were dark. And steep. My wife was in the way and I accidentally buried the ax in her brain. It was the booze. It was the cat. That demon from hell, the fucking cat, screaming when I rapped on the basement wall. Half a century later, and still no one’s discovered Fortunato’s skeleton behind the catacomb wall. Only a mastermind could plot a murder that well. No one knows but you. I’ll admit it. I was obsessed with Berenice’s teeth. Obsessed. I abstracted them. Okay, I extracted them. I inadvertently buried her alive, but the toothless hag clawed her way out of her grave. Who knew she’d be back?
Jacqueline Doyle is the author of the flash fiction chapbook The Missing Girl, available from Black Lawrence Press. A former contributor to Bending Genres and instructor in their workshop series, her flash has appeared in Aquifer, Centaur, Flash Boulevard, Ghost Parachute, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She’s been obsessed with Poe for years; he often makes appearances in her writing. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com.