The Twitching Hour

If you’re a New Orleans native wrestling with spiritual questions, you’ll find the answers at the House of Madame Benoit, Interpreter of Dreams. The house sits in a forgotten alley, the only backstreet in the French Quarter that curves and twists instead of running in a straight line. There’s something unsettling about the twists, like if you dare walk down them you might never find your way out. Tourists tend to avoid the alley without even knowing why. Which suits us locals just fine.

It’s early morning, the sun hasn’t climbed into the sky yet, and I wobble down the alley in a half-drunken haze, somehow avoiding the uprooted cobbles and weedy potholes. I stumble to a halt under Madame Benoit’s rickety sign, hanging over an even ricketier door. I crush out my cigarette with a broken stiletto heel and knock.

A speakeasy grille built into the door slides open, and a blue eye covered by a twitching eyelid peers out the peephole. “Annette,” the unseen mouth below the twitching eyelid says. “You look like shit. Whadd’ya want?”

I rest my pounding forehead against the door. “Mornin’ to you too, Aunt Maxine. You gonna let me in?”

The door creaks open. Aunt Maxine stands there, gray hair in rollers, a ragged bathrobe draped across bony shoulders, pink bunny slippers covering skeletal feet. “I ain’t open for business yet.”

I stumble inside, my shaky hand grasping for a sturdy wall. “Great. We can have some tea before anybody else gets here.”

She rubs her twitching eyelid. “You got money for that tea?”

“You’re my aunt, for Christ’s sake. You shouldn’t charge me.”

“Aunt-in-law,” she corrects. “And I gotta make a livin’.”

I fumble in my purse, pushing aside an empty cigarette pack, a bottle of aspirin, and what disgustingly feels like a used condom, and hand her a twenty. “Good enough?”

She takes the crumpled bill with two gnarled fingers, holding it like it’s a dead rat, and shuffles into the tiny kitchen. I follow, slump into a chair, and lay my head against the cool wooden table.

“What’s got you all fluffernutted enough to traipse over here at this ungodly hour, anyway?” Maxine says as she opens a cabinet.

“I had a disturbing dream last night.”

She pulls two teacups off a shelf. “You don’t look like you’ve even slept.”

“I slept a little. Somewhere. A park bench, maybe.”

“What was the dream about?”

I lean back in the flimsy chair, praying it won’t buckle, and rub my throbbing temples. “I was standing next to an open grave. Then, suddenly, somebody pushed me in. But I couldn’t see his face.”

Aunt Maxine snorts. “You don’t need my tea, Annette. Any dream interpreter worth a lick of salt can tell you what that dream means.”

“You don’t get it. I need to see who pushed me in.”

She hobbles over and plunks down the cups. Hot water sloshes out and sizzles on the table top. She pulls out a pouch, opens it, and sprinkles its contents into the water. “Fine,” she says, sitting in the chair facing me. “Drink up. But you already know who you’re gonna see.”

Her twitchy eye shoots me a pitying look. I stare in the other direction as I gulp the bitter tea.

“You should see a doctor about that twitch,” I murmur as her hand grips mine and the room dissolves in a misty haze.

“Pfft,” she says. “It’s just a side effect from this horrible tea. Don’t need to waste money for a doctor to tell me that.”

Her scratchy voice fades as I slump onto the table and close my eyes.

<<<>>>

The grave lies black and yawning in the withered grass. I smell earth and rotting leaves. Then, rough hands slam into the small of my back, and I fall, landing in murky mud. I roll over and gaze up at a silhouette framed against a gray sky.

“Hello, Annette.”

A ray of sun bursts through the gray, illuminating the speaker. He leans on a shovel encrusted with dirt. The soft blue eyes are exactly as I remember, except now they’re free from misery.

“Michael? Why would you push me into this hole?”

He smiles. In life, Michael had horrible teeth: yellow and rotting. The whiteness in his smile now is almost blinding. It’s like the sadistic grin of a macabre Cheshire cat. He picks up the shovel.

“Wait.” I raise a hand, as if that will stop what he’s about to do. “Why...?”

The shovel rises in the air. The soil falls into my eyes, blocking out that disturbingly white smile. I try to scream, but dirt fills my mouth and suffocates the sound.

<<<>>>

I drop Maxine’s hand and rub my twitching eyelid. “Ow.”

“Hurts, don’t it?” she says. “Be thankful it’s only a temporary side effect. My twitch never goes away. I drink gallons of that damn tea every day, so many folks wanting to relive their dreams and me to interpret ‘em. They ain’t never satisfied with what they see, neither.”

“His teeth were white. Michael’s.”

“I saw. Clean teeth. Not all yellow and rotting from tobacco and alcohol. Healthy teeth. Like when he was a boy, before the hard livin’ caught up with him.”

I massage the eyelid, willing the painful twitching to stop. “You blame me for that.”

She shrugs. “Everyone makes choices in life, Annette. He chose you and your wicked ways. He loved you for some stupid reason.”

I stop rubbing the eyelid and begin wiping the tears leaking from behind it instead. “I loved him too, you know.”

“I suppose you did, in your way. But it was the hard, sinful livin’ that killed him, you can’t deny it. Nothin’ you can do ’bout that now.”

“That grave in my dream…it was for me, and Michael dug it. Does that mean if I keep mourning him, it’ll kill me? Is that what the dream’s about?”

Aunt Maxine lets out a sharp laugh. “Hell no, that ain’t what it’s about. He’s warning you, Annette. Something is gonna kill you someday. Same thing that killed him, same thing that’ll kill me.” She leans over the table, her eye inches from mine. “Poison.”

I frown. “What poison?”

She sits back. “Whiskey. That’s your poison of choice. My tea is mine. Sure, folks can relive their dreams if they drink my tea. And if I drink it, I can help ’em understand what those dreams mean. Takes a powerful medicine to generate that sort of hallucination. It’s poison, just as poisonous as the crap you’ve shoved into your system all your adult life.” She gives me another pitying look with her twitchy eye. “At least I help people with my poison. What the hell good does yours do you?”

<<<>>>

Aunt Maxine predicted her own demise as accurately as she interpreted my dream. A few months after my visit she dropped dead, right in the middle of someone else’s tea-induced visions. Heart attack, the doctor said, but I’m sure it was the tea. Now I stand next to the family crypt, wearing my one good black dress and watching the grave diggers slide her coffin in, right above the pile of bones that was once my Michael.

I hadn’t talked to her since that visit. I’d stormed out, angry that she dared to lecture my lifestyle. I’d staggered into the nearest open bar, downed five whiskey shots, and passed out on a filthy toilet seat.

But that ended up being my last drinking spree. Not by choice at first—I had no intention of stopping, not then. The next night I was back at the bar, ready to drown my sorrows once again, but after two shots my right eyelid began to twitch something horrible. I ended up crawling back to my hovel, miserable but dead sober. The twitching stopped once I crawled into bed.

I tried again, two days later, but the second the first drop of of poison hit my tongue, the eyelid went spastic. Now I can’t even glance at a whiskey bottle without the twitching kicking in. I don’t know how Aunt Maxine tolerated such a miserable side effect for so many years. I can’t stand it for an instant.

They finish closing Aunt Maxine’s crypt. I sigh and whisper a goodbye. My old Uncle Ramone pats my shoulder. “She always liked you best, you know.”

Did she? “Thanks, Uncle Ramone.”

That night, as I drift off to sleep, I see a grave. Not a crypt, but a yawning hole like the one in that old dream, and I suddenly realize I’m the one now digging. I jump in the hole and dig deeper and deeper until I glance at the steep sides and realize there’s no way out. I drop the shovel, expecting Michael and his weird, white smile to begin shoveling dirt in my face, burying me alive again.

And a silhouette does appear against the gray sky, but it isn’t Michael. It’s Aunt Maxine. She grins—a nice, normal, yellow-toothed grin—and reaches out a bony hand. I take it. She pulls me back to the world of the living. We shovel dirt into the empty grave until there’s nothing left to fill. Her eyelid doesn’t twitch once.