A Spectral Rooster

by Diana Odasso

My second year at the University of Chicago, I moved into an apartment owned by my roommate’s father, a professor emeritus of Arabic Literature. Years before they had purchased the flat on the cheap as the previous tenant had been murdered there by her husband. She had been a sculptor; traces of clay were still visible between the floorboards.

It was summer in Chicago. A few days before the other roommates arrived, my boyfriend helped me move into the grimy walk-up that had been uninhabited for a decade. I had just purchased a single size futon, presumably to torture him. He squeezed next to me on the dusty floor of a bedroom with no air conditioning. That first night, we somehow convinced ourselves  that a human size rooster would soon be seen walking by, its sharpened spurs clicking on the floor, pausing at our bedroom door long enough to turn a feathered head and merciless gaze towards us. Terrified, we ran off to sleep at his mother’s house. So visual was this fear that even today I hold a crystalline image of that rooster in the mind’s eye.

A few years after college, I traveled to New Zealand with the same poor man. We were camping outside of Queenstown and walked to town one evening to watch The Ring. Later back at camp, I bawled in fear. The images on the screen, the images in my head, were no different than reality.  I would not have been surprised to see that evil child’s ratty wig of long black hair and bent arm snaking though the zipper of our tent

From childhood I have carried through the concept that if a negative thought alights on my mind but for a second, that thing, awful, tragic, or terrifying, will be willed into being. It began with the ‘Bloody Mary’s’ chanted in front of third grade bathroom mirrors and continued with ghost stories, roosters and later the sense of impending doom that surrounded almost all of my romantic relationships.

Unfortunately, I have not maintained the logically opposite belief: that wonderful and enchanted things will happen to me if I dare to think about them. And neither have I done much to dispel the negatives. The notion of creating phantoms, tragedies and car accidents with the mind is an intoxicating delusion. But today is Halloween, so you’ll forgive me if I choose to resurrect nostalgic ghosts – spectral roosters walking bandy-legged through the past.