Victor is out of town and I keep hearing weird noises in and out of the house. Rationally, I realize it’s probably just the house settling, but I’m pretty sure we’re all going to die here, and I suspect we need an exorcist. In the last six months we’ve had scorpions, mold, murdered pets, and possible chupacabras in the walls. I suspect the house was built on an Indian graveyard. I wonder how much an exorcism costs, and whether it’s more expensive if I’m not Catholic. Is there a coupon code I can use? This is probably exactly the sort of thing they teach you in catechism.
The Internet recommended “smudging,” a Native American practice of burning sage in order to purify things, and so I burned a bowl of dried sage and I walked around the house with it, chanting biblical phrases I’d heard in The Exorcist, and wafting the sage smoke around. I also told the spirits that I wanted them to leave, but perhaps they should go check out Hawaii, because I heard it was awesome. Then I did some Gregorian-style chants, but I didn’t know the lyrics so instead I just substituted the words “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” Suddenly there was a deafening screeching, and I screamed and thanked God that Hailey was spending the night with my in-laws, because I suspected the walls would start dripping with blood next, but then I realized that the noise was just the fire alarm going off. It was pretty much the same thing that happened in our last house, except that this time it was caused by angry spirits rather than me catching towels on fire.
I called my mom to ask her how to turn off fire alarms, but it was so loud she could barely hear me. You sound silly when you tell someone that you’re burning sage inside your house to appease the Indian burial ground that might be under your house, but you sound fucking ridiculous when you’re screaming the exact same thing over the sound of fire alarms. I tried to explain that a poltergeist was the only logical conclusion in light of all the crap that had happened lately. She said that it was more likely a series of tragic but common events that just coincidentally hit at the same time. I countered that it didn’t seem “common” to have to protect your dead dog by going after a vulture with a machete. My mom said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Where would a vulture get a machete?” Not because she was stupid, mind you . . . simply because she didn’t see this emergency as important enough for me to start using sloppy sentence construction.
Then my mom pointed out that Native Americans revered vultures, so if there was an Indian graveyard under my house I’d probably really pissed them off, and she suggested I make an offering to the vultures, and I totally would have if Victor hadn’t given all of our hamburgers to the foxen. She told me how to disconnect the fire alarms, but it seemed very complicated, so I just nodded until she stopped talking and then got a broom and hit it like a pi?ata until it stopped, which was a relief for me (and probably for our neighbors, considering it was eleven o’clock at night).
The next day Victor came home and saw the wires hanging from the shattered fire alarm, and I admitted that I’d tried to smoke out the ghosts and that I suspected the alarms were a sign that the spirits were appeased. He stared at me and told me that it was more likely a sign that the smoke detector was working properly until I murdered it after intentionally filling the house with smoke. It sounded much worse when Victor broke it out like that.
This afternoon I sauntered into Victor’s office and said smugly, “So, apparently my ‘craazy’ plan for setting off the fire alarm to appease the ghosts worked, because guess who just found the dead bodies I’ve been searching for? ME, MOTHERFUCKER. I found the dead bodies.” Then I held up my hand for the inevitable high five, but instead he just hit the mute button on his office phone and dropped his head into his hands. Which was disappointing for both of us. And, granted, this probably would have been better received if I’d realized he was on an important conference call at the time, but really, it’s not my fault Victor doesn’t know how to use a mute button properly.
Victor finally looked up, and then he told me to put my hand down, because he was not going to high-five me for digging up dead bodies, and that was when I started to think that Victor was a very strange man, because why in the hell would I dig up dead bodies? I explained that what I meant was that I’d finally stumbled on the lost cemetery I’d been searching for since we’d first moved in, and that the graves were so old that the bodies would no longer be a threat during the zombie apocalypse. He didn’t seem as relieved as I was, so I decided to be relieved for both of us.