A lot of stories start with a setting- a cool meadow, a foggy London street or the inside of a carriage rattling along a wooded path.
This story starts inside of a closet.
It's a long closet with a pair of sliding wooden doors, behind which you'll find a long row of coats, sweaters and jackets. At the top of the closet is a shelf bearing seldom-used blankets, hats, gloves, and other odds and ends.
In the back of the closet to one side you'll find a shelf piled high with equally seldom-used board games, puzzles and another box that was neither a game nor a puzzle. It was a Ouija board.
On this day, the dark of the closet gives way to a shaft of light as one of its doors slides open and I stick my head inside. Behind me is standing my best friend and neighbor, John. We are both about twelve years old.
"Here it is," I say, gripping the Ouija board and tugging it out from beneath a stack of boxes. A few puzzles and games fall to the closet floor, but, of course, I'm twelve, so I leave them for someone else to pick up.
"How does it work?” asks John, looking at the spooky looking box marked OUIJA in big off-white letters.
The box itself was long and rectangular. The cover had a black background emblazoned with the image of a light blue specter holding up one hand and sort of floating. Very creepy and always fascinating to me.
“I have no idea” I answer, tossing the box lid carelessly to the side. In a moment, I'm removing the contents of the box, which was basically just a game board covered with the letters of the alphabet, the words “yes” and “no” in the upper corners, numbers 0-9, and the words “Good Bye” printed along the bottom.
Contrary to our instincts against reading directions, John and I quickly scan the ones printed inside the box lid. This OUIJA thing seems simple enough. We are to place our fingertips on this V-shaped plastic coaster-thing with a round hole in it and let the spirits move the coaster (called a “planchet”) around the board to impart messages from beyond the veil.
Not quite sure what to make of this, John and I give it a try.
It's mid-afternoon, so not at all a spooky time of day. We are in my house in the family room with sunlight pouring through the many windows. We don't even know to ask any questions. We just wait to see what, if anything, happens.
Almost right away, the planchet starts to move. I assume we're causing it somehow, though I know I'm not attempting to guide it. In fact, I'm a little bored with this game, especially because it seems like spelling and reading are intimately involved.
"G" is the first letter the planchet reaches. Maybe it's going to spell "ghost" or "gotcha" or "get out!" in imitation of the movie The Amityville Horror. But no, the next letter is "A."
It's taking a very long time to get just two letters, I'm thinking, but we stick with the game. The planchet keeps moving and soon approaches the letter "F."
At this point, something dawns on me and I begin to worry. I don't want the planchet to stop at the F, but it does.
"GAF? What's that?" says John questioningly as a slightly nauseous feeling comes over me.
And now, the planchet isn't moving.
"What's GAF?" John repeats more rhetorically thanactually expecting an answer.
"Yeah, stupid, right?" I say taking my hands off the planchet and leaning back. "Let's do something else"
But in my head, I'm ill at ease. To me GAF means something very important, but I say nothing to John. I just put the OUIJA board back in its box, toss it in the closet and close the door.
You see, I didn't want to talk about my dad.
My father, just 54 years old, had died less than a earlier when I was eleven.
He was sick for a few months at our home. I remember knowing something was wrong. One afternoon, I heard a car honking in our driveway and went out to find he needed help just standing up. Soon, he never left my parent's bedroom. For weeks he stayed in there. My mother seemed very worried and sad, but I didn't ask what was wrong. I was afraid to ask. I didn't want to have to deal with anything as scary as what seemed to be happening in my home and to my father.
One morning, my mother sat me down on a small couch in our living room and told me my dad had passed away overnight. I cried and cried, but still somehow managed to hide from what was happening. I didn't even attend the funeral and no one forced me to go.
By the day John and I played with the Ouija board about a year later, I had gotten very good at avoiding the subject of my father entirely. In fact, for all of that year and forseveral more, I never mentioned my dad to anyone. Not once.
So, I didn't tell John that day we played with the Ouijaboard, my dad's full name was George Arthur Foulkes.
G.A.F.
I wonder. Was my dad reaching out to me that day, or was something inside of me reaching out to him? I'm not sure, but I never took the Ouija board out of the closet again.