Lauren Brazeal Garza
Howl
Jody, I wondered why you didn’t do it sooner. Years living under bridges, sweating time in one county jail or another, picking up and tossing odd jobs laying brick or bent over in fields that left you with a worthless back and few teeth by thirty-eight. No one believed we were the same age. The faces of your life carved trenches between your brow and across your forehead. Scowl lines, frown lines, worry lines. In Texas heat, our ever-blue sky electrifies. Every time I walked under that sizzling azure, I imagined your bare shoulders beneath it. Sometimes there’d be a year or more between your calls, always from a different number, often collect or from whatever cell block you were held in. For more than a decade, I thought each goodbye would be the last. And then it was.
//
Your aunt Becky called it perished from a troubled heart when she texted the night you died. That’s when I knew you’d finally made good on all your threats back when we’d make out, drunk, and stargaze naked on top of those rusted-out shipping containers by McAllister’s acreage—the one near route 67. I carried a romanticized version of your final act with me for weeks until your dumbshit cousin, Dylan, ruined it with the quiet, whimpering reality of what happened: one afternoon, you mixed Wild Turkey with Fentanyl and went to sleep. You didn’t even leave a note.
//
Jody, about a month later when Becky asked me to come up to Abeline from San Angelo and get your ashes, she also asked me to stay a while. She was still dancing around what we were--y’all were such, uh, special friends to one another—a way to not say queer. She’d made up the couch in Daryl’s workshop for me and stopped in the doorway as she said goodnight. That was Jody’s pillow, she said, before leaving. I put my face in it, trying to find your smell, and thought about when we were girls and I’d sneak from my own house on the other side of the high school football field to sleep beside you. We never talked much about those years, or how I went East to college in Austin and you went West train-hopping to California, promising that one day we’d buy a cabin in some wilderness and raise barrel horses or an equally impossible configuration of a life together. Twenty years later, you were in a Rubbermaid next to Daryl’s riding mower.
//
If you’d just gone to sleep maybe all this would’ve ended with me taking your ashes back to San Angelo and finding my own quiet ways to miss you. Becky was the first to hear you howling at the moon, which wasn’t unusual for you. Hell, I remember the two of us doing it together all the time as kids, naked on those shipping containers, during those late nights in San Angelo. We’d fill our lungs with the darkness around us and belt it into the sky. Girls were supposed to be small. Obedient. We weren’t supposed to have rock fights or curse and spit. You and I were always told to be quiet, and screaming at the moon helped us feel heard. I know you carried on the tradition long after we’d parted ways. The issue was, Becky said you started doing it again about two days after your funeral.
//
That first night, as I lay on Darryl’s couch with my face in your old pillow, it wasn’t more than twenty minutes before the howling started. Six feet above my head, on the roof of their garage, it began as a single, guttural yelp. Then another. Piercing the night. Within a minute the yelps grew longer and closer together, bleeding into themselves to form long, drawn-out yowls, heavy with rage but there was also a joy in them: rebellious, like a dare. They shook the whole house. After a while, neighbors on either side of the little building began stirring, Shut that goddam racket up! Someone shouted from a distance, their voice straining to be heard over the noise. I couldn’t help but chuckle a little at the idea of someone screaming at a ghost.
//
The next morning, Becky told me she’d called a specialist in Dallas, and was hoping I’d stick around for her visit, maybe help shed some light on all this. She’s an expert in spirits: an EVP transcriber Becky said over our eggs.
How’s she gonna help? I asked.
I don’t know, but someone’s got to figure out what Jody wants. Why she’s crying like that every night. We were quiet for the rest of breakfast. Later, Flamora, the EVP transcriber, arrived from Dallas.
//
Flamora wasted no time asking for a ladder so she could get up on the roof. I’m interested in what Jody has to say before we talk. Let me spend some time with her first. She said as she ascended at sunset, deflecting Becky’s attempts to be social. The howling started a few hours later, on queue. The next morning, Flamora was at the breakfast table, looking more serene than I’d imagine after a night balancing on the top of a house with a ghost. She’s not interested in answering questions, was the first thing out of her mouth at breakfast, and I don’t think she will be. This is all one big angry joke to her.
Flamora didn’t look frustrated, just sad. She said you just wanted to be heard and wanted to do it your own way, which sounds like she actually got to know you on the roof that night. Flamora also asked me to write you, which I’m still trying to get in the habit of doing.
//
Jody the whole stay in Abeline was two months ago and I hear from Becky that you’re still up on that roof every night. She also told me that she and Daryl have been getting threats from some of the neighbors—the cops were even called once. I laughed at that: imagining an officer knocking on Becky’s door about a noise disturbance from a spirit.
I’ve buried your ashes on the only hill on my property—one that gets plenty of moonlight. I go up there some nights and think about how sad and quiet we got towards the end. How you always had to live in the subtext, between what wasn’t being said. I’m guilty of this too: putting you in a box in my mind most days. Your voice was always there, but no one really listened. I’m glad you’re finally in the conversation again.
//
Your aunt Becky called it perished from a troubled heart when she texted the night you died. That’s when I knew you’d finally made good on all your threats back when we’d make out, drunk, and stargaze naked on top of those rusted-out shipping containers by McAllister’s acreage—the one near route 67. I carried a romanticized version of your final act with me for weeks until your dumbshit cousin, Dylan, ruined it with the quiet, whimpering reality of what happened: one afternoon, you mixed Wild Turkey with Fentanyl and went to sleep. You didn’t even leave a note.
//
Jody, about a month later when Becky asked me to come up to Abeline from San Angelo and get your ashes, she also asked me to stay a while. She was still dancing around what we were--y’all were such, uh, special friends to one another—a way to not say queer. She’d made up the couch in Daryl’s workshop for me and stopped in the doorway as she said goodnight. That was Jody’s pillow, she said, before leaving. I put my face in it, trying to find your smell, and thought about when we were girls and I’d sneak from my own house on the other side of the high school football field to sleep beside you. We never talked much about those years, or how I went East to college in Austin and you went West train-hopping to California, promising that one day we’d buy a cabin in some wilderness and raise barrel horses or an equally impossible configuration of a life together. Twenty years later, you were in a Rubbermaid next to Daryl’s riding mower.
//
If you’d just gone to sleep maybe all this would’ve ended with me taking your ashes back to San Angelo and finding my own quiet ways to miss you. Becky was the first to hear you howling at the moon, which wasn’t unusual for you. Hell, I remember the two of us doing it together all the time as kids, naked on those shipping containers, during those late nights in San Angelo. We’d fill our lungs with the darkness around us and belt it into the sky. Girls were supposed to be small. Obedient. We weren’t supposed to have rock fights or curse and spit. You and I were always told to be quiet, and screaming at the moon helped us feel heard. I know you carried on the tradition long after we’d parted ways. The issue was, Becky said you started doing it again about two days after your funeral.
//
That first night, as I lay on Darryl’s couch with my face in your old pillow, it wasn’t more than twenty minutes before the howling started. Six feet above my head, on the roof of their garage, it began as a single, guttural yelp. Then another. Piercing the night. Within a minute the yelps grew longer and closer together, bleeding into themselves to form long, drawn-out yowls, heavy with rage but there was also a joy in them: rebellious, like a dare. They shook the whole house. After a while, neighbors on either side of the little building began stirring, Shut that goddam racket up! Someone shouted from a distance, their voice straining to be heard over the noise. I couldn’t help but chuckle a little at the idea of someone screaming at a ghost.
//
The next morning, Becky told me she’d called a specialist in Dallas, and was hoping I’d stick around for her visit, maybe help shed some light on all this. She’s an expert in spirits: an EVP transcriber Becky said over our eggs.
How’s she gonna help? I asked.
I don’t know, but someone’s got to figure out what Jody wants. Why she’s crying like that every night. We were quiet for the rest of breakfast. Later, Flamora, the EVP transcriber, arrived from Dallas.
//
Flamora wasted no time asking for a ladder so she could get up on the roof. I’m interested in what Jody has to say before we talk. Let me spend some time with her first. She said as she ascended at sunset, deflecting Becky’s attempts to be social. The howling started a few hours later, on queue. The next morning, Flamora was at the breakfast table, looking more serene than I’d imagine after a night balancing on the top of a house with a ghost. She’s not interested in answering questions, was the first thing out of her mouth at breakfast, and I don’t think she will be. This is all one big angry joke to her.
Flamora didn’t look frustrated, just sad. She said you just wanted to be heard and wanted to do it your own way, which sounds like she actually got to know you on the roof that night. Flamora also asked me to write you, which I’m still trying to get in the habit of doing.
//
Jody the whole stay in Abeline was two months ago and I hear from Becky that you’re still up on that roof every night. She also told me that she and Daryl have been getting threats from some of the neighbors—the cops were even called once. I laughed at that: imagining an officer knocking on Becky’s door about a noise disturbance from a spirit.
I’ve buried your ashes on the only hill on my property—one that gets plenty of moonlight. I go up there some nights and think about how sad and quiet we got towards the end. How you always had to live in the subtext, between what wasn’t being said. I’m guilty of this too: putting you in a box in my mind most days. Your voice was always there, but no one really listened. I’m glad you’re finally in the conversation again.
Lauren Brazeal Garza is a Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her published poetry collections include Gutter (YesYes Books, 2018), which chronicles her homelessness and subsequent recovery as a teenager. She has also published three chapbooks, most recently Santa Muerte, Santa Muerte: I was Here Release Me (Tram Editions, 2023) Her work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, and Verse Daily among many other journals. She can be found haunting her website at www.lbrazealgarza.com