{"id":3405,"date":"2023-05-26T00:01:40","date_gmt":"2023-05-26T05:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/?p=3405"},"modified":"2023-05-26T01:59:04","modified_gmt":"2023-05-26T06:59:04","slug":"ethel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/2023\/05\/26\/ethel\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethel"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“Ethel’s Intro” appears in Temple of the Mermaid First Edition (available now) but will move to Laura Laura Phantasmagoria in the next edition. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ethel Cramden was seven years old; forever seven years old\u2014frozen in time and character for eighty-eight years. Her spirit had a perch in the air, suspended a hundred and fifty feet above the Galaxy Movie Theater. She had it pretty good as far as spirits go. She could watch the movies, after all. Her story was sad and famous; probably more famous than any of the other of the two dozen ghosts hovering above her river valley locality. Her fame shone bright due to her proximity in orbit of the colossal tale involving the poor sap that killed her. Ethel was his first kill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ethel bailed on her mom and older brother as they watched news reels. The year was 1932. She hooked up with some other kids in her peer group; kids with a loose affiliation, namely, that the news reels were boring. They included Little Joe, Sneaky Pete, Dottie, and Slugger. The gaggle of moppets made it a weekend tradition to meet and search for pennies and nickels behind the seats in the balcony. They were quiet. This was a \u201ccat burgler\u201d mission. Theater patrons could not know they were there: on the hunt. Getting caught; getting busted \u2013 was a mission-failure. They could not afford to get kicked out, or returned to their parents with their ears twisted, lest their twin purchase goals be derailed for weeks if not months. More on that later. Obviously, their overall mission did indeed fail critically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The back row of balcony seats and their iron foot mountings were backed right up against the rear wall of the auditorium and made a tight fit for young ones on all fours. But the strip behind the seats was a rich vein and Ethel was small. She could see a trail of coins like tiny stars reflecting ever so slightly in the light of the silver screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long story short: An overweight drunkard named Bart Dorfmann climbed the back steps into the balcony aiming to sleep through the next three programs. He sat down hard in his back-row seat with a \u201cFlunff!<\/em>\u201d and broke little Ethel\u2019s neck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was found five hours later. Mrs. Cramden did a cursory panicked search of the theater, went home and searched, asked the neighbors, and then came back to The Galaxy to double check. Ethel\u2019s brother Scott eventually found one of the kids she had been palling around with earlier. Her posse hadn\u2019t seen her in hours and were getting kinda worried too. Mom and Scott convinced the manager to raise the house lights. When a film breaks, people groan, but when the house lights just come up, people sit up, stretch a bit, and look to the manager for some concerning announcement. When no immediate announcement came, just the manager, a staffer, a woman, and a young boy charging worriedly into the upper deck, the audience and their curiosity quickly shifted to concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShe probably just fell asleep crawlin\u2019 on the floor,\u201d Scott tried reassuring his Ma. A wail of anguish, a pale bow-tied employee\u2019s dash for the lobby, and a boy\u2019s sobbing prefigured the reveal: Little Ethel\u2019s body discovered wedged behind the seat and under the tuckus of the groggy pile that was ball-bearing salesman Bart Dorfmann. The girl\u2019s arm and closed fist extended out, just barely touching her killer\u2019s pant leg, clutching twenty-seven cents in dirty coins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of downtown, it should be mentioned, snuggled the riverbank like two popsicles in a package. The courthouse sat two blocks up the from the water\u2019s edge and a railyard lay a stone\u2019s throw away from the water between the two. Dorfmann was vilified in the Midwest press. On his way to sentencing, a lynch-mob intercepted him at the courthouse, punched, beat, and dragged him to the railyard. There, the mob split into two factions; one began the process of tar and feathering, and the other prepared to weigh down his legs with bricks in anticipation of tossing him in the drink. Neither job made it to completion as the hot tar from the railyard only made it as far as his arms. What was tarred did get feathered, however; someone found a throw pillow in the back of a nearby parked car. The city police and the National Guard redoubled their efforts to get control of the situation and a free-for-all melee ensued.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe looks like a Goddamn chicken!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cKill the Chicken-man!\u201d They cried and beat him repeatedly. Bart was tossed in the river and from there, escaped. He hopped a train somehow. Historians both local and national investigated and picked over his story ad nauseam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe reason for years of national curiosity?\u201d you may ask, is that the train and the empty boxcar he stowed away in travelled east and took \u201cThe Chicken Man\u201d to the Windy City where he became a homeless serial killer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s the town\u2019s single most famous story. It\u2019s in books and on bumper stickers. True-Crime aficionados and conspiracy whack-jobs walk the routes while listening to their ear-pods. Dozens of TV docudramas, several major motion pictures, and several more direct-to-home-video releases produced one, ultimately, that premiered at Ethel\u2019s theater\u2014the spot where it all began.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ethel didn\u2019t like it at all. The film was called \u201cBloody Down\u201d and the main character, Bart, had been reconceived as a dyed-in-the-wool (from-birth) sociopathic murderer who got off on killing young adults. Ethel\u2019s character had been cast as a seventeen-year-old in a tight sweater. Some blond ing\u00e9nue played \u201cEthel\u201d, victim of strangulation. The real Ethel\u2019s ghost found the experience so frustrating that she longed to go full poltergeist on the theater. She resisted the urge, after all, being permanently frozen at age seven, didn\u2019t prevent her from developing empathy. She liked The Galaxy and its employees, after all, and honestly, she wouldn\u2019t know how to poltergeist the theater even if she wanted to. Well, she had a guess, but it involved summoning more rage than she ever possibly could. But that slasher movie! Ooh. After suffering months \u2013 it played for months \u2013 of seeing her own murder butchered<\/em> on the screen, (double meaning absolutely intended) revenge was definitely considered. In the meantime, she could still project her consciousness down like a reverse periscope and observe movie theater life. She could haunt the chair where she died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut what can you do with a chair? It\u2019s just a chair.\u201d She complained aloud to herself. The stupid thing was bolted to the floor. She could flip the seat up and she could flip the seat down. The theater had painted it, removed its neighbor chairs, and put a commemorative plaque on the wall nearby. She could sit in it, but she didn\u2019t need to. She tried a couple of times flipping the seat down while theater patrons were looking at it or sitting nearby. It freaked them out. She didn\u2019t particularly enjoy freaking people out. A thick restrictive invisible fog closed in around her near the Kill Zone. A quick anecdote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she was in school, she found her desk likewise bolted down. Ethel\u2019s feet \u2013 her white knee socks inside brown leather Mary Jane shoes \u2013 floated above the floor when she sat at her desk. She swung her legs, alternating left and right, but was unable to touch the floor unless she slouched way down. Ethel and her classmates often compared each other\u2019s success in life using the metric as to who would be the first in class to touch their tippy-toes naturally to the floor. Slouching was cheating. The girls knew deep down that the height\/growth rate era of equally-matched-physicality with the boys was soon to arrive, summit, and fade away. Well, not so much the \u201cfade away\u201d stage. That was too far out of sight. Ethel ranked as the most diminutive of her class. She just couldn\u2019t wait for the growth spurt that her Mom and Grandma promised was soon to arrive. If for no other reason that she could shove boys and make them fall down. That would be a glorious time to be alive, she expected. The thought gave her \u201cants in the pants.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During grammar studies, the teacher distributed stencils with capital and lower-case cursive letter shapes punched out. The stencils came in heavy card stock strips. The intent was to place the stencils atop sheets of paper and write out words like \u201cEthel\u201d and \u201cbucket\u201d and \u201cfish.\u201d Then move on to sentences such as \u201cEthel has a bucket of fish.\u201d Or \u201cJane and Spot run fast.\u201d The upper case \u201cB\u201d didn\u2019t have the normal double holes, so you were on your own crossing the middle divide of the letter with your pencil tip. The lower case \u201cg\u201d was inexplicably weird.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The point is, a few months later, after Ethel died, she thought of those details. She didn\u2019t have to worry about touching her feet to the floor of anything anymore. That<\/em> was bittersweet. She had no problem looking down on boys or grown men for that matter. Lots of men from the community and church, it turned out, had bald spots that she had no idea even existed. But even though she received a few moments of travel to her friends and family in the wake of her bodily dislocation, and even though she got a peek at her own funeral, when it came time to leave the planet or stay, she chose to stay. She had plans. She had playdates scheduled with her friends; her crew; the gang at the movie theater. She wasn\u2019t yet the group leader, but she was moving up the ranks. She was the dadgum treasury secretary! She couldn\u2019t bear to leave behind her snot-faced compatriots: Little Joe, Sneaky Pete, Dottie, and Slugger. The boys wanted to save up and buy materials for a soapbox racer. The girls wanted to buy a wedding cake; just a generic wedding cake, take it out into the glade behind Our Savior\u2019s, set it on the ground, dance around it singing hallelujah, and then at the count of ten, kneel and smash their faces into the cake simultaneously. Both sides agreed that each other\u2019s plans had merit. And just maybe, if they collected enough coins, they could afford to do both: Both wedding cake and<\/em> soapbox racer. The debate raged on, she didn\u2019t want to miss it, and so she stayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She rose up on day four and plugged into her perch. She felt it happening. She didn\u2019t fight it. It reassured her that something<\/em> was happening besides just wandering around in an incorporeal state. It was like she was a lamp and here, finally, was a plug. Therein she found the Whispers, the Knowledge, and the Rules. Ethel had chosen to stay Earth-bound under the assumption that she could talk to her compadres every so often. But no, and here returned the metaphoric stencils: Two weeks post-mortem, Little Joe finally showed up at the theater with his parents. Before the picture started, they paid their respects to the chair. Ethel, overjoyed to see her buddy, dropped her eyeballs and voice down into the auditorium, got right in front of Ol\u2019 Joe, and \u201cWhack!<\/em>\u201d there was the stencil. She wanted to say, \u201cHey Joseph, how you doing buddy?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s time to go looking for change,\u201d is all that came out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s time to go looking for change.\u201d It came out again. She knew it sounded creepy. Ethel read the reaction on Joe\u2019s face and was saddened to see his complexion go greenish-white. Tears and wails for \u201cMommy\u201d caused the Little Joe family to leave The Galaxy in a hurry. Sadly, if you wanted to project your consciousness down and do some light haunting, you could only do or repeat things you said or did in the few moments before your death. You couldn\u2019t comment on current events. This was a \u201cRule\u201d and continued experimentation over the following months yielded similar results. Trying to make contact with anyone in the theater was like moving through a fog-zone tunnel walled with grammar stencils. Each stencil was a punched-out sentence \u2014 one of her own quotes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI found two pennies, two dimes, and a nickel.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGet under those rich people in the third row.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy hand smells like melted licorice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The e\u2019s, d\u2019s, and p\u2019s (among others) all had their center shapes in place. Pushing any other words through the veil proved nearly impossible. \u201cGiving-up\u201d on communication with theater patrons and employees eventually seemed to be the best course of action (or \u201cinaction\u201d in this case). Conversely there turned out to be some communication available with other spirits when she relaxed and kept her head plugged into her slot in the sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This left movie watching. She enjoyed all the genres, as long as the movie was good. Black and white vampire and gangster movies disappeared for a few years. Color film eventually led to the reveal of actual blood on screen. The crazed monsters and criminals came back in vogue and \u201cBlood\u201d was there waiting to join forces with them, like peanut butter and bread finally meeting up with jelly. She watched the newer horror movies, but usually only once. \u201cBloody Down\u201d came along like a slap to the face. Definitely a \u201cone star\u201d review. Traffic patterns were more interesting. Boys and girls tongue wrestling in the balcony were less disgusting. The rabble outside the bar across the street was way more entertaining. When the movies stunk, Ethel\u2019s attention turned toward street life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one called Laura was an inch taller than the other one; something in the neck and the legs. She looked to have blonde hair (the roots were showing) but it was dyed black with streaks of purple and pink. She had multiple facial piercings, which at first, broadly speaking (in the 80s and 90s), Ethel didn\u2019t \u201cget.\u201d But, like those in the land of the living, over the last couple decades she found them novel. Laura\u2019s went: Lip hoop, nose hoop, eyebrow hoop; bing, bing, bing\u2014right in a row. Those were the mainstays. In the summer she wore t-shirts with cartoon characters displayed. In the cold she wore stretched out sweaters and sweatshirts with hoods; ratty, some… maybe hand-me-downs. Always darker colors. Dark lipstick. Crazy fingernail colors. She wore skirts seemingly from every decade possible and Boy-O, Ethel had seen them come and go. Then came the skirts with the leggings; solid black, white and black striped, and one pair of red and white barber pole striped leggings. She wore canvas shoes or black boots and walked with a bounce in her step. \u201cShe would have made a good flapper,\u201d Ethel thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laura oftentimes had a bag with her. Sometimes parents with children would scamper up the street, this way or that, within Ethel\u2019s purview. Kids would visit The Galaxy to watch animated movies and Ethel would watch along and ache terribly. It delighted her a few decades ago when little children suddenly started wearing Teddy Bears and other cushy stuffed animals on their backs like backpacks. It was revelatory when these same packs were demonstrated to have zippers and indeed held secret pockets and chambers in which children could store their crayons, artwork, and school papers. Not to mention tiny portable boxes of apple juice and graham crackers. All items stored inside a chubby Teddy Bear. Genius! Laura, of the \u201cLindy Hoppers Duet\u201d one night included a zippered Teddy Bear backpack with her ensemble. Ethel\u2019s eyes widened at this, but hopeful curiosity faded when Laura sat down with Joy, unzipped the Bear, and produced cigarettes and a lighter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOf course,\u201d Ethel thought. The little ghost made a sour face and stuck out her tongue in a \u201cYuk.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The one called Joy had naturally dark chocolate hair that she twisted up behind her and stabbed through with knitting needles, chopsticks, pencils, etc. Her eyebrows were moderate in thickness centrally but tapered to dagger points each way. She too had piercings all over the place on her face, including the septum! But she wore them with no rhyme or reason. She wore glasses with thin metal frames. She wore t-shirts, some plain white, some plain black, and some \u2014 many \u2014 with printed photographs and matching exclamatory statements. Ethel didn\u2019t eavesdrop on conversations so much as just gather information in a large pile and then ponder upon it in the wee hours of the morning. Being dead gave one a sharpened memory. It took her a long while to puzzle out that these types of shirts were, yes, advertising and that sometimes they advertised music groups and performers. Furthermore, the text and image sometimes were mismatched for humorous, shocking, or artistic effect. Joy had one shirt with a wild looking fellow depicted hitting a police car\u2019s windshield with a guitar. It said \u201cThe Goddamnits.\u201d Joy had plenty of other shirts with swearing on them, but she wore this one the most. It had \u201cTour Dates\u201d and cities listed on the back. For a time, Joy was accompanied by a young man who looked like the fellow on her t-shirt. Ethel wondered if they were the same guy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joy pretty much always wore jeans. She wore big clompy boots in the winter and canvas shoes in the summer. Sometimes she wore the big clompy boots in the summer as well. Eventually, Ethel rightly guessed Laura and Joy were roommates when they began wearing each other\u2019s clothes. This happened infrequently, but it did happen. Plus, they always staggered around the corner and up the street together. This was after the \u201cboyfriend\u201d disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese women could be fine attractive mommies,\u201d Ethel bemoaned, \u201cif not for all those pointy things in their faces. You might as well wear a sign that says, \u2018Don\u2019t Kiss Me!\u2019\u201d Ethel knew she sounded like an old lady in her thoughts, and after all, she was<\/em>, basically. All her friends grew up to be old fogies. Anyway, plenty of men followed Joy and Laura in and out of the bar, sat with them at the caf\u00e9 tables, flirted, gazed at, and (every so often) discretely made comment of their bodies when they were \u2013 and weren\u2019t \u2013 looking. Some of the guys had pierced faces too. Ethel worked out that pierced-face people must like to kiss other pierced-face people and the clacking together of all those piercings must cause a tinkling stimulation to occur, like getting shocked all over the face with static electricity zaps. Which must be a pleasant sensation, or else why would people do it? Ethel wondered what it would feel like to kiss boys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ghost Ethel kept tabs on dozens and dozens of \u201cregulars\u201d within her zone of influence. Joy stood out from the others in that she was one-of-the-only-ones over the years that could see her. Then, after, the past two years most recent, Joy made direct eye contact and seemed to nod as though she understood what Ethel was saying; even thinking! Whole ideas and thoughts outside of the few restrictive phrases: \u201cMy hands smell like melted licorice,\u201d etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Ethel’s Intro” appears in Temple of the Mermaid First Edition (available now) but will move to Laura Laura Phantasmagoria in the next edition. Ethel Cramden was seven years old; forever seven years old\u2014frozen in time and character for eighty-eight years. Her spirit had a perch in the air, suspended aContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3422,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3405"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3405"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3405\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3414,"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3405\/revisions\/3414"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/templeofthemermaid.com\/unicdn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}