When I was growing up, my mother heard disembodied voices and told me our house was haunted, and she often spoke of Mother Fraser, the woman who adopted her when she was four years old after her own mother died in 1927 of consumption in Brisbane, Australia, telling tales of a woman who, in my mind, became a character out of Dickens, not just a character, but one of the great villains, like Uriah Heep or the Murdstones from David Copperfield, or, even worse, Daniel Quilp, the vicious, grotesquely deformed moneylender from The Old Curiosity Shop. And I learned, early on, that my mother was a bit broken with a hole in her heart, occupied by this humorless woman who I never knew, a woman who lied to my poor mother when she was a child, telling her that she was really her own biological daughter who had been kidnapped and returned to her for proper care and a strict upbringing. But this haunting was nothing new for my little brother and me. We spent a lot of our time in our attic bedroom reading great books, telling each other stories, and talking about monster movies that we had seen at our local movie theater in North Kansas City, and my brother swore that the monsters all lived in his closet and came out at night to stare at him. I had a healthy imagination even then, but I wasn’t convinced of that; however, if pressed, I could image Mother Fraser in the back of the closet, deep in the attic crawl space sitting on the cold floor with Daniel Quilp, playing cards and planning mischief.

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Terry Allen is an emeritus professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, where he taught acting, directing and playwriting. He is the author of five poetry collections: Monsters in the Rain, Art Work, Waiting on the Last Train, Rubber Time, and Preserving the Past for the Present. His poems have appeared in many journals, including I-70 Review, Third Wednesday, The Main Street Rag, Still Point Arts Quarterly, and Popshot Quarterly. In addition, his work has been nominated for an Eric Hoffer Book Award, a Best of the Net Award, and a Pushcart Prize.