The Last Time I Saw Frank
“Down the Rabbit Hole” by Ashlee Craft
In the months right after Frank died, he appeared to me often, but never in the same form. One time, I recognized him in the bronze statue on an antique lampstand. I don’t mean the figure looked like him—it didn’t have his nose, for example, and this bronze man wore a flat cap and had one leg bent as if he were leaning against the lamp, which was not Frank's vibe at all. But when I saw the lamp in Lambertville Antiques, among old timey desks, warped mirrors, umbrella stands, and wintery landscapes, I knew it was him immediately.
The Frank lamp went into the passenger seat of our VW, the same VW we bought just six months ago when Frank was still alive and annoying though also the love of my life.
I saw Frank again in the face of a young man who skateboarded in the library parking lot. He was a skinny kid in a long white t-shirt, with a flap of hair hanging over one eye, but he was also Frank. This skateboard teen did not look like Frank, but he was Frank—the way he sized up a move before making it, the pull of his t-shirt across his shoulders.
I told no one of these sightings. Part of me knew they were manifestations, but every time it happened, I felt my throat close as if I’d swallowed a bee—Frank, Frank, Frank—Frank in the white swirl of milk in the coffee cup, Frank in the open, freckled face of a toddler, Frank in the black spikes of the cemetery gate.
How many times a day did I used to say his name? Frank, this door is creaky. Frank, did you return the library book? Frank, you left your socks on the floor.
When would be the last time I would say his name out loud?
***
Then, a knock at my door. A woman in a black sleeveless jumpsuit. She said, “I'm a psychic and Frank sent me.”
Of course, she could have looked me up. His obituary appeared in the local paper. I wrote it myself. It was a bit overwrought.
“Is there a charge?” I asked. It’s not like I had a lot to do, but I didn’t want to be a sucker.
She shook her head. She had jangly curls that sprang around her head like semicolons. “I usually charge a lot, but in this case, no. Frank told me to find you.”
She brought me to her apartment. A black and white cat was sunbathing in the front window. The cat was not Frank—not everything was Frank, you see.
She took me into her back room. I guess it was the place where ghosts were summoned. The windows were blocked off by patchwork tapestries. She lit three candles and sat at a table covered in a velvet cloth I recognized from Costco. “Give me your hands.”
We sat in the wavering light. I missed him in every part of my body. My knees, my collarbone, the skin between my fingers. I grabbed hold of her hands. She said, “Close your eyes. Frank will speak through me, but you must keep your eyes closed.”
Do you know how hard that was? Especially when Frank started talking through her. He reminded me of things I had forgotten: a trip to Asbury Park where we saved a Dalmatian who had gotten off his leash, the day I met his mother and wore my shirt backwards, the mosquitos in the lemon grove where we had our worst fight, the fight about whether to lease or buy the VW (he won).
He told me he was very sad to have died and left me alone. He didn't understand how it worked, but it was not an on-time death.
He asked me if I had any questions.
“Where is my wedding ring?” I lost it the day of the funeral. Rather, I may have lost it before then, but I looked for it the day of the funeral and couldn't find it. We had a lax ring policy in our marriage. Neither one of us liked the feel of it on our fingers. But we were faithful.
He was buried in his ring. I now felt its absence on my finger, a nakedness.
“You worry about the wrong things,” he said. Or she said, the woman. Her cadence became more Frank-like with his Midwestern pronunciations. “Check in the basement behind the washer.”
When I left, I pressed a twenty-dollar bill into her palm. I waved goodbye to the oreo cat in the window, who was now grooming itself with one leg in the air like a ballerina.
I looked for him on the way home, on one-way signs, on park benches, in the stern face of a man reading the paper at the bus stop. I thought for a second I saw him in a Rottweiler that trotted by in a pink collar, but no, it was just a cheerful dog.
When I got home, I took off my shoes. Frank had a rule about keeping a socks-only house. It gave me pleasure to continue to follow these wishes, leaving my sandals next to his walking shoes.
I went in the basement. I pulled back the washer. I knelt on the cold concrete. I found two unmatched socks, three quarters and a dime, Frank's handkerchief. I pulled it back further. An un-tripped mouse trap and a chewed-up pencil. Maybe Frank’s teeth marks. I shoved the washer. It stuck. I flayed my hand around underneath, found the impediment. A library book. Faulkner, the one about the family carrying the coffin across Mississippi in the back of a wagon.
I had hoped for a clear answer, even as I saw that the book was not Frank. Nor was the pencil, the park bench, the boy, the lamp.
I felt him vanish from me then.
Nothing ever would be Frank again.
About the Author
Aimee LaBrie's short stories have appeared in the The Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Fractured Lit, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. Her second short story collection, Rage and Other Cages, won the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize and will be published by Leapfrog Press in 2024. In 2007, her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published by the University of North Texas Press. Her short fiction has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize. Aimee teaches creative writing at Rutgers University
about the artist
Ashlee Craft (he/they) is a writer, multimedia artist, photographer, actor, & more based in Tampa, Florida. Their work often explores themes such as surrealism, nostalgia, gender, queerness, mental health, neurodivergence, and identity through symbolism, storytelling, & color.