The Nightmare Of Russell Pond

The boy’s stepmother vanished when he was ten years old, never to be seen clothed with flesh again. She was in her mid-twenties when she disappeared with thick dark brown hair parted on one side past her shoulders, and starchy white skin that seemed to him infected with chill bumps most of the time. He could not remember her wearing anything more than a short scissor cut white nightgown or yellow raincoat, her chalky white legs seeming long and fleshy for someone who wasn’t but a head taller than he. Two or three times a day she powdered her cheeks with red rue and painted her eyelashes black, and then smudged a little green over her eyelids. She did that even though she rarely left the house, which was a Cooper County shack without indoor plumbing and electricity. He remembered her either in bed with his father or wandering through the two room shack, a rolled cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Smoke and steam always hazed her, either in puffs above her head or with layers of thin transparent clouds trailing her like rolling hills. Aloof, she seldom looked at him. But when she did, it was with contempt. He reminded her of his real mother.