The piece is based on Robert Frost’s one-act play – narrating one’s stay at a farm overnight, hearing a conversation between mother and son. Unfittingly absurd monologue by the mom accentuates its eerie and creepy atmosphere of on object/spirit up in the attic.

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[Script]

I staid the night for shelter at a farm

Behind the mountains, with a mother and son,

Two old-believers. They did all the talking.

MOTHER:

Folks think a witch who has familiar spirits

She could call up to pass a winter evening,

But won’t, should be burned at the stake or something.

Summoning spirits isn’t ‘Button, button,

Who’s got the button,’ I would have them know.

SON:

Mother can make a common table rear

And kick with two legs like an army mule.

MOTHER:

And when I’ve done it, what good have I

done?

Rather than tip a table for you, let me

Tell you what Ralle the Sioux Control once told me.

He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him

How could that be — I thought the dead were souls,

He broke my trance. Don’t that make you suspicious

That there’s something the dead are keeping back?

Yes, there’s something the dead are keeping back.

SON:

You wouldn’t want to tell him what we have

Up attic, mother?

MOTHER:

Bones — a skeleton.

SON:

But the headboard of mother’s bed is pushed

Against the’ attic door: the door is nailed.

It’s harmless. Mother hears it in the night

Halting perplexed behind the barrier

Of door and headboard. Where it wants to get

Is back into the cellar where it came from.

MOTHER:

We’ll never let them, will we, son! We’ll

never!

SON:

It left the cellar forty years ago

And carried itself like a pile of dishes

Up one flight from the cellar to the kitchen,

Another from the kitchen to the bedroom,

Another from the bedroom to the attic,

Right past both father and mother, and neither stopped it.

Father had gone upstairs; mother was downstairs.

I was a baby: I don’t know where I was.