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I didn't cry or argue. I just stared and he would give up and it do the shopping, furious the whole time. I didn't even feel guilty about it, although I knew it was unfair for him to have the added burden.

"I'm sorry, Ed" was all I could say.

"Sorry does me no good," he would reply, but he swallowed it like bad-tasting medicine and after a while, he stopped complaining and just picked up my list and either got what we needed in a separate trip or on the way home from work.

In the beginning I did get a phone call or two from other women I knew, but after a while, they stopped calling altogether. I suppose that was because I stopped answering the phone or if I did answer, I just listened and said, 'Yes' or "No," but nothing more. I didn't even say goodbye sometimes. They did and then I hung up.

So I knew he was doing another one of those pretendswhen he would come home and tell me about the people he had met who all asked after me. No one asked after me.

Anyway, I remember going into the living room and sitting and starting my knitting and looking at Ed from time to time as he snored or muttered in his sleep, and then, suddenly, there it was: a Realie, sitting at his feet, all crumpled like a decrepit old man, its shoulders caved inward, its arms and legs as thin as spider legs, its head very big, but very, very wrinkled with large black, accusing eyes and lips made of two thick, blood filled veins, smirking at me.

He or I should say it didn't speak. It didn't have to. Its eyes said it all. It said you know all he says is a lie and you know your son is no hero, no young man blazing trails in foreign lands. You know its cold and dark outside and people don't really care about you, don't have the slightest interest in whether or not you

-e even alive, Then it laughed.

I screamed, of course. it was the first time, so I was very frightened.

Ed woke, blinked and sat up.

'What the hell you screaming for? he asked.

The Realie looked at him and then popped like a bubble and was gone. Later, it appeared in the hallway outside our bedroom, still smirking at me.

I told Ed and he stared at me and then shook his head and lowered himself to the sofa. He was asleep again in minutes.

Sometimes, there were two or three Realies at a time. They usually came in when the door was opened, so I stopped opening it and I kept the windows shut tight. I couldn't help it when Ed came home. If he left the door open while he carried in packages, I would scream and run to shut it, but it was always too late.

More and more of them streamed in, each with another ugly truth to tell or remind me about, like the one about my father hitting my mother or the one about Aunt Elsie dying from burst appendix when it should have been easily treated. Her mother distrusted doctors and nurses andwouldn't call for help. She put a hot water bottle on her stomach. She was only twenty-nine years old, and I couldn't believe she was in that coffin and being put in the ground. I was just nine at the time.

Who needed to be reminded, especially reminded by something as ugly as a Realie?

It got so my living room was filled with Realies and when I walked by, I could hear them all chatting away... They often laughed, but it was more like a cackle than a laugh. Some of my earliest childhood nightmares were in there with them, ready to be run on the television screen like a rerun of an oid movie if I glanced through the door.

I walked through the house with my head down. Whenever I went up to my bedroom, they followed. They even followed me into the bathroom. It got worse after Fletcher's death. More of them entered the house, each with a story to tell about him, about some of the other bad things he had done. They loved to describe his death, all the gory details, such as how the truck burst into flames before it hit the water and how he was screaming for me.

Finally, I -went down into the basement one day to get away and discovered they couldn't follow. They couldn't go down. They couldn't go below. I was safe here.

In those days, all we had was a storage area. I put a chair down here and spent my -whole day here in the dank, dark place. Ed discovered that and when I told him why, he sighed, shook his head and then, one day, he started to build all this for me. He moved things down for me and sometimes, he stayed with me.

Eventually, he did that less and less. There were times he left so early, I would only find some food at the door in a carton. There were times he was away .for days. I could tell the passage of time with my cuckoo clock, but I really didn't care what day it was. The only thing that vaguely interested me was how long Ed was gone.

One day he admitted something.

"No one asking about you anymore," he said, and I knew the Realies were still upstairs and now making him stop pretending, too.

'I should take you to see a doctor," he told me on more than one occasion, but he didn't. The Realies made him say it, but that was as far as it went. I wouldn't have gone anyway and he knew that.

Many things happened to me down here and I should have gone up and out to see a doctor and a dentist. I had a terrible toothache one day. It didn't stop no matter what I did, so I asked Ed to pull the tooth out of my mouth. He refused and went upstairs, but not more than ten minutes or so later, one of the Realies sent him back down with a pliers and he did it.

I passed out, but when I woke up, I began to feel better.

"Let that be a lesson to you," I told Ed. 'Never pretend something you know has to be done doesn't have to be done."

He shook his head at me just like he always did and left me. He was gone almost a week this time, and I ran out of many things. It was then that I realized as long as he stayed away from the house, he could stay away from the truth. Out there, on his jobs, away from this village and these people, he could be whoe

ver he wanted again and he could continue to make up stories about Fletcher, even though Fletcher was dead and buried.

Then, one day, I heard more than one pair of footsteps above and Ed came down with a darkskinned woman he called Suze. He said she was going to be our housekeeper and she would look after me and maybe, she would be able to help me come back upstairs.