1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose

that Sean is up in the air but that he will probably be coming back.
    â€œWhy is Sean up in the air?” Jack asks me. He’s four. I try to picture what he is picturing. Sean. Up in the air.
    That sounds even cooler than living upstairs. I guess it sounds as though he’s dangling under a helicopter. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder how we’re able to communicate with our children at all.
    Katherine asks me about the specific fates of two other friends, Juliet and Nadia. I tell her that, truth is, I have no idea what happened to Juliet and Nadia. Not a clue. Vanished. They’re just gone, and we don’t know where to or for how long and maybe we’ll see them again and maybe we won’t.
    I don’t know.
    Kids don’t work so well with uncertainties.
    â€œWill you find Nadia for me?” Katherine asks.
    I tell her yes, I will find Nadia. But I don’t know where Nadia is. I can’t even find my barber; how am I going to find some kid who has been cast to the fates?
    Where did everybody go?
    Man, it’s a hell of a thing that went down here.
    Juliet, Nadia, are you out there? Somewhere? Anywhere?
    If you are, Katherine says hello.
    And good-bye.

Groundhog Day
12/18/05
    We have been waking up with Groundhog Day Syndrome for a long time now, dragging ourselves out of bed with a sense of dread that the clock has stopped, the calendar pages don’t turn, and nothing is changing.
    We’re Bill Murray. We’re Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain. We’re trapped in an Escher print, walking down steps that actually lead up, down straight paths that lead us full circle.
    Okay, for the four of you still reading, I’ll stop with the cultural metaphors. You get the point. I get the point. We all get the point.
    The point is: it’s fourteen days until January.
    Wait until January, people in New Orleans say. You hear it all the time. Things will get better in January.
    It’s our mantra of hope, optimism, faith. Or maybe delusion.
    Maybe because we’ve been Saints fans for so long that we are willing to buy futures when the market is flat. So eager to accept promises we don’t really believe.
    It’s always been “wait until next year,” and we buy our season tickets and jerseys with the name and number of our new star player—the guy who’s going to take us all the way!—and, like Charlie Brown, we keep running to kick the football and Lucy pulls it away.
    Again and again. Wait until next year.
    But there is merit to the current theory of an impending turn of events for the positive, empirical evidence to shore it up. For New Orleans, that is; the Saints, I’m afraid, are a lost cause, and they don’t make levees big enough to plug that breach.
    But January holds the promise of a sound that has been missing from our city for too long: the music of children. Lots of children.
    Sure, there has been a refreshing repopulation of the little critters in recent weeks as schools opened and families trickled home, but the playgrounds still look pretty desolate and there’s hardly ever a line for sugar cones at the Creole Creamery.
    But there are legions of rug rats coming home this week or next or next, when the school semesters elsewhere end and the holidays are over.
    True, my son Jack’s nursery school class will have only twelve of the original twenty kids who were enrolled last September, but I guess that’s a decent rate of return. A start.
    And I think it will grow. The kid quotient goes up by at least three today.
    My family is coming home.
    This is wonderful news from a personal standpoint, but I am also filled with anxiety about this, and immeasurable . . . I guess I can say it: doubt.
    Is it safe? Will they pick up on the air of despondency that seems to have engulfed three quarters of the adult population here? Will they be upset that they don’t have a blue roof like everyone else?
    These