They Who Feed on Shadows - Episode 7: The Worry Machine

Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events and contains depictions of obsessive compulsive disorder and generalized psychosis. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.

People have always told me that I need to write my story. They say this as if it’s an obvious choice, like getting a cat a litter box.

Our cats grew up in the Westvale barn and shit in the forest under the stars. They were taken to the vet once, spayed or neutered, given their shots, and tossed back into the raccoon-infested wild with nothing at their disposal but shelter, water, and a metric fuck-ton of Meow Mix. Choice had nothing to do with it. Our barn was the cats’ destiny.

Similarly, writing of one’s human soul is one of those esoteric endeavors where you must let the universe guide you. You know when, and if, the time is right. So I apologize for the delay. But just as I’d rather not write until I’m ready, I’d rather be thrown ass-first into a garden of spiked dildos than have a litter box in our home today.

Zen and the art of kitten domesticity have yet to enlighten me.

I’m writing the ending first. This will be the final essay quoting from the lonesome archives of Dale and Sylvia. For better or worse, they represent the black hole of conclusion from which only love — or perhaps just a very resilient coyote — escapes.

The Worry Machine

By 2008, Dale Colgrave had found the perfect pry-bar to dismantle the floorboards of our family home. He didn’t just invade; he created a weather system of catastrophe that only he could forecast. He turned Sylvia’s obsessive-compulsive mind into a Worry Machine. If the machine wasn’t fed a fresh disaster every week, it would begin to eat itself.

My mother had a natural appetite for fear: fear of other women, fear of money, fear of accidents and genetic disorders, fear of driving with the windows down, fear of losing control. Dale fed that appetite diesel fuel, battery acid, serial numbers, power blackouts and twisted scenarios of Armageddon.

Before we get to the letter below, I must provide some necessary context.

The farm truck — an F-150 my brother purchased — was running fine. That is, until Dale Colgrave volunteered to “tune it.” After he tuned it, the truck sat inoperable.

We used to get real snow in the 1970s and 80s. Feet of snow. Numerous systems were in place at the farm to handle a six-inch storm, which you will see elevated here to the level of an extinction-level meteorological event. No Monroe family plow truck had ever broken down in thirty-seven years. Not until 2008.

Wes and Ray were our groundskeeper and his brother, both of them living out at the property in those days. Wes was one of the first people to call out Dale Colgrave as a gold digger. He used to stand by the garage door, smoke cigarettes, give Dale the most magnificently condescending side-eye, all while petting the dog and whistling a jolly tune. A 61-year-old amputee and Navy vet who loved sunsets, landscape painting, and calling things what they were. Wes saw everything.

Clara was my mother’s office manager, a devout Pentecostal Christian and a lovely human being — the best office manager Sylvia ever had. The paragraphs she has notated with a question mark are the places where she had, to put it plainly, no goddamn idea what my mother was talking about.

This is an exact transcription of what was written, underscores, quotes, and all.

Serial # 73769 (J5)

Clara —

Dale C called again tonight very concerned about “bad weather coming.” He says we are supposed to get snow flurries tomorrow, Friday, maybe Sat. — But Mon. & Tues. we are supposed to get at least 6 inches of snow. He says his much bigger tractor would have a hard time plowing 6 inches of snow off all at once, so if Wes does it on the tractor, he thinks it will require 2 – 3 plowings in the cold.

He’s going to try to come down here Sunday mid-afternoon, to get the snow plow on the truck. I told him Wes doesn’t trust the truck, but Dale wants it “ready to go” anyway.

He gave me a whole list of things to get seen about, some of which have to do with the truck, some with the tractor, and some with the generator. Some of them I know I’ve already mentioned to you, but here’s the list. I’ll copy this note for Ray too, so he can help Wes.

Wes needs to be sure there’s plenty of diesel for the tractor, several of the 5 gallon cans — done

Likewise, if the truck needs gasoline, Dale would like it to have gas in it — done?

He’s worried about the truck not having been driven since William was last home and drove it up to the west end of the house, and says he’d be grateful if the battery charger could be attached to its battery to make sure the electrolytes haven’t settled to the bottom with the truck battery frozen, so it can be warmed up and working when he gets down here (mid-afternoon, if he can) Sunday, so he’ll be able to put in hydraulic fluid and attach the snow plow to the truck — done

He asked again if I have the serial # of the engine on the generator. If Wes got that and you gave it to me already, I’m sorry — I remember leaving you a note about it, but if you gave me the # I lost it — done

I explained why my new phone upstairs won’t work (light off in the office) and he wants me to get “another power strip and a 9 foot cord,” so he can plug the phone in my office into one of the outlets where they can stay charged all the time and stay connected to the light switch (which he says they can do without having to switch the lamps off manually if I can get him the power strip to plug in behind my office couch Sunday afternoon. — done

Did we find the big, orange plastic barrels from H2O District #1? Although Dale says he’ll try to find an old barrel of his to bring down which has already had oil in it, b/c he says if possible the orange barrels should be kept clean for H2O in case the water goes off — ??

He wants me to call John Marley and ask him if he knows an electrician who would know how (& where) to plug the generator into the house’s electrical system — done

He also wants to know where the outside electrical power source is for the house, and wonders if the generator should be plugged into the electrical system there. I will ask William about this. Dale says maybe my generator could be kept in the barn and with a long heavy extension cord, could be plugged into the outside source — ?

So items #5, 6, 7 & 8 are not for Wes & Ray. But I do need someone to get the serial # off the generator for me, for him.

He’s a worry-wart, but I truly appreciate his trying to think ahead for me & help me be as ready as possible for the potential crises around here. If more of his cows have calves in this cold weather he may not even be able to come down here Sunday. But just in case, I want to be as ready as possible to help him help (all of us, really) out

I told him you got the info on the Dead Sea Scrolls & he said to tell you thanks.

Also, he repeated at the end of our conversation to advise Wes to be sure he has plenty of fuel (diesel & gas, I guess) on hand. Tell Wes Dale doesn’t mean to intrude (he said, “Wes’s probably already thought of all of this”), but is just used to trying to keep farm machinery running in cold weather, & fears for us. Thanks SB

Anatomy of a Hive Mind

The total dissolution of professional identity grinds like a massive, rusted flywheel suddenly starved of oil. It cannot stop its own spinning. It whines with the clairvoyant echo of a worry machine being fueled by a predator and greased by a victim. This is a board-certified physician with forty-four years of experience writing “Serial # 73769” at the top of a personal note to her staff, because a former patient has sent her on a mechanical wild goose chase involving a pull-start generator from 1979 that is not designed to be integrated with a home’s electrical system in the first place.

Let’s break it down.

1. The Weaponization of Weather

Six inches of snow, presented as an extinction-level event. Right out of the gates, Dale constructs a siege mentality in which he alone stands between the Monroe estate and catastrophe. This is preposterous on its face — and doubly preposterous because he had already rendered inoperable the singular piece of equipment needed to address the allegedly imminent disaster. A disaster he invented.

2. The Tuning Sabotage

Sylvia’s words reveal a Machiavellian tactic as old as the con itself: create the problem, then sell your mark the solution. Dale “tunes” a perfectly functional truck until it won’t start. My mother then produces a frantic manifesto of requirements to restore the very equipment Dale destroyed — even though it doesn’t work, because he broke it, but he wants it ready anyway.

A 2009 tow truck visit to the mechanic would later reveal that one of the brake lines had been cut, and diesel fuel poured into the gasoline tank and cycled through the engine.

Wes, who called it like he saw it, said he didn’t trust the truck because he didn’t want to get blamed for sabotaging it. Leaning into that kind of daylight reality was the last thing you wanted to do in my mother’s house. Sylvia used it as an excuse to declare Wes mentally ill and possibly brain-damaged from “the war,” and thus unreliable.

She crushed Wes beneath an avalanche of propaganda. She described Dale Colgrave to me as “a blessing.”

3. Serialized Micromanagement

A board-certified psychiatrist transcribing generator serial numbers and battery electrolyte levels for a former patient is not the behavior of a brilliant mind. It is the behavior of a mind that has been colonized by a virus. By the winter of 2008, Sylvia was no longer processing her own thoughts. She had become a stenographer for Dale’s escalating demands, her professional judgment replaced by the granular, grinding logic of his manufactured conspiracies.

I was worried. My brother was furious. Clara was concerned. Marsha the housekeeper was frantic. None of them wanted trouble. They wanted their jobs. The only person not worried was Dale Colgrave, standing behind Sylvia on her speakerphone, breathing lies into her tremulous receiver, Fox News running in the background and a frozen dinner beeping in a nearby, dirty microwave.

4. The Fears For Us Narrative

Her most coercive line is the final one: “He... fears for us.”

By framing Dale’s control as protection, Sylvia justifies his intrusion into every facet of the estate’s operation and coaches her staff to accept his dominance, even though they already recognized him for what he was. She could feel the pushback in the eyes of those around her. She microwaved their skepticism with her wine and Sprite and served it back as concern for their welfare.

Sylvia and Dale had begun to disassociate in unison, like intoxicated European starlings spiraling nestward at dusk. The blinding light of his “pure heart” was, in her eyes, unassailable. This was the pedestal she had cobbled together for him to stand on. He was waiting patiently in the rafters for the perfect moment to turn it into an altar.

5. The Dead Sea Scrolls Non-Sequitur

Everyone knew Clara was a devout Pentecostal Christian. Tucking a thank-you for information on the Dead Sea Scrolls into a manifesto about diesel fuel and battery acid is a non-sequitur of biblical proportions. Between the faith and the doctor, the lines of propriety had been righteously annihilated. This seemingly casual biblical reference illuminates the bizarre pseudo-intellectual hive mind Sylvia and Dale had developed to bypass every moral boundary that remained between them and the outside world. It was the flash of light when you realize your doctor is no longer wearing pants but wants to keep examining you anyway.

The truck would soon be skewered by the sunshine and unmowed tallgrass of 2009. And if you turned your head just right at dusk, you could hear Dale’s fingernails making a deliberate, delicate sound scraping across the chalkboard of the passing seasons.

He wasn’t her protector. He was her grifter. And the first domino was getting ready to fall.

To be continued…

PS — In the interest of fairness and nonfiction, I must confess that since first writing, shelving, and returning to this essay, I have relented and allowed Jane to put a litter box in the utility room for our adopted outdoor cat, Joan of Arc. It got down to -5 Fahrenheit here in Foxhollow and it just didn’t seem right to leave Joan out in the snow. Long live perception.

Jude Monroe

2/18/26

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They Who Feed On Shadows - Episode 6: The Chicken’s Mask

Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events and contains depictions of psychosis. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.

Sometime in the mid-1990s

Fantasy finds me.

A seven-foot chicken is walking out of our house.

It’s a full-body costume with yellow feathers and a molded headpiece that makes the man wearing it look 95% like a huge cock. If he had wings and a gizzard instead of arms and a flat chest, he’d be all the way there.

I stop at the west end of the house and get out of my car to watch. The chicken walks down the brick front steps that lead to the office entrance and plods across the driveway to the patient parking area.

Behind every great cock is an exasperated woman wearing enormous sunglasses. She waits discreetly for her man behind the wheel of a sleek oyster-blue BMW convertible. Her top is up. It’s a sunny day in late May.

This is why I think convertible people are deeply troubled. I’ve seen it before. I don’t know why I’m surprised. Smoke coils out the window from her cigarette. Somewhere, I realize, there is another story waiting to be told about the designated drivers of psychiatric patients.

Her rooster walks up to the car and throws open his wings, presenting himself. He does a little jig. She claps once and shakes her head and flicks her cigarette into our driveway. The pair have a quick, heated exchange. I can’t hear his costume-muffled mumbles.

The woman’s voice is high and bright, however. Like the song of a faraway, fussy bird that is predatory.

From this distance, I can make out the phrase, “You’re an idiot!”

She starts the BMW and jerks her thumb backwards. The trunk pops open. The man visibly deflates, and only now does he remove the head of his costume. I instantly name him Richard. The chicken head is huge. He tries to hold it under one arm and almost drops it. His hair is slicked back and black. I wonder if everything else in his life is this disproportionate. Is he unbalanced? Or just heartbroken? Richard’s glasses are thin-framed and hip. His skin is clean-shaven, gleaming pale in the sun, and I imagine he smells like German cologne.

I wait for him to detach his human head and put it in the trunk also, but that never happens.

After a couple of attempts, he gets his large, taloned feet awkwardly in the passenger seat of the Bimmer and shuts the door on the second try. The woman has been talking incessantly. She continues shaking her head as she drives them off, chiding furiously, a few yellow feathers fluttering from the passenger door of her car as they sail away, convertible top sealed tight under a cobalt dream of a day.

I should pause in moments like these.

But I don’t.

I’m 24 and am employed as a mental health tech at a short-term psychiatric crisis unit. I’m as comfortable with insanity as someone sane is going to get. In the last year alone, I’ve experienced men making mortal threats against my family involving basement-made napalm, a grave robbing, abuse of a corpse, people hallucinating conversations with Napoleon, ghost-sightings, a suicide attempt and an arsonist’s confession.

And that was just at our house.

I’ve also got stories about institutionalized psych patients. But I don’t want to bore you.

However, the chicken…

I had only recently moved home to the farm because there were no professional jobs in Ashridge. It’s a college town after all. So I was living with Sylvia for the first time since high school when this rooster appeared.

An explanation seemed requisite.

My mother’s recent actions have been troubling, so our conversations have been terse. I am using the chicken as an opportunity to talk to the parent I have left.

I opened the pocket doors off the dim foyer and entered the parlor. It was a different house in 1996. The royal pendulum of our family’s grandfather clock reflected the afternoon sun in a prism of gold light that spilled across a spacious blue and white Persian rug. Crown molding, a tufted gray velvet Rococo revival settee, and a fireplace accented by an oak mantle and hunter green tile greeted my eyes. I involuntarily stood there at the entrance feeling the resonant energy of memory. The parlor was my father’s favorite room - artful and timeless, with nods to science, music and the wisdom of good conversation. A square-nailed banquet table covered with books of classical sheet music sat between the couch and the black Steinway grand. My dad’s Prussian blue Cave Astrola 8 looked both industrially classic and refined. The polished telescope towered on its wooden tripod before an antique vitrine which stood against the far wall displaying shining shelves of silver service and 19th century Chinese porcelain. 1970s floor speakers draped with Asian tapestries were positioned on either side of the piano. The speakers framed a colonial-style picture window that looked out over a rear lawn edged by a limestone rock wall that curved around a lone redbud tree. The wall separated the lawn from the forest.

A memory of my father hand-placing those stones unsteadied me. Each stone came from our land.

Finally, I broke out of the drift. I swiftly exited the parlor.

I passed through a soundproof hallway that led to the patient waiting room and knocked on the door to my mom’s office.

“Come in.” Sylvia stopped taking notes and examined me over the tops of her reading glasses. She was in her mid-60’s, hair bobbed short and gray. She wore a purple old lady sweater and practical slacks. A fresh cup of tea steamed on a small table beside her chair. “Oh Jude, hello son. Are you okay?”

This was always her first question.

I walked in and sat on the client sofa. “I’m fine. A chicken just left?”

Sylvia smiled coyly, obviously pleased, “That’s Burt Thomas.”

“The weatherman from Channel 7?”

“Yes. We’ve been working up to this. His moment.”

“What moment?”

“His Tyson sponsorship. He has to do the weather in a chicken suit from the parking lot of a Safeway tonight at 6:00. Say, sponsored by Tyson… and all that.”

“It’s only 2:00 in the afternoon.”

“There were obstacles he needed to work through. His wife perceives it as demeaning.”

“I mean, it’s goddamn ridiculous. He’s a scientist.”

Sylvia paused, “Well, a weatherman.”

I threw open my hands, “A meteorologist, mom.”

She looked at me like I had the brain of a gerbil, “Of course. Like a chiropractor is a doctor. It’s a different time now I suppose.”

I hung my head, “Ugh…”

My mom’s voice pepped up, “Getting back to Burt and the chicken, his wife. Well… she also sees it as an affront to his masculinity.”

I shrugged, happy the conversation was moving again, but feeling sarcastic, “So he’s addressing masculinity issues by dressing like a chicken?”

My mother clicked her pen against the book she was using as a writing surface and rolled her overly big brown eyes. “If only the issue was that rudimentary, or that their sole problem.” She suddenly sounded as if it was all just so basic.

“What did you tell him?”

Sylvia sighed. “I told him to come here dressed as a chicken.”

“How does that help?”

“It’s a professional setting. He’s very nervous around me.”

“I don’t see…”

“Oh, Jude,” she interrupted. “When you’ve been practicing longer, you’ll understand.”

Now it was me rolling my eyes. “Enlighten me.”

“Okay,” Sylvia pointed her pen at the door. “Burt has to stop conflating his sense of self with a costume. I reminded him he’d lose his job if he didn’t.”

“Why would you tell him that?”

“His boss told him. I reminded him of a simple fact. There’s a difference. He committed to the Tyson sponsorship. He has to dress like a chicken. Just once.”

“So…”

Another sigh. “So, I made him sit through his session in a costume. When we finished, I got him to put on his head.”

“I don’t see how that is therapy.”

“Honey, he has to own the costume, intellectualize it. He can’t let the chicken own him. He needed to dispel the charade by embracing it, walk out, and present himself to Janine.”

“I don’t think Janine was impressed.”

Sylvia frowned. “His wife is a textbook case of borderline personality disorder. The woman is constantly testing the boundaries of their relationship by flirting with other men!”

“And your advice was to send him out there dressed like a damn chicken?”

“Yes. It’s crucial that he display agency over his identity with her, even more so than with himself.”

I stood and walked to the door. “Well, I’m not sure. She seemed pretty pissed.”

“She’s a slut.”

“Mom!”

“What?” Sylvia put her reading glasses back on and took a delicate sip of tea. “When I was growing up, we didn’t call women like Janine borderline. We called them what they were, hysterical sluts.”

My hands found my pockets. “Now we’re off the reservation. That’s not even close to a diagnosis. I just wanted to know about the chicken.”

“Don’t be upset.”

“I’m not upset!”

“The chicken is just a metaphor, Jude. I tell these people what they need to hear.”

I couldn’t take anymore. I had turned to go.

“Honey?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“Ugh.”

“The chicken is really just a metaphor.”

“Thanks, Mom. I get it.”

But I didn’t. As I grew to be a young man, I found myself increasingly unable to rationalize my mother’s scorch and burn brand of psychotherapy. Publicly, she bolstered her patients upon the surrealistic pillows of a curated reality, endlessly peppering them with prescriptions, platitudes and therapeutic ingratiations. Privately, however, she spoke of her clients as if they were confused pets in need of a shock collar and some time in the culture kennel. Her people needed a leash connected to someone with a stronger existential grip. Culture was a bead of mercury in the palm of her hand.

In her office library, 1994’s DSM-IV sat adjacent to 1994’s The Bell Curve.

My father would not have allowed that book in the house if he was still alive.

But my dad was a very dead man.

In his absence, pitiful had become a popular adjective with mom.

Sexual exploration was acceptable up to a certain age. Promiscuity was not. Unless you were a man. There was black, there was white, and there was gray, the abandoned puppy of the family. Sylvia was the arbiter of acceptability, and she dispensed acceptability’s definitions to her clients like they were the bedrock of conscious consciousness.

Beware, intrepid souls.

This is the hazard of hiring a psychiatrist to tell you what is right and what is wrong. Words stay with you forever. You can forgive a gun obsessed, arrogant surgeon who hunts baby wolves - if her stitches close your wound. You can forgive an alcoholic cardiologist with three DUI’s - if his angioplasty keeps your heartbeat alive.

But the psychiatrist’s mouth is a scalpel that cuts more deeply and more passionately. Their words are creatures that bed down with you. Their voices massage your dreams. Psychiatric diagnosis is a chimera of science and story. If your storyteller is compromised, the tale itself becomes a labyrinth of half-truths where your sadness is interwoven into the blackness of their madness.

These doctors do not repair broken bones. They tell you how to exist. How to be. A morally balanced therapist, with character and conviction in their heart? This person can save your life. My father was that sort of physician.

“My patients already know the answer to every one of their questions. Especially, What should I do?! I tell them they need less therapy and more common sense.” Dr. Grant Kellor

In 2005, as Dale’s obsession with my mother tightened around her soul like a vise clamping a femur, his own brother sat down at what I imagine to be a stately desk and wrote Sylvia a letter. This letter contained no hidden codes, no secret intimacies, nor fantastical metaphors. It was a simple warning written in the voice of a man who plainly senses danger, and hopes the doctor in the room will too.

Here is that letter.

January 3, 2005

“Dear Dr. Blackmoor

Dale Colgrave, who is under your care as a patient, is my brother. Our family loves him deeply, but we’ve grown increasingly concerned. He’s been struggling to manage his finances and has received several overdraft notices; I’ve enclosed a check to cover his 11-1-04 statement. If you believe additional sessions would benefit him, I’m willing to assist with the cost.

In the last several weeks, two separate people have told me Dale hurt them physically. One is a neighbor woman in her fifties who had a finger bent back, and the other is our mother who Dale has pushed at least twice. I thought you should be made aware of this.

Dale also farms land belonging to our family, but in recent years his delays in planting and harvesting have reduced our yields. He doesn’t seem concerned about these losses. I would appreciate any guidance you can offer about how we might address this behavior constructively.

I am a regional manager for Summit Valley Bank. You can reach me during the day at our branch in Clearwater Bend.

Respectfully,

Jeffrey Colgrave”

My mother replied to Jeffrey Colgrave on crisp office letterhead. She ordered him to stop interfering with the treatment of her patients. She returned his check. Dale Colgrave was allowed to see her for free from that moment on.

The words of Dale’s brother could not be more plain, and perhaps that was the problem. They are the words of a farmer’s son, a bank man who says openly: my brother is hurting people, he’s failing at his work, he’s failing at his life, and we’re worried.

Sylvia preferred the Colgrave voice that spoke in terms she resonated with - dreamscapes of angels, injuries, and flickering, false boundaries.

One letter is a fever dream. The other is daylight.

It wasn’t just danger my mother couldn’t see. She was also blind to sunshine itself.

Be careful when something doesn’t feel right. A higher wisdom is speaking to you.

And should you ever walk out the door in a costume - feathers, scrubs, a saint’s robe - make sure it’s your choice and not someone else’s.

If it’s your doctor’s idea?

Get a second opinion.

They Who Feed On Shadows - Episode 5: Sylvia Says

Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events and contains depictions of psychosis, patient-therapist boundary violations, and animal abuse. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.

Let’s talk about raccoons.

Your parents are supposed to know what they’re thinking. Particularly if they are psychiatrists. Nonetheless, my father came home to the farm one October afternoon in 1980 with a pair of seemingly benign raccoon kits named Ajax and Athena.

These creatures were a gift for my brother, Bill. He was twelve. Bill had the same propensity for animal care as a child that I did for dishwasher maintenance. Outside of rabies and baylisascaris procyonis (raccoon roundworm), which generate eggs in the animals’ feces that can cause blindness and brain damage in humans, adopting coons is a terrible goddamn idea for a multiplicity of reasons.

Raccoons are the urban wolverines of the apocalypse, fur coat locksmiths and escape artists dressed as alley oracles. Nature handed them a mask and said, “Go dine upon the soul of night.”

I was eight when I realized my mother sometimes also liked to sit at a darker table. She wore no mask. She wore a gray pencil skirt, slingback pumps, pantyhose paired with a white blouse, and carried a Rolodex of masquerades in her purse.

Ajax and Athena grew up lovingly housed in an old chicken coop with a nightlight and a wood hatch that swung open exposing a wire-covered prison-like window. I’m not sure what the plan was here. I don’t think there was a plan. Bill lost interest in his pet raccoons after about 32 hours, so their care fell to my parents. And me.

I used to slide food in a metal bowl under a wood cut-out covered in scratch marks. Like a jail movie.

Consuming a diet of puppy chow and isolation, Ajax and Athena quickly grew to be abnormally large and unstable. By the spring of 1981, they had escaped multiple times, always to be found in a nearby tree bisecting a chicken or disemboweling a barn cat in our hay loft. Every time this happened, the creatures had to be live-trapped and returned to their chicken coop.

Ajax and Athena snarled and snapped like the world was ending.
They scared the living shit out of me.

Until their final escape. When they were replaced by something scarier.

My father had padlocked the coons inside over the weekend. It was a Monday morning before school when I discovered they had tunneled through the floor, seized a bantam rooster, and retreated 50’ up the fantastically enormous shingle oak in front of the house. Its huge boughs hung over our driveway then as now.

My brother and father had already gone to school and work.

I rode with my mom on Mondays. No one was home but us. I fed the horses and goats, threw some scratch for the chickens, then ran to the house to report that Ajax and Athena had dug through a 3/4” sheet of plywood and were eating a rooster.

Sylvia had warned my father about the raccoons. She said they were not meant to be pets and should be put down.

My father, more than once while cracking a Coors, had replied, “They’re fine, Sylvia.”

When my mother reached maximum density on an issue, a placid silence drifted over her. Already attired for the office that morning, she marched outside and threw her heels in the grass. She rolled up the sleeves of her blouse and began to climb the tree with alarming agility for someone wearing pantyhose.

I watched from below. I remember her body undulating up the trunk with a caterpillar-like fluidity, white and orange feathers fluttering gently down, and the red stain of rooster blood on the tree as she climbed nearer. Ajax and Athena began to hiss and snipe. They were easily twenty pounds each, and I winced as one of them slashed the back of my mother’s hand.

Sylvia screamed!

She climbed a step higher, wrapped her thighs around the top of the oak, fearlessly seized each raccoon by the scruff of the neck and began mercilessly ramming their heads against the tree trunk. They got a few more scratches into her forearms with their rear claws, but soon went limp. Technically these were my brother’s pets. They weren’t bad animals, definitely not savage. They were just animals. And Sylvia kept slamming their faces against the trunk, seething through gritted teeth.

Until she let go.

The raccoons ricocheted down off the branches and landed in front of me as two bloody-brown heaps of fur with twisted necks. My mom shimmied back down to Earth.

She carefully gathered her heels, nodded at me and said, “Go wait by the car.”

She went inside, rinsed the blood off her forearms, changed her blouse, bandaged her hand, and came back out and put the bodies in the rear of her Chevy Citation.

She then took my chin in her palm and turned my head to meet her eyes. “Don’t cry, Jude. Your father made a mistake. He’s impulsive, it’s not your fault. They’re in a better place. Get in the car.”

I got in the car.

We stopped a half mile down Raventon Road. Sylvia got out, opened the hatchback, tossed Ajax and Athena into a ditch, and we drove away in silence.

I looked over at my mother’s bandaged hand on the steering wheel, and she smiled cheerfully as we turned onto Elderpine Drive heading towards the city. “Now we can get you another kitten for the barn!”

Insanity. To fully comprehend it, one must go a bit crazy. And to completely understand the origins of Dale Colgrave, one must embrace the realities of Dr. Sylvia Blackmoor.

This is my mother’s reply to Dale Colgrave’s letter, written twenty-two years after the vanishing of Ajax and Athena.

October 2003

“Dear Dale,

I wanted to answer tonight rather than wait for Claire to type this out on Monday. Your letter has stayed with me all day, and I couldn’t let my reply linger. Thank you for trusting me with your dream. I know that was not a light decision, and I would never consider any dream of yours silly or bothersome. Whatever you share with me I regard as special, and I take it seriously.

What struck me most was how accurate your unconscious seemed. When two people are on the same wavelength, I’ve long believed that truths can be shared between them, often before either one is even aware of it. If you were ever to come to my home office, you are one of the very few I might invite to sit outside in the grass beneath a tree, simply talking. You and I are both grass people, comfortable on the earth, attuned to it. And, of course, in such a dream, I would urge you to find more opportunities to share your own life and your quiet, unique observations with someone who can recognize their worth. I want that for you.

Your dream also touched something far more private. Over thirty-five years ago, I survived a car accident that left three vertebrae fractured. The pain is constant, though most days I hardly think of it. My husband always worried about my posture, insisted on endless examinations from the Mayo Clinic with the best neurosurgeons in the country. None could “fix” me, and so I learned to live with it. Perhaps you never noticed the bend in my thoracic spine, but it is permanent. Lately, with other chronic health challenges, the pain has flared again. Toxic medications take their toll, and there are days when Claire, my secretary, and Elena, who lives with her family in my home, have hovered like guardians, worried as I struggle even to drive. They are, I suspect, the assistants you saw in your dream. They watch me more closely than I like to admit, sometimes wishing they could call an ambulance.

Forgive me for burdening you with this detail, but your dream seemed to know it all already. That is why I feel compelled to validate its accuracy. Somehow you touched on what I thought was hidden.

Another detail: in your dream you saw books. In truth, I’ve written hundreds of poems over the years - I never set out to write them, they simply arrive. Claire has typed some of them. I think of them as a diary of who I am, my deepest feelings, moments of awareness. I had hoped to turn them into volumes for my sons. Perhaps that is why you dreamed of books, because they carry me in a way no analysis could.

It matters to you who I am beyond my professional role, and I respect that. I sense it is part of how you connect to others, by seeing not only the surface, but also what lies beneath. In this, I am complimented.

As for the mysteries of what you saw, I cannot explain them. There are forms of knowing not yet written into equations, a kind of energy that sometimes flows between those who value one another. Perhaps that is what visited you. Should I ever become gravely ill, I have no doubt my guardian angels would find a way to let you know, maybe even by sending you some of my poems. But I don’t think that time has quite come. My work here is not finished.

So thank you again, Dale, for giving me the gentle gift of your dream. It reminded me that even in my frailties, something of who I am matters, and that is no small comfort.

Take care of you,

Sylvia”

There is a profound difference between therapy and transference, professional care and personal disintegration. By the time this letter was written, my mother had been a psychiatrist for 39 years. Dale’s letter was a predator’s probe. My mother’s response was the breach, the moment a gate swung open that could never again be closed.

These are the five most egregious ways Sylvia destroyed the walls between herself and her patient.

“If you were ever to come to my home office, you are one of the very few I might invite to sit outside in the grass beneath a tree.” Translation: I see your fantasy and I like the pastoral hues you chose to paint it with. I sanction this intimacy. I want to invite you into my private spaces.

“Over thirty-five years ago, I survived a car accident… Perhaps you never noticed the bend in my thoracic spine, but it is permanent.” Translation: Here is my wound. Here is my private medical history. I know you’ll keep it safe. Your dream is prophetic and you are the oracle I have been waiting for.

“In truth, I’ve written hundreds of poems… I had hoped to turn them into volumes for my sons.” Translation: Do you desire more of my secret self? This vulnerability was meant for family, but now it’s my gift for you. Along with the rest of my diary.

“It matters to you who I am beyond my professional role, and I respect that.” Translation: You see the real me. Transference has collapsed. You aren’t a patient, you are a confidant. Your manipulations are empathies I choose to nurture.

“Should I ever become gravely ill, I have no doubt my guardian angels would find a way to let you know, maybe even by sending you some of my poems.” Translation: I am braiding you into my identity by inviting you to my deathbed. This used to be a dream. Now it is a legacy, yours and mine.

Conclusion: This letter is as far from a professional doctor’s response as a thoroughbred Arabian mare is from a Grand Canyon jackass. It is a breakdown. Dale was allowed to rape boundaries. As a result, his manipulations spiraled up in strength like a hurricane over warm waters because instead of countering, Sylvia reframed them as fragments of destiny. Here is my intimacy, my trauma, poetry, validation, and even my mortality.

These gifts were the wind beneath Dale’s pit-stains.

His letter was exploitative.

Sylvia’s was proof of how easily the madman’s script can convert a compromised therapist into the one who confesses, validates, and suckles.

At the end of this day and every day, even the cutest of raccoons should not be tamed. Wildness is hardwired into their nature. Dale was no different from Ajax and Athena, driven mad and improperly cared for until he tunneled through the floorboards of psychiatry. The walls of our medical system could no longer contain him. My mother didn’t slam his head against the trunk. She opened the coop, hand-fed him choice slivers of meat, invited him into the branches and embraced his claws as soft sermons.

Everything trickles down from this moment. Like bodies falling through branches.

To be continued…

They Who Feed On Shadows - Episode 4: The Coming of Colgrave

Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events and contains depictions of psychosis and manipulation. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.

Before I take you further into the labyrinth of our family home and the maze of recent history, it is necessary to do some time traveling to understand how my mother got to the point of getting carried out of her own house in a bag. It is also necessary that you understand the nature of the man who put her in that bag.

Visualize a 6’4” mixed breed, 53-year-old lovechild born to Dwight Schrute, Gollum, and Mitch McConnell. Add sweat, grandpa glasses with Coke-bottle lenses, soiled hunting clothes, and you’ve got Dale Colgrave. I’ve never met a woman who was not immediately uncomfortable in his presence.

Aside from my mom.

Dale’s vapor trail is cologned by echoes of bestiality.

And after eighteen years of attempting to defend my mother and our family land from this backwoods gentleman, I have come to know a few things beyond the superficial. Dale Colgrave wasn’t born as he is, he was produced in Clearwick, a one-tractor town a hundred miles north of Brookford, where fine dining is a Dairy Queen and retail is a liquor store with a gun and bait section. He was raised on a 300-acre farm and became a zealous Lyndon LaRouche follower.

I was employed as a real estate agent when I first met Dale and my mother for lunch in 2007. Unbeknownst to me, he had already been patrolling the dented arteries of Sylvia’s consciousness for five years at that point.

As a psychiatric patient.

We met at an Italian restaurant that wasn’t Olive Garden and sat in a maroon booth. He ordered a giant Dr. Pepper and was introduced to me as a “friend.”

Sitting across from Dale is unsettling.

His mud-brown eyes sparkle like dingy beams gazing at you from behind a disassociated fog light smile.

He asked me thirteen different ways how much money I made.

Given that I’d just bought my soon-to-be ex-wife a car to placate our divorce, was smoking too much weed and eating pathological amounts of take-out? The answer was: not much.

“I do all right, Dale. It’s a lot of stress. The fax machine beeps a lot.”

The things you wish you had said later are always better than what you come up with at the time.

I called my brother, William, after that lunch and told him, “This guy seems like a turd on a log.”

“I don’t trust him,” replied William.

“Better than Ricky Vega?”

“I’m not sure about that.”

Ricky Vega was my mom’s last boyfriend. Ricky drove a T-top Pontiac Firebird, took his Haldol religiously, and also liked guns.

My big brother was always right about Sylvia’s suitors.

With Dale, the first indicator of trouble should have been the fact that my mom called me the following day to ask what I thought. Before I could answer, Sylvia began answering for me, fluffing Dale’s non-existent credentials. She told me that he had dedicated his life to caring for his elderly mother, and that his brother and sister hated him.

They were “very cruel people.”

I remember sighing into my Bluetooth earpiece, “Why are they very cruel people, mom?”

She wasted no time, “They say he’s abusive and a bad caretaker. But he’s not. He’s a devoted son and a brilliant farmer. Did you know he was going to school to create a form of genetically modified grain before he had to drop out, give up his own life, and come back to Clearwick to help his parents?”

I should have done a better job of reading between the lines of this statement.

The future was all around me. I was blind.

People today often ask, “How could this happen to a brilliant therapist?”

The short answer is that Sylvia was always very proud of her intelligence. She also loved fixing broken, charming men and having sexual relationships with her patients. Karma being karma and ego being ego, eventually she was bound to meet a patient who was smarter than she was. Combine erudition with my mother’s propensity for chronic anxiety? The foundation was laid to create a perfect storm of personality dysfunction.

It is possible to describe a person with words. However, the finest description is hollow in comparison to experiencing the person yourself. Nothing I can write will give you a better insight into the consciousness of Dale Colgrave than one of his early, obsessive letters to my mother.

My mother, Dr. Blackmoor, was 70 when Dale Colgrave wrote the letter below.

He was 49.

He had been a patient for almost a full year.

September 2003

“Dear Dr. Blackmoor,

I had a very strange dream a few nights ago. I awoke suddenly, alert and concerned. Because I did not have the sense that this had been an ordinary dream, I found a notepad and wrote down everything I could remember.

At the time, I felt that I should write you immediately because you were in this dream, but now in the light of day, it seems silly. I am writing to you anyway on the remote chance that it might be important.

The dream was in three phases. The first of two I perceived as long and complicated, and were life journey stories with trials and adventures. The third phase was when I found myself going to meet you for an appointment.

After some polite conversation, you seemed to think it was time to be more direct with me. You took me outside, and we were both reclining in the grass under a shade tree. You were earnestly telling me to stop wasting time and start living.

Suddenly, you became ill as if a severe back pain was caused by a pinched nerve from your relaxed reclining position under the shade tree. Your distress was so severe that your assistants called an ambulance. The mood of myself and your assistants was one of extreme worry and concern.

As you were being loaded into the ambulance, I heard someone say something about “fibromyalgia.” (I know this sounds ridiculous. I hope you are amused rather than annoyed with me.)

After the ambulance left, your assistants showed me some books you had written under a pen name. I do not remember your pen name, but I remember there were only 3 or 4 letters in the first name.

There were 4 or 5 or more books of about 100 pages each. Your assistants seemed to be indicating that these books might be of interest or value to me and that I should look through them. They seemed to be offering to show me something very important.

I never saw the faces of your assistants. I was only aware of them at the edge of my peripheral vision, but I heard them speaking clearly. When you first became ill and they rushed to your aid, I perceived them as your office assistants. Later, as they were showing me the books you had written, I began to wonder if they might be your guardian angels. At this point, I awoke suddenly, alert and concerned.

I have no reason to think you might have back problems. I have always observed you to move gracefully and sit with good posture. Conventional dream interpretation theory would say that my subconscious mind was using dream characters as metaphors to illustrate some aspect of my own life. The warning of spinal or nervous system injury was probably meant for me.

I may be a superstitious neurotic fool, but on the remote chance that this was a divine message from your guardians, I would feel better if you took all practical precautions to safeguard your spinal and nervous system health.

I apologize for what must seem like an inappropriate intrusion into your personal life. Please forgive me.

If this was truly a divine message from your guardians, I am sure the words Fear Not would apply.

Dale Colgrave”

When you are born into a family of psychiatrists, it’s difficult not to leave college with a psychology degree. It’s also hard not to see the world in 131 flavors of behavioral diagnosis. Ultimately, I did not choose to go into the family business. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun unpacking the greatest hits of Dale’s letter.

Each line decimates boundaries. Each apology gags upon its own insinuated compliance.

“You took me outside and we were both reclining in the grass under a shade tree.” Translation: I am devouring your limits by placing us in an intimate, pastoral setting I couldn’t get away with in reality. My bad behavior is smuggled in via “dream.”

“Suddenly you became ill… pinched nerve… assistants called an ambulance.” Translation: I’m making you vulnerable while I become the strong observer. I am a master of archetypes. You are now fragile, dependent, and in danger.

“As you were being loaded into the ambulance, I heard someone say something about fibromyalgia.” Translation: Watch me implant seeds of health anxiety about your body. My foresight is special, for you. My concern is unique, for you.

“Your assistants showed me some books you had written under a pen name.” Translation: I’m floating myself as someone with access to your secret self. I alone can see the “real you.”

“I may be a superstitious neurotic fool… forgive me.” Translation: This is classic manipulation. I admit it’s an intrusion, but I do it anyway. By apologizing in advance, I make it harder for you to reject me without feeling cruel.

Conclusion: Dale’s letter was never about a dream. It was a test - a probe to see how much intimacy and authority my mother would allow. This document was carefully crafted while wearing a mask of consideration. His dream narrative was camouflage, a way to cross boundaries under the guise of naiveté. By implanting fear, then stepping in as the chosen messenger, he made himself indispensable. The entire performance was textbook madman behavior gift-wrapped in pseudo-spiritual language and false humility.

The only thing more cringe-inducing than Dale Colgrave’s letter to my mother?

Sylvia’s reply.

It reads like she never saw the trap she was blithely walking into.

And liked it that way.

To be continued…

They Who Feed On Shadows - Episode 3: Mom in a Bag

Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events and contains depictions of elder abuse and hoarding. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.

“Ms. Blackmoor, can you tell me who the President of the United States is?”

“Trump!” responds my mother enthusiastically.

“Can you tell me what year it is?”

“1925.”

The paramedics exchange a quick glance.

“Your son is here. Can you tell me his name?”

“William… no, Jude. Hello, honey,” she says with nonchalant confusion.

Her eyes are glassy and stare past me as she speaks. This is the first time we’ve seen each other in four years.

“Your son has been trying to call,” says Sergeant Jansen.

My mother screws her face up into an expression of naiveté. Innocence is one of her favorite tropes. “Jude tried to call?”

Sergeant Jansen frowns. “Are you able to get and make phone calls with your friends and family, Ms. Blackmoor?”

“I’m blind.”

“Then Mr. Colgrave assists you with calls?”

“I couldn’t do anything without him.”

“Does he let you know when people are calling?”

“Sometimes he forgets.”

I make eye contact with Sergeant Jansen and the female paramedic and shake my head. There is so much trash in the room that only a path leads to my mother’s side of the bed. Dirty clothes spill across Costco boxes. Half-empty Ensure cases, paper plates with dried cookies, Charmin Wipes, and empty oatmeal cream pie wrappers choke the floor. To my left, with a towel hanging off it, stands a china cabinet stuffed with family photos, mementos of another life staring at me like broken stars begging recognition. And I ignore them.

If I look, I will remember.

I will remember this is the mother I used to love.

I will remember this is a woman I used to speak of with honor.

But memory feeds only the saddest of fools. Pride exhausts me, and I feel the creaking weight of the house’s bones upon my shoulders.

I lower my eyes to watch a fat brown cockroach crawl across the carpet in front of my knees and disappear between the box springs.

“Ms. Blackmoor,” says the male paramedic, “Can you tell me what month it is?”

“February. No, March!”

The other paramedic leans down with a flashlight, checks my mother’s eyes, and says, “Pupils equal and reactive to light.” Her tone shifts,“You said you were blind, ma’am?”

“I can see light and dark shapes.”

“I understand.”

“You look like a big lump.”

“Right.”

The paramedic turns to Sergeant Jansen, “A&O X2, it’s on the fence. This is pretty bad,” she says, gesturing to the room.

The male paramedic asks, “How long have you been in bed?”

“Not long,” says my mother. “I was up this morning. Dale cooks me sausages. He made breakfast.”

“Okay. I’m going to sit you up for a second, ma’am. I’d like to check your back.”

“Sure.”

They pull my mother forward and lift her purple shirt, then lay her back down.

“I’m calling it,” says the lead paramedic. He steps around me and nods efficiently at Sergeant Jansen. “Pressure injuries. We have to take her.”

I take one last look at the blood on my mother’s sock and stand to get out of the way before they have to ask. Old candy bar wrappers crinkle underfoot as I walk.

Jane is taking pictures behind us and calls me into my mother’s dressing room.

The framework of the room I knew as a child is still there. Two of the three can lights are missing their bulbs. In the third, a spiraling CFL flickers intermittently in its fixture. The light it produces is weak and blue.

The broad counter of her dressing room vanity sits below a gallery wall of family photographs which hang on the original, sage-green wallpaper from 1972. There are pictures of me as a child, my brother, William, my legal father, Martin, and my blood father, Grant Kellor. Even my grandfather, Admiral Monroe, made the cut, along with my grandmother and my aunts. The photos are askew, covered with water stains and must. The counter still holds my mother’s makeup lights and jewelry box buried under old containers of Jergen’s lotion, Bounty rolls, food wrappers, and towels that look like they were used to polish furniture decades ago. Febreze cans, Ziploc bags filled with prescription medications, and Nature’s Way vitamin bottles colorfully accent the clutter. Every drawer is half-open, crammed with old lipstick, Band-Aid boxes, and hairbrushes. The medicine cabinet is stuffed with orange medicine bottles, too many to count. All the bottles contain pills.

Pills. On every surface.

This is one thing that has been the same since before Dale Colgrave.

The green dressing room carpet is stained and burnt. It’s impossible to say if the stains are from blood, grape juice, motor oil, or teriyaki sauce. A couple of the burns are from an iron. Another burned patch looks like a dollop of lighter fluid was set ablaze and extinguished with a rubber boot. The accordion doors to her closet have been removed from their hinges. Her vanity stool has been replaced by a cheap, weathered office chair covered with a blue towel that looks like it was a curb find.

Sylvia’s closet shelves sag under the gravity of never-worn clothes. Shoeboxes marked glue, string, tape collapse beside unopened bulbs and crumpled garment bags. Dust powders the shoulders of her dresses. A bin of dirty laundry spills across the floor, where slippers, nightgowns, and mismatched pajama parts lie in ruin.

I swallow my pride. I am embarrassed that my wife has to see this. She cannot read my mind. She cannot see my memories of the way these rooms used to be. She has never known anything but the trash.

Jane takes my hand, “Honey, have you been in here?”

I walk around the corner and gaze at the jack and jill bathroom that separates my dad’s old dressing room from my mother’s and immediately cover my nose and mouth. Jane touches my shoulder softly, then leaves to continue taking photographs.

The is where the buzzing sound was coming from.

Six 35-gallon lawn bags of soiled adult diapers cover the bathroom floor. None are tied off. The top diapers, streaked with shit and urine, glare at me. The bags bulge, threatening to tip. Ten, maybe twenty flies buzz about drunkenly. I watch one land, vomit, and eat. A can of Raid sits on the window sill. Hundreds of dead flies line the wall and litter the floor. Only a narrow trail to the toilet is clear.

Above the toilet, a calendar of classic European art hangs frozen in time on August of 1988. This is the month and year that he died. The image is Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) by Gustave Caillebotte. The calendar, the walls, and my father’s vanity all look as though they have been splattered with bleach. The once dark wood of the wainscoting and baseboards are dotted with opaline spatters of an unknown chemical. It is as if someone took a paint sprayer and swung it in a wild, abstract effort to destroy anything of meaning.

Jane comes back in, “You okay?”

“I’m good.”

“We should go look at the rest of the house.”

“Okay.”

My pocket vibrates and I answer the phone, “Hey dude.”

It’s a follow-up call from my brother, William on the east coast, “Hey man.”

“I’m looking at bags of soiled Depends in her bathroom.”

“What the fuck?”

“I know.”

His voice is pragmatic and efficient, “Hey, just remember, the assault rifles should be in the closet of my old bedroom.”

“Okay.”

“Show the cops.”

“I will. They’re taking her to the hospital.”

“Where’s the asshole?”

“A couple of cops have him out in the driveway.”

“That’s a thing of beauty. I hope they arrest him.”

“Me too. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Okay, man, talk soon.”

I return to the hall. Jane has disappeared again into the bowels of the house. She is filming and taking pictures. The curious daughter-in-law / photographer in her can’t help it. I am grateful. The carnage needs documenting, but I have seen most of it before and do not want to take those pictures.

I walk into my brother’s old bedroom. It has been bombed by a plethora of objects and garbage. I navigate around a large cardboard box labeled beef-sausage lasagna and a 24-pack of toilet paper to reach the closet.

The guns are there like my brother said. I pull out a long black case and open it. The firearm inside is an HK416. A young cop pokes his head around the corner and starts watching from the doorway. His body camera points at me inquisitively like a third black eye as I start pulling more weapons out of the closet and leaning them against a dresser. The officer disappears. Suddenly I feel the pressure of time. I hurriedly keep pulling out weapons in cases without unzipping them. They could be AK-47s or AR-15s.

The glistening skull of Sergeant Jansen appears as I am lining up rifle number eleven.

I look up and say, “These are the guns.”

I reach to make it an even dozen, but he stops me with a nervous chuckle, “Okay, we get it. Let’s just put all those back for now.”

“You guys don’t want these?”

“Not now. Detective Piolar needs to complete her investigation.”

I shrug, “Okay,” and begin putting the guns back, wondering about a world where a dozen assault rifles are of zero interest to the police.

“Thanks,” says Sergeant Jansen. “Here comes your mom.” He backs into the doorframe of my old bedroom across the hall to make way.

I step over the box of lasagna and watch as the sweating paramedics carry her past us in a brown polyester bag, each holding one end. The top flaps are closed, so her body is invisible, but I can hear Sylvia’s soft grunts of protest coming from inside. It looks like they are smuggling a gigantic sweet potato down the hall.

“No stretcher?”

That’s how I’m used to seeing bagged bodies leave the house.

“We can’t get a stretcher through this mess,” huffs the male paramedic.

Of course they can’t. The embarrassment returns.

I watch them carry my mother around the banister and down the stairs.

“It’s called a flexible litter,” says Sergeant Jansen, pursing his lips.

“Got it. What hospital is she going to?”

“Lightstone,” he says.

I nod knowingly. Lightstone Hospital is where it all ended last time. Another wave of déjà vu sweeps over me.

“She been there for this before?” he asks.

“Four years ago.”

He nods curtly, “I’m very sorry.”

What else can a reasonable person say?

I make eye contact with the shining lens of his body camera, mumble, “Me too,” and descend into the childhood labyrinth of the great house to find my wife.

For the first time in decades, it feels like we might win.

Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.

The police trucks are arranged in a phalanx 200 yards out as we pull up to the Big House. My brother’s college friends used to call it the Hotel Monroe. The great structure yawns before us like the grand specter of a mystic American daydream. Our family home was birthed as a New England Colonial in 1972 at the dawn of the Me Decade, a conjoined sibling with The Joy of Sex, transcendental meditation, mood rings, biofeedback, and quaaludes. The house was constructed in an era of irony, when cynicism and lava lamps were cannibalizing the idealistic daydreams of the Summer of Love. The hangover was real. Reagan was rising. Agent Orange B-52s were carpet-bombing the subtropical rainforests of North Vietnam, and stateside, Nixon campaigned as the peace candidate.

Enlightenment didn’t stand a goddamn chance.

It took them fifteen minutes to call us because Dale Colgrave was hiding upstairs with my mother. Before entering, the police pounded on all three front doors, again. They called both phone numbers, again. Then they had to explore an 8,000-square-foot interior of formica, wood paneling, sunken living rooms, alabaster yellow paint, macrame wall hangings, ferns, mud-brown appliances, and linoleum that used to sparkle like a diffuse Chablis showroom.

The police moved meticulously through the house from floor to floor.

Cops don’t tiptoe in this scenario.

They announce themselves loudly with weapons drawn, “Ms. Blackmoor, this is the police. We have entered your home and are performing a welfare check. Ms. Blackmoor, this is the police. We have entered…”

“It wasn’t until we were a few feet outside the bedroom that he appeared,” an officer tells me. He is stocky and short, wears Oakleys like his boss. He shakes his head as we approach. “I’m sorry.”

He casts an eye further up the driveway where two other cops are flanking Dale Colgrave under the low-hanging boughs of the grand Shingle Oak that sits centered before the house. Future bonfires of dead landscaping and broken lumber also sit beneath the tree, longingly awaiting a match.

The winding brick and mortar sidewalks have crumbled and shattered, and it’s hard to say now what is brick and what is lawn. I use the word lawn loosely. What used to be a manicured, edged, and irrigated advertisement for John Deere mowers and Kentucky Bluegrass is now a pock-marked maelstrom of weeds accented by the deep, muddy divots of truck tires. Sections of metal gutter hang free and forlorn. Paint is peeling off the wood rot white trim, and the cedar clapboards dangle like the gray riven ribs of a whale slaughtered long ago. Piles of firewood, half-covered with cheap blue tarps, are stacked where cars used to park. Two Ford Pickups, one from the 1980s and one from the 1990s, sit abandoned in the field. Their windshields are the color of cobweb. The spring meadow grass frames their dull and duller red paint as though the trucks were intentionally placed for staging a Midwestern junkyard photo exposé.

But it’s the east end of the house by the garage where my father used to park his black German sedan that truly evokes the desecrated energy of rotting human values, which have turned the dreamscape of my childhood into ash. Everything we used to be is broken down and scattered amongst the carcasses of multiple dead lawnmowers and a window air conditioning unit, piles of fungus-encroached leaves, and lichen-touched waste bins that desperately want you to know they once had a higher purpose.

Trash is everywhere I look.

I grip Jane’s hand as we walk through this catastrophe and am suddenly grateful that my father has been dead for 37 years. That is the nature of the spiral, though. He sees the disaster through his son’s eyes.

One of my mother’s housekeepers foresaw this spiral.

Rosa Delgado took over for her parents in 1992. Mr. & Mrs. Delgado were first-generation immigrants who arrived on our doorstep in a syncretic state between worlds, with one foot in the native history of the Kichwa, and the other lodged in the pointy rooms of Imperial Spanish Catholicism. Mrs. Delgado Senior used to leave curated piles of coyote bones in our attic to appease the dead. And it was Rosa herself who was found putting salt on pennies behind the basement refrigerator that used to belong to my father.

Five years after my dad’s death, she told my mother she had a vision while cleaning the refrigerator, “One day, your husband say this place will turn to splinters and fall.”

It wasn’t just the Delgados who were seeing my father’s ghost. Many of my mother’s psychiatric patients reported seeing a tall man in a gray suit with a cane walking across the meadow as they drove onto the property for their sessions with her. My mother had a prescription pad for schizophrenia, manic-depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, insomnia, hallucinations, mysticism, killing an acid trip, and even a pill to take the edge off one’s own personal Jesus. Ghosts were no problem either.

What she didn’t have a pharmaceutical for was sociopaths.

Jane and I don’t pause to look at Dale Colgrave as we approach the house. We don’t have to. We’re quite familiar with his never changing aesthetic. His vibe is gun-toting, gold-mining, real sweaty 70-year-old hillbilly. Only Dale and his grease-blue mechanic’s shirt know where all the bodies are buried for sure.

He is unusually tall and watches us over the heads of the policemen guarding him as we walk together across the yard. I can feel the smirk on his face radiating through his bulging transition lenses that warped the empty eyes behind them. When he looks at you, it feels like hot spit running down your neck.

We enter through the front door into the grand foyer. The first thing I notice is the smell of urine and dusky, stale shit. Then my eye catches the gracefully arched brass headboard that used to be attached to my parents’ bed. It is now standing in the living room leaning against a tufted chair, as out of place as an albatross reclining on a velvet footstool. My father’s Steinway grand piano gazes angrily at the headboard. The piano sits before the picture windows at the back of the house, half-covered by a bed sheet with an orange stain.

The stairs still have their original carpet from 1972.

I imagine my parents looking at swatch samples named things like Verdant Cascade, Moss Motor Inn, and Ficus Mist when they selected it. They went with Verdant Cascade, a medium-pile, mid-tone jungle green with a hint of avocado. The main stairway is littered with reckless stacks of unopened junk mail and bills. Some of the envelope heaps have been there long enough to gather their own dust. Newer past-due notices from credit card companies and months-old property tax bills, Cabela’s statements, Vitamin-Shoppe catalogs, and supersaver coupon packs are stacked on the bottom treads. It is like walking past a graveyard for my mother’s once immaculate credit score and thrifty saving habits. She used to impress these virtues upon us as children.

But we are children no more. There has been much death in this house. I can feel its salacious fingers probing the fetid air I breathe. After a pause, I hurry up the stairs, suddenly fearful that I too will be captured by its vampiric touch should I linger too long upon any one desecration.

In the curving hallway that follows the minimalist oak handrail and Colonial balusters all the way up from the foyer, the signs of hoarding begin, just out of sight. It is as though Dale Colgrave stood in the foyer and made sure that someone walking in wouldn’t see. There are cases of Coke, boxes of powdered donuts, five pairs of unboxed, unused hunting boots, galoshes, jugs of cranberry juice, hundreds of vitamin bottles, and stacks of Kirkland paper towels, adult diapers, and toilet paper. The second-floor carpet is a lighter green, almost yellow. It shows the wear. It shows the stains of unknown sugary substances. Even the Persian print runners are soiled and muddied.

The original antique furniture is interspersed with the garbage and clutter. A 19th-century rough-hewn walnut dresser stands at the top of the stairs. A leather-topped partners’ desk stands to our left. Both are covered with leaning, dust-catcher photographs of my family, including images of my grandmother and aunts on my mother’s side. There are photographs of my dad, my brother, my mom, and myself on family vacations from the 1980s: Maui. Germany. Switzerland. South Fork, Colorado. Red River, New Mexico. Esalen. San Diego. Zihuatanejo. And there are portraits of us taken around the farm itself. I shot some of the newer photographs personally, but those are from the 1990s. Other portraits hang on the nicotine-sunlight-yellow walls. Every reasonably accessible space is filled with the eyes of ghosts.

Despite the plethora of photographs, which almost make us seem happy, I notice that portraits of my father’s family do not exist. Not one uncle, cousin, or grandparent from the Kellor clan can be seen. My mother has erased them from time.

Jane and I slide past a cardboard box filled with Milk-Bone dog treats, though all the dogs are dead. We walk down the hall that leads to my parents’ bedroom. The hallway is lined with two solemn-looking policemen. One of them is the kid with glasses. He looks sad and confused, as if he can’t believe places like this house exist. The reality of it all has tarnished his young soul.

Outside, the faint, approaching wail of an ambulance rolling down Raventon Road can be heard coming closer. The sense of déjà vu is palpable. The odor of piss grows more potent with every step we take.

As I walk into the master bedroom with its vaulted ceiling, I hear the buzzing of flies coming from my mother’s dressing room to the right. Three officers surround the bed to my left. One of them is propping my mom up with a pillow. They turn as we enter and make way, pressing their lips together.

Sylvia is gaunt and her hair is spectral white. Her skin is the color of chalk. She is wearing stained green sweat pants and a purple shirt that hangs loosely, showing the skeletal map of her chest and blue collar bones. The bare mattress and box spring she lays upon are sitting on the floor. There are stains underneath her. She has no blanket, and the sheets are cluttered off in one corner of the bed. One of her front teeth is missing, and I can see old blood on one of her socks.

I ignore the trash, rotting food, and crawling insects.

I fall to my knees at the foot of the bed, doing my best to not cry, “Mom, can you hear me?”

“Jude, is that you? My sweet boy?”

“Mom, what has he done to you?”

Her voice flickers with static, “What do you mean? I’m just fine. Everything’s fine.

How are you?”

To be continued…

This is the first installment of They Who Feed on Shadows, my nonfiction series exploring family, power, and the failures of the American justice system. Each episode pulls from lived experience.

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Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.

Do you remember those lavender dusk summers that heralded the genteel darkness of night rising across the American prairie? When the skyscrapers of Brookdale were still a faraway jungle of mythic jazz and glass? I want to ask the cops this as Jane and I step from our truck. I want to tell them that once upon a time this place was filled with a song of the whippoorwills cooing in stereo at the edge of a one-lane starry road. Bobcats roamed. Coyotes patrolled the salt-lick under the persimmon tree. We learned to fear the copperhead coiled like a poison serpent beneath the fractal rays of the sun.

Raventon Road has always dead-ended where your leather-wrapped steel toes stand now. It cut through the ghost-signal deciduous forest like a glorified smear of gravel, purpose and tar. There was no pavement, and you should know it wasn’t always this windy in Westvale, boys. I used to ride my pony straight into a 1987 small-town vortex come Friday night. You could set a metronome against the andante clip-clop of horse shoes moving across the soft asphalt abdomen of the hills. I’d grab a slushy at the first sign of civilization, a 7-Eleven glowing like a neon quasar two miles down Elderpine Drive at the town’s eastern edge. I’d ride on south to the dawn of strip malls and tie my pony to a wood pole outside Videoland, soon headed home with a 3-day return VHS tape tucked into my saddle bag. That’s the way the red-tailed hawks used to arc across this cobalt bowl of sky and time.

The place where you stand used to be heaven’s analog.

We are not the trash you see laid before you now.

But this is what greets me.

Late April of 2025.

The untamed meadow grass is already taller than a soldier, taller than your spinning LED fantasy club, meaner than the best-laid plans of my forbearers. The March daffodils have bloomed and perished, and the grand wooden gates my father built have collapsed under the entropy of ordained law. Their skeletons have been chewed to death by wind, rain, and the fibrous claws of winter’s paralyzing hymnal. The split rail fence is defeated, its cedar spine crushed. Shotgun splatter and bullet holes and avant-garde graveyards of lichen are all that remain of his NO TRESPASSING sign. Only the hickory tree to which it is bolted seems immune. It has eaten the metal and choked down the fine, hard lines of our fleeting halogen eternity.

I want to hug my wife and cry for all that has been taken from us.

But there is no time left for that crap. There is no time.

This is the present.

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A bald sergeant in Oakleys confidently approaches me with a body camera wedged between the armor plates that cover his heart. “Are you Mr. Monroe?”

My mind rereads the email I received from Detective Piolar an hour earlier: “Hi Jude, Officers have been sent out to check your mother's welfare and have some questions. Could you please give me or the officer on scene that was trying to reach you (Officer Jansen) a call as soon as you can?”

These words and a phone call brought me home. I had not stood on my family’s land in four years. The police believed my mother’s boyfriend and caretaker was hiding in the house.

One of her former psychiatric patients, Mallory Stroud, called in a welfare check earlier that afternoon. Ms. Stroud had been sending me text messages like this since January:

“Hi, I used to see your mom in the 90’s for bulimia. Your mom could be dead... This man is abusing her. I am sick. Is she eating? I forgot that your last name is Monroe. I asked Dr. Blackmoor the last name of her husband and her kids. This guy turned into the devil! He stood over me and said... are you going to cause me problems? I freaked out and took off. Does he own weapons? She is being forced against her will! Your mom defends him out of fear. She is sitting in a chair in a dark cluttered house just waiting to die. He carries a huge zip lock bag with a TON OF CASH???! He stood at the door watching me leave. Does he drug her!?”

For Jane and me, this is not news. Actually, my mother drugs him. And of course, he has weapons. Nineteen assault rifles. You can’t say that to a former patient, though.

I snap back into the moment, “Yes, officer, I’m Jude Monroe.”

“Mr. Monroe, I’m Sergeant Jansen. We believe your mother’s associate is inside the house, a Mr. Dale Colgrave?”

“That’s him.”

“He’s not responding when we knock. I understand you reported there are firearms in the home?”

“There are. He keeps them in the front bedroom closet by the chimney. It’s the room with a view of the driveway.”

“And he has made threats against you in the past?”

“He told me in 2021 he was going to put a bullet in my forehead if I came out here again.”

“Have you been asked to keep out of the house by your mother?”

“No.”

“Did you bring the keys?”

“Yes,” here you go.” I hand him the keys to my family’s estate.

The officers behind him are younger, coalesced around a Brookdale Police F-150 and two black-and-white Ford Explorers. The kid among them appears like he just graduated from the academy. He has round glasses and curly brown hair. The day is hot and bright, and the boy squints constantly. He looks surprised to find himself standing there wearing armor and a Glock 17 instead of clutching a PlayStation controller in his parents’ basement.

The sergeant speaks for his crew, “All right.” He nods at my wife, “Ma’am.”

Jane extends her hand, “I’m Jane Monroe.”

Unlike the kid, you can tell the sergeant has seen some shit.

He shakes Jane’s hand efficiently and repeats himself, “Ma’am, Mrs. Monroe. I’d like you and Mr. Monroe to pull your vehicle back to the entrance to the property and remain out of the line of fire. One of my officers will call you when it’s clear to come up to the house.”

I grew up here. There have been pastoral days. And there have been days echoing with the sound of fully automatic Uzi’s, the screams of armed lunatics, ambulance wails, and squawking squad cars lining our quarter-mile private drive.

Jane wasn’t around for all that, but she knows the drill. She met my mom in the early days of our romance.

We exchange a glance and look back at Sergeant Jansen, “I guess we’ll wait at the turnaround.”

Jane adds, “Sergeant, Jude’s mom, Sylvia, told me that Dale Colgrave would blow away anyone who came over this hill that he didn’t like.”

Sergeant Jansen pauses, 2:23 afternoon sun gleaming off his Mr. Clean head. “When was this?”

“2021,” says Jane. “Right after we got married.”

“Okay. Let’s have you two go back to the turnaround.”

Jane and I reverse our truck 200 yards down the driveway and pull off to one side of the asphalt circle my father installed. He built the circle so the curious would have a place to turnaround when they arrived at what used to be the gates to our property. It served that purpose. The turnaround also became a weekend make-out spot for kids from Flintwood Northwest High. One of my Sunday chores used to be picking up the beer cans they left behind, those hot summer night talismans of an auto-reverse good time soundtracked by Steve Miller and Aerosmith.

We get out of our Toyota and open the liftgate to wait for the call. Before sitting down, I walk into the center of the turnaround and peer at the roofline of the house poking over the trees and tall grass.

Jane admonishes me, “Babe, get out of the line of fire.”

Jane is my whole world now. She is my family. Along with our rescued pit bull, Sadie-Blu, back at home in our Foxhollow bungalow by the lake where the lawn is still mowed and the tiger lilies bloom.

I return to the truck, lean into Jane, and hold her hand in mine. Only then do I feel strong enough to look around. The meadow is encroaching on the pavement. The limestone boulders that lined the turnaround’s edge have already been buried in graves of tall grass. A poison ivy vine is wrapping itself around a CCA 2x4 leaned against the section of split-rail that hasn’t collapsed yet. The board is warped and looks like it was abandoned hastily in a fit of well-intended repairs that never quite made it. A wheeled 55-gallon Waste Management recycling bin lies on its side covered in residue. Ensure shake containers and old dog food cans lie beside it, spilled and unrecovered. It’s obviously been there at least a year. Maybe two?

Five silent minutes pass as we chat in the familiar, protected tones of a husband and wife.

Ten minutes pass.

Fifteen.

“What do you think is going on in there?” asks Jane, becoming impatient.

I shake my head, “Nothing good.”

My iPhone rings. Once, twice.

“Answer it!”

My breath is measured as I hit speakerphone, “Hello?”

“This is Officer Jaymore. We found your mother. She’s alive.”

“Dale Colgrave?”

“We’ve separated them. Officers have him outside on the driveway. You can come up.”

“Thank you.”

I disconnect and look at Jane. She smiles wistfully. A strand of blonde hair blows across her face as she hops down from the truck in a black sundress. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

Jane brushes the hair from her green-lensed aviators, “You ready for this?”

“Definitely not.”

Welcome to They Who Feed On Shadows.

To be continued…