BEAN SPILLING
ALM No.93, September 2026
ESSAYS
Thirty years after our first encounter, I have my travel bag packed, awaiting the arrival of a man who will save me at the end of the world. We must flee. He knows where to go and how to get there. He told me to be ready via his voice in my head. I still don’t trust him, but I wait. And wait. And wait for him, but he never comes. I hear gossip. The man I think is the human incarnation of him has a girlfriend. Someone has toyed with me in the world I speak to him in, the voices world. No one will tell me what’s going on. In fact, the voices’ questions don’t mesh. Is he my soulmate? Am I to marry? Is it the end of the world? How am I supposed to know? I’ve been told not to trust myself by the doctors. So I drip, drip, drip, spill the beans in hopes of putting the pieces together.
I was eight, asleep with the window open. Sleep is good at that age, blankets safe, but I awoke with a start. I heard my neighbor’s voice. He was coming down the street yelling, “Fuck you!” I sat up and looked out at this tall, wild-haired man who looked like Peter Frampton marching down the hill in front of our house. My mother with her brass ovaries opened the living room window and yelled at him to be quiet. People were sleeping. Even I knew that was a mistake. He made a bee line for our house, and I jumped away from the window.
Glass shattered. I knew it was the glass by the front door. As screaming, glass shattering and more screaming continued, I went from bed to closet. My mother screamed. I wrenched and twisted myself to make myself invisible among the clothes hanging down. He continued screaming. Then, I heard my sister screaming. Later, I would find out my sister had been in the bathtub. She was wearing my mother’s robe. Years later, she would tell me she was lying on the kitchen floor being choked by him.
I curled in the dark, in the corner of my closet, on top of my shoes, with my face in cotton. There were louvers in the door, but hardly any light came in, and I could see if something moved. Then I heard a voice in my head and felt a spirit’s presence. He said, “What are you this time?” I didn’t trust him, but caught off guard, I answered, “Small and white.” And then I gasped. I wasn’t supposed to admit I was reincarnated, and I didn’t know, actually, until that moment that I was.
I said in voice world, “What are you?” automatically.
“Big and black,” he joked, which wasn’t funny. I looked at the dark closet. All I saw was big blackness. I was full of questions. Why did he manifest now? Why was he distracting me? Was this his weak way of protecting me?
“Don’t spill the beans,” he said.
“I won’t spill the beans,” I said, rankled. I didn’t know what he was talking about, what beans he thought I’d spill, but I wouldn’t admit that to him. Angry, I told myself I could keep a secret.
He said, “You’ll spill the beans.” The screams continued as I sat there afraid. Why did he worry about it? If he already knew me, then he knew it was only a matter of time before I spilled.
And now other men were screaming. I sat with knees against chest, curled in a ball. I didn’t move, not until my sister came in and said, “Where are you?” I didn’t want to tell her. She’d make me move, and I was pretty sure the screaming guy wouldn’t find me in the closet. He probably didn’t know I was there. I could crawl under the bed. But she was emphatic.
I said, “Here.” She opened the door to the closet, grabbed my arm and hurled me down the hallway to the steps which led down to the front door landing. There were men in the living room surrounding the man who had yelled, “Fuck you.” He wasn’t yelling that anymore. I’d find out later the neighbor men had come with pistols, hit the screaming man with the butt of a gun. My sister took me to the front door and told me to run.
My mother told me nothing of the incident. My sister told me that the screaming man had been smoking PCP and had beaten up his girlfriend. My sister told me there was a trial. She told me he went to jail for a little while
When I had my psychotic break at 32, I spilled the beans about big and black. The doctors told me to ignore that information and pretend it didn’t happen. But it did. They told me not to believe it happened. I tried.
The summer of the screaming man, I found a watch with a cracked face in the bushes in front of our house and wondered if it was his. I wondered whose blood was on the living room carpet, what he did to my mother, my sister, how he withstood all those neighbor men who hit him with the butt of a gun, how the trial went, how his beat-up girlfriend was, what PCP was. But I never found out, except PCP. That I tried when I was 14, smoked every day for six months to annihilate all emotion. But I didn’t walk down the street yelling, “Fuck you,” when I did it. I don’t know what makes a person do that.
I flop down on my bed before I unpack. I can go no further with this version of reality the voices tell me. What do I know for a fact? The voices convinced me “big and black” is reincarnated and that I met him, but he snubs me. Apparently, he doesn’t think that I heard him when I was eight, or he would show it. He doesn’t understand that I think we’re soulmates, or he wouldn’t have a girlfriend. I can’t believe anymore that it’s the end of the world and together we flee. I was wrong. The escape with him was only one future. There must be others. There has to be others, because he’s not coming. I reach for the zipper to my travel bag to undo what I have done.
There are other possible futures. I run through them with the voices. They don’t happen, either. I unpack again and again until it dawns on me that the future is happening already. I can remain seated and do nothing. It happens without me. I can look out my window and watch it. But mainly, I don’t have to run from it. When the voices spin a bad prophecy, I stop it by going to Starbucks and getting a passion tea. Nothing happens when I do. My terror subsides.
Years later, I spill the beans about talking to a presence when I was eight. I tell everyone, but people don’t believe me. The presence’s concerns were unfounded. My therapist tells me to talk to the voices. It helps. So I do. They believe me. They ask, Is it the end of the world? Are we damned? I tell them I don’t know their judgment. I tell them even if it is the end of the world, there is nothing to do, nowhere to go. Spend time with your family, I say, take in a movie. The presence never returns, and with the voices’ questions answered, they are quiet, and I can think again. I decide to spend time with my family and take in a movie.
Carroll Ann Susco has a chapbook, The Tracks of My Orbit, forthcoming on Finishing Line Press and a chapbook, Bean Spiller available on Amazon. She has roughly 60 publications, including in The Sun Magazine, Painted Bride Quarterly and Asylum Magazine. She writes about mental illness and life in general and lives in Alexandria, VA.
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