100 Unfortunate Days (11 page)
Read 100 Unfortunate Days Online
Authors: Penelope Crowe
If there are thirteen people at the dinner table, one will die within the year. This is probably a flat-out fact.
One out of three or four women get breast cancer. Several are probably just old, someone there is probably brewing some kind of heart disease and accidents happen every day. One of those thirteen is in for it.
Breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck. This is probably based on the idea that your image contains a part of your soul.
I don’t believe in any of the traditional superstitions—but I have some of my own. For instance, if I pray too much the devil will get me. If I look at myself in the mirror in the dark I will see something terrible. If I am not around when my children are sick they will get worse. If I want something really bad and I get it, and I will be very unhappy.
The devil is there at 3:00AM.
There is a pile of bones in my back yard. Most of them are the bones of people who did not like me. The pile of bones grows almost every day. It is strange to have a graveyard so close to my house. Part of me loves the bones and part of me wants to get rid of the bones. I know I will have to slit my wrists and bleed on the bones to make them go away.
I wake up every morning before the sun comes up and choose one of the bones from the pile and make a scratch in the palm of my hand. Sometimes the scratch makes me think about the things I have to worry about and sometimes I don’t think of the scratch at all. There are mornings where the man over the fence stares at me while I am in the bone garden. On the mornings he does not agree with the bone that I chose—he slowly shakes his head until I pick another one. Then he shrinks to the size of a mouse and he disappears until the next time. He does not live in the house next door and I really don’t know who he is, yet he somehow looks familiar.
Most of the bones belong to women. No one else can see the bones, and sometimes people walk right through them. They may make the comment they feel like a crow has just walked over their grave—or they may say nothing at all. The bigger the pile of bones gets the greyer my hair becomes. Each bone equals one grey hair. My hair is almost white now. During a bright sunny day the bones look ghostly…very see-through and almost phosphorescent. They don’t bother me much. But at night they are very solid and reflect the light of the moon. The reflection glows into my bedroom and many nights I cannot sleep.
As the pile gets bigger I know something is making a home beneath them. I can hear it rattling around as it gets comfortable. It’s funny because I hate the bones, and yet I am mad that something else is making itself a place to live there. Soon I will have to cut myself because the pile is getting to big—cut myself or be covered with bones from fingers, legs, spines and some of the bones may still have flesh on them. I tried to move them, I tried to throw them off a cliff, I tried to bury them but they keep coming back. Last night I looked out my window as the clock ticked midnight and I swear I saw the bones trying to form back into skeletons. I have a terrible feeling they will succeed.
One day I will have my own house. The inside will be white and the outside will be white. Then I will paint the dining room dark brown and I will put a large gothic white mirror in the middle of the wall. The living room will be pink and the couch will be pinker. The fireplace will be white and my books will be on shelves that run all along the wall to the bedroom. I will be healthy and I will have a job, or at least I will be working and making a lot of money. I will not be tired and I will not have any pets. No one will call me names and I will be happy.
It is easy to get stuck where you are because as they say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.
Aleister Crowley’s tarot card deck contains beautiful images that sometimes represent terrible conditions. For instance, the Four of Cups, or Luxury card shows an image of four golden shining bright and luminous beams, and the meaning of the card is a representation of love that is comfortable, but taken for granted. In the card it is a sign of too much control, and the potential to foul waters that are not allowed to flow.
We paint our own pictures with the type of house we buy and clothes we wear, but behind our closed doors and inside our hearts we may hold the dark. Our shiny appearances belie our natures, and we are as true as Pontius Pilot. You are not better because you have beautiful clothes and a Mercedes, and you are not bad if you cannot afford a summer home or personal chef.
We talk behind each other’s backs and feel better when our neighbors fail.
We fire arrows at those with the newest and brightest ideas yet scorn those that are happy being a secretary or mom or something else considered ordinary.
We wish everyone the best but ball our fists in private rage when our wishes for them come true and they are blessed with good fortune.
Someone said we should really be judged by how we act when we think no one is looking. Can anyone say they are good?
Maybe WE are the devil…
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One Thousand and One Nights:
Translated by Edward William Lane, Revised by Stanley Lane-Poole
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