WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (10 page)

In rejecting the gift—you rejected your true self. Your namesake had nowhere to go. It was yours to begin with. Yours—mine—ours.
 

A great heat rose up from my belly and surged through my bones rattling me to no end. Maw Sue taught me there were two kinds of people in the world. 
Seekers and sleepers.
 Seekers are driven by a force outside themselves and cannot rest until they connect with the source. As they seek out their purpose, they will come up a
gainst opposition, great forces, the Amodgians. 
If seekers can overcome all the obstacles in the journey by activating their gifts, and using them, they will accomplish their purpose in l
ife and propel others to do so.  She said in the heart of every Cupitor is a rock stone, dull and bland.  Each time you rise above and use your gift, the stone is polished and turns a different color until it shines brightly and others are attracted to that light.  There are many gifts, of course, too many to list, but the one I remember the most is the gift given to all seekers,
the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Through this, they will hear the spirit voice, the connector of all and
are given insight and wisdom into life.  Sleepers overlook this and their stones are dull and jagged. 

Gifts can only be activated by the simple magic of childlike vision and hearing. It is the greatest of gifts and accessible to every seeker.

I was
drawn to stories, and research, and meaning.  So I guess the seeker life made sense to me. 
Back then.
  A lot has changed over time.  I was
eight when she showed me a picture of Michelangelo’s masterful painting, 
The Creation of Adam
, in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Like most seekers are, I was drawn instantly to the mystical void, the space of time held up between the fingers of Adam and God, as if I belonged in that tiny space, waiting to be connected to the almighty, so that I could feel the wholeness of what it means to be
Seven
 an
d finally live abundantly in it as I was meant to. 
It was surreal 
then, and it’s surreal now.
 I dreamed of going to Rome one day to see it in person, to stare into the void between those fingers. I used to think if I could see it just once, then surely, by then, Adam and God’s fingers would be touching. And so would mine. 
Seven. Complete
. And the world would be right again. But that was when faith was uncomplicated, simple. No answers. Just pure belief without structure. Remembering this brings a hard shell resistance, a barrier that keeps me
pushed back. 
The shadows are gone because they ca
nnot stand the heart of a child, how they believe without facts, risk without fear. 

I sit in silence but
I am not alone.  S
omething or someo
ne is with me, unseen, but felt in a realm, palpable and close. 
I shudder and my heart leaps and wanes. I feel the sovereignty in everything around me,
all connected, me to it, it to me, all as one.  Her heart was pounding in me but I could not let her out, not yet, maybe not ever.  She wants to come alive, to be set free, for good, but I just cannot do that now. It is not safe. 
And then, on instinct, she acted out through me. Her power fueled me from long ago. My hand lifted with the leaf crackle until it was high above my head fighting the gusts of wind.

“Let go.” She said in my mind. 
“Let go.” But in my ears I heard her say, “Let
me
 go.”
I could not do that.   It is not safe to do that. 
I sat tangled with voices, things seen and unseen, fighting with me and a
gainst me, of me and beyond me.  I struggled immensely to keep it together. 

“Let go.”

I did not want to let go but she parted my fingers as if I could do nothing about it. The atmosphere turned blurry, sporadic and out of sorts. Something
otherworldly emerged from the earth’s foundation in a spirit form of earth and nature, wisps of wind.  It snatched
the leaf
crackle from my aching fingers leaving me void. 
My aching fingers. Her aching fingers. Our aching fingers.
 The leaf crackle emerged with the invisible entity, the phenomenon of kinetic power that swept up particles of earth, dust, debris, twigs, and leaves to form an obscure phantom.

It was here, then gone. 
I review the
scene in my head over and over as if I’ve been there before. 
But how?  And when?
 
The tempest grabbed the leaf like a frightened parent embracing a lost child and held it with aching tenderness in a long gripping hug, while
they danced around the yard as if time did not exist.  Just the sight
made me weep for reasons I didn’t understand. Everything in me, shifted, pieces of me rattled to life, waiting for acceptance, acknowledgment. 

Disturbing things—joyful things—both alive and dead.
 My heart began to
hurt. 
My gifted ears hear the brutal splintering of a
crushed crackle shell. 
The pain brings the shadows out in groves and they squeal in pleasure. The adult Willodean could not take the pain
.  I shrank inside the house.  The little girl took over. 
She closed my eyes and whispered my salvation. She made lovely my losses and gave me room to breathe.

Pink Elephants

Mag and I went to the skating rink every Saturday night.  We’d get home around eleven thirty, just in time to change clothes, cook a bowl of popcorn and lay a quilt on the floor to watch
The Midnight Special
, followed by the infamous bad girls of Roller Derby. There is something in me that garners an ebb of satisfaction when a chick on rollers skates is shoved and sent flying over a three foot partition till her teeth chatters. My favorite girl is Midge Mayhem, queen of the penalty box. She made her mark as a Bay City Bomber in the early days and will mess a girl up in a hot second.
  She doesn’t play nice—it’s all hard ball for Midge. 
Rumor is, her hip bones were made of steel and 
insured in the millions which is why her famous move is called the hip whip. 
She played dirty and threw in some illegal moves which garnered her a change of namesake, queen of the penalty box. Mag, on the other hand liked Princess Lay-you-out. 
Come on.
 I mean,
really
? Those two words don’t even go together. It’s like peanut butter and lettuce. Little Ms. Princess in her roller skates wears a tiara and pink embellishments on her God awful uniform, looking like tinker bell on wheels. But don’t let her looks fool you. She packs a pink punch that
leaves the others seeing pink stars.  She had the Jekyll and Hyde complex, where she’s nice and lovely and then in an instant, rip your head off and feed it to swans.  It’s
ironic because I feel the same way about Mag. Don’t turn your back on Princess lay-u-out and never, 
ever
, turn your back on the storm, especially, Maggie Storm. 

The sand man would make an appearance sometime during the shows and sprinkle us with sleep dust leaving us to fall asleep on the pallet with the volume
blaring.  I
’d dream that I was Midge’s co-partner in a round of hip whips and then she’d
blare a horn in my ears, making me deaf and I’d awaken to see it was only the national anthem playing on the television. 
I’d slip back to sleep only to dream that I was wrestling in a frying vat of oil with the likes of Princ
ess Lay-you-out.  She had me in pink scarf headlock when I woke up to see it was only the crackling
noise of static
because the TV station went off and the pink scarf was Mag’s arm around my neck.  I winched her off and fell back asleep only to slip right
back into the pan and fried for what seemed like forever.
 
Shusssssshzzzzzzzzz-crackle-shusssshhhhhhzzzzz-crackle-shuussshhhhhzzzzzz.
 

Princess Lay-you-out would kick, gnaw and grill me the whole night. Sometimes, I’d sleep crawl through the thick oil trying to find the way out. In the morning, I’d wake up with my body half under the television, my head lodged in the popcorn bowl, kernels scattered across the quilt and Mag’s feet jacked up around my neck, while the television blared its awful static sound.   

When I got bored, which was often, and Mag was out gallivanting with her rich friends, I’d search for evidence of pink elephants.
We had one somewhere, I just had to find it.  It
started at the skating rink when I overheard Janet Corbin’s mom, Eloise talking to Sue Fletcher and Linda Latham. I was on the other side of the deli partition adjusting my wonky skates when Sammy Stewart rolled up on me like a smooth talking sailor.
Ugghh, just what I need. 

“Wanna skate darling?”

“No. I’m busy.” I
said harshly.  I
shushed him away
with my hands and besides I was busy listening to the gossip on the other side of the wall and it was just now getting to the juicy part.  Sammy shrugged and skated off only to spin around and come back. 

“Come o
n Willodean.” He had a sad puppy dog face. 

“I. Don’t. Like. You. Go. Away.” I said like the devil.
What an imbecile.
 I shushed him away four times but he was an insistent shit. I had missed a ton of information. Apparently, he was used to dealing with the devil because
he kept hounding me to skate as if his pleading was going to get me to cave.  I was on the verge of screaming.  Sammy wasn’t my type, all legs and lanky, and h
e had the biggest and straightes
t teeth I’ve ever seen on a guy, enlarged white chick-lets inserted in his gums.  Plus he showed off and talked about what he had all the time, new clothes, new hat, new jewelry, new skates, his parent’s house, swimming pool, blah, blah, blah. 
He wore his fancy patent leather skates every Saturday night. They were slick black with dice on the laces. One of a kind, made in France by a veteran shoe maker, he told everyone, over and over again. 

I simply ignored him in hopes he would go away but after the fourteenth plea, I went straight up Midge Mayhem on him.
My hips whipped him a swift cut to the side. 
It hurt like the dickens but I reckon the roller derby queen would have been proud. Last I saw Sammy, he was rollicking across t
he rink like a rickety old cart. 
The hip whip must have traumatized him because he lost his balance, crashed into a line of people and landed on top of June Blackburn. It was a perfect love collision. June’s crop hair was as black and shiny as his pristine skates.
Sammy never bothered me again. 
Who knew I was a matchmaker.

I went back to listening to the
women gossip at the booth. 
I had missed a backlog of informat
ion already, so I had to fill in the missing parts with whatever I could come up with in my head. 
I came in on the middle of the story, when Betty, such and such, I didn’t get the last name but anyway, she had a dark secret but in reality it wasn’t a secret at all because the whole town knew about it and if the whole
town knew about it, then it was a pink elephant.  This is how I learned of those pink secret keepers and it’s also
how I learned women had potty mouths worse than men. Shocked Betty found out her ten year marriage was a sham because Ralph, her lying, no good for nothing, cheating, sonsabitchen husband had been sleeping around with the town whore. Betty was a traditional Baptist martyr who refused to confront the two timing bastard with tiny brass tacks for balls, because of submission or something to do with the law or God, I don’t know, but come to find out, she just pretended it never happened, drowned herself in a bottle of bourbon and spent all his money in revenge. That’s when Sue Fletcher said three words. Addy Mae Henderson. 
Uh. Oh.
 According to the gossip mill, Addy was the secret behind the secret, behind other people’s secrets, and the secrets no one dared talk about. 
Lord, I was getting in on the good stuff.  My ears were nearly on fire.
 
Even I knew, that the mere mention of Addy Mae Henderson’s name would turn women heated and a little crazy.
Tonight was no different. 
The conversation turned to men who are bastards, men who cheat, men who drink, men who are sorry, no good for nothings and the final curtain closer—one day that whore is going to get what she deserves. 

What does she deserve?  Why?  What?
 
Right when I thought I’d get my answers, I got slapped in the side of the head with a two by four that left me seeing pink stars until I was sure Princess Lay-you-out had f
ound me.  I sat up slowly, my eyes envisioning a multitude of prismatic colors.  I looked down to see a wallet lying neck to me.  In my head I replayed the montage of events that transpired
simultaneously.