WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (28 page)

“Honey. It’s okay. Maw Sue is gonna be just fine. When people get old they do things they wouldn’t normally do. Your grandmother, well, she takes way too many pills. She gets disoriented and then she gets angry and doesn’t know what she’s doing. She doesn’t mean to be that way. That’s why she had to go away for a while so she can get better and come back, better than ever.” Her voice turned chirpy as if she had just read me the ending of a Hans Christian Anderson fable. 
“And all is well in the kingdom
.”
Pffftttt!
Fear spackled through me and caused the shadows to
appear.  Remind me of the truth, the curse, what I knew to be true all along. 

“She’s not coming back.” The breathless shadow
says.  He appears to life from the swirling smoke of the puffing stick.  The shadows know me,
all of me, every fiber that wove me toge
ther since birth. He taunts me with interceptions, mingling into my mind, pictures of Maw Sue’s body strapped to a table in a cold room.  More shadows arrive, one after another, from cigarette smoke tendrils, all
stirring up memories, haunting darkness, screams and dreams, fears and tragedy. Dell talks and suck
s on her puffing stick, unaware.  The shadows toy with me like a wounded animal in a trap.  I am nothing but a captive in their sporting arena of play, to experiment their weapons, to perfect their strategies, to engage me and ultimately destroy me. 
The Amodgian shadows are disembodi
ed spirits of everything I fear coming to life.  They want me to join them forever.  They even invite me politely. 

“Now that Maw Sue is gone..you can stay with us.” The shadow heckles in warning. He disappears only to reappear in another part of the room. “You’ll be alone. All alone with us.”
He says guttural.  A few other shadows enter in for fun. 

“Electrified—sizzling—snap, snap!” They say in unison. “Shocked with thera
py—not dead yet—but soon.” 
Grimacing laughs
bellowed.  It felt like the ground shaking. 
“And your next—ahhhaaaaa.”

They creep and crawl creating living, breathing nightmares. 
My mind wanders without the wondering tree, seeking places to hide, avoid, deny. I could see Dell’s mouth moving in intervals of speech, but hearing nothing, while she sucked on the puffing stuff, 
and made motions with her hands.  Occasionally, she’d give Papa Hart the evil eye and then look back at me with a reassuring smile. 
She doesn’t know I’m stuck inside the Dumas of Umbra watching
the shadows hover, bob and weave.  All afflicting me with fear, worries, doubts
and my deepest, darkest secrets.
I try to keep it together.  If Papa Hart and Dell see the
crazy in me, like they see in Maw Sue, I’d be
carted out the door next, just like the shadows said.  The shadows mock
and fe
ed off my weakness, my thoughts. 
Maw Sue can’t die. She can’t. No. I need her. I need to know more of the gift, how to control it, what to do.
How to fight. 
I can’t survive without her. No one knows or understands but
Maw Sue.  She can’t die. 

The shadows pull and suck life from me.  I wander
to dark places inside the house, corridors of
many souls, hallways of hell.  I can’t keep myself from going there.  It draws me and keeps me. 
Maw Sue told me at an early age that it was my responsibility to put those thoughts in a place where they could be controlled. If left to wander unchecked, the shadows could destroy a person in no time flat
and merely by their own mind and thought process. 

“Control your mind, Willodean.” She’d say. “That’s the key.” 

And no time like the present.  I went to the room I created a few weeks ago. 
It happened one night when I went on overload. Tiny hands held the hammer and built it board by board, nail by nail, and wall to wa
ll until the room was complete. The outside door was as bright as the sun, so bright the only doorknob to handle the brightness was a star.  The gold nameplate said SEVEN.  And underneath it said, NO SHADOWS ALLOWED.  I simply built
a
room where they did not exist.  On the inside walls was inscriptions of the poem, Seven, and other quotes and words I loved.  Even a painting of the Michelangelo art work, Adams fingers and God’s fingers.  I could sit in this room forever.  The rest of the room was
similar to those glass globes that shake and snow falls, but in my glass globe Seven
room, it was a forest of wondering trees and leaves falling in every seasonal color.  There was a pine thicket with taller than tall pine trees, and thick carpet grass, a large open field with nothing but lilies and at night it was a cascade of moons and stars.  There were crackles enjoying their life as a child bug, sucking root and digging tunnels and never having to grow up, molt or have dreadful sex.  It was perfect in every realm. 

While I’m in the Seven room, I can still see the other realm of this world, where Dell is still talking, smoking and cutting eye glances at Papa Hart whose is back to eating cookies and staring at both of us as if we fell off the crazy train. There is no fear inside the dimension of the Seven
room. 
No shadows, no scary images,
no fear
. I can’t stay here forever, it’s only a temporary 
gather—my—wits
 place.
I talk to God while I sit in the branches of the wondering tree.  He answers me with breath and spirit inside my heart.  He tells me that he is not the creator of fear, only love, power and a sound mind, which I really, really need.  And then I remember what Maw Sue always said. 
“If everything
else fails—just plead the blood.  Speak
the saviors name and poof, 
life changes
. Nothing can withstand the blood.”

I’ve yet to see how this works, exactly, I mean, look at where it got her. 
Maybe she’s as crazy as everyone says, and maybe I am too.

Dell is down to her last drag of smok
e and I know my time is short.  I have to go back sometime.  So I climb down out of the wondering tree.  I take a deep breath.  I have to go back to the realm of reality that is filled with fears, shadows and other creepy things. 
Dell’s lips move in si
lence, jabbering between puffs and the shadow glints are still there—waiting on me. 
I step out of the seven room but before I am completely out, I take a moment inside the inner realm of mystery, the one I was born into, between this world and the next,
the tangled part that is me, secrets and threes of mystery and unspoken things. 
I whisper a prayer, a long benediction of words pleading the blood, Jesus on a roof top, kind of prayer. I envision a long lists of prophets and sages speaking the exact prayer in perilous times, two thousand years ago when lions stared them down and stones were cast, bodies burned and hung on crosses, all pleading the blood, all petitioning the heavens, bleeding hearts and bitter souls. I remember their tragic ending
s. The blood didn’t save them.  From
what I’ve read
in stories, it didn’t end well at all. 
They all died.
 Death in deplorable conditions, their suffering unfathomable. Fear trickles on
my skin thinking of it.  A stirring spirit rattles me undone. 
Maw Sue said that some things weren’t for our knowing and having faith didn’t me
an we always got what we wanted.  And
sometimes life didn’t turn out like we planned. It is God’s call in the end. Being human, we are conditioned to carnal things—we can’t see the end picture like God does. 
All I begged for is a little head’s up, that’s all.  Just a hint, a peep to warn me.  It would have helped me a whole, whole lot because i
nside my head, I lived out my life in warp speed, growing up accelerated, from child to adult in five seconds, age ten to fifty and the whole time, I created my death over and over again in various ways, trying to determine which one I liked the best. It was my way of giving God the okay or uh-huh or no freaking way. I was obsessed with death. How did God plan for me to die? Was I going to fall off a cliff, a car wreck, drowning? A snake bite or a plane crash? Eaten by a shark or worse than worse—shock therapy like Maw Sue. I was a bundle of fear, on top of fear, acting out fear and living in a house of fear. I was a big ‘ole walking lump of fear.

I came straight out of the Seven
room and stepped into reality but I wasn’t going to go out without a fight.  I had to try it, stoning or not. 

“I plead the blood of Jesus.” 
My lips whispered.  Th
e cry so faint it bare
ly made life from the syllables.  The
second the words touched air, the shadows dismantled—stung by fire
or singed by the blood. 
Impressive.
 

“What hon? Did you say something?”
Dell said. 

“Nothing.” I said
.  “Not a thing.”  But it was a thing.  A big thing.

“I thought you said…” Dell paused as if she was trying to figure out what she thought she heard me say. “Well I hope you understand our talk.”
She stood up.  I felt a hot jab on my leg.  I looked down to see a hot t
rail of ash from her cigarette
on my thigh.  “Oww.” I said brushing it off.  It narrowly missed my shorts.  Rats. 
Why couldn’t it have burnt these ridiculous shorts to dust?
 
This was the ugliest pair to date.  The brunt of the shorts are white and have
eight distinctly placed red, white and blue squares in the front and for some ungodly reason, there is one lone black patch on my right butt cheek. It was supposed to be a pocket but she ran out of material.
I think she ran out of brains.  Mag made it worse by drawing an
eyeball in black permanent market on the opposite butt cheek. Now my ass looks like a drunken pirate when I walk.
Hi-hoe Matey!
 
 

The room is quiet now.  T
he somber kind of quiet, after someone tells a lie, when pink elephants lurk, hide and grow. Dell snubbed the cigarette onto Marilyn’s
breast and walked towards the refrigerator. 
She pulled out a Schlitz malt liquor can.
It was ten o’clock.  When it came to drinking, Dell didn’t use a time clock, just her own clock. 
The distinct click, pop and fizz was as familiar to me as my own skin. 
Click. Pop. Fizz
. Day after day. Night after night. Liquor hi
gh on the grocery list as flour. 

I hear Maw Sue’s words in my ears.
The enemy has an addiction waiting for you. Don’t fall into its trap.
 Something unfurled in my stomach. And then I remembered why I came here to begin with. “When is Maw Sue coming home?” I said ready to get answers. Real truth. My voice was as solemn as a funeral eulogy. It triggered the shadows to
come out to taunt me, tell me what I already knew, but feared. 

“She’s no
t coming back.” The shadow said. 
Dell chugged
her beer. 
Papa Hart glanced at her, then me. He
didn’t say a word, but he didn’t have too.  His expression said it all. 
I-don’t-give-a-shit.
The whole family is nuts.  Where is my whiskey?
 It screamed anonymously in the face of
pink, yellow and blue elephants, the whole freaking circus who made an appearance. 

“Soon honey, she’s coming home soon.” Dell said glancing at me, then Papa Hart.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” She said. “She’s a tough old woman.” Her lips spoke the truth but her eyes leaked the truth beneath the truth, the horrible layer of pink elephants no one talks about. The thick, fat layer everyone covers up, hides beneath the skin, beneath the surface of the soul, beneath the hairline crack where things are not as black and white as they seem. Maw Sue said everyone has a hair line crack just waiting to fracture. It
’s a fragile glass vase encased inside our hearts and it holds the truth about ourselves.  If it breaks, in the least bit, the glass cuts us to pieces from the inside, out, and yet no one will ever know, because we are bleeding on the inside where no one can see. And right now, I felt my glass breaking, and slowly cutting me to death and I could do nothing about it. 

“Now you run along, Willodean.” Dell said
.  She crushed the can between her hands. 
“Maw Sue will be home soon enough. Go draw her a picture or something.” Her mouse feet shuffled back t
o the other side of the bar.  She sat in her bar stool and turned the tiny TV volume up until the voices drowned the room.  Then she lit her puffing stick.  P
apa Hart discretely disappeared. Maw Sue would rather have herbs or rocks, or write
a poem.  Not a stupid picture and besides, I
can’
t draw dirt. 
If there’s one thing Maw Sue taught me—it’s use the gifts you’
re given.  Don’t hone in on something you weren’t born to do and waste time.  My storytelling gift
was an inherited trait from her and Papa Hart, both born storytellers of the family. She didn’t like giving him any credit whatsoever and Papa Hart felt the same about her.
I kept my opinions about each of them to myself to not stir trouble.