WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (5 page)

Just when I thought I was safely there to erase all I know, the girl, the woman, the past—
I wasn’t there at all.
  When I opened my eyes, I was still in my bedroom, leaning out the window and clutching the man pillow. 
What was that all about? Was it a vision? Did I fall asleep?
 I
glance around the room.  The shadow Amodgians are here but they are distant as if something is keeping them at bay, guarded and away from me.  This has never happened before and then I understand why. 
Riding in on the edge of their darkness was a lesser light and attached to it was a voice. It was Maw Sue. 
What is happening? She's dead or I thought she was dead. Hell, I might be dead as well. 
How else can I explain the voices, the visions, all of this strange madness? 
Yes, I must be dead.

“Use the gift honey.” She said as she landed at the foot of my bed like some fairy godmother. 
Her voice was tangled up in this world and the one she came from. 
I smelled the waft of camel cigarettes, moth balls and old lady powder from her powder puff box s
he always kept above the toilet. 
Yep. It's Maw Sue alright.
 

“And you aren’t dead neither, Willodean. Still stinking thinking, I see. You haven’t changed a bit, have you? Stop it.” Her finger scolded me. “You are greatly loved. Greatly gifted. You need to get it together hon.” Her voice was the same as I remember, crushed leaves, snapping and popping. “And don’t forget to look for the crumbs.” She nods and gives me the eye as if I’d forgotten. “Simply be. Reach—reach—reach.” A great gulf of wind trailed her words and funneled inside the window. My arms lifted upwards automatically as if the words commanded them without my consent.
What is happening?
 I
forcefully jerked them down underneath my hips with pressure. 

“Why are you here?” I yelled.  Is that the first question you ask a dead woman?  I don’t know, it’s never happened to me before.  I am not prepared to speak with the dead.  I am freaking out.  I couldn’t contain my restless arms any longer so I grabbed my man pillow, snuggling it up against my chest as a shield.  The whole time I’m wrestling with an energy shield that generates my arms upwards, a kinetic vibration of the otherworldly intersecting with the earthly causing a shift.  I feel like my arms want to lift and fly or worship some deity. 
I could not stop wrestling on the mattress.  I
fought to keep my hands down, secured under the man pillow, when I realized my parents may hear me talking—
and that cannot be good.
I’ve caused them enough pain.

“The curse does not exist.”
My eyes penetrate hers with defiance. 
“It doesn’t exist. You don’t exist. This is not real.” At this point I’m not sure who I’m trying to convince, myself or my dead grandmother. “I hate this. What is happening? I never wanted this gift-curse to begin with.
” I grabbed my head, looked to the ceiling, closed my eyes and opened my eyes.  “Uhhhhhggg.” I groaned. “
Why me? Huh?
Why me?” My eyes glared at her hopeful for an answer and possibly to be released from this horrible terrible afflictions as if she had the power to do so.   

“Some things are chosen for us.” Maw Sue said. Her voice was a porch tone that I remember well as if we were sitting there again, gazing out across the garden and past the chicken coop discussing the ways of life and ancestral traditions, the curses, gifts and old stories.

“Stop it.” I
said unhinged.  Her absence drew up a bitter taste in my mouth. 
“It doesn’t exist and neither do you.” My muscles tensed, my face flashed hot and my ears started throbbing. “You left me. You just left. 
And now
…now you want me to listen to your so called wisdom?” I was angry, fuming. “YOU were the only one who knew.” I shook violently remembering my loneliness and then broke. Tears flowed without my consent.
I tried to fight them but they were not mine to stop. 
Great heaving sobs. Ancient tears. 
Child tears.
 The house inside me fell apart, pipes busted and spewed, little rivers flooded the hallways and seeped underneath the doors. I lost all frame of thought, place, and time. My eyes blurred and distorted my vision. I beat on the man pillow, planted my face into its skin, and screamed. Pain leaked out, a brutal overwhelming pain...so wrenching 
I realized I wasn’t dead. 
The dead feel no pain. 
I
was very much alive. 
I was jealous of Maw Sue and th
e dead who don't feel anything, the dead who obviously get to come back and haunt the living.  I was curious because I had a few on my list to haunt, as well.  I could barely lift my heavy head off the pillow, but when I did, the room was blank, still and she was gone.  Just dead air. 
No
ghosts, no shadows.  I was
alone. 
Alone.
 I hate that word.

Exhausted and empty, I dried my eyes, took a deep breath and snug
gled the man pillow to my chest, resting my chin on my knees.  I glanced out the window but it seemed odd and peculiar than before.  My vision seemed clearer as if I was viewing it for the first time. 
The web, the leaf and the crackle
were meticulous and detailed, vibrant and omnipotent. 

“Because you see it with my eyes.”
The voice said in a whisper. 

What?  Who said that?  Maw Sue?
 
I gasped and scanned the room but deep inside I knew who it was.  I know that voice. 
Crisp, so clear inside me, of me, around me. 
It was her.
 I went into a slight panic because if she’s here, then that means she’
s been turned loose, and that means she’ll talk and roam about. 
No. This can't happen.
 
I start rocking forward in body ticks, back and forth.  Panic trickles on my skin and I do what I know to do.  What I always do.  I shut
her
down.  I don’t know who she thinks she is anyway, usurping her power over me, but if she thinks she’s going to gain control, she’s got another thing coming. 
She
talks way too much for me lately, believing in the unbelievable, unseen and seeing life through undimmed eyes.
I have lived in this world to know better.  She doesn’t understand the consequences.  I DO.  I have to stop her before we get into a pickle again. 
I feel her swimming around in me, in the house, close to my heart tracing it with her memory fingers. 
STOP IT! Stop it right now.
 But she doesn't stop. Instead, she
resurrected a deep need in me I didn’t know I had.  A
 need I wanted
to fill up like a bucket. 
Yet, in the same
thought, I know the great cost of such a thing. 
She is blind to the cost of fulfillment and doesn't know the pain. 
I do.
 Even as I know this—I see a tenderness in her that makes me want to hug her instead, exchange the man pillow for the child, embrace all that she is now and then, before and after, all that she was, and wasn't,
everything in her.
For just a second I want to believe in her, in me, in us, in what
we
represented but the truth won’t let me, it rips me apart.  The adult knows the truth, the woman knows the truth. 
 
What a foolish little girl. 
If I could go back in time to that little innocent, naive girl on the porch, I’d stomp the crackle with my bare feet, rip the vow into a million pieces and smack her a good one. “Wise up little girl.” I’d say. “Quit living in a dream world.” And then I’d just grow up and become mindless and incoherent and wander the world in little drifts, like the rest of the adults.
Oh…wait. 
I am that adult.
  Touché, little girl, touché.

Shadows

Darn near everything Maw Sue owns is oodles and oodles of horrors, especially her house. It looks normal on the outside, white frame, red trim, shutters, and a small front porch with
an awning.  The back porch is large, rectangular with
two stair cases and two entrances. We use the screen door all the time but the other screen door entrance
has never been used to my knowledge.  It’s blocked by a large freezer as if it’s keeping something from getting out, or maybe something from getting inside,
who knows,
I think too much.  But I know this much, I’d eat dirt before I took one bite of anything inside that block of ice.  Everything in it is a crystalized freezer burn, so much you can smell the icy singe from the outside container.  It’s like a hundred years old.  As far as the rest of the house, it comes alive when you step on the porch planks.  I
t has its own language; squeals, chips, chirps, whispers, barks, bleeps or rattles. Inside every room, the corners 
slide off into a faded darkness, as if there was a slide.  It happens even when the lights are on.  In those corners, I have seen sh
adows in the shadows, figures that absorb light and others swallow the dark.
If I look too long, I feel myself being taken, as if I’m pulled down that dark slide and I have to flee, get away, and run outside.  Her house is
a Labyrinth of holes and hidden things. For a long time, I thought it was just my demented mind, my warped namesake, my gifts and curses, but later
on when I questioned Maw Sue about it, she confirmed my worst fears.  It was exactly as I saw it.  Which made it worse, now that it was confirmed. 
I couldn't pretend an
ymore. It wasn't my imagination after all.  This only gave her more room to talk about her candle ritual and how I should use it to banish the dark encounters.  “
The dark is a lesser light, remember?”

“I know, I know.”  I said.  How could I forget?  She talks of it constantly.  As far as I know, she performs it every night before bed. 

“It’s probably just the Amodgians messing with your mind Willodean.”
Well, no shit grandma!
The inner workings of the shadows have haunted me my whole life, shackling me, trying to shut me up, push me down. I can’t see them—
but their presence is always upon me, prickling my skin, hedging my back with an overwhelming resistance to my every move.  I could not imagine being hunted this way for a lifetime—it was inconceivable.   
 

I was hanging out on the back porch dreading my future when I found another lone crackle hanging on the post beside the metal steps. It mirrored me and looked pitifully sad. I found the shoebox army and introduced the lone crackle to the troops, then I created a world of magic all by myself.
I should have known. 
Mayhem always follows magic.

I sat t
he lone crackle on the railing and stared into its vessel.  In the background, the sun was setting, dropping midway into the pine trees, intermittingly shooting off rays of
light that glistened
and created prisms off the crackle in every direction.  I fell into a trance and drifted into the house inside me. 
I passed by hollow dark tunnels and into dimly lit passageways, channels and cubbyholes, until I
was in the familiar long hallway of rooms with doors on each side for as long as my vision could reach, like looking down a walled railroad track with doorways and lighted entrances.       

I came upon a yellow door with the familiar gold nameplate and in bold black lettering I read, PONDER.  I turned the glass doorknob and entered in.  This is the room where I go to work things out in my head.  Inside the room is accumulation of nature and indoors.  Most strikingly, is the huge Chinese
Tallow
tree to climb and sit inside its branches and ponder about life, while the bees buzz and soothe my sorrows and afflictions.  Inside the wondering tree, I w
onder about this...about that. I sort and sift through t
he inner dialogues, the many voices in my head, the influx of a thousand television sets, all talking and telling me things, overkill of information that accumulates without my consent. 
I was five or six when I knew the house inside me was real, a place to build, or tear down, to live in, to make it whatever I wanted it to be. It was a strange, peculiar awakening
but Maw Sue told me it was part of the gift and I had to make the best of it.  In the process, and m
ore importantly, I learned who to tell and who 
not
 to tell. I made the grave mistake of mentioning it to my mother once. She glared at
me fish eyed and then cocked her head like a dog that doesn’t understand what you’re saying.  You’d thought I just
told her I was from planet Pluto and my time on earth was over, and would she mind making me a cake for the trip home to my people. After a few eye coded twitches she replied, “That’s great honey. Have fun. Now go play with your sister and try to keep her off the rooftop. You know how she likes to climb things” and then calmly went back to licking green stamps in squares and placing them in a cardboard box that said KITCHEN. It should have said DENIAL.
Knowing I couldn’t talk to anyone but Maw Sue about my dilemma, I nearly drove her crazy with questions.