WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (73 page)

I will not say goodbye. I will not say goodbye.
 I feel dizzy and out of sorts again. Loss of place, loss of mind. I reach out and place my hand on the slick polished wood. I want the porch. I ache for the porch. 
Our time. Our place.
 My heart swells bigger than my chest can contain it. I linger over memories,
fading in and out while hot tears spill out from my eyes.  

“Well, Papa Hart, this is it.” After the words leave my mouth, my lips press down
to keep me from wailing, a surge of emotions boiling underneath and below. 
I will not say goodbye.
 “You’re with Dell now.” I whimper and sigh loudly, then half smile. “And you know how I know that? Because I can smell her biscuits. I miss the taste of them. So you tell her to quit toying with me and how about letting me find the recipe.
About now, you’ll find out that she did give it to someone after all.  Me.  But I have to find it first.  You tell her, when I do, I will learn to make them.” 
I laugh out loud. “Oh, by the way. Have you seen your coffin? Pretty snazzy tree, huh?

"I. Had. Nothing. To. Do. With. It.” My tone was accusatory, point blank and directed straight to the family tree where his two heathen sons sprout from the branches.

“I will miss you so much. I will miss everything. Our talks, our time.”
My voice turns to a faint whisper.  I want to go, run away.  I want to stay, open the casket, and get inside. 
I close my eyes to remember. I close my eyes to forget. I look at love underneath my eye lids. 
Love looks.
 I keep all the memories tucked inside my heart. I pray a solitary prayer while my hand glides across the shiny and slick casket. I slip my fingers into the well cut grooves of wood and carved etchings. Pain jolts me
undone.  I open my eye and jerk my hand back. 
Blood
trickles down my finger in three streams and spills into my palm.  It is slow and thick.  It
unleashes a terrible, awful emergence inside the house, inside me, and its coming from an unidentified room. A
room I KNEW was there all along but avoided, denied, refused entry or exit. 

Denial. Avoid. Pink Elephants.
 I panic. I can’t move. I can’t run. I can’t do anything but see it for what it is—
or what it isn’t.
 A thousand screaming sirens are going off inside the walls, stirring up insidious commotions, a topsy-turvy, chaotic, spinning orbit of existence that makes me uncomfortable. Lights flick on and off, doors slam and shut violently, windows pop open and close, glass breaks, boards splinter, roses and flower petals explode like confetti, Peppermints bombs drop and splatter candy like paint, blood pools up from the floor joists, light beams turn into swords battling dark shadows.
Hands prick, prod and reach and grab.  When the light flickers inside the house,
I catch a glimpse of her in the shadows. 
She is there.
 She is an accumulation
of every little girl I’ve seen since I first started to remember things from my childhood and now she is all of them, combined. 
Her pale face motionless, wounded, frightened.

Her face. My face. Our face.

She walks to the door and rattles the knob but it won’t open. She goes to the window and tries to open it, but it remains closed, and each time she looks back at me as if I had something to do with it. 
Do I?
 
Yes.  I do.  Something in me, cannot let her
be.
 
She walks closer to me, her blues expanding in my vision,
and I see my reflection in them.  I blink and t
he world stopped spinning
. I was standing in front of the casket where I was before the commotion inside me, erupted.  But as I look to the side of me, a dark shadow emerges shrouding my view.  At first glance, m
y lungs burst with air and I let out a blood curdling scream. I lost my balance, fell backwards and landed on one of the aluminum chairs
in the front row underneath the awning.  F
or a second, just a split second, I imagine none of this is real, just grief, fueled into a topsy-turvy mind
dispensary.  And then I see the blood on my hand and remember touching something…a flower, a thorn? 
It can’t be...
 I glance up and sure enough, SHE is perched on top of my grandfather’s casket like the DQ of the Dairy Queen.
Immediately she has control of me, her eyes grabbing mine and making me feel sweet suckles of memories and bitter sap. 

“It’s just you and me.” She says laughing.
She points to herself, then me. 
“You—me—us. Yeah, I know. It’s kind of hard to understand and put into words since we are the same, huh?” 
She knows what I’m thinking.

“Oh, I always know what you’re thinking
.” She said. My eyes went wild realizing she heard my thoughts.  She was hearing me now. 

“
Yeah, I can.  I can do all that. 
I’m you, remember. I’m 
all
 of you. I can answer your thoughts, your questions, all of it. I’m a bigger part of you than you want to admit. Since you’ve denied me half the time.” Her voice turned bitter. “But we’ll deal with that in a minute. First…” 
Who does she think she is? How can she control me?
 
What is happening?
 
Oh God. I must be lapsing into that place of no return.
 
I’m going back to the house. The Shadows must have control, want me, no, no….I can’t. No. I can’t go there again. If I go there I might never make it out again. This cemetery is making me nuts.
Papa Hart’s death has made me have a breakdown. 
 I have to get it together or I’ll end up with my parents again. 
NO!
 
Seven Willodean Seven.
  I felt something inside me uncurl and stretch
its claws. 

“
I can still read your thoughts. 
Make me seven—make me seven.” She says in a mocking childish tone. She is holding a creepy, dried pink rose that looks more like a mangled Barbie doll. Her wicked eyes stayed glued to me as if she was simply reading a book on my life, page by page, detailing every sin, every secret tra
nsgression, ever single thought and deed.  She is
the exact replica of my dreams, and nightmares, still dressed in hideous patchwork shorts and an orange t-shirt, freckled face and a cascade of limp, dishwater hair. She is barefoot and her toes are spotted with peeling red nail polish. 
I look as I always did
. I mean, 
she
 looks like she always did, I mean, 
me, I look like I always did
—this is madness. 
Could this be another vision? Am I in the house, stuck inside the room? Am I just imagining? Remembering? Is there more?

“No. You’re not
imaging.” The little girl said. 
“And don’t worry with Maw Sue—she’ll have her say, for sure.” She acted upset, as if Maw Sue would revenge me for taking the necklace, causing her death. 
But how could I blame her?  It was my fault.  I’ve prayed for forgiveness for years but could not get it. 
The memory came
to my mind, as if the little girl made me remember. 

A few weeks after Maw Sue’s death I fulfilled ever last one of Lena Hart’s nightmares. Well, let’s just say I was a little carbon copy of a crazy Maw Sue, except in teenage form. I
was unable to get out of bed, just a zombie staring at the ceiling.  
The
Mason jar on my nightstand began to spin like a carnival ride.  Suddenly the room came alive with petal people.  My bed began to jerk and I heard a loud thumping noise underneath. 
The mirror bin.
 I jumped up and rolled to the floor. Th
e bin was bouncing up and down, the same way it did, the night I stole the necklace.  It hit the metal frame underneath.  I reached in and pulled it out.  The mirror on top threw out a prism of ill
umination until the whole room
lit up in flares.  I looked into the reflective mirror and it showed me
horrendous white faces, those awful, terrible Dr
esden’s that scare me to death.  Instead of fear, all I could think about was ope
ning the mirror bin and getting the red stone out. I had crazy delusions that I could bring Maw Sue back to life with it, like some resurrection stone. In my head, I’d go to the cemetery, present the stone at her gravesite and she’d forgive me, come back to life and all would be well with the world. She’d
go back to rubbing that stupid stone and soothing her mind.  I’d go back to sitting
at her feet and listening to her stories, in order to soothe m
y troubled soul. 
Life would be normal again, our normal. 
Maw Sue was my stone
. 
A crazy, wild stone but
she soothed me unlike no one else.  Papa Hart runs a close second. 
Her presence gave me comfort, her stories kept me level and mildly productive but when she died—it was if she took it away, leaving me to rot in my sickening, twisted mind while the stone sat inside the mirror bin
locked away.  I had simply given up on ever getting it open.  It has been underneath my bed ever since so why is it suddenly coming to life?  In one simple courageous move,
I unlatched the
lid and flipped it open.  The surge of power inside threw me backwards into my closet and bounced the bin across the floor, reclosing the lid.  The sound was so loud I was sure my parents would run in any second.  I waited until I was positive they wouldn’t show up and then I crawled back to the bin and carefully opened the lid.  No impact this time, just an eerie quietness that disturbed me.  My eyes glaze over as I look at the contents.  Laying on top of a folded piece of paper was the red stone necklace. 
The paper was the poem, Seven.   

“It’s not your fault Willodean.” Maw Sue’s voice says.  It is coming from a sifted stir amongst the inside of the mirror bin like rustling leaves in fall.  “
It’s the curse.
But all is well now. 
The necklace is yours as it was meant to be all along.”

Just hearing it broke me. 
I screamed. I cried. Afterwards, her voice disappeared and I never heard it again, not until the tree climbing incident at my parent’s.
Everything after that is a blur as if I purposely erased it.  I have no idea what happened to the mirror bin, the stone necklace or my life after that. 

I came back to myself.  I’m staring into t
he wi
ld pink rose that spins and twirls and is held by tiny hands.  I realize the little girl’s finger is bleeding.  I look down at mine, and it is matching each drip of her blood,
identical h
eartbeats pulsating and surging together but in different eras. 

“Yeah
. You’re me. I’m you.” She says. 
“It’s all that. Now can we move on?” Her voice was flustered and cocky as if she was glad to be in charge. I was still in shock trying to find place.
It was a bit overwhelming. 
I could not take my eyes off the small persona of myself, a body and soul I didn’t quite recognize.

“So…
now
 that you’ve acknowledged my existence, gosh almighty and Lord tarnation, you are a stubborn shit. I thought I was going to be stuck inside that room, inside that damn house forever. It’s about time you listened to me and let me out.” She wiped the damp sweat from her face and pulled her hair off her neck.

She fanned her hands on her face. “God, I forgot how hot it gets here.” She fidgeted a lit
tle. “Anyway, back to business.”  She used her hands to talk and motioned her words.  “
You know Maw Sue said seekers work out their own journey, you know, this, that and the other, ultimately, it’s your own choice and all, ‘cause he don’t force you to do nothing but I think we both know what you need to do, huh?”

“No…uhhh.” I said afraid, confused. “I don’t know what to do.”

She leaned forward and drew my eyes to hers. “I encourage you to go forward and by encourage, I mean you don’t have a choice, 
not
really,
 unless you 
want
 to remain stuck and circle the freaking mountain of stuck for the rest of your life.  But no matter what—I tell you this much,
I’M NOT going back to that room—not the house. It ain’t happening, you hear? Oh, and when I say you must go forward, I really mean you have to go backwards to sort some things out. It’s that backwards crawfishing thing.”

She laughed. “You’ll figure it out. Seekers have to seek. Yeah…I know, I sound like an Ancient Sage don’t I?” She nodde
d her head as if I would agree with her but I had no idea what she was referring to. 
“But hey, your great grandmother knew some things about the ancients, your kin folks. She might have been locomotive half the time, but she knew some stuff, for sure and her most important subject was 
you.
 
Did you know that? 
She wanted to guide you Willodean. She knew the calling on your life
.
A seeker
must grow and change. 
Remember what she always said…”