WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (35 page)

I’ve always felt like a survivor of sorts, a conqueror of something dark and eerie, saved from the horrible, the terrible, yet I can’t tell you what
it is. I suffer in the unknowns with a pain that has no pinpoint. 
I need to know what it is. 
Why am I like this?
It cannot be just the curse.  It cannot. 
 I raise my fingers to the sky, reaching for something I cannot find and feeling a yearning in my heart for the space between my fingers and God’s fingers—
to connect
. And then, all will be right in the world. 
Seven.

 After the eleventh continuous night terror, I
basically chose not to sleep.  I jumped out of my bed, my throat frozen from the icy dream.  I
scrambled to the kitchen
and poured a glass of water.  I gulped it down, and felt it defrost my innards to a room temperature.  Exhausted from lack of sleep, I leaned on the counter. 
I stared into the half-moon peeking out from the pine trees. A glimmer of light flashed against the small shelf below the window frame.
It startled me at first and all I could think of was a firefly.  I thought of Mag and I chasing them at dark and putting them in Mason jars to watch them light up.  I could never keep them inside for very long, without feeling trapped myself, a little of me inside the firefly, so I’d let it go and hope for a favor in return someday.  And then it happened again, a quick burst of light. 
It hit the crystal decanter full of peppermints and the room lit up with a kaleidoscope of red, white and silver glints until the room appeared frosty. For a second, I thought I
had fell asleep again, stuck in the dream world of frozen seas, but on second glance, it was just the way the light of the moon had hit the crystal decanter.  Plus, I was half delirious without sleep, so no telling what I might see. 

I bought the candy dish as a house warming gift to myself. It sat glitzy between two dusty books and three hat boxes full of sewing supplies in the back room of the old antique store. It seemed out of place, so I purchased it, filled it with peppermints and sat it in the kitchen window. I’ve passed that candy dish a thousand times since then, but only now, do I see it clearly. 
It’s like its speaking to me. 
It is eerily right and eerily wrong.
 Everything around me shifts. The room is askew and I struggle to keep balance. I
feel like I might pass out.  I drop the glass and it shatters in the sink.   
The last thing I remember is falling...

I wake up inside my parent’s living room. It’s 1970 something. I know because it’s the spitting image of everything
we owned in that era.  It was all brown, orange and avocado green. 
And wouldn’t you know it—to add to the pain is the torturous little girl
.  She just keeps coming to life all over the place. 
In my dreams she drowned, but here she is, again. I’m frantic.
Am I asleep but don’t know it?
I see
the little girl, but I see myself too.  I see us together.  I’m an adult.  She’s a child. 
What is going on? I must be losing it again. Time for therapist.
 
Wake up Willodean Wake up!
She subdues me with her haunted eyes, fixated on me, forcing me to stillness, where only my senses are alert. I am ravaged by intangible ghosts and tormented by the grim shadows that I know are there, between us, for us,
against us. They are invisible to everyone but us, lurking in corners and hiding places.  She walks across the room and
my eyes follow h
er. She sits on the brown couch designed with a fabric of hideous yellow daises sprouting from every cushion. 
Above the couch in the center of the wall is an oil painting of a forest with one dirt pathway snaking off into the distance. Suddenly I
want to jump inside, run away. 
The girl presses her back against the cushions and dangles her feet. She looks my way as if she knows I’m watching. Her feet lift up and hit the maple coffee table in front of her. I
always hated that table for the fact Mag and I ran into it, a gazillion times. 
Corner to corner, jabs, pokes, stumped toes. Dad did too, and he threatened to take a chainsaw to it and use it a
s firewood.  But we all know what happened to that.  Everyone cowers under the Lena’s bent eyebrow. 

In the center of the table, is a crocheted dolly that Dell made in her early years of sewing, long before her patchwork phase set in. On top of it is the centerpiece. 
My centerpiece. 
The splendid royal bowl of crystal sits in its rightful throne, its pla
ce of authority, its dutiful namesake. 
The candy dish was
my favorite. 
I don’t remember a day of it 
not
 being there. 
Where it was supposed to be. 
I rarely held interest in material attachments, seeing what it done to my green stamp mother but this dish was different. I idolized it. I’m not even sure why. In my fairytale head, it embellished the look of a crown jewel in its rightful place.
I liked that
. Inside its belly was
a plentiful bounty of sweetness one could savor and go into a sugar surge. 

The glass dish was a deep translucent caramel color with amber swirls. It was eight inches tall, round with a scalloped lid and sat on a flower bud pedestal. There were carved tea
r drops sorrowful and haunting in spirals that formed it. 
I believe they were angel tears hardened into crystals. Directly underneath the spiraled tear drops was a spiral of stars as if someone plucked them from the night sky. Each star and tear drop was brilliantly detailed with points and etches and intricate sparkles. Sometimes I’d try to imagine how it all happened.

The angels or Rectors as they are known in Cupitor language, had a crying spell, and heaven could not contain their moist and heavy tears, so they fell to earth. On their journey down, they crashed into the bright stars, dislodging them from orbit. Tears and stars tangled up and fell to earth and formed a crystal candy dish. As a kid, it was a reasonable story. I was fully convinced it could have happened. 
I mean, if dinosaurs and giants existed, then why can’t a candy dish made from tears and stars exist as well?
 For me, the dish was a 
centerpiece,
 the décor of my childhood stabilit
y where everything has a place to be.  Maybe that’s why I bought the candy dish at the antique store.  I needed to
reclaim what was lost.

As a child, no matter how chaotic my mind ramblings got, no matter the puzzling world of adults around me—for me, I knew this simple candy dish had a place—right in the center of our coffee table. It was the 
one
materialistic thing I could count on, day after day, after day. The world may have spun out of control, but the candy had a place and I reckon,
I envied that.
  I couldn’t think of a day that went by that I didn’t long for my centerpiece, a place to fulfill my creative
purpose, to simply exist and be who I was created to be. 
I wanted a place to consume all the sweetness of my life
inside and out.  So
metimes I’d place the lid which looked like a crown, on my head and then I’d speak a royal pronouncement like a decree of my namesake.

“Take your place Willodean Hart.” I’d say with every ounce of southern aristocracy. “Take. Your. Place.” And then I’d feel God’s breathe on me, giving me his power of approval, his blessing of new life and purpose. I’d celebrate my namesake, my Cupitor purpose and eat a peppermint and everything was right in the world. While my mind weaved in and out of childhood remembrance, I felt the pull of her eyes drawing me into the living room scene. It played out before my gifted and cursed eyes. Sounds and noises filter in my ears
 making me distraught, fearful and locked up, so much I can’t move.  She wants me to watch what happens.  And then I see, as if I couldn’t before, that w
e are not alone. Dad is sitting on the edge of his green wool recliner. His head is down and when he lifts it up, his eyes are swollen red. 
What is wrong? Oh, my God, what did I miss?

Lena walks in fretting, and carrying a dishrag, hitting her leg with it repeatedly in nervous ticks. She flutters about, discarding her emotions by dusting the furniture, television to table, and picture frame to vase. She stops occasionally to sniffle and wipe her eyes. Her face is streaked with black lines.
What has happened?
I catch her glance and give the girl the look, one we both were familiar with. 
The flawed gene look.
 And then Mag appears, like a ghost on the rug, sitting cross legs like an Indian.  She
is crying Mag style, in little spurts, holding back the fullness of herself, lest it do her in.

I stare at myself, me as a kid, a little girl.  I have no idea what is happening.  Our vision tangles up together.  I see what she sees.  A
trance of peppermint swirls, lost in a mess of tear drops and stars, dark of the moon, shine of the sun. A spinning sensation erupts inside h
er, inside me, inside the room, inside the house, inside both of us. 
It’s
one I’ve experienced countless times.  That
terrible moment when I’m gripping the edge of the world and my fingers are slipping, I can’t hang on any longer, so the world falls off its axis and takes me with it. The last image I see in my vision before emerging back to my kitchen, in the present time—is the scattered remains of my stability. The q
ueen of the candy dish went mad hatter. 
In one quick desecrating moment, the girl lost it, disoriented, displa
ced, disengaged from the world and all that was in it. 
She dethroned herself and smashed the centerpiece to bits. 
The crushed royal crown no more. The majestic landmark in ruins.
My parents jump back in horror of this unexpected rage. 
Mag sits in the rubble, unmoved and unaffected by the terror in her midst. Time seems to stand still. Shards of amber glass are everywhere, similar to the cracked sea scape in my dreams, along with scattered pepper
mint life preservers glistening in the crystal pieces. 
Mag breaks the icy silence of the room by brushing the broken Rector tears off her legs.
Clink. Clink. Clink.  The sound breaks me over and over again.  She sniffles
loudly and wipes her nose on her sleeve and then picks up a peppermint laying amongst the debris of the room and unwraps it. The crackle and snap of the clear wrapper is almost too much for me to take, like snapping pine
trees in the forest.  Then t
he smell of fresh menthol rises up like the dawn of the dead invading my nostrils like an army of pilfering soldier’s
hell bent on finding my heart for spoils of war. 
I began to tremble, uncontrollably. 
My teeth chatter until my mouth cannot keep up with them.  I realize I’m back inside my kitchen, still in my pajamas where this all began. 
My reality is confused and daunted with emotions as if the descent into chaos has rendered me unable to return to what I was, then and now.

My stability is no more.
 
Gone as a child. Gone as an adult.

Panic tap dances on my skin. Inside the Dumas of Umbra, the house inside me, a doorway opens.
The creaking sound of a long closed door terrifies me. 
The pain of yesterday mingles with the pain of today. 
I was lost. I was found. I was crazy. I was sane
.

When I come back to myself, which is significantly hours later, I am sitting on the floor of my kitchen while the light of the half-moon in the window glitters across the floor, l
ighting it up in little prisms and kitchen colors. 
I sit amongst the busted stars, broken tear drops and cracked peppermint life preservers. The past repeated itself in the present. 
The dream makes sense.
 The little girl told me what she needed me to know.
And that is that.
As if there was nothing left to do, I picked up a peppermint, brushing the
broken stars and tears off. 
The clear paper made a sickly crisp sound as I unwrapped it. The striped ball slid into my palm
, and mixed with the blood streaks running down my hand, from my fingers. 

My centerpiece
gone then, gone now.  I shouldn’t have taken the necklace.  It was all my fault. 
I was only trying to help. I shouldn’t’ have
done it.  She’s dead because of me.  And it’s my fault. 

I plop the bloody peppermint life preserver in my mouth.  It cannot save me.  No one can save me. 
It is too late for me. It is too late for the little girl.
The Shadows return
and fill the kitchen with their awful dread.  They whisper, they taunt, they remind.  “Yes, it was your fault.  Come to the house.  We are waiting for you.” They say.  And then they sweep me away to the numbing room, under royal confinement, chain after chain of bitter memories.  I recognize a sound I hadn’t heard in the room until now, and I recognize its horrible ticking, tock.  It grows louder in my ears and I on my tongue I taste the sap of my own soul. 
Tick—tock. Tick—tock. The room is sweet. The room is bitter. It is full of candy and death.