WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (39 page)

Everything in my vision changes. I am no longer in Annie, I'm in the park on the pristine grass and 
she
 is there. 
The one I love. The one I hate. The one who shows up in my day dreams, my nightmares, my childhood, my adult life.
She is running, smiling, briskly skipping up and down, and untethered to the earth and its gravity shields. She runs in the wide open field as if nothing held her, unhindered, free as a gazelle and bouncy as Tinker bell. Attached to her wrist is a string tied to a glorious white kite that dances
gracefully in the wind above her. 
I felt instantly emotional. The kite rises, it falls, dips, dives and pulls. It tugs at my heart, my soul. It makes me feel the same way, I felt when I saw the leaf and the crackle outside my bedroom window. The little girl runs faster, giggling. She is so immersed with the kite above her that she tangles up in the string and tumbles to the ground. The string snaps. It’s violent to my ears. Something unnamed inside the house, inside me—
broke.
And something horrible slipped out. It was unnerving.
Unfamiliar anger.
 Anger for things I lost, anger for things I missed, anger for things I never had. 
Just anger
. I hadn't felt this way...in forever. I didn't like it. 
It was lethal.
 I never got angry, not that I could remember. It wasn’t part of my makeup, I mean, sure I cried and hurt and felt terrible, awful physical pains but I rarely, 
if ever,
 got angry. I considered angry people unwanted planets of bad energy floating in our galaxy to be avoided at all cost. I didn’t like it in others and certainly not in myself. 
Stop it Willodean. Stuff it down. Put that away. Don’t be like that
.

To rid myself of toxicity, I concentrate on the white kite trying to make a connection to something real, 
or not real
, just anything to rid myself of the poisonous juices wanting to blow me up. The more I tried to banish them, the more they overpower me. It was a capsizing boat, rivets popping one after another, spring after spring rising up, little geysers of gall, disgust, blasphemy, and wrath. 
No. No. No. I say to myself. This is not happening.
 I stare at the little girl hoping to evade, absorb, deny. She lifts her head to the sky and watches the kite rise higher and higher into the mouth of the heavens. The sky eats it in large blue bites. She turns to face me. Her eyes were like that of the Angelina, white laced, deep and dark. The realm of distance that used to separate us, a glass shield of something unseen, is no longer keeping us apart. 

In our gifted and cursed vision, the one we share, inside the house, we were only an inch away from each other, nose to nose, as if the realm of time, the years of our past and our present had forged a thin glaze of protection, a shield of sight and remembrance only we could penetrate and allow entrance. In a moment of vulnerability, we saw ourselves. We peered into the looking glass of our souls, tracing the white laced maps of time and torture, inside and outside the house, fears and anger having their place, taking captives willfully. A trickle of tears stream down her face. My cheeks start to burn. I have no tears to shed, only fear. She turns away. I notice the delicate placement of her ears, her dirty blonde hair draping in curls and hanging loose on her shoulders. I notice the innocence, how it carries itself in her core, seeping out of her pores uncontainable, unstoppable, no matter the madness or the circumstances around her, she has an inner substance of sustainability that I myself—
did not have.
I lose my breath in this effigy of
this little one.  S
he reads my thoughts, her eyes no longer a laced mess but a hollow nothingness. Her face is stark white, paler than paper, pasty as flour. 
Suddenly she takes the appearance of a Dresden.
 

The depth of her emptiness releases something inside me. My mouth salivates. A crumb springs up on my tongue and I taste a vile stomach acid. I retched and gagged but I could not spit it out. The awful crumb memory would not leave until I accepted it for what it was. 
It was all my fault.
 
She is who she is—because of me.
 
I did this to her. It was my fault.
 In a frightening rush I am pushed back to the moment. The concrete angel is still touching Annie’s bumper. Steam rises from her hood. The angel is standing tall as if she has never moved, never cracked, never looked me in the eye. There was no chunks of concrete, no blurry windshield, no feathered creature, no burning angels, no crazy visions, everything was the same—
everything but me.
 In a mad dash, I cranked Annie, sped off the curb in reverse and drove like the crazy woman I was. I barely made it to my house without spinning off into some star gazed galaxy for deranged divorcees. If there is such a place—I am queen without a centerpiece.

The Mirror Bin

She placed the box in the closet, to deny, to forget. It was such a long time ago, a period of confusion when she could not withstand what life required of her. 
She had been in and out of the sanitariums, more times than she wanted to admit. 
The shadow imps were intense, grueling in their mistreatment.
Maw Sue could do nothing but turn away.  In her present state, she felt the burden of life crush her.  She felt u
nworthy of love, of light, and therefore went her own way, dealing with life as she could without the gift, or its requir
ements.  She was filled with resentment that she had to bear it at all.  Her only choice was to put it away. 
She tucked the mirror bin under a cloak of darkness, inside the cedar closet, where the shadows hide and multiple. 
Out of sight. Out of mind.
 No reminders of failure, no reminders of unfinished tasks, and no relics of regret. And this is how it would be, that is, until
…I was born.
 Willodean Hart would enter the Imperium realm. Another seeker would fulfill the quest and do what Maw Sue could not do. There would be great enlightenment and great danger.

Hours after I was born, Maw Sue was still inside her closet holding the corners of the ancient box, unsteady and trembling. She began to panic, as usual, wanting to flee, take a bottle of tic-tacs, forget it all, make it go away but her love for me, stayed her hand. The gift sat inside the wooden box, unfulfilled and waiting. Her fingers felt the magic of its power and the warmth of the light she abandoned. The box came to life and only for a minute, her vision was restored to remember.
It was lovely and then it was loss.
It was the most vibrant, vivid, heart breaking, soul coming apart moment of her life. A thousand stars spewed outward from the silver toned mirror made from antique pewter, attached to the mirror bins surface. The ancient wood of its shell vibrated like a bell clock in her hands, shaking her inner core, and stirring up old demons and a terrifying light. It racked Maw Sue spent and lifeless until she drooped forward across its hard surface. She tried to remove her hands but the mirror bin was not done. 
What was meant to be—shall be—always in the end.
  
It is written
. The Rector spirit appeared to strengthen her
, glowing and providing warmth and reminding her of words written ages ago.  She thought of t
he old ritual, the rite of passage, decades old, and its mission to finish to the task.
She was a descendant of the seventh tribe, where seven sisters started it all, and passed it down.  Maw Sue was not one of those women, but in that moment, she felt their strength bound together in her blood, ancient blood that would not flow without her.  She
surrendered and closed her eyes to speak the ancient words that would transfer the gift and change my life.

Birds of the air. 
Lilies of the field and the bright stars of heaven. Take her God and make her seven. Send her crumbs that she may consume, and make her life a beautiful bloom.
 

Maw Sue said the room likely spun out of orbit for all she knew because in that second she felt captured within its brilliance. Her mother spoke the same words in her last dying breathe.
She knew the well. 
Joy and sorrow filled her body as she remembered the bitter and sweet days. The mirror bin took back its power like a suction cup, pulling everything out of her, taking back what was unused, leaving her house an abandoned building. It left her a ghost, an unused vessel, a life stored away on a shelf to gather dust. 
Whoosh.
 And just like that..
it was done
. The gift released her from the task. A mission she refused to fulfill. The mirror bin sat on the floor, full and fat. 
It waited to receive me, the new vessel, the compromise, the southern sap.
 

Consumed with tears and sorrow like a fury, each wet drop of Maw Sue’s tears unleashed a crumb she had forgotten, the ones she loved and hated, received yet denied. Mistakes stored away, crumbs of light and da
rk, crumbs of herself, and her soul.  The stone inside her had long ago, lost its luster, turning a blackened hardened chunk of weight, bagged she carried daily.  She remembered the most
imp
ortant part of being a Cupitor, one her mother reminded her constantly. 
If one denies the horrible, terrible memories, our tragedies, blackened childhoods—is to also deny our wonderful, beautiful, poignant memories of childhood. The light and the lesser light are tied together in the inter-realm like an intricate design. Woven together they form who we are and who we are to become. We are blended and created by life’s pleasures and pains. We are our past. We are our present. We are
an accumulation of both. 
It is only when we accept each, as they are, that we touch the pain and become what we should. 
Cupitor. Seven. Whole. Complete. A beautiful bloom.
 
To love and be loved is pain. Loss is pain. It is in this that we make lovely our losses and our lives become a joy to live and to suffer because ultimately they are intricately one.

“The mirror bin.” Maw Sue cried. The adult and the child cried out, their voices wounded and broken. 
Unfilled.
 
Maw Sue felt two parts of herself, separate but together.  She
took in the energy of the mirror bin, breathing in its regenerated oxygen, a breath of pure, unpolluted air of which she’d been denying for many years, air from another realm, air that didn’t suffocate, air that gave renewal and redemption, purity that frightened and alienated her. In those few minutes of restoration,
a sense of duty and purpose emerged for which she hadn’t felt in ages.  Maybe not ever. 

“All gifts truly divine come with attachments.”
She remembers her mother’s words when she gave her the mirror bin. 

“But what is it mama?”
Maw Sue said.  She was filled with marvel and awe
.

“It’s called the mirror bin.” For months she listened to her mother tell her the stories as old as time itself, on the banks of the Mississippi river, one year before her mother would be tragically removed from her life. One year before her life fell apart. One year before she would fall into the darkness and never recover.

From what Maw Sue shared, she too was a fragile child born at 3:13 on March 3, 1903. Her mother, a sage by old tradition passed the ancient stories down as did her ancestors
before her. 
She taught her the ways of her people, a generation of seekers started with seven women, long ago, long dead and gone, yet their stories lived on, their lives lived on, their traditions lived on, one after another in the telling. 

When her mother died, she
obsessed over the mirror bin carrying it everywhere, never setting it down. 
It was all she had left of her mother as if she ex
isted in the grain of wood, the stories with it.  And from all her mother told her—she believed it.   She’d see her
face melting in the mi
rror reflection on the outside retelling her stories, and talking to her as if she was still alive, just inside the box, another realm away. 
She read the journals, the scrolls, the old stories over and over. Her fascination with the box and the epic tales grew more intense each day. It was the only substance for which she could gather strength to
wake up in this hell hole of a world in which she lived and hated, by the minute.  Out of nowhere, one day, she noticed her mother’s face grow faded and dim, as if it was going away.  Her voice that calmed her in her dreams, a symphony of sleep gradually faded as well. 

She could barely hear the symphony of her mother’s voice in her dreams to calm her anymore. An army of unrecognizable voices replaced the soft maternal voice and drove her mad, unstable and displaced. The Dumas of Umbra upon which her mother warned her, left her undone. 
Her eyes appeared wet all the time, her teeth set on edge, and excessive manic energy poured from her. 
Highs and lows tormented her soul, she was unable to sleep,
the voices loud and terrible, as she grew more tormented by the shadows Amodgians.  Even in the desperation she could see the
br
ight light of the Rectors nudging, directing and making demands of her.  She felt pulled in every direction, going nowhere but crazy. 
Tonics didn’t help—the mirror bin didn’t help—the old stories didn’t help—prayer didn’t help—Jesus didn’t help.
  
Nothing and no one could help.
  Maw Sue was trapped inside a dark shell of herself, a shadow prisoner of other dimensions, of mind wanderings of which she could not control.  
After her mother died, her father unable to handle the burden of a girl, especially a troubled one, left her with her Aunt. 
Abandonment swelled in Maw Sue’s bones. 
Unwanted,
 screamed the shadow imps,
Unwanted.