WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (7 page)

“Suck root for-ever!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Dirt rules! Ban Soap! Mud. Mud. Mud.” I stomped
the tub and chanted. 
I fist pumped my arms like those hippy dope-smoking protestors I
saw on TV in Washington State protesting the war. 

“Rule the kingdom. Take your life back. Demand what’s yours. Take your place people.” Lena fought my emancipation like a heartless adult.

“Be still.”  She says.  She wrestled me every which way but loose. 
“Stop it. What has gotten into you?” Her wet washcloth dodged and darted me at every turn but my endorphins were too engaged to feel any pain—only revolt, revolution and rebellion.

“Never grow up. Fulfill your na
mesake!” I screamed and marched.  Bubbles were flying around the room like air balloons.  Lena grew tired and slow and she
was soaked
till her breast formed two points. 
With all the commotion, dad poked his head through the door. His face said,
what-the-hell-is-going-on
. I gave him the helpless
save your daughter look
 but the octopus in
tercepted with the bent eyebrow. 
Lena was certain dad’s family tree
of outlaws and renegades had tainted her precious seeds nobility and I was living proof.  Dad skedaddled and I was left like a fledging to survive with a crazed octopus
hell bent on pulling up my rebellious roots and then it escalated into effervescent madness. “Rule the kingdom. Take your life back. Demand what’s yours. Take your place people.” I yelled and yelled some more. She scrubbed
and scrubbed some more. 
The generational sins of James Dean fell off me in scabs until I was raw and squeaky but the Willow tree
did not break.  It endured.  It survived. 
I threatened to go outside and roll in the dirt like a dog after a bath but the Octopus said she’d dust me in old lady powder and make me go to school smelling like it. Ugh.
My nose reared up at the thought.  L
ena-1. Willodean-0.

I reluctantly put on pajamas but for the re
cord, I didn’t like it one bit and I made it known. 
I stomped to my room while the spent octopus sprawled out on the couch, soap bubbles smiling in her hair
while she drank a glass of wine. 
Dad sitting across from her, was on his fifth beer. I could always tell by the empty can tower on the floor
.  He gave me a sympathetic glance right before
I slammed the door of my room. I felt the piercing stare of Lena’s steely eyes through the wa
lls. I smirked in satisfaction and sighed loud enough to blow my windows out. 

“God. What a day.” I knelt at my bedside and pulled out my salvation.
The mirror bin. 
Just seeing it made me feel better. It was a treasured gift from Maw Sue on the day I was born. According to family legend, this peculiar box, over six generations old holds my destiny, among other things I have
n’t figured out yet.  Maw Sue says time will tell me all things I need to know.  Of course, she doesn’t have a clue that I’m not going to grow up, so there.  Who knows what might happen now. 

Stashed ins
ide was all my favorite things.  The rock I found at the creek, a milky crystal with jagged ends like teeth.  A blue jay feather I found in the wondering tree, when I was praying for God t
o take care of me, and wondered how he
was going to do it, and all, since I knew me, and it wasn’t easy.   I opened my eyes.  The blue marvel was floating right in front of me as if it dropped from heaven.  I grabbed it and with its touch the answer flooded my heart. 
If God takes care of the birds of the air, the beast of the earth, the lilies of the field, and the stars of heaven, then how much more will he take care of me.
  I shouldn’t worry about the how’s and why’s.  He does it all.  My heart swelled so big I thought I might break the limb.  I always loved it when I heard God’s voice.  And I was sure of it…couldn’t no one convince me any different. 

Underneath the rock and feather, there is an assortment of poems that Maw Sue gave me and on top of them in a beige pouch is several medicinal herbs from her garden.  When she ran out of doctors in four counties who wouldn’t give her any more pills to take, she’d resort to the garden.  The smell of the herbs themselves could change a mood in an instant. 
She showed me how to be one 
with
 the earth when all hell broke loose 
on
earth. I could think of no time like the present, besides the soap smell was making me nauseated. I crushed the Rosemary and Sage leaves into my hands and rubbed them on my necks and my arms and put my hands up to my nose to take in their earthy fresh aroma. When I could no longer smell soap, I took out my pen and notebook.  Maw Sue said it was good for those who are gifted with the Dumas of Umbra, the house inside me, to journal our thoughts in an effort to remember them because the curse can render us mindless without memories if we’re not careful. It was called, memory muzzling and it’s the Amodgians
strongest weapon against us. 
I didn’t want it to happen to me, so I was meticulous to journal every day.

Today is a game changer.  I am going to write a
letter to my grown up self. The future me, the molt-have sex-die adult.  
Ewww.
 Just thinking about it gave me the heebie-jeebies.  I sealed my namesake in blue ink and folded the paper vow into a
square and placed it inside the mirror bin, closing the lid. 
The mirror attached to the outside lid, sparkled and glistened on the ceiling, and walls, followed by an array of shadows
and things I try not acknowledge.  I gasped suddenly.  I had left the crackle outside when Lena had her hose fit. 
I bolted ou
t the door slipping pass the octopus who now had a fresh bottle of wine next to her, while dad was fast asleep and snoring in his chair. 

I stopped in the kitchen
to pour a glass of water to avoid suspicion and then slipped out the back sliding glass door.  It was ink splat dark ex
cept for the
small kitchen light making a key whole glare out the window. 
I walked to the edge of the cemen
t patio until my eyes adjusted to the lesser light. 
The night sky was
a thousand diamonds glistening and I paused for a second to wonder. 
Maybe I could learn to like the lesser light after all, especially when
its beauty is jaw dropping.   It wasn’t about the night sky anyway.
Deep inside I knew what it was.
   I
t was the dark house inside me that left me undone, most times, if not
all
times. 
Now, where did I put that crackle?
  I
want to commemorate this day because if the dreadful curse of adulthood hits and I’m left to wander like a desert lizard with all the other idiots, at least I’ll have a reminder of what’s important; the simple, barefoot kid at heart who plays in the mud, dances in the rain, builds pine straw houses, climbs trees and plays sky cloud with the angels. At the end of each day, I want to stare into the lesser light and not be afraid and most of all, I want to
make lovely my losses
. I have to remember everything I’ve learned in case adulthood and molting inadvertently screws up my brains. And 
sex

God forbid!
 I don’t want to think about what that might do. After seeing it in a magazine once, I have never recovered from its strange affects. It was like an alien invaded my bones and swam through my organs causing all sorts of oddities, reflexes and gushing anomalies. If that’s part of being a grown up, I want nothing to do with it.

 

My eyes had finally adjusted to the dark and I found the crackle inside the broken tea
cup at the edge of the patio. 
I held it gently in my hands an
d slipped back inside the house.  When I got to my room, I placed the crackle inside the mirror bin on top of my vow and closed the lid and then I let out a hopeful sigh.  I hoped the mirror bin would fulfill its destiny in me, as it did with all my ancestors before me.  After all,
I am a seeker, a common girl from a great line of Cupitors. 
Namesake ready.

 

Sleepers

 

I sat for hours staring out the window into a space of time, lost in childhood dreams and tree climbs.  I drifted back to the inner sanctum of the crackle shell room where she lives, where she hides, safe from the world and all its troubles.  It is good that she is there and not here.  I want nothing more than to make amends for what I did
 to her but some things can’t be undone.

“Eyes to see—ears to hear.” 
The voice came into my room like a wind squall. 

“Jesus!” I said agitated. The dead woman’s voice was back. “Quit scaring me like that. What if my parents walk in and find me
conversing with the dead?  They already think I’ve flipped my lid like you did, which I’m beginning to wonder if they’re right.  If they get one notion I’m talking to you, a dead person, a ghost of all people, they’ll put me away for good.  I’ll go to one of those
sanitarium places, you know, those terrible awful places you used to visit.”

I
scan the room waiting for her to appear, follow her voice. 
Only silence and the sifting of wind outside. “Maw Sue?” I began to wonder if I heard her at all. Maybe I am going crazy. Maybe the curse is real. If I know her, she isn’t going to be quiet when it comes to the gift. She’s a squeaky wheel when it comes to Cupitors, seekers, sleepers and the family history. When I was a
kid it was all she talked about, that is, when she wasn’t locked up somewhere.  Thinking of it made goose pimples rise up on my arms. 
How close am I to going to that place
?  When Maw Sue died, I was sure the curse died with her.  The gifts, the
superstitions, candle rituals, all of it. 
Dead.
 It was magical to the child Willodean but that child is no more. 

“Is that what you think?” She says
startling me.  She stood at the foot of my bed like a paper doll, thin and wafted. And suddenly, next to her,
she
appeared.  My breath left me and I stuttered in mind.  
How did she get here? I didn’t let her out. What is happening? How did you…where did you...what did you…

“Aww hush.” Maw Sue said stammering in her ghostly realm.
She read my thoughts and banished them. 
The l
ittle girl sneered and liked it a little too much for my taste.  I gave her the slant eye.  It seems I am being
cornered by a little girl and a dead relative.
The urge to flee hit me like a bolt of lightning. 
My skin twitched and my heart pounded. The little girls face stared through me in a knowing fashion that made me nervous, as if she saw everything in me, a deep scholastic eye that no one else c
ould penetrate. 
Maw Sue’s was strictly piss and vinegar. That meant business as usual. She was not leaving till she finished what she came to do and I have
no idea what that might be.  Hopefully, she’ll take me with her and save me some misery of my own existence.  Wispy and subjective, they glided over me like misty apparations, invading, terrible and touchy.  I felt a strange energy field that pulled me, yet held me back. 
The little girl locked eyes on me, as if searching deep inside me. I closed my eyes to will her away but I had no power against
her as he held me in a vice. 

“Devinio, devinio, devinio.”  They chant and their arms reach upwards.  The sun shines outside but the room grows a bitter dark I can taste. 
“Devinio. Devenio. Devenio.” Soon, I am shaking like an unbalanced washing machine, jerking with knots and lumps while the house
inside me cracks and splinters on its rocky foundation.  This sets the
shadows lose
to roam freely, unhindered, to stir up secrets and cause chaos. 

“Noooo!” I screamed into the blackness.
A floodlight inside the house teetered and swayed, exposing the dark things, leaving a pallor of screams inside my ears. 

“This is the end of me…the end.” The lesser light swallowed my words like hot liquid
sliding down its caustic throat and I absorbed into the inky damaged dark.  When I thought for sure I was at deaths door, the room lit up with an illuminating candle, otherworldly, as if Maw Sue plucked off the edge of a star.  It flickered and held me spellbound. 
It took me a few long exhaust
ing breathes to gather my wits and my panicked heart to slow in beats.  B
efore I knew what I was doing I was snuggled next to a ghost of Maw Sue, as if I was eight years old again, inside the walls of her bedroom during 
the candle ceremonies. 
I watched the shadows leap and dance across the haunt of my room,
their airless footsteps and lightweight arms touching the dark places I want to forget. 
They whisper and tell me things. Terrible awful things. I glance at Maw Sue beside me, holding the star candle, her hands like fog blending in with the smoke rising from the flames, while a multitude of shadows engulf the room, in front, behind, above, and through her. The little girl was pressed into me on the other side but I
kept scooting closer to Maw Sue, not letting her invade me like she wanted to.  Our breath was one, inhaling, exhaling, our heart rhythm tied to some dark thing neither of us could understand. 
Her accepting. Me refusing.
 
It had always been this way. 
Maw Sue turned and whispered as if
she had read my thoughts again. 

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