WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (78 page)

“I—don’t remember!”  I screamed.  “No, no, you don’t understand.  I don’t remember at all. Please tell me, remind me.”  There was silence.  Dreadful, awful porch silence.  My ears cracked and popped and waited.   “Papa Hart?”  I waited, I looked, I wept but he did not answer.  The barrier to the heavens was closed and I was alone, on the porch, in utter consuming, deafening silence. 

I pulled at my ears.  “No.  No.  No.”  I want to hear the words again, and again.  I want to remember when and where he told it to me, what it means, the message, and the family tradition, everything I had forgotten. 
Why?  Why did I forget?
 
Was it important? 
My mind is swirling.  I want all my childhood memories back.  Why is it so hard to remember things? 
Is it because I’m a Dresden?
  God.  Is it?  I’m so confused.  So stirred with memories.  I am like Papa Hart.  I want everything to stay the same.  I want the seashells in the house to click and clack like they always have.   I want the lava lamp to roll and boil and trance my eyes.  I want the Samsonite travel bag to sit right where it’s at until Jesus comes back.  I want to stare at the grocery list and repeat each item over and over again.  I want to look at Papa Hart’s leather boots and Dell’s fluffy beige house shoes in the same corner of the house.  I want to flip through the novel Dell was reading, book mark still in place, chapter 12, page 115.  I want a freaking museum of my own, one where nothing changes and nobody moves nothing.  I want a memorial where I can say, “This is where I learned to make biscuits.  This is where I tried to learn to sew. 
Tried
is the operative word.  This is the bar where we played dominoes till the wee hours of morning and I fell asleep on dad’s shoulders.  This is the quilt I snuggled on the pallet in the floor while I spent the night.  This is the cabinet where Papa Hart prized fig
newton’s
were hid, behind the crackers and the castor oil.  He said no one would ever look past the castor oil so that meant they were safe.  This is the back porch.  This is the front porch.  Here is the porch swing built by hand.  This is Papa Hart’s chair.  See the indentions?  How his body molded into the folds? 
Oh yes
.  This is the porch where life started and life ended.  Where stories were told, lessons were learned, wars were fought and love was given and received.  Wisdom was learned in this swing, and can you hear it?  

I sat in my misery, trying to pull joy from my past, to keep it in my heart but it was ungraspable.  This has been the weirdest, trying, most revealing year of my life, emotionally, physically and spiritually.  I was tired of crying, tired of pain, tired of figuring things out, tired of childhood, tired of being an adult.
Tired.
  Eerie sensations filled the air around me.  The wind picked up speed as if God flipped the wind switch.  Tree limbs sway and leaves rustle.  Immediately, I perk up. 
I await him
like an expectant child for a father.
   My hair twisted and flew into my face. I felt a stirring, alive inside me, breathing and bending.  I saw something from the corner of my eye and turned to face it.  My eyes grew wide in fear.  It wasn’t—
him
.  It wasn’t who I expected.  It was him, but he wasn’t as I remembered him.  He was a different Dirt Dancer…or was he?   My nerves went into a frenzy and lined my skin with goose pimples.  Watching him swirl and bob left me isolated as if I was hedged up inside a room, inside the house.  This wasn’t no ordinary Dirt Dancer.  His spiraled maze hypnotized me as if he came straight out of the house inside me, a piece of him from each room.  In each spine tingling swirl of darkness, I saw a shadow, one from each haven, and every room I built with my own hands.  This Dirt Dancer was broken, burned out and frazzled as much as I was.  He was wild, untamed, unashamed and chaotic.  His mannerisms were different than the other Dirt Dancers I had encountered as a child.    This one was dark and yet still, I was drawn to him.  His attire was fading in and out like ink blots on clouds, a bluish gray shirt and black pants, both tattered and stripped and they absorbed into the white transparency of his molted skin figure.  His eyes were red as flaming fire almost like the dragon eye stone but deeper as if they were embers from the hottest flames.  To look into them, for too long, melted me with tears.  It felt as if I had fell into a campfire to be consumed.  Inside their amber midst, a terror sat, side by side with a peaceful glow, an unseen confidant of safety, assurance and wellness.  As unsettling as it was, I couldn’t take my eyes off him.  In seconds, he was upon me.  My hair flew straight back and I lost breathe.  My chaos joined his chaos.  The Dirt Dancer bowed as I knew he would.  His hand extended outward to meet mine.  “Invitation my lady.”  I heard him in my gifted ears.  His voice deep in the chambers of my secret house, inside the rooms no one can enter, but us.  It is then, I realize he has always been with me, before and after, ahead and behind, always with me.  He is the smudge in the night, the lesser light of a greater light, a vast swelling of black in the sky which drapes the edges of the moon, and spills off into the depths of the deep, sliding down stars, one to another.  It was like looking up at the deep, dark night sky and seeing it for the first time.  As if the moon, the bright stars and the shine of faraway planets were just the diamond tips of another world behind it.  The sparkling essence of uncountable billions lying beyond in a cosmic jeweled treasure chest, the limitless sky, the outer covering, only the untouched surface.  Seekers see that which is unseen. Going beyond, beneath, below, above.   We are but those foolish children, adults, seekers, those who are careless enough, and just crazy enough to look beyond what the eye can see, beneath the stars, the moon, behind all the planets, dredged up in darkness, hidden in the pitch where the sacred treasures lie, to the realm of in-betweens, the place where God created light from the dark and the greatest void of our hearts lie in wait, for the fulfilling promise of what’s to come. 

In this moment of recognition, of revelation, the Dark Dirt Dancer speaks and I hear him in my mind, as clear, as if God himself, keeper of the stars, of the light, of the dark spoke them for my ears only. 

“I will give you hidden treasures in darkness. Do you accept the invitation?”   He says.  I am swept up in this magical and wild world of realms and otherworldly gifts.  The second I touch his gray smoky hand my clothing transforms.  This dress is different than my Bella Ball dress I created as a child.  It is ashen black and shredded into slits.  The bodice is in pieces, dark as dusk and out of it is the scratched sky which are my shattered sleeves and threaded frays of material which hold this world to the next.  Blue sparks shimmer from my hemline as it taps the ground as if it is on fire.  We swirl, we spin.  We dance.  In every twirl I see the shadows lurk and leap with us, through us, around us.  They frighten me with their presence as they always did, but this time, my heart stays, knowing that I am bigger, stronger and more prepared to take them on.  Now that I know the truth.  The shadows stir up long buried secrets inside me, hidden inside the house and they remind me of this with each turn.  This time, I know I cannot run from it.  Whatever it is I must face it.  Doodlebugs and beetles run across my dress and disappear into the trimmings of fabric.  Darkness spills around us, ink inside a fog, white then black.  Everything around us was dead, cut up, broken, stripped and lying on a gray tarnished landscape, in ashes, a soot covered destruction zone amidst a poverty polluted acreage of nothingness.  A wasteland.  I saw it for what it was, a wasteland of my life, the House inside me, the shadows that ruled me, destroyed me and took me captive.  In a quickened second I heard his crackling fiery voice.    

“Living life is about moving forward.  Inhale.  Breathe it in.”  His voice was energy and I almost lost myself in his raptured spin, a mass consumption of song, dance, spinning, loving, desiring.   All at once, his liquid lips inhaled everything I was.  He sucked my spirit inside him, and then exhaled outward all that I could be, all that I should be, all that I obtain to be.  He gave me back a restorative breath.

“Dance in the wasteland.  Breath in the ashes of failure, of what was and what is, or what could have been.  Accept the invitation now.  It will get darker as you go forward but it is always darkest before the dawn.  One has to travel in the lesser light in order to grow.  You have untapped strength to access.  There is nothing magical about the things you can explain.  It’s the things that you have no answer for, that are touched by the divine.  The natural order of life has been transformed into the spiritual.  They become crumbs, heavenly crumbs to consume.  They remind you of what really matters.  Fulfilling your purpose in life, matters.  It is always bigger than you.  Willodean, look for the crumbs.”   We spun round and round.  He swept me across the yard and around the mimosa tree, down the ditch and back to the porch.  The syllables of his words filled me with oxygen, with life, with faith and just when I thought I had lost myself inside him,
forever
—he came to an abrupt halt.  Eye to eye his fixation stayed on me.  I thought I might faint with this marvelous power before me. 

“When you think all beauty is burnt up and every trace of life is extinguished, when it’s cruel and unfair and a wasteland of ruin is all you see, feel and touch—remember there are treasures in darkness.  Don’t give up looking for them.  If you can dance in the wasteland—the enemy cannot contain you.”   And just like that he was gone.  My heart deflated like a puny balloon.  My body was thrust backwards to the porch.  Everything was stilled and quiet.  All but the beating of my erratic heart.  I was not the same. 
I was changed.
I felt my head drop and big tears leaked out.  I heard the eek-eek of the swing, the whoosh of air between the slats, the squeal of the rusty chain.  The sounds made my heart skip a beat.  I felt that stare into my back, the one where you are positive someone is watching you.  I turn and she is there—in my place, my sanctuary of seats, my storytelling and silence.  I instantly want to react since I’m an over-reactor. My lips start to open but I cannot speak.  The little girl is holding her fingers to her lips.  My mouth was muzzled, unable to form words.  Her eyes pulled me towards her.  I felt a slight filling inside me.  It was a strange feeling as if she reached inside my mouth and placed a large crumb on my tongue, a heavy, awful crumb.  I wanted to spit it out but she would not let me.  It dissolved sweet then turned to a wracking awful bitterness. 

“I know who you really are.”  She says with bland eyes.  “You know, Willodean, when I was a little girl I dreamed of a man to rescue me, to save me from my loneliness, to love me, to fill this great big hole inside me.  To talk to me, and carry me away to blissfulness.”  She smiled at me awkwardly and raised her eyebrows.  I had no choice but to listen.  “I was so innocent and stupid.  And Lord knows, that man wasn’t my daddy.  He was too busy working two jobs and building all those projects Lena Hart
had
to have, you know, to fill that unquenchable well of materialism, of people pleasing, and keeping up with the Jones.  Oh, dad loved me, I know he did but he wasn’t there, not really.  If he wasn’t working, he was hunting, fishing or drinking, which made him more unavailable.  Secretly inside, I feared his love for beer overrode his love for me; that he held the aluminum can, more than he held me.  And God forbid, Lena Hart wasn’t going to rescue me—we had our differences.”  She rolled her eyes and I felt mine do the same.   “And I know she loved me too, in the only way she knew how, I guess she did her best.” Her shoulders inched up as if she wasn’t too sure.  “We had a lot of things—lots of stuff to play with but the one thing I wanted from her, she couldn’t give.  I remember her telling me that all she ever wanted was to be a housewife.  Well—she got that for sure.  But now that I’ve had years to think about it, and watching you act out my life as an adult has changed my perception of a lot of things.  You know, maybe Lena needed someone to rescue her too.  Maybe she needed love and dad—
well,
he just needed another beer.  But then again, hell, maybe dad was looking for someone to rescue him too and love him.  Ya know, replace the drink.  And then again,
maybe
—that’s what we’re all looking for.  The whole freaking world is looking for someone to rescue us—and maybe save us from ourselves.  Fill up that hole inside us.  You know, Willodean, touch the space between the void, between the fingertips.” She paused and stared at me.  I could do nothing, not move, not flinch,
not
sweat, nothing.  

“I mean, you had that love all along Willodean and you didn’t recognize it.  Heck.  I know it’s mostly my fault and all.  The things I did without thinking but that’s why I’m here now—to reveal these things to you so you can fix them before you destroy yourself and others in the process.  It’s easy to accept the good.  It’s the bad stuff that kicks us in the rumpus.  Living up to who we are meant to be scares us most.  I know.  You know it too.  But there is no other way.  We have to confront it, face it down, and stare into the darks eyes.”  At this point her eyes made mine sting and burn and run wet with tears. 

“Now that you have accepted me, or rather, the me of your childhood, all of her, all of me, the good and the bad, the unknowns, all that, we must now go back and confront the awful, the terrible.” 
Her words petrified my heart.  What does she mean the terrible and the awful?  How does it get worse than what I’ve endured already?