Emily's House (The Akasha Chronicles)

by Wright, Natalie

  “No short cut to understanding Akasha.”

  “Akasha? Who is she?”

  “Akasha, not a she – or he. Akasha is all that is. You are here to learn the mysteries of Akasha – the great Web of All that Is. Now sit.”

  I groaned loudly at that. How can sitting on my butt possibly help me learn about this Akasha or become a warrior or help my friends?

  After a few more minutes I said, “Look, I’m not a warrior. I just want to go home. I want to find Fanny and Jake and just go back home.”

  “You leave without training, you not ready to defeat the dark one.”

  “I’m not the one, okay. You defeat him, you know so much. You and Brighid and little Hindergog – you guys know so much, you go defeat this guy. You shouldn’t be sending a teenager to do this anyway.”

  “We exist only in this realm, not in yours. We cannot stop the dark one from his plan. Not our destiny. Destiny of one called Emily.”

  “Well then find someone else. There’s got to be some other person that can do this job. I’m not hero material.”

  “You are what you believe yourself to be. Now sit. Breathe. Answers you seek will come to you. Lessons you need will be learned. Just sit. Breathe.”

  I was frustrated as hell. I had envisioned learning how to use weapons or magic spells. Instead, I was told to sit and breathe, two things I was pretty sure I already knew how to do.

  But seeing as how I didn’t know the way out of that place, and it didn’t look like Madame Wong was going to show me how to leave, I flopped myself back down on my chair and pouted. I may have to sit. I may even have to breathe. But I sure didn’t have to be happy about it.

  “Miss Emily stubborn one. Yes, very inflexible. Your resistance only makes your lesson harder.”

  I ignored her. I would sit and breathe. Best to do it quickly and get this over with so we could move on. The sooner I figured out what she wanted, the sooner I’d be able to get out of there.

  I sat. And I breathed. My mind wandered freely. I was thinking about how Fanny and Jake were doing. I was thinking about being out of school and started to wonder if I’d missed much but then decided a few weeks didn’t much matter since I was close to flunking almost everything anyway.

  Then I started thinking about Muriel and how steamin’ mad she’d be at me if I ever made it back. And my mind stayed on the subject of Muriel for a long time, thinking about how she’d probably lock me in my room without food and maybe beat me with a cane like Madame Wong’s.

  Suddenly sitting and breathing was interrupted by the sound of a shrill and familiar voice.

  “Emily Marie Adams!”

  I opened my eyes and there before me was none other than Muriel the Mean. Her eyes glared at me, and she held a cane in her hand just like Madame Wong’s.

  “Get up off of your lazy butt this minute!”

  As I stood she rapped my legs with the cane.

  “Go. Go to that table and study your math. You will study all night and all day and won’t eat again until you have mastered the entire book.”

  I started to walk to the table now before me, very much like my table at home where I had suffered wraps across my knuckles and Muriel’s icy stare. But then I stopped in my tracks.

  “Wait. I don’t have to do what you say, not here. You’re not real.”

  “What the hell are you talking about girl? Not real, are you hyped up on dope? Maybe a lash from this cane will show you how real I am,” she said as she pulled it back, ready to wallop me with it.

  As the cane swung forward, I grabbed it with my hand and wrung it from her. Muriel was stunned but only for a moment. Then she was furious.

  “How dare you?” she said.

  “How dare you treat me so badly?” I asked.

  “You get what you deserve for your disobedience. You are a stubborn child, so unlike your father. If you were only more like him. . .”

  “If I were more like him instead of my mom, you’d stop beating me? Well, I’m not Liam. I’m Emily. And I’m not going to let you beat me or starve me or mistreat me anymore. Now go away!” I shouted.

  In an instant, Muriel faded into the mist of the Netherworld as if she had never been there at all. My heart raced. I thought I was supposed to be just sitting and breathing.

  “Madame Wong, what the hell was that? Why did Muriel just pop in for a visit?”

  “I said sit. Breathe.”

  “Well I was just sitting and breathing.”

  “No. Madame Wong also say ‘No do. No think.’ You thought.”

  “Well yeah, I was thinking. It’s kinda’ hard not to think if you have a brain. I don’t exactly have a shut off switch for the thoughts.”

  “Oh, you do. You find it. Until you find switch, you will face whatever your mind think about here.”

  “You’re saying that if I think about something, it will appear – good or bad – it’s just going to pop in for a visit?”

  “That what I say, why you need to repeat it Madame Wong not know.”

  “But I can’t control these thoughts! My mind wanders, and it often wanders to unpleasant things – memories or nightmares. . .”

  “Then you in for rough time. Sit. Breathe. No do. No think.”

  “But I can’t help it that thoughts come to me. Other thoughts came just then when I was sitting, but I didn’t have Fanny or Jake pop in. Why only bad things?”

  “No difference, good or bad. Thoughts like birds in mind. Some fly in. Some fly out. Some stay at water hole to drink. Beware of birds that linger.”

  I reflected on what Madame Wong had said and remembered that I had dwelled on Muriel for a while. My thoughts of her weren’t fleeting.

  “Now, sit. Breathe. No do. No think,” commanded Madame Wong.

  So I sat. Again. Breathing. Trying not to dwell on any thought. Letting go. Mind wandering. Trying hard not to allow anything awful to come into my mind.

  “If awful come, let it go,” I heard Madame Wong say from what seemed like a far off place.

  I started to get the rhythm of my breath. In. Out. I focused on that, repeating the words ‘in’ and ‘out’ in my mind in time with my breath.

  And the whoosh of my breath in and out, in and out reminded me of a sound from a memory. The whoosh, whoosh, whoosh got louder. It was no longer my own breath I heard but the sound that had haunted my dreams – both waking and sleeping – for seven long years.

  Whoosh. Whoosh. That horrible sucking sound. Air being sucked in and pumped out.

  I knew that sound. I didn’t want to open my eyes. I knew what I’d see, and it was my worst nightmare.

  How many times do I have to see my mother die?

  30. Riding the Waves

  If I'd had any sense about me, I would have kept my eyes closed and tried to hurry up and think of something good - anything else. But it’s like a car wreck that you drive by and you can’t help but look, even though you know you might see something gruesome.

  I opened my eyes and there I was, in my mom’s hospital room. The last one. The last time I ever saw her.

  There was my dad, sitting in a chair beside her bed. And there, on the other side, was a little girl. Her long red hair looked unbrushed. She was sitting with her eyes open, wide with fear but totally focused. The room was silent except for that awful sound. What’s making that horrible sucking sound?

  There it was the machine, the thing responsible for the awful sound. Some contraption hooked up somehow to the little girl’s mother. A large, clear plastic container with what looked like a bellows inside, going up and down in a smooth rhythm. And below the bellows, a disgusting black, tarry substance. Was the tarry stuff coming out of the woman? Or being put in?

  No kid should ever see their parent die. Yet there I was, reliving the nightmare again.

  It was unbearable. The long seething wound deep within me was ripped open again. The tar alien being sucked out of my mom by that horrible machine. My dad, eyes red-rimmed, his face ashen gray. The little g
irl – my child self – focusing on her mother’s station – picking up her frequency for the last time. And there through it all, that incredibly irritating sucking sound.

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I rushed over to that machine and I started ripping at it like a mad person. “Stop sucking the life out of her!” I screamed at it as I knocked it over and pulled at the cords and wires.

  “I won’t see this again!” I yelled as I swung madly at the air, trying to make the ghosts go away.

  I cried then, mighty heaving sobs that I thought might wholly overtake me in a river of tears. I was no good as a warrior. I would drown in my own tears before I’d had the chance to help anyone.

  I felt arms around me, and I was afraid to open my eyes for fear of what I’d see. But the touch was small and soft yet unfamiliar.

  I opened my eyes and it was Madame Wong, the last person I expected to comfort me.

  I didn’t say a word but instead just relaxed into her arms. Without us speaking any words out loud, I knew as surely as I’d ever known anything that Madame Wong knew more about my suffering than anyone I’d ever known – or would ever meet. The human part of her knew.

  In my mind, I saw a group of ancient Chinese houses. Rice paddies. Beautiful mountains in the distance. But the houses were on fire. The sound of anguished cries.

  There were other pictures flashing before my mind’s eye. A baby that looked still as a stone. Another baby – no a child this time – being held by a gentle looking man, this one still too.

  I saw men and women dying by the hand of a sword and felt the anguish of a heart that had known considerable loss - and great anger. I saw an old woman finding her way through the mist of the portal and into the Netherworld. I saw her struggle with the lessons that I too struggled with –of letting go of anger and of sadness. Of finding peace and happiness.

  All this was a flash in my mind, like a movie being shown at super high speed. It was more like a knowing than a seeing.

  Madame Wong. This tiny little creature – she had known enormous suffering in her human life. And she had come to this place and learned how to. . . forget?

  “No, Miss Emily. Not forget. You never forget. If you live to be as old as Madame Wong, you will never forget.”

  “Then how. . . why did you choose to live so long – to allow yourself to go on – when you had such immense suffering inside?”

  “Ah, yes, choice. I chose to let my ghosts stay in past. Past is history you know. Living is now. I sat. I breathed. I let past go. I let future go. I am. That is all.”

  “But didn’t it take you many years to learn how to do that?”

  “Have you not understood yet? Time, here – it is slippery, no?”

  “It seems not to exist at all, and still. . . it’s odd, in some ways, I feel like I’ve been here my whole life, but it also feels like I just got here.”

  “It is difficult for humans to stay here because here there is no watch, no rising of the sun, no setting of the moon. No markers for the human mind to gauge its ever present need to know the time.”

  “So if there is no time here. . .”

  “It is eternal.”

  “Then what is happening back in my own time and place – my own dimension? Has a great amount of time passed?”

  “Miss Emily, you need only know that you need not worry about time. That is one you must let go like the ghosts of your past. Plenty of time to sit. To breathe.”

  Back to sitting and breathing.

  I sat on my chair again and got comfortable, closed my eyes, and began again to breathe. I thought only of my breath. I opened my eyes briefly, and there was Madame Wong, back in the same exact tree pose I’d seen her in before. It was like she had never moved. Had I dreamed it? Was her comforting me also a vision, a wish of my own mind?

  But that thought too I let go as I paid attention to my breath, like the waves of an ocean. Tide coming in. Tide going out. My breath like the gentle roll of the waves, up and down my body.

  I sat in meditation for a long, long time, reckoning as best I can about these things in a place with no time. I had more visions come to life, but they weren't as frightening or as momentous as Muriel or the hospital room.

  Eventually I found that I was fully in control of my mind. Mostly I thought nothing at all, which I hadn’t thought possible. For long stretches of time, known to me by the large amount of breaths I had followed like a wave through my body, I thought nothing at all. At other times, there were small thoughts that popped in, like the little birds Madame Wong had talked about. I told them to take flight and they did. It became easy to have a mind free of the distraction of a thousand thoughts and ideas crowding all at once like a busy market filled with people. My mind was instead like a vast, still meadow, waiting to see what would appear.

  After immeasurable breaths into and out of my body, my long meditation was broken by the sound of Madame Wong’s voice.

  “You ready to become warrior now,” she said. “But first, you sleep Miss Emily.”

  I opened my eyes and felt underneath me the rustic bed of Madame Wong’s cottage. It took me no time at all to drift off to a dreamless sleep, my mind already so empty that it didn’t even have the material left to create dreams.

  But just before waking I had one dream – or was it a vision? I couldn’t be sure. In the dream I was standing before a man – a dark haired man with eyes like two lumps of coal in his skull. He was gaunt, his fingers bony and his body like a skeleton covered in thin skin. He looked smug and satisfied with himself.

  In my dream, I was thinking I should be scared of him because he was scary looking. But I wasn’t scared. Instead, I felt pity. Why would I pity him?

  As the dream faded and my eyes opened, I recalled the image of myself in the dream. At first I didn’t think it was me. There was this girl, but she seemed strong and powerful. It was like she had a light glowing from within and all around her. Her face was determined with no hint of fear or smirk about it – just a calm assurance. And in my dream the girl was holding a dagger in her hand. Could this be me? I didn’t own a dagger.

  I opened my eyes, ready for a new day with Madame Wong in that place of mist and fog, in that place of dreams and shadows. And I had a vision in my mind of a girl with a dagger that I wanted to meet.

  31. Why I Hate Bamboo

  I found Madame Wong in a perfect headstand in her spot under the large maple tree in her garden. I sat in patient mediation in front of her, waiting for her to start my lesson for the day. I listened to the burbling sound of the brook that tumbled past her small meadow, and I drifted off into a deeply relaxed state. It was such a shock to the system when Madame Wong finally spoke, her high-pitched croak interrupting the perfect stillness I was becoming accustomed to.

  “Miss Emily ready to become warrior now?”

  “A warrior? I don’t know if I’m ready for it, but I’ll try.”

  “Only do or not do. Which is it?”

  “Okay then, I choose do.”

  “Ah, good choice. Come,” she said as she gracefully exited her headstand and walked across the garden. I followed respectfully behind her a few paces as we walked through intense fog and mist to the babbling brook.

  “Miss Emily has learned focus, yes?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “NO, NO, NO! No suppose. Focus or no focus – which is it?”

  “Okay, yes, for God’s sake, I can focus! Jeez, no need to scream at me.”

  “Don’t suppose. Don’t guess. Know the answer and say it. A true warrior is sure of herself. Right or wrong does not matter.”

  “Well see that’s the point now, isn’t it? I’m not a 'true warrior'. And about the only thing I’m sure of is that I’m not sure of myself.”

  I looked down into her eyes. She just stared at me evenly. Stalemate.

  “You know focus. Now time to learn awareness.”

  I rolled my eyes, a knee-jerk reaction to the thought of spending more time sitting for days on end
breathing. I was ready for action, not more doing nothing.

  “Oh, you’ll have action young one,” she said with a smile.

  “Okay, what action? How do I learn 'awareness'?"

  “By doing laundry,” she said and out of the nothingness appeared an enormous pile of clothes just like the ones Madame Wong was wearing – black linen pants with wide legs and a drawstring waist with a long-sleeved dark blue linen shirt with cloth buttons up the front and a mandarin collar. There also was a large, metal washbasin and a bar of soap and a washboard.

  “I become a warrior by doing your laundry?”

  “You become aware – alert and ready – by doing laundry.”

  “How long do I do this laundry?”

  “Until all the clothes are washed and hung to dry,” she said as she pointed to a clothesline hung between two large oak trees.

  “Then what?”

  “Then you cut the fire wood,” she said pointing to a pile of logs and a hatchet that I hadn’t noticed before on the edge of the meadow. “Chop wood, learn awareness and alertness,” she said then vanished into the misty air.

  I wanted to rebel. I wanted to sit down on the ground and refuse to do anything. I wanted to be back at my house, even if Muriel was there.

  Then I realized I’d better stop thinking about that or Muriel the Mean would pop up again and this time she might be wielding something more dangerous than Madame Wong’s bamboo stick! So I dug in and started washing the old gnat’s laundry.

  Dipping a shirt into the stream, rubbing soap on it – up and down – then rinse cycle and then hang to dry. Over and over, trying to be ‘aware’, whatever that meant.

  Suddenly I was on my knees in pain, a burning sting surging from my calves and up the backs of my legs. There was a moment when I thought that hatchet on the edge of the meadow had flown into the backs of my legs.

  “What the. . . ” I turned, and there was Madame Wong with her cane, a slight smirk on her face.

  “Did you just beat me with that cane?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you do that?”