I’ve never been able to explain the horror of my mind to anyone, except Maw Sue. I hear her voice speaking from the grave and it helps, but even so, no one understands and I feel so utterly alone. She knew the harm the Amodgian shadows could render. How they hover beside the light, feeding off my fear, my insecurities and my want of answers but never getting any. They study me, observing my wants, desires or lack of. My features, my tears, my brokenness, my weary cries of yearning and loss for something I can’t find nor describe. They hunger and bite off my loathing and gain strength by my weakness. Where darkness is—they are there. Where light is—they are there. They are hedged in the lesser light, right on the edge of it, the place where daylight meets dusk, dawn meets the day, the thin line that separates the light from the lesser light. They are there. They sit on the brim and wait. It’s the moments of in-between I fear the most. The long, drawn out lapses of silence, void of space, time and presence, where nothing exists, nothing cares, nothing matters. This is when my mind is afflicted in the worst way. It cannot still itself for fear of destroying itself in the process. In the small gaps, something ethereal from a nether world, slips in. I can feel it but I can’t see it. I only know its presence. Even more so, now that I accepted the gift, as an adult, I notice it more often. It lies in wait between the little girl’s voice, in the moment after she screams, after the eerie calm, after her voice grows mute, and the aftermath of silence is left to crawl on my skin. It is then I am faced with a choice, although no question has been asked.
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 her. 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 as 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 place 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 tear 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 stability 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. Sometimes 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 ap
proval, 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 we 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 her, 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 queen of the candy dish went mad hatter. In one quick desecrating moment, the girl lost it, disoriented, displaced, 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 peppermint 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 the 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, lighting 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.
Confrontation
Maw Sue, my mystic great grandmother had her own thoughts as to what occurred the night of my birth. Her reality of the situation was met with much skepticism. It didn’t detour her from doing what she had to do. She knew the outcome could mean life or death. The dreadful shadows were alert and feeding off the energy of a new subject. Me, the new newborn rookie, to test, to torture, to try. Shadow Amodgians grow bored with the same lackluster humans, day in and day out, so the challenge of a newborn makes them crazy festive, almost cheery because it allows them to test their skills and try new things. They even bet with other Amodgians on what test will win, or fail as if humans were just pawns in their games.
Maw Sue knew this all too well, which meant I was in imminent danger and time was of the essence. She left the hospital under duress. On her way out of the hospital, she started to feel the pressure of the resistance, an invisible presence, a knife hedged before her, behind her, all around her. A stifling oppression almost unbearable. She had ran from it many times, if not all the time. But this time—she could not. She would not. She knew she had to push through for my sake. It did not want Maw Sue to succeed at her thoughts, her plans. Everything came against her, man and machine, nature and animals. She could hear her rapid heart beating through her chest as she walked the fast pace of the hospital floor towards the elevators. Every click of her feet a demon stepped in front, behind, around. She could feel them grow and multiply by the seconds. She stopped at the elevator and pressed the down button. Her eyes flitted and her body felt panicky, on the verge of breaking. She wondered if she had brought her pills with her. Her mind a mess, she couldn’t think straight. “I must get home, I must get home”, she whispered to the air. Ding! The elevator doors began to open, so she impatiently stepped forward to squeeze inside impulsively. Her thoughts rushing ahead of her steps. Move, rush, go, get home. Startled, she was unable to step in. She was met with a sea of white coats, and a patient on a rolling bed cart. There was not an inch of space to get in. She noticed the odd looks on their faces, as if they had no human emotions and she could see the dark in their eyes, as if they were simply mannequins, put there to thwart her from getting inside. She fell back a few steps, startled and flinched when the patient sat up spontaneously, like a loaded spring. The bandaged bloody woman was her mother. “Going somewhere Susannah?” She said viciously with blackened eyes.
Maw Sue flipped out and ran down the hall towards the staircase, and down the steps and into the night. She didn’t bother to pull out her umbrella, she just wanted to get out of there and get home. But it wasn’t over, it was just beginning. Her car key did not unlock her door, so she rattled and inserted, over and over again. Lightning and thunder boomed and she thought for a moment she would be struck dead. Then, it worked as it had always done, up until this moment. She got inside the cab soaked to the bone. She cranked the car and pulled out of the hospital parking lot, only for the rain to become a torrential downpour, making it ha
rd for her to drive. A rally of bizarre lightning bolts lit up the distant sky, illuminating the outskirts of the sidewalks on each side of her, and in those brief flashes, the white coat nurses, ghostly in figure, stood, one after another. “No. It couldn’t be. It’s just your mind. Drive on. Get home. It’s the curse”, Maw Sue said. That’s when a crop of doves out of nowhere hit the windshield, causing her to swerve and stop on the side of the road. She gathered her wits and floored it. She didn’t let off the gas pedal, despite the ominous weather. She simply drove like the crazy woman everyone thought she was.
Finally home, she skidded to a halt in the driveway, barely missing the shed. She ran up on the porch, pausing for breath, and holding the post rail to steady herself. The power of the gift activated was almost too much to bare. For years, she lived a bland existence, not able to accept what the gift expected of her. But now, since she put it to work, everything in her sight and sound was crisp as if seeing and hearing for the first time. The sky poured a waterfall, pounding hard on the ground like drumbeats, and the Gods of thunder answered while they yielded their swords of lightening like bolts of wrath. The night sky was inky and lower as if she could touch it with her finger and draw on it. A bark rang out inside the house. Her dog Peppy was glad she was home, since the thunder drove him under the bed. Hearing her car drive up, he came out and scratched the screen door. The hum of the freezer on the porch was a loud tribal chant, the buzz of insects off the lights pinged and strummed. She wasn’t used to her senses in such high alert capacity, so it was unsettling. It also bought to mind things she had put away, long ago. She was not used to dealing with emotions, feelings, sounds, issues. Just hearing the gift in her ears was enough to send her packing. She wanted to run—leave it all behind, not look back, take a bottle full of tic-tac’s and forget she had a mission. But when the thought hit the corridors of her mind, my violent newborn screams entered in the spaces, filling every hole, crevasse and orifice. My infant cries were terrible, damning, and pleading. You are my only hope. You understand. It is your responsibility.
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