by Smith, Skye
"You have probably seen them already." Maya sat up and demonstrated as she explained the techniques. "To make my aura more powerful, I press my hands together as if I am praying." As the women were almost touching, leaned up against the pillows, Nana felt the aura very quickly and visibly enjoyed its growing strength.
Maya continued. "To make my aura less powerful I hold my elbows with my hands." She watched Nana's body language slump as her aura withdrew. "I can also focus my aura through my hands, so most of the aura that would normally go out in all directions from my body, goes out through my hands instead. For instance, this is called opening the lotus." She put her hands together in prayer, and then while keeping the wrists together opened her fingers as if she were holding a big softball.
"No, don't touch!" Maya dropped her hands immediately because Nana was reaching forward with her hand. "It focuses a scary amount of power. I use it to charge quartz crystals with my aura, but I'll tell you about that later."
She held her left arm out with her fingers up and her palm aimed at Nana, then she crossed her right arm over her small breasts and with her right hand grabbed her left upper arm. "I use this to focus my aura and aim it with my left palm."
"Oh, yes, oh that is nice. I feel you warming the very breath inside me," gasped Nana.
"The monk never told me the name for using my left hand like that, but it sort of looks like an Italian curse, so I call it 'pushing pizza'.
She switched over to almost the same stance but with her right hand forward. "And then there is my right hand. It's sort of like the left hand position but my left hand grabs my right wrist to support the right hand so that I have the strength to hover my right hand close to something without touching it. Like how I massaged your back on my first day."
"Very interesting," said Nana. "What were you going to say about the lotus and the crystals?"
"Oh, just that I can charge a quartz crystal, you know, the long six-sided ones, with my aura and it stays in the crystal for sometimes, like, weeks. I brought you one to wear." She leaned over to the bedside table, opened the drawer and pulled out a crystal on a shoelace. "Now stay back while I charge it, but watch and tell me what you see."
She hung the shoelace over the bedside light, prayed and then opened the lotus around the crystal. She felt her aura go white, then bright white, and then dazzlingly white, and then she closed the lotus and grabbed her elbows. She looked around to look at Nana, and then panicked. Nana was slumped over.
She couldn't trust her hands to search for a pulse because the aura may still be strong in them, so she put her cheek near to the old woman’s mouth to feel for breath. She got a big kiss on the cheek for her trouble.
"That was quite the most erotic feeling I have had for twenty years," whispered Nana. "Leave me alone for a while and allow me to drift and savor it."
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MAYA'S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith
Chapter 6 - Nana Knows Best
Maya took her toast and tea and sat in the cottage's front window. The one with the view along the spine between the two small bays. Her mind was clear now. The aura had cleared it. She felt much better. "He must have drugged me," she thought, "but how?" She had lived all her life surrounded by the drug culture of Mendocino County. As a girl, she had been well trained in how to prevent herself from being drugged and later, in high school, overly drugged.
Her subconscious kept flashing two pictures at her. The man with his fly open with his boner poking through it; and the sugar packets with twenty white ones and one brown one. It slowly dawned on her. The drug was in the one brown sugar packet. The taste of the drug was covered by the bitterness of the coffee.
"So, how did he know I would use the brown sugar packet?" she asked herself. The writing on the packaging slowly became clear in her memory. Natural Sugar. Of course. What woman who used sugar would not choose natural sugar? She even remembered cursing that he only had one packet of it.
"So he had me. Why didn't he just hold me down and do me? Why all the polite talk? Why all the helpfulness?" He had saved her from a long row. He'd gotten her motor running. Why so nice when she was already drugged? Why not just do her? All these thoughts jumbled in her mind.
She must have whispered them out loud because Nana came and sat beside her, looking out, and said, "Because he wasn't a rapist, he was a seducer. In my day he would have plied me with red wine. Nowadays there are more efficient drugs."
"What, and that makes it not rape?" Maya's tone was suddenly clipped.
"We all live by codes of ethics, even the predators that live amongst us. Even the thieves running the big banks into the ground on Wall Street will swear that they did it ethically. If he seduced you within his own set of ethics, and certainly within the law, then it would be a conquest he could be open about without fear. He could brag about it to his friends, even to the local men. He may have even have wanted to hold your tight little ass to ransom in return for his keeping the secret."
"Nana!" exclaimed Maya, shocked at her great-grandmother's thoughts.
"Hah, do you think this is new to the world, to society, to the lessons of growing up as an attractive girl? The rapists are eventually caught and punished, whether by the law, or more likely by the family and friends of the girl. The seducers, on the other hand, are applauded by other men."
"Well, I think that my aura punished the seducer, like, in advance."
"Ah," Nana said, leaning back and gazing at Maya, "so finally we get to it. It's about time."
"My aura has powers I don't understand. No one I have met understands it." Maya felt a sense of relief as she began her confession. "At low focus it heals by soothing. At higher focus it overwhelms bad things, sick things. I sense sick and bad things as black or gray when I hover my hand. My aura tries to get rid of the black and gray, as if it was like, rubbing it out with my white light. I don't know how it does it. It just, well, bathes them in white and they become less black and then less gray. With time, they disappear."
"But that is marvelous, wonderful. There have been stories of this type of healing hands, healing power, all through history. I know. I have read some of the original written accounts."
"Nana, what did you see when I charged your crystal?"
"I had to look away. The crystal eventually became blindingly bright."
"If I cup my hands like that around someone’s neck, that brightness forms in their brain, especially in the tail of the brain that is controlled by the subconscious."
"In the medulla," Nana interrupted with the word.
"Yes. I think the man on the boat died because I put both my hands on his neck."
"Oh dear, oh my child," Nana stroked her arm. "But that is not a fact. It is just your guess, your theory. But wait. Didn't you say the aura overwhelms things that you sense as black or gray?"
"Nana, in Vancouver we experimented. Psychopaths don't just feel dark to me, they push darkness into me. Their darkness fills my world with the scent of charred toast. My aura reacts to it automatically. It leaps to defend me from the darkness. It goes almost instantly brilliant, like that crystal just did." She studied her hands for a moment, and gave a deep sigh. "Oh, it is more complicated than that. You can imagine how hard it is even to guess what is happening. There may also be some link to a disease that cats give to people. A disease that may turn people into psychos."
"Toxoplasmosis," Nana rolled the word off her tongue.
"Exactly."
"Forgive me, dear, but you have just pushed one of my professorial buttons. Psychopath as a term has come to mean nothing, and the same with sociopath and narcissist, because the medical professions cannot agree on their terminology. They are spending all of their time arguing about words rather than doing something about the bastards."
"I thought you were a History prof, not an English prof," Maya said, annoyed at the interruption of her thoughts for something so petty.
"A History prof is just an Engli
sh prof who thinks that the truth is more wondrous than fiction." Nana gave a little giggle and put her finger to her lips. "Shhh, don't tell anyone I said so."
"So, um, like you give me your definitions and I will use yours, okay?" said Maya.
"Back to basics, then. A psychopath is someone who is born with a mental disorder. A sociopath is someone who has learned to be a psychopath, and a narcissist is a sociopath in training. Actually I would rather not use any of those terms because they are over used and misunderstood. I would prefer to borrow a word from the animal world. There they would be known as rogue males."
"Okay, so what I have found out in the ten short months I have known my aura, is that it hates rogue males, or at least the darkness that the touch of a rogue male pushes into me."
"So, what are you saying?" asked Nana, giving her a hard stare.
"Can you keep a secret?"
"Yes."
"I mean forever, from everyone," whispered Maya.
"Oooh, do you work for the CIA?"
"Get real."
"Okay. A secret." Nana held her hand up solemnly. "I mean, forever for me will be what? Two years, maybe three."
"Ten rogue males in the USA and Canada, well, now eleven, have died because my aura took like, great offense, like maximum offense, to their darkness," Maya whispered. There was silence. "In India another six were, uh, stilled by my aura, but even more died in a building fire that I helped to light."
"Then why aren't you in jail, dear," said Nana, dropping her gaze and fearing the answer. "Oh my. Is that why you are here? You are on the run, hiding from the law."
"No, Nana. In each case everyone assumed it was a heart attack or some kind of sudden death syndrome. Look at this latest one. Fell overboard while having a pee. I have never once come under suspicion from the authorities, well, except once in New York, oh, and once in India, but that was because of the fire." Maya looked at the floor. She knew her great grandmother was staring at her. She didn't want to look up.
"But I don't understand," whispered Nana. "If they were rogue males, then they were very dangerous men. Surely you would have been injured even if they did eventually have a heart attack."
"Well, the first few times the men were trying to rape me. That was before I knew what I was doing. That was before I knew that just cupping their throat, caressing their throat, would be enough to make my aura go ape-shit and stop them."
"So you strangled them?"
"I did nothing but hover an opening lotus under their necks. My aura did something to their brain. To the whatsit, medulla. Our theory is that it instantly stops every instinctive impulse in the body. Just a complete stop. They go immediately still, as if dead, and then the impulses have a hard time starting up again, so they stay dead."
"The brilliance in the crystal," nodded Nana.
"That's what I have been trying to tell you," sighed Maya.
"So P.P., my dark artist. If he had balled you instead of me, the world would not have all his fabulous paintings."
"Bingo. Give the little old lady with all the books a prize," sighed Maya. "If my aura kills a serial rapist or a serial killer, so what? Who cares? If it kills a crooked banker or a corrupt politician who are ripping the people off, so what? What if it kills someone who is doing no harm? A painter, a golf course developer. I was drugged out of my mind yesterday, and still my aura zapped him."
"It was his own fault. He drugged you," Nana objected.
"What if it had been red wine? Is that how this artist P.P. seduced you? Red wine?"
"Well, yes, but then I wanted him to seduce me. He was so charming. So vital. That is until he started touching me. Then it felt, well, how you described. Dark. Wrong," Nana said, scrunching her shoulders together and sighing.
"Yeah, but you left him alive. I don't. My aura is like, so strong, that they die." She sat back and closed her eyes tiredly. They stayed like that, in a companiable silence for some minutes. Then Nana jumped up and got busy.
"You need cheering up," said Nana. "Come with me to the kitchen table." Once Maya was seated at the table, Nana carried over two huge garbage bags which were filled with one quart waxed cardboard milk cartons. She passed over some big scissor shears.
One by one they shaped the cartons into all sorts of designs of toy boats. They even stuck lollipop sticks in some and used some of the cut out pieces as sails. Into each one they stuck a short candle stub, fixed in place by melting the bottom with a lighter and then pushing it down into the wax on the carton until it stuck.
Before a half hour had gone by, Maya was whistling a happy tune while she worked. When she was ten, Nana had done this with her on the longest day of the year. Now they were going to do it again, despite the early darkness of April.
They had an early supper, or perhaps it was a late lunch, without interrupting their candle boat factory. When it was pitch black outside, save for the glow on the horizon that marked where Boston was, they took all the boats down to the big bay and lined them up on the shore.
One by one they lit the candles, floated the tiny boats, and pushed them gently away towards Boston. Once they got six feet away from shore, the light breeze caught them and hurried them on their way. They sat there on the old bench, huddled together under an old sleeping bag and watched until they could no longer see any tiny spots of light from the candles.
"Someday, Nana, the environmentalists are going to catch you doing this and haul you away to jail."
"Ah, the secret is to leave some crinkled paper in the bottom of the boat, so that when the candle gutters it catches the paper on fire, and then the entire boat catches fire. Whatever is left doesn't float."
Eventually the wind switched around to be from the north again, and the sudden cold convinced them to go back inside. It was just the strangely magical, strangely surrealistic end to the day that Maya needed to pull her out of her funk. It was capped of by two big bowls full of Honey Nut Oatios just before bed.
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MAYA'S AURA - The Charred Coven by Skye Smith
Chapter 7 - Nana's Treasures
The next day they got down in earnest to the business of cataloguing the books. Nana estimated that there were 400 books. Even at a minute a book it was a seven-hour job. Three days later they were finished. All of the plastic bins were filled with the most valuable of the books. Each bin was labeled with the names of the books inside and the approximate value of each. The highest value bin held about fifteen thousand dollars' worth of rare paper. They estimate that all of the rare books were worth perhaps a hundred thousand dollars.
"That will pay for my old farts' home without having to sell the island," said Nana with a big smile on her face.
"How much do you think the island is worth?"
"Well, at the peak of the silly real estate boom, I suppose three million," Nana said softly. "A lot less now."
"Nana, you have three million dollars and you live like a pauper in a draughty cottage."
"It's been my hideout from the modern world. I am an historian. I have no place in today's economy. Nobody wants to know about history any more." The old lady was finishing an email to the Director of Rare Books at Harvard. She was offering him first refusal of any of her books. She attached two lists. The full list, and the rare book list. The last sentence gave him a week to reply before she transferred the first refusal to the other Cambridge. The one in England.
The phone rang just before supper. The director would offer no more than two hundred thousand for the entire collection depending on actual books and conditions. She was not to move the books nor even un-stack them. He would send a special team out to collect them within a very few days. She said 'yes'.
"I knew they would snap my hand off. The big universities are rolling in dough because all the easy credit of student loans has allowed them to obscenely inflate their tuitions. The big rare book collections have agreements with big web tech companies to scan and digitize rare books so now they can cha
rge for access to them en masse."
Maya looked over at the ragged piles of books left over from their pulling out the rarest. "I suppose we shouldn't have touched them other than to read the info off the spines."
"Bah," Nana snorted, "They have professionals that restore books. Besides, these days they take apart the bindings so that they can scan them and digitize them. Once they have a high resolution scanned image safe on the computer, the books are fumigated, sealed in storage bags, and put into cold storage never to be pawed again."
"I cannot believe that there was so much money standing in stacks of dusty books," whispered Maya.
"My dear, it is exactly because they are dusty and deteriorating that I sold them. Better to get a good scanned image of them now than to wait for the worms to finish their work. Besides, my really valuable stuff is in the cellar."
"What?"
"Peter was quite a collector, especially when he traveled with the Army during and after the war. Uh, World War Two, in Europe. I have some sealed tubes containing ancient scrolls in the constant cool of the cellar. Some are truly museum pieces."
Maya did not know what to say. Her mother lived in a leaky cabin on the site of an abandoned gold mine in the fog belt of Mendocino. She had grown up wearing used clothes from the church thrift shop. Meanwhile, her great- grandparents had valuable museum pieces in their cellar. She didn't know whether to be angry or sad.
"Of course, the most valuable piece only dates back to 1948," said Nana wistfully staring into space. "My dark artist, P.P. , wanted me so badly, but he only seduced his models. I refused to sit for him if he was just going to paint me in his cubist style. I stubbornly told him that he didn't need a model for that. He finally gave up and painted me in a realistic style. It is quite beautiful. I was quite beautiful."
"And you still have the painting?"
"Peter would not allow it to be displayed. It's quite erotic. Let's see. The last painting of his mistress that went up for auction fetched six million. Who knows what mine would fetch? It is a unique piece unlike any other." Nana giggled, "Well, after all, I was a unique piece. He had never felt an aura before. He thought he was in love. Poor P.P. I suppose I tricked him into thinking that he was seducing me."