Earthly Powers: The Adventure Begins

by DC Alexander

M y days were filled with sameness and I was content for the most part. I was used to not having to accommodate anyone other than myself. I was careful not to put myself above anyone with my speech. I adapted to blend in. I built a reputation as someone it was better not to mess with, blindly vicious and without scruples. Some days I believed it myself after wearing that attitude like the armor it was for so long.

  I was nervous, trying to decide what to wear and how I would act when I met with this woman. My social skills were rusty. Well, ok, they were nonexistent. It’d be good to do something different for a change. I looked forward to getting off the reservation. Apprehensive and a little scared, but the way to handle that was to bull ahead and not think about it. I shifted mental gears and went into ‘I just don’t care’ mode, a special mental place where I dealt with whatever came up moment by moment without thinking.

  It was time to leave if I was going to meet with the girl from the store. I set the security system and left.

  The neighborhood that woman lived in was a different world. The bus dropped me off a couple blocks away from her address; I used the map on the Iphone to find my way. I’d spent a little while learning to use the map and it was amazing.

  There wasn’t anybody outside. Everything was forced into unnatural uniformity, concrete and asphalt locked yards into regimented squares. Cars parked neatly along the sides of the street, shiny and clean and neat, nobody scoping them out. No kids played on the porches or in the yards. There were people inside, dim presences sitting or lying. It was a ghost town with perfectly mowed yards and hedges shaped in squares and balls and little white fences all clean and fresh and pressed together.

  I made it to her place and went up to the door, she must have been watching, she opened the door for me before I could knock or ring the doorbell, “Come on in, I am so glad you came over!”

  She had a robe on, it was real light and sheer, and she had a big white towel on her head like a turban and no makeup. She looked different without the makeup, she was older and her face was not quite as perfect. She said “You’ll have to excuse me, I just got out of the shower “and laughed as she put her hand on my arm and urged me on inside and closed the door “good thing it’s just us girls.” She was a toucher. I looked around the place and tried not to be obvious about checking it out or feeling out of place.

  That place was so clean it looked like nobody ever lived there. There wasn’t any cigarette smoke stink and the walls were clean with no handprints or stains. The furniture had never been set on, and had no discolored spots or tears; there were no marks where anything had been scooted around and scarred the shiny golden yellow hardwood floor. There were little lights everywhere, track lighting, and they all worked and even the light switches were clean.

  I said “I’m glad to be here, I appreciate you inviting me over.” I can talk good when I want to, and if I’m really on a roll, I can speak well.

  Where I stayed if you went talking all proper and saying “ing” on the end of words and shit like that, they’d think you were putting it on and trying to make them look stupid and it hurt their feelings. First thing you knew they’d get unfriendly and burn you out or drive by and pop a cap on your ass or shit in a bag, set it on fire and throw it on your porch. That last was funny if it happened to someone else, not so much if it was you stomping the flaming bag out.

  She said “Come on in here and I’ll show you how to handle that stuff” and casually walked in front of me to a big bedroom, she didn’t consider me any kind of threat at all.

  I looked into the bathroom through the open door on one side of the bedroom. She had some nice stuff sitting out on the dresser and a set of shelves loaded with jewelry and dolls and trinkets. I didn’t say anything about her stuff, she’d think I was scoping it out.

  “You live by yourself, don’t you?” Oh damn! I sounded like I was setting her up.

  Oblivious, she said “Yes, I do. It gets lonely but I like the freedom. Would you like a drink? I just opened a bottle of wine and you know it’s not good to drink alone.”

  I said “that would be just fine, thank you.” She went out and left me alone in that big old bedroom. It was the size of my living room or bigger. Jewelry and cosmetics all over the place, the bed was made up like nobody ever slept in it, and pillows covered half the bed. It looked like a setting for a magazine spread. I wandered around looking. There was no camera that I could see recording me. I was amazed at how she had survived to be as old as she was with no more caution than what she showed.

  She came back in with two glasses of wine and handed me one as she sipped hers, she said, “aahhh, that is so good. It’s been such a long day. I didn’t think it would ever end.” She reached out and touched my hair “Oh, your hair is as soft as it looks. I wanted to touch it when I saw you come in the store, I love it!”

  I didn’t get a lot of compliments unless somebody was fixing to ask me for something, but I had nothing she could want. I guessed this was small talk. “Well, thank you! Yes it has been a long day, I’ve been on my feet all day shoppin and ridin the bus, that bus ride gets old.” I took a sip of the wine. I drink a little wine now and then, I like Mad Dog 20/20. The blackberry flavor actually tastes good. I have a drink sometimes at night to relax me and make me sleepy.

  She obviously didn’t know much about wine and bought some that had started to turn. It was red wine but it was thin and pale, it wasn’t dark like good wine, and there wasn’t any sweet to it at all. I didn’t want to embarrass her with how bad it was. She thought it was decent and probably paid way too much for it. So I just didn’t say anything and tossed it on back to get rid of it.

  She laughed “I can tell you’re beat, go on and undress and I’ll get you a refill” she gestured at the bathroom, took my glass and left the room.

  I went in the bathroom and there was plenty of room. The entire place was amazing. I wondered how somebody got a place like that. The toilet was in a room by itself; there was a big white Jacuzzi bathtub with jets all over it and controls on one side for heat and jets and air. There was a chair to sit in if you got tired. Another room was just for a shower. It had a curtain on a curved rod to keep the water in and it was all tiled in shiny black with little green flecks deep down inside of it. There was a glass on the sink. I got some water in it and washed my mouth out and spit it down the sink to get the taste out of my mouth, that wine was just foul.

  It was all clean and there were no clothes on the floor and there were towels hung up on a towel rack all neat and straight. They didn’t look like they’d ever been used. I looked at the base of the knobs, places where dust normally collected and got discolored over time, and there was no dust, no discoloration.

  She came in and handed me a full glass of nasty wine and stepped behind me and grasped the zipper of my dress. “Let’s get this dress off; we don’t want to wet your clothes”.

  I looked at her in the mirror. I wasn’t sure just where we were going with this, if she made money doing something to people and filming it for movies maybe. I bristled and got defensive. I still didn’t see a camera. Maybe somebody would bust in on us and take pictures or attack me if she got me naked. That just didn’t make sense. I forced myself to calm down. I could break her in two if I had to.

  She had the zipper down and she was waiting for me “If it would make you feel more comfortable I can take this robe off,” and she shucked right on out of it and tossed it out there on the bed, then she pulled the towel off and tossed it into a white wicker basket by the door as she came back in.

  That girl was maybe thirty or forty, skinny and white as a piece of paper and wasn’t embarrassed at all. She wasn’t sagging anywhere and it was easy to see she didn’t have any hair on her body. She was hairless in places where there wasn’t any way to shave. She giggled and turned around with her arms over her head real slow, she didn’t have much ass but what she had was smoothly curved and looked fit and firm. Her tits were small and the nipples were standing straight up. She came
back to face me and laughed, “It’s a little chilly!” She shivered as she reached up and brushed her nipples with her palms.

  She come close to me and said “Is this better? Set your bag down just anywhere, here, I can take it for you” and reached for my purse.

  I had my money in my purse and all kinds of other things I didn’t want stolen. I set it by the toilet where I could keep an eye on it. “I’ll just set it here.”

  “That’s fine, whatever makes you comfortable,” caught my dress at the shoulders and pulled it down over my arms.

  This was different than what I knew. She was moving along fast. She stripped my dress down to my feet and kneeled down waiting for me to step out of it. She got up and pressed against my front, reached around and unfastened my bra. I liked the way it felt when her arms went around me like a hug. “Oh my, those are really nice, I’m jealous now” she casually lifted one of my tits with her hand under it and looked at it close, the nipple stiffened up at the attention and she leaned closer and blew on it, sending a shiver up my backbone.

  She caught my waistband and bent down quickly and pulled my panties off. I just went along with it all, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It definitely wasn’t hurting. I wound up in the shower. She was in there with me. There were three shower heads and she got them all tuned up and running water on us. I braced for the shock of the cold water but it was warm right when it came out, we didn’t have to wait for it.

  She washed my hair. I was going to tell her I didn’t do anything with my hair but she had it soaped with shampoo and was working on it before I could say a word. She stood behind me and pressed up against me and rinsed it out and it felt good having somebody doing stuff to my hair, I liked that, and I enjoyed the feel of her pressing against my back.

  She took some stuff in her hand and lifted my arm so she could get at my armpits and she rubbed it in briskly. It stank like sulfur a little. She said “hold on, this takes a minute, we’ll let it work” and went to the other side. Then she came around front and knelt down and started rubbing the stuff around my privates with no hesitation at all like there wasn’t anything unusual about it.

  She pressed my leg meat out of the way. For the first time in forever I wished there wasn’t so much of me. She got in there and she got awful close to some sensitive spots and I tried not to let on how much I liked what she was doing. I moved my legs apart to give her better access. She finished with the rubbing too soon and I was disappointed; then she slinked up the front of me dragging herself on me all the way.

  She squirted liquid soap on her hands and went to rubbing me all over with it. She was mighty friendly and didn’t have any sense of things she ought not to touch. I got some of the soap and rubbed it on her and she was happy with that.

  She pulled one of the shower heads off the wall on a flexible metal hose and she rinsed me off, rubbing with one hand as she sprayed with the other. I didn’t have any hair on my privates. I was bald and smooth as an egg and my pits were bare and slick and it was as strange as I ever felt.

  We dried off and wound up in that big bed having a fine time. Sheila knew all kinda things about making me happy and didn’t have any shy to her at all.

  I headed back to my place relaxed and tired and a little hungry. When I got home I reached for the doorknob without thinking and almost fried my ass. I chortled, that would have been funny if I’d got knocked out on the porch in front of everybody. It made me laugh out loud thinking about that. I was in an excellent mood. I walked around beside the house so nobody would see what I was doing and put on my gloves so I could get in.

  I sat down at the kitchen table and unloaded my purse. I’d need to get service for the phone when it ran out of minutes; I needed to find out how to do that.

  While I neatened up I thought about painting the old, ugly walls in the kitchen. They were dull and stained. It was hard to tell what the original color was. Maybe some sort of dull yellow.

  I wanted to fix a snack. I was tired. I thought about cutting down on how much I ate, maybe losing some weight. Shelia had some nice stuff. I’d figure how to get stuff like that, and how to keep it all clean and dust free.

  I needed to lose weight. I wanted some comfort food. Nothing changed quickly in my world, I fixed a snack and settled back to enjoy it.

  Chapter Five

  I was dreaming and I knew it was a dream. A woman lay on a bed covered from the waist down with a dull blue blanket bunched up around her waist leaving her feet and chest bared. People stood around her, wringing their hands, touching each other reassuringly. An older woman bent to wipe the face of the woman in the bed, no it was a girl. Something nasty and evil crept through every part of her, she’d been poisoned. She was dying. I recognized the people but I didn’t know their names. They weren’t doing anything to stop it. It looked like they couldn’t see what was happening. It ate me up that I couldn’t do anything. All I could do was watch. I floated near the ceiling and struggled to move where I could reach the girl. They talked. I couldn’t make out what they said. The bed shook, making a noise; the headboard tapped the wall, and then slammed into it, it got louder and louder.

  The booming on the front door was confused with the dream. I rolled over and looked at the clock, six twenty three in the damn morning. The door was going to come down if that kept up. I got up and pulled my thirty eight from under the pillow and went to see what was going on.

  I looked out the window by the front door and Carl was standing there beating on the door with both hands. When he saw the curtain move he came to the window “Miz Rosalee, we need some help quick, it’s my sister! Can you come help my sister, I think she’s dyin!”

  I wasn’t a doctor, I didn’t know why he came to me, I was still coming awake and hadn’t had coffee. I opened the door “Carl, what’s goin on? Come in here and tell what you want.”

  “It’s Stephanie, she bad off, come quick! I aint got time to come in there!”

  Stephanie, that was the girl in the dream, I remembered now. “Carl, tell me about your sister. She’s in the bed sick, and her eyes are all black?”

  He didn’t come in, he was jigging anxiously from foot to foot; “Yes ma’am, and she sweatin and cryin. She aint jonesin though, she don’t mess with no drugs. I thought you might could help, can you please?”

  I slipped my feet in the flip flops by the door and closed it behind me. I guess I wouldn’t get coffee for a while. I wasn’t sure if I could make sense without coffee and I didn’t know what I could do, but this sounded bad and if the dream meant something I was supposed to be there. The street was empty and quiet, it was early. We hurried to the Roberts place. A car passed us. Somebody on the way to work, she drank from a Styrofoam cup and never looked aside.

  It was hard to talk and jog, everything on me flapped and flopped up and down in time with my feet hitting the pavement “How long has she been sick like this?” Carl was about to start running circles around me, impatient, frantic.

  “She’s been down the last couple days. About five this mornin she got real bad, screamin and messin the bed, we tried to wake her up and she started talkin to somebody but they wasn’t nobody there. Now she lyin there with her eyes open like she dead and they all black and she moanin like she hurting. I told momma you might be able to do something and Momma said come get you.”

  If it wasn’t for the dream I’d tell them call 911 and get an ambulance, maybe she had a ruptured appendix or an aneurism.

  The door stood wide open, he led me back to the bedroom. I smelled the stink before I went in, it wasn’t just puke and shit. Something foul made the hair on my neck stand up, goose bumps popped up on my arms, danger filled the room. I felt like I looked over the edge of a tall building, my guts did that drawing up thing.

  Carl said “Stephanie, Miz Rosalee gone help you now.” She lay there motionless staring at the ceiling. Her chest hardly moved when she breathed.

  Miz Roberts come up to me and took my hands. “I would have taken her to the hos
pital but she aint runnin a fever.” She had bags under her eyes. She’d been slim as long as I had known her, she was a busy, active woman who was always doing something, usually for one of her brood, but she’d lost weight, the skin of her face sagged, she had aged years since I’d seen her. She closed her eyes and tightened her lips as though she were in pain. Clamping down on my hands she continued earnestly “She been acting funny for a week, it’s like she aint there most of the time, off somewhere in her head, then yesterday she wouldn’t get out of bed. She just lay there not moving till this mornin when she started screamin.”

  The stench filled the room; a bitter, metallic reek that made me think of biting down on aluminum foil unexpectedly but with a rotted rat aftertaste. It stood out clearly from the smell of human body waste and sweat and fear. I leaned down to look close at Stephanie. Her pupils were huge and black. Her mouth hung open. She breathed in short, labored gasps like she couldn’t get enough air and it hurt to try.

  Ms. Robertson said “I don’t know if I believe you can do anything to help, but I don’t know what else to try. Can you do anything? Please, if you can’t just say it and let me try something else. We gotta do something.”

  I said “Yall gotta be quiet or leave the room, this is bad. I’m gonna try to do somethin but I don’t know if I can.I seen this before I came over here.” I hoped I could help, I felt like I could, but damned if I knew what. I was halfway to telling them to get her to somebody who knew what they were doing. I didn’t want the responsibility of letting her die and she was bad off.

  Carl’s momma shooed the little ones out and stood by the wall watching. Stephanie’s top was uncovered. She had nice size tits for a kid but she was shrunk down and starved looking and they lay loose and empty, she was just skin and bones.

  The smell was making my head hurt and I felt distant. I asked “Do yall know what that smell is? It’s giving me a headache, is they somethin in here makin her sick?”