by K. G. Duncan
Stump continued, “Then how you manage to make your way all the way back here from your home? Hmm? How did you get away without your folks and all them police knowing?”
Olivia slapped her knee and snorted. “You go on!” She laughed at Stump and turned to wink at Abby. “It’s not like they put me under arrest. Lordy, I still had to get up and go to school today. In fact, it’s even better than that! She reached into her pocket and pulled out a new iPhone. She held it up proudly for Abby and Stump to see. “My momma was so worried about my safety, that she gave me my very own, brand-spankin’ new iPhone! It’s Christmas come early! She said that I have to call or text her to let her know where I’m at all times.” She paused and smiled conspiratorially. “But don’t worry. I haven’t used this phone for anything. I texted my mom once, so she thinks I’m still at school, so…”
“Shit howdy!” Stump suddenly sprang to his feet. He grabbed his baseball bat and grimaced. “They know that you’re Abby’s best friend, Olivia. Ain’t no early Christmas gift reason for you to have that phone. They know that you would come looking for her, and …”
“And that you would lead them straight to me,” Abby finished Stump’s sentence for him.
As if it were a perfect punctuation to her sentence, the sound of several car doors shutting echoed across the parking lot. Abby peered through the hedge and could see blue and red lights flashing in reflection off the dumpster bin and the puddles of rain that had formed on the asphalt.
Stump turned to Abby and hoarsely shouted, “Abby, run!” He parted the hedge and stepped out into the parking lot. Abby grabbed her bag and with one glance at Olivia, she darted out the other way, hugging close to the wall.
“I’m sorry, A.B.!” Olivia cried. “I didn’t know!”
Abby burst through the hedge, scratching her face in her haste. She took two steps and froze as men in suits in another car skidded to a stop next to the wall and piled out of the car. She turned to look back toward the dumpster, and she saw Stump, brandishing his baseball bat as three Sheriff deputies, guns pointed directly at him slowly approached, all business. A crowd of homeless onlookers had gathered behind them. It was exactly what she had seen in her earlier vision with Stump.
It was all happening in slow motion: Stump turning to look back at her, smiling, then turning back toward the approaching deputies. Stump taking one step toward them, then flinching as if to swing his bat.
“Stump, NO!!” Abby cried out just before the gunshot fired. Olivia screamed, and two more shots rang out in rapid succession. Abby watched as Stump fell, twisting toward the asphalt. His body landed soundlessly as the baseball bat struck the ground and woodenly thunked and drummed till it rolled to a stop. Horrified, Abby tried to move toward him just as hands came from behind to hold her fast.
Then there were more deputies, men in suits, a woman leading a shocked and tearful Olivia out from behind the hedge. A crowd of onlookers, the homeless denizens of the nearby camps, gathering to gawk and twitter. Somebody, a deputy, was barking out orders, telling everyone to stand back. Just stand back.
Struggling in the arms of an agent, Abby slowly began to wail as she stared at the unmoving form of Stump, the harmless old bear, his face turned back toward her, his chest was heaving in slow, labored breaths, his eyes dimming. The rain began to fall heavier now, and big drops pattered and bounced off his face. He smiled, the white of his teeth reflecting in the deep crimson blood that pooled around his head. And then he wasn’t moving any more.
From the Audio transcripts of Dr. Joanna Kinsey
Chief Psychiatrist, CHNOLA Northshore Center,
New Orleans, LA
Excerpt of Audio File Transcript #AR10089-42
Jul 1, 2022
Subject: A. B. Rubideaux. Female. Age: 11
Transcript of recording begins: 9:56 AM EST.
Kinsey: I have to admit something to you, A.B.. I’ve not been entirely honest with you.
A.B.: I could say that I’m not entirely surprised, but you know that already, don’t you?
Kinsey: I’m serious. A.B.. Please, hear me out. I am always honest with you when we speak. The things we speak about are completely confidential. I would never betray your trust.
A.B.: I know that, Joanna.
Kinsey: What I haven’t been honest about, completely, is the fact that I’ve kept some things away from you. I want to explain those things to you now, so hear me out. (Long pause.) I’ve run several tests, as you know. The results have come back, and it’s very clear. You’re not mentally ill. At least that is my determination after looking for all of the traditional, standard measurements for how we determine such a thing. Your brain is amazing and unique, yes. Your blood tests? Well I can’t even imagine how that doesn’t show up in your medical records—what little we could find any way.
A.B.: Momma Bea don’t like doctors.
Kinsey: Well, that might very well be. Not surprising that you would never have had access or any reason to take these kinds of tests. But I have done them for you. And despite the chemical activity and signs of lesion or disruption that might, under usual circumstances, indicate a paranoid or schizophrenic personality, I have determined that there is no behavioral evidence of that. There are other things, however… things that we can’t explain. There is no precedent for someone like you. It’s not just your bloodwork and your CAT scans. Your charts are beyond anything I or anyone else has ever seen. You’re a modern medical anomaly.
A.B.: (Giggling.) I’m sorry, doctor. (More giggling.). (Singing.) I am the very model of a modern medical anomaly!
Kinsey: (Laughs, briefly.) Yes, and that’s just it. I did that show in my middle school, many years ago, in a wealthy suburb of Alexandria, Virginia. But of course, how would you know that? You, I’m pretty sure, have never encountered Gilbert and Sullivan before. So, there you go, saying things and knowing things that you simply shouldn’t know or have any inkling about. You have proven this to me again and again.
A.B. Do you mean to say, doctor, that you are coming to believe that I might be telling you the truth?
Kinsey: Well, that may be one of the reasons we’ve changed our venue today. But what I believe in this instant, is irrelevant. You have some very special visitors today. Folks that really want to talk to you.
A.B.: Those wouldn’t happen to be the Men in Black characters that arrived in those very American cars with the government plates, would it? (Giggle.) I saw them earlier from my window. I watch, you know. Who comes in and out of the building. It helps to pass the time.
Kinsey: Well, I imagine so. And yes, our visitors do happen to be from the FBI.
A.B.: They’re not going to poke me, are they? Stick needles in my arms or probe my various orifices? Extract tissue samples?
Kinsey: A.B., please. I’m going to be right here with you. I would never let them do anything like that to you.
A.B.: Yeah, until they take me away. Which you know they will, doctor. Joanna. He has authority and a different set of rules. There is nothing you can do to stop him.
Kinsey: Not a chance, A.B.. They are doctors like me. They specialize in abnormal psychiatry. They are here at my request, in fact.
A.B.: (Long Silence.) I guess that part about confidentiality just went out the window, then. It’s okay, Joanna.
Kinsey: A.B., I asked them to come here because they can help.
A. B.: Help who? You or me?
Kinsey: Well, both of us, I guess.
A. B.: I thought you understood by now.
Kinsey: I’m sorry?
A.B.: That you won’t find any answers by talking to me or doing more tests on me. If you really want to discover what is going on, let me show you. (Long Pause.) All you have to do is take my hands, Joanna. We could start by talking to the very biosphere itself.
Kinsey: (Chuckling.) A.B., I am not a shaman. I don’t know how to do
that.
A.B.: Yes, you are. And yes, you do. You have approximately one hundred thousand billion cells in your human body—that’s a hundred and twenty-five billion miles of DNA just inside of you alone! Your personal DNA strands are long enough to wrap around the earth five million times. All of it connected to the biosphere, and to the Fold. You are constantly interlinked to the biosphere. You are constantly talking to the multiverse.
Kinsey: Well, right about now, we are both interlinked with a government agency. Hold that thought, A.B.. I would like you to have this discussion with our friends from the FBI. Are you okay with that?
A.B.: Oh, this should be fun! But, Joanna?
Kinsey: Yes?
A.B.: You should always remember one thing. (Long Silence.) These people are not your friends.
38 Days Earlier: May 24, 2022
You haven’t really hit rock bottom until you spend a few nights in a detention center with two other girls—a severely unstable 15-year old crackhead and a pregnant kleptomaniac. The kleptomaniac may have been 12 or 13—trying very hard to act 16.
The past two days had been a blur for Abby. The deputies who drove her to the holding facility were stoic and tight-lipped. Neither one of them had been the one who shot Stump, and she was grateful for that.
Stump. After they took her to the squad car, she sat in the back staring out the window. He just lay there on the pavement, glassy-eyed and unmoving. It was the exact same image that flashed through her mind when she first shook his hand a few days before. It wasn’t the kind of image she wanted to see again—all that blood, the rain falling down… and inexplicably, incongruently, Stump weirdly smiling. When the paramedics came and lifted him on a stretcher into the ambulance, she was relieved to see him taken out of her sight.
He was dead. They had shot and killed him for no good reason.
And then there was Olivia, who had been led away to another car, which was unmarked and driven by a lady in a suit. As the car pulled away, Olivia turned and slowly waved through the back window. Abby waved back, but found herself fighting back tears, suddenly overwhelmed by all of the shocking events and the uncertainties that lay ahead. She hadn’t seen her friend since then. No word. Nothing. Not even about her family.
Her own car ride was uneventful. They checked her into a juvenile detention center somewhere in the Ninth Ward. It was late afternoon and she sat in the office for what seemed like hours while they “processed” her. A female guard came in and gave her a tray for dinner—some kind of meat casserole with powdery mashed potatoes and inedible, overboiled, and very sad green beans.
She spent the first night in a cell with the aforementioned girls. When she was first ushered into the room, a windowless 15 by 12-foot cell with institutional light green walls, two steel-framed bunk beds, and really bright fluorescent lights. The two girls were already inside.
“Don’t even think about it, Lizzy,” the hulking female guard who brought Abby into the room barked, as the crackhead had jumped up and snarled at Abby when they entered.
The guard pointed her stick at Lizzy, who smiled, muttered “Fresh meat,” and sat back down on her bed.
“Who you bring in here now?” The other obviously pregnant girl drawled in a thick Cajun accent. She rubbed her extended belly and smiled at Abby and looked her up and down. “She not much more than skin and bones. You reckon I can eat her dinner if she don’t want it?”
“Stow it, Ms. Germaine,” The guard replied humorlessly. “Don’t start in with any of your lip. You two just leave her be.”
“Aw, Officer Mills, why you always do me like that?” The pregnant one teased, not taking her eyes off Abby. “You know I got two to feed?” She patted her belly and leered at Abby.
“Stow it.” The officer replied evenly, jutting out her chin. She stared down Ms. Germaine, who pouted and returned to her bed. Then the officer turned to Abby.
“Pick your bed. Doesn’t matter which. These two start any trouble,” and she pointed with her stick at a camera above the door, “we’re not far away.” Then she pointed at a button on the wall next to the door. “You need to use the bathroom or need something for an emergency, you press that.” She turned and glowered at the other two girls. “And that’s just for emergencies, not foolish requests, Ms. Germaine.” She turned back to Abby, and something like a smile flitted briefly across her face. “It will be lights out at ten PM, which is coming up soon. Meals at seven, 12, and six. But I don’t expect you’ll be here all that long.”
As the guard turned to leave, Ms. Germaine piped up, “Why you say that, Deputy Mills? Why she so special? You got a special suite waiting for her? With a little Chicken Etouffee? Coffee and a nice omelette? Why don’t I get a nice omelette? Why she so special, eh? Eh?”
The door closed behind the exiting deputy, and Ms. Germaine turned to Abby, “Why you so special, eh?”
“Omelette,” the crackhead called Lizzie murmured.
Abby stood next to the door and silently regarded the girls. She still felt itchy and sticky from her two nights on the street, but she felt a might bit cleaner than the girls who now kept her company. They both wore drab, light brown institutional pants and blouses, and they looked unwashed and decidedly apathetic regarding their lack of hygiene.
“What you do to find your way in here?” The girl called Ms. Germaine asked.
“She’s a real killer, this one. I think she’s dangerous.” Lizzy chimed in from her bed, then chuckled.
“Right, she’s a killer all right.” Ms. Germaine agreed with a smile. “Killer of spiders, flies, and cockroaches. That’s your job while you in here with me and Lizzy. You got bug duty. But don’t eat ‘em. You give ‘em to Lizzy over there.” She smiled and held out her hand. “Eloise Germaine. Kleptomaniac and teenage catalogue bride.”
Abby stared at her outstretched hand. She didn’t take it. She looked up into Eloise’s eyes. “Abby. Destroyer of restaurant property and recently detained vagabond.” She glanced down at Eloise’s outstretched hand. “I don’t touch other people,” Abby explained looking stoically into her eyes.
The girl called Lizzy whistled and slapped her thighs. Eloise brought her hand dramatically up to her hair and swept the bangs away from her forehead. “I see,” She said. “Never know what you might catch.” She smiled humorlessly and turned to retreat back to her bed and sat down.
Abby stood and stared at the two girls who wordlessly and sullenly stared back. She looked up at the two top bunk beds, then back down at the girls.
“Which one is mine?” Abby asked.
Lizzy sprang to her feet then clambered up to the top bunk of her bed. “Mine! This one’s mine.” She said and glared back at Abby breathing heavily.
Abby glanced around the cell, and her eyes fell on the security camera above the door. “They watch us all the time?” She asked. Eloise nodded her head. “Seems like an invasion of privacy to me.”
Lizzy snorted in disdain, and Eloise laughed before speaking. “Where you think you at, girl? You expect Hilton Club points? Fresh sheets on your bed every day? I’ll put a word in with the concierge.”
Lizzy snorted again then proceeded to make inarticulate animal noises while bobbing her head up and down as she glared at Abby from her perch above. Abby decided to ignore her as she went to the bed below her and plopped down, reclining with her hands clasped behind her head. She was not comfortable, and the entire bed shook and squeaked as Lizzy continued her primal dance above.
Abby closed her eyes and tried to still the anxiety that coursed through her like a jillion jolts of electricity. Her mind was racing, and she couldn’t latch on to any one thought. She thought of everything that had happened over the past few days: The incident at the restaurant; her escape to the Superdome; Olivia covered in mustard; her failed transformation into a dragon. Long, wonderful conversations with Stump.
Stump.
She tried not to linger on his lifeless form lying on the pavement. Instead, she thought of his dopey and infectious smile, the hitch in his gait as he walked along, humming the “Hole in My Pocket” tune. She thought of his childhood and his wonderful performances. His grandmother in her white dress standing beneath a bayou tree draped with Spanish moss. The forest woman whom she also knew as the spider elder named Bo M’Ba Nesh.
She was a traveler.
Unconsciously, Abby reached for the bear claw that was still hanging around her neck, beneath her blouse. They had taken away all of her other belongings, but somehow, they had missed this one. Maybe it was magically cloaked. Maybe it was meant to stay with her. She felt the smooth coolness of it, and her mind grew instantly calmer. She could hear Stump’s smooth, deep voice: You are the constant Abby. You are the one who always remains true to herself.
That’s right. Abby felt the calm return to herself, and she relaxed for the first time in hours.
True, Little Sister.
The dragon’s voice rumbled up from somewhere deep inside of her. It had been silent for many days, now, and Abby was beginning to wonder if her connection to it had been severed. But it was soothing to feel the presence inside of her again. Her heart fire was rekindled, and she felt the cool bear claw lying against the skin of her chest, almost like a channel, a conduit to her soul—a connection to everything that lay beyond. It had been a while since she felt that heart fire, but now she realized that the flame was there all along. She just needed to think of it, and the dragon presence filled her being.
