“Hey look!” She pointed to the leaning rail. “It’s the crackles.” I was compelled to look before the epic debacle occurred. Simultaneously, out of the corner of my eye, I saw several things happen. My head swiveled towards the defenseless crackle hanging by its tiny claws on the wooden post and that’s when I witnessed the mishap, the national emergency, the act of God, the tragic destruction. It was brilliant. Mag stood up gracefully and swiftly leg maneuvered her way across the porch. Her big foot desecrated the swordfish and with one twist, the goldfish was all jacked up and disjointed. A few more karate moves, and the tuna was stuck halfway inside the floor slats with doglegged fins and an assortment of upturned fish parts. When it was over, I was furious. I wanted to throw Mag off the porch and settle things right then and there but my love for crackles overtook my desire to beat the big-L off my sister’s forehead. Basically, she was saved by a crackle.
We had always been fascinated with the strange creatures. Their transparent skin left my mind to wander to the empty places inside me, fragile and void, hanging and waiting, and looking for place. Crackles must be handled with care, loose fingers, no constriction, no binding. If you mishandle them, their thin barrel chest will cave in and their tiny feet will fall off, plus they make the most awful bone crushing sound since the dawn of mankind. And bugs.
When we first discovered them, I made the mistake of plucking one off the tree bark and literally thought my spine cracked into splinters. It was a lesson that garnered the creature a change of namesake. Their official encyclopedia bug name was Auchenorrhynchake which sounded like a hock of throat spit. For short, they were called Cicadas but that still sounded a lot like French and we didn’t have no French in the South, so Mag and I fixed it. On a hot summer day in Pine Log, Texas, the Cicadas died and the crackles were born. And the south rose again.
Over the years, we collected armies of crackles and stored them in shoe boxes. Last summer we counted sixty seven gut-less creatures staring back at us. We dressed them up into wild, crazy characters using leaves, moss, pine cones and grass. We had puppet shows, villages and towns of crackles. Two of them had patchwork shorts like us. We even created a town similar to Pine Log. It had one Dairy Queen, one grocery store, one hundred and fifty Baptist churches, and one beer joint on the other side of the Salt Flats River Bridge. Dad always said Pine Log was the wettest dry county in Texas. When folks said they was going across the river—they were not talking about fishing.
Mag and I are proud to say our best prank involved two ninja crackles, experts at covert missions and willing to die for the cause. Well, okay… actually they were already dead but the shell, it was fully committed. We painted their bubble eyes blood red with a yellow dot in the center and disguised their bodies with black coats of paint. We chiseled a sword out of sticks, painted it silver and glued it to their hands.
Maw Sue finally settled in for her evening nap and we made our move. We tiptoed across the squeaky floor, snickering and giggling, barely able to keep it all in. Mag was a clumsy boob and hit the roll away table beside the refrigerator. The three tiered table squealed out. The statue of Jesus holding a baby lamb went down face first. We froze. The table eek’d in judgment then fell silent. I gave Mag the OH-MY-GOD-THAT-TABLE-HAS-BEEN-THERE-FOREVER look of doom. Maw Sue snorted and rooted around. We went on lock down.
“We’re going to hell.” Mag lip synced the words.
“We live in Pine Log.” I lip synced back. “I think we’re already there.”
Maw Sue was in a deep sleep again so we moved out. We slithered in like serpents. Looking back on it now, I figure we should have turn coat and ran when we had the chance. Heeded the baby Jesus moment as a sign, instead, we turned heathen and mounted two ninja crackles on the rim of her glasses. The hardest part was not laughing out loud. A few times, she’d jerk her arms or legs and we’d freeze up nearly busting a gut giggling. Mag kept glancing over at Jesus and the squished lamb. I couldn’t take my eyes off the bloody red stone around Maw Sue’s neck. It watched me angrily and pulsating with my every move. A few times it reached out with its wet liquid fingers and I flinched. Mag looked at me weird but we moved out fast and swift. On the way out, Mag up-righted the savior and petted the lamb as to get us back in the saviors good graces. It took a while to get out the door without the bell clanging loud and giving us up. We hid behind the chicken coop for an hour, laughing and cutting up. We imagined her waking up from a dead sleep, staring into two bug faces. The enormous zoom on her bifocals would make them triple in size. The more I laughed—the more I saw the statue of Jesus giving me the stink eye.
Just when I started to regret the whole thing, we heard a scream and a loud plunk. Loud plunks are never good signs. Maw Sue came barreling out on the porch madder than a boar hog with his nuts cut off. According to dad, this is the maddest any southerner can get and still keep their genitalia. She paced back and forth a good five minutes, then slammed the washing machine lid down with a loud reverberating clang that made us shake. She reached for the wall and pulled off the whelp maker. At this point, I could hear Mag’s knees knocking together. Maw Sue lifted her flowery skirt and whopped her bare thighs a good one. Her skin sizzled and sent out shock waves of laughter. Mag and I knew what it meant.
The whelp maker was a thin paint stick about fourteen inches long. If there was one thing that hadn’t lived up to its namesake—it was the paint stick. The stupid stick hadn’t seen a speck of paint in its entire life but it could etch out the back side of our thighs in a heartbeat which is why it was named the whelp maker. We hid out for three days until neither of us could take another day not seeing Maw Sue because we missed her. Sometimes, there are worse things than whelps.
The screen door let out an eerie squeal and the bell clanged. We stood in front of the kitchen table nervous and silent. Maw Sue was sitting down on the opposite side, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee. The air was thick and daunting. The red stone eyed me with its piercing glaze. I gulped and fidgeted. Mag swayed and her knees knocked. From across the room, the statue of Jesus melted us with his hot stare and the lamb bleeped and bleeped. Maw Sue never looked up. She didn’t have too. The message was clear. On the opposite end of the table was the whelp maker and sitting on top of it was the mangled remains of two ninja crackles. They died for the cause but Mag and I took the punishment.
SALVATION
They say you gain strength in what’s left behind but what if you can’t remember what you’ve left or why? I’ve lived with my parent’s for months, how many I’ve lost track. I woke up daily from nightmares, strange creatures, shadows and slinks, wailing sounds, rustling and sifting, hands touching me, grabbing and prodding, wanting, touching me and chilling me into a cold sweat. I was afraid to open my eyes for the fear of what I might see but it was always the same. I was in my childhood bedroom which seemed to be haunted. Or maybe I was the vessel that was haunted, I’m not altogether sure anymore. I never leave this room, I rarely get out of bed, except to pee. I sleep and sleep, dream and dream, toss and toss, turn and turn until I feel as if I’m just waiting on death to take me. I have no wants to do anything, to talk to anyone, to speak to anyone, to get dressed, to bathe, or to brush my teeth or comb my hair. My breath has become the same stale puff of air as a dogs and I barely have the strength to lift my head from the pillow. The worse part about it—is I don’t know why. But I don’t have the strength to care. Just to lift my arm is an effort. My bones are wasting away and I want nothing more than to die and leave my ravaged pitiful body behind. My mind is a simply a torn up road map, scattered everywhere and I cannot make sense of it. Here, there, everywhere. How I came to be here—I’m not sure. There are rare times when I rise up with a sudden gust of energy, supernatural in nature, I cannot explain it otherwise, and it reckons me to pick and pilferage for land marks, a road, a doorway, a map or a memory but all I get is the adamant cries inside the house, from the dark house inside me. No lesser light—just dark, overwhelming dark. And I re
alize it’s not supernatural at all—it’s her. She will not let me be. So I lay in my childhood bed of suffering, limp body, cold heart, listening to the sounds of the world spinning while I cannot silence her deafening screams. I can do nothing but what I know to do. I retreat internally to cope, while I shut the world I cannot bear, out of mind. No matter where I go, internally or outwardly, I struggle to hold her inside me, keep her where she belongs. SHE CANNOT COME OUT! I fear the walls are not strong enough to hold her. She is violent and adamant, determined to find a way out but as long as I have anything to do with it—that will never happen. As soon as I assure myself, my mind thinks it—I feel a rupture inside and the foundation of the house splinters and shifts under the weight of her heavy heartfelt cries as if she is throwing a fit as she is prone to do. Voices slip through the cracks of the house, of my soul. I rise up from my death bed, eyes wild and alert. For the first time, in months, I say, I cannot be sure, I am not catatonic. What happens next, I cannot explain. My room becomes a bridge, a connection to things buried, stored away, hidden, forgotten, abandoned, denied, an entryway into my past, and a voice silenced long ago. It wasn’t a cosmic boom or a thundering awakening. It wasn’t phenomenal in the grand sense of things, quite the opposite. It was simple, transcending. Until it, whatever it was, happened, I fear I had been dead all along. The core of my heart beat rapidly, my senses came alive, acute and responsive. My vision crisp, my scent anew, my tongue tasting, my skin touching other places, not my own.
It was strange and yet sensational, maybe because I haven’t felt in months. I don’t rightly know. I smell peppermint, copper pennies and moth balls. It was the weirdest, scariest, enlightening moment I’d had in years. When I got divorced—life stopped. I wasn’t sure I even existed at all, except for the pain reminding me. I barely have a place of reference, you know, to grab and say, this is where I start or end, this is where I go to and from. I am just stranded—nowhere. No forward, no backwards. Memories are gone, erased tidbits of time and place, my mind somehow intolerable to their presence. I look at my arms pale and thin and my head aches with heaviness I can barely hold upright. I feel eighty but I’m twenty two. How does this happen? I fear I will never know—just wander my whole life—no purpose—lost. My thoughts are fluid like water rushing downstream, me in the middle chest deep, hands sprawled out side to side feeling the wetness of their power as they give me life and remind me of the days which have passed like slow punishment where time is irrelevant. What used to be my former life is now an erased chalkboard. The slate of my soul used to display words, stories, descriptions…my entire life, now nothing but a film of indiscernible white chalk scribbles and smudges. And the pain. Oh. My. God. The pain. I am a body of twisted rope and knots of it. If I could find the source of the gnawing malaise, a damaged organ in my wrecked body, I would yank it out with my own hands.
My life is a see-saw, where I engage on two planks of existence. Pain or numbness. Both extremes are chaotic, troubling and bring to mind, people, places and things, not entire details, but merely the pain associated with it. I can’t seem to get past any of them—but yet I cannot downplay their meaning and simply discard them. I simply push the unopened baggage down, deep inside the house, inside the rooms where I store them away, stack after stack, bag after bag, towers of suitcases. I can’t live. I can’t die. I simply exist in the place of in-between where nothing exists. The room grabs my attention. The bedspread is the same as I remember it, night after dreadful night, white and waxy on top with princess ruffles cascading down the sides and right in the center a medallion of pink and coral roses draped over a flowing green vine. On the windows are thick faded pink curtains drooping like aged wisterias. Most nights, if I slept, that is, I was tucked inside a wild garden, nestled in the arms of a rose bush, while poked and prodded by thorns or that’s what it felt like. I knew it wasn’t the thorns of the bed covers, but something darker, more dangerous than I wanted to believe. The thoughts send me into a terrified frenzy.
I scoot up on the mattress, rip the bed sheets off and throw it all on the floor. I pull my knees to my chest, shaking. I notice it still in the center of the mattress, after all these years, forever dooming me to its fate. The ominous blood stain is immortalized like a mural on my mattress, a faded cherry blossom tree. The rite of passage stares me down and reminds me of the unavoidable entrance into womanhood. Some woman I turned out to be. I feel trapped inside this room, inside this house, inside this body. What in God’s name is wrong with me? I yearn for something I can’t even describe. I’m trapped here, there, everywhere. My mind is churning with fifteen television sets all talking and acting out various episodes of my life and I—I can’t seem to hear any of them.
Then, as if it had no choice, it thinks of him. Without him, the man I married, the man I divorced, my mind would simply wither away. Without him, I don’t seem to exist. He was the man that was going to save me, rescue me. He would love me as I wanted to be loved. Psshhhtttt! That didn’t happen, did it Willodean. Silly girl. Love isn’t real, don’t you know that? I am lost without him. Lost without a man, period. I need him. I need someone. Need. I hate that word…sigh. I needed him. Like a bullet to the head, I needed him. Like a knife to the back, I needed him. Like a punch in the gut, I needed him. And I still need him in a sick, familiar, whiskey drink hangover sort of way. I’m a mess. I keep waiting on my life to change as if he was the change I need to rush in and save me again. God. Stop it Willodean. Stop thinking of him.
But I do think of him. I lie in the mural of cherry blossom trees and think of nothing but him, while I wither away in the house that rules me, controls me. I wait and wait. I wait for something but something doesn’t arrive. Branson doesn’t save me. A man doesn’t save me. No one saves me. I am stuck.
“Eyes to see—ears to hear.” The voice ushered in the room and startled me to an upright position. I wasn’t sure if I even heard it or if it was simply another television in my head. Somewhere the earth rumbled and left me undone. Every fiber, cell, and microbe in the room screamed 1970. I thought for sure, the Bee-Gee’s would bust out of my closet in white polyester jumpsuits, foot stomping a synchronized dance and blasting the tune, Shadow Dancing. It was eerie, a dream state of sorts. I’m here, but yet I’m there, but where is there, exactly?
Barry Gibbs doesn’t show but my great grandmother makes an electrifying appearance at the foot of my bed. Now, what makes this so freaky—is that she’s dead. I stared at Maw Sue, blinking a few times to make sure I wasn’t still asleep. Here lately, the realm of this world and others converge until I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. She looked the same as I remember. Her face a dried apple with eyeballs, covered with horned rimmed glasses with two pearls on each side. She wore a purple dress with yellow daises as if she was standing neck high in a field of wild flowers. She had a striped blue and white apron from her sewing collection. This must be a dream. Maw Sue is dead, in the grave, under the dirt—and has been for years. This is not real I tell myself. Not real. It’s part of the madness Willodean. Voices and people in your head always speaking, always telling you things. Ten thousand televisions and radios blaring. Just ignore it, let it go, pretend it doesn’t exist.
I blink rapidly. I rub my eyes. I shake my head, close my eyes and open them. She is still there, more real as ever. I am gut punched and winded. I want to slip away, quickly, leave this dream and go to the house inside me, inside the numbing room, where I am void of response, denied of sensation, sight, and sound. What if this is another breakdown? A part of me denies I see anything at all—and the other part of me remembers the gifts, the family requirements and the curse. Maw Sue’s ghostly lips speak what I fear. The words I heard a thousand times over as a child.
“The awful, terrible, splendid gift always lives up to its namesake. One way or the other.”
Then she vanishes as if she wasn’t there at all. Why—why did she have to say it? I’ve tried to run from it. Erase it. Ignore it. Or better yet, do what my
family does. Pretend it doesn’t exist. I play out scenarios in my head when a branch hits the window. It startles me and I turn towards it. It slides down the glass slow and morbid while making a violent scraping noise as if it is terrorizing me on purpose. Even nature is out to get me. I notice the weather outside, something I haven’t thought about in days, months, maybe years, who knows. When you’re crazy, days mix with the nights, the sun collides with the moon and everything is blackened. No light, no lesser light, no nothing.
I feel different today, somehow…as if I’ve woken from a bad dream that lasted months. My vision is a tad clearer than it has been. My thoughts are more put together, not altogether there, but better than chaos. The sun is bright and hurts my eyes, the wind is blowing the leaves across the lawn and the tree limbs bounce up and down as if they’re waiving to me. The warmth of the sun’s touch takes me to the window. I drag my man pillow with me. It’s an old feather pillow I’ve had for ages that I plump up and wrap my hungry arms around, a temporary exchange for a warm body. A replacement for Branson. Here lately, it’s been my lifeline. I have to hold things to keep from dying…literally. I sit upright and lean against the windowsill, lost in what is and what isn’t. My hand glides up the man pillows back slowly and erotic, taking me places. Hurt. Pain. Need. When I can’t stand it any longer, I press my cheek against the warm glass and squeeze the man pillow. I want to slip away inside the house to visit the pity room, the poor, poor me room. I’ll go there a lot, dwelling between four walls of self-deprecation, drowning in the tears of regret and woe is me, but instead, my eyes drift out the window. The wind is whipping the Chinese tallow tree like a spoiled child. Dad planted the tree outside my window in 1962, a year before I was born and it has literally grown into the side of the house as if they are one and the same. And since Mag and I felt we had the authority to change namesakes for just about anything, the tallow tree was officially the wondering tree because that’s what we did when we sat in its scraggly limbs—we wondered about life.
WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) Page 2
