Witchscape

by Y G Maupin

  At this bit of news, Olive took in a deep breath and straightened her shoulders. She wasn’t surprised. This was exactly why she had begged her daughter to select a college close to home, here in the south, and not one that entertained misguided and life destroying ideas like they did on the east or were promiscuous and god less on the west coast. Olive was no prude and she was very cordial when she came across the ladies at the bank or at the checkout line, which was rare since she did her shopping early in the day and they seemed to favor the local Kroger in the early evening after all the family dinner rush had passed. Olive was kind and her smile was genuine, no one could charge her with being insincere. She would always be nice, she just couldn’t say that she would accept an invitation for coffee, much less call either of them an acquaintance. She could hear when they had people over, especially when they left. She heard laughter coming from somewhere deep in the house, of many different women, at least twice a week and every night she could hear the lady she knew as Alice putting out their cats. Thankfully she never had to approach them with an issue about their cats defecating in her gardens. She had put an end to that with a quick shot from the garden hose.

  There had been one time she had caught the larger Siamese cat cornering a robin. It had hissed at her as she stepped in between the two and she scooped the injured bird away. It had died the next morning and she quietly wept, amazed that she had felt that strongly over something that happened every hour somewhere in town. She had later chalked it up to perimenopause and began to take a low dosage hormone pill. She recognized the pharmacist as someone she had seen leaving their house when she had gone to refill her prescription. Now she resembled the stereotype of an unabashed lesbian if ever Olive had seen one; which she only had on occasion seen them at the state fair in Dallas, wearing their pride shirts, heavily tattooed and wearing bandannas. They resembled bikers or pirates to her and this pharmacist was no exception with her short clipped dark hair and what seemed to be eight piercings in each ear. All this didn’t matter to Olive anymore. There was a wind of change coming to the county that would return the family values that have been eroding ever since those women and others had come to town. Olive stretched out her legs before her and then moved her arms, and beamed with joy at her quiet little plans that she had been placing like dominoes in an intricate pattern around the city council. People would come up and places would go down.

  This was not supposed to be like any other Friday. This was the last Friday before Spring Break started the following Wednesday. The students were buzzing with excitement, and the teachers had picked up on the excitement by the end of the fourth period. Sharon had been running Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet for her freshman English lit classes since the beginning of the week and had been sitting in darkness with the single overhead light, while she looked up weather patterns on her weather app on her phone. Every once in a while, she had to shush the tittering of the students from the brief nudity of Juliet and get her class back on track. She was lucky she has been able to show the film. She had heard other school districts were removing Romeo and Juliet for the sex and suicide; two topics that the righteous right were trying to pretend did not exist amongst their young innocent souls. She looked up to see some students struggling to stay awake while others whispered and talked amongst themselves, no doubt making plans to hook up just as Romeo had done as well.

  At the other end of the building, T was going over the graph charts that students were supposed to be copying for their final six week project when the fire alarm went off. The piercing wail and sound of chairs scuffling the floor as the students gathered their books grated on her nerves. The teens were giddy as they made their way out the back door out to the adjoining baseball practice field. Sharon was already out there, near second base, talking to a tall young man. Her class was on the other side of the parking lot, so her being out of range from them was remarkable and out of the ordinary. T recognized him as Clay, the aspiring baseball star that had garnered the scorn of so many, despite being a key player in what appeared to be a promising season. Sharon was flapping her arms out of exasperation in whatever kind of conversation she was having with him, as he stood with his head down, arms crossed, listening or just acting like he was listening to yet another adult direct his life. T turned back to her class to make sure that she had taken roll and slipped back toward the chain link fence as Sharon and Clay parted ways into opposite directions. T willed Sharon to look her way, so hard, that her brows furrowed and she felt her mouth tightened[1]. It seemed that Sharon had glanced her way, but she kept on walking back to the inside of the school as the all clear signal had been given. T shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. Something just wasn’t right with this scenario.

  Later that afternoon, Birdie had met up with T in the grocery store parking lot to do some shopping for the next evening’s festivities and to hang out together. Birdie didn’t have too many friends close to her age, she was about seven year’s T’s junior, and was as awkwardly sexy as a long limbed lingerie model looked, at least one that might have been abandoned in a North Texas town. Her beauty made her a marker for jealous ladies who clung even tighter to their boyfriends arms as they passed, and they gawked without being able to help themselves. There was a time that Birdie would walk with her shoulders hunched over, crossing her arms over her chest, almost knock kneed and clumsy in her gait. But all that changed last Autumn, after she walked into Alice on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore. Alice stoutly held her ground and quickly calmed the panicky girl that was profusely apologizing between tears.

  “Don’t worry one bit. I’ve been bulldozed by teams of protestors, I’m sure a gangly girl like you is someone I can survive,” she chuckled, and led her into the mostly empty bookstore and introduced her to Sarah, who had witnessed the entire scene from the counter as she slowly sipped her tea and stroked Kismets fur.

  Kismet purred and jumped from her perch to the table that featured that month’s author, a snake charmer from Peru. Later that night, as the last customer left the bookstore and Alice was turning out the lights, Sarah was tapping her pen in her suede covered notebook and checking her watch.

  Sarah cleared her throat and started. “Don’t say it,” Alice murmured.

  Sarah shifted in the tall stool at the counter and crossed her legs again. “But.”

  “No,” Alice sang and laughed. “She’s too young, too impressionable…too ..this place.” She gestured to the town outside their bookstore window.

  Sarah scoffed, “And?” She waited for a response.

  Alice continued straightening books and magazines and came to the side of the counter to scoop up Kismet, who stretched like a toddler fighting being picked up and then let her drop back down to the floor.

  Sarah continued. “Well, I think she would be perfect and the next time I see her, we shall have a little talk.” Alice looked over her shoulder at Sarah and raised an eyebrow. Sarah smirked as she strolled away.

  Now Birdie had all the confidence in the world, and was blissfully unaware of the disruptions she caused when she walked, well, just about anywhere in the small town. She was hard to miss. She was taller than most women, close to 5’10 and had the longest blonde hair to just below her elbows that jutted out as her hands rested on her slightly curving hips. She squinted at the containers in the spices and dry goods aisle.

  “Uh, I can’t see it, T. I think I need glasses or something?” she popped down quickly, and caused the man walking by to suck in his breath as he watched over his shoulder, running his cart into the boxes of pasta.

  T looked up from the list she was reading, to reach over Birdies shoulder and pick the sea salt container from the shelf. She tapped her shoulder with it and went back to scanning the items on the shopping list.

  “Oh.” Birdie grabbed seven more containers and dumped them into the cart. She started pushing away and then stopped as if she wanted to ask T a question, thought better of it and kept moving the cart down the aisle. Birdie knew t
hat in the group of women that she met with, she wasn’t as educated as they were. It only bothered her a little bit, like when Beryl corrected her pronunciation or Anesta gently explained an ancient story. Birdie wasn’t as well read as Sarah or Alice, none of them were, and she never finished school like they all had done because she couldn’t concentrate most of the time and she hated staying indoors. But she felt her power strongly running through her veins and when she was in a trance or chanting over work, she started the spark of fire that always got the ball running. She had been a natural, Sarah had declared, and Birdie squealed in delight (to herself, she didn’t want to come off any more childish than she did) and walked with a lighter step after meeting the two odd women that always seemed out of sorts with the rest of the town. Birdie couldn’t help it. She was attracted to the work and to the mysteries that she was beginning to learn, and she felt smarter just by being part of their group. Smarter by association. T sighed next to her.

  “Well, it looks like we have mostly everything. Want to go get something to eat?”

  Birdie groaned, “ Ah T, I wish I could, but I told Trevor that I would meet him after he got off work tonight.” She looked genuinely disappointed.

  A look of surprise was on T’s face. “Oh, uh, that’s not the pizza guy, right?” she inquired, looking at Birdie.

  The young woman looked down and then back at her. “No, um, he went back to his girlfriend. Said something about wanting to go back to church and maybe changing his habits, ha! Yeah right,” she ended quietly.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Birdie. Well, his loss...” T started, and suddenly Birdie clutched her arm.

  “Yeah, but you know what. He acted like he really liked me, and I thought he was different. He used to write me little songs and play them on his guitar and sometimes he would bring me flowers…” Birdie drifted off, as she saw the couple at the end of the aisle standing near the checkers.

  T looked from the young woman to see what had caught her eyes, and for a moment, she was startled as well. At the end of the aisle, there was a twenty-something man, dressed like a typical Texan with jeans, boots and a hat. The woman that was with him was considerably older and very attractive. The only thing jarring about her, was that she appeared to be trying a little too hard and leaning a little too close to the man that could have been her son if she had started at a young age, which she had. It was Birdies estranged mother Carol, and she had Birdie when she was fifteen. Birdie slowly turned the cart to go the other way.

  “I’m kind of not in the mood to talk with her tonight and she looks like she might be busy, so yeah, let's uh…” T felt bad for the girl. Despite modern times and independent women, small towns were still small towns and just when rumors and gossip begins to die down, something else happens to stir it all up again.

  Outside in the parking lot as Birdie helped T put the bags in the trunk, she couldn’t help but feel hurt and pain deep in her chest that made her hold back the strongest desire to start sobbing right there on T’s shoulder as all the world took their groceries home. Her mom had left when she was eight-years-old. She came back for two more years when she was eleven and then she never saw her. It seemed like Carol Thompson never aged, and her desires and needs remained as they had been when she was twenty-three-years-old-- twenty years before. She took very good care of herself and made sure to always be in the company of someone that could provide for her in any way. Carol had a magical way with all men, married or not. She was well aware of it and took great pleasure in enjoying herself. One could not help but envy her situation if it weren’t for the distasteful fact that she was as ugly inside as she was beautiful on the outside. She was a stereotype that she didn’t mind fully embracing: the gold digger that was always looking over your shoulder to see who else was on the horizon. Birdie seemed to have come from two very carnally potent parents, and their offspring inherited their lust for life as well. The difference was that while her father fell in love wholeheartedly, forsaking common sense to his detriment, her mother calculated and overtly schemed a careful map of sleeping partners to conquer and string along for her purposes. Birdie just loved. She didn’t leave partners. They would leave her.

  Four

  The weekend started off with a hazy Saturday morning. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the clouds dissipated and left behind the heavy humidity coupled with the earliest heat of the year, unusual for an early April. Anesta worked every weekend in her family’s funeral home, as those seemed to be the busiest days for seeing off the dearly departed. There were four viewings scheduled for the day and three funerals. The days always started early, and carried through late into the evening, rearranging chairs and positioning flowers as the mourners and their entourages came and went to pay their respects. She was sitting down for the first time that morning and realized that she had left her coffee behind at the front desk, surely at this point it was cold, but she didn’t like the idea of an unattended cup being left in the lobby, so she reluctantly got up and that was when her Aunt Liberty, Libby for short, hurried in clucking and waddling like a worried hen.

  “Anesta! What are you doing? Please don’t tell me you plan on being back here while that horrible woman is here with her horrible sisters trying to be the death of me and this business.” Libby Duke wrung her hands and paced on the chunkiest lavender heels to match her lavender suit.

  Anesta plopped back down into the wing backed chair and frowned. “I have no idea who you might be speaking of, Auntie Libby. And I had no such plans to stay in this office.”

  Libby stopped pacing and shook her hands at Anesta. “Oh you know who I mean. That one woman that kept changing her mind for every single detail. First, it was no viewing, then she changed her mind and wanted cremation. And wouldn’t you know it we were halfway to preparing the body to take to the crematorium and she rang us up, hysterical saying that there was no way her Momma was going to suffer the fires of hell on earth by being cremated that we had to send Rocco down running to stop before they turned on the flames?!”

  Auntie Libby was one of two aunts that still worked in the Funeral Home with Anesta, her three uncles, and four male cousins. Auntie Libby was just as guilty of indecision as the offending customer was, as was evident from the two different earrings she wore that day. Anesta clutched the arms of the chair and hurled herself in slow motion up to her feet, stretching her back as she made her way up unwillingly.

  “Of course, I will speak with her, Auntie Libby. Let me just get back upstairs and I will handle this,” Anesta assured her, as she reluctantly winded her way back up and to the front of the funeral home. When her grandparents died and left the funeral home to their seven children, Anesta’s father was no longer alive. He had been gone for fifteen years already, having left two daughters and a young wife behind. Anesta’s mother never remarried. Not out of respect for her husband’s untimely death, but out of fear that whatever had gotten to him would be soon coming after her.

  Andre Louis Duke had been a handsome philanderer and it had been common knowledge that the husband of one of his conquests had murdered him as he was sitting in his Coupe under the street light in old Metairie, Louisiana. His wife, Soledad, had been at home with his twin daughters, praying to the Virgin Mary, surrounded by lit candles, that whatever devil had gotten into her husband to drive him crazy with lust would leave them alone after he had drunk his fill of Andre’s blood. How she knew that her husband would die that night, was never discussed and it was only an assumption that his womanizing ways would be the death of him. When they came to their doorway that night and her mother collapsed in her brother in laws arms, Anesta knew that her daddy was gone.

  She never forgot that funeral, and all the others after that. Her sister died five years later after she drowned at a friend’s birthday party that Anesta had missed because she had talked back to their catechism teacher. Anesta had been punished by having to stay at home and she wasn’t there to see that her sister had tripped on her flip flops, hit her head and then s
lid into the pool. By the time they had found her body floating face down near the stairs, it was too late. Anesta spent the rest of her childhood assuring her mother that there were no unwanted spirits in the hallway closet and that the lady at the library wasn’t cursing her books. Her mother’s fear eventually paralyzed her socially and wore her down mentally that she was later admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Slidell, where she had begged Anesta and Anjolie, Anesta’s twin sister, to not abandon her in that god forsaken state.

  “Please,” she had cried, as her medication was breaking through the IV at the hospital. “Any other state, but this one. You know it is cursed by the devil and the people that live here worship him and sacrifice their children in service to him,” she choked out, as the nurse looked up from her clipboard and then returned her eyes back to what she was writing.

  Nothing different from what she heard every day in the ward. Except that when Soledad Duke looked to her daughters for mercy, she saw them both, Anesta who was 17 and little Anjolie, still dead at ten-years-old. Soledad turned from one daughters sad, bloated, drowned face to the panic stricken one of the daughters that stood at her bedside.