Meg Sefton's Blog, page 63

Mother

 

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Neil Moralee, Watchers in the Wood, flickr, Familiar by Dorcas Casey

Walking her dog beside the wood one afternoon in July, Maja noticed for the first time a black mattress in a clearing of trees. The mattress was tucked inside the canopy of green leaves, almost indetectable. The week before she had seen a huge pumpkin there. It looked fresh and it wasn’t Halloween. She had thought at the time it was odd. Pumpkins of course didn’t grow in a Florida wood.

She stopped to observe the clearing. The clouds were gathering. The trees and vines and undergrowth was taking on an intensified darkness like it did on a rainy Florida day in summer. Her dog sat her little white bottom on the warm asphalt of the street, unfurling her long tail and sniffing the wind which sure smelled to her of the rain drops and wet street and wet earth to come.

Twenty years ago, her mother had flown down from Pittsburgh to be her with her for the delivery of her first grandchild. Maja was due on Halloween. When he didn’t come on time, they tried all kinds of silly tricks – walking backwards, primrose oil, eggplant parmesan, driving down a bumpy road. A week later, Maja had still not delivered and her mother had to go home on her return flight.

The night before she left, she entered Maja’s room where Maja was getting ready for bed. Abel was still at work.

“Maja,” she said, pointing a long nailed finger at her, her face framed by the darkness of the room, the only light being at the light on Maja’s dressing table where she sat, removing her earrings. “I know you have delayed the child on purpose! Don’t try to hide that from me now, girl.”

Maja, mute like she had always been over her mother’s extreme paranoia and superstitions, said nothing. Eventually her mother drifted from the room.

Maja shivered that night in her bed to think of it, the tightness of her swollen belly indeed hers and hers alone, thank God. Her mother’s absurd accusation she had prevented the birth reminded Maja of her loneliness growing up, her fear.

When Maja moved to Orlando with Abel, she had been grateful for the very odd climate, the exotic green an over exuberant lushness. It reminded her nothing of home, the cobbled and slightly frail seeming streets, the huddling of old dark buildings and homes so close to one another, the grayness of the days fall until late spring. She had gone back for her mother’s funeral right before Justyn’s tenth birthday.

In the wood there was something over the black mattress, something standing there, large and hunched. In the place that seemed to be its face, Maja observed the dark penetrating eyes, the ugly open maw. Was it a person or a tree? She had a horrifying thought it was some form of her mother. She gathered herself and made her way to her porch.

She knew she should call the police, or someone. But she would let the mattress set out there for the night.

Justyn was safe in his liberal arts college up in South Carolina. He would have laughed good naturedly at his mother’s belief there was someone in the woods.

How much that had cost her, she had thought, that laugh of his, its nurturing and its preservation.  It had been well worth it.

She went inside her three story townhome and locked the door.

Beautiful Ones

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Solomon Church 07, Dan Tantrum, flickr

On Good Friday Mama and I saw the blood dripping from Jesus’ cross. The cross hung from the church ceiling with wires at the front of the sanctuary. It hung over the communion table where Daddy in his robe broke a big round flat cracker and said Jesus’ words to his congregation: “This is my body, given for you.” Where he held up the silver cup and said “This is my blood shed for you.”

Mama and I sat in the front, our usual place. While Daddy passed out the plates of crackers to the ushers to take to everybody, the choir stood in the balcony behind everybody and sang some of my favorite hymns.

“On a hill far away, stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame.” Some of the voices of the choir were very wavery. They were very old. A lot of the ladies hugged me after the service. Some even brought me a candy or cookies they had made.

A cluster of fat drops of blood fell from the cross and dripped on the white cloth pressed out by Mama the night before.

Mama stood up, shaking. She let out a tiny cry. She whispered to me “Did you see that?”

I nodded. I did see it. I put my arm around her and helped her out of the church. Recently, Mama had been seeing things at church, and I had too though I was trying to be strong for her. Mama wasn’t as strong as I was.

We hightailed it out. The ladies in the pews would be wagging their heads and clucking, gossiping, especially the ladies who had made it a big point to wear all black on Good Friday for Jesus. These same ladies would look like iced cakes and Easter eggs on Sunday. The men would draw up their brows and grow stern and pick at their hands and mustaches and wonder what they should do.

Early the next morning we had to drive Mama to the Florida state mental hospital in Chattahoochee.

“I’m sorry to tell you, your Mama has schizophrenia,” said the doctor, for some reason looking directly at me. Maybe he wanted to treat me like a grown up so I could believe I would understand it. He laced up his fingers across his white doctor coat and leaned back in his chair behind the army green desk.

Daddy and I were sitting in the doc’s office on the other side of his metal tank. The nurses had taken Mama down the hall to help her change.

“No,” I said. “She saw blood. It was Jesus’ blood coming down from the cross in Daddy’s church.”

“She shouldn’t be seeing these things, Shawna. She’s ill.”

Daddy didn’t stand up for me, he didn’t say These things are real. He didn’t say I preach about them every Sunday. And I preached them on Good Friday.

And I didn’t say And I saw it too. I saw the blood Jesus shed. It dripped down high from the cross and splashed on Daddy’s communion table.

I didn’t say it because I wondered if the doc would call me a crazy bones and lock me up. Besides, I had to be Mama’s protector. I couldn’t be crazy.

The Doc took us down to Mama’s room where a nurse was shooting her up with something. Mama would never have been caught dead in the clothes she was wearing, not even just to hang out around the house. She was drooped over, barely holding herself up.

“Why are they making her more tired?” I asked the Doctor, looking up at his big granite face, not really know if what I said meant anything.

The Doc let me go in and give her a hug. I took her in my arms and it was almost like I was the Mama. Her hair smelled like it did more and more recently, unwashed, wild, like an animal’s who slept out in the woods.

Daddy took me home when we got back from Chattohoochee. He dropped me off and went to the church to finish up some business for Easter Sunday.

Pony and Todd were out back when I got home. They were boys from the tracks and overpasses who slipped in through our back fence. They were always around to make me laugh if I was lonely. It was almost magic the way they showed up just when I needed someone. And I was nice to them even though they could do bad things. Mama had taught me Jesus loved everyone.

Pony had a burlap bag holding something big and wiggling around. They had both been huffing paint, their mouths were ringed with the white. Their lips were always red and chapped.

“Shit, Shawna, bout time,” said Pony. “Ma got stashed away in the loony bin.”

I hadn’t said anything. I don’t know how he knew. I had half a mind to haul off and whop him.

In Orlando Daddy bought us a house that backed up to a railroad track. It used to be orange groves but there was still one orange tree in our backyard which pops out tough dry fruit. No one eats them. They’re kinda gross. The fruit falls and molds and rots in the grass, turning green. Pony, Todd, and I throw the rotten fruit at each other, the dried mold flying up in little puffs from our clothes.

We used to crawl through the fence to the tracks and follow the tracks where the women sell their bodies on Orange Blossom Trail and the pornographers sell whatever they want. I heard a news person on the tv say the tracks have a reputation like the killing fields of Texas because the sounds of murder are covered by the trains just like they were by the oil rigs in Texas.

I have no idea now why Daddy bought us this house but at the time I didn’t think much of it. It was an exotic adventure compared to my life in a small town in Arkansas. I’m pretty sure Mama and Daddy had no idea who I hung out with or where I went. They knew I was happy and occupied. They had bought me a bike so I could get around places. Kids weren’t often in too much danger back then. And our house and other houses just sat on this kind of edge that backed up against something dark. They weren’t super fancy but they weren’t poor people’s houses either. No one seemed to worry. Besides, the only people who were killed were the homeless.

It turned out the contents of the burlap was a baby. I was shocked Pony could lift the sack his arms and body were puny like Alfalfa but he was wiry from living on the street and scrapping. He and Todd often ripped people off and pulled schemes to eat, find supplies to huff, pad out their living quarters in cars in a scrapyard or in the underdeveloped woods between neighborhoods.

“We stole this baby,” said Pony. It was always him speaking for the two of them. A train screeched past on the other side of the fence, creating a dry wind of metal on metal and dust pouring through the cracks. The baby, startled, started to scream and pump its fists.

“Shut up, baby!” shouted Pony, bending over to yell in its face. “Shut the fuck up little stupid baby!”

Todd toppled over on the grass, his raspy laugh gaining hold on his throat.

I kind of didn’t care they stole from stores or people’s pockets but I couldn’t tolerate this.

I picked up the baby.

“We’re putting the baby up for ransom,” said Pony.

“You’re clueless.”

I walked into the house with the baby who was nice and chunky in my arms, like the huge sacks of oats they sold at the feed store in Arkansas. The two of them followed me in and draped themselves across the table where Mama served us waffles for breakfast with strawberry syrup.

“We were going to tie you up and make you a sex slave,” said Pony.

I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. I couldn’t be sure they weren’t serious.

“Now your Mama’s gone and Daddy’s always away, we can do whatever.”

I put the baby on a little couch next to the kitchen and kicked Pony boy in the nuts. I cracked Todd’s shoulder with a cast iron skillet. They flew out the back door, wailing.

The light was fading from the sky and it was getting dark. The cicadas were out in force. It sounded like one was just on the outside of the back door.

It made me sad Mama couldn’t help me with the baby. She would have liked to. I found soft cloths and safety pins and changed its diaper. I put her in an old tshirt of mine, one that was too small for me. It was soft and smelled like softener. I found an old sippy cup Mom had kept and warmed some milk.

I fell asleep with the baby in my bed. I missed Mama but I wasn’t as lonely as I had been when she started checking out on me at night when Dad was at the church late, working. She had stayed in the living room, silent, no tv, the fading light invading the cracks of the room. It made me feel strange and sad, all at once. She hadn’t always been that way. We used to play Operation, my favorite game.

“Mama, at least turn lights on,” I would say, and I would turn a light on. I made us dinner. Later I put her to bed. I never told Daddy about these nights. I didn’t see any reason to. In the morning, she was Mama.

When Daddy got home it was almost midnight. I had fallen asleep on my bed with the baby. I would tell him all about it. He would know what to do just like he always did.

But he didn’t come up to my room. I heard him crying. He was in the living room and I could hear the loud cries all the way in my room. I had never heard my Dad cry.

I walked down the stairs with the baby. I had decided to name her Leanna.

“Daddy,” I said, “Are you alright?”

Leanna was passed out on my shoulder, sucking her thumb.

“I’m alright sugar, just a rough day,” his voice was wavering in a way that made me not sure of what to do.

“Daddy, some bad boys in the neighborhood stole a baby. We have to get her back home.”

“Do they have her?” he said. I thought maybe his eyes were too jammed up with tears to see her. She was right there in my arms.

“No, Daddy, she’s right here, with me. Don’t you see her?”

“No, Shawna. Look, I’m in no mood. Go to bed now, ok? We’ll talk about it in the morning, I love you, sweetie.”

The shadow of the branches moved over the white blanket on my bed, the white blanket Mama said was really a cloud that would take me to a castle if I wanted, or a beautiful beach, or high up on the mountains. I saw the blood, Mama, I say to her out loud. I knew she could hear me. She had told me people with similar thoughts can communicate with each other even when they are not together. She had told me people who love each other can meet in the air in their dreams.

I hoped Mama would meet me. I knew the bars at the insane asylum wouldn’t hold her. She would be proud of me for saving the baby and beating the bad boys. She would tell me she and I could see things others couldn’t. Sometimes even the friends we know that others can’t see are still not good for us. We need to find better secret friends. And she would say not to trouble Daddy, I could save Leanna on my own.

I wanted Jesus to suffer me to come to him. I wanted to sit in his lap. I wanted him to see Leanna, to tell me what a beautiful baby she was.

I wanted him to slip through the cracks of my back fence to be with the sinners and prostitutes on Orange Blossom Trail, the paint huffers and murderers.

I wanted him to come down from the clouds. I wanted him to bless us with a beautiful light. I closed my eyes and could feel his warmth.

I asked him to bless Mama and Daddy.

And I asked him to bless me too.

Beautiful ones

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Penetrating the veil, Sara Biljana Gaon, flickr

On Good Friday Mama and I saw the blood drip from Jesus’ cross over the place where Daddy celebrated the last supper with his church. The next day, Daddy and I took Mama to Lakeside where she had to stay for a while.

She had schizophrenia said the Doctor.

No, I said, she saw blood, the blood of the Lamb who was slain for our sins, she heard God’s voice.

Those are all just words describing Christian belief, said the Doctor. She shouldn’t actually be seeing these things. She is ill.

Daddy didn’t stand up for me, he didn’t say these things are real, I preach about them every Sunday. And I preached them on Good Friday.

I didn’t say but I swanee, Doc, I saw a blood drop fall from the cross too.

I didn’t say it because I wondered if the doc would call me a crazy bones and put me in clothes like the ones Mom now wore, clothes she would never have been caught dead in, not even just to hang out around the house.

Mama and I had seen the blood drop together and we had looked at each other, wide eyed. It splatted on the communion table, a wide pedaled dark squished peony.

I knew if I said I saw it, Doc would put me in a little white room with bars on the window, a metal bed and a pancake mattress. How can an ill person get well like that? There should be a bouncy house, pop music, cotton candy, games, feather beds, flowers, painting. And also, grits and waffles.

If I said I saw the blood, Doc might think it was Mama’s fault I was seeing things and have the state give me to another Mama.

Pony and Todd were out back when I got home. Pony had a burlap bag holding something big and wiggling around. They had both been huffing paint, their mouths were ringed with the white. Their lips were always red and chapped.

“Shit, Shawna, bout time,” said Pony. “Ma got stashed away in the loony bin.”

I hadn’t said anything. I don’t know how he knew. I had half a mind to haul off and whop him.

In Orlando Daddy bought us a house that backed up to a railroad track. It used to be orange groves but there was still one orange tree in our backyard which pops out tough dry fruit. No one eats them. They’re kinda gross. The fruit falls and molds and rots in the grass, turning green. Pony, Todd, and I throw the rotten fruit at each other, the dried mold flying up in little puffs from our clothes.

We can crawl through the fence to the tracks and follow the tracks where the women sell their bodies on Orange Blossom Trail and the pornographers sell whatever they want. The tracks have a reputation like the killing fields of Texas because the sounds of murder were covered by the trains just like they were by the oil rigs in Texas.

I have no idea now why Daddy bought us this house but at the time I didn’t think much of it. It was an exotic adventure compared to my life in a small town in Arkansas. I’m pretty sure Mama and Daddy had no idea who I hung out with or where I went. They knew I was happy and occupied. They had bought me a bike so I could get around places. Kids weren’t often in too much danger back then. And our house and other nice houses just sat on this kind of edge that backed up against something dark. But because the houses were nice and not far from the country club no one seemed to think of it much. And the only people who were killed were the homeless.

It turned out the contents of the burlap was a baby. I was shocked Pony could lift the sack his arms and body were puny like Alfalfa but he was wiry from living  on the street and scrapping. He and Todd often ripped people off and pulled schemes to eat, find supplies to huff, pad out their living quarters in cars in a scrapyard or in the underdeveloped woods between neighborhoods.

“We stole this baby,” said Pony. It was always him speaking for the two of them. A train screeched past on the other side of the fence, creating a dry wind of metal on metal and dust pouring through the cracks. The baby, startled, started to scream and pump its fists.

“Shut up, baby!” shouted Pony, bending over to yell in its face. “Shut the fuck up little stupid baby!”

Todd toppled over on the grass, his raspy laugh gaining hold on his throat.

I kind of didn’t care they stole from stores or people’s pockets but I couldn’t tolerate this.

I picked up the baby.

“We’re putting the baby up for ransom,” said Pony.

“You’re clueless.”

I walked into the house with the baby who was nice and chunky in my arms, like the huge sacks of oats they sold at the feed store in Arkansas. The two of them followed me in and drape themselves across the table where Mama served us waffles for breakfast with strawberry syrup.

“We were going to tie you up and make you a sex slave,” said Pony.

I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. I couldn’t be sure they weren’t serious.

“Now your Mama’s gone and Daddy’s always away, we can do whatever.”

Daddy wasn’t in the house. He had dropped me off on the way home from the insane asylum so he could finish up at the church, get ready for Easter the next day.

I put the baby on a little couch next to the kitchen and kicked Pony boy in the nuts. I cracked Todd’s shoulder with a cast iron skillet. They flew out the back door, wailing.

The light was fading from the sky and it was getting dark. The cicadas were out in force. It sounded like one was just on the outside of the back door.

It made me sad Mama couldn’t help me with the baby. She would have liked to. I found soft cloths and safety pins and changed its diaper. I put it in an old tshirt of mine, one that was too small for me. It was soft and smelled like softener. I found an old sippy cup Mom had kept and warmed some milk.

I fell asleep with the baby in my bed. I missed Mama but I wasn’t as lonely as I had been when she started checking out on me at night when Dad was at the church late, working. She had stayed in the living room, silent, no tv, the fading light invading the cracks of the room. It made me feel strange and sad, all at once. She hadn’t always been that way. We used to play Operation, my favorite game.

“Mama, at least turn lights on,” I would say, and I would turn a light on. I made us dinner. Later I put her to bed. I never told Daddy about these nights. I didn’t see any reason to. In the morning, she was Mama.

When Daddy got home it was almost midnight. I had fallen asleep on my bed with the baby. I would tell him all about it. He would know what to do just like he always did.

But he didn’t come up to my room. I heard him crying. He was in the living room and I could hear the loud cries all the way in my room. I had never heard my Dad cry.

I walked down the stairs with the baby. I had decided to name her Leanna.

“Daddy,” I said, “Are you alright?”

Leanna was passed out on my shoulder, sucking her thumb.

“I’m alright sugar, just a rough day,” his voice was wavering in a way that made me not sure of what to do.

“Daddy, some bad boys in the neighborhood stole a baby. We have to get her back home.”

“Do they have her?” he said. I thought maybe his eyes were too jammed up with tears to see her. She was right there in my arms.

“No, Daddy, she’s right here, with me. Don’t you see her?”

“No, Shawna. Look, I’m in no mood. Go to bed now, ok? We’ll talk about it in the morning, I love you, sweetie.”

The shadow of the branches moved over the white blanket on my bed, the white blanket Mama said was really a cloud that would take me to a castle if I wanted, or a beautiful beach, or high up on the mountains. I saw the blood, Mama, I say to her out loud. I knew she could hear me. She had told me people with similar thoughts can communicate with each other even when they are not together. She had told me people who love each other can meet in the air in their dreams.

I hoped Mama would meet me. I knew the bars at the insane asylum wouldn’t hold her. She would be proud of me for saving the baby and beating the bad boys. She would tell me she and I could see things others couldn’t. Sometimes even the friends we know that others can’t see are still not good for us. We need to find better secret friends. And she would say not to trouble Daddy, I could save Leanna on my own.

 

 

liquid asylum

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Oakwood Cemetery, Austin, by kissingtoast, flickr

We think you should know, but you do, don’t you, dear ones, ones who have passed on, ones who now live in the street, ones who have killed and molder in prison, ones who live in underground spaces forgotten under cities until money and children and food go missing, until abandoned houses are destroyed, until libraries parks and public places reek of unseemliness, we will never leave you, the representatives of who you were before you were placed on operating tables, drilled clean through your skull, hammered through your eye socket, shocked with insulin and electricity, precious memories flying, shrieking, from your skin, old personalities, pleasures, predilections lingering saddened, forlorn, in corners of the operating room.

See? The doctors and nurses and orderlies said. We don’t have to put them in cages. Look! We don’t have to put them in straight jackets. No longer the padded cell! And yet we said to you, we pointed this out dear ones: Your tongues are now so jammed in your mouths you can barely speak.  They congratulate themselves, the nurses, the doctors, the orderlies while you convalesce in the infirmary. There are cigarettes outside behind the surgery, there is wine and beer on breaks, a cake to celebrate the next hundred batch, and sex in the janitor’s closet. And finally, families can bring their smiles to the common areas and feel relieved for they are not pretending.

We the spirits of this place, the spirits that gathered when the town said We will build buildings for a keeping of those not fit to live among us, we those spirits want you to know we have been watching you and know you, the real you and not your spirit of violence and destruction, of hate, but the one you can’t remember now, the one born of God, the one who must exist somewhere, the one you hope will be recaptured, the one who will get married again, the one who will help you regain the respect of your children and community, the one your your mother and father believe will break through the face you present, the blank mind, the addled tongue, the hand that drifts up uncontrollably to pat the space on your head where a drill bored through, the drill taking you though it didn’t care, not really, leaving you sensitive to light and noise, any loud noise, any disruption to a mellow day which nowadays means just about any sound.

And for those of you who became like power plants with nothing but current running through, for those whose bodies veins were flooded through with insulin over and over, you were just as fucked. We have your memories up here on a shelf. You may never get them back but we keep them and send them back in little batches like molded leaves rotting on trees, memories of leaves, veiny outlines, lace.

When you come back in your mind to us no matter where you are, the flophouse, the prison cell, the cardboard box, the bungalow with a picket fence, we know you want the whole thing back, what you were, or, more accurately could have been. You are with us in spirit and we meet you in the air while you are drift in your dreams, we meet you to try to help you find what you are looking for.

In your mind you go back to the place where you lost yourself, you go back to your old bedlam, you come home to us, your home you never intended to feel as home and yet it was the site of this terrible new self you were born into, and there is no place like home my dear ones for here we keep who you were, you will find it here, we promise, if only you return, to make yourself whole among us again, to confront your executioners as they say.

It is not as haunted as tourists say, you know that, those foolish people who want to give themselves a shiver spending a night in restraints. Idiots. We have half a mind to show them real fear, but it would be a waste, alas.

You were the real beauty and the romance, my how we miss you, our beautiful, broken ones. Bring your old and weary bones to lie here again and let us give you back your old self. Your memories await. So too the tears you cannot cry being too feeble to feel. We will give you your self to you whole, along with your pleasures, as well as a deep and lasting sleep if you come to us and find your home once more in the bosom of health. It did not happen the first time, the wholeness, the health, but let us try again. Please.

 

Wild Animal

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Hailey Kean, unsplash

The door that always used to creak up in front of me while I sat in the hall of the manse was heavy and dark. It moved like an old grandfather. It created a shadow over my face, blocking the light of the hall light. It kept me in the dark for hours. Until it wanted me to leave. Then it slammed shut, waking my mother, waking my father. My sister slept.

Why don’t you want to sleep in peace? said my adopted mother. Why don’t you stay in your room with your sister? She was awake now standing over me in her curlers and robe. Why do you sit in the hallway half the night like a hyena?

I thought of that later, wondering if my eyes glowed in the dark, wondering if whoever was opening the door to cast me in darkness was hoping to see my glittering eyes. I wondered if it was my dead birth mother. The one who gave me life. I wonder if she was wild too.

When I went to a friend’s birthday party with my mother and sister, I tore into my friend’s gifts and opened them myself. I couldn’t wait. Like a wild animal, my mother said, shaking her coiffed head. She apologized profusely to the child’s mother. In a dress and everything, she said to me, later in the car, jamming in the lighter with a pointy red nailed finger.

I sat beside the door that night and consulted the dark blocking the light, its nonseeing coolness a relief after so much scrutiny. You could do anything in the dark, say anything. Be who and what you wanted. I could take the heads off my dolls, stab them. I could pinch a boy, make him cry. I watched for my birth mother again. She would have to be a ghost. She was dead. She had hung herself in the dark. In the dark of her lonely house far away from my father.

I know I make my adopted mother sad. My Rangerette boots that will never be so clean as she hoped. Digging with my grandfather in the garden for Easter eggs. He, a wild animal himself, encouraging me, boisterous and loud. The two of us just on the other side of feral and he my adopted kin. Maybe I wasn’t too far gone after all.

I could have been anything, my mother said to me, confronting me the day before my divorce was final, talking to me with Dad and my sister in the therapist’s office. You always thought you were so special, always thought you could be more. But you were always so wild, couldn’t keep your mind on anything. Now look at you.

I know she considered me not technically hers.

That night, I sat on the floor of my newly acquired empty apartment, my default shelter. I am not sure there had ever been any options here. Does a dog choose its course? I watched through the sliding glass door the moon setting over the lake. I watched with my glittering eyes. I would not sleep for years.

Ms. Myska Rebel Mouse

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Kittens and Cats, a Book of Tales (1911), flickr

This morning I revised a story I wrote loosely based on the Mouse Woman tradition of the Haida Gawaii native people of the Canadian Pacific Northwest. My Mouse Woman is more of a silently influential citizen whereas the original Mouse Woman was a kind of fairy godmother or even spirit guide between worlds. Here, in a more human manifestation, she shows her village there is a rhythm to life and death that is mysterious, feral, and not to be disrupted. She has her own rhythm, hence “rebel.”

Her plight is similar to mine in terms of unusual sleep patterns that can sometimes find one at odds with the rest of the world. But Ms. Myska teaches us to be ourselves. I wrote this three years ago and wanted to revise it and bring it forth again as I once more find myself in a struggle but am still seeking redemption through a celebration of individuality and acceptance.

https://brokenwriterblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/507/

witch in the woods

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Mike Kniec, To Grandmother’s House We Go, flickr

I went to a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. Often I took a path that cut through the woods, a path that connected our small campus to a street of high end shops in town. In the heart of the woods there was a little bridge arching over a small brook. Beside it there was a stone cherub. When I was unhappy senior year, I often sat beside the brook to quiet my mind. Changes would be happening soon upon graduation. Life would no longer be as simple as cramming for tests or writing papers. I had to find work. And I did not know where I might find work. And I didn’t want to go home.

Over my college years, I had become distant from my parents, my father and stepmother. They didn’t often visit at school, not even when other parents came. And they didn’t always help me get home when I didn’t have a ride for holidays, except for Christmas. When I was younger there had been other problems as well though I hadn’t remembered them until I spent long quiet hours in dorm rooms, empty, echoing halls. Was I a young woman with a bad attitude? Or had I encountered neglect, even abuse? I couldn’t know. I just felt home was dark and unknowable.

Thanksgiving my senior year I walked through the woods alone. I was a Halloween baby which means I had turned 21 and since I was alone I felt I owed it to myself to buy a drink. Not even Max was here with me, my boyfriend since freshman year. He also lived in Florida and found himself on campus over holidays. But he went to Myrtle Beach with a friend. On Friday of the break, I sat on my bridge having had a white Russian at the bar. I felt the moss on the brick, soft to the touch and under my stockinged legs. The time between the pink sky and utter darkness had become my favorite time and in these woods there was always a dove to serenade me, or an owl or whippoorwill. I wished the cherub was real, still I was glad for its stone presence. Something about it comforted me.

I sensed a pre-mature encroaching darkness but when I looked into the woods I noticed it was only a darkness limited to a particular shape. As it neared I could hear clinking and clattering, like a wooden windchime. I made out skirts which swished among the leaves. And a very high pitch of hair, a nimbus surrounding the face above which floated a high ruff accentuated with clattering ornaments. The woman held a long staff of a particular shape. When she neared it looked vaguely like a giant pestle. She wore circlets of bones and skulls on her neck, wrists, and waist.

“Waste of time,” she said, “waste of a girl.”

“What?” I said, hoping I didn’t hear what I thought I heard.

“Don’t waste my time. I was going to say something helpful to you. I know you’ve been loitering around here, but I resent wasting my breath.”

She walked past, her skirts dragging on the footpath. She smelled of roasted meat, dirt and damp leaves, unwashed skin, tallow, smoke. Likely one of the crazed homeless like we have in Florida.

“I remember your babcia, your sweet little Polish grandma” she said, “And you. I remember you when you were a girl and your babcia cared for you.”

I said nothing. I let the whippoorwill speak. It was getting cooler. I had a strange taste in my mouth, like something was deeply wrong. Of course there was: How could she know me? Yet somehow I felt I was also expecting someone dark to show familiarity with me, a stalker, a murderess. I felt my blood coursing.

“You don’t know me,” I said, in defiance of the bones which clattered on her frame.

“You babcia made huge batches of pierogis every summer and took care of you and your brother and sister. She taught you about plants and flowers and placing plant offerings on the alter for the ceremony for the Feast of the Assumption. Remember? You have abandoned your ways with the Virgin Mary.”

“I remember.”

“A waste,” she said. “You will never be your babcia.”

“She’s dead, I don’t want to go home. Mother is dead too, long ago.”

“You are spoiled. I should have boiled you up in the pot when I had the chance. I should have taken you and chopped you up and eaten you.”

“The red ribbons tripled on my wrists for the Feast were my babcia’s protection against the likes of you.” I said, practically shouting now, so much louder than she was being with me. I shivered. The cream of the white Russian was not resting easy on my stomach.

“But you forget, I also eat adults. You appear to be sweet meat. I’ll bet your flesh tastes bitter.” She ran the black tips of her fingers along her tongue. “You’re a bitter, stupid girl. Who cares if your step mother abused you? Who cares if she only cares about her own birth children? Go home and pray I don’t find you or I will take away one more waste of a life and be nourished. Be glad you’re even alive. Be glad every day I allow it.”

I stepped away. I backed away not taking my eyes from her. Then I turned and ran.

When I got back into my dorm, the dark empty, echoing halls, I checked behind me before closing the door. There was no one.

I didn’t mind the rest of my holiday alone in my room. The food in my minifridge was a comfort. I made soup and tea with my kettle.

After graduation, I took a menial job shelving books at the library. It was all I could find. I lived with my father, stepmother, and stepsisters.

It was a while before I went to graduate school. Eventually, I found a job as a librarian.

I had my child baptized in the Polish Catholic church and made a beautiful offering of hawthorn, wheat, and roses at the Feast of the Assumption. I promised Mary I would not forget my faith and tied red ribbons around my child’s wrist to protect her from boginki, forest spirits who would take her away or hurt her.

At thirty I was diagnosed with bipolar depression. The faith of my childhood and reawakened faith of my young adult years became extinct with the medications. I felt I had lost some critical link to my mother and my babcia. My life was no longer as sad, scary, and uncertain. But it also was no longer as interesting. It was flat and strange, a foreign territory.

With my diagnosis, I had to assume my encounter with a cannibal witch was some delusion of my illness.

And yet, I don’t feel I would be the person I am had this thing not happened.

One week when my child was away with my husband’s family, I stayed off my medications to see how I would feel. All I felt was deeply confused. I could not accomplish a thing and I did not sense the witch of my babcia’s bedtime stories or the Virgin of her faith.

Nevertheless, I remembered Baba Yaga’s lesson to be grateful.

I returned to my medications and never strayed from them again.

cannibal witch

[image error]

Mike Kniec, To Grandmother’s House We Go, flickr

I went to a small liberal arts college in North Carolina. Often I took a path that cut through the woods, a path that connected our small campus to a street of high end shops in town. In the heart of the woods there was a little bridge arching over a small brook. Beside it there was a stone cherub. When I was unhappy senior year, I often sat beside the brook to quiet my mind. Changes would be happening soon upon graduation. Life would no longer be as simple as cramming for tests or writing papers. I had to find work. And I did not know where I might find work. And I didn’t want to go home.

Over my college years, I had become distant from my parents, my father and stepmother. They didn’t often visit at school, not even when other parents came. And they didn’t always help me get home when I didn’t have a ride for holidays, except for Christmas. When I was younger there had been other problems as well though I hadn’t remembered them until I spent long quiet hours in dorm rooms, empty, echoing halls. Was I a young woman with a bad attitude? Or had I encountered neglect, even abuse? I couldn’t know. I just felt home was dark and unknowable.

Thanksgiving my senior year I walked through the woods alone. I was a Halloween baby which means I had turned 21 and since I was alone I felt I owed it to myself to buy a drink. Not even Max was here with me, my boyfriend since freshman year. He also lived in Florida and found himself on campus over holidays. But he went to Myrtle Beach with a friend. On Friday of the break, I sat on my bridge having had a white Russian at the bar. I felt the moss on the brick, soft to the touch and under my stockinged legs. The time between the pink sky and utter darkness had become my favorite time and in these woods there was always a dove to serenade me, or an owl or whippoorwill. I wished the cherub was real, still I was glad for its stone presence. Something about it comforted me.

I sensed a pre-mature encroaching darkness but when I looked into the woods I noticed it was only a darkness limited to a particular shape. As it neared I could hear clinking and clattering, like a wooden windchime. I made out skirts which swished among the leaves. And a very high pitch of hair, a nimbus surrounding the face above which floated a high ruff accentuated with clattering ornaments. The woman held a long staff of a particular shape. When she neared it looked vaguely like a giant pestle. She wore circlets of bones and skulls on her neck, wrists, and waist.

“Waste of time,” she said, “waste of a girl.”

“What?” I said, hoping I didn’t hear what I thought I heard.

“Don’t waste my time. I was going to say something helpful to you. I know you’ve been loitering around here, but I resent wasting my breath.”

She walked past, her skirts dragging on the footpath. She smelled of roasted meat, dirt and damp leaves, unwashed skin, tallow, smoke. Likely one of the crazed homeless like we have in Florida.

“I remember your babcia, your sweet little Polish grandma” she said, “And you. I remember you when you were a girl and your babcia cared for you.”

I said nothing. I let the whippoorwill speak. It was getting cooler. I had a strange taste in my mouth, like something was deeply wrong. Of course there was: How could she know me? Yet somehow I felt I was also expecting someone dark to show familiarity with me, a stalker, a murderess. I felt my blood coursing.

“You don’t know me,” I said, in defiance of the bones which clattered on her frame.

“You babcia made huge batches of pierogis every summer and took care of you and your brother and sister. She taught you about plants and flowers and placing plant offerings on the alter for the ceremony for the Feast of the Assumption. Remember? You have abandoned your ways with the Virgin Mary.”

“I remember.”

“A waste,” she said. “You will never be your babcia.”

“She’s dead, I don’t want to go home. Mother is dead too, long ago.”

“You are spoiled. I should have boiled you up in the pot when I had the chance. I should have taken you and chopped you up and eaten you.”

“The red ribbons tripled on my wrists for the Feast were my babcia’s protection against the likes of you.” I said, practically shouting now, so much louder than she was being with me. I shivered. The cream of the white Russian was not resting easy on my stomach.

“But you forget, I also eat adults. You appear to be sweet meat. I’ll bet your flesh tastes bitter.” She ran the black tips of her fingers along her tongue. “You’re a bitter, stupid girl. Who cares if your step mother abused you? Who cares if she only cares about her own birth children? Go home and pray I don’t find you or I will take away one more waste of a life and be nourished. Be glad you’re even alive. Be glad every day I allow it.”

I stepped away. I backed away not taking my eyes from her. Then I turned and ran.

When I got back into my dorm, the dark empty, echoing halls, I checked behind me before closing the door. There was no one.

I didn’t mind the rest of my holiday alone in my room. The food in my minifridge was a comfort. I made soup and tea with my kettle.

After graduation, I took a menial job shelving books at the library. It was all I could find. I lived with my father, stepmother, and stepsisters.

It was a while before I went to graduate school. Eventually, I found a job as a librarian.

I had my child baptized in the Polish Catholic church and made a beautiful offering of hawthorn, wheat, and roses at the Feast of the Assumption. I promised Mary I would not forget my faith and tied red ribbons around my child’s wrist to protect her from boginki, forest spirits who would take her away or hurt her.

At thirty I was diagnosed with bipolar depression. The faith of my childhood and reawakened faith of my young adult years became extinct with the medications. I felt I had lost some critical link to my mother and my babcia. My life was no longer as sad, scary, and uncertain. But it also was no longer as interesting. It was flat and strange, a foreign territory.

With my diagnosis, I had to assume my encounter with a cannibal witch was some delusion of my illness.

And yet, I don’t feel I would be the person I am had this thing not happened.

One week when my child was away with my husband’s family, I stayed off my medications to see how I would feel. All I felt was deeply confused. I could not accomplish a thing and I did not sense the witch of my babcia’s bedtime stories or the Virgin of her faith.

Nevertheless, I remembered Baba Yaga’s lesson to be grateful.

I returned to my medications and never strayed from them again.

Laughy Taffy Daffy God and Country

[image error]

What Lies Above by Kinga Britschgi, deviant art

It was Memories of Laughy Taffy Daffy God and Country Day and Mrs. Seidelbraun had a major issue: She could not manage to extricate herself from the bed. Soon Taffy Day participants would be flooding the streets, floating good spirits balloons, spewing fireworks from their mouths, doing midair acrobatics with the aid of their combat-sadness-anti-gravity-boots.

On days like this, the air turned butter it was so smooth, the sun was a creamy smear in the sky, neighbors greeted each other with kindly salutations, even those who on non Taffy Days dreamed secretly of administering unnoticeable but painful papercuts over slights, grudges, micro aggressions. People baked for their neighborhoods, the smells of sugar and pastries filled the air. There was hugging and laughing and handing out candy. And of course there was taffy pulling, greased pole climbing, pig calling. Years ago, there had been a brief memorial for The Town of Daffy Day residents who had given their lives so that everyone could be Happy, but really, that part of the day started to become both boring and super triggering. And so they made do with laying flowers on the one memorial in the town: A water feature of an upright gun holding a helmet.

Every year had become worse and worse for Mrs. Seidelbraun. The first year she recognized painful gravitations on Memories of Laughy Taffy Daffy God and Country Days, she managed to make it down the elevator of her high rise apartment, down to the street of festivals, parades, and bacchanalian frivolities. She didn’t laugh exactly but she didn’t exactly frown either. She played it off and no one was none the wiser, including Flora who managed to be offended at every affront to festivity. They had decorated a float together, full of paper flowers and young girls from a local ballet company pirouetting on tippy toe as the truck pulled them through a street raining with confetti. She even managed to eat a Happy Hot Dog beside which Mr. Happy was administering his annual contest of Happy Hot Dog Stuff Yourself Silly. She put mustard and ketchup and relish on it, a sign to Mr. Happy she was still A OK. A Good Girl though she was 40.

That was a couple of years ago. Last year, she made significantly less progress. She pushed herself up to standing in her studio apartment and slid her feet into her dilapidated old slippers and shuffled over to the window overlooking the street. Sshh shh sshh went her feet, the only noise in the apartment though the marching bands down below were beginning to warm up and people wearing the combat-sadness-anti-gravity-boots were whirring by, practicing their maneuvers in the air. Prayers were being sent up to heaven on balloons with strings of flowers attached. Prayers that said “Only happiness,” “only peace,” “no triggers,” “trigger warnings please.” “please be happy always and keep us all happy.” She knew what the slips of prayers said. She helped copy them from the Community Suggestion Book for Wellbeing. Flora would be upset with her for staying inside. She hadn’t pulled it off, getting to the street. And she was right, Flora had called the next day, upset and angry.

In a way she had been glad she wasn’t even going to have to face Flora this year, at least not on the day of the event. She would simply have to admit the truth: Her bed held her fast as mud in a deep bog. It would not release her, it had sucked her energy, her strength. When she closed her eyes she saw terrible things, she heard terrible and agonizing cries and explosions and pops. She tasted blood, dirt, gun powder, fear. And yet, she couldn’t open her eyes for long, she kept falling asleep again, or falling into visions, into nightmares or waking nightmares. She saw friends she knew bloodied and missing half of their faces, their eyes and limbs torn away, children running in the streets crying and naked. The sky was exploding and there was fire, as if this place were a very deep hell. Buildings had crumbled and were splitting, tumbling like large giants laid low, groaning in agony. She cried out but no one heard her. She had not discovered a way out. All day, she had dreamed of the past, or maybe some distant time in the future, maybe sometime soon.

 

 

Mother’s Day in the Land of Operant Practices

[image error]

St Nicholas [serial], 1873, flickr

Within the Kingdom there is a land. It is called the Land of Operant Practices. More than a hidden away place, it is actually quite out in the open. There are telltale signs of the citizenry, knowing exchanges, tacit agreements. This isn’t witchcraft nor is it a kind of backdoor eugenics. It has more to do with the nurture and training of a certain set aside people, a bootcamp of sorts, a training of a race of super people which begins at birth.

There is compensation of families by the state if a participating family can show need but mostly, the program is billed as a patriotic duty. And only a few are selected, those with a certain predisposition and personal history. After all, a country of 100 percent super people would be chaos as no one would serve the super people, no one would nurture them and subvert their own needs to support their tender egos. They are super but the downside is they demand a kind of manic loyalty.

The operant practices are as follows: Embrace parenthood, but know one’s work is never done until the dross is burned away, until the wheat is separated from the chaff and a Super Person emerges. And as this is accomplished and the parents move through the ranks of the program with a growing child, there are greater and greater accolades to recognize success, parties given, trips booked away with other Super Child Families, discounts at designer clothing stores, free nights at gourmet restaurants, exclusive country club membership, free luxury cars, spa vacations.

There is a kind of need that all babies in the kingdom have and that is the need for unconditional love, to gaze into a parent’s eyes and have the gaze returned, to be rocked by a parent late at night to soothe crying or to be allowed the space to calm down alone when too much touch overstimulates. It is that perfect attunement that babies need so much, crave, must have to feel safe. While the ability to provide this exists to a certain degree in almost all mothers save a few, the mothers of the Super People are actually more attuned to how they themselves feel rather than the child. A crying baby all night deep in the night most nights is uncomfortable for everyone but especially to the mother who succeeds at the extreme level of Operant Practices. It is an affront.

Most mothers in the program make it because they themselves have had ambivalent mothers, or mothers who for whatever reason felt ill equipped though they want so desperately what others have: To be a good mother, to have a family. It is hard for some mothers to deal with messy feelings, and so, their eyes slide away when their infant seeks to make eye contact, or they hold and touch their baby less though you would have to be a program scientist to detect these subtle cues, at least at the infant stages.

As the child grows there are such things as temper tantrums in the grocery store, jealousy over brothers and sisters, acting out behaviors at school – performing below one’s ability, causing trouble. Of course there are many more examples, all of which point to being a typical child. When it comes to Super Child Families, there is a policy of zero tolerance for these undesirable, typical behaviors. To be honest, there is some flexibility. After all, this is a program designed by humans so absolute zero will hardly ever be achievable.  When the program is working at maximum capacity to effect the greatest societal benefit, there is more emphasis on Desired Behaviors. The child receives the message that to receive the most attention, it is beneficial to focus on Super Child behaviors. This is the level of Beneficial Practices.

Parents who succeed at this level of the program tend to be those who sometimes literally freak out if their child is less than Perfection because their child is a reflection of who they are. The outcomes in a situation like this are Young Adults who become leaders, who start businesses or rise quickly in corporate structures, politics, religion, nonprofits. They are charismatic, self promoting, influential. Though sometimes there is a lack of conscious awareness why they are doing what they are doing. And sometimes there is a sense of lack, deep down, but they are not aware of it. Therefore, at times deep in the night or at critical times like midlife when there is suffering. Their relationships are often shallow and they can create confusion and heartbreak among those who expect the normal flow of reciprocal work relationships, friendships, romantic bonds.

For Super People, there is a vampiric need for a kind of fuel Adult Typicals received in their growing up years. It is more of a psychic fuel, fuel only produced in Citizens under conditions of unconditional love and acceptance. In these Adult Typical families there is a high tolerance for a variety of behaviors albeit conditioning through the natural give and take of learned consequences. There is attention given not only to Desired Behaviors but Undesired Behaviors. These children are seen, attended to. In the case of Super People, there is often a cold, hard ignoring of a child suffering through whatever their lower nature is commanding them to do, therefore training them to be superficially compliant but also less self aware. When Super Children become adults they want the psychic fuel Adult Typicals have received.

For society to benefit maximally, Super People naturally couple with Adult Typicals to have their needs met. Such pairings are almost always cause for celebration for the support of Super People. This pairing means a benefit to society because of the blossoming and enabled function of those among us who are Super. Unfortunately, those to whom they are married are drained of their psychic fuel, sometimes they get sick and die. But there is always another source of fuel and another and another, a never ending line ready and waiting to serve.

And we have to think of the larger vision.

Thank you, Mothers, who play their part in supporting the Kingdom. Your efforts are recognized and appreciated and will be especially rewarded in the next life of Good Martyrs.