#he was an extremely stereotypical long haired hippie and he told us no matter what anyone says we didn't have to go to college
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nice-cheerleader-blog · 7 years ago
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Short Story Sunday: French Toast & Black Cats
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Witches aren’t really around anymore, but you can still feel their presence. At least, that’s what my mom would tell me. ­­­­­
“You think it’s a coincidence that the Calgary Flames haven’t won a game in Anaheim for 11 straight years?” She didn’t know the witch behind it, but figured there must be one responsible. Going over a decade without a single win on the Ducks’ home turf? I agreed with her—it was a little spooky.
According to my mom, witches have been just as fanatic about sports as any typical frat boy or suburban dad. Ever heard of the Curse of the Bambino? My mom says that witch was infamous—she set the curse in 1918 when the Red Sox traded her beloved Babe Ruth to the Yankees. She died in 1939, but the curse lived on after her for another 65 years. For 86 years, the Sox never won a World Series.
***
I learned from a young age that witches were neither the hat-wearing, broom-riding women from Halloween catalogues, nor the devil-worshipping vixens of Hell that the pilgrims of Salem’s Village feared in the 1690s. Witchcraft was much more mundane than all of that, to your dismay or comfort. Killing through magical means is possible, but extremely difficult to pull off. Plus, it was equally dangerous. That kind of vengeance could be the last thing a witch ever does. Don’t get me wrong, though. Any community has its bad seeds.
There was once this witch my mom said was scary powerful. She was a housewife in the 1960s, the spouse of a conservative state senator and mother to two rambunctious teenagers. As the story goes, her two kids became quite the counterculturalists. They loved Hendrix and Janis Joplin, would steal records from their friends to play while their mother was out. Of course, their mother hated rock music and the lifestyle it represented. It didn’t take long for her to catch wind of her children’s new vices. She did what any overbearing 20th century mother would do: smash the records and forbid them to leave the house. But in a time where hippies ran rampant and communes were almost common, do you think that stopped them?
“She could’ve hexed them to stay in the house,” I told my mother. “Why didn’t she?”
“It was taboo,” she said immediately. “You’d never use magic on the people you love.”
This housewife, though, couldn’t stand for this behavior. She was furious; she had to do something. If she couldn’t target her kids, she’d target the thing that corrupted them. My mom didn’t know how she did it, but the witch used all of her power to curse the musicians that dared seduce her kin. This was in 1968. Three years later, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison were dead—all at the ripe age of 27. Now, this group of dead musicians has become its own club: The 27 Club. Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse are among recent high profile inductees. No one knows how long the curse will live on, but it might be awhile. It did cost the housewife her life after all.
***
The curses that were most common were more agitating than dangerous, my mom assured me. Little annoyances were much easier to create. My mom knew this one witch who would hex the watches of aggravating coworkers to run backwards whenever they were particularly grating. Another girl she knew would curse people to forget about their tea until it was cold. She was English, and you know how they are about their tea.
The hexes could be even subtler, if you can believe it. My mom worked at a grocery store when she was a teenager, and this guy that was always on shift with her would show up late every day. After a few months of this nonsense, she cast a spell that would force him to wake up a half an hour before his alarm every day, no matter what time it was set, with the inability to fall back asleep. “I was just trying to help; time management is a valuable skill,” she assured me with a self-satisfied smirk. Another favorite of hers was cursing people for a few weeks or so to step in water whenever they’ve put on a new pair of socks.
She pulled out all the stops for an ex one time. “The whole ‘fire and brimstone’ thing is a bit clichĂ©, but I was pissed,” she told me. She caught her girlfriend redhanded, in the arms of another woman. They hadn’t seen her though, so my mom made it her mission to follow her unfaithful partner to the adulterous rendezvous’ and hex her in the most embarrassing ways. One day, it was a giant sneeze, launching a big wad of mucus into the mistress’ face. On another occasion, it was a bit of flatulence. Then a lot of flatulence. My mother progressed her curses meeting by meeting 
 I won’t get into too much detail in case you’ve just finished eating. Finally, the mistress had had enough, and broke things off. On the same day, my mother broke things off with her too. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and all that.
***
“How would you do it?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain. It’s like a feeling that you put every thought, every bit of energy into. You almost will it into existence, whatever thing you’re trying to accomplish.”
I asked her about the candles. Movies like Hocus Pocus and The Craft always said you needed candles to do witchcraft. They used different colors for different spells, lighting them in the dead of night or in some eerie, darkened cavern.
“There’s something to the candles/incense stereotype. They’re helpful, but not necessary. Casting spells requires focus. You have to inhabit your own being with everything you’ve got. It’s like meditating. Sometimes the candles help with that. They set the mood.”
She smirked.
“Also, it’s kind of a cool feeling, casting spells in candle light. I’ll give the movies that much.”
I asked her about black cats then, too.
She laughed. “That was more like a self-fulfilling prophecy. People started to think that they were bad luck, owned only by servants of the Devil, which we thought was hilarious. Having them became a big inside joke. It’s a bonus if they scare the neighbors.”
***
You might be wondering why my mom didn’t just show me how to cast spells firsthand. I wondered the same thing for much of my life. She had dodged the question for quite a few years before I got any sort of answer. Before then, it was all “Maybe when you’re older,” or “I need a good reason to cast a spell, and I don’t have one right now,” or “It’s not all its chalked up to be.”
It wasn’t until I was 17 that I put my foot down. I asked her one more time. “No more excuses.”
She sighed. “I can’t.”
This gave me pause. “What do you mean you can’t?”
“I haven’t been able to cast anything since I was pregnant with you.”
I remember the look on her face as she told me, so unlike herself. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, blushing slightly, like she was embarrassed. It was clear that I got her to admit some sort of vulnerability, but it was uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to do.
She made herself busy, putting the dishes away and wiping off the counter as she spoke. “I tried to do a few things around the house after you were born. Small things, like charming the laundry to fold itself. But it was like it had switched off. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis. “Nothing.”
I asked her what she thought went wrong and she replied quickly with a mumbled “I don’t know” and continued cleaning. I had planned to leave it at that, and went up to my room to just be somewhere else. I didn’t like being around this hesitant person that wasn’t my mom. She found me a bit later, though, popping into my bedroom doorway.
“It’s a genetic thing, typically. I know you know that but 
 You’ve never made anything weird happen? Something you thought hard about that just—”
“No, mom. Never.” It wasn’t the first time she had asked, and it wouldn’t be the last. Answering her felt like an admission of guilt. She always smiled afterwards, nodded her head reassuringly, but the expression never reached her eyes. I always felt like a disappointment.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. I used the sit in my room with the lights off, sitting with my legs criss-crossed on the floor. I’d think hard about the math test I might’ve flunked the day before, or Sydney MacNeil and her aggravatingly straight hair and the smile she’d give anyone after granting them a backhanded compliment. Regardless, everything the next day was the same: Sydney was still a bitch with perfect hair and I still sucked at math.
***
“Tell me about Dad again.”
It was a command common of my youthful self, a request that I would ultimately grow out of. But when I was a little girl, he was my favorite of Mom’s stories.
“Dad was the most beautiful son-of-a-bitch there ever was. Remember that Shakespeare line I told you about?”
I slid the orange slice I was sucking on out of my mouth. “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here” I replied with a teeth full of orange pulp. No passerby had reason to think I was the daughter of a former witch, but had anyone caught that phrase escaping my then 10-year-old lips, they might have been suspicious.
“He was here all right, but people forget that devils can be beautiful. I certainly did. They can look like cherubs, with curly blond hair and blue eyes. Their smiles know how to set off the butterflies in your stomach. They know just what you want to hear.”
“What did you want to hear, Mom?”
“I wanted to hear how beautiful I was. I was vain. I wanted to see adoration in someone else’s eyes. And I did. Until one day
”
I knew this one. “You told him!”
“Yes, I told him I was a witch. Something I hadn’t the guts to tell ANYONE in my entire life. Until that day. And you know what he did?”
“Mean things!”
“Very mean things. Luckily you were there with me, right in my belly. You kept me company, especially after he left. And it’s been the two of us ever since.”
That was how the story usually ended. She would return to whatever she was doing before, usually with added fervency. I always wanted a bit more though. “Mom, where did he go?”
“Hopefully back to whatever HELL he came from,” she said, scrubbing the counter a bit harder.
Even at 10-years-old, something told me not to push it.
At some point, I stopped asking about him altogether. He was a fairy tale that came to be a waste of time.
***
Not being a witch was something I learned to cope with. It was hard for a while—during high school especially—to know that there was some force out there that could’ve made everything just a bit easier, if only I was able to conjure it. Having somehow disinherited the powers of my mother, and her mother before that, and so on certainly didn’t help with the teenage angst and feelings of inadequacy. I never met my grandmother, but that gave me some sort of relief. She was spared from the disappointment of sharing blood with the magically handicapped, the disappointment I imagined my mother must’ve felt every day.
In hindsight, it’s odd that I didn’t question the existence of this entity I had never seen with my own eyes. Perhaps that was foolish of me. But Mom was so transparent, always. She was honest, and so was anything she said. Santa, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny—they were make believe, she admitted. But witchcraft was real, as real to me as the woman who told me about it.
Nonetheless, it was also a secret. “These stories are for you and me, Chrys,” she’d remind me from time to time. “Other people might get the wrong idea.” That meant that there was a world between Mom and me that no one could come close to touching. Needless to say, I had trouble making friends, or even wanting to make friends. Soccer team drama, going to the movies, the daily grind of office life—it was all so boring compared to stories of magical vengeance. My peers didn’t know what they were missing, and I held it against them.
In grade school, the other kids called my mom a hippie and made fun of her “weird” clothes. “What kind of name is Chrysanthemum, anyway? Who would name their kid that?”
If only they knew how much greater she was than them. They were little people, wandering through life inconsequential, and she was the Statue of Liberty. I stood on her shoulders, looking down at them all.
Mom was always a big hit with people—cashiers, waitresses, the people she passed by on the street. She was a character, as people say. But she tended not to have many close friends, either. I don’t know for sure what she thought of my being a kind of recluse, though I think she at appreciated it. We got to be recluses together. She provided the entertainment, and I was her built-in audience.  
Part of me wanted to share these stories with the world. Maybe I just wanted people to know that I was privy to a world they knew nothing about, at least vicariously. But at the same time, I was selfish. They couldn’t have those stories because they were ours first—Mom’s and mine.
***
Mom got sick—early-onset Alzheimer’s. I was 35 and she was too young. It was easy to spot because she’d always been such a storyteller. I knew something was wrong when she started losing details.
“Who was the witch that had cursed the Red Sox?”
“What year did Janis Joplin bite it?”
“Don’t you have school today, hun?”
By this time, I knew the stories like the back of my hand, and had to remind her that I haven’t been to school for quite some time. She just shook her head, made some joke about being an old crone. “I’ve always told it like it is; now my memory is just as blunt.”
I knew about Alzheimer’s, had seen all those sad movies about people slowly losing their grasp on reality. I figured that was what she had, despite her age. But I wasn’t prepared for how quickly it went. Her mind, that is. One day, she was cursing out a Jehovah’s Witness for daring to ring the doorbell at 8am, fiery and loud. The next, I found her staring at herself blankly in the mirror, looking like she was searching for some sort of misplaced purpose. That’s how it felt, at least. I didn’t want to take her to see anyone, though. I hated doctors and so did she.
On one of her bad days, we were eating breakfast. I made French toast. She had this fool-proof recipe that I adopted as my own. Mid bite, she turned to me with her brows furrowed. “Have you seen Jude? I didn’t get to say goodbye.”
Jude was my dad. I told her we should go for a drive and took her to the hospital.
***
My mom was pretty out of it most of the time after that, but she had her moments of clarity. I think of it like she thought of her magic: a switch being turned off. Most days, she was off, and the on days were few and far between. It was always good to have her back, though.
“Did I ever tell you what happened after your dad left? I don’t think I ever did.” She said so during one of the on days, towards the end. We were sitting in her room at the home, decorated just how she liked it: lots of reds, oranges, and pinks. We were sat in the middle of a perpetually setting sun.
“No, Mom,” I agreed. “You just said he went to Hell.”
She chuckled. “Maybe he did. I wouldn’t know—I never heard from him again. It might be my own fault, though, and I never told you why.”
I sat up in my seat.
“I felt so betrayed when he left. He was so taken with me, or so I thought. It only took that one bit of detail to turn him against me wholly. ‘A witch?!’ he asked. ‘You’re delusional. You’re a freak.’ He stormed out after a few more jabs.”
“And he never came back,” I added.
“I 
” she trailed off.  “Not that I ever gave him the chance to,” she said finally. I looked into her eyes to see them glistening. I asked her what she meant.  
“I was so embarrassed. And angry. I just 
” she brushed a bit of red hair out of her eyes. “I freaked out. Before I knew it, I was willing him to forget about everything. About me, about you, about where we lived. I don’t have any concrete evidence that it worked. But he never came back; I do know that. Never called, not even to ask about you. That wasn’t like him. He was a devil, for sure, and mischievous as all hell. But he was so excited about you.”
Her voice was pained, the same quality it had when she would forgetfully ask me about Jude. I felt my eyes burning for a man I grew up learning to hate.
“Taking things out of the world isn’t as easy as putting them there. It never is. Remember what I said about cursing the ones you love?”
I nodded.  
“Like I told you before—the last time I used magic was when I was pregnant with you.”
She paused. I waited, too. Then, I could see the dreamy look coming across her face. She was going again, but she didn’t really need to say anymore. I got what she was getting at; she might’ve ruined witchcraft for us both.
***
For years, I wondered if the suddenness of my mom’s downward spiral had anything to do with the spell she cast on Jude. The doctors could always back up her decline with their PET scans and CAT scans and DOG scans or whatever, but even they knew that something weird was going on. Most of them commented on my mom’s age. She was unusually young for a woman losing her mental faculties, especially at such an alarming rate.
She never spoke of Jude again after that day, and I never prompted her to. I let a war rage inside me instead. There was contempt and understanding, bitterness and guilt, questions and possible answers. How could she be so rash that day he left? I’d ask myself, even while knowing the reason why: Other people might get the wrong idea. He couldn’t have understood her, I’d decide. But then I’d see us, the perfectly imperfect nuclear family, me and Mom playing magic tricks on Dad, the way it could’ve been.
I had no means of finding him. To me, he was Jude with curly blonde hair and blue eyes and a mischievous smile. No last name, no address, no phone number. Even if I knew those things, what then? It would be best to let him fade from thought, just like he had up to this point in my life. I never needed a dad, and didn’t need one now. That didn’t keep the possibility of one gnawing at me, though.
He could’ve come back. But if she had waited a little longer to do anything, she wouldn’t be my mother.
I was a mess. That’s saying something, trust me. I’m not the type to let myself become a mess. Yet, there I was. Perhaps I was behaving like any normal human would when faced with losing the one person in their life that actually mattered. I didn’t feel normal, though. I felt weak.
***
Would you believe it if I told you that, even in this state, I attracted a shoulder to cry on? Morgan. God, Morgan. The man is a saint, I swear to you. I’ve never been one for dating, and I somehow managed to land this guy just before the worst period of my life. He stuck with me through all of it. He was one of my mother’s attendants, an employee at the home. He was assigned to her as soon as she moved there, but I didn’t notice him for quite some time. I was too busy being wrapped up in my own thoughts and whatever was left of my mother’s.
I went for a visit one day, but the nurses informed me that Mom was taking a nap. I told her I’d wait until she woke up, and kept to a couch in the lobby. I tried to read whatever magazine was left out on the coffee table, but I skimmed the same page over and over again instead. Morgan sat down beside me, unaware of his presence until he spoke up.
“Care for a smile?”
I glanced over and looked at him for the first time. Really looked at him. I could associate this man, with dark hair just beginning to go gray at the edges, with the blur of movement in the corner of my eye I’d recognized coming in and out of my mom’s room. I couldn’t even remember his name at the time, so I avoided addressing him directly. My attention was elsewhere: the plate of sliced oranges in his hands.
“Smiles?”
“Your mother is quite the talker, about you especially. She kept saying how her little girl loves orange smiles, and made me promise to bring her some. She’s a persistent lady.”
He was a good judge of character. “You knew what they were?”
“My mom used to call them smiles, too.” He picked a piece off of the plate and wedged the whole thing into his mouth. He gave me a solid orange smile.
I’m stubborn, so I didn’t smile back immediately. He nudged one out of me eventually.
I wondered for a while why Morgan decided to make such an effort to be chummy with me. I don’t mean to be self-pitying, but I wasn’t exactly the most fun to hang out with in those days. One day, I gathered up the courage to ask him why he bothered to be so kind.
“You were so vacant when I first met you. Not even there for me to like or dislike. But I’ve seen how you are with your mom. When I pop in and out of her room, I see you smile, I see you laugh—you light up for her in a way you don’t with anybody else. I’m just hoping I’ll get to see that Chrys for myself sometime.”
I’d tease him later for being so suave.
***
I forgave my mom; I had to. Now, it’s been weeks since my mom passed, and I’ve gotten pretty good at being normal. I miss her. That much is obvious, I’m sure. But it’s like she used to say: witches aren’t around anymore, but we can still feel their presence.
I see her in the color scheme of the rooms in the house I share with Morgan, bright like she would have liked it. I see her in our cat Fiona. She’s black, of course, with the biggest, greenest eyes, and loves to knock over the candles we keep in the living room. My mom would’ve gotten a kick out her.
Morgan helped me with her until the very end. He grew to admire her almost as much as I did, which made him pretty okay in my book. I couldn’t help but keep him around.  
It’s Sunday. Morgan and I are making breakfast. I’m on—you guessed it—French toast duty, while Morgan is in charge of the home fries and bacon. For all his wonderful qualities, though, his potato-chopping abilities are slow as molasses. Consequently, I’m waiting patiently to cook the French toast while his home fries take decades to cook in the oven. I say this much to him.
“These potatoes are going to be perfect,” he assures me, laying a couple strips of bacon onto the frying pan in front of him. “Unlike your French toast, which will be mediocre at best.”
I purse my lips and raise an eyebrow at him. He sticks his tongue out at me, a child stuck in an old man’s body.
“That’s some tough talk for a male nurse,” I quip.
He shakes the spatula at me accusingly. “Tease all you want—you know you think the scrubs are sexy.”
I roll my eyes and turn to leave the kitchen.
“May all your bacon burn,” I curse him with a smirk.
I enter the living room and plop myself down on the big red couch in the center. I thumb through an old magazine, waiting for the right moment to begin my portion of the breakfast prep.  
A bit of smoke catches my eye behind the magazine’s pages.
“What the hell?!” It’s rare to catch Morgan cursing, even as mild as this. I call out to him, still seated on the couch.
“There must be something wrong with this pan,” he shouts back. I see him enter the living room doorway, pan in one hand and a strip of blackened meat in the other. “I swear I’ve been putting down the bacon only for a few seconds, but each strip comes back completely charred.”
I’m puzzled for a second, and then my jaw drops.
***
I never told Morgan about the witches, and I still haven’t. I haven’t been able to bring myself to say the words, not after what happened to my parents.
I’ve decided to give myself an ultimatum. I will tell him, but I have to do something first.
Morgan’s out for the night, on a business trip a few states over. Fiona and I are alone in the house. She keeps me company as a light a dozen candles in my darkened bedroom. I set them up in a circle on the floor, and climb carefully into the open spot in the middle. Cross-legged, I rest my hands on my knees and keep my breathing even. My mom was right; the candles do help.
I close my eyes. I wait for my head to clear, and then fill it with a single name.
Jude. Jude. Jude. Jude.
Where is Jude?
And I see him in my mind’s eye.
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