By Tess Doberville
Maggie stared out of the window of her tiny apartment. Her long blond hair rested around her hips. Someone from that church was praying against her in witchcraft again. Claiming to be a mature adult, or at least only looking like it on the outside, someone from that church was praying against her in witchcraft again, she told the flowerbox of daisies on the ledge, a second time. One year this past August signified the anniversary of whoever prayed a bundle of witchcraft against her all at once. And you might fool some of the people some of the time. But this was uncalled for. She was living in peace and minding her own business. Isn’t this what they wanted? For her to go away. To just kind of dissapear into the cracks of the walls. Or take a dive into the chilly Mississippi. Imagined standing on the ledge of the bridge with her arms out and the seven foot wingspan, like a giant dove. She closed her eyes and thought about what it would be like to fly. She obeyed. So leave her alone. All of you. What seems to be the problem? They will reap what they sow.
Just like God found a way to tell Kate Winslet through Leonardo in the final scene of Titanic that she would not only die old in a warm bed, but more than live to see the day when God sent her someone, Maggie remembered going to watch the film. The real one does exist. Maggie thought of who her one would be. He would brush her long blond hair for her just as her grandfather had done for their wife and his father before him. It took one whole year to grow her glory back. The more she thought about it, it really was her glory. Maggie sat on the perfectly made single bed in her living room and closed her eyes. She felt and it was good to feel what God gave her. Even sad. After all, the cruel books of her husband from the other church said to shut down your emotions and die. But she knew how they used it. They used it to oppress people and take their lives over. For when Paul said to die to self, he meant that to minister to the sheep of God, thought Maggie. And for she knew her relatives ever filled with his warm love always had a flock of sheep around.They did not have to beg. Presence of love drew humble sheep. Loud noises ran them away. That is why that if she could write the final scene to Titanic, the two star crossed lovers would have survived and floated back to Ireland and married. They would have lived in a newly thatched cottage on the sea.
It was very sad to write death into the final scene for DiCaprio surmised Maggie wisely as she glanced at her black antique typewriter with typed on papers everywhere all over her table. Like a face down game of fish, even the ones who attempted this past year to bully an already crushed and broken person born of a sick desire to attempt to use her own enemies to crush her must know that even like they say, you reap what you sow. And so they might. So she just as well might just wait and watch and while praying they did no more evil, take less time to analyze, and more time to wait upon God to outlast that other shallow badness. They will reap what they sow.
Until that week, Maggie thought her life had just started to fall into place. She had routine. She was just starting to slowly reach out and trust. And then suddenly right in the middle of walking on sunshine, the avalanche came. She tried to push the door closed, but soon tired of that and collapsed. After that week, though she fought as hard as she knew how, she felt punished for a crime she knew for certain she was not the perpetrator of ~ On top of it, asthma, she was healed of at the age of eighteen, returned. Shortness of breath. For the first time in years she realized how very tired she was. Her best friend from high school announced he was gay. He would need her help to come out of the closet. And she barely had time for herself during that late August summer. It was at the same function that the fiance’ of her other best friend said he would put the wedding off if only for her. Shocked, she wanted to slap him. But patiently held back and like a mother or a sister counseled him back to health. She stood for photos with another friend’s husband who stood for photos with everybody. He felt as comfortable in public as he did alone. This is strange.
After that there was the sudden hair situation. It is very true what Jim Morrison said. People are cold when you are a stranger. In short, people take your good prayers. They drink you down. Surprised, she slowly turned and looked and saw herself in the glass of the red lacquer wall mirror that had been hers and hers alone this past year. An old friend gone shortly, now to reappear. And they, like greedy and careless vampires on a cold winter night, sit back and watch you die as if it were the Sunday afternoon footballer game. Making shallow puns and asides you do not find funny and do not have the strength to laugh at. Do they not know, you are more about Handel’s Messiah and a whole lot less about standup comedy. And that the tragedy you write about is a good despair of an even greater melancholy and dissapointment that you feel almost all of the time. Sad, that this is what God has put in his pulpit to care for the sheep, you whisper to the mirror afraid that God will hear you say it and make them pay vastly for their secret infidelity to him and him alone. Not for her and certainly, they the energy sucking emotionless, have no heart. They could not care less about anything but one thing. Morning. Noon. And night. Eat. Sleep. And laugh. And more like chuckle themselves to death. I guess and besides, thought the mellowed, and no more the crisp and prompt Maggie, it is so much easier to make an excuse when it is your turn to have the problem you know you prayed in against a gentle one, alone. Legion. They will reap what they sow.
They love to put up the barricade of, well God is developing your faith or you need to give us some money or not wanting to be confrontive of your enemies although you defended them from theirs. They say, God is just developing you as they head for the shopping mall or McDonald’s for a cone. No he is not. It is what it is. An ancient excuse, she spent at least seven years on the farm believing that one thought Maggie. And now that she is in the city, even more private silence finally figured out that no one was ever coming to get her negatives at any time. They did not then. They are not now. People are comfortable to live lives of the kind of nonconformity called conservative. And yet this is only a great rebellion for the covering of a broader blanket of resistance to any art of change they may draw up late at night. In the secret precipice of the creative gallery of the mind, only one direction knowledgeably exists. You have to cross the river to get east to the other side.
Yet she only had the strength to think about holding the nirvana inside and giving life a wait. At the very same time, two horrifying situations that came against both of her daughters and her son; her father, her sister, and all in the final week of August, one year ago from August 2012. And no thanks to I’m reading everything you write, and I’m right on top of it with my magnifying glass, thank you very much. She thought about her critics, and often wondered if they had even completed the fourth grade, let alone the fifth. For certainly, most did not act an age past ten.
“And from my basement platform, I’m calling down the hordes of hell against you,” you threaten. ” But I ask you,” Maggie speaks shyly and quietly, ever so softly to the sheriff devils above. And since that week someone, somewhere had been calling down the hoards of hell against her daily. “No need.” She was already so deep down in it by then, the light necessary to process even peaceful joy from out of the deep seemed dim at best. At least here was the precious thought world. She did not even have a milidot of the capacity to process it. One man did this to her for eight years, a rabid King Saul who pursued her daily. He then died suddenly, all of life concluded one day. It was the first day in eight years she had a peaceful day. That day. “For anyone to oppress a David on the farm or anywhere,” the macroputer spoke freely in a gentle male voice, “Is nothing to wear a badge of honor over, secret or otherwise.” She stared at her computer, grateful for the subtle revelation she at times found this way. They will reap what they sow.
The second alien imposter, not at all of her Irish family clan of prior times, her bulbous old husband, died of natural causes after a little over ten years of such behavior. He too seemed as blind to the art of giving apologies as the other rude rogues. His arrogance waxed high in the heavens. His boasting more so. “I am the fifth generation of Farmington preachers,” her old husband bellowed as she watched him lie, hoard and commit nasty deeds too criminal to mention. “Well, I could not even begin to compete with that she said. No preachers in my family. Just my mom who got saved before she ever started first grade when Jesus appeared to her in the middle of the woods of the high mountains of Tennessee and conveyed his love to ‘Little Engin’ and her affectionate town nickname at the time.
That’s all. And her Grandpa Emmet of Watervalley, Mississippi who got delivered from severe alcoholism and found Jesus while alone and spent the rest of his life being gentle and kind and telling the rest of us about the real love of the flow. The head Irish Whiskey runner over all of the other whiskey runner go boys of Yallobusha County. Well,” she guessed that wasn’t much. And then there was the Indian grandpa who smoked five packs of non-filter camels a day, he proudly rolled himself and a fifth pint of whiskey from the time he was eleven until he died young at the age of nearly eighty, which is very young for a mountain person to die, the good air and all. Everyone attributed his early illness to the fact that he smoked non-filter cigarettes all of his life. Then he accepted Jesus Christ on his deathbed and all twelve something of the children, one adopted, another one they adopted after he just showed up on the doorstep one day, and all of the sisters still tell of how the light of the heavenly presence filled the room and everyone saw the angels come for him.
Well, but I guess my old husband is right,” she thought to herself whispering in her head, and only dreamed of writing all that down someday. Very sad that she did not have more to say about her family being preachers and all. Yes, almost all of the people in her family were saved from things that should probably not be discussed with anybody at all. He was right. It was such a shame to discuss such things. Besides, she had always secretly loved to listen to the stories of all of the many adventures her two grandpas had had before. The grandma would call out from the kitchen for them not to tell all of the stories, to let me talk too. But it was like I told Grandpa. “The fireplace is warm. And I live overseas the rest of the time. I am little, and I am lonely. But I want to be alone when I do, and besides to only see him once every four years. The last time Maggie went, why she thought when she was twelve. They did not sit that year for him to get him started, and make him talk for five hours straight or more.
He had a new electric guitar with a wa wa and he was sitting up in the attic on the third floor writing songs. Fresh back from Vietnam, her cousin Ronnie who now measured life slow pounded floor boards. He never talked to anyone anymore. Maggie loved her family. They were good people who had loved many strangers. She remembered her parents driving down the Pennsylvania Turnpike in a snowstorm and stopping to pick up a private home on leave going to his folks on the farm for Thanksgiving. They taught her things like that. The folks of the young military man invited Maggie and her family to come inside. His mother must have had over fourty-two plates and bowls including leftover dishes on the table. They all sat in the quiet of low indoor farmhouse light on hundred year old handmade wood chairs and scooped homemade strawberry ice cream from shining ceramic bowls. The people were loving. Her parents taught her openess to meet new people. She knew that once, and had almost started again. You will reap what you sowed.
One cousin delivered from drug abuse and filled with Jesus in the time it takes to blink an eye. But again, he was right, her husband. None of his black man hating preacher cousins or back to the first of the fifth generation had ever allowed a black person into their home, let alone their church. They were a family that kept it clean, her old husband’s family. And the friend that was with her cousin at the time was a black person who also got instantly saved and delivered from all desire for drugs forever. “Yes, her husband was right. Only a small handfull of her family lived as men of the cloth.” Surely she would take his advise. For she had to. “You will stay away from your family,” he said. Because that deliverance minister at the church who wore marine khaki and never set foot in a war, let alone with his camoulage hunt. He said his family was better. They only thought they were better. She prayed for God to give her a family next time that just was. Better yet, a man that was an adult and who could navigate like a man. On his own. The holy good fifth generation preacher was a wife beater who unfortunately did not fall asleep when he drank what he had hid out in the cow milk barn. But instead, got meaner. “And God he was right. Wasn’t he?” Maggie thought about her family. She loved them. They were life. But he said they were bad. And that his family is lily white. You reap what you sow.
A lot of people in her family, a lot had been saved straight up out of sorrow, and to walk a holy happy life all of their days, they loved to reflect a joyful light. Gee, nothing like a f-i-f-t-h g-e-n-e-r-a-t-i-o-n Farmington, Missouri preacher. Whose mandate, cold, and with no love. How was this life? Her sinful family and almost all of her relatives who loved eachother, so much so that most of Maggie and her cousins grew up through the years, “For all of us to feel close no matter where we go in the world,” and they talked about it like that at family reunions. Compared to the fifth generation preacher and his cast of lukewarm drip dries, she rather had to love who and what he condemned as sin by Mormonism. And yet they had a spirit greater, and even more, love. And yet there were the Catholic side of the family of Maggie. She loved them too.
One time, she went into a Catholic church place where the nuns were. She walked over while he was in the package store looking around for something to drink. She would never know how he found her in there sitting in the few back rows of where the nuns were praying and singing. She was praying for one of his dead relatives, who presently lived in a house one town over. “Get your Catholic ass out of here,” he said. Well, she thought she had better do that. However, she had already looked up Catholic in the dictionary, and knew for a fact that it meant universal. And that part of her she had always marked as private, exclusive, and most definitely not universal. Her universal that was safely tucked into her blue jeans. Private, it was hers alone. Was he by any chance trying to insult her? Although his request made no sense, she obeyed it. The lily whites on the other hand, heretofore known as his fifth generation preachers, looked and smelled like bowling alley proach at all times. But that is likely why almost all of the cousins among Maggie’s family preferred to go to the L.D.S. Did she say a cuss word? It was either that or the Catholic church. Not one more bad than the other. But just places to go where you took what was in their heart. But they coudn’t see that. They could not even see they were religious. So how could they see that. The other side was Baptist. Besides, modern Pentacostals are not the real thing. Arrogant, God feels constantly fit to squeeze them every minute. The others got saved one by one. They would all join in groups and pray for the young folk. One day she thought of who was continuously and daily praying against her, and she thought. “I should just get into my car and drive to their house, and tell them to stop. Just stop.” But of course, she would never go there. It was the last place she wanted to go. She was tired. She just wanted the evil to stop. They would reap what they sowed.
And as time went on, it was almost like that bible story she heard in church growing up, about the forming of the original church, after the time when Jesus died. That and it seemed like God was always adding one more of us to the mix. But, first the perpetrator of Meg’s old husband’s ministry group he left died suddenly one day of sudden natural causes, after eight years of such unbearable and wicked behavior, and complete jealousy of Meg by his side. Little did the man know, he could have had him for a good chicken. And for reasons Meg never did fathom, she heard God say, “Trust me. I would never give your shoes, past or present to anyone on this earth willingly,” she heard that voice say to her. “Although if you are really evil, God may take your power to make that choice away,” remarked the spirit to him. You will reap what you sow.
Therefore, let us kindly proceed with the plot of our story. Also during that final week of August 2012, a man who had never ever even been invited to her home in his life, let alone talk to, a man the age of by now her dead old ex-husband, in his seventies suddenly showed up at her door and asked her out on a date. A man she had not ever even talked to, but who she had only ever talked to his sister some at the store that he owned. A man she had no interest in whatsoever and he was so pushy. Maggie was deep in the depths of her manuscript and trying to do alone what some people got help with. She was so insulted as she saw right through the spirit of the thing. It was all she could do not to cry. That and be rude to the man. Because it was the fault of the others and no fault of a one who unknowing just went along with the feel of that current. While she needed her strength to finish what she was working on, that same week, and for a grand total of more things happening that week than had happened the three years since she had slowly and quietly walked away from the halls of drama, she had actually been healing from the post traumatic stress disorder. Or at least on the path toward that.To proceed, and finish telling the rest of what happened to her during that week, outside of the memories of the condition of all of those people in her family who got miraculously saved and delivered, and not a one a stiff, cold, intolerable and very religious and a very hateful, do not touch my hair as I do not like that, preacher like her perfect wife beating, cussing, alcoholic and among other things adulterous fifth generation preacher husband. They will reap what they sow.
So, up to her neck in manuscript and without any answers in the mail for a willing collaborator, she felt overwhelmed. After all, they said it had to be finished that week as well, and what was more, she still did not have all of the factual information she needed. Which meant one extremely inconvenient thing, and one extremely inconvenient thing only. The young lady would have to go back through every last single paragraph of every last single page and begin deleting from a work that was technically complete, hence this. With hours of editing before her. She had hoped to bless someone. She had hoped that for the first time in her life, this part of her life would change. That this would be the end to the endless pattern that she had experienced and known all of her life of people who had let her down despite her faithfulness to them. At the pivotal times, when they were uglier than sin, she had stayed by them. They will reap what they sow.
The world is filled with songs and poems and books about people who are bad and selfish friends, and even cold and apathetic lovers. Which reminded her, one day her old husband always claimed he was like a father to her. But he also told her all of the time that she did not need Jesus, because he was all the Jesus she would ever need. He did not mean that lovingly. He meant that when he was God. One time she got a job at a school typing. The superintendant rang her on the phone. “Hello, this is God,” he said. “Yes. Nice to meet you,” she responded back. For she did not doubt it. And besides, she knew this, she had never seen a Jesus in her life that acted the way that he did. He was supposed to be soft, gentle, kind and loving. Not loud, boisterous and jumping around and screaming, and so obsessed with gaining power. Such behavior is actually relative to the medical profile of a serial killer, of which my husband had already received his medical diagnosis. His psychiatrists coddled him and assured him it was due to an unhealthy childhood. How stupid of his psychiatrist. Someone needed to give them some acid free paper to write his medical prescriptions on.
First, her husband was the exacting opposite of her father. And her father had grown up more abused by far than this ego-maniac. But her father was always gentle, kind and good and did not hurt people. Therefore, that dispels the totalitarian blanket hypothesis that all girls marry their father. And yet why anyone in the world has to have an evil heart is an enigma. It is exactly like the maintenance man who helped her set up her table said as he told her his story. His mother also was a raging alcoholic and ruinously abused all of the children. True, there is a long-lasting rage that is the noted medical diagnosis of every victim of child abuse and incest. But this big old guy was kind by what he called choice. Choice is a lot like love. It is a choice. Everyone in the world can think of lots of people who had a bad childhood who are not out there hurting people. And what is more, there is something demonic about it or not. After all, what about the people who are born without conscience? Did the demon get inside when they were still in heaven getting ready to come down? Is it physio-biological? Or are some people just plain evil and they enjoy it? It is likely all of these things rolled up into one. What they really needed Maggie knew, was that if they did not have anything good to pray for her, and wanted to get out of spiritial work with the lazy man’s excuse, then what they really needed to do was to just leave her alone. If only they knew how tired she was. She could not carry them anymore. They had carried her a little in the past. And then one day, they had just suddenly walked away. Maggie was tired. In a way for the first time in her life, she had never been tired like this before. Even during the abuse. They would reap what they sowed.
One day she went to the library to see what had happened to her. But first, in order to do this, she had to hide under the back seat of the truck of her husband when he went to town. She pulled the moving blanket over herself and lay there. He went into a place called The Factory, a kind of small town shopping plaza to flirt with women. And quickly she got up and ran into the library and looked up on the computer what was wrong with her. What had the infrastructure of the modern cult church and his religious evil done to her? She looked up the phrase strange movement and instantly, the computer pulled it up as according to Wikipedia Encyclopedia,”The kinetic energy of an object is the energy which it possesses due to its motion.[1] It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity. Having gained this energy during its acceleration, the body maintains this kinetic energy unless it’s speed changes. The same amount of work is done by the body in decelerating from its current speed to a state of rest.”
Amazing. And then right next to the definition, a picture of a ferris wheel was posted to help illustrate the definition. However, what about the times when it felt more like a roller coaster, or like you were the roller coaster? The owl perched on the top of the curtain rod began to speak to her. “I told you for the second time,” she said. “All of my life I have been good. It’s really not a self-righteous thing. At times, it has been a disturbance to me. If only I could be like those who feel nothing when they take revenge or misconstrue, because they are mean. And in fact have been so mean all of their lives that they have long since lost the power to know the difference.” The tiny set of red velvet curtains parted to a miniature lawn outside. An army of a hundred Christmas soldiers bowed, and bending as a set of many trees danced she felt, and this more pleasant to the sight. She turned aside and wrinkled her nose at the other veterans of bitter and rancid. But thankfully, they were few and very far away from her. Very far away. She made a mental note. “Someday you will write a book,” stated the coy librarian. She stared straight ahead without speaking. This was how she cheered the librarian up. It took a thousand years of concentration just to get herself into the place she called book heaven. “I wish I owned one,” she accidentally said out loud. Speaking out loud. This was a cult rule violation punishable by two or maybe even three days locked up in the chicken shed. They will reap what they sow.
One time a chicken got stuck back there behind the large meat freezer and died. He didn’t care. But this was her friend. Horrified she thought about and felt his suffering for days. She began to hate meat. She hated that he filled the freezer with the old ten year old meat. Who could eat that much meat? Who could eat that old meat? Gross. It wasn’t her fault. The man on the farm, he was always picking things up and shoving things, and hammering and moving things around. One time he jumped up in the middle of the night and pulled the sheets off fast and hard. She fell out of bed. “It’s time to change the sheets and re-arrange the bedroom,” he said. She never complained or argued. She expressed calm and quiet gratitude for each strange and cruel instruction. At the time, she did not know it was an illusion.
There was that other time she was in the shower. Thank God it was summer, although she had slept in the snow for almost eight hours one winter day. She was hiding. From him. She had, well she does not want to give all of her secrets of survival away. After all, the others in this world, others have their own lessons to learn too. Half asleep, and even after suddenly wide awake, she survived the screaming and the threats and the demands about not moving the furniture around fast enough by remembering how he demanded she come outside now one summer day and take the outside pool down. He hated that pool. But she had to come out and do it, he said right now. An elderly woman who lived in a house so old, one of the owner’s slaves had set a hallway on fire to protect himself from her, gave the teenager the money to buy the pool after she spent something like all summer gardening, cutting grass and on the tractor, cooking, cleaning, scrubbing floors, and everything else also as well as chopping enough wood to last the woman her whole winter. He hated that woman. She dismantled the thing carefully and systematically for over an hour. The sun burned hard. But that felt good. It must run in the blood of a descendant of such a royal heart to work so hard like that, and even if in the void of no supervision. She did wonder who flew overhead in the private plane. But it did not matter. No one ever came to rescue Maggie Maise. Maggie Maise was clearly on her own. She went back inside to put on her long skirt and standard shirt and tennis shoes and put her hair up in a bun and all of the rest of the gear. She had a full body suntan to beat the band.
Evelyn knew what was going on. While others were steamed mad about not getting her for her piano for a church platform, she had more things to worry about than the selfish desires of the youngest preacher in Farmington. The meat of the matter they did not notice. Evelyn knew that something about the man of the woman and the daughter was not right. However, it was good for them to learn of this hate. For they would encounter it in two or three cruel churches. Although elderly and in her nineties and secretly dying from cancer, she as a woman who once worked as a kind minister in the streets of St. Louis before her retirement here to the historical country home and property her husband and she bought for a weekend home for in between trips to California and back, and he now sadly dead ~ She discerned a devil of Satan in the husband man of the speechless wife and child before her. She knew that the behavior of the little girl he dropped off there everyday was not right. And the woman never drove. She only rode. And only the little girl could stay. He never let the woman stay. And the little girl only worked and never talked. The woman only seemed to talk with her eyes. And she seemed far away, somewhere completely different from here. It was almost as if that although she dwelt in the earth, she did not. And that she certainly always dwelt in heaven while on earth. She would go back to that. They would reap what they sowed.
One day the elderly woman, Evelyn, she announced to the man who the little girl was going to stay with her for a weekend. She did not ask. She had dealt with few of his kind ever. But she knew enough to demand and not plead for favor. She put the little girl, actually thirteen by now upstairs in the tiniest little girl room with the original furniture for the period of the dwarfed about 17th century two-story farm home. Everything in the home was scaled down to the size of four-foot two tall people. And everything in the home was a kind of reddish wood and all original. The crooked posted canopy stints which held up a pink flag which rested over the bed gave way to small porcelain dolls and an antique lamp and a even an old jewelry box. And a burned area in the middle of the house, still there from the pre-civil war days where a slave or someone had set fire to the home for protection, and of the house that leaned slightly sideways.
When the little girl came home, she whispered to her mother that she actually ate a bowl of homemade cherry ice cream, and for the first time in about ten years, slept like a log. The mother did not think she herself had slept at all in twelve years. Let alone like a log. Until August rolled around again. And it was then that she just climbed into the bed at the end of September and she slept for one month solid. And then she got up. And saw. It was all still the same. As cold as snow. Lazy Christians everywhere. She had given up hours to pray for them, spending whole nights on ice froze Missouri parking lots and parks and backyards and wherever she could go to do this. She saw unlike the prior, these now complacent simply wanted to take the lazy man’s way out. She realized that for the first time in years, she was just simply out of strength. She saw the cold truth. That she really had not been loved back, and indeed was not loved as she had loved at all. She was necessary to them for one thing. And one thing only. She repented for taking a break from the other world. She kneeled and crossed herself. And then got right back into bed again. She sunk, and for all of the months after, she lost all track of time as most men know it.
Mysteries & Other Short Stories 