So, I haven't been in here blogging, at all. So I am going to change that and I am going to start it today. So, we'll see how that works out. I want to start with a sampling of something I've been struggling with. I want your opinions so tell me what you think. Treasure? Or Trash? Jump in!
Mary Anne Lewiston was what most adults would call a good kid. A good kid in the sense that she was well behaved, which means mostly quiet. She was smart, which means she knew enough to get her point across, but not so much she was annoying. With her huge deep brown eyes, hair that bordered on red in the sun and her dazzling smile Mary Anne was more than pretty. The product of a West Indian father and a West Texan mother she had an exotic look that stunned people even at the young age of five, copper and cream, her father called her; he said she was the sweetest thing since sugar cookies. “She is going to be a killer with the fella’s,” people would say in that annoying way people have of saying things you never cared to hear.
She lived together with her mother and father in a small Victorian house. Her father, an engineer, was rarely home and it fell to Mary Anne’s mother to care for the home. Mary loved her home and her mother dearly. She often dreamed that she was a princess and she’d spend hours in the parlor playing tea party. On Saturday afternoons her mother would have friends over for tea. The ‘flock’, her father called them.
“Cackling birds,” he’d say and he’d gather his keys and papers and head for the door.” Mary watched him leave and she’d go find her party dress and tea set. After she dressed herself she’d carry her tea set down the stairs and set it up on a side table. Then she’d position herself in her little chair and she’d sit, silent. Unearthly the child seemed at those times as if she were not all natural, but somehow more than nature could produce. The women would whisper and talk about her as if she were not in the room.
“Did you teach her to sit like that?” They would ask her mother.
“It’s creepy, downright unnerving.”
She would sit there, saying nothing, watching thinking (Cackling Birds). The idea of crackling birds amused her and she could see them burning, screaming as they burned. What they never knew as they talked about her was that Mary hated their intrusion. She knew her mother only tolerated these gatherings and Mary could only think to make it stop. The parlor, was the place, the parlor was the problem.
When noon rolled around on that next Saturday Mary was sleeping in her bed, napping after a long morning of playing with her dolls. In actuality Mary never touched the retched dolls and only lay down so she would not be drawn into glasses of watered down tea and poor conversation. As soon as she was sure the party was in full swing Marry quietly went into her parents room to grab her fathers Zippo from the bed side table. She really was unsure why he had a lighter, neither he nor her mother smoked anything, but Marry was glad he did have one it would make the coming task easier. After pocketing the lighter, Mary tip-toed down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door only pausing twice, once when a loose board squawked on the stairs and another in order to keep the screen door from banging behind her. Once out side she made her way to her fathers work shed. The door had a lock on it but Mary knew that it didn’t really lock anything. The Dummy Lock her father called it, it was there to keep the dummies out. A smart crook, he had said, wouldn’t be breaking into an old shed anyway.
Mary actually liked her father, most adults, her mother included, were well rounded bore’s and had nothing better to do with their time than make them selves look important by attending various in home gatherings around the neighborhood, mostly to gossip about who ever didn’t make it that week. Her father on the other hand was a man of vision, an engineer, and an artist who could take an idea and turn it into something real. The work shop reminded Mary of him and she stopped for a minute to take in his scent. The shop was not used for much any more but before she was born Mary’s father used it as his office. His high school diploma still hung on one wall and there was an old drafting table set up in the cramped space. Now it was littered with garden tools, old news paper and various levels of grime. The whole place was crammed with shed stuff, rakes and blowers, mowers and trimmers with only enough room to step in and begin pulling the stuff you didn’t want out so you could get at the stuff you did want. Fortunately for Marry what she wanted was right in the front.
Mary didn’t expect the gas can to be quite so heavy and she banged her shin when she first lifted it up. Dropping the can, she stood looking at the wounded leg as if she meant to cut it off as soon as they got back inside. Mary thought about how she would do this. If she tried to carry the can all the way back to the house she would be all after noon getting it there, she was after all only five and this thing her father lifted with such ease was a job for her to get off the ground. Looking around she spotted an ice pick and a mallet, the idea came to pop a hole in the can and make her jaunt indoors a bit easier. Pushing her hair back from her face Mary climbed over a push mower and a stack of unused bags that read “Mamma’s Potting Soil” on the front. The picture of the woman on the package reminded Mary of one of the women inside now and she planted one small foot firmly on the woman’s sun faded face. Stretching her little arms she was able to grab the mallet and then was able to use that to pull the pick to within grabbing distance. That done she backed tracked to the gas can.
Mary stood there for another moment, a little winded and soiled from the climbing and reaching, mallet in one hand, hammer in the other and thought that it would not be wise to puncture the can too low on the side least she loose all her fuel. You needed a good deal of fuel to start a fire when you were burning gossips instead of proper wood. Squatting down on the ground near where she had dropped the can Mary carefully positioned the ice pick on the plastic surface and whacked it one good time with the hammer. The pick slid across the can leaving a deep scratch but as yet no visible holes. Mary grunted and positioned the ice pick again, this time just above the crossbar on the raised “A” in gasoline, and took another swing. This one did the trick and the ice pick popped through with a whoop of punctured plastic and the out rushing whoosh of pressured gasoline. The trickle that flowed in a steady stream from the hole was enough for Mary and she tossed her tools down in the yard ready for her second attempt at lifting the can. She found that it lifted more easily than before and the can quickly grew lighter as she made her way back into the house.
The time for absolute caution had passed and Mary made no effort to mask her reentry into the house. As the door banged shut Mary heard her mother calling from the other room asking if she was alright or needed anything.
“Just playing,” Mary called to her, standing absolutely still, hoping no one would come around the corner. She didn’t know what she would say if she were caught now.
“Well stay the hell away from that door young lady.”
“Yes mamma.”
“Why don’t you come in here?”
“I’m coming momma.”
Before continuing on Mary stopped in the kitchen to pull her fathers Zippo out of her pocket and unscrew the cap on the gas can. She then made her way into the sitting room by way of the hall in the “New Wing” of the house, the one that led to her fathers new work shop. Mary knew what daddy did in there when mommy was not around but she never told her mother, Mary knew enough about working to know that sometimes you had to keep your clients happy.
Mary walked in from behind the couch, carefully spilling gasoline as she went, where three of the gathered sat cramming cookies into their faces and sucking down iced tea. She let the can drop onto the plush white carpet with a muffled thud and turned to walk out again. No one had noticed her, not even her mother. Put an end to the crackling birds, she thought.
Marry pulled back the top of the lighter, exposing it’s inner-working of flint and steel, cold precise and accurate as always the lighter flared to life when she spun the wheel. Leaning back around the corner to the living room Mary tossed the burning lighter towards the gas can. At first nothing happened and Mary thought for sure she would be caught before she could burn anyone, and she would be in serious trouble then.. Just as she was about to step in and retrieve the lighter, someone inquired about the smell of gasoline and the fuel Mary had spilled onto the carpet went up in a whoosh. One woman screamed, a man, who Mary was sure would like to keep her mother happy jumped up and ran towards the blaze; everyone was stunned and as Mary stared into the fire time seemed to stand still, nothing moved but the flame running ever closer to the can itself, licking at it’s sides and finally…
The whole room went up in a blaze of crimson and yellow, the gas can actually imploded and the fuel blew straight up like a volcano bathing the ceiling in flame. The wooden frame work and lead laced paint of the house quickly picked up the fires rhythm and danced itself to cinders in the crackling music of the blaze. Amazingly no one had been seriously injured in the fire; however the New Wing of the house was lost.
People looked at Mary differently after the story of how the blaze started got around. She was no longer the good kid people assumed her to be now she was suspect, a child to be watched carefully. Her parents treated her differently as well, Mary was no longer allowed to wander alone and found her self confined to the boundaries of her room more often. The tea parties had been moved to a new location and because of the incident Mary caused her mother was no longer strictly welcome at these gatherings. On Saturdays Mary’s mother could now be found wandering through the house like an old woman touching things as if searching them for some long forgotten memory. Mary did not care much about her mother’s depression and was glad when the doctors prescribed a “relaxing” pill for her. It was the look she often saw in her father’s eye when he was alone in his office a look of loss and despair that drug Mary into sadness like a vortex and often held her there for days. Finally her father had left them without a word taking only what he needed to continue his work. Mary was sure that her mother blamed her for the loss of the only man she had ever known, but Mary was equally sure that it had been her mother’s lackluster life that had driven the man away.
That same year Mary began school. In the hallowed halls of elementary learning she found a new place to hide her self and there she found a new group of people to despise. The children in her class all seemed to be hollow shells, shapes of the dead adults they would become waiting to be filled with all the rhetoric society had to offer them. It didn’t take Mary long to make the decision to keep to her self and her strange ways kept the other children well away from her. She was left with a lot of time to think and to create a place for her self where she was surrounded by things that made sense and people she could talk to. The thought of burning the school down crossed her mind on occasion but in her time alone she had discovered a new way of removing obstacles and she knew just the person she would test them on.
Mary was six when she killed her mother. It was a sunny spring day just before school ended for the year and Mary had been under punishment for the better part of the month. She had stuck a pencil into the palm of another kid at school and when asked why she’d done it Mary told the teacher that the girl was a twit and needed a little shaking up. The thought made sense to Mary but the adults involved had the idea that it was somehow wrong to stab people with pencils even when they so obviously needed it. Her mother had gone screaming crazy when Mary came home that evening and for the first time in her life Mary had a spanking. The initial pain was nothing compared with the pain of suffering the humiliation. Having her bottom bared and being whacked unmercifully by a woman who was so weak was unforgivable. Over the next weeks the pain of that humiliation only grew and with its growth came an anger that dulled the pain but did nothing to remove it. Mary decided that there was only one way to remove that pain, remove the cause of it.
That morning before school Mary pulled a knife out of the kitchen drawer. She chose the biggest one she could find that would still fit into her book bag without tearing through the bottom. She spent the day as she usually did working diligently at the three R’s and at the end of the day made her way home not straying from her usual routine. When she arrived everything was as she expected it to be. The house was quiet and her mother was asleep in her bed, high on the relaxing pills she still took every day. Mary took the knife from the book bag and slipped quietly into her mother’s room. Her mother slept on her side curled into her self, her face was bathed in the light from the bedside table a lock of hair falling over one eye, her fist balled under her chin like a child. For a moment Mary felt a brief wave of pity for this woman that had brought her into the world, could she actually kill her; so fragile and pale sleeping there defenseless and unaware? Then the vision of the spanking flashed through her mind and the anger rushed in to seize the knife in a white knuckled fist. Mary watched wide eyed as the blade rose, blinking once in the light of the bedside lamp, and then fell with an eagles grace to land with a crunch in the side of her mothers face. The woman came awake with a scream and the knife flew once again this time slicing one protective arm to the bone and landing in the belly. Only small rivulets of blood came from her mother’s mouth and a look of fear and shock painted her face a ghostly white. Her belly on the other hand had been sliced deep and when Mary pulled the blade free huge gouts of fresh blood and bits of matter followed in an arc. The knife rose and fell again and again, 27 times in all and Mary only stood impassively watching as the blade did its gruesome work.
No one ever saw Mary Anne Lewiston again after that day. In the beginning the authorities assumed that there had been a robbery and that Mary’s mother had been murdered in her bed before Mary came home, that Mary had probably walked in on the murder in progress and had been taken off. Later a bundle was found a few miles from the Lewiston home containing bloodied clothing that the people at the school identified as belonging to Mary Anne. A man hunt was launched but that soon ended, no one could really bring themselves to care much about finding a lost little murderous child. The tiny police force did not have the man power to continue the hunt alone and so a missing person’s file was opened and people went on with their lives. Many secretly hoped that she had been abducted by her mother’s murderer so that they would never have to look into those cold predatory eyes again. Eventually the case grew old and died in an unsolved case file.
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