Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

Additional Halloween Contest Entry

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness around the world.

October 30, 2007

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This newsletter is to provide one additional story for the Halloween Contest.? It is not to be considered that the publisher favours these stories over the other.? The membership makes the decision on which author is our winner for the best Halloween Story and which poet is the winner of the best Halloween Poem.?

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Present Tension ? The Novel

Tanja Cilia

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I look, I listen, I learn.??I came, I saw, and I conquered. Much good it does me; they tied me up again today, because they said I am in a self-destructive mood. But self is a subjective term. I am not necessarily me.

Paradoxically, I am; yet I am other people too, mostly people in my own family, but there are exceptions ? I think. Some would call it schizophrenia or maybe bi-polar disorder; but it?s definitely not any type of mental condition.? It could be an extreme form of bi-location ? although I am told that only people who have achieved a high level of holiness manage it.? In my more lucid moments, I think I may be imagining it all.? But then I get flashbacks that are too clear to be anything but what happened to me in the past ? and what will happen to me in the future.

Take the time the house burnt down ? albeit I use the word house in a broad sense, since it was actually a cave. We had just discovered fire, and I somewhat instinctively knew that boar fat would make it go better. I had just gouged out some lard from between the (dead!) animal?s heart and lungs, and when I threw it on the fire, the whole universe -mine, anyway -went up in a whoosh of smoke.

I must be the only thirteen-year old mental patient in a strait jacket in the padded cell, anywhere in the world. Yet, I am here because they cannot even begin to understand my powers; silly geese, they even got the priest in to try to exorcise me.? Moreover, when that did not work, they tried the shrink.

They told Mum I have a tendency to mislay things, but that is because they stole my ring, as they know it is special.

I would like to see the look on the face of the person who wears it, when ?

"I know that ring!" I said, as I picked it off the bedside table. The last time I had seen it was on my grandmother's ring finger ... just before they closed the coffin lid and lowered it into the grave.

Now, in my semi-lucid state, I felt a light kiss on my cheek and footsteps running downstairs. The thing is?I live alone, in a single-storey house, with no one to kiss me or present me with rings. Not since that incident happened.

I put it on?and suddenly, I heard a baby bawling from somewhere downstairs, and a smell of burning reached my nostrils. I slid down the banister rail, and saw that the frying pan on the stove was aflame. Without thinking, I grabbed the baby and ran.

Running across the muddy common, I hoped Sandra was at home. I banged on the door; a stranger who was yet familiar opened it. I gasped a few unintelligible words.

I immediately knew that somewhere along the line I had transmogrified into my own grandmother, and that the child I had just saved was my own father. Heaven knows how many times he had told me the story. But how could I explain to people that I was just "passing through"? They would burn me at the stake, or the equivalent.

I understood what was happening with wisdom far beyond what I knew to be my fifteen years. Although I am now thirteen.? Or am I? My husband -my grandfather -was away at sea, and would not be back for another month. By then, I had to have everything cleaned and repaired, because otherwise hell would break lose and he would beat me within an inch of my life for being careless with his possessions. That, I knew, too.

Dragging my feet, I walked into the pawnshop. The sneer on the pawnbroker's face said it all. As soon as I removed the ring from my finger, I felt faint. I came to in a kitchen; the calendar said 1973.

I searched everywhere, but could not find the ring. And suddenly I recalled that Sandra?s granddaughter?s daughter had borrowed it to complete her outfit as the Wicked Witch of the West at the Halloween party.

I panicked. With a feeling of deja-vu, I grabbed the baby from the cot and ran to Sandra?s house. Apparently, from what they said later, only ?the ring? was coherent enough to be understood. But when Sandra climbed the stairs to talk to the young girl ... the room was empty, and a white cat played with the ring on the quilt. And Sandra shouted my name. I tried to run upstairs, but I tripped forwards ? in time.

The digital display on the otherwise blank wall said 2008, and I was trying to explain to the Warden how I had come by a ring so precious when both my child and I were in tattered rags. Clearly, the cynical sneer he gave indicated he did not believe me. When he manacled me, and forcibly removed the ring from my fingers with a view to placing it in an evidence bag (or purloining it?)?we dissolved before his eyes.

With my third eye, I saw him throw the ring, terrified, across the street into the sea. As it sank, it caught a glimmer of light from the setting sun.

I woke up in what I later learned to be Italy. I was in a caf?, with a steaming cup of something -I recall the word now, cappuccino - in front of me, and two miniscule almond tasting biscuits. In fluent Italian, I patiently explained to a typically tall, dark, and handsome signore why I could not marry him, saying that I was betrothed to someone whom I recalled faintly as my husband. However, the thing is, I was 13 years old, again, so I could not possibly have had a husband.

When the stranger indicated this salient point, I showed him my black-gemmed ring. He laughed, and I flew at him like a tigress, because I deemed he was ridiculing me in front of everyone at the caf?.... Just because he was rich, it did not give him a right to
mock me.

I turned and ran out?smashing into a glass partition as I did so.

I was wearing one of those ruffled neckerchiefs, and I had to re-learn my life, because somehow I had catapulted backwards, tumbling through space and time, into Queen Elizabeth I?s day. There, I found myself treated as a special person. I was called The Holy Fool, and they took my advice when I spoke, at random, about battles that
ought to be waged and others that were to be avoided at all costs. I was a Seer, and special because I was a female. Truth to tell, I had the foresight of hindsight!

Came the day when a traitor - who shall be nameless, but who has gone down in the history books as one of the greatest heroes of all time, so much so that even a film was shot extolling his exploits - tried to sneak in on me in the dead of night. I smelled his particular garlicky odour and saw his purple aura when he was still yards away.

Therefore, I called up my polystomatous sprites from Afar, and they ate most of him. I had the freedom of the castle, and so I made as if I would found him lying there?after I appropriated the ring with the jet stone?and screamed and screamed. If it had been the theatre, I?d have brought the house down?again. Or got an Oscar.

With everyone running toward me, there was too great a sensory input to bear?so I wished myself elsewhere, and, indeed, I found myself in Malta, right in the middle of the square at Bugibba. The Times of Malta headlines on the poster in front of the newsagent?s were dated 3rd September 1959, and soon afterwards, I felt birthing pains ? and this means that I was both myself, and my mother, giving birth to
me.

Still dazed from the rush to hospital, I tuned in to the mumblings of the medicos around me, and realised that I had contracted some serious infection the source of which they could not fathom. They whispered words like typhus and salmonella.? My illness was probably caused by the unsavoury living conditions of my immediate past life, but I wasn?t telling them that, was I? They would have blamed post-partum depression, and sent me to the cuckoo?s nest.? Before my time.

However, when I heard the word typhus, I panicked. I tried to get out of bed, intending to scrub myself with antiseptic soap ? but I was still wobbly, and I fell and bumped my head.

I found myself in this padded cell, and when I did some astral travel the first night I was here, I discovered that the date is 2009 and I have been brought here because I am delusional ? or so they say.

But I can?t move; it?s not that I?m mechanically immobilised; I?m either in a coma or else I?ve been drugged. But there are electrodes all over my head and strange noises from even stranger machines all over the room. The only apparatus I recognise is a computer monitor of sorts. However, there is no keyboard.

I hear the rustle of clothing. Someone gently eases the ring off my finger, but this time I cannot even make a token resistance. I borrow a fly?s mind and follow the man to his lodgings.? I find I can do that easily, these days.

A child opens the door upon hearing the man?s step on the stair-treads. He has been playing with a white cat, but quickly shoos it off the bed because he knows he will get a belting if the cat is discovered there.? The man pours olive oil in a pan and waits until it starts smoking. Then he tiptoes upstairs and puts the ring on the dressing table where a sleeping woman- hey, she is I! -surely would see it. He cannot resist kissing my petal-soft cheek, before running out of my life, as he thinks, forever. He runs
downstairs...

And I smell the burning oil, grab the child, and dash across the road to Sandra?s house. I remember the ring, and dash back for it, without offering any explanation. The flames cut off my escape. I throw the ring into the empty space before me?and I leap to my destiny from the tiny bathroom window.

And I, being also one of the children in the crowd of spectators, see the glimmer of the ring as it catches a flame. I put it on, and tumble into blackness; I wake up in a coffin.?

"I'm, alive!" do I scream ? in vain. I feel the clods of sod fall on my bier; I am being buried alive. I am Grandmother.

The grave looter took the ring and broke into the house of the mother of his child, the woman who had scorned him way back in Italy, but then had? had second thoughts. He leaves the ring on the bedside table, and puts a pan of oil on the Aga. He lights the flame and leaves the house, carrying the baby with him. He knows he can sell it on the adoption black market. Babies with black hair and blue eyes are all the rage lately. His last action is to lock the door from the outside.

I smell the oil, and I frantically search the house for the baby.?Not finishing him, I jump out of the balcony window, my clothes aflame.? ?I survive, but barely; I have 3rd degree burns over more than 50% of my body. The prognosis is bad.

Ah, that is what they all think. So, read my lips?or rather, the computer screen. Give Me Back My Ring so I can get back to my cocoon in the padded room.


? Copyright, Tanja Cilia
tanjachilja@hotmail.com

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