Evanescence 3

Part 3

It’d been three months and I’ve had two more dreams. The first one was me living in Louisiana. It was hot as hell there and I woke effected by the heat, my sheets sweated through and curled into a ball crying my eyes out until my mom can in and tried to calm me down.

The thing is I had been way back before the civil war. I was young and teenaged and strangest of all I was black. You know African American but with way, way more emphasis on the African part….Goddess, unless you’ve lived it and still I’m not sure I can even talk about this…That feeling drilled into you culturally over several generations that you’re nothing, absolutely nothing. A slave, property…I remember being young and pretty and that being seen like a curse. I remember being raped, taken and ordered to do such things by my Masters and the white men who worked for them…I remember being ostracized by some of the other black folks for being the master’s whore. I remember the men in the little shanty town we lived in taking a bit o’ what the white folks thought was so special.

I remember finding the goddess when I first danced in Voodan with my head full of drugs and a water moccasin draped over my shoulders………..D’ere was t’ings to learn and we, The Sista’s touched by de Goddess became part o’ de solution an not de problem. Our people was dying an we did all that we could do for them, we saved food and seeds and made potions to ward away the sickness and bad mojo. We made tings to make a man sleep or so his wee William would stop being able ta lead a man into his raping ways. We did da work ta get as many folk up to the north an other places ta be free. I remember the men come to us with the horses in the village and talkin to our master up at the house. They all had hoods on and they ran us out of our homes and beat us, whipped us an shot us…They was angry cause they found out what we women we doin, that not jus us women but Ni---rs like us stealin from them an getting out the slave’s from unda them…I remember how they raped me and my sista’s hard and then I remember…getting strung up.

It ISN’T a pleasant way to wake up being filled to screaming with the memories of all that sickness and abuse of a lifetime and just so much evil…then, of getting gang raped and brutally beaten before being hanged.

The Spanish noblewoman in my head still unsettled freaks out as she too is bombarded with it all. My mom is really freaked out at how freaked out and upset I am as I scream and bawl my eyes out.

She thinks it was a nightmare, she thinks it’s a really bad nightmare and she worries about me.

I’m worried about me too.
I do vividly remember seeing The Goddess looking like this mixed race very light skinned black girl with a half blouse and full skirts and her hair wrapped in a slave wrap with braids kind of hanging loose. I remember her arms around her legs at the knees tears streaming down her face as she cried silently for US tears streaming down her face.

We had just been a Gathering, just women who had started to follow something just to feel something bright in a reality full of evil and darkness when we saw her and she found us. We came from six neighboring plantations and used herbs and lore we had gathered to doctor our people, poison and drug those who needed it. We freed some slaves, we help others who were free but we did it quietly…It didn’t matter. I can remember now feeling, smelling and tasting something foul in that lynch mob. They were evil men but something was there pouring gas on that fire.

I’m getting it now.
I’m feeling that there is something out there something dark…and it want’s the darkness back. It wants the light gone and everything of it gone or destroyed or worse.

The second dream, the third life had been easier.
These dreams these lives though these are my lives live I have really led and lived and cried, breathe, loved and died in. After you remember just a few of these…you change.

It was easier and at the same time there was nothing easy about it. I was a young girl, a wiccan girl who was an oddball back home. A witches daughter, who lived in a cult or so a lot of the people in her hometown said. It was wrong really, the cult was a few hippies and like minded people in a few cheap cabins and small trailers out in hills outside of town. Not that it stopped the rumors any. Her mother and her partner were just hippies and dabblers with the ways of The Goddess in a small town in …Iowa.
I.. She had good marks but had gotten in trouble with several boys, trying vainly to get affection and acceptance from boys or men and all she got was a bad reputation, slandered from the small minded right wing people in town and pregnant she fled town.

She…I…just couldn’t live there anymore. I remember hitchhiking east. I can really remember her…Me…getting an Abortion in Buffalo.

Running away to NYC and living in The Alphabets…trying to make enough money to survive. Hitting a few hard times enough to make her really broke and homeless. Her faith wasn’t strong all the time, shaky most of the time as she became a hooker…men, boys, sex again and the drugs. Goddess the drugs, Cocaine to be a wild thing in bed, Heroin to just zone out into the darkness and sweet release of sleep. Then…Overdosing.

Like I said it’s been a month from my last death dream. My mom looks at me a lot and I know she’s got questions that she wants to ask and she SO doesn’t at the same time.

My hormones and blockers are working really fast and amazingly well. It’s energy, I can feel the three other lives in me, adding to me. So while not effecting me medically they are at the same time. It’s like my body is responding to things amazingly and my T. blockers are like anti-venom or something.

I’m starting girly bump beginner breasts already. My doctor say’s I might turn out quite “blessed.” The biggest difference is my skin and how it’s cleared up, it’s really different after I started to tan and use a bronzing sunscreen, that along with my hair growing like crazy and getting thicker and thicker but this really complex brunette color.

I can see the other version of myself in me in the mirror. I think.

My skill sets have grown and grown too. I can cook, My slave self was a kitchen worker for a time up in the big house. It felt good to cook for mom and be thanked for it. I cook a lot now. I’m putting things down or canning things too.

I’m also writing down all these recipes for food and potions and drugs that I know how to make now. I write with a noblewoman’s hand and in other books I write gothic poetry of The Goddess and draw and sketch. Like I said mom’s got questions and she’s fascinated at the same time…I’ve gotten looks from her but she hasn’t said anything yet.

………………..I check my saddlebags on my bike and then crank over the engine and just nearly idle my way through the trailer park. My neighbors are nice and I stop in at Mrs. Delaney’s trailer and stop. I knock on the door. “Hi Mrs. Delaney how are you this morning?”
“Oh, Alright I suppose love, come on in. Would you fancy a tea?”
“Alright but let me get it I can tell your arthritis is bothering you again else you’d be bustling about like you normally do.”
“Oh you don’t have to but thank you love.”
“My pleasure, now here this is a lotion for your knees it’ll take some of the ache out of them.” I pass her a jar of a balm with Aloe, Burdock root, Fever-few and a few other things that I’ve woken up the energies of what was in the plants and such with my own…It’s kind of like using energy to rehydrate the power in the plants and herbs.

I smile as I make the tea with loose tea leaves and hear her sighing with relief as she rubs in some of the balm. I serve up the tea and sit and sip and play a few hands of gin with her. It’s taken me awhile to find her in this maze of lanes and ways and streets that make up this part of town. Astrid Delaney was a witch, a former priestess of The Goddess she lost her gathering mostly through old age and disinterest the younger girls that seek wiccan are often just idle curiosity seekers and bored kids who don’t want to see the traditions through, or meditate for real or put in the work. I’ve been working with Astrid for a week now and she’s been a good teacher so far.

I stay and play cards with her and try to visualize her hands and obscure mine. It’s an exercise. I know it sounds far fetched and not like much but there are times I can feel what her cards are. When I’m in town I can feel things coming off of certain people or places. I can feel things like when someone hates me.

……….I’m in town and wandering through the farmers market and flea market and buy and pick up some more things that I need. I sell some of the homemade soaps and shampoos that I’ve made and several bags of my homemade muffins and rolls. I don’t have a job anymore having been fired for being gay?, trans? Me? It didn’t matter to old Mister Asher the law said he could fire me without a fight and he did.

I’m going to really miss working at Bl-ckbuster…sorry Ballbuster video.
NOT!
F-ing chain stores and restaurants should all be investigated for human rights abuses.

I see Shaun looking at a bunch of books that are in the science fiction pile at the used book section of the market….I haven’t seen him since the accident, since I told people that I tried killing myself because I wanted to be a girl.

I’ve got a Chai-tea in my hand and watch him for awhile. He’s walked past me three times now. There’s no way he’d really recognize me. I’m not the skinny geek I used to be. I’m a whole new kind of skinny geek. I use to wear plaid shirts and baggy t-shirts with ganger logos. Today I’m wearing a nice bra and underpants. A pair of fades jeans with a bunch of fashionable tears in them over a pair of black tights since it’s getting chill out and it can be cold on the bike. I’m wearing a pink support breast cancer t-shirt with a couple of necklaces and a bunch of bangles and bracelets on each wrist along with a simple zip up grey hoody over my tee-shirt and under my leather jacket. I’m a little surprised because it’s my old leather jacket before my change. I’m wearing sunglasses and my hair is tumbly and loose.

I miss him, He was one of my best friends and we would hang out with the other geeks and smoke a bit of pot or drink a little but mostly watch movies or play video games or more likely role-playing games like Rift’s or Shadow-run, or stuff like Warhammer and Majik the Gathering. I’m still a gamer geek and I’m rebuilding my decks and I’m buying or thinking about buying some new books. Yeah I’m still a bit of a geek and I always will be. I walk up and start looking through the books beside him sorting through them and sipping at my tea. “Hi Shaun, long time no see.”

*** Elsewhere…

There was a pain that came with it all. It hurts so good crossing over, there’s this compression that feels like you’re awake at being born again as My Essence is squeezed through the barrier between the dimensions.

The blood calls me, the essence of the sacrifice calls me and provides the power that tries to reach me from so far.

Heroin…drugs…in the system of this…Good, I’ve got a dick. I can smell the blood and see the marks left painted all over the drywall shouting my arrival. The dreams sent to him had worked and worked on his weak mind and he sought me out. Cutting his flesh using his blood to paint the sigils, to call me here from…there…He thought he was finding rapture in the blood, in calling me to shared his soul.

That’s what I am…I am Rapture.

I walk out of the reeking tenement of the crack house and into the nearest bar and push thoughts the energy of others away from me until I see a likely suspect. He’ll fit. I follow him into the bathroom and he notices me in the mirror as I plug a sink with paper towels as he’s washing his hands. Mirrors are fucked up things, they warp perspectives that whole right left thing…It’s why you can’t see some things like vampires or in some cases they’ll let you get a glimpse of my true form. If you’re a smart demon like me that’s useful. The sight stuns his mortal mind and with a quick move I smash his face through the mirror into the wall and he’s unconscious. I slit his throat into the sink and hold him there until he fills the sink and I say the words.

Words have power…each of the old words are formed and re-enforced with power over the ages. It’s like making candles. Layers of power and belief and tradition piled ontop of each other over time, over eons.

The blood is a medium, it’s power, blood holds power better than any other medium. I watch it bubble. Those bubbles aren’t from the drain, they come from somewhere else, somewhen else…The masters unheard voice makes ripples in the blood.

She’s here…The Evanescence is alive in the world again.

I leave heading outside leaving the body of the guy in the john while I’m wearing his suit and taking his money and things. He’s got car key’s It takes awhile for the brain of this meat-suit I’m wearing to recognize how to use the push button alarm to find the car.

I need to get where I can gather strength, where I can see everything and get lost at the same time. I get in the car and leave this south Miami pit and head north.

New York City…I’ll start there first.