Imma, Queen of the Insects

The Kindred Collective

Imma, Queen of the Insects

The water was thick with earth, and alive. It moved with unseen creatures. Small ones with legs that scattered, or ones with out legs that slithered. It never mattered to the girl that she wasn’t one of them, that she moved on two feet and was covered in skin, she let her body sink into the muddy pond anyway, and pretended. 

She practiced moving like an insect, contorting her limbs into angles and moving fast. Her skin grew soft from the minerals and her muscles strong from all the crawling and burrowing in dirt. Soon she secretly referred to herself as Queen of the Insects. 

“Imma!” Her mother called. And Imma emerged covered in the stuff of the ground, nails caked with dirt, hair wet and tangled, handfuls of earth worms for her to play with in her mother’s garden. 

One day Imma’s mom called her home…

View original post 542 more words

Quite Contrary

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” 

I walk through town clutching The Secret Garden and thinking about Mary and Colin and Dickon (I always wished I had been named Mary), while the whispers float around me like bubbles I want to pop but are always just out of reach.

“That Molly-girl’s a little touched if you know what we mean,” they say. I hear them and they say it.

Do they know what they mean? Do they mean touched by the hand of God with something special, or by the hand of someone’s (handsome or not, what does it matter?) big sweating grunting dripping handful of a swollen something special? Do they even know the difference? Is there a difference?

(Well there is a difference. One doesn’t mean anything, nothing. The other means everything. It is an invasion of everything you are by everything someone else is.)

I walk through town clutching The Secret Garden and thinking of Mary and Colin and Dickon. I stop where the sign says stop. The streets are grey and empty and the sky is grey and empty, and then a car, bright and red, screams by and “Slut!” is thrown out the window and right at me.  The pitcher is Sally Buckley. Her face is contorted with contempt.

Her dad fucked me when my mom was his girlfriend.

It was only once, but he could change, he begged my mother.

Only once.

Once is a ghost. Once can haunt. Once is endless in that space where once lives.

Finding the Blood Line

The visions that appeared during the ritual:

A boy whispering the word “steward”

An ancient ship with a giant mast, sail

(I don’t know the words the water is saying

But it is saying

Something)

Waves crashing onto a shore of rocks

Cliff, Ocean, Horizon on Ocean, Cave

A high totem reaching into the sky

The ocean is now background, setting sun shines behind totem

And then

The moon

And She Is The Darkness

A stew was boiling. A storm of lentils and onions and turmeric and chiles and other ground things, things from the ground swirled in the pot. Cecelia was her name; it was she who created the storm and then dipped a wooden spoon in and then out and tasted it. “Hmmm…,”she thought, “needs acid.” A lemon rolled down the counter and under the knife in her hands. Cecelia pierced the flesh.

In the Comfort of Strangers, or, Wish Fishing

I’ve felt the awesome power of anonymity in the brush of a stranger’s hand.

When I was a kid my mom would lose me in a crowded mall–or rather, I would lose her, on purpose, just so I could wander to the fountains and fish the coins out of the cool clear water and guess the wishes they carried down to the tile; the tossers could have been anyone, the wishes anything, I could swear the wet faces I held in my palm winked at me before I threw all those strange copper futures back into the glittering fountain–and scream for me, hysterical, until she found me: my hand holding the hand of a security guard and the other hand gripping a balloon or popcorn or whatever they had to make me feel safe. “Hi, mom.” I’d smile and let go of the warm hand.

Slow Potion

It takes time but it works. Whoever said the way to hell is short obviously didn’t know about me. The night will drag on like the longest train on a wedding gown on a rainy day, muddying anything that was once light, getting heavier and heavier, but never stuck, never stuck. And that’s not even the best part. That comes later. Right now: the night is long and the potion is slow. The moon will seem ready to burst through you, like a firecracker lit too close, but it won’t happen. You’ll never feel the spark of all that gravity. You have to trust  me.

My name is Nyxa Chamomile. But I usually just go by Cam. And no, my brother’s name is not Earl Grey.  I don’t even have a brother. I don’t know what forces pulled my mother to the name she chose for me, because I never knew her. My mother is dead and I never had a brother.

Oh. You want to know why I did it?

I can’t tell you that. What I can say is that the mothers bring their sons to see me when their sons can’t sleep, and the wives bring their husbands to see me when their husbands can’t sleep, and the mothers and the wives come to see me when they can’t sleep.

What do I do for them?

I do something different for all of them. I help the sons understand, I help the husbands see, I help the mothers understand, I help the wives see. I help put people at ease, that is all. It is not my fault. I did not choose my talents. I did not choose my name. We are not our fates. Our fates are not ours.

I can’t be anymore specific, unless you ask me specifically about a certain one; each one is different.

Oh, okay, him.

Yeah. Nothing went right that night. The comedy half of the porcelain drama mask slid off the shelf and shattered on the floor. That was a tell-tale sign, but I ignored it. I never do that. It’s just that this guy, he was different.

Oh is that what they all say?

Well, he was different. He didn’t have a mother worried about him, he didn’t have a scared wife. I didn’t have to worry about anybody hating me. It was different. It was a combination of things actually. The moon was full, for one. When I looked up and saw the sky leaving the moon alone, I should have headed the sign. One sign ignored, and they all crumble, a tsunami of recklessness falls them.

But what can I say?  I love what I do. I was born to do it.

Upon Wonder

The sun’s hot light clutched the faded paint of  the small brown house at the end of the block. Inside, abandoned bowls of Ramen Noodles and half-eaten bologna and mayonnaise sandwiches sat on almost every surface of the living room. I counted 12 Styrofoam bowls, but couldn’t be bothered to count the paper plates wobbling upon stacks of wonder bread upon paper plate upon wonder bread upon paper upon wonder. And they never went away, each one simply covered with a new version of itself.

I left school early with a stomach ache moving through me in waves the day she came to me. The heat of late summer followed me home, and once inside did a sour dance around the mayonnaise-perfumed room that left me dizzy and tired. When I woke  there she was, sitting cross-legged atop a piece of  drying Wonder Bread. She was small like an insect but with a very human head, and face, and torso, and limbs.  I asked the little insect human thing her name. “Constance, ” she answered. “But that’s my name,” I said. “Well we can’t both be Constance,” she said.

We frowned at each other.

I squinted my eyes and brought my face closer to her, there were striking similarities in our head and face and torso and limbs! Could we both be Constance?

Little insect-sized Constance put her hands on her hips and said, “Well, then. One of us has to go!”  She pursed her lips, as if to say she wouldn’t be the one leaving.

“Look”, I said, “my sisters will be home from school soon and they can’t see you, okay? Get in my pocket.”

“You get in my pocket,” she said.

“That’s funny. Now come on.” I thrust my pocket closer to her. She climbed in. “Don’t make a sound,” I warned.

A deep yellow  filled the room as the door flew open and my sisters crashed in. My sister Matilda glared at me. “Mom and dad are going to kill you when they find out you left school.”

“I didn’t feel good,” I said.

I sat on the floor and flicked the television on. Matilda and my two other sisters, Marie and Maggie, left the room, fumbled around the kitchen and came back with more bowls and plates to add to the stacks. Maggie slurped noodles. “Today was horrible,” said Marie. “What is that awful sound?” Matilda asked. Three heads and six eyes turned to me. “What?” I said.

A beautiful, familiar music floated around, barely audible. I felt a vibration in my pocket. “I have to pee,” I told my sisters and got up. Six eyes rolled.

I locked the door behind me in the bathroom and set mini-Constance on the sink.

“What is that sound? I told you to be quiet,” I said.

“Swan Lake. Isn’t it pretty?”

My nana had a music box with a ballerina that spun when the lid was lifted, it played Swan Lake. After she died I played the music box every night until one day the ballerina stopped spinning.

“I told you to be quiet,” I said again, my voice cracked a little. A sudden fear of my sisters finding mini-Constance lodged in my throat.  Afraid my voice would crack again and split me open, I didn’t say anything else for awhile.

“One of us has to go,” mini-Constance repeated. She kept on humming. If she was a replica of me , then her voice was a replica of piano keys playing Swan Lake.

“My sisters, they’ll toss you to the cat. Get back in my pocket.”

“One of us has to go. One of us has to go. One us has to go one of us has to go one of us has to go…”

“STOP.” I couldn’t let her keep on like that, my sisters would hear. I saw myself in the mirror: I wore my sisters’ old clothes that hung too big on me, my hair needed to be washed, tears poured down my face.  “Where are you from?”

“Swan Lake.”

I wiped the  tears from my face and stared hard at her. “Would you stop this? Where are you from and why are you here?”

“I told you. I’m from Swan Lake. I’m here because I don’t want to be there and you don’t want to be here. I heard you whispering in the dark, so I came. We can’t both be in the same place, so one of us has to go. Now.”

“Wait. What do you mean you are from Swan Lake? And how does one of us go?

“I live in the vibration the music makes. And one of us has to eat the other.”

This is where I began to believe she wasn’t real.

I still stood in front of the mirror and she still stood on the sink, and I could see us in the mirror. Her hands were missing now. Just as I noticed this she looked down at the place were hands were and where her arms were slowly being erased. “Hurry, I told you one us had to go,” she said. “If  I eat you it’ll take too long and you won’t like it. Just pop me in your mouth.”

“This is crazy, ” I said.

“Just do it.”

I picked up little mini-Constance–armless now– and looked her in the eyes that were the same as mine, and then did as she instructed. I popped her in my mouth. I expected unpleasant chewing and taste, but there was nothing. Nothing. I am crazy, I thought.

But then I felt a vibration run through me, and the faint sound of Swan Lake played in my ears. The vibration became stronger and stronger and the sound louder and louder. I saw myself in the mirror and everything dissolving.  I heard a faint laughter from the other rooms. And with no one to hear me, I drifted off  on a wave of pulsating silence.