E's mother used to hear everything. She heard gossip before it formed on lips, she heard spiders fucking in the walls and storms getting ready to march over the horizon. Her family line traces a drunken path through witches, old Scottish royalty, criminals and circus travelers.
The eldest daughter of each generation in this family has a large W formed across the wrinkles of her palm and hears banshees before someone dies. No joke. E's mother used to wake up and ask if we "heard the howling last night" then the news would arrive that someone in her family had died. E's mum did not know what the howling was, but some other family members did.
E's mother passed away two weeks ago. A one-minute storm fell on the mourners on the way to their cars then the power was out for the entire path of the funeral procession and nowhere else. She would have got a kick out of that.
E is the eldest daughter of the next generation and has the "W". Now that her mother is gone tradition indicates she is going to start hearing the banshees and that scares her a lot. Would you hear them if you could? The generation after E is all males and my son Julian is the only one with the W. Time will tell what it means.]
My family, at least those I know are artists and Indians, settlers and scientists. I do not know who my biological father was, but I like to imagine it was David Bowie since mother attended one of his concerts around the time I was conceived. Beyond these quirks I prefer a chosen family to biological, but that is a story for another entry.
In other news last night I dreamed that I gave a hitchhiker a ride to a store that sold suicides and netflix rentals. The back of a store was an open wall that dropped off hundreds of feet into a scenic seaside cliff and you could step out and die on the rocks below. They shelves were lined with poisons and old 80's movies. The hitchhiker thanked me for the ride and I woke up. I wonder if that means anything. |