My dearest friend,
There are more letters and words than can be accurately placed
upon this page. I am attempting to decipher the messages that I receive from
the heavens. I have selected this one for your perusal. I apologize for the chaotic
appearance of my handwriting, this
cannot be helped, as my curdled fingers rarely hold a pencil with fairness.
I have not attempted to change anything except the spelling,
where it could be helped. I realize that these words are from something deep
inside of my own psyche, I have no illusions regarding some external source.
The words that I have written here are for your eyes.
Unfortunately, I cannot expect that they will fall upon other ears with the
same voracity that it may fall upon yours.
Forgive me also for the nature of this letter. There is nothing
I would rather do than to leave you out of this entirely, but I cannot help
myself. You are the only one that will fully appreciate the method to the
madness. This genius called itself (REMOVED), and I will leave its words for
you to peruse, study, and discard if necessary. I called upon it to give me
wisdom. I fear it has given me something else entirely.
Yours in spirit, and in fact.
Frances Bordeaux,
Medium
It is madness through which I decided to summon the stranger
aspects of my subtle mind. It began with an evening of spiritualism, drinking
wine with my more occult oriented friends, pulling out a witch board, hand
painted with simple spray paint, and a cheap whiskey glass.
The four of us somehow meandered into the discussion of ghosts,
spirits, the fae, and demonology, whereupon my friend produced that cheaply
crafted plywood board and the fake leaded crystal glass, and we experimented
upon the summoning of various spirits, as pulled from her shabby copy of the
Clavicle of Solomon, or the Goetia.
We took no precautions, no consideration of the warnings in the
book, and brought forth no prayers nor fasting, nor pulled any of the tools
which the writer demands the reader to craft in preparation for such a
spiritually dangerous task, as the calling forth of spirits with which we were
too youthful and ignorant to consider as real things. No, we were young, and
did not think that the reality of the mind was what was being played with, so
foolish were we to think that the spiritual world was a mere plaything.
Our hands, guided by our shared minds, called whatever spirits
may have been nearby and available to our inquiries. The glass moved, slowly at
first, but smoothly, our fingers barely touching, one finger each, so as to
keep each of us from being blamed for guiding its action. And it began with a
bit of a story, which I attempt to recall as clearly as possible, considering
both the decades which have passed, and my own muddled recollection due to too
many glasses of wine.
Small Town
Canada
Or
Long Pig
Winter
“We were only children, our mother and father young, and we were
poorer than dirt poor”, began the first spirit, who had introduced herself as
MM.
“The winter was our first in this place, we were not prepared
for the cold. We did not have but flour and water to eat, each day, sometimes
with a polish of tasteless pigs fat, sometimes with a boiled mouse. Often
enough, we would be lucky to fill our hunger pains with grass roots, frozen
worms, beetles, and sometimes bark cut from the bushes nearby. We were in no
place to complain, nor could we, since then we spoke only Bohunk, as the
neighbors would say, Polish.
“Each week, we would stand in line at the local catholic church,
in hopes of filling our tin mugs with enough broth and a dried up chunk of
brown bread to help keep our teeth from falling out. It did little to keep us
fattened up.
“There were four of us children, the youngest but a baby, barely
three months old when the winter came early, the leaves were still hanging to
the trees when the icy winds swept in. We did what we could to gather branches
on the way home from the school house, and if we could, rose hips and dandelion
roots, if we could pull them out of the ground before they froze solid. Our
father learned how to set a snare with a bit of wire he’d pulled from a fence
post, and fashioned like a makeshift noose, would occasionally murder a
squirrel.
“The harshest point of winter came after St. Stephen’s that
winter, and we woke to find that the second youngest, little Gurta, had died in
the night, her frozen little hands blue as the snow drifts shortly following
sunset. Without ever speaking of it again, we would make good use of her,
boiling her fat little body in bits and pieces in the little pot bellied stove.
The soup would serve to keep us alive for the following weeks, when the
youngest, David, would follow her into the pot, his muffled cries in the night
suddenly silenced, replaced with the bubbling of the pot. We were fortunate to
be gifted a bag of dried beans from a neighbor, who had heard from my mother of
our sad loss, the neighbors believing that we had buried them under the showy
frozen ground near the fence post, small crosses marking their imaginary plots.
“We made it through that winter, but not before my father would
leave to forage for something to keep us from complete sallow faced starvation,
and never return. His was a sad fate, having fallen through the shallow ice of
the river near town, struggling to catch a fish which would never come.
“When spring finally lifted the cold from our bones, we reported
the loss of family to the local constabulary, and identified the empty grave
plots near the fencepost as the final resting places of our siblings, which,
when sought after by an inquiry, were found to have been dug up and dragged off
by wolves, or dogs. No one would search too hard for the bones, which were
scattered nearby in a field, cracked open, marrow dug out, it kept mother’s
cheeks rosy enough.
“The following season, Mother was to find the fancy of a local
butcher, his wife having passed through the winter as well, and as luck would
have it, we would never find ourselves needing to feast quietly upon our own,
ever again. But that old butcher was known to help the constabulary dispose of
certain ne’er-do-wells whose disappearance may be easily forgotten, as skunk
drunk vagabonds happened through every so often, causing trouble, as they did.
No one ever really asked about what farm supplied what ground up pork. It was
common enough to find that the stew meat didn’t always match the packaging. But
still, our little town shared their silence, and none ever much spoke up about
it, until now. Tell no one, keep my silence, or suffer my secret following you
all to hell.”