Long, long ago but not so far away,
I was born. Okay, so it wasn’t that long ago, but considering the story
I’m about to tell, it could be interpreted as such. It all depends upon your definition and perception
of time: is it linear or layered? For
most of my life, I assumed it was linear.
You’re born, you exist, you die, and there’s no going backward…or
forward. But the more ghost-hunting
shows I watched (stop laughing), the more I started to wonder about the
linearness of life. Of course, now I’m
giving away the story before it even gets started and must therefore shut up
about it. Where was I going with this?
Oh
yes! I was born. I was born in the mid-70s to a typical
Central Texas farming-and-ranching couple.
We lived in a modest two-story house on the outskirts of Austin, just
outskirty enough to have an open field behind our house bordered on all sides
by trees of various levels of attractiveness: oak, pecan, sycamore, cottonwood,
and a smattering of those annoying mesquites that are only good for flavoring
barbecue sauce, apparently. There was a
creek at one end of the field that generally had running water in it except for
the summertime when rain decided not to grace us with its presence overly
often. I particularly loved that spot
until one afternoon when I unwittingly sat down on a piece of driftwood…and
noticed that a four-foot rattlesnake already occupied the space. My Discman and I removed ourselves in short
order. When not cavorting in the great
outdoors listening to music and singing at the top of my lungs to reptilian
audiences that likely wanted to bite me, I loved to read and write stories
which transformed me into the biggest daydreamy English nerd ever. Add to that a penchant for all things sci-fi
and fantasy, and you’ve got a quirky personality.
When I wasn’t
enjoying my favorite pastimes, my parents used me as free child labor in the
cotton fields. Okay, so it wasn’t that
bad, but I never want to chop up another sunflower again. Where was I?
Geez, I’m lousy at narratives.
Anyway, we always had a dog and a few cats that kept inbreeding and
producing imbecile kittens which, of course, meant that they inbred themselves
out of existence. The dogs fared much
better (because they were big man-sluts who spread their canine seed far and
wide) and provided adequate “a stranger’s here” alerts over the years with
their voluble barking. My Dad also kept
chickens, but I’ll tell you more about that nightmare later.
From
little girlhood I’d always been fascinated with the supernatural. Most people seem to be, but I was one of the
unusual ones (unusual for back then, anyway) who took said fascination to the
next level by organizing community Halloween ghost hunts for all the local kids. There was this creepy old broken-down house a
couple of neighborhoods away from ours that simply begged to be investigated,
so every year I conned my best friend Mick into accompanying me as co-leader…well,
protecting me would be more accurate. Why nobody ever tore that sagging wooden
remnant of a building down was beyond my comprehension, but as things turned
out, it was a darn fortuitous thing that they didn’t. So now that you have a bit of backstory,
we’ll get to the actual story.
