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 Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 8:32 pm
NEW BEGINNINGS } "Ow!" She could see Stanley's eyes well up with tears from where she stood as the top of the stairs. He had tripped near the bottom of the stairwell and was rubbing a red knee. He had knocked it hard and it would probably bruise.
Zita frowned as she heard sounds of mirth coming from around the corner. One glance at Stanley told her he could not hear it. This did not surprise her. She had been seeing and hearing things no one else did for several months now. Whenever something bad happened around the orphanage, she had to suspect the source was her not-so-imaginary friends. They were constantly running amock and because she was often in the vicinity of the mischief they caused, she was in trouble often. It wasn't fair.
But Zita had learned at an early age that life wasn't fair. She had no family or home to call her own. She lived in St. Jerome's Orphanage in Durem, which had taken her in as a baby. She couldn't remember much before the orphanage, but she knew she must have once had a family. Sometimes in dreams she remembered what it was like.
The other kids in the orphanage liked to invent stories about their families and talk about how they would someday come back to claim them. When they did, they would have wild stories about how they had been seperated unjustly in the first place. Zita knew this story wasn't true. She could feel it, the same way she got a stomach ache around Alex the day before he tried to burn down the orphanage.
"Zita!" One of the matronly women who ran the orphanage, Ms. Gerta, placed a heavy hand on the young girl's shoulder. "Why are you always where the action is?" It was a common question asked by the other kids as well. It had garnered her a reputation for being lucky, although she personally knew as many bad as good things happened in her presence. People seem to ignore the bad though, as if they deserved it - and they usually did.
One of the older girls, Alison, had started a rumor that Zita was a witch. But most of the other kids found the story too unbelievable for it to catch on. She was relieved not to be found out, because the truth was that she had very little control over what happened to who.
"I don't know," she said to Gerta, annoyed. It didn't make sense to tell the truth. She had tried, in the past, to explain about the little ghosts that followed her around. She had tried to tell people that they were the source of both mischief and good fortune around the orphanage, but no one believed her. The nuns had called them imaginary friends and the other kids had tried to tell her about their own imaginary friends, who Zita learned eventually were not real. After a while she had just stopped trying to explain to people.
People got mad at her for the actions of her 'friends' occasionally and, out of necessity, Zita had learned to fight. She was small, but tough. She used her intelligence and speed to her advantage on the playground. It wasn't always enough, but it kept kids from challenging her without good reason.
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Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 9:02 pm
OPEN EYES, part one } For someone with such an interesting waking life, Zita's dreams were thoroughly boring in comparison. If some hint of her past or her future was to wing its metaphysical way into her life, it would not be through them.
It would be through what everyone else believed in secretly, but openly explained away - luck. While other people might talk about expected values and probabilities, Zita lived with the truth of the matter. Her companions, unseen by the rest of the world, tipped the balance between good luck and bad at will.
One dismal and rainy day, when all of the kids were penned in the building like so much cattle, Zita found out the answer to a question other people ask themselves their entire lives: Why am I here?
Tempers were running high among the kids, and the nuns were having trouble keeping it under control. Like a wildfire, fights broke out here and there, no matter how much work was done to soothe and contain it. One of those trouble spots broke out right next to Zita. One shove went wide and suddenly she was in the middle of the action, throwing punches and kicking shins with the best of them. It was a whirlwind. The little ghosties jumped in too and attached themselves to Zita, hiding their eyes against her skin and randomly lashing out little ectoplasmic tentacles.
When it was over, the nuns having waded into the mess to pull out Zita by her collar like a baby kitten, she had dealt out three black eyes, a mess of bruises, and a broken wrist. Normally she might have felt bad about the broken wrist, but Chris deserved it. He was a bully. And if that wasn't enough, he had told everyone he thought Zita was pretty.
"Zita!" Ms. Mary put her hand under Zita's chin and forced the girl to look at her. "Your behavior was innappropriate. I suggest you apologize immediately."
"No," Zita grinned, wrenching her chin away. "I refuse to apologize. I didn't start this and at least one of them deserved it."
Silence followed this pronouncement. Absolute silence. No one even drew a breath while they all waited for the explosion to begin. And it did. But Zita didn't hear a word. She smiled throughout the entire lecture, unrepentant, and in punishment was exiled to the windowless attic.
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Posted: Fri May 12, 2006 10:03 pm
OPEN EYES, part two } Still in a good mood, despite her exile, Zita had her arms tucked up near her chin and was punching out in the air. She was re-enacting, with the help of one of the ghosties, the fight that had gotten her there.
"And then I did this, and this," Pausing for breath, she looks around at her audience. Most of the ghosties are gathered around at a safe distance, watching the action, but one of them - the one she called Gawk - has wandered off on his own. He was twirling around in the dast bunnies of a far off corner. "Gawk." Zita takes a few steps towards her wayward spirit and startles him. He jumps and a shelf topples down, squishing him. The contents of the shelf, an ornate silver box and a book of matches, scatter around him.
With a growl of disgust, Zita strides over to lift the shelf off Gawk, making clear footprints in the dust on the floor. She is clearly the first person to set foot in this corner of the attic in a long time. Once Gawk was free of the weight of the shelf, he fled back to the safety of the rest of the group. Then, while Zita cleans up the mess that was made, his compatriots pet him and then started exchanging high-fives.
As she picks up the silver box, the cover slips a bit and an alluring smell wafts out to tickle her nose and her memory. Curious, she opens it further and pulls out a thin stick of incense. She doesn't know what it is, but the ghosties do - and suddenly they are gathering around her. One of them is holding up a match, which has been struck against the rough wooden floor. Another of them takes the stick of incense and sticks it firmly into a crack between the floorboards. Then it is lit, and the room disappears.
The smoke swirls around Zita and her eyes roll back in her head. Instead of the darkness of the back of her eyes, however, she is seeing something else. The world is blanketed in gradients of color, which look like hills and valleys. As they move and shift, she realizes she is seeing through walls and across space. These hills and valleys are places and people. It is dizzying to watch them milling around and she blinks several times before something new parades into her field of vision. Gawk, she can tell, the way she can identify her own limbs.
Gawk? She says, but without moving her mouth. He nods quickly, making her feel ill. It appears her ghosties cannot speak in this plane anymore than they can speak in the one she normally inhabits. He is moving purposefully, though, towards a close valley of deep purple. It is almost black and it feels wrong to her. It needs to be evened out, she thinks to herself. It would all be so much easier to watch if things were even. A little dot of bright color, Gawk is becoming brighter and brighter as he tumbles into the valley.
A family wants to adopt me? Zita hears a voice she recognizes as Emily, a morose girl three years her senior. Are you sure? It sounds like she is far away and through a long tunnel. But the valley has begun to lift and lighten. Gawk detached and popped back across a long distance, his shade lightening out as he came back to the attic.
She wasn't sure when she had fallen asleep, but Zita awoke in the attic some amount of time later. Her face was pressed against the rough wood of the floor and her body felt stiff and unfamiliar. Her vision had returned to normal, but at the edges of her vision she occasionally caught hints of the same colors she had seen overlaid over everything while in the incense-induced trance.
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