Breadcrumb #199

CHRISTIE DONATO

There are a total of four books currently on my Kindle: The Book of Honorius, The Greater Key of Solomon, The Munich Manual of Demonic Magic (or the Forbidden Rites), and From Grief to Growth: Coming to Terms with the Death of a Loved One and Getting the Most Out of Your Life. My aunt had made me download the last one. She’s convinced that it’s essential reading for me, a girl who recently experienced the death of a loved one, namely my mother. She succumbed to a year long battle with cancer a few months back. The latter is also the only e-book I have yet to open. 

    During the period of time directly after my mother’s funeral, I was in sort of a weird place. I was reeling from her not-so-sudden death and a not-so surprising break-up (if you could even call it that). Can you break up with someone you were never technically dating in the first place? He was the guy I had been talking to. The guy I was no longer seeing where things were going with. In his defense, he had been pretty upfront about what he wanted from our relationship at the very beginning, which was next to nothing. He was careful to throw the disclaimer “I’m really just looking for something casual” my way the third or fourth time we “hung out”. Casual definitely did not mean a girl with a dying mother. A girl with a soon-to-be dead mom. Death was decidedly not casual. 

    So we ended things six months ago, and by “we” I mean he told me he thought we should just be friends, and I pretended to be cool about it because at that point I was determined to prove just how chill I could be for the benefit of the most half-assed dude I’d ever dated. Sorry, “talked to”. Also because the rest of my life was falling apart in the most horrifying way, and it was getting harder and harder to even be bothered by any of the bad stuff anymore. I was desensitized to all the bad, like a teen boy after endless hours of Call of Duty. 

“Casual definitely did not mean a girl with a dying mother. A girl with a soon-to-be dead mom. Death was decidedly not casual. ”

    In retrospect, maybe the half-assed dude could sense that I was on the verge of some kind of massive psychotic break, or maybe that’s giving him way too much credit. Either way, it was in the aftermath of the death and the break-up that I started practicing black magic. 

    I was a novice, for sure, having never been formally trained in witchcraft. As far as I knew there was no coven in East Harlem currently accepting initiates, and even if there were one they probably wouldn’t approve of my motivation for practicing magic. This meant that I had to start from scratch, and so I spent endless hours typing phrases like “summoning the dead”, and “invoking the spirits of the deceased” and simply “necromancy” into Google. Initially it was all out of curiosity, but the further I went down the internet rabbit hole, the more I started to believe that this was a legitimate outlet for my grief. I bought incense and oils from those stands along 125th Street. I Yelped occult stores in New York City and actually had the balls to visit one of them on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I briefly considered Craigslist as a means for finding a fellow black magic practitioner, particularly one with more experience who could help me to prepare for the ritual, but I was unsure which category it fell under. I poured through PDFs of different grimoires in search of the right demon to conjure as a bridge between my world and the one in which my mother now resided. 

    I shared my new-found obsession with no one. I regularly stayed up too late researching spells and rituals and then slept in till the mid-afternoon, only leaving my apartment for class, and blowing off my small group of friends so consistently that eventually they stopped texting me altogether. I couldn’t even blame them for abandoning me. Someone else’s grief can be too much for most people my age to deal with, especially when you just want to worry about normal things like the stress of midterms and chatting with dudes on the latest hook-up app. Grief had made me into a social pariah at school, and it suited me just fine. 

    Anyways, I know what you’re thinking. Clearly I was meddling with forces far beyond my control, and I did briefly imagine a scenario where I accidentally unleashed a seriously evil demon into our physical plane, hence setting into motion the end of the world as we know it. However, I figured it was highly unlikely a demon that powerful would ever appear before a witch as lowly as myself. We all do stupid, and sometimes dangerous, things out of a misplaced sense of love, and I am no exception. So believe me when I say that I never meant for this.

• • •

 

Breadcrumb #198

GABRIELLE JORDAN STEIN

You had seen my name in text.
It was one of the names next to a circle of an image of a girl.
You swiped right.
You told me it would have been cool,
if we had met the day we,
he and I,
broke up.
How cool.
A circle on a screen.
To be toggled between.
To be bought a drink.
Left or right.
You had never heard my name out loud.

You learned of me before you knew me. 
Before you learned my name.
A traveler.
Investigator.
Your questions pried.
Filling me with more questions,
never anything of your own.
You collected, harvested information.
I lifted my skin for you.

By the time you learned of the ‘ga’ coupled with the ‘be’,
and it escaped your lips in a mechanical tryst of simulated passion,
I had convinced myself that it was
good enough. 
Warm body,
enough.
Apathetic lover.
Enough. 
We tell ourselves lies to sleep through the night,
but I ever slept one next to you. 

‘I dig you,’ you said.
Upon learning my name,
you no longer did.

Learn of me,
drink from me.
Discard me.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
Left.
Right.
Drinks.

You moaned, ‘gabby.’ 
No capital ‘G’. 
Before you learned of my name,
you entered me.
You told me I was yours.
That I belonged to you.
Role play.
Trying on a role.
Learning from me,
taking from me.
Rolling over after.
Laughing.
‘I never talk dirty.’

A two year thirst slaked, 
I couldn’t respond.

‘I don’t think I can be overexposed to the world,’ you said.
While you may expose through story or lore, you are never exposed.
No symbiosis. No reciprocity.
You are an explorer, a traveler.

You have no home,
no entrance.
I am not your home.
I am not your host. 

And while I may have found comfort in your ‘Hey lady.’ this or your five roses that,
I wonder if I was, 
‘Hey lady.’ 
because you did not know my name.
Copy and pasted,
left and right.
“Hey lady.”

Even after you learned my name, it never came alive off of your tongue.
Tongue spreading, lips pursing and parting, 
no.
“gabby.”
It stopped short.
No breathy and lingering ‘yyyyyyy’
no heat grazing my ear.
No want, no need
No Gabby.
Uttered to remind yourself of where you were, what country you were invading.
To remind you that you are an explorer, and that this is not your home.

• • •

Breadcrumb #197

ALLISON MAPES

I was 21 years old when my father’s cancer killed him, and I spiraled out of control. 

    It was that same year a peer at school became schizophrenic and started hearing my voice in his head. Among his illusions was the one where we had been in love and he had broken my heart, despite the fact that the most we’d done together was have a polite conversation. He’d apologize to me over and over whenever he’d manage to get me alone shaking, crying asking me to take him back. He followed me, called me, texted me, left notes for me on my apartment door. He’d ask people if they’d seen me, if they knew where I was.

    He’d invite himself over, show up during my shifts at work, watch me from far away, sit behind me in class, send me songs he wrote about me, and harassed anyone I showed interest in. When my keys went missing and the last place I had seen them were in my bag which hung over the back of my seat in the class he sat behind me in, I rushed to change my locks. The night before the locksmith was able to come, I lay in lay the dark, listening for footstep outside. He was always there. And the thing was, the campus was so small it actually didn’t seem that weird for him to always be present in some way. He didn’t look that out of place, everyone knew everyone so he was always connected to the group of people around me in some way, he always found a way in. 

    It’s hard for me to trace the path of events during that time. Mostly what I remember was feeling sick a lot. A dull ache pulsed in the back of my head and I had a sore throat most days. I ate very little and slept as much as was possible. My grief pummeled me, disabled me, for a long time I saw no way out of it. I learned that it’s possible to feel something so deeply it consumes you and then it kills you. I taught myself distance, self medication, and compartmentalization. I taught myself to hang on, to live without faith, or a plan, or control. Most days I was floating through. Most days I was aimless, most days passed in a haze. But I was alive even if it didn’t always feel like it.

“My grief pummeled me, disabled me, for a long time I saw no way out of it.”

    I went back to visit campus once shortly after graduating. I heard that he was still there, his parents had taken him home for a semester so he could get some help, and now he was back finishing up his credits. But there was no way he would even know I was there for that one night, I wouldn’t be anywhere near him.

    After a late night of partying, I ended up passing out on my friends Greg’s couch, in his dormitory. I woke up suddenly around 5am, it was still dark except for a little bit of light creeping through the windows from the street lamps outside. Cloudy, hungover, I thought it was my thirst that had woken me. Unable to find my glasses, I went without them to pour myself some water and as I stood there holding my blurry glass, something began to feel slightly askew around me. I had that sick feeling that comes after a night of heavy drinking. “Did I do something bad last night”? I thought back but nothing floated to the top of my memory.

    The feeling persisted, and I thought to knock on Greg’s door, I didn’t think he’d mind me waking him up and I suddenly felt like I could not be alone. I spotted my glasses on the floor next to the couch and pushed them on. The far wall came into view and I froze, confused at what I was seeing. Across the entire wall, a manic red pen scrawl stretched from top to bottom. Slanted, illegible, it was the work of a jittery hand in the dark, the message was both illogical and menacing and at the very bottom, clearly written was my name.

    I wanted very badly to think this was a prank but I knew deep down that it was not. The air felt suddenly electrified around me, my heart raced and I tried very hard to listen for any noises through the buzzing sound forming inside my head. I glanced at the front door, the lock was not bolted and my stomach dropped. I looked at Greg’s door, maybe 20 feet away. I then looked at the bathroom door right next to it. It was slightly ajar, the lights off. I made up my mind quickly, and vaulted across to Greg’s door and slipped silently inside his room. 

    Life in New York felt claustrophobic after that. In an attempt to get away I went to Maine to live and work in Acadia National Park. With very little money, or knowledge about what I was doing and where I was going, I drove myself 12 hours in one shot to the cabin I’d be sharing with 6 other girls. I worked in the restaurant 6 days a week 10 hours each day. On the 7th day I’d venture, usually by myself, into the woods. A small map tucked in my back pocket, a water bottle in my backpack, desperate to be alone with my thoughts.

    In late October, tourist season was dying down and as the town emptied I began to feel anxious to get back home, to return to my life in New York. The days were so short and the temperature dropped a degree each day, an adamant countdown to a deep freeze. One of my last hikes there started as a nighttime walk. But it wasn’t long at all before I took a wrong term and suddenly felt disoriented by my surroundings. Night fell all at once around me and suddenly I came to the realization that I was lost in the dark.

    I pulled my phone out of my bag, no service but still a bit of battery. I walked another ten minutes to a trail post and tried desperately to read the map posted on it, but it was an older one and had suffered some from water damage over the years, the faded line and symbols offered me little guidance, and I kept walking hoping I’d reach another. To the right of me was a large lake, I had the strong sense that the trail would loop around on the other side and lead me back, but my stomach was in knots as I tried to contemplate if it’d be a better plan to turn around and try to trace my steps backwards.

    I decided I’d gone too far for that, that I’d follow the trail ahead around the lake and make my way back that way. Luckily the clouds would drift apart from time to time and light up the path ahead of me, I wasn’t tired yet but my heart beat very hard as I continued on, racing faster and faster every time I came around a bend and saw nothing except more darkness ahead of me. My mind did its due diligence, assuring me I’d make it back soon. There might even be dinner left at the lodge, or at least dessert. Just a little further, just a little further, we must be close now.

    Hours passed, and I panicked. I began running through the woods desperate to reach a new point, to come to a clearing, to see a light from the cabins. I thought to scream for help, but I was terrified to make it known that I was out there to anything unwanted. In the pitch black silence I was invisible. I stopped and sat down on a rock at the edge of the trail. I breathed in deeply and began to cry, the darkness so thick around me I thought I might suffocate in it. Morning would come I repeated to myself, it was only a matter of time before the light came back, and I would have a window of time to find my way out before it falls dark again.

• • •

Breadcrumb #195

KATHERINE FLANNERY DERING

I’d left three small plates of food scraps
on the ground by my deck, and brown, 
crusted-over bits still clung to the rims.

The food eaten, perhaps, by that family of raccoons-- 
burly beggars, stealers of garbage, makers
of messes in driveways.

Two mammoth crows strutted about from
bird feeder to bird bath, their blue-black plumage
shining like a businessman’s just-polished dress shoes. 

Had they eaten the food scraps, I wondered. 
But what scraps were they, anyway, I suddenly thought.  
And where had the plates gone?  

Just at the point I had conjured up a family of opossums, 
squeaking and grunting as their pink, obscene forms
dug into bits of week-old black beans and chicken cacciatore, 

next to the garden hose that lay there like gigantic tangled
green spaghetti, it occurred to me that I was dreaming.
There were no three small plates. 

They must be some neural transplant
of the three little, green-rimmed dishes my sister
uses to feed her three cats, 

or used to do, before two of them
disappeared in the night and
were never seen again.  

• • •