My Wrong Brain Writes

The Setup...
Three random words to be used in a story involving a random gerbil comment: exorcist, flatulence, lamb

So, here goes:

Sometimes I feel just like a gerbil running around and around on his wheel! Except I'm lacking vital organs, you know, those long hanging things that swing pendulously as I run around and around and around repetitively, endlessly, monotonously. Well, that's not completely true-- my hanging things are on a different part of my anatomy. But I digress.

Around and around I go, running to the store, running to the car repair place to pick up the old clunker, around the office looking for papers to copy, around the house with a vacuum, around the square, my footsteps echoing in the silence. I wonder why I do it sometimes. Sometimes the silence gets to you here. You're alone. You're running, flitting from open antique shop to WalMart to Costco. You pass block after block after block of dark caverns chained shut, deserted, boarded up. It's like it never stops, even though on a slow day when I'm riddled with pain in my knees, I can make it around the square in ten minutes.

The darkness is everywhere. It follows you as you duck in to pay Margie Olufson a quick call while picking up yet another jelly glass for your groaning cupboards. You see it tailing you down the aisles of WalMart, where half of the remaining population of Groaning Fork, Wyoming now works. Maybe it's the tension on their faces, or maybe it's the pain in their eyes, but the darkness lingers, even in the brightness of warehouse fluourescents.

It didn't used to be this way. I remember, oh, twenty years ago, the square bustling with Farmer Josh's Wednesday produce market. Farmers from all around used to bring their trucks loaded with lush, fragrant corn which would give you the squats later if you ate the six cobs I used to love to down as my Wednesday night dinner. And the flatulence the next day was incredible! Farmer Fred would bring fresh lamb cutlets which he'd sell for the then princely sum of $3.00 per pound. Now, if I'm lucky, I can get cut-rate WalMart hamburger for that price. I'd grill it up on Thursday, and, if I had recovered from the previous evening's digestive issues, serve it up with a luscious cob of corn which was sweeter than candy without being cooked. And the Fourth of July picnic! The band blared Stars and Stripes Forever, and rocked to the Star Spangled Banner. I looked forward to it every year.

I miss those days with a passion. It's even lonelier now that my Brian left me. Now, I know what you're thinking: what did you do to make him go, you scandalous woman? But, really, it's not that way at all. It was a heart attack that took him away from me, and Doc Earl couldn't get him to Mercy General in Choctanaw in time. The Doc was a bit slow in those days, God bless his departed soul. He left us a year ago, and those of us left gave him the best sendoff we could muster.

I can't remember when it was that people started disappearing. My Brian had been gone for five years or so when Missy Banmiller first vanished. Scuttlebutt was that she'd run off with Billy Pressler, who also came up missing. But not even Rowena Pressler had a clue where he'd left to, and she still hasn't heard from him to this day.

No one thought much about it at first, but then, three months later, Reverend John was gone. Rev had been around forever, presiding over two generations of weddings, funerals, services, and everything in between. He was our mentor, our guide, our counselor and our advisor. Brian would probably kill me, but I did have a few chats with Rev after he and I shared a few words every now and then. I'm sorry I had to mention this, Brian, really... Rev was the heart and soul of Groaning Fork, and when he was gone, we searched high and low for months, even as far as Choctanaw. Rev would never have left us; we knew it in every fiber of our beings.

Something was wrong, and when old Marissa Dandrige, the town historian and quilter, vanished without a trace two days later, the thousand of us in Groaning Fork clutched our Bibles to our hearts and prayed that whatever menace had befallen our little town would soon be lifted.

Several of us left for Cheyenne, but most of us held on with all of our hearts to our idyllic square and our dwindling Farmer's Market. But Cheyenne can't save them. Fred McMurphy disappeared last year in Cheyenne. Little JoAnne McMurphy saw him fade like a ghost as he potted and spaded soil in his garden. She screamed, and Marianne, her mother, saw the last mist of him seconds later. She wrote home to her mother-in-law my best friend Clara, who dropped dead, white as a sheet. I don't know what's happened to the McMurphys. I can only hope they've seized on a bit of a reprieve.

There's six hundred of us left now, and as the WalMart grows in size like a cancer, we, the survivors, run around, never stopping, praying that if we keep wheeling like that gerbil, we'll escape Fred McMurphy's fate. It makes me tired, running like this, but I can't stop.

Three weeks ago, we'd had enough. Jenny McFarlane's ankles were giving out after all those years of greeting customers at WalMart, and in our monthly dwindling Town Council meeting, she'd blew a gasket.

"What the hell are we doing here? Can't you all see that Cheyenne Hall is half-empty where it used to be full? We have to do something! I can't take this shit anymore!" she screamed.

I gaped. Jenny had never used a curse-word in all of the years I've known her. Not once. Not when the brick fell on her left foot and broke half of her toes. Not when she caught her husband shoving ten-dollar bills down the front of Rosy McPhee's undies at The Baudy Wench when she and the kids were making due on peanut butter and Wonder Bread.

"Jenny!" I gasped.

"We have to do something!" she yelled. "Brenda, I'd've expected better from YOU!"

Mayor McCandle said, "What do you propose?"

"We hire somebody," she said. "Someone who can contact the other side."

"What? A medium?" Joe Brown asked.

"That's not enough," she said. "Margie suggested an exorcist. Her nephew's been training with the Jesuits for a decade now."

"Are you off your rocker?" I asked Jenny. She'd always been clear about her atheism. "That muscle relaxer must be getting to you... Are your ankles ok?"

"Brenda, can you think of anything else?"

"No." Really, I needed to go for a stroll. Or a run. Or pace up and down the pallet-blocked aisles at WalMart. I needed a hug from Brian, really.

Mayor McCandle scratched his head, remembering the day that Marion had evaporated like a drop of water on a scorching griddle. "You're right, Jenny. Whatever it is, it's not natural. Let's call him in..."

There was no vote. But everyone cheered Mayor McCandle.

So that's how I ended up here, in this field, with a shovel, a burning sage bouquet, a pentagram drawn in the dirt around me. In front of me, Shamus McPhee is chanting. I think he's droning on in Latin, but my foreign language experience is really limited to a semester of bad French from forty-three years ago. I'm holding my head high, looking to the heavens, chanting, "Oh my dear Lord, save me. My God, I have done nothing but serve you and glorify your name. Well, not all the time. But I did teach little Briana and Brian Jr. about your Holy Self. Please save me, Jesus! I beg you!"

The wind swoops in all of a sudden, rippling the waves of golden grain like the Atlantic Ocean I once saw when Daddy took me to New York. I think I was six. I think to myself, "America! My fruited plain!"

I hear the brush behind me part, and I swivel my head as far as it will go. I catch a faintly brown shadow behind me, and I bite down on my tongue to keep myself from screaming. The shadow is oddly translucent, and I see glimpses of glowing blue-black in waves that can only be human hair.

"Forward, Brenda!" Shamus barks. "Keep your head forward. You must face me, no matter what happens!"

I clamp my inner thighs together hard to keep my bladder from emptying. Suddenly it seems strangely full. "What's going to happen?" I gasp.

"Just wait," says Shamus, and I feel a chill right in my heart, as if it was frozen in ice.

I look down, and a brown translucent hand is sticking out of the middle of my stomach. And then the arm follows. And a torso. My brain freezes, and for a moment my eyes see a series of spiral cairns around me. The vision passes just as the smoke, or whatever that brown substance is, passes through me. I've never been so cold in my life. Not even in that winter thirty years ago when Groaning Fork was submerged under twenty feet of snow, and we had to dig our way out of the house, our heads submerged.

"Spirit of the ancients, what is your wish?" Shamus demands. Part of me wonders if the smoke can understand English, but the rest of me wants to run far far away as fast as my hobbled knees will take me.

The smoke whips the ethereal black hair around itself, tossing its head. I think it's a woman, but who knows? From what I've seen of Native Americans, men and women both wear their hair long and flowing, like a river.

The wheat parts on either side of me and more brown smoke erupts from the gap in my peripheral vision. Around me, I hear what sounds like the laughter of the hyena they keep in the Cheyenne zoo. It's carried on the wind which whips around me and Shamus in a whirlpool. I wonder, as my thighs clamp tighter together, and sharp pains shoot through my bladder like needles from a gun, why I'm here. In the panic of the moment, I forget to pray.

"What do you wish, O Spirits?" Shamus demands, shouting over the whipping wind.

"We..." echoes back from the smoke that passed through me. "We... neeeed your... help..."

"What do you want?" I demand, a flash of anger running through me. It takes me by surprise. Clara McPhee's face dances in my mind, and I see her body lying in a casket in my mind's eye.

"Brenda!" Shamus says reprovingly. "What help do you need, Spirits?"

"Weeee... neeed... you... your... haaaard... fleeeesh..."

"What? Why are you bothering us?" I yell. "You've taken almost half of us."

"Youuuu... are... on... our... saaaacreeeed... g...round... Weee... must... fight... and... youuuu... saaaave... ussss... from... our... angryyy... gods... Theeeey... muuuust... eeeet."

"You're feeding us to your Gods? You sick bastards!" I scream.

"Noooo... youuu... not.... understand... Youuuu... save... ussss... innn... theee... after.... death... Youuuu... guard... usss... Coooome... seee..."

"Fuck you! Fuck you!" Shamus glares at me.

"Spirits," he yells. "Listen not to this one. You must tell me what to make right!"

"Yooouuu must... make... more... stones... Dig! Deeeep... Then... weee... leave... you... and the gods... eeeet."

"What?" I ask and the lead smoke touches me. I see the cairns. I see the spirals, going in from the infinite into the depths of nothingness. The nothingness of the afterlife. The blankness of the gods.

"Oh," I say, and drop the sage. I begin to dig.

Shamus smiles. "Jenny!" he calls. "You must dig! All of you!"

The brush rustles all around me, and I swear that I see the lead spirit smile. We're all out here, all six hundred of us. I smile at Jenny, as she tries to break the dry ground with her shovel.

I think it's going to be ok.