Lena St. Clair
When I was little, my mother told me my great-grandfather had sentenced a beggar to die in the worst possible way, and that later the dead man came bad killed my great-grandfather. Either that, or he died of influenza one week later.
I used to play out the beggars last moments over and ain in my head. In my mind, I saw the executiorip off the mans shirt and lead him into the open yard. "This traitor," read the executioner, "is senteo die the death of a thousand cuts." But before he could even raise the sharp sword to whittle his life away, they found the beggars mind had already broken into a thousand pieces. A few days later, my great-grandfather looked up from his books and saw this same man looking like a smashed vase hastily put back together. "As the sword was cutting me down," said the ghost, "I thought this was the worst I would ever have to endure. But I was wrong. The worst is oher side." And the dead man embraced my great-grandfather with the jagged pieces of his arm and pulled him through the wall, to show him what he meant.
I once asked my mother how he really died. She said, "In bed, very quickly, after being sick for only two days."
"No, no, I meaher man. How was he killed? Did they slice off his skin first? Did they use a cleaver to chop up his bones? Did he scream and feel all ohousand cuts?"
"Annh! Why do you Ameris have only these morbid thoughts in your mind?" cried my mother in ese. "That man has been dead for almost seventy years. What does it matter how he died?"
I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that happen to you, to know how you avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable. Because, even as a young child, I could sehe unspoken terrors that surrounded our house, the ohat chased my mother until she hid in a secret dark er of her mind. And still they found her. I watched, over the years, as they devoured her, piece by piece, until she disappeared and became a ghost.
As I remember it, the dark side of my mother sprang from the basement in our old house in Oakland. I was five and my mother tried to hide it from me. She barricaded the door with a wooden chair, secured it with a and two types of key locks. And it became so mysterious that I spent all my energies unraveling this door, until the day I was finally able to pry it open with my small fingers, only to immediately fall headlong into the dark chasm. And it was only after I stopped screaming—I had seen the blood of my nose on my mothers shoulder—only then did my mother tell me about the bad man who lived in the basement and why I should never open the dain. He had lived there for thousands of years, she said, and was so evil and hungry that had my mother not rescued me so quickly, this bad man would have planted five babies in me and theen us all in a six-course meal, tossing our bones on the dirty floor.
And after that I began to see terrible things. I saw these things with my ese eyes, the part of me I got from my mother. I saw devils dang feverishly beh a hole I had dug in the sandbox. I saw that lightning had eyes and searched to strike down little children. I saw a beetle wearing the face of a child, which I promptly squashed with the wheel of my tricycle. And when I became older, I could see things that Causasian girls at school did not. Monkey rings that would split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space. Tether balls th