The sound of breaking glass woke her from a fitful sleep. She jumped up from the bare floor of a vacant rental she was remodeling that she and her husband owned. She had left him, for good, this time and had only a blanket, a gun, and the clothes on her back. She grabbed up the SKS and ran the length of the house, on unfinished floors, sliding on silent feet into the dining area. She pointed the barrel into the kitchen at the silhouette of a man standing across the threshold of her house, with the back door open and his hand still on the interior knob, reaching through the broken pane. She loaded a cartridge into the chamber, the unmistakable clacking alerted the intruder and he yanked his hand back through the door in a panic and the moment etched itself in her mind.
“Get off my porch, motherfucker, before I blow you off!” she growled. Her would-be assailant leapt out the door and stumbled down the rickety metal steps, running for his life. Her husband had come in the dead of night to settle their divorce, before it was even filed. Had he advanced, instead of retreated, she would have shot him, center of mass. It was open and shut self-defense. There was a lot of property at stake and she knew he’d sooner murder her than settle it in court.
She’d been battered for years and it got worse every time. There was the time he held her for seven hours in the basement interrogating her, beating her to get her to confess the name of every boy she had dated or had slept with before they got together. He suspected three, but there had been twenty-two. She didn’t give up a single name and endured what seemed like an eternal WWF event as he battered her from one end of the basement to the other on what was the longest night of her life. He eventually stopped because he had worn his rage out. When his mother saw her pulverized, broken body the next day, Mara knew she had colluded by watching the baby overnight. Her body took half a year to heal from that event on the surface. Her mind suppressed the memory, but her cells did not. Her nervous system was shot.
She was reminded of the Steinberg/ Nussbaum case and the media’s portrayal of a woman in complicit attendance in her daughter’s death as a catatonic victim of domestic violence. She remembered her mil’s words…they calm down after forty… Uh-uh…fuck that. Resolutely, she took a position in the dining room, against the wall where she could see both front and back doors and sat, knees up with the rifle across her lap, waiting for the night to pass.
Her dream was lucid…but her mind was racing…she was awake, contemplating the broken bones, rapes, black eyes and doubting nothing about her decision to leave…it wasn’t planned at all. She went out for a loaf of bread and never returned. She called the house from a motel close to work to tell her child to put some clothes in a bag, she was coming to pick her up, but Lewis had listened on the other extension and immediately moved her to his mother’s house and filed emergency custody papers against Mara. The judge, a political friend of his mother’s, immediately ruled against her.
She worried for the child she left behind. She wasn’t sure if Lewis would hurt her…it was Mara he felt empowered to abuse, she reasoned. Lewis was permanently angry with her for not being a virgin when they married. Hell, she was pregnant when they crossed paths again, at eighteen, he knew she was carrying another man’s child when he proposed, she had been honest from the get go, not that her belly would let her lie. Her child’s bio dad was caught kissing her little sister, twelve at the time, so Mara had slapped the snot out of him and sent him on his way. She suspected her husband’s real problem was he had zero girlfriend experience. He threw off a weird vibe. He never got over missing out on his treasured moment and she thought he was a fucking idiot and needed get over his asinine virgin fantasy.
She was simultaneously walking the shoreline of a paddleball court in the middle of the deep woods that contained the ocean tide in a long treasured, but curious childhood dream. She knew if her father was alive, he would have shot Lewis the first time he hit her. Her mother told her she made her bed and needed to lie in it. Few cared for the orphaned, she reminded herself. She wasn’t really an orphan, though…her mother had defaulted on the family when her dad died in the summer of 1980 and Mara eventually ran away. All she knew was that he never came home from work one day and her life had changed forever. A blackness had dropped over her, reverberating, like a steel door slamming down the moment the two police officers came to the door and informed them John Wright died at work from a massive heart attack. Three years later, the family redeemed her from foster care because of a settlement from her father’s insurance on behalf of all the children.
Marriage had few benefits…she worked because she wanted to, not because she had to. She discovered she really disliked her husband on every level and his family. They were bigoted and violent, and as Italians, considered themselves the crown jewels of humanity. They bragged about mob ties. They were secure in an ancestor’s wealth. Mara focused on developing herself along with a drive for materials. She owned a house before she had a driver’s license or a HS diploma. She collected property, art, coins, and rare books, but kept a secret fund in case of trouble. Her goal was to be a millionaire by age thirty. She dropped out of beauty school to take a real estate course and read everything she could find on creative financing. She negotiated for her first property at age nineteen and bought her first house at twenty but the family’s sketchy attorney put it in her husband’s name, though it was a community property state. Lesson learned, she retained her own attorney for future closings. She was not opposed to starting over with nothing at twenty-eight. She broke the teen-mom mold and defied poverty. She knew could get it all back, even quicker. Her only concern was to stay safe and collect her child. She was becoming fierce. She felt violence in her hands and her mind locked onto a new thought. She was done being the victim and a plan quietly unfolded…a recovery op to secure her child and the contents of the safe. She was very good at one thing. Chess.
The water twinkled in the golden glow of a light never defined. Waves lapped at a shoreline articulated by concrete and grass, surrounded by deep, tall woods. The white wall of the paddleball court rose like a monolith from the deep, rectangular mystery of this finite ocean and the feeling of unsettled curiosity pervaded her being. Her outlook was overlaid by the sense of deep unknowns, yet this place in mind was familiar and soothing. She retreated into the marigold dreamscape and stood watch over her future until dawn.
The Initiation
Mara had just gotten into bed. It was a cold March midnight, ten years and a lifetime away from the last chapter of her life and she was snuggling deep into her bed when she heard a gentle, feminine Voice say, “Maraaa!” She questioned her sanity for a moment, as her lover lay loudly snoring.
“Mara!” she heard the Voice call out again, patient, but gently insistent.
Mara bolted upright and listened, expecting to hear neighbors speaking or music coming from the closely stacked balconies of the apartment complex. The Voice came from the ethers and all around at the same time.
“Mara! Go outside!”
Mara jumped out of bed, compelled to exit the sliding glass door of the bedroom balcony which overlooked a wooded stream. At the doorway, the Voice echoed,
“As you were born!”
Mara took this to mean naked…startled and shy, she obediently peeled off her nightgown and stepped out onto the balcony nude, but not before grabbing an owl feather that her girlfriend’s conservation-officer stepfather had given her just weeks before. That was fuckin’ odd…am I nuts? Why would I even respond to a disembodied voice telling me to go outside? Why would I take the feather? Why would I even have a feather? Then she remembered she had wished for one. She looked back toward her partner’s sleeping form,
“Whatever happens, don’t look!” she warned, not knowing where those words came from and slid the door silently shut.
Icy rain stung her skin as she stepped out onto the balcony and faced north, shivering. She was the last person she knew who would be outdoors in the noon of night, naked on purpose in a cold rainstorm, listening to voices. Unconscious action trumped reason and she touched the tip of the owl feather to her menses and held the feather up, offering her blood to the night sky. Lightning struck her forehead and thunder rolled.
The Voice demanded, “Who is here for her?!”
“Isis!” another feminine voice responded.
Mara cried out, “and Jesus…’cause I don’t know what the fuck is going on!”
The wind whirled her around to face east and lightning struck Mara in the forehead again, this time exiting her crown, hands and feet, lighting up her body with divine voltage too powerful to comprehend. The light blinded her yet all she could see was light emanating in through a blast in her forehead. Somehow, she continued to hold the feather up, arms and legs shaking, extended to the Voice. She was spun around, lifted, to face south and lightning struck her forehead again, followed by thunderclaps and a freezing downpour. She was spun to face the west and again to the north, each time lightning striking her body and soul, lighting up the balcony. The force released her, dropping her feet back to the deck. She suffered no harm but her body was shaken and weak, cold and wet. She was baptized by the elements and her blackened footprints were cooked into the wooden deck where her fate was sealed. She staggered through the door and collapsed into bed. She was trembling violently with strange energies and exhaustion. Suddenly, night turned into day and she was flying with a giant owl over the creek behind the apartments. There was a conversation she couldn’t remember. The vision continued in brilliant color as they rose to the outer atmosphere, leading a light-band of souls to another star system, revealing a secret mass destiny. When she awoke, key parts of her experience retreated into the fog of her unconscious mind.
