Willing
Willing
by David Michael
Hell on Earth didn’t bring the Goddess to Veta Banham, nor Veta Banham to the Goddess. The Goddess had always been there. Even before the legendary Indian princess cast herself to her death and gave Creve Coeur Lake its broken-hearted shape and name, before the first white man, black man, red man–or any other man of any color–had tramped through Missouri and claimed it as their own, the Goddess had been there, born with the world itself.
And Veta Banham felt as though she had been born just a few minutes later.
Foolishness, of course. And probably impertinent. Still she laughed, despite the darkness that touched her heart and threatened her with a creve coeur of her own.
She pulled her long gray hair together, still as full as it ever was, and strong, and held it back with her left hand while she stretched and looped an elastic band around it to keep it out of her face.
She was old. She knew it, even without looking in the mirror and seeing the tangible proof. No longer a maiden. No longer a matron.
Today’s generation resisted the appellation crone, but Veta Banham relished it. Approaching ninety, she figured she had been a crone now, in a technical sense–much like, she decided, her great-granddaughter Evie had asked about being a “technical virgin”–for as many years as she was either maiden or matron, combined.
Veta snorted, as she always did, still distracted and outraged at the concept of “technical virgin”. Now that was impertinent. As if the Goddess were a lawyer or would be fooled by the vague, imprecise affirmative that sounded like a precise negative, or vice versa. Technical virgin, indeed.
She picked up the tarnished silver frame that held Evie’s picture and considered the young beauty, remembering her own, long ago youth.
“The Goddess embraces a rainbow of colors, child,” Veta told the picture as she had told the girl in person the week before after the ritual preparations, “from black to white and all shades of gray. But She isn’t stupid. Keep yourself pure for another week, at least.” At least the girl had had the sense to ask before.
She put the picture down on her dresser again, alongside the many others that displayed her progeny, and theirs, and more, through four generations. Black and white and color, faded and crisp, alive and dead, the faces of her family looked back at her from their brass and silver and gold and polished wood frames, and she wished them all good-bye, one at a time.
“The family records,” she told the visage of her eldest, confident in the Goddess that the message would arrive when the need arose, “including Papa’s diaries, are in the black trunk in the attic, to the back. Do not sell the trunk …”
“Don’t hate your brother,” she told her second child. “He loves you and was doing what I told him …”
She held back the tears for her children, the three who still lived and the four she had buried. They would need to be strong in the coming days, so she was strong for them. With the grandchildren, though, she cried freely, tears running down her face as she told them what she could.
“Stay in school. You little scamp. You were always my favorite grandson …”
“The power, child, comes not from within you, but through you, from the Goddess …”
The messages, the last words of wisdom she had always planned to impart. Though she had hoped to give those words in person, as much as possible, from her death bed, as she reposed and retired from this earth with her family around her, wishing her well.
But the Goddess needed her for one last chore. And Veta Banham had never refused anything the Goddess asked of her.
So she made her peace as best she could, an old woman living alone since her last sister had died a year ago, but never far from her friends and family. And never closer than now, as she looked into their faces and whispered a final, “My love to you all.”
She used an antique lace handkerchief to dry her eyes and considered what must be done now.
It had been a long time since she went downtown. Long enough past that she had ridden the trolley, holding hands with her husband, the two of them going gray but still young in their hearts. She almost started crying again when she thought of Tully Banham as she had last seen him, with his wrinkled face and twinkling eyes and toothless grin, and how she would see him again soon, remade into the young man with the strong chin and gorgeous lashes, waiting for her beyond the Veil.
She snorted again, and laughed at her own giddiness in the face of what she had to do.
The nights were beginning to cool, so she put on a sturdy black blouse over a green skirt and wrapped a matching shawl around her shoulders. Unsure of how much walking she would need to do, she decided that comfort trumped fashion–hardly the first time she had made that choice, she thought, remembering the barefoot walks on hot summer days as a maiden that had enraged her elders and … aroused … the interest of the young men, including Tully–and wore her padded, rubber soled, full arch support sneakers instead of the dressier black flats.
None of her closest friends had a car, those that still had drivers licenses, and she didn’t want to subject them to what she knew was her burden alone. So she called a cab and waited in the old sliding swing on the front porch, where she and Tully had sat and watched the sunset a million times or more, young lovers growing old and cranky and falling apart together.
When the cab pulled onto the cracked concrete of her driveway and honked, she put aside her memories and pushed herself to her feet to walk slowly to the car. The cabbie stared at her, impatience on his face, then a flash of annoyance, as he got out and opened the car door for her.
“Where to, ma’am?” he asked when he was back at the wheel, looking at her in the rearview mirror.
Veta considered. The Goddess didn’t give street addresses. “Take me to the old Union Station,” she said. “I’ll walk from there.”
The cabbie turned around and looked at her directly. “Are you sure, ma’am?”
She wasn’t, but she nodded. “I have to find someone,” she said. “And that seems as good a place to start as any.”
“All by yourself?”
“That’s the way it has to be,” she said.
The cabbie shrugged and pulled out of the driveway.
Veta looked out the window as the cab moved from the quiet, old residential neighborhood she had lived in so long with its small houses and huge old trees into the ugly modern sprawl of convenience stores, restaurants and stripmalls. Very little remained of the countryside and forests she remembered from her youth and childrearing years.
She wondered how much of the ugliness had come from the Eruption of Hell on Earth, and how much from much closer to home. On her crankier days she had told anyone who would listen that she wasn’t sure Hell on Earth had made things worse, or just more honest.
They merged onto a highway, the setting sun directly behind them as they headed east. In the middle of a river of bright headlights and red brake lights, she could still feel the pull of the Goddess, but also the closeness of death, as if she rode in a boat on the ancient Styx, headed into the Underworld.
Off the highway, the darkness of the night settled around them, underscored and punctuated more than illuminated by the street lamps and the neon signs.
The pull of the Goddess became stronger.
“Young man, is it OK if I change my mind?” she asked, leaning forward.
“It’s your dollar, ma’am,” the cabbie replied.
“Then I want to continue along this road for a bit longer.”
They came to a stoplight glaring red. The cabbie braked to a stop and looked back at her again. “This road?” he asked. She heard the incredulousness in his voice, and maybe a hint of concern for what Grannie might have in mind.
“Straight ahead, yes.”
“Alright,” he said. “Suit yourself.” He faced the front with the changing light and they drove on.
The darkness competed with more and more harsh lights as they continued, and more and more people–and things that pretended to be people, Veta saw–walked on the sidewalks, went in and out of the various bars and brothels and gambling houses and … other establishments. Veta averted her eyes, tried not to look too deep.
“Goddess protect me,” she said under her breath.
“I hope she’s enough for both of us,” the cabbie said.
The darkness wasn’t banished by the bright lights, only driven into corners, where it lurked, blacker than ever, and into the hollow eye sockets of the people on the street, turning their faces into death masks and skulls.
Heavy traffic slowed them to a pace that matched that of the people walking and some of those turned to look into the cab in the same way that Veta looked out. Some of them met her eyes. Some of them sneered at her, recognizing that she didn’t belong here, in their world.
A man walked in front of the cab, causing the cabbie to curse and slam on the brakes. The man, well dressed, with graying temples making him look even more distinguished in combination with his suit, looked into the cab, straight at Veta, and smiled at her. The smile at once seduced her so that she smiled back, but also repelled her and made her nauseous. She noticed then that the man led a child by the hand, a scruffy, dirty little girl with blank eyes.
Man and girl walked past the cab and the cabbie pushed forward again. Then yelled, “Shit! Stupid kids!” as a gang of children, all of them as dirty as the little girl with the man, boys and girls both, none of them older than ten, all of them looking hungry, ran out of the crowds on the sidewalk. They ran in front of and behind the cab. Some crashed into the doors of the cab and the fenders, picked themselves up and climbed over or ran around the cab.
Veta cried out, startled by the sudden stop and the sound of the little bodies hitting against the side of the car. But then she saw who she had come to meet. Saw the young woman sitting on the curb, struggling to prevent a little boy from stealing what she held.
“Stop here,” she said before the cabbie could start moving again.
The cabbie looked at her like she was crazy, but he told her how much. Veta gave him all the money she had brought and stepped out of the cab as the little boy was running away and the young woman was standing up, looking after him, eyes flashing. Veta saw now that the boy had been trying to take a curved sword from the young woman, and that another weapon, a sawed-off shotgun, hung from a strap on the young woman’s shoulder.
“You gave me too much, lady,” the cabbie said behind her.
“Keep it,” Veta said, and closed the door of the cab. She wasn’t going to be needing return fare.
The young woman hadn’t noticed Veta. She still stood there, looking after the little boy, her hands ready to pull out the sword, to kill, but not following.
Veta swallowed and took her first step toward the young woman. “Give me strength,” she whispered, no longer asking for protection. Because her life was in the hands of the Goddess now, and the Goddess had chosen her for this.
She took another step and reached out with her hand, as she had seen herself do in her vision from the Goddess.
Her hand touched the shoulder of the woman. Veta said, “Reese-anne, the Goddess–”
Faster than Veta would’ve thought possible had she not already seen it happen once that day, in her last dream of her long life, the young woman spun, drew the sword and plunged it into Veta’s mid-section.
It wasn’t the attack that interrupted Veta’s message. The blade didn’t hurt when it bit into her and cut up through her abdomen, front and back. She wondered if it had severed her spinal cord, then wondered if she would know if it had.
What stopped her was the hatred that burned in the young woman’s eyes, the lips that trembled in pain and despair and lust for vengeance. Those stopped Veta’s voice, hitting her like an avalanche, overwhelming her and leaving her to stare in silence into those green eyes as she slipped backwards off the blade and onto the sidewalk.
Veta felt her life pumping out of her onto the concrete and asphalt. She had never experienced what she knew she was about to happen, and she waited for it in wonder, and awe.
The Goddess touched her heart and a fire lit within her, consuming the blood she had lost and the life that remained within her.
Power flowed through Veta and she knew that she could heal herself, undo the bite of the young woman’s–Reese-anne’s–black sword, undo even the ravages of age. She could run through the grass and the forests again as young and beautiful and lusty as a maiden in her prime. She could see her family grow and prosper past seven generations. She could dance for the full moon to make her brighter and pull rain from the clouds to make the flowers grow. She could even kill this young woman, who deserved killing a hundred times, maybe more.
But the Goddess hadn’t given Veta Her Gift for any of those purposes.
Reese-anne still looked down at Veta, panting as if she had run a race, radiating hate and despair, but not directed at Veta, and not at the little boy who had tried to rob her.
“Don’t hate yourself, Reese-anne,” Veta said, her voice sounding hollow in her own ears. She coughed then, and tasted her own blood in her mouth. “Have hope. You are the key.”
Reese-anne shook her head. “No,” she said. “Don’t call me that. You don’t know me, witch. You don’t know anything about me.”
“The Goddess knows you,” Veta said. She pushed herself up to a sitting position, the pain hitting her now, making her wince. The Goddess gave her strength, though, and she did not collapse. “And She says that you are the key, Reese-anne.”
“Stop calling me that, witch.” Reese-anne shifted so that she no longer faced Veta directly, coming into a fighting stance, left hand holding the scabbard like a shield between young and old. The sword moved as if on its own volition until its point threatened the spot between Veta’s eyes. The black metal reflected and condensed the look that came down it from the young woman’s eyes.
“She has a Gift,” Veta said, looking past the sword, her eyes locked on the green eyes of Reese-anne. “For you, Reese-anne.” Veta reached out her hand to touch Reese-anne’s left hand.
Reese-anne pulled her hand back. “Was this her gift to you, witch? Me killing you?”
Veta smiled, and felt blood trickle down her chin. “I was Her sacrifice,” she said. “Her willing sacrifice. Accept Her Gift to you. Accept my sacrifice, Reese-anne.”
Pain clouded Reese-anne’s face and her eyes became brighter as tears formed. The young woman blinked away the tears and emotions twisted and contorted her face. The hand with the sword, though, never wavered, and her left stayed out of Veta’s reach.
“I don’t need,” Reese-anne said, “another sacrifice. I want–” But she stopped herself before she told Veta what she wanted.
“Hope is born in sacrifices,” Veta said. “Big and little. Accept me … mine. You are the key, Reese-anne.”
Veta reached forward again. This time Reese-anne didn’t draw back her hand.
As Veta’s finger touched the taut knuckles of Reese-anne’s hand, as the Gift of the Goddess passed from crone to key, the young woman’s eyes grew large and she drew a sharp breath.
“Find the Old Man, Reese-anne. You have to face him. But you don’t have to face him alone.”
Pain, held back by the strength and the Gift of the Goddess, burst forth now, ripped at Veta’s body and soul, and Veta felt the full cost of what the Goddess had demanded of her.
And she paid. Willingly.
Copyright © 2006 by David Michael.
Melissa said,
November 10, 2006 @ 11:37 pm
Thanks for your comment on my blog. My productiveness during this year’s NaNoWriMo is uncharacteristic of me; I wonder if I’ve been too easy on myself in the past and could be doing a lot more writing on a regular basis.
I admire your willingness to take on a year-long challenge. You’ve written a lot of stories since February! I wonder what will happen in February 2007; will you embark on a new challenge?
Good luck with the last few months of your challenge and with NaNo.
DavidRM said,
November 11, 2006 @ 12:06 am
Oh, hey.
I’m sure we’re all too easy on ourselves. Except when we’re not.
For Nano, writing at a rate of 2700-2800 words per day, instead of my more normal 500-1500 words per day, has pushed the time required noticeably. I don’t think I’ve had a day in November where it took less than 3 hours to complete a story, and 3.5 hours is becoming the norm.
After November, I expect I’ll have to slow down again, if for no other reason than to put my schedule back in place. =)
Thanks for dropping by! And good luck to you too!
-David