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from Contest #2

All the trouble began when my grandfather died and my grandmother - my father's mother - came to live with us.

Hobbling, beady-eyed, scraping her walker 'gainst our shoddy wooden floor, I am now certain she entirely created her maladies as great civilizations meticulously construct entire cosmological views over the eras. If only to enrage me by pretending that her corpusclular frame required protection within those metallic confines, she had no qualms concerning the lies of her outlying robotic entanglement. The hideous extension of elderly limbs was used to rattle our future sensibilities with reminders of corporeal disappointment, to beg cheap sympathy when we engaged in activities escaping her disenfranchised condition, to wantonly toss around at unknowing victims when her expectations went awry. Yet none of these issues were anywhere as unsettling as those which I plan on revealing later. Mama Stein's walker did not only function as locum legs and an artificial livelihood for the old trickster; I'm willing to venture that she consciously realigned her neurons according to the new bodily instrument, affecting her almost as if it had been surgically implanted to function of its own accord. A ghost-coxa, if you must call it such.

Allow me space and time to relate the horrifying circumstances.

I, being a fresh-minded and somewhat despondent university étudiant at the time, was especially crestfallen upon arriving home and realizing that Mama Stein was ever to lodge in the cabin across from my own. According to the laws of the universe, which had been determined some time previous to my birth circa 1974, my birth-parents neglected to relate me the situation in order to secure my approval. At this time, the wench had not become fully enlightened of her extraordinary ability, which developed gradually over the next few months. Alas, this novice stage was one that still afforded me time to prepare and embattle my forces, though I knew not what for. All that I can safely recall from the odious afternoon was the drippy characteristic of her face that attempted to draw out my inner-thoughts as she conversed with me, a weapon that I thankfully gained immunity towards shortly after its introduction.

First appearing in the lengthy conveyor of offensive situations was the Cranberry incident, committed approximately on the date of annual Thanks-giving, 1994. The guests roamed plenty and saturated nigh every inch of our wooden abode, threatening to crumble the first floor down to the basement below, lest the walker plot and designate destruction as his or her aim. As I flew throughout the house seeking a breath of air not yet made stale by the odors of long-lost cousins, I happened upon the preserved carcass somewhere between the elders' chamber and the toilet. We squared up, my skin flagrantly perspiring as I attempted to wash my face of obvious motives, and she merely letting one eye strain on the right side of my face and the other to wander westward. Oh, how I longed to rid that spot of carpet of her wilings, as I witnessed the tut-tut-tut in her walnut mind. Before she dared commit any incriminating deceits, I fled my post and returned to the feast room to regain my composure and catalyze my appetite. No small feat concerning the scepter burned onto my mind's eye.

Ensuite when I desired to allay my burning legs and stretch, I removed myself from the delights of conversation and entered the smoking room a few halls down. All would have been at peace if that depraved image had not awaited my crossing of the threshold, for staring at my figure was none other than the accursed Mama Stein. Like the repulsive naked mole rat that scurries underground to pester what other creatures it may find, she posited her wrinkled mass onto the crusty walker and began the arctic push forward that began and ended in the sight of my company. Sealed tight with the fright of what opposed me, my muscles refused to dislodge me from my frozen stance. Madame Stein wracked the ground's resources for useful friction and the walker edged its way in my direction. Twas but a few moments later that I felt the lactic acid sizzle through me as I dashed toward the antique island between myself and the prune. I held on to the table in anguish, mind you reader, I was rehearsing the steps of 'fight or flight' in dizzying repetition. Once she remained only wheezes away from my shaking frame, the walker paused in its succession. She once again allowed her eye to stray sideways and forced the other to hone in on my right side, furiously concentrating on her mysterious stratagem. A flash of embossed aluminum blinded me in the moments following and, somehow during those frightful seconds, I captured visual evidence of the walker leaping out of her claws and smashing the oriental pearl atop the mahogany surface. Along with the cherished vase, Mama Stein and the walker too sought closer contact with their gravitational origin, as I unpeeled my orbs to behold her shredded form laying at my feet. The porcelain shards reformed in a mosaic upon the hard floor which her face also joined, but as beautiful as the pieces seemed a'scattered and covered in scarlet substance, I knew that Mr. and Mrs. Stein would curse the perpetrator of such desolate art.

Without the necessity of my exposition, Mama Stein relished the retelling of the sociopathic tale to the party guests, of course depicted from her sanity-thirsted perspective. I was no longer invited to dine amongst the educated and cultured folk that customarily visited Chez Stein, but was banished instead to greasy kitchens of hamburger havens and bleak college libraries reeking of stale beer stenches and unctuous body imprints. One of the only condolences I maintained during those ensuing weeks was that my exposure to the slivered widow was lessened, letting me abandon my nervous condition 'til I skulked home at day's end. As I biked my sorry person to weekly meetings with Dr. M, my teeth continually gritted in immense displeasure when I recounted the duplicity of Mama Stein's version of events. How foolish I was to consider that her ends might have been accomplished heretofore and that she would not repeat such malevolence! Only pause so that I can relay what occurs next.

My angelic head lay caressed in silken flowing and shortly entered the dream sphere around 10h05 when the creeping commenced a chamber away. Though my thoughts engaged themselves elsewhere and of course my regions remained completely defenseless, the wretch devised a conundrum that was surely to spoil my ambient state. Having almost witnessed my soul flee my timbrous frame, my heart a-leapt when I woke to obliteration beneath my floorboards. But since past incidents involving those who sought my person when I was manually indisposed caused my invention of a chamber-lock, I was not yet a-frighted of my own well-being at my rising. The cacophonous activity prompted my body's rapid escalation to découvert the dastardly trespasser who tread upon my slumbersome hours, but subsequent to my journey down the steps I found naught. When my mind's eye finally jolted my attention to a humidifier both destitute and deconstructed, my heart flared at the offense. Just as a crick in the stair gave away the intruder, I wrenched my neck to decry the perpetrator; twas no one but Mama Stein solidifying her crusty stance on her walker whose cataract-laden eyes blazed back at my own. Her rubbery jowls twitched as she bore my presence, useless opals scanning the environment for the right one. All of this occurring in nanoseconds at a time, I had not the agility of mind nor the wise man's foresight to behold the launching of the walker straight at my person. Thankfully a youth wrought with athletic ventures enabled my narrow skirting with danger to be abandoned, plunging myself to the west to avoid catastrophe. Regaining what little mental sanitation I still possessed, I made note of the sizable eruption that the walker affected on the wallspace where I previously stood, thinking quickly and quietly about my potentially damaged condition that could have arisen. When the gall rose in my throat and tempted me to pursue murderous inclinations, Mama Stein, seed of the demons, was lickety-split, ghoulishly absent.

Not one of the members of the intact Stein family know quite where she scampered off to after she forfeited her metallic scepter. True to my nature, I freshly anew have been cast aside in favor of their entrusting the pruned one's character, much to my chagrin and pessimistic expectations. Not even the single most solitary condition of all, the mark left on the wall, will persuade them of the truth and its occasionally perturbing manner of revealing itself to mere humans. At long last, owing to my utterly lonesome condition in my own perspective, I was able to peer inside the nature that they sometimes attribute to man, and to sever my ties with its influence altogether.

back to Contest #2