MANASA & ABRAXAS

Abraxas

Manasa

MUSCARIA

SKULLPTURES

All sculptures clay and acrylic.

Prometheus (detail):

Uncle Creepy:

Professor Haunted:

MASKS (continued)

Capricorn

Ursa

MASKSII

MASKED

By Blood and Tradition

My Aunt had a special reputation in the neighborhood as a person who knew who to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, without having to deal with the expense and trouble of seeing a doctor. She referred to it as a Tradition, something I never quite understood but still would never have questioned. It was much easier to let my Aunt speak without interruptions or questions, because after speaking for a time her face would kind of change a little and her voice would sometimes get deeper, and you could feel the presence of someone else in the room, inside my Aunt, and she could say some strange things, stuff that had no context to whatever was going on in our family or the world at large, like she was seeing too far into the future for me to comprehend. But she would laugh and her voice would change back and she'd take another drink from her glass before sharing some arcane bit of knowledge that would one day suit you.

But she made special potions by combining oils from the wooden rack in the kitchen, when some teary eyed woman from the neighborhood would come over and tell her sad story about how they couldn't afford another mouth to feed, or else they'd say they'd gotten knocked up on accident, or by force, but my Aunt never questioned their motives. If they were paying, my Aunt would pick a few leaves from the herb garden out back and she'd let them soak in the oil mixture in her old black glass bowl, and she would swirl the leaves as the lady spoke on about how their doctor is friends with their husband and he'd most certainly report the discretion if she walked into his office with a baby to get rid of. My Aunt, I was never sure she was ever even listening. She'd pour the stuff out through a coffee filter set over the mouth of a mason jar, and a clear liquid would drip drip drip into the jar, and my Aunt would smile even though no one was saying anything funny at all. Everyone knew to come to my Aunt for problems like these.

Once it was all drained out she'd throw away the filter and close up the jar, and my Aunt would tell each of them to drink the liquid before bed, and that the next morning when they went to the bathroom they would pass the baby, simple as that. And then the lady would hand my Aunt the money and they'd disappear. I guess it worked, because I never once heard one of them coming back to say the medicine didn't work. I did see some of the ladies more than once or twice.

When she didn't have her customers coming over, my Aunt began to teach me the Tradition, little bits and pieces as she went. Some days she wouldn't have much at all to say to me, and others I felt like I was getting overwhelmed with her describing what each plant worked for which ailment and how if you mixed certain plants different things would happen. I tried to remember what I could, but she wouldn't let me write anything down. She said you weren't supposed to write about the Tradition, that it had to be spoken and remembered, and carried on. I didn't really understand very much of it at all, but I still clung to her.

I was her shadow. I wasn't the best student, but I tried.

One day, she was explaining how she could make a miscarriage happen with her medicine. She told me that her medicine was only good if it was an early pregnancy, within the first three months, because otherwise the woman would bleed to death passing the baby. My Aunt gave me this look, like she was waiting for me to ask a question, but I didn't have anything to ask. She went on to tell me about another method, one she didn't tell many of her customers about. She said there was too much room for error in the method, even though it was effective at any point in the pregnancy, even up to the day before delivery, she said. It worked, but it was too involved for most of the careless women who came to the house for my Aunt's medicine.

She never explained it to me. She trailed off, and never came back to the topic. Maybe she realized I would never follow the Tradition like she would have hoped. I would have believed it if she told me she saw far into the future, seeing me break away, a firsthand witness to my future follies. From that moment after, she treated me with a sort of resigned defeat. She didn't see it in me anymore.

And I did kind of outgrow her. I found myself avoiding her conferences at the kitchen table, and not making my way out to her herb garden. Summer came, and there was a traveling carnival that had set up in the fields across from our house. I found myself exploring this strange new world and its inhabitants, until I met a man who worked in some capacity for the carnival, but I never found out what he did. He treated me special, and seduced me, and like a fool I fell in love with him, but in less than a week the whole carnival was gone, run out of town by the local police. And there I found myself, 15 years old and pregnant with the baby of a drifter. I told no one of my condition, and for a time I was able to conceal the baby growing inside me. The summer turned to autumn, and by October I'd resorted to starving myself to fight the onset of a lump growing in my stomach. I took to bed, no longer leaving my room, always covered by a blanket. Everyone thought I had come down with some illness. My Aunt, she saw right through it all, and late one night, she entered my room, and sat at the edge of my bed, and explained the method, the one she never shared with me.

If a woman wanted to not be pregnant, she explained, and if she was past her first trimester, she would have to go to a graveyard at midnight, during a waxing moon. She spoke slowly and softly, and I remembered every instruction, so much easier to hold in my mind than it had been the year before. She said I would have to find an infant's grave, by checking the dates on the stones.

I went out, the next night, alone with a small flashlight, I snuck through the silent house and through yards to get to the Clementville cemetery. I walked the rows until I found the right kind of grave. This baby, it had been alive for only six days. I rubbed my stomach and thought about the baby inside of me.

My Aunt said to mix some of the dirt from in front of the grave with my urine to make a clay, and I worked it into a thick mush in my hands, forming the body and then the head and limbs of a tiny figure. My hands shook as I remembered her telling me to lay the clay figure on top of the gravestone. I felt a hot pain deep inside my stomach, a pain so intense I fell to my knees.

She told me about the pain, but I didn't think it would have been as bad as it was. I felt as if I was being pulled apart, and I was splitting up the middle. She said I might see blood, and not to be frightened, but I got scared when it began pouring out of me like a faucet. The dirt turned into sludge around my knees as the deluge continued, until I felt like I had nothing left inside, just emptied out.

She told me I would know when it was all over, and that I was supposed to lay the clay baby in the mess. I watched it fall apart, soaking up the mess around it. It felt like my skin was hanging off of me. I walked home, and as quietly as I could, made my way back to bed. The next morning, my Aunt brought me a cup of tea with leaves still floating in it. She told me it would take away my nausea, and give me back my appetite. She didn't ask about the method. It was like she knew.

Twins

The twins, they were almost identical, they dressed so nonchalantly but still ended up picking the same clothing out of their piles. Nobody ever asked why they had two of everything, we must have assumed that was how twins came. Physically, they never seemed to notice they looked the same. They hardly interacted beyond shared whispers but it was understood in the House that they were two different people, and to somehow happen to mistake one for another could have grave consequences.

Marabel was a tormented girl, scarred in such a way as to encourage her unbridled id to inflict terrible injuries upon the other children. Like a preteen De Sade she would lure a confused little cousin up the stairs to the attic, at the very top of the House, and there she would come upon them. There would be her favorite pair of restraints hidden in the corner, and there in the faint shadow cast from the small window, with a view of heaven, there were a pair of scissors. Once ensnared, she toyed with her prey, and soon becoming bored she began to cut; first clothing, and then, their flesh. She held them down and cut them to pieces, defenseless children who thought that she was Selene, her sister.

Selene was gentle, a graceful girl whom the children seemed to flock to, like a mother hen. Selene would make sure they were well fed and that they would take their baths and be in bed by nine. She helped them with homework and changed diapers when she had to; and in her quieter moments there was almost always a pleasant interruption by an adorable toddler. She would find them a rag doll toy and send them along. When she wasn't tending to her flock, Selene seemed to hover in place, like a non-transparent apparition locked in a looping pattern of slowing fading in and out of reality. If no one was watching she sometimes looked like the static on the television screen. Her eyes were blue like the babble box showing the aux channel, never-ending and bottomless.

I don't know who raised her. I do know Selene looked after Marabel for a time, which always kind of mystified me because Marabel was 7 minutes older than her. I also did overhear a conversation in the kitchen once when someone said Marabel killed their mother with a knife from the kitchen, when they were little. No one said an age, and I had to go before I got caught eavesdropping.

Someone said once he could see a resemblance in me and the twins, one of my drunk uncles holding on to the stair bannister. I gave him a scowl and ran down the hallway. I don't want to look like either one of them.

Grandma said there had been a curse laid upon the house the night the twins were born. She said their Ma wasn't supposed to be having twins, but she delivered them in the kitchen, during a really bad thunderstorm, blood dripping through the partition in the table. Grandma said she had to help their Ma during the delivery, because the girls came out fighting, with the cord wrapped around one's neck. That baby came out blue, but once Grandma slashed the cord she started breathing and everything seemed fine. After that no one was sure which baby had been almost stillborn, they looked so much alike. I have my suspicions.

I was born in a hospital, like a normal child should be. I ain't nothing like those two.

I hate finding Marabel's victims one she's through with them. I never know what to do. I found Emma in the third floor bathroom, crumpled in the tub. I tried to ignore her and back my way out of the intrusion but I could hear her struggling to get my attention, and I couldn't ignore her. I closed the door behind me and looked at the damage. Her eye makeup had streaked to her ears, dragged by tears, and there was something wrong with her eyes and the way she stared at me. Marabel had removed her eyelids, but left the rings of eye shadow, not knowing how much was makeup and how much was caked blood from the sloppy wounds. Marabel had covered her body with a dirty old blanket that she must have found in the attic, in one of the old boxes.

I asked Emma what she wanted me to do, since I'm just some dumb kid who found her. She shook her head back and forth. She didn't say anything, but she was crying. I cracked the door open a tiny bit when I heard footsteps down the hall coming. It was Selene, but I wasn't completely sure it wasn't Marabel, so I didn't move, and I prayed she wouldn't come in, but my heart just about stopped when she pushed the door in and found me and Emma, who started kicking the sides of the tub, scared it was Marabel coming back to hurt her more. But the thin frail girl stood in the doorway, looking at the two of us that was in a way unreadable, so distant that it seemed she was watching us through a telescope. It seemed there was blood coming down the inside of her leg, running down to her slipper, staining the white cotton, and she smoothed my hair in a way that I knew it was Selene, and she eased me from the room so gently, told me there was stew ready in the kitchen, and so I walked away, knowing Selene would take care of everything. I noticed the sound of the door locking, I couldn't help not feeling it reverberate through the hallway.

I never saw Emma again.

Doorway

This is a Doorway.

Someone had seen fit to staple wallpaper to the piece of plywood covering the doorway in the closet in my bedroom. It kind of matched, but not really. You'd look at it and know it was a half-assed job, the way the fixture in the room twinkled off the staple backs, set into the paper in no apparent pattern. No one would say who did the patchwork over the door, but it was understood that I was not to pull off the wallpaper and move aside the wood to expose the small door, only three feet high and almost as wide, small enough for a child, but an adult would run the chance of being trapped in the enclosure should they decide to uncover the door and try the latch that held it closed and stepped over the threshold.

They told me to leave it alone, and so I emptied some boxes in the closet so I could make a dummy stack in front of the door, easy to move when I knew I could work in silence, in peace. My progress has allowed me to preserve the visual integrity of the wallpaper, where in reality it came off in one whole piece, adhered by old wads of chewing gum. The board was not nailed to the wood beneath it, and the first time I moved it, I came away with a deep splinter in my left hand, which ran from underneath the webbing of my thumb through the top few layers of skin, and it left a black outline as a reminder.

There is no door knob, but rather a small latching lock mechanism that somewhat resembles the trigger of a revolver, and when you slide your finger in and fire, the door swings inward, into deep murky nothing that I dare not enter. There's something down there, something wholly unpleasant. I don't understand whose bright idea it was to close off the entryway to something malign with a quarter-inch slab of plywood and a big swatch of flaking plaster paper covered with yellow sunflowers. But I've opened it three times, and looked in long enough to hear something moving deep within the passageway. It sounds like it could get hungry, but I don't know what it prefers to eat.

Diana taught me a new game to play. She calls it Bloody Mary. To play the game, you go into a dark room, without windows, with a mirror and a candle. You light the candle and stare into the mirror, and once you're ready, you repeat Her name three times. You will see her reflection, standing behind you, and you must remember not to turn around in fright or surprise, because she can steal your soul from your body and then inhabit it, taking over while you exist in limbo for the rest of eternity. When you see her, you must stay calm, and you can ask her a question, any question at all, and Bloody Mary will tell you the answer. She can see the future, and she can change it too if you want her to. Mary will take care of whatever you want.

I conjured Mary, with the closet door closed tight, the rest of the house fast asleep, and with my back to the covered up door I called her name three times, and in the dark I saw her, the face of the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her hair was black and hung past the border of the mirror, and her eyes were tiny explosions, sparkling like a chemical fire. I closed my eyes for a second and I felt something like tendrils easing past my body, as if I had been floating through thick seaweed, and she waited for me, waiting for my question. I knew what I wanted to ask her, but I was too scared. She told me to close my eyes, and when I did I saw her standing next to me, but it felt like she had extended past her own physical boundaries and had somehow swallowed me up in the flutterings of her flowing dress, individual threads pulling away and bringing me closer to her, in the darkness of my closed eye imagination, she showed me the doorway behind us and somehow it had been uncovered, and the entrance seemed alive as she had me try the latch. It opened, and as the door swung inward we were drawn into the opening like the water swirling down a drain, and we slid down through darkness into a long tunnel, the two of us locked into a tighter and tighter embrace as we sunk downward with the slope of the tunnel, like some forgotten vestigial air duct.

Somewhere near the center of the universe the passage ended, in a long empty room whose walls went on forever. Mary untangled me from her tendrils and affixed me with a cold stare. I felt so scared of the thing that was sleeping down at the other end of the room. I couldn't see it, but I could hear its heavy breath, lumbering as if it were having a hard go at the task of breathing in and breathing out. Mary led me by the hand into the dark, and we got closer and closer to the other side of the room, but I couldn't find the beast. Mary shook her head in sad desperation. She told me the truth, and to hear it made my lungs explode in an awful wail and I fell to the floor and beat my tiny fists in the dirt. I didn't mean to turn and look at her, when we were upstairs. I just got a little scared, spooked enough to jump and kick the candle over, and in the act of pulling away Mary caught me falling and pulled me through the doorway. It was the only way out for me, when the carpet caught fire and it spread to the empty boxes, and it quickly turned into a tiny inferno. She said the flames ate me up, and I knew she was telling me the truth. I felt my burnt limbs a whole lifetime ago as they turned to ash inside the closet.

Sometimes I can hear things, at the other end of the passageway, and I will go to the opening and stare in, wondering who's at the other side of the closed door. I wonder if they did anything to close it over, so no one will ever find me here in the bottom. I shriek and make a racket hoping they will hear me but I don't think I'll ever be found. Even Mary went away after a while. I tried to follow her down the passageway but something kept me from getting very far at all, and she disappeared into nothingness. But, she kept me company for a while.

Craft