And Ruin Followed Behind Her

Chapter 5-2

MY HANDS AND FEET SHOOK for another hour as I tried to make sense of what happened to me. The panic I felt made it hard to concentrate on anything for too long. My rational brain wanted to make sense of transporting from one place to the other, and so I laid against the cold, hardwood floor and tried to force myself to calm down and focus.

I thought back on every single moment from the last hour, every single emotion I’d felt, and still my mind wandered. I was hyper aware of every nuanced detail of my living room as I haven’t been for my entire life. In the years since I’d left for Chicago, the ceiling had become warped. A crack split the room in half, winding its way from behind the rabbit-eared television and up the wall and ceiling until it disappeared behind our overstuffed brown couch. Another crack twisted on the wall next to our dusty grandfather clock in the corner. The whole house had fallen into disrepair. It had never been big or flashy, but Mama always took pride in keeping it spotless.

“This is our plot of land, baby girl,” she told me when I was younger. “We don’t have forty acres or a mule, but we got this place, and it’s up to us to do with it the best we can and take pride in it.”

When I was a child, she kept our house the most pristine on the block. She spent weekends pruning the garden and cutting the grass. Heck, she even bartered for better grass seed to make sure that our house looked as good as any on the other side of Chandler. Every week we cleaned the house spotless so that whenever somebody came over they knew we did the best with what we had at our disposal.

But when I left for college, that all changed. It didn’t happen at once, but the years wore on our house over time. The bright, fresh paint we spent every summer reapplying became chipped and dull; inside, the rooms were cluttered and dusty, with cracked ceilings and smudged walls, not to mention dust caked an inch thick on every surface.

I wondered if that was the reason Mama never liked being inside the house, or if her never being inside the house is the reason it fell into disrepair. I knew better than to ask, though, because asking the question meant cleaning the house, and frankly it never bothered me that it was dirty...just like it didn’t seem to bother Mama that we transported across town in an instant.

My mind snapped back to the events of earlier tonight. How could teleporting across town not bother her? I mean, it was crazy that it didn’t bother her. I wasn’t just freaking out about something trivial, even if she tried to make me feel that way. No way. This was not normal.

And what did she mean when she said, “’Well, sometimes it happens’?” Had it happened to her before? Would it happen to me again? I kicked myself for letting her go to bed without asking her more questions.

I struggled to stay awake and ponder answers to those questions, but the day’s events caught up to me in a wave of exhaustion. I’d never been so tired. I made a vague attempt to make my way into bed, but my body simply refused to move. Eventually, I stopped fighting against it and drifted off into the silence of sleep, right there on the floor.

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