The Wicked & Divine

Chapter 22• Bad Omens

whats your guy's fav artists/bands? this chapter is extra long

I had never been so privy to the cold. I hated the way I had to trudge through the snow or rain on the way back from work or school, my socks soaked with thawing ice and my skin red and numb. Once when I was in junior high, some kids from school asked if I wanted to hang out, naturally I agreed, runty as I was, I didn't have many friends. Kids didn't like me in Washington, it was a small town and Mom's accent was about as heavy as her fake leather purse, and some people weren't as open armed as others were. Within a week it seemed everyone knew that my mom was a single parent who didn't honor the word of god in the local church as often as she ought to.

Not to mention her choice of career, I could only be glad she chose a club in the neighboring city about 45 minutes away. The town was small and heavily conservative, and this would've painted a bigger target on my back.

We went to one of their houses, and he suggested we venture in the small meadow behind his house. I saw nothing behind this proposal, nothing sinister and nothing suspicious.

They ended up tossing me into an icy pond during the worst of a brutal winter in Washington. I would've drowned and/or frozen to death if it weren't for one of the kids older siblings who had run along to see what we were up to.

We moved town a few weeks after, not because of the bullying, but because mom had found work elsewhere. "Salt Lake City mija ! the city of promise!" She beamed as she threw the room to my door open, quickly shoving my stuff into a small bag. "More like the city of Mormons and meth-heads" I grumbled back. She scolded me, anyplace was livable in her eyes. That stupid motto was probably why we had been currently living Redneck capital and moving to Bathsalts, USA. And also why all of my belongings could fit into a small old trunk from a goodwill we found two years earlier.

My favorite place we had ever taken up residence was in Los Angeles County, it was lifetimes ago and I forgot what the city was named. I liked it though, not that we had lived in a good neighborhood particularly, but we had a neighbor, Yomaris, whom I absolutely adored. She was a very small elderly lady who hailed from the same town in Mexico as my mother. She would watch me all day and most times all night as mom worked. On hot summer nights, she would rock me in her lap outside as we picked the mangoes from her tree and ate them, scooping it with my sticky fingers as if I had been starved. She would tell me stories about her life as a young woman, the juices from the sweet fruit sticking to my hands and face.

She worked with her mother in the fields when she first immigrated, and once when she had saved enough, she bought the fabric to make her first real dress. She told me that the first night she wore it, she had gone out dancing and she had fallen in love with her late husband at first sight. She didn't talk about him much, her husband had passed away years before. And although her skin was withered and wrinkled, the color of coffee with cream, she maintained the aura any young woman had. After all, youth was not in age, or skin, but in spirit.

The fairytales she gave me were what kept my ahead afloat all the years, after awhile she was like family and one of the most important parts of my life. She would come over night or morning and cook when my mom was too tired, feeding our hungry bellies with the most flavorful dishes.

She was a servant of God first and foremost, and a good catholic woman. So every Sunday she would bring me with her on the bus to morning mass, mom would laugh and groan when I began wearing a rosary Yomaris gifted to me, but she was just mad that I had faith in something beyond cigarettes and men. And truthfully, I adored our Sunday trips and would wait dutifully on the porch for Yomaris to come gather me. It was the one time in my life I was an avid church goer.

I didn't know that Yomaris knew something about me that even I didn't know. It was only when crows followed me to school every morning and stray blood hounds sat outside my home, growling at every passerby aggressively that she began dragging me to church. I didn't puzzle everything together until quite recently. I wondered, did mother tell her? did she simply sense that the aura surrounding me was simply not as normal, not as pure.