Yeah, it’s been a couple of months since I wrote anything…my bad. At first, there was some personal stuff I had to deal with, then the move and a crazy October snowstorm (what is it with this year and the screwed-up weather. And let’s not forget the power outages! If this earthquake/hurricane/snowstorm stuff hadn’t happened to the whole PA/NJ region, I’d say I was cursed….). And then I started school. No wonder everyone thinks tweens and teens are neurotic. Just attend a week of the school/jail we have to put up with 5 days a week. And the “homework” that’s “necessary”! I learned more on my own, when I was homeschooled for three hours a day, than I do now in the zoo that I’m spending seven hours a day in. I’ve been more stressed and confused at D.S. Whitsone Middle School than I have ever been in my life. So something had to give, and that was my blog writing. If anyone has actually been reading this, I’m sorry. “Mea culpa” --or whatever it is you’re supposed to say when you screw up.
I guess the best way to do this is to go back to where I left off, so let me try to play “catch-up”. It’s now the week off from school that most kids call “Christmas Break” but the officials call “Winter Vacation” or “Winter Holiday” so as not to insult the atheists. Like all the lights, stars, Christmas trees in stores and such, and manger scenes on the lawns of churches, civilians and even certain “rebel” municipalities (NOT White Cedars, if you care) don’t clue you in as to what’s being celebrated here….Anyway, I’ve got my three reports that are due on January 3rd written, so I have some time now. Yay me.
So, let me try to start with what may be the toughest thing to write about – Aunt Lina. About a week before we moved, she sat down with me to have a “talk’. It started like some Judy Bloom moment. We were talking about me getting to the age where I’d begin getting my period, and what I was supposed to expect. I figured I knew what was coming – a talk about pads & plugs, strange feelings, being a woman, yadda yadda.
Boy was I wrong! Aunt Lina began to tell me a little bit more, about what this meant for shifters like us, and how I might be overwhelmed by cougar urges to actually mate (EWW!!). She told me that some shifters become teenage pregnancy statistics because they give in to their inner animal. That was a long and embarrassing few minutes. She then said that my shifting abilities might change, too. We were sitting in my bedroom at the farm, both of us on the bed, eating popcorn. That was Aunt Lina’s attempt to make this all seem a little “normal”.
But it wasn’t. She mumbled and fumbled, trying to explain, and then she decided to show me. And I almost freaked when she did. You see, Aunt Lina’s a LOT older than she looks, or rather, appears. She showed me her “true age” face. She’s like ancient. Wrinkles, grey hair, saggy neck old. She just likes the look of her Aunt Lina self, a woman in her late thirties/early forties, so that’s the “skin” she chooses to walk in. She told me that for her, the “great war” was the one of her childhood years, and that the uniforms were grey and blue, and it was fought right here, on this continent. Yeah, I’m talkin’ Civil War. Looking at her old faced self, I believed her. You would, too if you saw her wrinkled, wise-woman face. She quickly shifted back to the face I knew and loved, mumbling something about vanity.
She said that shifters kinda get a bonus of a long life, if you manage not to get killed by something stupid. Like war, or getting run over by a bus, or driving carelessly wouldn’t stop me from dying, but if I lived a peaceful life, I had the chance of seeing another century pass. I also tended to heal quickly, but I already knew that. Then she said that there was even more to my becoming a teenager.
And that’s when things began to take a turn for the weirder.
Yeah, I suppose that if you can shift your body into the form of an animal you should be able to believe in anything. But to me, that’s just a different part of “normal” for me. Aunt Lina said that now I had to open myself up to a new definition of “normal”. And that it was going to be more complex than ever.
You see, there’s this place that exists called the spiritworld. Except Aunt Lina says it as if it should be capitalized, like a country or something. Spiritworld. And it’s not just one someplace else, but a whole bunch of layers of somewhere else, and that it’s a place I should be able to find after I start my monthly bleeding. It’s not just a place for shifters, but for powerful spirits, mischievous beings, and certain blessed humans. Time can be tricky in the spirit realms, and “reality” can be a slippery concept. She said that if I start to see things out of the corner of my eye, or hear things, or even smell things that didn’t seem to really be there, to call her immediately. She even gave me my own cell phone.
I must have had a look on my face that showed my skepticism, because Aunt Lina just sighed and shook her head after her little lecture.
“You don’t believe me. You can believe that information exists when you hit a key on a board with wires attached to an LCD screen, and you don’t think of that as impossible, but this you think is impossible. OK, then maybe you need to see.”
Then she just disappeared.
Yeah, my aunt was there one moment, gone the next. I jumped like a live wire had hit me. My mouth was open—I must have looked like a fish.
I put my hand out, smoothing the covers where she had been sitting, sweeping a few loose pieces of popcorn to the floor --- she was NOT there!
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement, and I turned, and there was Aunt Lina, holding hands with someone else.
Except it wasn’t Aunt Lina as I’d ever seen her. Not the attractive 40-year-old artist I’d lived with ever since I could remember. Not the large bear that had roamed with me in the woods around our farm. Not the wrinkly old-faced lady she’d shifted into a few minutes ago. This was some hybrid of her bear self and her Aunt Lina self. She had the head and shoulders of an upright bear, but she had human hands (with furry arms!) She was bearish to the waist, but her bottom half wore the silk pajamas she’d left with. Her companion wore the guise of a fox, and was definitely male. His pecs would make that guy from that Jersey Shore show jealous.
“Randi, this is Ricky.”
Aunt Lina’s voice came out of the bear’s muzzle, and it was freaky. The fox-headed Ricky nodded & waved.
“Hi.”
My mouth opened and closed, but nothing came out. I must have looked like a trout-girl or something. Ricky just chucked at my confusion. He hugged Aunt Lina rather affectionately, running his hand down her back in a rather possessive way. Then he winked at me, tongue lolling as if he was laughing, and he was gone. And just as suddenly, Aunt Lina was herself once more, wearing both parts of her blue silk pajamas.
She ran a hand through her long black hair and sighed.
“Now do you believe me?” she asked, settling herself back on my bed and reaching for the bowl of popcorn as if her antics were as normal as getting up to go to the bathroom. I shook my head as if to re-arrange the marbles that were coming loose.
“Why did you become half-bear-half-human?” I blurted out, when I finally managed to find my voice.
She froze, with a handful of popcorn halfway to her open mouth. I remember that a few pieces fell on the quilt, and Aunt Lina looked down, blushing.
“You saw that? And Ricky? How did he appear?”
“Half-fox, half-man.”
Aunt Lina was quiet for a few moments, and then she smiled, tilting her head to the side.
“Well, Miranda, you’ve always been a surprise and a challenge. You’ve seen me as I appear in the Spiritworld, as I appear to Ricky. And yet you’ve never walked that path. I don’t exactly know what that means, but I take it to mean that once again, you are exceeding the expectations that everyone had for you. Maybe the spirits are telling me that I’ve been too cautious. Perhaps you should know exactly why we’re leaving this place.”
Mostly I felt as if things were finally falling into place, as if I was finally going to be treated as an equal, not a child. But the sarcastic imp in the back of my mind felt like Aunt Lina was the hostess of one of those infomercials, and this was the point where they said “But wait, there’s more!”
That part was right. Aunt Lina explained that the farm and the forest around it had spots that made it easy to slip back and forth between the Spiritworld and our own. That had made it a good place to raise me as a child. But recently some of the wilder spirits had been in touch with Aunt Lina, warning her that with my coming change I was no longer safe, and that there were those who would try to take me from her, to steal or use my abilities for their own purposes.
“Do you remember that cougar in Connecticut that was killed by a car in June?” Aunt Lina asked, seemingly going off-subject.
“The one that was supposedly from Montana?” I responded around a mouthful of popcorn.
“Actually, they said it had its origins in South Dakota, and had wandered through Wyoming and Minnesota. It was a young male, looking for a mate. If a wild cougar would wander that far, how far would a shifter wanting to mate with its “own kind” go? There are lots of crazies out there, my dear, and a teenage cat-in-heat would be a target for their desires. Most cougar-men need open space to roam and hunt, and open space with easy access to the Spiritworld is not the place for you to be until you learn how to walk the paths of the Spiritworld yourself, and until the wildness of your hormones become controlled by your inner strength. If you are not strong enough, you’ll just be like a beacon, or lure, calling out to the men who would use you like—”
Aunt Lina saw from my expression that I didn’t want to hear any more. She reached across the bed and gathered me into one of her fierce bear-hugs; that was her way of saying a whole lot without using words. I hugged her back, knowing that she had always been there to protect me. It was weird, realizing that the woman who was raising me had been around since Lincoln had died. She’d seen technology develop that would have been considered magic in her childhood. And here she was, an extraordinary woman living an ordinary life, after more than a century of life, worrying about me. If there was something here at the farm that made her concerned, then who was I to doubt that suburban NJ would be a safer place for me?
I had to put my trust in Aunt Lina; she’s survived so much more than I could ever imagine. How could I not trust her wisdom?
Until my next post…
Randi
