The Power of Nine (Part 1)

     It was Mindy Epstein, who started every suspiciously friendly inquisition with "So.....", who began to sense what I was capable of, with my mind that is.  That summer I'd turned nine and cut my hair boyshort for the first day of fourth grade.  With my green polyester dress, kneesocks, buck teeth and baseball cap, I didn't even entertain the notion of what other people thought.  That was it, the moment in time, that lofty precipise and agile balancing on the brink of pure feeling and action before the damp blanket of puberty, comprehension and hesitation.  I could feel the energy racing through  me, BoUnCiNgBoUnCiNgBoUnCiNg, like a streak of light and my mind far flung out the window as I squirmed at my desk.  Mindy Epstein had perfect penmanship, to watch her sit dutifully and execute each letter, perfect height,size, spaced, placed properly on the linelineline was painful, my mind did the mental equivalent of swatting gnats.

       I'd hit her radar last year when I started a fight with our teacher, Mrs. Bonato, over her precious daughter, who was also in our class, because she bossed everyone around.  When I turned to my classmates for support, they clammed up and studied their desks and I swore I spoke the truth and stormed out.  Mindy loved confrontation and my stock subsequently rose.   I probably shouldn't have made such a scene, but Kelly Bonato irked me. She got everything she wanted, but she lacked the proper amount of sunshine from standing too long in her mother's formidable shadow.  Her mother bought her shoes, lots of shoes, she had about fifty pairs, but she only had two feet like the rest of us.

      I didn't waste much thought on Kelly, and neither did Mindy.  Last spring we intertwined with nature.  Discarding our shoes in the Donnelly's front yard, halfway between the busstop and home, we rolled in the grass, dangled from trees and spied on the neighbors, made full course meals out of mud and expertly built up the permanent dirt on our ankles that would eventually culminate in a summer well spent.  In the stillness of inevitable boredom our nine year old perception grew acute -  the scuttle of a chipmunk, the patter of Mr. C's sprinkler, the billow of Miss Claire's sheets on the line.  After dousing each other with the hose, we would lie in the front yard on our towels and I believe it was then that I learned to will the squirrels to jump from one branch to the next, and soon, not just any branch, but the one I wanted them to.  I'm convinced that it was the cultivating of this perception, tweaked by tragedy, heightened by the roiling hormonal soup of pre-puberty that gave me the special ability.  Some people call it a sixth sense, my mother called it luck and swore she wouldn't fly on a plane without consulting me first.

     I was only four when my father was violently killed, abrupt, beyond recognition.  My mother swaddled us, my sister and I, in love,silence and grief.  Wall to wall powder pink carpet, even in the closet, is what I remember of that room, my room and that house, our house.  Sitting bunched up, behind the clothes, among the shoes with the secret, crumpled brown bag of last year's Halloween candy.   They did make me come out eventually.  The rest of the picture I filled in with overheard conversations from the continual stream of adults tripping through that house.  I imagined my mother identifying the body at the hospital.   I imagined the funeral home, but the lighting was always harshly florescent, not appropriately dim and soothing, so I figure I wasn't actually there.  I imagined the sea of a hundred umbrellas at the graveyard on the day he was buried,  because when you die at 29, everyone comes.  I imagined God was as sad as I was, that's why it rained so hard.

     All of this was too much to carry around inside me, so I projected it outward.  The first time it happened, I was sitting in the kitchen. I had an inner turmoil so strong that I was breaking out in a sweat and I was not to be contained.  That's when I did it, I flung the shoe across the room, hitting the bird clock above the sink.  Only I didn't touch it with my hands at all or any other  visible body part, I had thrown it with my mind and I was instantly filled with relief and wonder.  After that, I willed everything; a chance meeting with a friend, lasagna for dinner, a number between one and ten, first in line picked from a hat and exactly how many jellybeans in the Library jar.  It wasn't till the fire that I had an inkling for the extent of my powers, but by then it was too late, wasn't it? 

     

To be continued.....

By: DPR