Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 122
The smell was what Felecia noticed first, Josephine wore the scent of the crushed berries like an insane perfume and chewed the leaves until the thick saliva ran down her chin in rivulets while she worked. The plant came from her grandmother’s people, she said they planted it in the swamps of Aquidneck where it was wet enough to survive. Josephine called the plant dreamfoil because she said it helped to keep her nightmares at bay, what Felecia noted of it was something written by her great grandmother, a salvia plant from the islands with red leaves and roots that seemed to calm nerves and regulate the cycles of the body.
Dreamfoil smelled like hot pepper seeds and dry ground ginger. The plant was altogether refreshing and yet significantly unpleasant to taste. Felecia married its fragrance and properties with the woman who used it so much. The old tar paper shack stank of dreamfoil as she reached those ugly, sagging windows while she crawled toward her certain undoing.
Felecia dared to whisper as she crawled ahead of the morons slowly plodding along through the meadow. “Step out the back. They plan to light the place on fire.”
A terribly familiar voice dared to whisper in return from the sagging back windows of the shack. “You think me deaf, girl, think I don’t get that already?”
Felecia already knew how Josephine worked. Better to let the old ruin figure she won, better to let her accept the obvious than swallow what’s right. “They came to burn this old shack to the ground; you don’t care about it anymore than I do. You can afford to crawl to the west just as much as I can. What are you doing…?”
Josephine killed Felecia’s line of questioning as well as her hopes for seeing them both out using common sense and reason. The old woman stood up; risking being seen through the small window next to the front door of the dilapidated house. Felecia could see she was wearing her filthy brown poncho with her wooden whisker mask fixed over her face.
The old woman grimaced and fixed her hands around the handle of a corn knife while she waited for the dimwits to stamp their path up to the front door of her old abode.
“I ain’t going nowhere. Yoseph and his had their fun once, never again.”
Yoseph is dead, a ghost, his son is an old man now with a grown child of his own!
Felecia wanted to shout a rebuttal but she knew it would fall on deaf ears and be heard by the men outside. Jacqueline never took to the news that her old tormentor was long moldering in the wet Aquidneck earth. For her the love of her live had always just left and her life was always taking a turn for the worse, every day.
Instead of reasoning Felecia held onto the facts of what she had learned about her Nana’s doppelganger over the previous year. “Why did you come out here to the meadow? You said you were going south and west to the mushroom harvest?”
Jacqueline continued to speak out loud, threatening to be heard with every utterance as the two morons enclosed on the entrance of the tar paper shack. “I got back and you were gone. I knew where you would go, and I know Yoseph and his and how they think, so here we are!”
Yes, here we are!