Mabel Episode 42

The past is a dream of itself

in which temporal fabric is folded and refolded.

The Hi, you've reached Mabel Martin. If I'm not in my dorm room, I'm probably in the forest. Either dead or alive. Leave a message after the beep.

I guess I'll just...

...bred at the beginning.

I guess I'll just...

...start at the beginning.

When I was 8 years old, my mother and Abolita brought me to a healer.

I've been having dreams for months, the kind of dreams that woke me screaming.

My limbs all shivering and swollen, my skin suddenly too tight, too heavy.

The weight of my bones bones impossible, crushing me.

It was my abolita who suggested it first.

They drove me into the city at night, long after I should have been asleep.

I remember that ride more clearly than anything that came before or after, any other journey.

Me in the back seat, twisted in on myself, billboards and brake lights and strip malls

and the glitter of the city after dark. I remember the distance between myself and my mother and grandmother, myself and

the entire rest of the world. Most of all, I remember. There was a door, streaked black

and red and green, with a snarling Aztec doghead, a show that's

quickly, though I didn't know that name until years later, chipped and faded in the middle,

and a blinking eye in green neon above the shop front.

Painted on the window the lurid yellow word botanica and underneath

...