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Deirdre had moved to the city of Boston in a quest for answers to questions she
could not name. Strange feelings tugged at her inner core. The trouble was that
she could not isolate those feelings and find a sense of direction. Like many
people recently graduated from high school, she had no goal, no clear sense of
what she wanted to do with her life.
Because of her lack of direction she had not applied to a college along with
her friends. She had instead drifted apart from them and started looking for her
own road. The small town of her birth seemed to offer nothing and she had come
to this city in hopes something would happen for her. Nothing did.
Deirdre took a variety of jobs, dead end jobs they are usually called, and
her employers were neither happy nor dismayed when she moved on. She was just
another face in the crowd, another pair of hands that could easily be replaced.
Right now she worked at the big hotel on Boylston Street as a maid.
"Other people dirty up the sheets and I clean up after them," she
thought wryly. In the back of her mind she realized this would remain the case
for the rest of her life unless something changed. What, she had no idea.
Her room on Huntington Avenue was drab and lifeless. It matched her mood and
she exerted no energy in changing it. The boys living there treated her like a
sister - a role she did not desire. But apparently they had no desires either.
Once in a while the other girls in the building put together a little party. The
type of party where a host tries too hard with the passé jokes and the guests
are soon yawning. The high spot of the last one had been to find that six of the
girls living there were hookers. Their stories had many people blushing and
everybody in stitches.
Deirdre actually gave thought to going into this, the oldest profession, but
backed off not from morals but from the fear that the men she approached would
not want her at any price.
"Probably I'd have to pay them," she thought at a moment of
especially low self-esteem. "Might be worth it."
She worked the second shift and some nights when she got off she would just
walk around the city, remembering the history that once took place on these very
streets. On days off she visited Paul Revere's house, and Bunker Hill Monument
and Old Ironsides, still in the water after these two hundred years.
Inklings of an idea started forming in her head; not crystallizing, just
floating around. Idly she thought of the past and wondered if she could
incorporate it into the future. There was no way to enter a school, her family
was dirt poor and her job barely paid her rent. Until she found the
establishment of Bennie the Thief on Washington Street she didn't even dare to
spend the money for a radio.
Deirdre knew that other poor people somehow found a way to attend college.
She wondered about this. That was as far as it went. The girl would never
actually ask, for it would draw attention to her and that was to be avoided if
at all possible.
Sunday came around overcast and threatening. It held an appeal and she
gathered up a bag lunch so as to go to the Fens for a solo picnic. The Fens is a
park that draws nowhere near the crowds of Fenway Park, the baseball stadium, or
the Boston Commons, home of the famous swan boats.
Her imagination ran wild today, not only with history of the Revolution but
with the times that went before, when witches were sought out and burned and
Puritans that had come here for religious freedom whipped the Quakers that dared
to speak their minds.
She pondered on this - how people study history so ardently but apparently
learn nothing from it. Oh well, she could not solve her own problems, let alone
those of the world.
The sun poked through for a little while, and sitting on the raincoat she
carried along she laid out her rather poor picnic and set about doing it
justice. When almost finished a flicker of movement caught her eye and she saw
it was a rat, watching her in the hopes of gathering up any leftover crumbs.
Then another movement, and another, and suddenly she realized the beady-eyed
rodents surrounded her, all watching her every move attentively.
Slowly she stood up and began to walk away. Her verve failed when the wall of
rodents moved and she started to run. Now she felt the tiny claws on her legs
and she leapt into the Fens River, emerging on the other side to see the rats
had transferred their attentions to a family of ducks that became smaller before
her eyes. She shuddered and turned just as the impending storm finally hit.
Jagged streaks of lightning crashed and rain as cold as Arctic water turned
the area into a cruel moonscape. She had left her raincoat on the ground and the
cold struck to her very core. Then suddenly she was hot, as if the fires of Hell
were rising up from the center of the earth.
In front of her was a figure, lifeless and distorted like a stuffed doll
tossed away by a bored child. She forced herself to look and see if there was
any hope. Her scream was involuntary as she saw the face. It was her image. It
was the face she saw every morning in the mirror. Could she be dead, hit by the
lightning perhaps and now just wandering as a spirit?
She did not feel like a spirit, but this was not a dream, either. Perverse
fascination made her reach down and touch this distorted version of herself, and
when she did a strange thing happened. She had touched the fingertips and now
the body was melded to her own. It was weightless and when she tried to fling it
off it simply swirled like an airless balloon. And then it entered her body.
From a distance it looked like a snake swallowing a rodent, her arm showing a
huge lump as passage was made, then going back to size as the invader took on
the same shape as her own.
Deirdre shook her head to get her bearings. What had really happened? It had
been real, of that she was sure. But she shrugged it off and headed forth into
the warm sunshine that had broken through the storm.
She had traveled to the city to find herself, and she had.
©2002 StoriesByEmail.com
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