A Part of The Story

The news of Great Granny’s deadness is wrapped up and sealed in a black rimmed envelope. The envelope and the letter inside it are the colour of a caramel milkshake with chocolate sprinkles. Their edges look like someone’s melt-glued a licorice whip to them.

I touched the paper to my tongue - to taste. Why not? Neither the envelope or the letter are licorice or caramel flavoured.

Great Granny said to investigate things for myself. If I don’t investigate, I’ll never find my own answers. An answer is like a favourite chocolate, or a pretty pebble.

I wonder if she is all pale and filmy - a ghost seen and unseen.

My family says that when people die, they cross-over into another world.

“We travel through the veil that divides the worlds.” They say. Phrases like that took the place of nursery rhymes when I was a baby. My family doesn’t believe in being dead. We’re undead and we stay that way forever.

I’m not certain about dead or undead, but like the idea of the River Styx. The ferry man carrying us onwards to somewhere. Not here. Were the Ancient Romans or the Ancient Greeks the believers in rivers and ferrymen?

I think I liked Great Granny - a little bit. Once. I think I still do like her. Or - I did like her before she died. Or didn’t die.

Her eyes were brown? Grey? I remember they were a colour. They weren’t ice-blue or black and freaky orbs.

She was a ghost-whispering, future reading sort of person. But, Great Granny didn’t look anything like Hollywood’s glitz future seeing characters. She wore navy blue blazers, pencil skirts and sensible black shoes.

She looked like a sales person in a shop that sells thousand dollar china sets and crystal.

Great Granny wasn’t interested in fancy dish sets. She was interested in the people who bought the fancy dish sets. Well - some of them.

Rubes and Suckers; That’s what she called her clients on crunchy days. On those days that the damp and rain made her knees ache, and the tarot slipped through her twisted fingers.

“Rubes.” She spat the word like a taste, before flipping on the ‘Open’ light in her shop window. But, as soon as the first client stepped through the door, Great Granny was all lace and grins.

That black rimmed letter.

The one that says Great Granny has thumbed a ride across The River. None of us noticed it for a few days. Not even the annoying clutter of people - the Moopies - who have globbed themselves onto my family found that letter. I was almost surprised that the Moopies didn’t find it. I’ve seen some of them pick through our trash and unwashed dishes in the kitchen sink.

(Moopies are what I call the groupies that grow like mould around occult shops and almost famous mystics and sooth sayers.)

My family is littered with crystal gazers, tea readers, and undead communicators. The occult - after-life communicating - it’s been our family business longer than forever. Long before Harry Houdini wriggled out of a straight jacket, my ancestors and their ghostly antics were astounding elite and bedazzled audiences.

That letter in its black rimmed envelope might have simply turned into a sodden moldy mush,If my sister, Cedar hadn’t been craving an extra olive and no cheese pizza.

I’ve glued together pieces of tarot cards, some pink quartz crystals, and amethyst, to make a frame for the letter and its envelope. A memorial art piece.

I’ll probably pin it to a bit of the black velveteen tenting in what may or may not be the living-room of our house.

Almost all of the our home’s rooms are tented with purple or black velveteen. Even the windows are veiled with purple sheers. My family believes in creating ambience and mystery. These are important since Cedar and my brother, Spruce, host a series. “The Undead Said,” can be found on the electronic device of your choice, whenever and wherever you find yourself.

The program mostly features interviews with my parents, and other Seers, Mystics, and New Age types trying to sound like Druids, or Shaman. All magical and unexplained. Every month Spruce and Cedar host a special episode in which counsel ghosts and other assorted undeads.

Who knew being on the other-side was so troubling and problematic?

My father created the concepts for ‘The Undead Said,’ when Cedar and Spruce were seven and nine years old.

My parents say that Cedar has exquisite knowledge of the tarot. She is an astounding reader who knew the symbolism and definitions of the Major and Minor Arcana by the time she was in first grade. By the time she was in fifth grade she was reading her classmates fortunes in cookie crumbs.

I am told that I swallowed three of my mother’s divining crystals when I was in second grade. I do not know whether this is fact or fiction.

I’m not enamoured by veils or curtains. I’ve never even seen an interesting pattern in the tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. Crystal balls make me dizzy.

When I graduate high-school, I’d like to go to university to study computer systems design. A computer design engineer. Maybe I’ll drive a Porsche.

Cedar and Spruce understand all the stuff about the family business. Crystals and tarot, palms and tea. I think they have porous skin and learn by osmosis.

Like amoeba.

Great Granny moved out of our splintery old house after the first episode of “The Undead Said,” was broadcast.

She moved herself and her boxes of scarves and crystals into a brick and wooden building. A corner building that was once a general store. The previous tenants had left a white iron day bed and a hot-plate in the back room. That suited Great Granny who sometimes slept in broom closets - because.

She opened ‘The Rising Moon Tea Shoppe’ where futures were seen and people could come and chat with their undead friends and relatives. She even hired an assistant who answered phones and welcomed seekers to the Shoppe.

For a time my cousin, Morris and I were sent to stay with Great Granny whenever my parents, Spruce, Cedar, of aunties and uncles were assembling new episodes of The Undead Said.

The air inside Great Granny’s shop tasted of dust and incense. Great Granny and her assistant tacked palmistry illustrations on the walls. To hide the bigger holes and stains. The pictures also gave people something to look at while they sipped their leafy tea and munched a stale sugar cookie.

Granny believed a sweet should always be served with tea.

Whenever a tea-leaf client came into the shop, Great-Gran’s assistant, clapped her silver ringed fingers and shushed Morris and I into the back room. She gave us each a box of crayons and a piece of pink bubblegum for entertainment.

Once, I asked her I might have a piece of paper on which to create my art.

The assistant blinked through her long blonde bangs and asked; “What do you think the walls are for?”

Morris and I covered the wall with our imagined and magical world. We drew; rabbits,trees, castles, houses and flying goats. (I’ve always loved goats.)

On most days Great Granny was like a sun Morris and I orbited. Sometimes she’d rest a touch so light on my head, it felt like a butterfly had landed for a moment. Once and again two chocolate iced cookies appeared in the back room of her shop.

But my favourite days were those when a client wanted to speak with The Departed.

On those occasions Morris and I stepped from our shadows and into our light. Great Granny wanted us to shatter silence, to create a fearsome and wonderous presence and perhaps we did.

She had designed a special table for communications with the spirit world.

It was thick and black table that sat in the centre of what was once a store-room. I doubt anyone looking at the table suspected it concealed anything unusual. The table’s base was thick. Decorated with carvings of stars, moons, and other mystical symbols. The table top shone like glass. It reflected those seated or standing nearby.

The perfection of Great Granny’s design was its simplicity.

No one ever thought to examine the table’s base. They didn’t notice see that one side of the base opened and inside was a compartment large enough to conceal a small child.

Once inside the pocket Morris or I slipped our arms into the wooden supports that held the table. We became the departed. Rocking our body to make the table jump and rumble, thumping our fists against the table’s underside to rap out spirit answers. Controlling a giggle fit or stifling a sneeze was the most difficult part of our job.

Great Granny kept a jar of caramels and chocolate drops she used to reward Morris and I for our performances.

I always picked the chocolate drop whenever it was my turn to work the table.

During the in-between times - when the shop was empty of clients Morris and I wandered the whole shop.

Great Granny’s Assistant sometimes gave us chalk and we drew on the walls and floor boards.

“Spirit Writing,” Morris and I heard her tell clients who asked about our designs.

I was just tall enough to rest my chin on the window sill and spent a lot of time trying to see out through the glass. The windows were rippled with dirt and dust, and age. People passing by looked blurred, even after I wiped clean the inside of the glass. The passers-by all looked like ghosts.

When I was five years old, I thought the world outside Great Granny’s shop was populated by ghosts.

I think I really loved Great Granny’s shop - for awhile.

Morris and I lived in The Rising Moon Tea Shoppe for almost a year. When “The Undead Said” became a ginormous viral sensation, Great Granny and my parents, and assorted aunties, uncles and cousins stopped speaking to each other. Great Granny told my parents they’d brought an evil eye onto the family business. My parents, aunties, uncles and cousins told Great Granny that she was a foe of progress and development.

The first members of what became a Moopie commune moved into the dust and thistle yard that surrounds our house, and neither I nor Morris I ever got to play the role of the Dear Departed again.

The end.

The black rimmed letter was sent to us by Great Granny’s assistant - I think. Or perhaps a Moopie?

Great Granny’s shop isn’t even far from my family’s house. A person with stubby little legs could walk from our house to The Rising Moon Tea Shoppe in five minutes. A tall striding person might get there in three minutes. Cedar, Spruce, my cousins and and I pass it every-day on the way to anywhere.

“Auras read, Fortunes Told, Lift the veil to another World,” is written in gold on one window.

I used to slow my steps. I’d peer through the window. I think I hoped to maybe see Great Granny taking a clients hand in both of hers. Saying “We plan our lives before we’re born - you’ll see it through.”

And sometimes I’d see her all fuzzy behind the dust and glass, smiling and half-turned towards me.