The Witch Part 6
“Donnie don’t you worry ‘bout what your mother said, hear?” said her father, whose volcanic mood had suddenly shifted to another much more comfortable season. “Daddy’s gonna make you some more pancakes. OK? Daddy’s gonna make you some more pancakes. With lotsa blueberries, OK? Big fat ones too! Just how you like.”
“But Momma said…”
There was the sound of a bowl crashing and tinkling as it exploded against the floor. Almost like it was screaming. Donatella had always liked that bowl for some reason, the pretty red, yellow and green swirling designs of smiling small animals that had been painted along the sides. It had been a large mixing bowl, not the kind of dish any child would normally pay attention to, but to Donatella – ‘Donnie’ as her father sometimes liked to call her – it just looked like something that had been made especially for her. And since she didn’t have many things, certainly not many toys or dolls (she had lots of promises though, of all the wonderful things Mommy and Daddy were going to get for her but then there would always be another something standing guard, mocking her, between the promise and the delivery), then her very special bowl that her parents never quite understood was special (because why would a bowl be special to a child?) began to fulfill the promise of all those other barren promises that Donnie began to understand would never be allowed to breathe.
But now that bowl was scattered haphazard all over the kitchen floor in sharp edges. For a painfully extended moment the apartment grew silent as the echo of her father’s inexplicable rage faded into empty. Fantasma straightened herself up on the couch to where she nearly resembled who she had once been as a young woman and shot Ellis a look meant to kill, but Ellis never saw the look. Only felt it as he stood quietly at the stove looking down at the bits and pieces of his worthless anger. As for Donatella, a small tear leaked from the corner of her left eye.
“You broke my bowl, daddy,” she whimpered.
Ellis didn’t even bother to contest the small child’s misplaced claim to ownership of a dish that should have been a toy as he tried to ignore the scratching accusation inside his brain of who he was not and would never be. But what he could not ignore was the way his small daughter sucked in an impossibly large breath that never could have found space inside a child’s lungs. Except that anger always finds its way somehow. Anger always makes its room.
“You broke my bowl, daddy!” the child screeched at an unholy volume that shook the entire apartment building to where doors were timidly opened up and down the hallway as neighbors peeked out and regarded one another with expressions of fear and questioning.
But none of those expressions could match the level of fear that had now taken up residence inside the home of the James family. Well, maybe just in Ellis, who stared wide-eyed at his only child as an unrecognizable horror that had somehow invaded his home. His hands hung limply by his sides, fingers fidgeting as he began to tremble. His mouth opened to speak but there were no words, only a dry whispering of air that spilled out.
Fantasma, however, was smiling. Almost like a proud mother whose little girl finally delivered the performance of a lifetime at the school recital. She was no longer slouching but sitting up straight as could be on the couch, leaning forward just a bit as if in anticipation for whatever was coming next. Her bird-like hands were folded in her lap, her dark brown eyes sparkling. And when she opened her mouth, the words were not afraid to come out.
“You know what, little girl? I think you might just be mine for real after all. Come on over here, baby.”
Donatella Makes A Friend
But Donatella did not want to come over there. She could smell the lie in her mother’s words almost as well as she could smell the desperation. What kind of mother would have felt drawn closer to her child after an outburst like that? What kind of mother warms herself beside the flames of rage sparked by the confusion of her own child?
Someone who was not really her mother, who was just pretending. But why?
“I need to go out,” she said quietly, still sitting awkwardly in her chair as her father’s mouth still moved soundlessly. Fantasma leaned forward with her arms outstretched, a twisted smile pulled across her face, as if she hadn’t heard.
“Come on over here, baby,” she said again, this time her voice taking on a bit more urgency. “Momma needs to talk to you. There are things…”
“I need to go outside. Please. You need to let me go outside.”
Fantasma’s rubber smile began to contort into something less, but her arms remained outstretched, not so much welcoming but reaching. And there was a difference.
“Baby why you think you need to go outside right now? Besides, you too young to go out there all by yourself, and you too little. You got to be grown like your daddy and me to just walk yourself up and down the street, girl. You ain’t nothin but a child, so why don’t you…
“Let the girl go, Fan.”
TUNE IN NEXT WEEK AS THE STORY OF ‘THE WITCH’ CONTINUES…