By the time a friend convinced me to put this insane tale to paper two years had passed since it's birth and it had grown to encompass elements of all my favorite stories and shows. So without furthur ado, I present my seventh-grade masterpeice, Any Way the Wind Blows.
Chapter One - A Falling Star
I was born June 13, 1967. [I was very into exact dates. I even came up with a little method on pinpointing what day of the week things happened and mentioning them repeatedly in my storeis] I was the third child, second daughter, to Peter Coffield and Suzin Hanson.
I was five minutes older than my twin sister--Laura. My mother named me Kelika. Kali Ma. The godess who embodies both creation and destruction. It was a Vedic name. Who I was.
I am not sure who will one day read this. I’m not sure why I’m even writing this down. But let me make one fact clear; I am not evil. There was a reason I did everything that I did. To you, I was probably just an irrational child. But let me assure you, I’m not. [Me thinks you sound a wee bit paranoid, Kell Bell.]
Life’s an ironic thing. It has ways of teaching you things like nothing else does. Each and every thing on the planet has one purpose or another. I had one too. I don’t think I was ever clear on what my destiny was, but I am not what I used to be, so maybe things have changed.
My story begins when I was a child. My brother, Michael, was simply adorable. Everybody loved him. He had wavy black hair and dark green eyes. He was born on July 22, 1964 [My birthday, though 20 years earlier.]. He was sweet and everyone loved him. Michael was very protective of his little sisters, all four of us.
My sister Jennifer was born a year and a half after Michael. On Febuary 15, 1966. Jennifer was extremely smart and preferred to be called Jennifer rather than Jenny. But I always called her Jen-Jen.
Jen-Jen had long whispy black hair and sapphire blue eyes that were hardly found in anyone other than toddlers. She was a very mature woman and didn’t have much fun in her childhood.
My younger sister, Megan, was born on August 2, 1969. She was two years younger than me, and the most annoying little sister a girl could have. Megan made me sick half the time. Instead of having black hair like the rest of us, she had golden blond curls. Along with Jen-Jen’s blue eyes. She was like a breath of fresh hair, most people would say. Especially for the Coffield family. [Was it her “breath of fresh hair” personality that nauseated you?]
Then there was me and Laura. The Coffield twins. We were both positively gorgeous [No modesty here. And for the record, in my head Kelly's always looked like Mila Kunis. When I first saw Gia back in '97 and saw Mila Kunis I was like "Holy shit! It's Kelly!"]. With our long wavey black hair, and our demonic green eyes. But we were the rarest of twins. For Laura was ¾ human and ½. . . . Something. But it was the opposite for me. I was ¼ human, and ¾ something. [Now it gets weird. Had you fooled in the beginning, didn’t it?]
Laura was the good twin. She got good grades, good boyfriends, and she had a good attitude. I, on the other hand, was the screw-up. I never did what I was told. I never took orders from anyone. In fact, I acted like a total bitch most of my life. I think it’s funny. But maybe it’s not so funny.
My story starts when I was four years old. When my parents got divorced and Daddy left.
It was about one “o” clock in the morning and my parents were fighting. Even though they were poor, and had us when they were teenagers, they were good parents. They never fought in front of us. They never even seamed to have anything bad going on between them. But I knew better. I knew them. I could sense when something was wrong. It was sort of a gift I had. Knowing when things were wrong. Usually what’s wrong. Knowing when people were lying to me. Most people wished that they had my gift. But I wished I didn’t, throughout my life, it just caused me nothing but pain and agony.
My parents were yelling at each other very loudly. I wondered why the other’s didn’t wake up.
“Suzin,” my father yelled at my mother. “What the hell are we gonna do with her. It’s one thing having a wife for a murderer. It’s another thing having a daughter for a murderer.” [So Suzin’s a confessed killer. Wonder which daughter they’re talking about…]
“Look, Peter,” my mother said calmly and rationally, like always. “If you don’t like the way things are, you are a 23 year old adult. You can take care of yourself.” [Ye Gods, 23 with five kids. Probably a good thing he left before they could spout out more of these Coffield hellions.]
“What are you getting at, Suzi?”
Then my mother went off. She grabbed his neck and screamed, “Don’t ever call me Suzi!” Her fingernails were digging into his neck and then a drop of blood appeared. Mother seemed fixated in a trance. Frankly, I thought she was going nuts. [Me too.]
I know when most kids caught their mother trying to kill their daddy, that they would get scared. But not me. I was almost as fixated as my mother. I knew that my mother couldn’t kill him. She loved him too much. That’s why she tried to not fall in love. She was never able to kill those she loved. And that would once again after this incident come back to haunt her.
Suddenly, my mother stopped, and she left go. They were in the big living room, with me in the hall. This is how our house was set up.
[I'll get this picure up later, my scanner's not set up.]
“Get out, before I changed my mind,” my mother spoke restraining her temper.
“Alright,” he was quickly getting out of there before Mother killed him. I didn’t blame him.
But before he stepped into the hallway I stepped in front of him.
“Daddy, where are you going?”
He nealed down in front of me. “Daddy’s got to go away for a while, Kelly. There are certain things you’ve got to understand.” [She’s four.]
“Go back to bed, Kelly,” I heard my mother call to me.
“Goodbye Kelly,” my daddy kissed me on the cheek and walked out the front door. I never saw him again.
I walked into the living room and sat next to me mother. She was squeezing her temples with her eyes closed, and she obviously didn’t know I was there.
“Mother,” I said touching her shoulder. It was when she looked up I saw she was crying. “What’s wrong?” I said.
She just looked at me as if I were crazy. “You know, Kelika. You always know.” She got up and walked towards the kitchen, but then she turned around and looked back at me. “Go back to bed.” And I did what I was told for once of the few times in my life. But only because she used my real name.
Kelika, I never really hated the name, I just liked being called Kelly.
Nothing much happened in my later life. [If that were the case, this story would be much shorter.] I went into school the next year. And I was a straight A student.
Then my life took a turn when I was seven. Mother told me to meet my Aunt Laurella. She was who Laura was named after.
Aunt Laurella was born on May 15, 1882. The woman was 92 years old. But she didn’t look a day over 25. [People would kill for her secret.] It was October of 1974.
Aunt Laurella had just gotten off the tran. I knew she could not see me, but she knew I was there. And she walked right to me.
“Hello, Kelika,” she said when she reached me. She was a gorgeous as a model. Her hair was long, almost down to her ass. And it was black. It was not died though, it was completely natural. She was tall, at five ten. She had a wiry lithe figure. And she was wearing an old fashioned black dress that most people wore when she was a kid. [How does she know all this?]
“Aunt Laurella, how did you know it was me?” The question seemed to amuse her for a moment, then it frightened her. [Laurella’s bipolar.] Almost as if she knew me. Many people who knew me were afraid of me, even though at that point I hadn’t hurt a thing in my life. Most people knew what I was even before I knew. I think now that that was the only thing that frightened me in life. People getting to knew me. Because I wasn’t like other people. I didn’t even know myself. Because I was a walking time bomb. And God only knew when I would go off. [She does like to ramble.]
“Silly girl,” Aunt Laurella said, the smile returning onto her narrow pale face. She reached into her handbag and too out a ring case.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s for you,” she handed it slowly over to me and took off her sunglasses. It was then that I saw her eyes. They were almost as dark as mine. “Here, take it.”
I reluctantly took it from her and opened it. It was a plain silver band. [Ahhh! What happened to the ring that was the self eating serpent with the emerald eye? It must’ve been in an earlier version. Or maybe a later. Damn that ring was so much cooler.] An odd gift, I thought.
“It’s from Mars,” Aunt Laurella told me excitedly. “It’s a part of you.” [And Laurella’s been smoking some weed.]
“What do you mean?”
“there’s more to it than what meats the eye.” She smiled. An evil smile. A smile that sent shivers down my spin. I just stared at her. Waiting. Waiting for what? Perhaps what happened next. I’m still not sure.
As I stared at Aunt Laurella’s evil smile, something happened at that moment to change me forever. The smile seemed to start to crawl all the way up her face till it reached her eyes. It wanted to eat her eyes. Then slowly, everything except Aunt Laurella, turned black. And all I could see was that smile. That stupid smile. Her eyes started to dissolve. And soon her whole face. Till there was nothing left except that smile. That smile I hated so. The smile that sure as hell didn’t belong to her.
Then I saw who--or should I say what--that smile belonged to. It was an ugly green demonic reptile. He was scaly and smelly--yes, I could actually smell it. It was so nauseating, I thought I would die. So I closed my eyes and screamed. And screamed. And screamed. [Well so far she seems a smidgent smarter than Gracie and Dawn. Screaming is an appropriate response.]
When I finally opened my eyes, I automatically stopped screaming. Everything was back to normal. With Aunt Laurella shaking me.
“Kelly, are you all right?” I pushed her off me.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” I turned and started funning. Running faster than I had ever run in my life.
“Kelika!” I heard my aunt call and I stopped. She quickly caught up to me. [Pretty quick for a 92-year-old woman.] “You forgot the ring.” I quickly realized that during my hallucination I had dropped the ring case.
“Why are you giving me that ring?” I asked. [More importantly, how did you get ahold of a ring from Mars? Or, why do you look so young?]
“Because it’s a part of who you are. It will help you.”
“With what?”
“Your powers.” My powers? How did she know about them? I had never told anybody. “Just remember this.”
“What?” I whispered.
She leaned down and whispered in my ear. “Any way the wind blows, life is like a black rose.” She rose and left. The next time I saw her was ten years into the future.
I took the ring out of the case and put it upon my thumb on my left hand.
I stared up at the sky and was surprised to find that it had grown dark. How long had I been out there? Then I took a look at my surroundings. How did I get this far? I was at the hanging tree. [Yes, because the very backwards town of Shadyside had a history of hanging witches in the nineteenth century. Including Laurella’s twin sister. Why do I remember this crap?] Three miles from my house. How could I have possibly gotten this far?
It was then I heard it. It. “Hello, Kelly,” It said to me from inside my head.
I squeezed my temples and said, “Who are you? What are you doing in my head?”
It just laughed. It had a deep baritone voice. “I’m here for a reason, Kelly.”
“And what’s that?”
“To help you. To show you?” [Apparently he’s unsure.] The to show you part struck me as insane. [That’s the only part?]
“To show me what?”
“Yourself.”
I had been walking towards my house all that time, and I finally reached the lake. The lake was just down the street from me. God I had walked fast.
I walked over to the crystal clear blue water to see my reflection. I was so pretty. [And so narcissistic.] But I didn’t see my face. I saw the ugly reptile instead. It was sort of like that story about that girl who was really vain and selfish, so one day she looked at herself in the mirror and she saw a really ugly girl. [So she recognizes the fact that she’s extremely vain.]
But this was different, I wasn’t that ugly thing. I was simply there, hearing, listening to the ugly thing.
It was at that moment something made me look at the sky. Some people say when you see a falling star, you’re supposed to wish upon it. And if you don’t tell anybody what you wished for it would come true.
But not for me.
Because in the instante I saw that falling star something clicked.
I was that falling star.
Because in my brief, but unbelievable life, I hardly learned anything. Life is a precious gift. And you should live it to it’s fullest.
I truly was that falling star. My life had highpoints, and it had low points. But that’s life. [How melodramatic can you get?]
What is the green reptile? What powers does Kelly have? What kind of anti-aging treatment does Laurella use? Who did Kelly kill? What the hell is going on in this story. Find out next time...maybe...
