The Water: Chapter one

CHAPTER 1                                                            


                   The funny thing about something thats forgotten is that it's alot more dangerous that way.  Atleast when your worrying yourself over it it can't sneak up and bite you on the ass.          
I was forgotten.  I was born in a place time forgot too.  You know the drill small town, very pretty, everybody knows everybody.  My whole family is from here, always have benn always will be.  My mom is a homemakers my daddy's a preacher.  Mama loved us and daddy loved jesus and all the female followers of the lord.  So needless to say I spent the  later half of my life in a one parent household. 
         The first time I ever really noticed the differences in my family from all the rest was when granny died.          
         I'll never forget the day she passed I walked to the door of her hospital room and there they were my mom and my aunts.  Eight of them all togather surrounding my naked granny who was lynig so still on the bed I just knew she was already gone.  I stood as still as I could for some reason not wanting to interuppt what I saw, but after a moment I knew my presence was known and that I was being allowed to witness thier actions, 
         They dressed her hair in purple wildflowers, a beautiful crown of her favorite color tucked into the soft fluff of permed gray hair that seems to be the favorite hair do of every respectable ordinary old granny the world over.  But with those flowers she looked like anything but your run of the mill cookie baking grandma.          
         Next they picked up bottles of of scented water I could smell the lavender from where I was standing and they coated her entire body in it.  Not just poring it on her but with a couple of them dribbling it over her and the rest softly massaging it into her skin.  My aunt Iris took up a basket of flower petals and as the other s continued with the scented water she went behind then and covered the already annointed areas of her body with the petals.  This went on in a painstakingly slow pace for almost an hour.  They moved in silence, with such steady hand you would have thought they all did this on a regular basis.  That this was not the oddest thing in the world to be doing as your mother drew what could be her last breath.           
         I couldn't move during this stange process I just stood there terrified to look away for even a moment scared I would miss some important point where all of this would be explained and my sense of having a normal family could return.  But any hope of that faded the moment they finished.  Granny lifted her hand and took my mothers and whispered what ileast expected.
         " Thank you "  she said in a voice that was full of a lot more than gratitude.           
         And with that she left.  She just closed her eyes and was gone.  As soon as her last breath was finished the most horrifying sound I've ever heard rang out through the hospital.  They wailed.  I know this is an odd chioce of words btus its the only ones to described what came out of these women.  They wailed.  I ran.  I ran and ran until there was no breath left in me.  What else could I do something had to be going horribly wrong for the women who had loved and raised me in such a normal way to be acting so strangly.  I don't know if I had ever even seen one of them cry and to see them scream out in such a way filled me with the most incomprhensible fear.           
         When I returned to the hospital the alarm had been sounded my granny was missing and my family who i had just seen with her protested they could not imagine what had happened to their mother.  I couldn't believe what i was hearing.  Lies, lies from these women who would have popped my mouth for such a thing and didn't they want to know where the body of their dead mother was.  But one look in my mothers eyes told me even more strange truths.  They knew and worse they had taken her.  But why, why why why would they be doing this.  We walked out of the hospital toagather all of us surronded by apologies from people who has no reason to do so.  All of them filled with the fear of the reprcussions that would surely come form losing a member of someones family.  But those reprecussions never came and for niether did the explanation, but what did come from that day was my  beginging in a strange tutalage. 
         From that day on I was shooed from less rooms i was allowed to see parts of these women i didn't even realize was hidden,  and to learn what they and myself really are.          
         I was sixteen years old that day and I'm pretty sure that it aged me more than any other time in my life. As I walked out of that hospital with these womenI walked more beside them than being led by them as before I was allowed to know.  As far as they were concerned Iwas grown now and the confidence that came with that was dampened by the fear that as a grown woman I would no longer be protected from whatever other stangeness was lurking  in the shadows of my family.