Crystal Grader by Tag Cavello (read my book txt) 📕

“Jarett?” she called, padding up to the candle.

The wind seemed to be getting stronger. Screams deep and cold shook the windows. The bathroom light flickered. Crystal stepped into the hall. Wooden stairs, familiar, curved down into blackness. Balanced on the railing was something that looked like a miniature torpedo. Shiny steel gleamed in the strange light. Crystal somehow knew what it was: a handgun.

“Jarett!” she called again, looking down towards his bedroom, where more blackness held sway.

And—eureka!—he answered.

“Come on downstairs, sweetheart, I’m in the kitchen!”

As he spoke a light popped on from somewhere below.

Night-dress billowing, Crystal raced down, eager to jump into her trophy’s arms and end this weird adventure. At the bottom of the stairs was a door that let onto the living room. This she ignored, choosing to glide down the narrow corridor on her right instead. It took her straight to the kitchen, which was clean and organized as always. Wooden cupboard doors, all closed, gazed impassively over an empty table. The refrigerator hummed. But Powell—she knew it had been Powell who’d called her—was nowhere to be seen.

Crystal called his name a third time just as the sound of high-heeled dress shoes began to click over the floor in the dining room. Their pace was brisk, and when she looked left a grotesquely tall woman with black hair covering her face appeared out of the dark.

“I’m gonna KILL you!” the woman moaned.

Her body slithered under the kitchen table like a snake—knocking chairs everywhere—popped up in front of Crystal, and grabbed her by the throat.

“KILL you!” she moaned.

Crystal opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out. The black curtain of hair came closer, closer. She felt her feet leave the floor. Her body was being lifted, pressed against the cupboards. Now, crazy as it seemed, the banshee began to accuse her. To lay groundless, confounding blame that made no sense.

“You threaten me!”

Crystal’s back was slammed against the cupboard five times: WHAM-WHAM-WHAM-WHAM-WHAM!

“You mock me!”

WHAM-WHAM-WHAM-WHAM-WHAM!

“And now you swim on the floor!”

With that, the banshee’s cold, clawed hand took hold of Crystal’s head…and twisted it straight off.

Somehow, she was still able to scream, over and over, as she felt her bodiless entity tossed into the black dining room, where it bounced off the table, hit the wall, and rolled to a stop beneath one of the chairs.

Mouth gaping, Crystal’s head was plucked once again from its resting place, this time to be thrown so high into the air she knew from some distant connection in her thoughts that the ceiling had disappeared. At the very peak of her ascent, two hands reached over a wooden railing and caught her. They belonged to the banshee. She had raced upstairs…and now her black hair was slithering over Crystal’s face, splashing her cheeks like dirty water. In it a mouth with bloody red lips could be seen.

“SWIM” it boomed.

The banshee popped Crystal’s head into her mouth, and swallowed her with one gulp.

***

She sat bolt upright in bed. It was still dark outside. Through the balcony window, an orange overhead light threw shadows of raindrops on the wall. Crystal’s heart raced, though she knew she wasn’t at the Jackson farm anymore. It had been a dream—just a bad dream. She was back in Manila.

The baby lay asleep beside her, hands curled into tiny fists over his head. And beside the baby, her husband Michael. Miko for short.

There was nothing wrong. She had suffered a nightmare, but now she was awake, back in the real world. Yet her heart would not slow down. It raced like a rabbit being chased by a wolf. Her breath came up short; her arms began to tingle. Knowing that it was just another panic attack—one of maybe half a dozen that struck her every week—did not make it easier to cope with. She looked at Miko, considered waking him up, then went to gnawing on her thumbnail instead.

Her nails were ragged these days. Broken all over. The fact became bothersome whenever she thought about it for too long (in school she’d taken such good care of them). But it couldn’t be helped. Against these panic attacks, her nails were on the front line of defense. It was either bite them and slow her heart down or let them be pretty and have a stroke.

“Shit,” she whispered.

Now that ugly word—stroke—was skulking about the shadows on this already ugly night.

Well why not? her mind gibbered. Strokes are very common. They happen all the time, and it doesn’t matter if you’re only twenty-five. Panic attacks make your blood pressure go up. Way, way up. You need to calm down or you’re going to have a stroke. You need to calm down or you’re going to have a stroke. You need to calm down—

“Stop it.”

The baby’s fists came slowly open. Not wanting to wake him up, Crystal reached behind her for the book she always kept on the headboard. Books were her second, and by far the most powerful, line of defense against what she had come to think of as mind mutinies. She fumbled it open after activating a flashlight app on her cell phone and began to read.

At first it didn’t help. Her heart kept racing, her arms kept tingling. She began to read aloud, softly so as not to wake the baby. Overcoming a panic attack involved diverting the mind, giving it something other than fear to focus on. Reading almost always accomplished the trick for Crystal…but when even that didn’t work, reading aloud did.

Like now. She came to the end of a sentence, bit down harder on the nail…and finally, her heart tripped into a slower rhythm. Crystal’s chest relaxed. It was over. For now. For one more night.

She finished the chapter. Rain kept trickling down the window, now accompanied by a breeze that rushed through the room, lifting curtains, rifling papers. Miko’s ID badge swung back and forth from a closet door handle.

“Da ba-ba!”

Crystal looked down in surprise—she’d had no idea the baby was awake.

“Hey you,” she whispered.

A grin surfaced on her son’s chubby face. “Da ba-ba!”

Crystal smiled back. “Da ba-ba yourself,” she said, then got up to fix him a fresh bottle.

***

A few hours later they went grocery shopping at the mall, without Miko. This because her husband refused to set foot outside the house on weekends and holidays. Too much traffic, too many people. That was his explanation. A good one, but still inexcusable. Since when did Filipinos mind spending time with other Filipinos? Since never, that was when. But Miko, though born and partly raised in Manila, had not been cultured here. No, he had the United States to thank for his cultural values, and Crystal found it hard not to point an accusatory finger at it sometimes, as if to say this is why you are the way you are; this is why you’re cynical, why you never talk to me anymore; you married an American and now what you want a Filipina to help you forget.

Only she herself had been neither cynical nor silent—not at the beginning, at least. She’d been in love. Genuinely and unabashedly, head over heels in love.

“How do you know?” a friend had asked her, long ago.

“Because I don’t care if he doesn’t love me back,” Crystal had replied. “This isn’t like I need to win anything. I just want him to be happy.”

And happy was how things were, for a whole year after their marriage in the States and then another in Manila, where Miko had taken a job as manager at his uncle’s hotel. Then one day not long after the baby came, she realized they were drifting apart. Fate favored the usual suspects: boredom, disenchantment, temptation from different horizons. It could have been one of those things, none of them, or all of them. She only knew that Miko was changing. Talking less, smiling hardly ever. His eyes didn’t widen anymore when he looked at her. He no longer surprised her with gifts, or acted silly to make her laugh. Sex had come to a dead halt. Crystal had married one man; today, she lived with another. And while it hurt to see him slip away, she was willing to let him go. She still wanted him to be happy. All she wanted in return for that freedom was to know why.

Slim chance, to judge by Miko’s ever-increasing reticence in her company. Sighing, Crystal placed a box of instant spaghetti into the shopping cart. Luke—the baby—pointed to it from his safety-seat, as if to say what is that, Mommy?

“That is the stuff you’re going to smear all over your face tonight for dinner,” she told him. “Come to think of it, so is your dad.”

She rolled the cart over to the sauces shelf. Loud music brayed from the store’s audio system. A small video screen on the second shelf shouted at her to Buy Prego! Other than that there wasn’t much going on—not in this aisle, anyway. It was still far too early for the really big crowds to start jamming things up. Like Miko, Crystal knew about these crowds and avoided them like the plague. Learning the trick of it had taken time, but even in the huge metropolis of Manila, there were methods of crossing the street safely. One only needed to see the gaps. And after searching for the better part of a year, Crystal had found enough to establish a routine of sorts. You did your grocery shopping late morning—between 11AM and 1PM. In the early afternoon—around 2PM—you drove to work. You paid your bills on Tuesdays because that was when the lines were the shortest. Ditto for visits to the transportation office and immigration bureau. And so on and so forth. On most days it all worked out just fine. Of course she still became angry—more like furious—on the rare days when it didn’t, but like her marriage, that was a part of herself she had learned to live with, for better or for worse.

***

Later that night she was back in the kitchen, listening to the wind gust against the windows as she fixed Luke another bottle. Meteorologists were tracking a strong offshore typhoon, predicting that it would arrive in Manila by the end of the following day. Miko had shared this information with her as they unpacked the groceries. Spoken to her without provocation—a rare occurrence indeed.

Crystal supposed it had more to do with Luke than herself. “Don’t drive anywhere tomorrow with the baby,” he finished up by saying, a bottle of Coke Light in one hand and a carton of eggs in the other.

Now he looked up from his book as she returned to the bedroom. “I think he went back to sleep,” he said tunelessly before delving back into the pages.

Leaning over the mattress, Crystal could see that Luke had indeed sacked out after issuing his demand. From the front of his jammies a purple dinosaur smiled at her for following through anyway, and as she placed the bottle on his chest, two chubby arms closed around it. Seconds later, with eyes still closed, Luke started to drink.

This deed accomplished, Crystal picked up her cigarettes and went outside for a smoke on the balcony. The wind was an instant presence, sweeping her hair back from the brow and giving her holy hell with the lighter. More condominiums with balconies sparkled in front of her. Office towers shined. Beyond them, near the horizon, she could pick out Manila Bay, black at this time of night, abysmal.

The water made her think of Lake Erie…and from there, her mind went back home. What was Monroeville up to today? she wondered, before laughing out a puff of smoke. Monroeville was never up to anything. It was a place of men fishing on river banks and women knitting sweaters by windows. It was a place of old houses, well-kept, that brooded beneath the mighty boughs