• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1084 0

childlike, and possibly traumatized. Boys, that time, like the Dunmores. They had moved to Littleton because their father was going to be the superintendent of a nearby correctional facility. They were eleven when they arrived, moving with their parents and two younger sisters from Nashua to the White Mountains. When they had been toddlers, their town house and the adjoining town house had burned down in the small hours of the morning, and the fire had begun in the very bedroom they shared. The wiring behind their night-light had been defective and set the night-light and then their bedding on fire as they slept. But their father had smelled the smoke before they succumbed to it and gotten the twins and his wife safely out of the house. The next-door neighbors had not been so fortunate: They were an elderly couple, and both succumbed to smoke inhalation in their sleep.

Sadly, no sooner had Anise gotten to know the twins’ mother—a deferential and mousy little thing, and thus rather perfect—than the father was involved in a very public, gloves-off sort of fight with the state legislature over funding for the correctional facility and ended up quitting in a huff. The family moved back to Nashua, and whatever opportunities those twins might have offered were gone. They couldn’t possibly try outside of Bethel; they couldn’t possibly try at such a distance. People would notice. They would watch. They would intervene.

She sighed. It wasn’t simply that the earth here in Bethel felt sacred to Reseda—though it did. It was liminal. Connected. A bridge, in her opinion—or, better still, a passageway. She thought of the Egyptian doors to the afterlife, six- and seven-foot slabs of granite found in some of the ancient tombs. Often carved into granite was a series of concentric doorways, suggesting an infinite corridor.

But Bethel was also isolated, and that mattered, too. It was, in the end, why she stayed here. The soil was at once blessed and undiscovered—at least by most of the living.

Sometimes people from other parts of the country found her. They wanted her to host everything from goddess workshops to rites of passage retreats. These strangers had heard rumors about her and wanted to learn from her, though they never wanted to learn anything she wanted to teach. Politely she would direct them to shamans she knew who were legitimate healers and—unlike her—comfortable as teachers. Unfortunately, the world also was filled with hundreds (thousands?) of people who claimed to be shamans and had Web sites, and would be content to take their money and teach them to handcraft a shamanic rattle or drum. Maybe help them to try to make sense of their dreams. The truth was, she wasn’t especially interested in the living. These days, she knew, she was far more fascinated by the dead.

Once again she saw in her mind the faces of the Linton girls and then the face of their father. She saw him flinching reflexively when his plane flew into a cloud of geese. And, finally, she thought of the geese themselves, rising up from a marsh or inlet or patch of swampy soil and flying thousands of feet into the air only to collide with a jet plane. One of the other women in a group she had joined before retreating to New Hampshire had had an eagle for a power animal. But no one, as far as Reseda knew, had ever had a goose. She wondered if those geese had been part of a plan. Had they been sent? Had there been a reason for the sacrifice of the thirty-nine passengers aboard the aircraft?

She resolved she would watch the twins more attentively and she would wait. Unlike the family of the correctional superintendent, she doubted the Lintons were going anywhere soon.

Occasionally, you recall the unsolicited comments that passengers would offer as they boarded the plane and you were in the midst of your preflight checklist. There was that exchange with a Southern belle as you prepared to lift off from Charlotte. She was a blond debutante, attractive and slim at middle age, and she stood beside the flight attendant, her elegant Burberry carry-on bouncing against