Manitou pokes out a nose. Furiously sniffs the ruined air. The great snout lifts skywards, the nostrils red, each nostril as large as a whale's blowhole. Up comes the rest of the tremendous head, eyeballs rolling.
The Windigo's daughter, stinking as a windigo stinks, dark red hair matted from bulging forehead to high-arched bigfoot, sinks into her hairy skin, grunts in fear as Manitou pulls back its lips to say: GO HOME, ALL OF YOU!
Everyone is here. All of them. Each in their own way has scared me, tormented me, disturbed me. This time, they terrify me. I search their faces. Is he there? Is the boy I left in the shower among them? Is Kate?
No. But then, they wouldn’t be, would they? I did not create them, I destroyed them. This is not about what I have unmade, but what I have made. Anarchy and destruction have no home here.
They’re not staring at me. Not one of them, not even the child or the dog or Harry Houdini is paying me the slightest mind. They’re all staring at the roof ten feet to my right. And then—they aren’t. They’re turning as one. They’re moving. They’re running straight at me and as they run they’re melting. Melting? Is that the right word? No. The right word is transforming. They’re becoming something else. Like bees. And not like bees.
I see. I’m not going to spend a year of my life in a trial as public and as culturally revealing as the trial of the revolting O.J. Simpson. I am not going to lie in a cold room strapped to a cold table to be injected with something humanely lethal. I am not going to drown in the tea-colored Connecticut River. I’m not even going insane, although I may be what folks on this side of the door call dead. Aside from that, what I am doing is being herded by talking bees into my own dream, my own world, somewhere I created.
It’s where I belong. It’s what I deserve. It is my center and it holds…nothing but me.
Inside the house is outside the house. Inside is a wild and wonderful land, full of wild and wonderful people—but more wonderful still, are its creatures.
It isn't yet called Vermont, but it will be.
At that time, magic walked the earth by day and by night, and the very air shivered with an ancient pizzazz.
Stinking, shaggy with matted red fur, I slouch with slow thighs through a sapling door into The Windigo’s Daughter.
I am the Windigo’s Daughter.
He was right. I have a Houdini Heart.
Manitou's breath is like a great wind sweeping down from the top of the world. Turning the bees into the leaves of autumn, blowing them back through the sapling door. From the moment they gain the other side, leaves of red and gold, leaves of tender yellow, spring up from the earth as they truly are, as Manogemassak, as the little people, faces like ax blades, hearts like water, giggling as they scatter on home. The Windigo's daughter has at least the grim satisfaction of seeing that the bee, the leaf, the man she married, is no less than a minor Prince of the Manogemassak.
YOU! roars Manitou. WINDIGO'S DAUGHTER! RUN HOME WHILE YOU CAN. RUN HOME TO YOUR FATHER'S HOUSE.
As the Windigo's youngest daughter tumbles through the sapling door, as her father's waiting hairy hand reaches out to snatch her up, comes the last words of Manitou: AND SHUT THE DOOR! I KEEP NO OPEN HOUSE!
Thrice her size, a hundred times her age, the old Windigo stuffs his errant daughter under his reeking armpit, lolloping off through the woods on the other side of the sapling door.
Which exists no more, not now that Manitou has blown them away before sinking back into the earth under West Hackmatack Street.
Ki Longfellow, Houdini Heart
(Series: # )
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