A Sudden Change of Heart
A Sudden Change of Heart
Sometime over the course of the years, my life became an awfully repetitive story. A sequence of actions, sounds, and occurrences that, while once a beautiful and exciting pattern, had turn into a dull archive of thoughts and whose months and years blended into a mess of gray. The only difference between this particular winter Tuesday and one two years ago in the middle of summer was the thin layer of snow that dusted the ground and a few more gray hairs strewn throughout my hair.
The good thing about all of this was that there was a lack of stress to the monotony. The bad thing about it was there was a lot of monotony to the lack of stress. After who knows how many years, something in me was starting to get antsy. The antsiness spent a few years bubbling before it was prepared to boil over, and even then it took a year or so for the bubbles to drip down the sides of my pot.
As the bubbles made crispy crackley sounds on the burner of my mind, metaphorically of course, my life started to crisp and crackle as well. As a forty-something woman with basically no memories to fondly look back on or stories to tell grandchildren that don’t exist and probably never will, a life starting to crisp and crackle was a startling development. There was a clear line between my life the previous day, a Monday, and my life that Tuesday.
My nine-to-five office (Monday to Saturday) job disappeared. I have no clear recollection of quitting, but I know I wasn’t dismissed. I wasn’t ‘laid off’ or ‘fired’ either, I promise. I have a feeling that I just walked away, skipped town. A few towns over, my grandparents had left my siblings and I a run-down apartment building with few residents other than the current superintendents (a Mexican family composed of two young grandparents, two young parents, and two young children), and a string of drug dealers of all colours, shapes and sizes. There were thirty apartments in the building, 16 of which were occupied. The one-bedroom apartments cost $600 a month, two bedrooms for $675 and 3 bedrooms for $750. The apartments themselves were bargains, but the neighbours were something few people were up for.
There was a certain stigma attached to that particular part of town, but at this point in my life, if the legitimate danger was something I was willing to handle, I was sure I could deal with the attitudes of the people around me. I’m not going to come right out and say that I went crazy, but I can’t think of any other explanation for the series of events that I was in the midst of.
I didn’t set up a phone or the internet in my new apartment, nor did I get a job in the new city that I didn’t know very well. I didn’t drive my car over from Windsor, I just took a series of buses that managed to land me exactly where this building that I owned a third of existed. I didn’t have anything but my wallet, a single outfit, and a terribly furnished apartment with a view of a drizzly and polluted lakeside. Obviously something needed to be done.
One would probably think that the next few days would be filled with frantically shopping for a new wardrobe, or perhaps finding sheets for the yellow- and brown-stained mattress, or even looking for a new apartment elsewhere because this was hardly a step up from an expensive condo in a larger city. It is additionally possible that some people would assume that I would have bought some groceries and set up cable so that the 50-year-old television on the floor of the living room would play more than salt-and-pepper-coated channels that play solely TV shows that are as old as the TV itself. None of that has happened yet.
In reality, the first thing that I did was go to the local library. The local library, it turned out, was a graffiti-coated building that resembled a gang hideout or an old movie theatre. The windows were papered from the inside, and the door had a schedule taped to it that was ripped, with ink that had encountered so much rain that it was completely illegible. I tried the door though, and it opened to reveal a pretty inside. The papers that covered the windows were posters advertising a variety of things including safe sex and movies that came out a two or three years back. Two tiny, kindly-looking librarians sat at a desk in the middle of the floor, surrounded by almost-full bookshelves divided into categories.
I walked up to the librarians, with no particular intention in mind. Maybe I was going to set myself up with a library card, but I can’t be totally sure of that. I got rather self-conscious very suddenly about my tan women’s business suit, but shook it off. As I approached the desk, something sort of creepy started to fill the air.
Something was really off, at least in my mind. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was.
I couldn’t figure it out, that is, until I reached about five feet from the desk they sat at. Neither of the kindly ladies had moved at all from their position looking down at their paper work, not a single inch.
My feet wouldn’t stop going towards the desk, and in that last second worth of moving, one of the ladies looked up. Her eyes (if you could call them that) were totally blood red. Her lips were chapped and scabbed, her teeth sharp and inhuman. There was no colour to her face, and her voice was a tone and pitch that didn’t register on any regular level, but I could hear it.
“You are ours now. You are no longer you. You are ours now.”
And now here she is.
The good thing about all of this was that there was a lack of stress to the monotony. The bad thing about it was there was a lot of monotony to the lack of stress. After who knows how many years, something in me was starting to get antsy. The antsiness spent a few years bubbling before it was prepared to boil over, and even then it took a year or so for the bubbles to drip down the sides of my pot.
As the bubbles made crispy crackley sounds on the burner of my mind, metaphorically of course, my life started to crisp and crackle as well. As a forty-something woman with basically no memories to fondly look back on or stories to tell grandchildren that don’t exist and probably never will, a life starting to crisp and crackle was a startling development. There was a clear line between my life the previous day, a Monday, and my life that Tuesday.
My nine-to-five office (Monday to Saturday) job disappeared. I have no clear recollection of quitting, but I know I wasn’t dismissed. I wasn’t ‘laid off’ or ‘fired’ either, I promise. I have a feeling that I just walked away, skipped town. A few towns over, my grandparents had left my siblings and I a run-down apartment building with few residents other than the current superintendents (a Mexican family composed of two young grandparents, two young parents, and two young children), and a string of drug dealers of all colours, shapes and sizes. There were thirty apartments in the building, 16 of which were occupied. The one-bedroom apartments cost $600 a month, two bedrooms for $675 and 3 bedrooms for $750. The apartments themselves were bargains, but the neighbours were something few people were up for.
There was a certain stigma attached to that particular part of town, but at this point in my life, if the legitimate danger was something I was willing to handle, I was sure I could deal with the attitudes of the people around me. I’m not going to come right out and say that I went crazy, but I can’t think of any other explanation for the series of events that I was in the midst of.
I didn’t set up a phone or the internet in my new apartment, nor did I get a job in the new city that I didn’t know very well. I didn’t drive my car over from Windsor, I just took a series of buses that managed to land me exactly where this building that I owned a third of existed. I didn’t have anything but my wallet, a single outfit, and a terribly furnished apartment with a view of a drizzly and polluted lakeside. Obviously something needed to be done.
One would probably think that the next few days would be filled with frantically shopping for a new wardrobe, or perhaps finding sheets for the yellow- and brown-stained mattress, or even looking for a new apartment elsewhere because this was hardly a step up from an expensive condo in a larger city. It is additionally possible that some people would assume that I would have bought some groceries and set up cable so that the 50-year-old television on the floor of the living room would play more than salt-and-pepper-coated channels that play solely TV shows that are as old as the TV itself. None of that has happened yet.
In reality, the first thing that I did was go to the local library. The local library, it turned out, was a graffiti-coated building that resembled a gang hideout or an old movie theatre. The windows were papered from the inside, and the door had a schedule taped to it that was ripped, with ink that had encountered so much rain that it was completely illegible. I tried the door though, and it opened to reveal a pretty inside. The papers that covered the windows were posters advertising a variety of things including safe sex and movies that came out a two or three years back. Two tiny, kindly-looking librarians sat at a desk in the middle of the floor, surrounded by almost-full bookshelves divided into categories.
I walked up to the librarians, with no particular intention in mind. Maybe I was going to set myself up with a library card, but I can’t be totally sure of that. I got rather self-conscious very suddenly about my tan women’s business suit, but shook it off. As I approached the desk, something sort of creepy started to fill the air.
Something was really off, at least in my mind. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was.
I couldn’t figure it out, that is, until I reached about five feet from the desk they sat at. Neither of the kindly ladies had moved at all from their position looking down at their paper work, not a single inch.
My feet wouldn’t stop going towards the desk, and in that last second worth of moving, one of the ladies looked up. Her eyes (if you could call them that) were totally blood red. Her lips were chapped and scabbed, her teeth sharp and inhuman. There was no colour to her face, and her voice was a tone and pitch that didn’t register on any regular level, but I could hear it.
“You are ours now. You are no longer you. You are ours now.”
And now here she is.