Yigga
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The garter snake kept still in his pocket. The boy was ten or so, kneeling in the tall grass beside the stubble of a harvested corn field. The sun lay upon his brown back. He had just squashed a bee into the palm of his hand to see what would happen. The pain jolted him to his feet. He bent his head over his hand and poked the velvet bag and the twitching legs away from the angry wet pulse of the stinger still sticking its poison into his palm. A puff of wind blew the bee off and away. He did not mind that. A shadow uncoiled from the grass and hung there over him, eclipsing the sun.
``Hello whadar you doing?``, a dry reedy voice startled him. The boy shot his hands behind his back. DOING doesnt rhyme with BOING, his first thought was panicky nonsense. The day was so hot the sun was steaming the sun off the grass, yet he still felt his backbone drenched in ice water. He shuddered. In the middle of all that nervousness, he turned around and looked up and still farther upwards until his eyes met the shadows head.
``HAAAAAA!! Your FACED!!!``, there was a very tall, very thin light green girl smiling broadly and pointing her finger at a spot right above his nose. She was crowned with the morning sun and looking down at him with glittering black eyes. She suddenly pushed him so hard that he had to take two steps back or fall in to the clods of the chunked out field.
``Whadar you DOING, huh?``, the strange girl advanced on him, cocked her head to one side and smiled that wide grin that split the bottom half of her face from ear to ear. Her pigtails jumped in the wind.
``Nothing``, the boy wiped his hand on his shortpants and swallowed. He didnt want to tell her about wanting the bee sting when he wanted to feel it. He didnt want to tell her ANYTHING. Besides, she was pushing him around like she OWNED this place, and she made him feel very uneasy. Where had she come from anyway? Who in the heck was she? He had never seen her before and she was pushing him around, pushing HIM around, in THIS place, of all places, HIS getaway spot! Well, he reminded himself, anyway, shes just a girl. The strange girl circled around him pointing at his determined face, watching his eyes and smiling. The boy pivoted in place to follow her movements and their eyes locked in challenge for a second.
two.
three.
She stopped, twisted, and pushed him AGAIN! She laughed a loud bent-over laugh as he stumbled backwards over the crumbly rocks at the edge of the field. He was confused, embarrassed, and a bit angry, now. He regained his balance and was about to say something but the thought that was the impetus of his utterance withered away before it had a chance to sprout. He watched her, still laughing, leaning back into it with one of her hands across her lean belly, the other swung limply at her side. She kept laughing, laughing longer than anyone else would have, swaying there in the fields of the sun and watching his reactions in a bright, black way.
It was downright eerie. Those eyes held his attention tight and her deep rhythmic laughter seemed to swell in the heat of the day and every exhalation thudded in his ears. The sun wanted the top of his scalp all to itself and the boy felt like some sort of ridiculous captive. He shuddered again and he realized that she had stopped laughing and was circling him again, eyeing him up and down with curious sideways jerks of her head. Why did he feel so off-center? What did she WANT? HE wasnt going to LEAVE, that was for certain. His mouth felt as tho it were full of chalk.
``Uh, HEY!`` he stopped his sentence there. His voice sounded TOO loud, almost like a shout. She stopped moving and tilted a bit toward him. Her arms flexed. ``Hey!`` he said again, quick as he could and stepped back, hopefully out of her reach. ``Whats your name?``
Her eyes narrowed, and, although it seemed impossible, her fixed grin grew even wider. The boy thought shes GUESSED! shes found me out! she KNOWS me! but why he thought those thoughts, he didnt ever want to know. The wind lifted her pigtails into dancing cords. She thought a bit before answering. she moved her head upon her sinewy neck and smiled out her answer from between two rows of tiny pearls, ``Ma nam iss YIGGA!`` At the end of her pronouncement she raised her arms to the sky, danced a shimmery mocking dance and then poked her fingers at the boy and wiggled them. she slit her eyes and laughed out a ``WoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!`` while slithering around in the knee high grass.
The boy was spooked out here, standing in the sun with a girl he had never seen the likes of his whole LIFE! The boy was flabbergasted. He felt like he was in the presence of a crazy person. She only looked a few years older than him. Could a 14 year old girl be insane? She was still dancing around in front of him and jabbering in her wide open smile. He stood there with his mouth open and the world was spinning slow around him. She danced closer and pushed him again and laughed some more. She pointed at him and repeated, ``Oh your FACED!``
He didnt feel like laughing as she loomed there, casting down at him from her great height. He almost felt sick. He wanted to run away, but he knew that would look foolish, and besides, she could probably outrun him. Lookit how TALL she was! The boy felt powerless. He felt the power of summer drain out of him right there, in one sluice. He felt that anything she wanted to do to him would be done, no matter what he said or did and it would be done under the swelter of the sun.
There was something about her that wasnt RIGHT, and the whole world suddenly went strange in his head. Everything felt tighter, stricter, the air grew closer and couldnt wait to leave his lungs, the sun packed more grass into his eyes the sky was coming down faster and her face was quick and close to his. The wind stopped dead.
``Whassyer nam?``Yigga whispered. Studiously, she listened and accepted what he told her his name was. With the slyest expression he had ever seen she slid back into her lean height and, for the first time, looked away from him. Yigga closed her eyes and tilted her face to the sun and hummed. She smiled, basked, worshipped. Her arms spread wide and the sun got caught in them. If there was a time to run, it would be now, but the boy was lost in enchantment and his legs stood rooted in the baked over ground. The boy felt removed, lost, his body felt sluggish, made of wax and string. He found it difficult to draw a breath in the sun-ripe air. The welt on his palm sang to him and he felt like taffy and dumb rubber. He gulped and closed his eyes. When he felt as tho he could open them again, a thousand years later, she had VANISHED!
``Yigga!``, he almost screamed. Now, why would he DO that? Didnt he want her NOT here? The boy felt surprised when he felt RELIEF that she HADNT disappeared into thin air when she said, very calm and close to his ear.
``YASS! Hallo, Yigga iss hee-yar.`` She wavered into sight from his side and leaned there, taking ripples from the heat, he imagined, or maybe that was her dress billowing a bit under the winds push. She smiled at him expectantly and he found his voice. Questions piled up in his brain and they spilled out all at once, plopping and slithering out his mouth.
``Where do you come from how do you live are you coming to school with us in the fall?``
Yigga nodded at him and licked her lips. Her tongue came out quickly, looking dry and red. It snapped back into her mouth with an audible thwack! She began to circle him again. Yigga placed a finger on her collarbone, and as she moved around him the finger slid across his chest and up his other collar bone to over his shoulder and across his back.
``Yass, ma mudder joost moved hee-yar and yass i am going to school witchoo in da FALL!`` Yigga ended this declaration by hopping a bit right in front of him and bending down to stare directly into his eyes as she said the last word.
``Now, coom wid me, i waantchoo to meet mah mudder!`` said Yigga as she turned away and started to run away from him. He had wanted that from the start. He liked the idea of her leaving him alone, but at the same time it distressed him so much that he had to follow her. He didnt WANT to, not REALLY, but he had no choice, his legs carried him right after the girl. His eyes couldnt leave her form. It was if his vision were glued to her narrow body. His legs pumped below him and his heart and lungs reached up and made him go all hot beneath the sun and he followed her as best as he could. He saw her as if she were down a length of pipe, a startling brown and grey girl in a bubble of pure summer running ahead without effort, outlined all around by a black circle, and summer again outside that circle. And all the time he was running there was a dark pressure pulling him forward and down to earth. he struggled to keep running upright. He felt very heavy.
Yigga did not run like other girls. She did not run like any human he had ever seen. Her arms did not pump up and down in front of her, no, she let them trail behind her, thrashing the air back and forth, just like her pigtails, thought the boy. She was a brown and green elastic streak, beating the air she had run thru. Her legs seemed to take on the same rhythm and movements her arms did and soon she was so far ahead of him that this became all one motion in his sight. The boy saw her swim thru a barbed-wire fence. She went THRU it? That didnt make any sense. He was struggling to raise his head enough to be able to follow her but she was yards ahead of him and she seemed to be swishing down in amongst the grass as she lead him. His vision was playing tricks on him, perhaps it was the sun, all proportion had been lost, skewed and twisted, into an undulating mass. His head felt like a wooden mallet, his eyelids bore down on his eyes with the weight of fever, his arms and legs felt as tho they were logs that had taken on the density of granite, he could barely move. It was difficult for him to focus on any one thing. It had been hard to look at her, the way she was moving to one side and then the other, waving all over the place. He couldnt believe his eyes. Yigga was far away and dwindling there before him until she stepped around a single blade of grass!
No way. NO WAY. The boy, hot and sweaty, gave up and sank into the tall grass. His eyes did not shut, his face went right into the grass and he lay there swooning and lost in his own cyclonic brain. The enchantment intensified, the sun came down in bricks, his vision tilted at a distressing level. There were some things he would never know, and he felt pretty comfortable just then allowing whatever happened to him to just go ahead and happen to him. his mind had given up, he felt the stuff of shock.
``HEY!`` he awoke to her voice and to feel the patch of grass crisscrossing patterns into his cheek. Had he been asleep?
Yigga was standing next to the old abandoned house that his father had told him time and again to never go near. Yigga was standing beside it and looking down the hill at him expectantly. The boy was at the bottom of the hill the haunted house stood on, looking up at Yigga. He knew all about this house. ALL the kids in town knew about this house. Like his father said, it was dangerous, looked like it could fall at any time and, besides that, it was HAUNTED!
The house itself resembled two dead grey toads squatting on top of one another. It looked swollen, as tho it were holding its breath and waiting for someone to come back, but no one ever had. The golden grass of summer went up to it and washed against the sides as if to be petted. The boards of the house swelled outwards and between every slat the boy could see the cuts of darkness the house was pushing out, as if to escape itself. the house seemed to breathe there, on top of the hill, in his returning vision.
As his brain settled down the boy had the thought that the house may be a nice cool place to rest.... or had Yigga SAID that? No, he had THOUGHT that, for sure. Yigga was up THERE, on top of the hill beside the house, no way he could have heard her if she had SAID something. He stood up and, a bit wobbily, started to climb the steep hill that led to the house. He walked past pieces of glass blown out from the empty window panes. They glared up into his eyes, flashing and blinding him a bit. He squinted his way up to where Yigga was standing, green and black splotches dominating his vision. She was standing in the houses shadow and looked almost as grey as the wall was. Her tongue appeared and snapped back into her mouth. THWACK! The boy discovered he was too much out of breath to explain why he had fallen down. All he got out was, ``I saw you step around a blade of grass!`` as if that explained EVERYTHING.
Yigga tilted her head to one said and asked ,``Ssstep? whatiss SSStep?`` and then she grabbed his wrist with a dry, iron grip and pulled him up the steps to the front door. He shook his head once to clear it, twice more for no, no please. He said to her, ``But, you LIVE here? This place is a wreck and my dad says its DANGEROUS and could fall at any time and-``
``SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,`` Yigga was as over generous with this hissing as she had been earlier with her laughter. The skin above her eyes jumped as she placed a warm dry finger over the boys lips. They listened a moment. Yiggas eyes were rolling wildly in her head as she fixed and earnest look upon the boys face and said, ``No not me, mah MUDDER, ssshe lives in dee-yar, by HEWSELF, and isss okay, im ssshow you,`` and the boy mouthed the word no, but it didnt make any difference. His body followed the voice that compelled him. His body followed the hand that had Yiggas hand coiled around it.
The boy had all kinds of objections. He didnt WANT to meet the creepy girls mother who lived ALL BY HERSELF in this haunted house, he didnt care WHAT time of day it was! He wanted to say a LOT of things. Even so, all he could do was to open his mouth and ask ``WH-wh-wh-at about rats?``
Yigga snorted and spat out ``Dey are not any RATssss!`` as she pulled him thru the splintered doorframe. There was a huge hole in the roof of the house. You could see the hole in the roof because there wasnt any more second story floor. That had been smashed in by whatever had torn the hole in the roof, and whatever it was that had come thru the roof and smashed thru the second story floor was now in the basement, because there wasnt hardly any floor on the first story either. It was all smashed to jumbles, poking out of the dark cellar.
Yigga led the boy towards an intact staircase and quickly pulled him down into the cellar. The boy had no choice but to meekly follow her, tho his blood had turned to electric ice.
As soon as they reached the bottom of the staircase, Yigga pulled him him over the smashed up boards and cinderblocks towards the center of the basement floor while the sun fell down two stories of destruction to baptise them in gold. Yigga was hissing again, a very long drawn out and dry sort of noise. The boy watched her and saw that even tho she was hissing like that, her ribcage under her dress moved as tho she were inhaling AND exhaling.
The boy swallowed and quaked when he heard a movement over THERE in the darkness. It sounded like someone dragging a refrigerator over gravel. Yigga looked at him and smiled, licked his lips and intwined her fingers deeper into his beestung hand. She looked so proud.
``DEE-YAR SSSHE ISSS!!!!`` pointed Yigga, and the boy turned to face Yiggas mother, already knowing that Yiggas mother was a giant serpent with a head as big as a volkswagen beetle. The boy screamed, panicking, and tried to get away, but Yigga held his wrist and twined slowly about him and he tried to hit her but she easily dodged his swings. He stopped, because Yigga was gently laughing, and so was the giant serpent, her mother!
Her coils were all along the cellar walls. The boy thought, that mother could eat me in one bite, but then he remembered the garter snake in his pocket. He reached in his pocket to pull out his new found friend, and he thought maybe this would save him, but it was GONE! The snake he had saved from the swooping hawk earlier in the day was GONE!
and then Yigga told her mother his name.
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