Guardian of the Moon Pendant (2 page)

“Not at all!”

“Kisses,” said Edgar, pursing his big red lips together and smooching up against the camera.

“Kisses,” I replied, lightly touching two fingers to my lips, pressing them against the flat screen.

♦

I stepped into the kitchen littered with debris, a mound of chipped dishes piled up high in the sink, covered in an unknown slimy green goo, unleashing a stench so foul that even Oscar the Grouch would feel like it needed a nice spray of Febreze, a plethora of cabinets left open, its countertops coated with crumbs, empty beer cans, and an array of Doritos bags: Nacho Cheese, Cool Ranch, Taco, and Izzy’s favorite Spicy Sweet Chili.

Oh, the horror of it all. I closed my eyes tightly, trying as hard as I could to forget what a pig sty I lived in. Unfortunately, sooner or later I had to open them up again and begin the cleansing process.

I snapped into a cleaning frenzy, closing cabinets, scrubbing dishes, wiping up crumbs and tossing out as much garbage as I could find. I sighed when I was finished and even smiled, gazing around the kitchen as it sparkled. 

I then leered into the family room, warily, afraid of what monstrosity lived in there. My mother’s prized shotguns were mounted in a glass cabinet along the wall along with an array of wrist and hand slingshots. My father laid back in his recliner, catatonic, a simple white undershirt and a pair of boxers donned his hairy body as a soccer game flashed on the TV, his head tilted back, mouth wide open, snoring up a storm, his left
arm drooping down toward the floor, a lone empty beer can dangling from his fingertips.

I tip-toed into the living room, stealthily, studying my father’s burly arm. He had a couple of strange scars on his left arm, two deep indentations in a pasty white color, covered by his thick arm hair. I always wondered where he had gotten them from, perhaps from a war, not that I would ever know
,
he was never really coherent enough to tell me. I crouched down beside him, my fingertips cradling his empty beer can, quickly snatching it away from his clutch, then tossing it into the recyclable bin.

The front door flew open and mother traipsed in, holding up a handful of dead squirrels in her hand, throwing their carcasses onto my clean countertop. “The little vermin are such suckers for a good decoy,” mother laughed through her crooked teeth. “What an excellent idea you had about using a bird feeder. Little vermin didn’t know what hit them!”

A wave of nausea rose and fell in my stomach. How in the world was I ever related to this woman?

“We’re gonna eat good tonight!” she bellowed in a hoarse voice, slamming down a handful of metallic pellets and slugs onto the countertop,  an air rifle and shotgun slung snuggly behind her back.

“Mother!”

“Yes, dear?” she said with a shimmering smile, pinching my chin.

My index finger pointing at the grey carcasses, their bodies stiff on the laminate countertop. “Dead animals and lead pellets should never, ever be put on a clean counter,” I said wide-eyed, my fist balled up on my hips, shaking my head back and forth.

“What?” mother laughed, snatching up her grey rounds, holding them under my
nose.
“These? These are not lead!”

I just blinked at her, not knowing what to say. I really didn’t care what type of evil ammunition she had. I just wanted it to be off my newly cleaned counter.

“They’re iron slugs and pellets,” mother blurted out, curling her fingers around the dark grey bullets. “All my ammunition is iron.” Then she winked at me.

The basement door swung open and out staggered the last of the living dead. Izzy sleepily shuffled into the kitchen, a pair of furry slippers sliding across the floor, a black beehive swirling down her colorless face, her eyelids heavy and half open, she wrenched open the refrigerator door, sticking her disheveled head into the ice-box, pulling out a pan of chewy brownies. “Yum,” she mumbled, still half asleep, plopping the tray down next to the dead bushy tailed rodents.
“The breakfast of champions!”

Mother slapped the back of Izzy’s head hard.

“
Ow
!” she cried, rubbing the lump on her head.

“That’s for Anabel!” mother said sternly. She cozied up next to me, stroking my manicured pony tail softly. “When my dear, Anabel, gets her acceptance letter into Doctor School.”

“Medical school,” I corrected her.

Izzy’s face soured, rolling her blue eyes back into her head.

Izzy always had some sort of annoyed smirk on her face. As she was my younger sister, I was supposed to love her, but it seemed hard to want to love someone who was so different than me. She used to be my little shadow, always wanting to do what I wanted to do, cleaning the house, baking cookies, organizing closets, labeling all the contents in the house, but things changed when we met Hilda the Gorilla, the local bully in town. Izzy didn’t want to do what I did anymore. She wanted to climb trees, jump into dirty piles of leaves, dive off cliffs, and roll around in the mud. One day, Hilda the Gorilla attacked me with two of her minions behind the local convenient store in town. Izzy just stood by watching, never raising a finger to protect me. I started karate soon
after to defend myself. Since then, we just spent our whole lives fighting like wild animals.

“Did the post come today?” asked mother, filling up a glass of water from the faucet.

“It’s called mail here in America,” said Izzy boldly, cracking open a beer can and guzzling it down.

I quickly snatched it out of her hands. “You are not twenty-one yet!” I scowled.

“I’m legal in Scotland,” Izzy said nonchalantly, shrugging her shoulders, plopping down into a cushy armchair next to father, throwing her legs up and crossing them on the ottoman. “What’s on the boob tube?” she asked, scooping up the remote and surfing through the channels.

I shook my head and yanked the front door open, scooping out the letters in the mailbox. I shuffled through a handful of letters, a long cardboard tube, and a few flyers from a few local pizza parlors. I read the name on the unusual cylinder, handing it to my mother. “This is for you.”

Mother placed her water glass down, inching her fingers out slowly for the tube of mail, as if she didn’t want it at all.

I continued to thumb through the remaining letters, pulling out the last of my medical school responses. I bit my lower lip, not knowing if I should open it right then. I didn’t want Izzy or my mother to know about it, so I slid it into my purse.

Mother’s hands trembled as she popped off the lid of the long tube, drawing out an aged piece of parchment, tattered and frayed at its delicate edges, rolled up like an ancient scroll. 

“What is it, mother?” I asked, watching her usually rosy face turn a pallid color.

“Hey! Your Royal Highness,” barked Izzy, “are there any brews left in the fridge? We could use a cold one!”

“Not now, Izzy!” I yelled back.

Mother backed away from the counter, trembling, accidentally knocking her water glass onto the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces, mumbling to herself, “new moon, not yet…” 

“I got it!” hollered Izzy, rising out of the chair, making her way to the kitchen. “I’ll get it myself.”

Mother cleared her throat, gazing at me lovingly, and then starred at Izzy. “Girls, I’m afraid…”

“What? We’re out of beer?”

“Izzy, you’re eighteen. You’re not allowed to drink!” I informed her again.

“Who said it was for me?” she smirked, swinging the refrigerator door open, snatching out a tin can. “It’s for Pops!”

“One of you must go!” announced mother, as sweat began to bead over her brow.  

“Go?” asked Izzy.

“Go where, mother?”

“I never thought this day would come. It’s your Gran. One of you must go to her, help her.” Mother took in a deep breath, clenching her pellet gun to her side, her knuckles blanching at their seams.
“With her duties.”

Before I knew it World War III erupted between Izzy and me.
Words like,
not me, why can’t you, you always get away with bloody murder, hell no.

The argument escalated.

Izzy wasn’t backing down, and neither was I.

I had clearly stated that with my upcoming nuptials and entering medical school, there was no way I could help her, nevertheless travel to some foreign country 3,000 miles away.

Izzy retaliated stating I was nothing more than a self absorbed nit-wit. She cracked open another beer, spraying foamy lager into my face, chugging it down in one long gulp, using the back of her hand to wipe the suds off her mouth, and then burping loudly into my face, its aroma saturated by an intense odor of Doritos.

“You’re the oldest,” she argued, stabbing a finger at me, “you go!”

“I just said I’m getting married and going to medical school! I can’t go!”

“Really?
Someone actually accepted your lame..?”

“Izzy!” mother roared, cutting her off just in time before using a forbidden word.

My blood began to boil. Of course, I was getting into medical school. I had a 4.0 all through college and scored a perfect score of 45 on the MCAT. She wasn’t getting off that easy, not with all her nonsense!

“Izzy should go!” I exclaimed. “She’s got no job!” I watched Izzy back away, her cold eyes twitching at me. “She has no future; she’s just
slutting
through life anyway, waiting to die.”

Izzy’s mouth was agape, hanging open like a giant ‘O,’ not knowing how to counter attack my cruel words.  She plastered a sardonic smile on her face.

Standing in front of me, her fingers fumbled into her robe’s pocket, whirling her hand around inside the terry cloth, searching for something, and then plucking out a pack of cigarettes. With the fleshy part of her palm, Izzy lightly tapped the pack once, a slender white straw popping out of its top, gingerly, plucking it out with two fingers, inserting it into her mouth, a crooked smile crawling across her face like the Cheshire cat. “What do they say?” she remarked, the cigarette sticking to her wet lower lip,  her
thumb striking a silver lighter, and then torching the tip of her cigarette. “You’re the heir, I’m the spare?”

“Izzy!” screamed mother, pointing toward the front door. “Not in my house!”

Izzy yanked open the front door, the cigarette still dangling from her red lips.

Whirling around, she leaned against the wooden door frame to face us. “You know what they say?” She took a deep long drag on her death stick, expelling ashy puffs of smoke back into the house. “Good girls go to heaven,” she said, winking at me, “but the bad girls go everywhere!”

Mother bulldozed across the room, her hands firmly gripping her pellet gun, ripping the pack of cigarettes from Izzy’s hand, and then strategically tossing it to me sideways. I snatched the sling-shot off the coffee table, realizing how amazing this will be as I marched past Izzy, grinning insolently, and outside into the warm spring day.

Mother cocked her head to the side, croaking out of the side of her mouth, “Pull!”

Izzy lurched toward me as I quickly secured her Holy pack of cigarettes into a thick rubber band, stretching it back with two fingers, and shot it high into the clear sky.

Mother steadied her long pellet gun, a twisted grin curling across her pockmarked face, her index finger itching on the trigger. As she released the safety, her eyes steadied on the moving object still skyrocketing through the air. Once mother locked onto the target, she pulled the trigger, her body jolting back a few inches while a lead pellet fired into the sky, splicing through the pack of cigarettes, bursting it into a thousand pieces, its remnants floating down to the ground like tiny brown feathers.

“Got it!” roared mother, pinching the cleft on my chin. “That’s me girl!”

“Nice shot, Mrs. MacAlpin,” said a deep voice from behind.

Vyx swaggered up the driveway, a burly, tattooed Neanderthal who happened to be Izzy’s boyfriend. He was pierced from head to toe, a sharp mini dagger sliced through his lower lip, a silver ring hooking out of his eyebrow, his hideous head covered in
swirling black ink while a furry black
mohawk
covered the rest of his skull’s tattoos. His massive body broke through the tobacco confetti still falling from the sky. 

Izzy’s tossed her cigarette to the side and her hands clamped down onto mother’s and my forearms, jerking us back into the house, slamming the door shut, and dead bolting it closed.

Vyx banged his fist on the door. “Izzy, I know you’re in there!” he said in raspy Scottish brogue.

Izzy stiffened, leaning her back against the door, barricading her body against it, raising her index finger vertically to her lip, shushing us to be quiet.

“It’s a bit too late for that,” I said, mounting my fists on my hips.

“I know you’re in there, Izzy!” Vyx hollered from the other side of the door.

“Go away, Vyx!” Izzy seethed.

“I know what you’re thinking!”

“Oh, you mean… for you to drop dead?”

“Listen, to me… She’s just an old friend,” he argued.

Mother pursed her hairy lips. “I told you that guy was nothin’ but trouble, Izzy!” She jabbed her dirty finger into Izzy’s shoulder. “Someone who has more paint on him then the Louvre museum isn't right in the head.”