Be Witness Moon
​
I can remember not being poor. I was young, 8 years old in fact, living with my mother and father in a two-story bungalow in a town called Firesridge, Maryland. Originally, we had lived in Appalachia – coal country – but had uprooted ourselves to pursue a fuller, more prosperous life up north.
25 years later and I’m sitting at a table inside a stranger’s apartment, wearing my only set of clothes, my hair and neck greasy with sweat from spending a sleepless night in my car. A twenty-dollar bill – of the very few I have – is slapped down on the table, waiting for the woman to take it as her fee.
From where I am, I cannot see but can hear her prattle on to someone whom I cannot hear respond. Once she waddles into the hallway and into view, I discover she is chatting away on a cordless phone, presumably to her children since she keeps repeating You do as your daddy says, I ain’t taking your side. I can also see that she is hundreds of pounds overweight.
She lifts the twenty from the table and it disappears inside her soft ball of a hand. Still chatting away on the phone, she winks at me as though to say, Be with you in a moment. As she waddles out of sight for a second time, I look around the room, seeing stuffed toys and plastic figurines strewn across the carpeted floor. I’m now sceptical; this doesn’t seem like what I imagined a fortune-teller’s parlour would look like.
The chattering stops and then the woman re-emerges into sight, her rosy cheeks round and taut – a shrill giggle just audible in her throat. However, after sitting down and taking stock of me, her cheeks flatten and the rest of her face drains pale.
Presumably, she can smell the coalmine on me – I am rank with it. But it is not her olfactory senses that I have offended. Her eyes widen, I can read the words My god, muttered silently on her lips.
“Something has happened to you,” she finally speaks.
I give a little giggle at her vague, safe guess, immediately regretting giving up my twenty dollars.
“I-I um,” I start, adjusting myself in my seat. “I just haven’t gotten a lot of sleep is all.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she says, and I realize she is not looking at me but rather looking around me – as though I’m glowing. “There’s something that has been following you – almost all your life…since you were a child.”
Forcing a smile, I shake the image of the shadowy face from my conscious mind.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I assure her. “I’m not interested in any of that.” I then swallow hard. “I’m here because…I--”
“Because you have been met with great misfortune,” says the woman. This time, I am stunned by her clairvoyance. “Because you have been hounded by misfortune for twenty five years.”
Hesitantly, I open my quivering hand and show her my palm. She ignores it and continues to bore into me - or my aura – with her eyes. She then winces, seemingly experiencing some kind of discomfort.
“You’ve…lived in the south the vast majority of your life,” she continues, massaging one temple. “Though – not all your life. You once lived furtherer north, in a house made of triangles, with a dark purple roof.”
My own eyes peel back and I retract my hand, as though afraid she might bite it. That was how I had described the bungalow in Maryland to my mother when I first saw it: triangles with a purple roof. But…how did she know?
“Look,” I say, ready to stand and bolt for the door. “I just came here to find out what my future will be.”
“And to know how to change it. How to change this black fate that has dogged you and your family.”
“Yes.”
“To change your stars.”
“Can you do it? Can you tell me?”
“Yes. But…I need you to tell me everything, everything you remember. Starting from that house with the dark purple roof.”
I smirk just a little.
“Aren’t you the psychic?”
She hisses at me, not amused by sourly incensed.
“If you want me to tell you your future and how to alter it we cannot waste any more time with silly parlour tricks! Divining such knowledge requires much energy. Tell me all that you can and I will fill in what you don’t know.”
So I tell her. I tell her about the bungalow home in Maryland. About the first day I’d seen it. It was in spring – April. The neighbourhood lawns were lush and the wind carried the sweet scent of dandelions and Black Eyed Susans through the streets. My father was a coal miner, like his father and his father before him. My mother however had graduated college and had found work as a business liaison at a budding textile company in this new town. Over the stubborn objections of my father, my mother moved all three of us to this new home, having swayed my father that the coalmine would only be the death of him.
Immediately, I noticed that the grownups were less talkative in this new place– a bit less friendly. For a while I assumed that was just how people who weren’t from the Deep South acted. Didn’t take long to realize the silence was only for us, and the few words shared were rife with condescension.
My parents would confirm my suspicions soon enough, but not before the other children let me in on it themselves. There was another girl in the neighbourhood, Samantha, who lived next door to us. She and I played in the same group of children every afternoon. One day, while we were playing manhunt, Samantha kept teasing me because I was always out of breath on account of my asthma. “Keep up, slowpoke,” she repeated over and over again. “You’re ruining the whole game, slowpoke. We shouldn’t even let you play.”
After fifteen minutes of this abuse, I got fed up; I told her to shut her mouth and called her a brat. Samantha’s jaw dropped in exaggerated shock, as children do. Then she said it: “You shouldn’t get to play because you’re not staying in this neighbourhood.” In my fragile, childish way, I was both crushed and panicked by this sudden revelation.
“W-what do you mean?” I had asked. “That’s not true. We’re staying here for a long, long time.”
At this, Samantha’s nose crinkled as she giggled cruelly. “My mom put a spell on you,” she said. “She says you and your mommy and daddy are bad people who make the neighbourhood a bad place. So she put a spell on you to make you leave.”
The fortune-teller nods curtly.
“But you knew something was wrong before this,” she asks.
I nod my head, though I know she wasn’t asking a question.
I tell her about the second night in the new home. I had my own bedroom. Modest as it was, I loved the complete privacy and sanctuary it afforded me. That is, until on the second night. While lying in my bed, I stared up at my ceiling, waiting to fall asleep. My eyes ventured to the space above the door – and there I could see what I can only describe as the outline of a face. There was no body attached, not even a head, just outlines of essential facial features. I remember making out the pointed knob of a chin, like the face was not directly peering at me but rather looking down upon me with the smallest affordable effort. Above the chin were large lips, swollen into a frown, expressing the most grotesque displeasure. The nose was of no particular distinction, other than that it was large, but the eyes, gazing down at me, over the outlines of cheeks, were deep black, and smouldered with the same expression of disgust as the lips.
I remember the fear of the image waned rather quickly, leaving me with a tearing sense of shame. Shame for my being there. Shame for my existence.
Every night since that evening, the spectre – that face – was always there, hovering over me with that chastising visage.
The day after Samantha had told me about the spell, her mother, Missus Whitmore, approached me. I was walking home alone from school and had just crossed from the other street. Missus Whitmore was standing on her lawn in bare feet, wearing whitewashed dungarees, when she called my name. Hearing her, I stopped but did not go over to her. Instead I waited as she gingerly made her way over to me. She moved as though afraid I might gallop away if she made any sudden moves.
I remember thinking how beautiful she was. She was tall and fit, with full blood-red hair that cascaded over either shoulder.
Standing within seven feet of me, she asked how my day was. I gave her the typical non-committal answer that children give. She didn’t nod or smile but seemed to listen. She then asked me if I wanted to play with Samantha and I told her no. She didn’t respond to this, probably because she expected it and knew why. She then took a step forward and patted my head, smoothing my hair down against the back of my neck. “You’re such a pretty girl,” she said encouragingly. She then reached into her pocket and pulled out a small string of pearls. The pearls were obviously real, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“Here,” she then told me. “I want you to have it.” Despite my marvelling at the shining little orbs, I thanked her but told her no, knowing my parents would be displeased if I took such an elaborate gift from anyone who wasn’t family. At the time I didn’t know what it meant, but my father always said that no Breslin ever took a handout. Missus Whitmore insisted and we benignly went back and forth until she finally relented and curled the necklace back into her fist and returned it to her pocket. I walked into my home and she watched, the same concerned expression on her face.
Presently, the fortune-teller has become a little impatient.
I tell her that the next week my mother’s textile company, which had provided our sole source of income, has filed for bankruptcy. Just, poof! Out of nowhere with no warning, my mother is laid off with no other prospects. My father too cannot find anyone willing to hire him – a high school graduate whose only experience is digging in a coalmine.
Within less than two months, my mother and father sat me down on their bed and told me we had to move back home. The next day, we were packed, on the road, and back in our town before nightfall. My father started work in the mine the very next morning.
“But the spectre,” interrupts the fortune-teller, “it did not leave after you left Maryland.”
Realizing she meant the face in my room, I respond, “No. It didn’t.”
After we had moved back to Appalachia, my mother began screaming in the middle of the night, crying that there was a man – a face in her bedroom. My father tried to calm her, assuring her no one else was in our home. I did the same, knowing, even at that age, that it was better to ignore it and not tell anyone. Regardless, my mother wailed on for endless nights, shouting at the apparition, crying for it to leave our home, demanding to know what it wanted. I still saw it too. Only my father seemed to not have.
Trying to console my ailing mother, we took her to every psychiatrist in the state, only to have each tell us there was nothing wrong with her. That, of course, did not stop them from recommending endless, expensive dosages of medications, which drained our bank account, and drove my father deeper inside the coalmine.
By the time I was a sophomore, my father had already contracted the black lung – far younger than any of his ancestors had.
Without any money for college, and no reason to finish high school, I got a job and assisted my hysterical mother in caring for my bed-ridden father.
Within a few years, the worker’s compensation checks began to wilt – and even with my menial waitressing job at the diner – we could no longer afford to stay in the humble house we had started in. The three of us pooled our resources together with another family and moved into their home. And even there, the face followed us.
My mother would never have a chance to see my father finally wither away. On the date of my 25th birthday, I found her hanging from her neck in the basement, a suicide note tucked in her shoe.
I remember I did not cry upon discovering her hanging form. Nor did I cry when she was carried lifelessly on a gurney into the back of a van that sped from our home. It was not until I went to sleep that night, on the fold out couch in the living room, and saw that round face hovering above me. Its expression had changed: the lips were pulled back, stretched thin into a hideous grimacing smile, revealing endless rows of ivory teeth. The knob of the chin had vanished, and the eyes stared directly down upon me – and I swear to God – I could hear the faintest, hollow sound of laughter.
I was terrified for several minutes, fixating on the razzing expression above me. Then, suddenly, I felt my throat constrict and my eyes burn with water. Curling into my comforter, away from the cruel spectre’s sight, I wept myself to sleep.
As I tell this story, I can feel the same tightness in my gullet, and the moisture in my lashes that I thought I had wept out of my body completely several years past. The fortune-teller reaches for a small tissue box, bringing it closer to me. I take one and dab my eyes quickly.
I resume the story: Without any other prospects, and the diner bringing little monetary gain, I had no choice but to follow in my father’s footsteps and begin work in the same coalmine that had given him his current ailment. The superintendent was hesitant at first; he had never hired a woman, or “a girl” as he referred to me. But once I told him who my father was, he obliged and booked me onto full time shifts. Didn’t take long for my body to be ravaged with deep, convulsive coughs like my father’s.
The most recent tragedy, as inevitable as it was, was the death of my father. I didn’t see it happen, I didn’t even get to speak with him. I was at the mine when I got the call. By the time I had arrived in the hospital – he was gone. He lay there in the hospital bed, a thin husk of a man entangled by tubes and wires.
And just like it had always been, that face was waiting for me in the shadows across my ceiling over my bed when I went to sleep that night, that toothy grin of malicious satisfaction torn across it.
Clearing her throat, the fortune-teller speaks up, “You want to make the face go away.”
“Yes,” I reply to her statement.
“And to change your fate. The same fate that has claimed your parents and both of your homes.”
“Yes.”
She then seems to stare into space, as though in deep concentration.
“Be witness moon,” she says, more to herself.
I squint hard and peer at her for clarity.
“Be witness moon,” she repeats an octave louder, “be witness moon, Kara Margaret Breslin will lose her house.”
I can’t believe what she’s just said; that’s my mother’s name! Her full name. There is no way she could have known that; I hadn’t even given her my name. Even people in our own family didn’t know my mother’s full name since everyone just called her Peg.
“That’s it,” she tells me. “That’s the curse this woman, Missus Whitmore, put on you.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. I can sense it. She was a woman whose family had long lived in this town in Maryland for generations. She and others did not like your family coming into their town because you were Appalachians and might drive down the reel estate value. This has happened before, though I have never witnessed it myself.
“This curse is from an old pagan tradition: it must be done outside in full view of the full moon; the words, ‘be witness moon,’ must be uttered twice and then the person’s name, and then the curse. The curse Missus Whitmore put upon you, that night of the full moon, was ‘Be witness moon, be witness moon, Kara Margaret Breslin will lose her house.’ I suspect the woman only bestowed this curse to rid the neighbourhood of you. However, the curse is not meant for mere removal; in the pagan tradition, losing one’s house has a symbolic implication rather than a literal one: it means to lose everything. So, the curse follows the targets through life, taking away everything, ensuring a torturous existence through their anguished, short life.
“Such a fate will be met onto you, Clair Breslin, unless the curse is removed.”
I stare at her wide eyed, my body pressing hard against the table edge like I am about to lunge over it and grab her.
“Okay,” I say, my breath catching in my throat. “I’ll do what you say. Tell me, how can I remove the curse?”
“You?” said the woman in an almost mocking tone. “You cannot do anything. The curse can only end if the one who put it on you removes it. You must go and find this Missus Whitmore and ask her to remove it. She must perform the exact same ritual, in view of a full moon, only this time, ask that the curse be taken off.”
With that, I sink back into my chair, my hopes deflated.
The fortune-teller then takes out her iPhone and begins searching on it for something.
“Aw,” she exclaims pleasantly. “There’s a full moon, visible from Maryland, in two weeks. That will also be closer to Christmas so she should be at her home. I assume you remember the address?”
My eyes rest pathetically on the floor. I can sense the woman staring at me with expectation.
“What is it?” I hear her ask.
“She won’t take it off,” I mumble. “I know it…those people…they’re so stubborn. They would just deny doing anything.”
“Honey, you must try,” needled the woman. “Surely, after you tell her what has happened, she’ll feel awful and want to take all of it back.”
“She’ll just accuse me of making excuses and blaming her for my own mistakes. She’ll say I’m just another bum looking for a hand-out.”
Sighing from her nostrils, the woman says nothing. I then hear the cry of her chair’s cushion springs from her massive frame getting up. She’s then beside me, kneeling, stroking my course oily hair with a silky, puffed hand.
“There is no other way, doll,” she whispers contritely. “The curse can only be taken off by the one who issued it. And…I didn’t want to tell you this…but…that curse of the black lung your father, grandfather and great grandfather suffered? You don’t have long until it gets to you.”
I turn my head and meet her with half-mast eyes. Surprisingly, the shock of her prediction wears off shortly, leaving me numb.
“You must,” she continues to soothe me. “You must at the very least try.”
***
It’s Christmas Eve when I’m in Firesridge for the first time in 25 years. It had taken a lot of days without eating and even more with my hand held out but I was finally able to get enough gas money to make the trip.
It’s late. I’m staring at the Whitmore house from the driver’s side window of my car, parked on the opposite street. It’s snowing. The once lush lawn of the Whitmores is completely blanketed and even through the thick snowfall and darkness, I can see shadows pass behind the glowing kitchen windows.
Bracingly, I gather my courage inside my freezing automobile, trying to convince myself to get out and knock on the door. Just then, a large black escalade, which looks brand new, pulls into the Whitmore driveway and parks. The escalade’s engine shuts off and I can see two people get out: a man in a black pea coat and a young woman wearing fur. I recognize the latter as Samantha, all grown up, and from her interaction with the other, I realize that he is her husband. Instantaneously, I’m no longer shivering or cold but writhing with a sudden fever rising from my bones. I then reflect on how I have never had a boyfriend – never even been touched by a boy or man in my whole life. Never even had time to entertain the idea…
As the happy couple saunters to the front steps, arm in arm, the door opens, and I can clearly see Missus Whitmore – just as thin and beautiful as ever – rush out and embrace them both. Her long red hair is now cropped short and entirely grey, but she is still beautiful – as beautiful as she ever was.
I then look away from being suddenly absorbed in a violent coughing fit. The seizing pain in my lungs relents after several long minutes and when I retract my fist from my mouth, I discover blood specked on the knuckles.
When I turn my attention back to the house, I just catch the happy couple being hastened out of the cold and into the warmth by Missus Whitmore, the door shutting behind them.
Benumb, I sit there, burning a hole through that door with my eyes. That door trapping in the heat and staving out the cold. My throat tickles with the oncoming onslaught of a second coughing fit. But before it can come, I turn my key in the ignition and peel out of the neighbourhood street, into the snowy December night.
***
It’s 2:46 AM. I’ve parked on the outskirts of Hagerstown, just outside Baltimore. The snow has stopped. The clouds have parted.
I walk fifty yards from my car on the side of the highway into a bare, black forest. My hacking cough slows my pace but won’t stop me. Back inside my car, the dash and passenger seat are littered with torn and bloodied tissue swabs.
There’s a clearing, and directly above me, the swollen full moon, is visible. Bathing me in its cold, alabaster light, it stares down on me, both indifferent and petulant all at once. I stare back at it with the same expression on my face.
“Be witness moon,” I dictate in a carrying voice, “be witness moon, that Missus Elizabeth Caroline Whitmore, nee MacKay, will lose her house – and her whole family with it.”