Margret

Fair blond hair, light bronze skin, eyes the shade of emerald green, her freckles were all over her face, and her nose was long and thin. Her beauty was alluring; her mind was as sharp as her manner. The art, that she called grace, with the beauty mixed together, she was often compared to a 1970 Lauren Hutton. She was short but her skinny legs made her appear taller than she truly was. And her arms were long when at her side reaching down past her hips.

As for her mother, she was kind of out of the picture, not ever really seen much after Margret turned five years old. But the way her father described her was music to her ears, a needle in a haystack, one of a kind, and the most beautiful person in the world. Her dad had a way of describing her as a Greek goddess. Even before her mother left there were no pictures, no family heirlooms, a ghost, a nobody.

7:15 her alarm clock blared its loud beeping noise, and Margret rolled over in disappointment that she had to wake up “early” according to her. She threw her legs over the side of the bed and made her way towards the door before she looked over her shoulder out the window to look at the sky, which was barely awake. Her hand pulled away from the doorknob and she walked over to the window to see and admire the breathtaking view of the creek, along with the sunrise. She looked down at her father just to see him standing over packed down dirt blowing the leaves near the side of the road. He was working hard since the sliver of dawn. She smiled in sweetness to see her dad actually working, considering his old age. She left her unorganized room going down the cold creaky stairs, then to go outside, just before quickly slipping on a pair of shoes. She made her way walking down more stairs and then across her yard to get to the back of the house where her father was working.

“I ain’t never seen you out here actually trying to do some work in quite the time.” Margret teased.

“Hey it’s about time you start pulling your fair share around here, I feed you right” her dad argued, they both shared a little chuckle and a grin. And that was the perfect moment.

Then in the nick of a happy moment, Margret froze, at the moment she was still, couldn’t move… blink…she was trapped… blink… she was losing her mind… She saw two women in a suburban backyard one of which was in a long blue halter dress, her hair was a reddish-brown color and it was put up in a very neat bun like she was from some early nineteen hundred type stuff, or going to a fancy dinner, and her eyes were the sensational ocean eyes blue. The necklace that was dropped hanging around her

neck was a big chunky locket that looked like an old ancient artifact. As for the child, she was basically younger her same hair color, same eyes even her smile, and the way her shoulders were squinched up when she was happy, just like Margret, she had a plaid red shirt and a pair of big overalls to lay over it and some child garden shoes.

“Margret.” a voice whispered it grabbed onto her like a person playing tug-o-war with her mind, it echoed, a loud banging, vibrating, a vocalizing call really.

“Margret.” The voice called, sounding more faded on the last time her name was said, but it sure as heck was still there. Shivers ran down Margret’s spine, and her hands were shaking, eyes were rattling, toes were curling, and every single hair on her body from her head to her toes stood up. She was trapped in mental paralysis, her thoughts almost closed up on her.

She kept trying to come back to her mind…Blink… but there was something in her that was still trapped…Blink… she could move her arms once more and now they were free from their side … and then at that point in time … Snap just like that… Back in her reality, her father looked at her in confusion but she just stood there like a stone, as if at that moment she crossed paths with Medusa. Her dad just stared in concern, he reached his arm up and tapped her shoulder a few times, before she noticed. When she did she was a bit startled but just told him that it was a daydream and she was just so tired and she didn’t sleep the night before and that she was probably hallucinating a dream because of her insomniac sense of sleep.

“I’m going to try to go inside and go back to sleep for a good half an hour, so this all kinda blows over,” she said while giving a short smile.

She gave him a head nod and started to go towards the house.

He nodded, but was still worried, and wasn’t buying the excuse a whole one-hundred percent. Looking down from her and getting back to doing his yard work, he picked up one of those big brown bags from the garden store. Got on his knees and started ripping weeds out of the ground from near the outside of their above-ground pool. While in the meantime Margret was inside where she poured herself a bowl of cereal and brought it over to the table.

She was there eating and having some of her daily thoughts, ten years since the last time she saw her mother. She was now fifteen and thinking about how she wouldn’t trade thirty seconds with her dad for a millisecond with her mother. But while she was dipping her spoon back into her milk, she just kept reminiscing about the two women dancing around and playing outside, it wasn’t a daydream there was no way, and she wasn’t really all that tired. It could not have been just a daydream, So who the hell were those two girls she saw.

She threw her bowl in the sink and gave it a quick rinse. Marget walked up the stairs and made a turn to the right going down the small hallway and another right to the attic door. She tugged the jammed door open and swung her hands in front of her face, clearing dust from her eyes every step she took. As her head peered over the steps there were several boxes but she was looking for the ones marked pictures, she knew she had seen those people somewhere they were way too familiar just to be a random family. Right corner. There were at least four boxes that had pictures written with a purple sharpie. She walked up and down the attic stairs carrying one box at a time into her room back down the hall again and past the stairs. She set the boxes on the floor and sat on the end of her bed, lifting the biggest box up to her lap, she removed the lid. And tears filled her eyes. She thought that she wasn’t going to see anything, that it was just a coincidence, but not a coincidence. A woman, the woman, same one from her moment that she had, just in a senior picture class photo, but still wearing the aged locket.

A gasped slipped her mouth and she dropped the small woof frame. Margret remembered the faces but had never seen that photo before, and why now, how is this all happening now. Then, she saw it, there it was. The big rusty locket in the bottom corner of the cardboard box. She freed her hand from shaking and reached towards it. She dusted it off quickly with her index finger and opened it from the little latch on the side. And it was the little girl’s face, in the small inch by inch little frame, plastered on the right side of the necklace. She flipped it over and rubbed her finger along the engraving on the back, with the name Mary, her grandmother’s name. She stuffed everything back into the box with no pristine and just shoved it under her bed and put the other box into her walk-in closet.

Margret was on the verge of crying. She made a quick one-hundred-yard dash to where her father was in the backyard and began the investigation. She didn’t mention the box or the locket but she was curious.

“Hey father, what do you know about grandma, on momma's side,” she asked frantically but calmly.

“Not much I can say, I didn’t really know her, but she always said that she had

“The gift”. He let out a little snicker. “She just kind of disappeared”

Margret looked at him with wide eyes “What do you mean, “The gift.” and why did you put air quotes around it.”

Her dad was shocked that she was interested with this information, “I don't know anything really besides that she was a very petite woman and loved having her hair in a bun.”

Her heart dropped into her stomach, she saw everything that her father described.

“Ok, I was just wondering, it was a school project for our family tree.

She went back into the house and sat down on the green couch in her living room, Then she heard it, “Margret,” the voice, there was a high pitched ring in her ears. Again, “Margret.” Her chest tightened, and her eyelashes battered hard.

She appeared in a room, one like from Coraline, then at the end of the long pathway there was her grandmother, she had missed the opportunity before, so she picked up her foot and took a step towards her. At this point, Margret was sweating and her stomach was clenched as if she got punched. “Margret,” the voice called out to her again. That made Margret throw her hand to the side of her head, not letting her ears hear any noise. But she needed to know, air filled her lungs as she took a deep breath.

What type of matrix portal was she now living in. Heart beating in her eyebrow she was now only about six feet away from this woman she had been imagining, “Margret,” she just shuddered and curled her spine. Walking closer now she was less than three feet away, close enough to reach her arm out and touch her. “Margret,” the voice echoing five times louder.

“Who are you, and what do you want?” Margret’s voice has now shifted into a sputter. But there was nothing, no acknowledgement of her saying anything whatsoever.

“Mary” a small voice came out, “My name, Mary Josephine.”

“Margret,” she heard her name, but the woman never opened her mouth to say anything, so who was talking to her, every time she heard her name said in that echoey tone it got more painful for her to hear.

Margret had tears in her eyes, causing her vision to get really blurry really fast. “Grandma,” her voice said, rattling.

The older woman looked up another inch or so, to where she was now making very clear and direct eye contact. And it wasn’t scary like in a movie where they had buttons for eyes. This was an old lady, with her hair in an average neat bun and her nails were fancied up, and her makeup was on point with the perfect dusty rose shade of pink.

“My dear, the arrival,” her grandmother groaned.

“Pardon, the arrival, of who and wait, of what, Mary who is coming.”

The old lady turned around and simply just walked away, Click… click…. Click….. Her heels made a snap of the concrete floor. Marget reached her hand to the woman’s shoulders to try to stop her but she faded into a cloud of dust as if you jumped off a waterfall and tried to grasp the water to stop yourself.

Margret sat alone in the empty room all by herself for a moment, just thinking about what the woman was trying to tell her.

“My dear, the arrival..” she kept repeating out loud to herself over and over. “Arrival of what, of who, COME BACK,” she yelled but sadly there was no response. Blink….. Blink…… in a blink of an eye, a whisper of the wind she was back, but with no answers this time, and no clue about anything, but she knew her, and she would see Mary again.

She picked up the remote and flipped through your basic cable channels, Margret was bored out of her mind, same old day sitting around in the house, she looked out the window to try to check on her father, when she gazed at the barn and saw an owl making around of circles to try to find food, Margret was just astonished of that owl, she had been watching it soar around every day since it was hatched, she put her arms on the side of the couch to stand up and go closer to the window. She walked across the dusty living room floor to look at the white barn owl making a hover over the gray wooden shack of a barn. And that’s when it hit her in the face like a kickball at recess, she wanted to know more about her grandmother Mary and for that she realized Mary’s old 1920 blue Chevy car was probably still in there along with some old furniture from her living days in an apartment. She snatched her muddy Chuck Taylors from under the short coffee table and her black hoodie draped over the green swirly chair and ran across the front of her house to get to the barn.

She reached her hand in her back pocket and grabbed her flashlight to turn it on, then she pulled back the curtain substituting for the door and stepping over the shattered glass and over the broken messed up bike from her childhood, and then she found a yellow mustard couch with stains all over it and a halfway lifted couch cushion. She decided to just completely lift it up to investigate the state of it. There were at least thirty pictures of Mary and at least $1,000 dollars under it.

Her mouth dropped to the floor and her eyes widened with red-ness. She lifted her trembling hand from where it was resting at her side and picked up the money, and it was one hundred percent real money and the pictures were without a doubt of her grandma.

She stood up from her crouching position to look around in the barn for more things that may have belonged to Mary. Margret walked through the empty space and stepped over the shattered bottles, vases, and glass to a wooden full-length mirror that had chunks of the mirror missing. When she got in front of the mirror she saw what made her eyes water, the reflection was not hers. The woman in the mirror was not a seventeen-year-old named Margret, it was an eighty-year-old dead woman named Mary. Out of being frightened, she pushed the mirror back causing it to knock over and crack completely she let out a scarce cry.

Then she went back to her dark, black, empty room where the old woman was in the dress a mere twenty feet away from her. Then the old lady walked towards her, but when she got to Margret she dropped at her feet and just broke down crying.

“Margret,” Her grandmother’s voice echoed loudly in her ear. “What have you done I can’t go back anymore. I'm stuck here, in this place now forever.” Mary wailed.

“Grandma, what do you mean? leave me alone! I can’t help you, why are you trapped in this place forever?” Margret yelled!

“My mirror, you broke my one ticket back home.” wept Mary.

But Margaret’s stomach just curled, as she could not give her an answer. And just like that, the black room was gone, and her eyes stared back into the dimly lit barn. And her grandmother was gone.

She felt like throwing up, burning the voice of her grandmother out of her head.

There was no way that she could forget about what she had said, so Margret stood there very still like someone was painting her. Her mind was just trailing off and she was staring into space as her brain was just constantly replaying that moment. And the pain in Mary’s voice.

At that moment the same owl from earlier flew down at her feet and tipped its head up so that it was looking eye to eye with Margret. Margret squinted her eyebrows and looked sideways back down at the owl, but the owl just stared for a bit and simply turned around, and flew away towards some random shelves covered in cobwebs. Margret noticed the owl probably lived in the barn. She decided to follow it. She turned a corner around some more shelves and right there perched on the end of a nest, standing guard, puffed chest, all brave, was the white owl she had just had a staring contest with. She picked up her foot to take a step closer, but the second she lifted up her leg the owl lifted up her arms as a shield. Margret put her hands out in surrender and moved closer trying not to scare it, because she knew her babies were in there. She got close to the point where she could have touched the owl. She moved to the side of the shelf to look in and there were three small eggs, Margret put her hand up and slowly backed away with a proud smile making sure to befriend the owl so that it wouldn’t attack her, but for some reason, the owl had not a single problem with her.

In the meantime, in the background Margret’s father was calling her name, she recognized him calling out for her but she didn’t want him to know that she was in the barn, and about the owl, with his humor he would say, ‘Don’t go in the barn you will get rabies.’ So Margret climbed out the broken back window and walked around the back of the barn with confusion,

“Is everything good dad,” Margret said with an expression trying to act surprised.

“Where were you? I was looking for you everywhere,” he said.

“I was just going for a walk around the lot. I saw a butterfly and was so bored so I followed it.”

Of course, her dad believed her because she used that a lot, and she did also love butterflies so it wasn’t that unbelievable.

“Ok then,” he said while turning and leaving, “I was just wondering because I haven’t seen you in a bit and you were acting weird.” He kept walking away from the barn to the house, Margret let out a breath of relief. He didn’t know she was in there. Shortly after he got inside the house Margret followed behind going to her room. She grabbed her drawing book from under her pillow and sketched the things she found in the barn along with a quick outline scribble of the owl. She set her pencil down on the top of her book and shoved it back under her pillow.

How would Margret go to school the next day? What if she went back into the darkroom in the middle of class, what would people think? Was she crazy? Weekends with no school in her opinion were the best thing that could happen to exist.

The next day walking through school was awkward, every boring day like the one before, when she thought people were looking at her she would grip the straps to her backpack even harder. The people in the halls with their murmur gave Margret severe paranoia more than usual. She would look over her shoulder casually, nothing could shake the scary words her grandmother said. Monday back at school thinking how she was saying “they were coming”, who even were they.

Margret lifted up her long arm to give a little wave to her friends standing on the wheelchair ramp in their normal spot. She did a little cringey happy-dance- walk over to her friends. She smiled ear to ear because when she was with them there was no such thing as being a lonely child. She still was a lonely child but she wasn’t alone by them. She looked at her friend’s shirt that had an owl on it.

“You good M.” He said while waving his hand in front of her face. “Come back to earth, space cadet,” he teased.

But she wasn’t fazed, she just slapped his arm as she walked past him going to her first class. Margret just gripped her books in her arms being almost scared because she could feel the eyes on her. She just walked the long strip to her computer science class. She walked across the white tile to her red chair and pulled it out. She set her computer down and that was when the teacher walked in from cleaning up her back room. The teacher made her way to the front of the classroom and stood in front of the board and began to explain what they were doing. In the background of the teacher’s voice Margret could swear that people were pointing and laughing at her, but when she turned around in frustration there was nobody even looking at her. She turned back to the teacher and just tried to focus on what she was saying. But again she could hear more people laughing and giggling. She whipped her head around and now there where people looking at her but not because they were laughing, they were just staring at her in bewilderment.

Margaret just wanted to cry, and it was all her grandmother’s fault. She was the reason that she saw the box with her stuff. She was the reason that Margret was getting all of these visions of her and this young girl. And why did she see the owl in the barn and why at the perfect timing?

She seriously started to get worried. Was this all just an issue of her acting out? Was she rebelling against herself? Was she out of her mind? Her heart got heavy because she thought that she had the problem, she thought that she was the problem. And maybe that was the issue with her. That she didn’t believe herself. Why was this not clicking in her brain? She sat through the class as patient as she could be in her situation, But the second the bell rang though, she made a one mile dash across the school for her locker before most kids even stood up from their desks. She grabbed her stuff and ran out one of the back doors.

The bus ride home was dreadful but Margret felt like it was a mission she got home. Without even going inside she went straight to the barn. She stepped over trash and over shelves to be close to the tipped over mirror. She walked over to it, and pieced a section of it together on the floor, and when she stood over the small palette of the looking glass it was her grandmother again but this time not talking. And Margret didn’t go into the black room she normally did when she saw her. As a matter of fact the woman in the mirror looked like Mary but was doing the same movements as Margret, when she lifted her arm so did her reflection of Mary.

And that was when the workers in her head turned on the light switch. Margret was her own grandmother and Mary was Margret from the past but in the future it all made sense. It was the owl and the pictures in the couch. Margret almost lost her balance because she was about to pass out from shock. She fell to her knees and started crying. She was going to die. Her emotions were consuming her like a black whole. In the depth of it all the owl flies over and lands at her legs, all she did was tilt her head and look at Margret.