CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

2000- Isa

So, where was I?  Oh yeah- I received 4 years for felony stupidity.  And if that wasn’t fucked enough, I also potentially accidentally set the cops on Cabrón’s trail.  And now I was stuck on Rikers Island, waiting to get the call to move back Upstate- this time to women’s prison.  Bedford Hills was the facility nearest to the city, but it was maximum security.  I had a feeling they’d toss me into Beacon, located in Poughkeepsie.

 

I had Biz send me enough money to purchase an overpriced, off-brand portable CD player and headphones from commissary and gave June a list of factory sealed CDs to send me.  I wore out Sade’s “Stronger Than Pride” CD- “Paradise” reminded me of the good times with Mundo and “Keep Looking” was where I was now.

 

I wondered why I hadn’t heard from ‘Brón.  I know he didn’t listen to that voicemail.  You’d think he’d want to keep me close, now that I could do some serious damage.  I just didn’t get it.

 

One rainy, grey day in late fall, I was sitting at one of the lunch tables trying to write my thoughts out in a little spiral notebook.  I’d been a dedicated practitioner of journaling since the fifth grade.

 

As I was trying to get down all my confused feelings for Mundo and Cabrón, this weird Celtic witch/hippie lady came and sat next to me.  I think her name was Dolores and I think she was some biker chick from out towards the end of Long Island, around Sea Cliff.  She had faded snakes chasing their tails circling her biceps and claddagh symbols on the tops of her hands.  She was much, much older than me- probably pushing mid 50s.

 

Dolores cocked her head towards me and spoke very authoritatively- like she had the key to the meaning of life.  “Eula,” she said, “Let me give you a rune reading.  You probably don't believe in it, but come on, you've got nothing better to do.”

 

I’d heard of runes before but had zero experience with them.  I raised an eyebrow at her and gave a perfunctory nod.  Why the fuck not get a free reading from a random hippie lady?

 

She pulled a set of runes out of a manila folder.  They were handmade from construction paper taken from the arts and crafts cart, the inscriptions written in blue Sharpie.

 

“Ask a question,” she told me.  “Any question.  But make it very precise and focused.”

 

I looked directly into her cloudy blue eyes, took a death breath, and said a single word.

 

 “Why?”

 

Dolores laid out all her little scraps of paper and did the smallest shuffle possible.

 

“Pick three and put them in front of me,” she told me.

 

I did exactly that.

 

Dolores turned each one over and let out a short but deep crone’s laugh.

 

“Okay.  Yeah.  You got Hagalaz, Isa and Jera,” she told me.  “This is the clearest, cleanest reading you will ever receive in your life.”

 

From there she went into a focused monologue, telling me about myself.  And that shit cut deep.

 

“Oh yeah,” she said, deep into her psychic-friends groove.  “This is the reading you're going to get, and this is the reading you deserve. Most important, this is the reading you need. The runes you pulled- all three are read the same way, no matter how you pull them- there’s no right side up or upside down with these three.  So, what that’s saying is: no matter what you've done in your life up to this point, this is where you were supposed to be.   No matter what changes you’ve ever tried to make, no matter who or what you thought you were fighting against, this is where you were always meant to be.”

 

I looked at her, hard, but I could see this was not the time to try to break into her speech.  She was on a roll.  I let her it be.

 

“So, you can’t feel like you made mistakes.  You can’t assume that if you’d made better choices, you would have wound up somewhere different.”  I nodded. 

 

I felt that deep in my solar plexus. 

 

And my pussy.

 

“Okay,” Dolores continued, “I’m going to break it down for you so you understand where it’s all coming from.”

 

I nodded.

 

”Hagalaz is destruction,” she intoned.  “People have disappeared, you've lost possessions, you've lost friendships- connections you thought were grounding you to this world. Right now, you feel like you're scorched earth and your womb is barren. And that's actually where you need to be because you were never going to get ahead with what you were doing.”

 

I nodded again.  Shit was accurate.

 

She continued, flaying the very core of my existence. 

 

“Isa in the middle means you're frozen. You are literally where you are supposed to be. You’re unable to  move. You can’t make any choices for yourself. There is no influencing the situation you’re in.  You are stuck, but you're not dead. You're just frozen in ice, waiting to be taken care of and trying to figure out if you just need to bite the bullet and take care of yourself.”

 

That was the story of my life.  I sighed.

 

“And then, Jera is the rune of Harvest.  If you do the right thing now, while you’re frozen in Isa- when you clean yourself out, when you're free, you'll be able to start all over again and reap anything you've sown.”

 

She looked up and looked directly at me.

 

“If you do good while you’re here, you’ll reap good things.  If you waste your time and bullshit with the other so called bad girls, you're going to reap bad things.   But you got a year or two to figure it out.”

 

She collected her runes and put them back into the manila folder.

 

“That’s all I got.”

 

Thanks, old hippie biker lady.

HQ BK

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CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

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CHAPTER FORTY-SIX