WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) Read Free Page A

Cicadas died and the crackles were born.   And the south rose again.    
     
    Over the years, we collected armies of crackles and stored them in shoe boxes. Last summer we counted sixty seven gut-less creatures staring back at us. We dressed them up into wild, crazy characters using leaves, moss, pine cones and grass. We had puppet shows, villages and towns of crackles. Two of them had patchwork shorts like us. We even created a town similar to Pine Log.  It had one Dairy Queen, one grocery store, one hundred and fifty Baptist churches, and one beer joint on the other side of the Salt Flats River Bridge. Dad always said Pine Log was the wettest dry county in Texas. When folks said they was going across the river—they were not talking about fishing.
     
    Mag and I are proud to say our best prank involved two ninja crackles, experts at covert missions and willing to die for the cause.  Well, okay … actually they were already dead but the shell, it was fully committed. We painted their bubble eyes blood red with a yellow dot in the center and disguised their bodies with black coats of paint. We chiseled a sword out of sticks, painted it silver and glued it to their hands.
    Maw Sue finally settled in for her evening nap and we made our move. We tiptoed across the squeaky floor, snickering and giggling, barely able to keep it all in. Mag was a clumsy boob and hit the roll away table beside the refrigerator. The three tiered table squealed out. The statue of Jesus holding a baby lamb went down face first. We froze. The table eek’d in judgment then fell silent. I gave Mag the OH-MY-GOD-THAT-TABLE-HAS-BEEN-THERE-FOREVER look of doom. Maw Sue snorted and rooted around.  W e went on lock down.
    “We’re going to hell.” Mag lip synced the words.
    “We live in Pine Log.” I lip synced back. “I think we’re already there.”
    Maw Sue was in a deep sleep again so we moved out. We slithered in like serpents. Looking back on it now, I figure we should have turn coat and ran when we had the chance.  Heeded the baby Jesus moment as a sign, instead, we turned heathen and mounted two ninja crackles on the rim of her glasses. The hardest part was not laughing out loud. A few times, she’d jerk her arms or legs and we’d freeze up nearly busting a gut giggling. Mag kept glancing over at Jesus and the squished lamb. I couldn’t take my eyes off the bloody red stone around Maw Sue’s neck. It watched me angrily a nd pulsating with my every move.  A few times it reached out with its wet liquid fingers and I flinched.  Mag looked at me weird but we moved out fast and swift. On the way out, Mag up-righted the savior and petted the lamb as to get us back in the saviors good graces. It took a while to get out the door without the bell clanging loud and giving us up. We hid behind the chicken coop for an hour, laughing and cutting up. We imagined her waking up from a dead sleep, staring into two bug faces. The enormous zoom on her bifocals would make them triple in size. The more I laughed—the more I saw the statue of Jesus giving me the stink eye.
    Just when I started to regret the whole thing, we heard a scream and a loud plunk.  Loud plunks are never good signs.  Maw Sue came barreling out on the porch madder than a boar hog with his nuts cut off.  A ccording to dad, this is the maddest any southerner can get and still keep their genitalia.  She paced back and forth a good five minutes, then slammed the washing machine lid down with a loud reverberating clang that made us shake.  She reached for the wall and pulled off the whelp maker. At this point, I could hear Mag’s knees knocking together. Maw Sue lifted her flowery skirt and whopped her bare thighs a good one. Her skin sizzled and sent out shock waves of laughter.  Mag and I knew what it meant. 
    The whelp maker was a thin paint stick about fourteen inches long. If there was one thing that hadn’t lived up to its namesake—it was the paint