Autumn Irene 🌕

Jacques was an empty man, head full of hot air, heart black with hate. His spirit didn’t like to make home in him, so it most often walked beside while the demons danced inside. His body was their vessel, their music the lies of a tongue in service to a mind driven by ego. 

Everyone’s hate has a root, and for Jacques, that root was his mother, buried deep as a fig tree in the pit of his stomach. Of course, he’d never come to face this cause the mirror wasn’t a place he liked to visit for long, so instead the branches of his hate wrapped their gnarled selves around the women that came and went throughout his life. 

The relationships always started the same, shielding his envy in admiration so he could pull them in and drink from their ever-filled cups. He’d coax and manipulate them, make them feel he was different than the others, make them feel safe enough to let their guard down and allow their flaws to shine through, and when this happened so came the despising and the abusing. 

Jacques hated flawed women, hated flawed people, but especially the women, and rather than leave he’d revel in making them small. He liked to watch them squirm, watch them suffer, watch them cry and beg and plead for kindness he never knew how to give to begin with. With these women at his feet, he felt big, felt like that trembling little boy on the floor beneath his mother wielding a bloodied, broken broom stick had finally gained his power back. 

He didn’t realize that doing this was crossing himself up karmically. He wasn’t a spiritual person, though he liked to pretend he was, the truth of it was that he wouldn’t know a spirit from a breeze, and in these brash moments of cruelty all his spirit could do was watch and wait for the Collector to finally come. The Collector being Death, because what’s not learned in the physical is always paid for in the spiritual.

The relationships always ended the same. The women waking up to choose themselves again, walking out without a glance back. He hated them even more for this, because every time they left, he was left with only himself, the vampire now short of energetic supply. And so, rather than look in the mirror and spend time tending to the wounds that kept him caught in this hellacious loop, he’d start his search again. He’d lay traps for fresh prey, starting with the adapting of his personality to include the best and most interesting traits of the last woman he drove away. 

But one day he got crossed up with the wrong woman, one that worked with her left and right hand and had a throat coated sweet with honey that brought her spirits to her feet. One who Death both knew and admired, and whose bloodline had long worked in its service. Jacques’ spirit knew she would be his undoing as soon as it caught sight of her, smelled the destiny of her path and felt the power of her aura. Their paths had come to cross because she was battling some demons of her own, flies and pests looking to feed on her half-opened wounds, Jacques representing the lingering gnat of self-doubt still bruising her ego.  

The relationship went as all his relationships always did, the trap was laid, the guard let down, and the despising took root. It took her longer than the others to leave, so he was fed more than he’d ever been before. But still, the destined time did come, and she finally cut the cords with him without a second thought. 

Jacques hatred towards her was a greater force than the others had to endure, there was something about this woman that made her impossible to let go. His hatred fueled an obsession that manifested as lies and slander to any ear that would listen or eye that would read. She knew all of this was happening, she’d seen it in her dreams, heard his voice through an itch in her ear, but rather than act on it she’d let it go and breathe away the pain of her memories with him. She knew her magic was sacred and should be preserved for things better worth the exchange of energy, not a gnat still stuck in the muddied realm of delusion.

A year passed and Jacques’ obsession only grew, and one day while humming with the birds beneath the sun a breezing spirit came to the woman’s ear and told her of all he had still been doing to slight her, and this time she decided to do something about it as her grandmother’s spirit whispered to her that, “some men are just begging for lessons.” 

It didn’t take much, for she was highly favored, able to cast or conjure with the sway of a hip or a whisper of the mouth. She sat before her altar and cursed his tongue through flame. Her throat was sore afterward, as the call was heard miles from her home, the Collector ready to give favor to his devotee. 

The next day Death conjured itself into a group of buzzing bees, wisping through the tendrilled leaves of the plants on Jacques’ patio. Jacques’ spirit felt Death’s presence before it even arrived, the Collector finally come round to take what was owed. When Jacques stepped onto the patio to water his pothos, the bees came swarming, each one planting their stinger in his throat before dying off themselves.

Jacques had never been stung by a bee before, and so he couldn’t have expected what was to come next as he swatted and yelped through the sharpness of pain. It didn’t take long for his tongue to swell up in his mouth. He stumbled inside his apartment, falling to the ground as he clasped at his swelling, closing throat. The minutes passed slowly until life finally left him and his spirit stood over his swollen, crumpled body, feeling solemn at the sight, though it knew that at least now the real work could be done. 

A few nights later the woman sat with her feet in the pond beside her country house. The sky blue black with stars gleaming as bright as the full moon reigned over them. She sang an old song her folks used to sing, the lyrics a star-filled map to freedom. She tossed a penny and some salt into the water and waited for the visions to stir in the moonlit pool, and when they did, she saw the swirling of a spirit, a new one that she hadn’t seen before, wrapping itself at her ankles. She laughed and closed her eyes, throwing her head back to the sky, thanking God for giving her the gift of another spirit to do her Earthly bidding. 

THE END 🍯