Demon Mare...
An excerpt from:
Miss Burden’s World
Biography of a Cult Poster Child
I wondered if my mother’s annoyance over my preoccupation with my animals was what accounted for her increasing moodiness. She peered at me from beneath the rim of her parasol sprinkled with yellow daisies one day, more like a gargoyle from under a cornice than a former debutant.
“I had premonitions last night about the series of cataclysms that will take place on our planet. Wars, fires and terrible storms. You must prepare yourself for the day when a flame-flecked cloudbank overhangs our horizon. I don’t know when this will take place, but should it come to pass while we are alone here at Paredones, you will need to construct a bomb shelter using stones from this nearest corner of the corral. Then after you’ve finished building the third wall you will need to stock the shelter with water and food. Last of all, you will need to drape the collapsed tents over cross poles to serve as a barrier against fallout.”
I looked down at my thirteen-year-old girl’s hands, insubstantial bony torso, and spindly legs. With my mother’s forewarning still ringing in my ears, I reflexively turned to glance up at the northern skyline for signs of fire and smoke. Hoping my mother wasn’t reading my mind, I only dared reply honestly to her in my own head.
“It would take a crew of strong men days to reconstruct a third stone wall in a corner of our corral, Mother! And without a window in our hideout, there wouldn’t be enough light for you to even read your books by. We would die in the dark, like rats sweltering in our own filth! What can you be thinking!”
“Alright Mother,” I replied flatly as though not taking her seriously.
She pulled herself up tall, her eyes flashing and hands gesticulating wildly as she projected her stage voice in my direction. “Manifest the will to do a thing and you will find the capacity to do it, you insolent girl!”
“Yes, well, since World War Three hasn’t arrived yet it’s hard for me to imagine what miracles I might yet pull off when it does!” I retorted.
To my surprise, instead of entirely morphing into the sorceress, my mother’s reaction was a defensive one. “You don’t understand what it is like to experience a prophetic vision. I go into SUPER consciousness. This activates my third eye through which I see everything clearly. Even the texture and quality of the air changes!”
Decades in the future, I would come to wonder whether, rather than the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, my mother might have glimpsed the horrific, widespread California fires I would later witness from 2019 to 2020. From where I would be living near the city of Santa Rosa, smoke would so fill the air that it was hard to guess where the sun should be. Or had my mother simply made up her supposed visions there at Paredones, as yet another ploy to provoke me into fearing the future so I would agree to learn the influential capabilities of occultism from her?
Back on the boat, without my parents’ knowledge, I had enlisted a student’s help in sending away to the US government for information on the effects of a Thermonuclear War. If my parents were so afraid of a third world war, why hadn’t they gone to the trouble of learning what such a nuclear holocaust would really entail, I wondered. Instead, they relied on my mother’s supposed spiritual guides and their definition of “intuition” to point the way. In my experience, my parents utilized this faculty in ways that begot narcissism, paranoia, resentment, and misinformation!
I stepped back from the corral wall to estimate the size and weight of the boulders that my mother—who must have imagined I could transform into Moses’ doppelganger who possessed the ability to levitate the stones into place (though without the aid of his staff)—said I should move. I then wondered why, after physically ensconcing ourselves beneath the collapsed tents she had told me to drape over the top of the bunker, I would choose to leave my poor beasts to die of thirst and radiation poisoning while saving my scary mother and myself for a doomed world.
~ Daphne Oberon Burden