There and back again

This post is long and a mixed bag of things. If you're only interesting in Hellier, you can skip everything past the picture of The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies.

I did a marathon watching of all ten hours of Hellier Season 2 on Friday—as after cooking two large meals that week and housecleaning, I wasn’t up for much more than viewing and eating leftovers. It’s currently available for free on Amazon Prime (as is Season 1), and in a couple of weeks will also be available for free on YouTube.

I rather wish I had watched it at a more leisurely pace because I got rather tuckered out there at the end. I’m still trying to process it (and have been rewatching it slowly for the past few days) and I might have processed it better if it had been in smaller chunks. Or maybe not.

I did manage a brief Amazon review:

Season One of Hellier was a perfect little gem of high strangeness, evoking that tumbling feel of falling into a storm of the synchronicities. That storm continues in season 2, tumbling harder and stranger. It has the authentic feel of lived experience rather than staged paranormal TV. We ride along with the participants, feeling their puzzlement and insecurities, their disbelief and belief, and watching as things shift and shift again. If you are looking for pat answers and highly manipulated content, this may not be the series for you. But if you have realized that asking questions is the most important thing, Hellier will give you that thrill of late-night discussions with friends trying to figure out the mysteries of the Universe.

My head's so full of Major Stuff that I can't talk about because, spoilers. I may post again in a couple of weeks after people have had a chance to watch. For now, I'll just say that at the end of episode 9 I used some sweetgrass oil, just in case, and drew a protective sigil on my TV screen before watching episode 10. Also, as soon as those damned tones started I got nauseated. You’ll know the tones I mean if you watch it. The same thing happened with a recent “Haunted Salem Live” sigil experiment done by Greg and Dana Newkirk. So. Mass initiation or suggestibility? I'm still not sure. And that's in the true spirit of Hellier, I think. Questions are more important than answers.



There are very mild spoilers in the following. Skip to *** if you don’t want even that.

I will say this, and with all due respect to Tyler Strand, I do believe the carving he saw on the tree was not a green man but Odin. Which suggests an entirely different focus of worship in North Carolina than in...that other place. And does nothing, of course, to negate the strangeness he experienced. And speaking as a geezer, if some odd young man showed up at my door going on about strange things in the woods, I might also have called the police. It doesn’t mean abominable practices were going on there, just that whatever or Whoever they worship, they probably figured it was none of his gods damned business.



***Okay, it’s safe now.

After viewing Hellier 2 there were many books I wanted to read and reread. I already had, and had already read, many of the ones they recommend: Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee, The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen, Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies by the Reverend Robert Kirk (written in the 17th c. and widely referred to in paranormal circles), and others. I thought it might be time to reread Kirk again, since it’s really just a tract, not a long book, and it fit in with some of the research I’ve been doing lately for my current novel. Somewhere in this house I have a 1991 reprint of Kirk edited by RJ Stewart but of course I couldn't find it. I once had a very neat filing system for my books, but that was before the chaos of the last house move and the caregiving years that followed, alas.



I notice that you can even buy this Andrew Lang edition as a Kindle book now. I love living in the digital age. But since I spent beaucoup $ in the 70s xeroxing this at the UCLA Research Library, I don't think I'll spend anymore money on it. I'd forgotten that I'd filled it up with pink highlighter. It was interesting to see that I didn’t find all those passages relevant anymore, although some overlapped.

Back in the ancient days when I was a student at UCLA, they had two original copies of The Secret Commonwealth, the original 1815 imprint from his 17th c. manuscript, and the 1893 Andrew Lang one, in the open stacks of the Research Library—a holdover from the days when Thelma Moss ran a paranormal research program there. Research libraries were the only places you could find these back then.

I've thought about those books since and wondered if anyone had the sense to put them in the restricted access area of the library or if, Rev. Kirk-like, they have subsequently been kidnapped by the fairies. Or other beings of more malicious intent. Somebody I know may have mentioned their rarity to one of the librarians, who didn't seem that interested. Probably thought that someone a pedantic busybody or just another arsehole student trying to tell her what to do. I appreciated having easy access to them, but also know it's a very sharp 2-edged sword: not even the Library of Congress can protect against theft, individuals deciding their wants are more important than access to that cultural heritage for the rest of us.

Ah well.

Below are some notes and quoted passages from the current reread. Some are relevant to Hellier 2, some relevant to my current research, but I thought someone might find them interesting.

• The Rev. Kirk says that females rarely have the second sight. That's a 17th century male elite conceit, I believe. If women spoke of having second sight back in that day they would likely be burned.

 

 

1. Let me thread you a story…(1-12)
2. Howdy, folks. I know it’s been a long time since you’ve heard from me—and I’m not a’tall sure anyone has a mind to listen to an old country narrator like me any more—but sometimes a person has to be tellin’ stories, even if they’s talkin’ to themselves.
3. Truth is, I fell into a pit of despair over the way of things in the larger world, and the state of things in Portalville itself. All the stories in the world, no matter how sarcastic, didn’t seem to make a lick of sense to anyone so I figured, why bother?
4. The other problem is when you’re a confabulator and things happenin’ in the real world is more confabulous than what a storyteller could come up with and still be believed, it does somewhat take the gunpowder outten your musket.
5. Still, like I said, I got that need to tell stories whether anyone believes ‘em or not. Like that time President Turps joined forces with Portalville’s former mayor and minor god of chaos, Belial Covfefe. Covfefe got voted out of office here in Portalville fair and square—
6. once townsfolk got wise to his evil ways—but he kept screamin’ that the whole thing was rigged even as he packed his bags and left in a huff. Turns out, he became one of them political consultants on President Turps’ re-election committee.
7. Said he’d learned from his mistakes here in Portalville and if President Turps wanted to be re-elected he, Covfefe, would show him the way. Before you knew it, the president had him a revolvin’ set of heads on his shoulders.
8. Whenever anyone called him out as a liar to his face, which nervy journalists and late-night TV show hosts sometimes had the balls to do, he’d swivel another head around and that one would get all riled & declare, “I never said any such thing. These are all just fake truths.”
9. All’s he had to do was keep track of which head told which lie & switch to a new head that had no part in the lyin’. Trouble was, you can only fit so many heads on one pair of shoulders and the president told so many lies he soon ran out of heads to do his denying for him.
10. So the president started sproutin’ little bitty heads out his rear end—but that wasn’t telegenic. Folks didn’t want to see footage of that process. For a time the news was filled with shots of the back of the president’s drawers with these tiny muffled voices comin’ out.
11. Had to shove them microphones so close to his pants that people finally said, “Enough!” ‘Course, they’s always folks what believe anything the president tells ‘em without regard to common sense. Even if it is comin’ out his rear end.
12. You can read the entire sage (so far) of Portalville at https://pjthompson.dreamwidth.org/1672524.html

I was reading an article in the September 2018 issue of Fortean Times (FT370) called “Strange Stories from Southport”—a seaside town in Merseyside, roughly 20 miles north of Liverpool. Most of the stories in this article dealt with sightings of the Old Man of Halsall Moss—an old, possibly drunken, man in antique farmers clothes who is often seen staggering beside the road by passing motorists only to suddenly disappear.

Other people traveling the solitary places around Southport have had timeslips or momentarily driven through a changed landscape. One mother and son experienced a nighttime landscape beneath a crescent moon showering luminous arcs of light down upon the open fields. The streetlights on either side of the road echoed these luminous arcs, as did the headlights of the cars coming from the opposite direction. They passed a car with two ladies inside but when the mother looked in the rearview mirror, the car had completely disappeared, although there was no turn off anywhere nearby. When they returned home by this same road about three hours later, there were no arcs of light and, furthermore, they realized that the streetlights weren’t on either side of the road as they had originally perceived them, but went straight down the middle. They also realized that the crescent moon arcing light had been to the north of them instead of traveling its usual east to west.

Stories like this are a great comfort to me because I’ve had my own impossible sightings, when a mundane trip down a familiar road can turn suddenly…other. Even though I’m certain of what I saw and was fully awake in broad daylight, knowing that you have experienced something you just could not have experienced is deeply unsettling. You gnaw on it for the rest of your life, you return to it again and again, asking yourself how it could have been. And not infrequently, you (I) question your (my) sanity.

But when I read about other normal people seeing scrambled realities I can tell myself that sometimes weird stuff just happens.

Some time back my friends and I were having interesting discussions about timeslips and other warps in reality, sharing personal experiences of our own and of our friends. The next day I received the (then) latest Fortean Times (February 2017, FT 350) which had an article by Jenny Randles (“Timelessness”) on “time travel, close encounters and other ripples in reality.” Being the good Jungian that I am, I recognized a synchronicity and started working on a post—which, alas, got buried by busyness in other areas.

My friend, L. (I have four friends with the first initial of L), told me of a strange encounter she and her then-boyfriend had when camping at a remote site in the Santa Rosa Mountains of California. As they drove along the lonely highway, they came up behind an old jalopy of a truck going slowly up the mountain. It was loaded with people riding in its bed and even though they spent considerable time behind the truck because the road was too narrow for safe passing, the only person in the vehicle who acknowledged their presence was an old guy who stared and laughed and grinned in a kooky kind of way that L. found quite unnerving.

The truck continued up the mountainside, but eventually L. and her boyfriend turned off at the campground. Their car was the only one in the small parking lot in the middle of nowhere. They unloaded their gear and hiked into the remote campsite. When they got there, two women sat on one of the campground picnic tables looking at a fire on a distant range. They didn’t seem unfriendly. They smiled and said something neither L. nor her boyfriend could understand and pointed to the smoke they were watching. Again, L. felt unnerved, but she put it down to having read too much Casteneda. She and her boyfriend hiked into the woods to set up camp but when they next looked at the picnic table, the women were gone. As the night progressed, a feeling of oppression overcame L., like something wanted them gone. She felt as if she was being closed in upon, watched. L. turned to her boyfriend and said, “I think we should leave. Now.” “I think you’re right,” he said. He’d been feeling the same thing. It was the middle of the night, but they packed up in a hurry and left.

Ms. Randles speaks of the “Oz factor” often preceding odd experiences, wherein, for example, a busy road or room suddenly becomes profoundly quiet as the state of consciousness of the percipient changes. Simon Young, writing in FT362 (January 2018—“Introducing the Fairy Census 2014-2017”) says that there are a significant number of these experiences “while people are driving or travelling in a car” or stopped at lay-bys. He also speaks of a profound silence often accompanying this otherness.

In the case of a friend of a friend (another L.), when he was a teen, he was traveling down Roosevelt Boulevard in St. Petersburg, Florida in a car driven by his mother. The road was surrounded by fields and palm scrub, and as he gazed out the window, he was no longer in the car, which had completely disappeared. He was riding a horse and felt certain that he was an Indian. This went on for several minutes before he returned just as suddenly to the car.

Many years later, he decided to teach himself how to drive a stick shift so he borrowed his wife’s car and headed for this selfsame Roosevelt Boulevard because he knew he could drive to the end of it without getting in the way of too many other drivers. The boulevard dead-ended at some piney woods, so he headed in that direction. By the time he got there, it was dark and he came upon a stop sign that he didn’t remember ever seeing before. Not only that, instead of piney woods, the boulevard ended at a T-intersection. He also didn’t remember a road crossing there before, but as it was dark and he was uncertain where it led, he elected to turn around to go back the way he’d come rather than exploring the road. But he was curious, so he drove back the next day in the daylight. There was no stop sign and no road. He and his wife found an old map of the area and on that map, the road he had seen that night clearly appeared. They looked into it and discovered that the road had been created to service a housing development that had never come to pass because of environmental concerns. Even more curious, although the map had shown the road in anticipation of the housing development being built, the road had never actually been constructed. He’s very glad he decided not to drive down that road.

But it’s not just friends and friends of friends…

In December 1992, I gathered some of my loved ones together for our annual Christmas dinner. In the middle of the festivities when everyone was telling stories and laughing, my world came to a standstill. I’ve tried to describe this sensation before and that’s as close as I can come. I was sitting in that room, but outside of it, too. I saw everyone talking, but couldn’t hear them anymore. Inside of me everything had gone completely still, the kind of silence and stillness I’ve never felt before or since. I heard a voice. My impression is that it was deep, but I can’t be sure anymore and I can’t be certain whether it was male or female, but it was a voice of great conviction. It said, “This is the last Christmas you will all spend together like this.” With those words came the utter conviction that one of us would die before the next Christmas. I didn’t know who, but I suspected it was one of my parents. Then it was like the bubble burst and I was back in the room just as before, only trying hard to pretend nothing had happened, to deny what had happened. I told no one about this experience lest they think I was crazy. October rolled around and no one had died so I began to think it was ridiculous. So I finally told someone, my oldest friend, L., and we had a good laugh over my lunacy. Two days later, my father collapsed with an aortal aneurysm and passed away.

For oh so many reasons, my world was never the same after that. As Ms. Randles says, “we scramble to make sense of the scattered fragments of reality and reconstruct the world in a linear way.” It took some work to reconstruct things, but I never returned—didn’t want to return—to the same old linear narrative I’d been living. As Emily Dickinson once said, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” She was speaking of the artifice of art, but for me it means that the truth of reality is slant. Or as Simon Young says, “…an inconvenient fact slapping you hard in the face: reality is not as you thought.” Unless we live on the north or south poles, all of us are walking sideways on a globe, held there by gravity. But our brains can’t deal with this version of reality, so we create a level and flat plain, a straight-on world that doesn’t exist. I see the Other as something similar, something that exists alongside us, that we catch momentary glimpses of before our brains wrench us back into our more comfortable time and space.

I have also had my own “seeing things I couldn’t have seen while driving” experience. You can read about it here. (Note: I’ve just realized, looking back at that old post, that it happened the year my mother had her stroke and everything changed utterly for me. Not only that, I wrote the post no more than a week or two before my mother’s stroke.)

As Simon Young notes, “there have been several large-scale population-wide surveys of supernatural and psychic experiences over the past 120 years.” These have shown that as many as a quarter of the population have had these kinds of significant experiences, the kind that “the rest of the population would rather not think about.”

As much as twenty-five percent of the population is an impressive number. Maybe, like me, they just read too many issues of Fortean Times or maybe, just maybe, there are layers and layers of otherness living just beneath the surface of ordinary life.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

My morning commute is seven miles from front door to workplace garage. Being Los Angeles, that seven miles is fraught with many traffic headaches. Most mornings it takes about forty minutes—but there have been many notable exceptions.

Today was one of those. My commute took one hour and fifteen minutes. For much of that time I was stuck on the Lincoln Boulevard hill down from the Westchester plateau. There really are only three ways down from the plateau and I was on the wrong one. Construction on the Ballona Creek Bridge near Marina del Rey had reduced four-lane Lincoln to one-lane Lincoln. Even at the top of the hill I couldn’t tell where the problem lay as I was behind a large truck and in the lane next to me was a bus, both effectively blocking my view. I was stuck in the second lane because I knew the first lane was blocked ahead from previous commutes, and I couldn’t get over to the right because everyone in those lanes was just as blocked as I.

So I called work and told them I would be seriously late and tried as hard as I could to go with it and remain calm. Mostly it worked. I thought thoughts, I listened to music, I tried to stay positive, I amused myself by thinking of a guy on the elevator last night who escaped with his life because I didn’t possess an ice pick.

And so I sat for close to an hour. About a half hour in, I noticed a dragonfly, about five inches long. It flew back and forth over the hood of my car six times, not more than a couple of feet from my windshield. Knowing that dragonflies are very symbolic critters, I wondered if it had some message for me?

“This too shall pass.”
“Hello from Mom and Dad.”
“Pay attention, mortal.”
“Concern yourself with what’s important.”
“Which way to the wetlands?”

And in fact when he flew over my car the last time he headed purposefully west, towards the wetlands.

According to http://bit.ly/1RnTHQA

"The dragonfly totem carries the wisdom of transformation and adaptability in life. As spirit animal, the dragonfly is connected to the symbolism of change and light. When the dragonfly shows up in your life, it may remind you to bring a bit more lightness and joy into your life. Those who have this animal as totem may be inclined to delve deep into their emotions and shine their true colors."

Okay. I wouldn't necessarily count on that. And don't even get me started on that whole "spirit animal" thang. I mean, I do acknowledge that I'm in sore need of transformation. But the ways of the world are strong.

It is, however, interesting that this should come up now. I was just having this conversation with myself last night. It was a little less poetic, though. More along the lines of “You better get your s**t together, girl, and stop acting like a baby. Things need to change.”

Maybe the dragonfly was a reminder of that, a reinforcer of my own soul’s message to Self. Maybe a coincidence, but it’s no fun thinking like that, unless you call it a synchronicity.

So, a synchronous message of soul to Self, or Self to self, or…

It was a very beautiful dragonfly, all blue and gold. I loved watching it fly.

1. Let me thread you a story…(1-30)
2. Mayor Begay has been in office for some time now. We like the job he does and the way he cares for all the people of Portalville.
3. Weren’t always that way. We had us a mayor before who caused nothing but hard feelings and chaos. Mayor Covfefe.
4. As I’ve said before, folks in Portalville are generally accepting of everybody, but even good folks get scared sometimes.
5. If you’ve got an unscrupulous sumbich who likes chaos and playing on people’s fears it’s sometimes hard to break through the stramash,
6. and get people thinking sensibly once more. Mayor Covfefe was one of those sorts. Took over the City Council with his pack of yes men,
7. forcing agendas on the town nobody really liked but were too scared to oppose. Nobody trusted anybody else, see, and figured everyone
8. was out to get them, so no one wanted to listen to what others said without starting a yelling match.
9. So much screaming in the extremes when most folks just wanted to negotiate some peace that the City Council ground to a halt.
10. Weren’t no business getting done, or only what business lined the pockets of Mayor Covfefe and his cronies.
11. They tried to shred every principle we held dear here in Portalville, violating city by-laws like confetti.
12. Pretty soon folks was yelling at each other over every tiny thing that came along and forming parties of folk yelling in the same key.
13. We had us the Portalville League of Lawyers threatening to file suit over anyone who didn’t agree with them.
14. Fortunately, they mostly couldn’t agree with each other so their suits went nowhere or were easily dismissed by Judge Mathead.
15. Then we had us the Portalville League of Opposition. They didn’t really have a point of view except that they were in opposition…
16. to everyone else in town. “What are you opposing?” people would ask. “What have you got?” they’d answer.
17. The Portalville League of Witches got so fed up they put reversal spells on half the town. So many folks walked around
18. with heads on backwards they didn’t know if they was coming or going & got a much closer look at bodily functions than they ever wanted.
19. Finally, Sherman Begay, the town shoemaker, had enough. He formed the Portalville League of the Beleaguered to try to reassert sense.
20. Bar-Bar Shumay was one of the first to join, followed by Madame Mosibelle Nimby and her son Rupert.
21. They held giant clear-seeing resistance rallies where everyone who showed up got the scales lifted from their eyes.
22. Pretty soon, folks saw that Mayor Covfefe was a minor god of chaos, although no god of chaos is ever truly minor.
23. His magic had scared folks into going against their better nature, against what they knew was right.
24. (Then again, some folks ain’t got better natures and think right is only what is right for them. Even the most powerful magic
25. can’t do nothing to heal that kind of perversion. What’s required to fight them folks is a really big stick.)
26. Fear is a great motivator, but I got to believe love is, too. Once Sherman Begay, & Bar-Bar, & the Nimbys broke through the shouting,
27. let people see the truth, most folks came around. They realized that loving your neighbor wasn’t just a passel of pretty-sounding words.
28. It’s a way forward, a commitment to doing what’s right for the whole community.
29. Folks decided that they’d rather live in harmony than have their own way in every tiny thing. Compromise became a holy tenet.
30. Come next election, Mayor Covfefe lost by a landslide. And that’s how the new mayor, Sherman Begay the shoemaker, saved our souls.

This tale can also be found on Twitter @downportalville.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

“It is possible, therefore, that the encounter experience is a contemporary form of an ancient mystical knowledge or gnosis, that is, knowledge that comes from the reality of visionary or revelatory states, that are also taking place in an actual “space” of the soul, or subtle vehicle. Such experiences also make it imperative that we expand our dichotomous worldview to include once again these other levels of reality, that in fact are by no means new, but recover an ancient multidimensionality.”

—Virginia Goodchild, Alien Contact Experience and Ancient Traditions



Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Lucy and Ethel, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashian Klan. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

1. Let me Thread you a story…(1-18)
2. We're just a little town. Don't go in much for big and showy, but we had us a fella once who liked to write his name everywhere in town.
3. Wasn't a building or a fence or a bench or a sidewalk safe from his red spray can. "Huge, Huge, Huge" it said everywhere.
4. Natty Knowles spent all his time scrubbing it off things & the town shelled out so much money for it they finally confronted Freddy Huge.
5. Said they were going to make him pay all the expenses. At first, Freddy tried to blame one of the Syrian refugee families in town.
6. But everyone knew Ahmed Shah was a hard-working man who just wanted to raise his family in a safe, peaceful place.
7. And his wife, Halimah, was busy raising their two boys, Idris and Harun, 4 and 3, respectively.
8. Besides, she was eight months pregnant at the time with their daughter, Bilqis, and everyone knew she couldn’t be doing it.
9. Besides, Minnie Halverson, head of the Beale Street Neighborhood Watch was on stakeout one night and saw what happened.
10. Freddy would never dirty his own hands with anything like real work, but his Russian accountant, Ivan Drago, was up for the job.
11. Minnie literally caught him red-handed as the spray paint leaked back over his fingers some.
12. Faced with this evidence and a huge bill from the city, Freddy and Ivan declared bankruptcy.
13. They snuck out of town one night and folks hear tell they set up shop in New Jersey where waste management is a…big industry.
14. Sad to say they left the shareholders at Huge Waste Management holding the bag, and people lost badly needed jobs.
15. Like I’ve said before, we take care of our own in this town. Mayor Begay formed a city waste management firm.
16. The shareholders were happy to buy into that, folks kept their jobs, and we saw no more red spray paint around town.
17. Meanwhile, Freddy and his Russian contact are growing wealthy. Hear tell they’ve opened a university for the waste management business.
18. Naturally, it’s called Huge Waste University.

This tale can also be found on Twitter @downportalville.

1. Let me Thread you a story…(1-16)
2. We got us some spooky properties here in town, left over from the days of the Great Spirit Invasion of ’07.
3. Spirits poured into town from all over through a rip in the Space-Time Continuum, taking up residence in homes and businesses.
4. Madame Nimby, town exorcist, & her son Rupert sewed up the rip with existential thread and that kept new ghosts from coming through.
5. But they were so busy exorcising the ones already here they couldn’t keep up. It took a deal of time for things to settle down.
6. Most ghosts was just lost souls sucked through the rip by accident and easily persuaded to move on to a higher place.
7. Some, though, were stubborn & not inclined to persuasion. Folks who had those spirits in their homes & businesses had a tough choice.
8. Either move out or learn to live with haints. Some businesses made deals with the ghosts to stay quiet during business hours.
9. Likewise, some residents made similar deals, asking that the hauntings stop after everyone had gone to bed.
10. Still others just couldn’t live with the ruckus, or the spirits refused to cooperate. But we take care of our own.
11. The town banded together to build new homes & businesses for those forced out. That left about a dozen spooky abandoned buildings.
12. Madame & Rupert laid down salt & warding spells ‘round those places. Kept the bad spirits from wandering.
13. Nowadays our biggest problem is out-of-towner ghost hunters pestering us to do investigations (cuz we got us a ghosty reputation).
14. Some of these are sincere folks just wanting to understand the nature of the universe & we towners got no problem with them.
15. Others seem to see ghost hunting as entertainment. I don’t hold with people who use the lost souls of the dead that way.
16. But ain’t no spells for exorcising dilettantes. More’s the pity.

This story can also be found on Twitter @downportalville.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

1. Let me thread you a story…(1-20)
2. Sheriff Rosa Limonada came to us by way of Texarkana where she worked as a deputy in a little town named Spoot.
3. The sheriff she worked for had nothing but high praise for her. Said she was the crucial factor in solving their La Llorona murder case.
4. She’s fit in well in Portalville and been a fine sheriff to us. She has this special power to quell magic. Mostly, she doesn’t use it.
5. But if somebody is behaving bad magically, the sheriff can hawk up a metaphorical anti-magic spitball and launch it into their face.
6. Do no harm is taken seriously ‘round these parts, and the sheriff enforces it—in the nicest possible way.
7. If some of the young ‘uns get a little too rowdy with their mischief spells on a Saturday night, Sheriff Limonada knows how to calm ‘em.
8. She’s mostly live and let live when it comes to magical working. If you do no harm, you’ll never hear from her.
9. Most folks do as they will and harm none, but once in awhile someone gets out of hand or really full of themselves and needs quelling.
10. Mostly, though, the sheriff uses her powers for the more sinister characters that slip into town.
11. The last one was a skinwalker straight out of Uintah County in Utah. Was bothering folks’ cattle something fierce.
12. Borrowing folks’ faces, too, and walking around like it owned the town. When it took the form of Mayor Begay the sheriff took action.
13. Like a scene from one of them Old West movies, with the skinwalker standing at one end of Main Street, the sheriff at the other.
14. The skinwalker reached out its hand, fit to steal the sheriff’s face or soul, and Sheriff Limonada drew her gun.
15. The skinwalker laughed, a sound like rocks grinding together, cuz skinwalkers can’t be harmed by bullets.
16. But the sheriff marshalled her resources and yelled, “Kapow!” at the thing as she launched her anti-magic.
17. The skinwalker’s laugh turned to a shriek like ice ripping through a steel hull and it disappeared in a fiery ball.
18. Took a helluva lot out of the sheriff, all that energy, but the critter ain’t never been back, so Sheriff Limonada did a real good job.
19. She said it made an interesting change from wrangling drunks and setting up speed traps.
20. All things considered, though, she hopes she doesn’t have to face one again soon.

This story can also be found on Twitter @downportalville.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

1. Let me Thread you a story… (1-11)
2. A big orange blob parked itself in the town square. Just appeared overnight and plugged up the fountain something fierce.
3. Trapper Bruce poked it with a stick & it blatted something that sounded like “Sad!” then barfed chicken fat out of one of its orifices.
4. Sheriff Limonada suggested taking a flamethrower to it, but nobody had one of those, so a mob with torches formed up.
5. I don’t really hold with mobs carrying torches myself as many an innocent creature has been declared a monster by them.
6. But this blob gave off a foul odor of corruption & kept getting bigger, spreading all over the fountain and the park benches around it.
7. It exploded soon as the first torch hit it. Guess it wasn’t much more than a giant gasbag filled with grease. Burned real good.
8. The fountain ain’t never going to be the same, though. The nymphs who frequented it have been debauched & are quite traumatized.
9. They had to go to Aunt Cozy’s Soothin’ Shack for some deep soothin’. Don’t know if they’ll ever return to the fountain.
10. Only one happy about the situation was Natty Knowles who owns Spic n’ Span Like It Never Happened Cleaning Service.
11. One of his biggest jobs in recent memory. I hope we’re all done with explosive orange blobs.

These tales can also be found on Twitter: @downportalville

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.