Saviors 101

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

six years until Armageddon - Lap 1

Dana Murphy hated the rusty old energy spells from her book Tips and Tricks from the Gods, they took so much work to resurrect. At fifteen, her mom’s old one-speed Schwinn was still a bit tall for her to ride. But she could just manage it, and it was quite necessary tonight. Mama kept saying she’d been a late bloomer as well, but Dana was sure getting tired of the pancake-flat, knobby-knee look.

The bike complained as she leaned into the energy current along Seattle’s Ravenna Boulevard. The streetlights shone down through the gaps in the ancient maples leaning over the street. Trees that drew constant complaints of sap and bird droppings from the owners of the BMWs and Audis that now lined the road.

Twenty laps. She’d have to go twenty laps around the neighborhood in a very specific pattern. That was assuming she’d properly reformulated the powers correctly for latitude, longitude, and era.

Dana knew she was different, but at two a.m. on a warm, fall night she was alone, which was her most comfortable way to be. At least she’d come by her role as a misfit honestly.

By the time Dana Murphy was five, she knew her red-haired, deeply freckled mother was different. It wasn’t the distracted air that sometimes had her eating steaming hot meatloaf with baked potatoes and broccoli for breakfast, or cold, syrup-sodden pancakes sliding out of her Lisa Frank lunchbox at daycare.

It wasn’t even the piano that played itself in the living room, though she’d never been able to find where it plugged in. All it had was pedals and scrolls of paper.

The first really weird thing was that there was no television or video games in the house. Her first after-daycare play date at Theresa Peterson’s had included Barney and Super Mario Brothers which had greatly shaken her firm views on the sensibility of her universe. She hadn’t gotten over it until six weeks later when she’d managed to whip Theresa’s behind at her brother Sam’s Super Car Racer III.

In fact, the only modern device her mother owned was a CD player which held five discs at a time and played music incessantly.

During her entire childhood, the house was never quiet.

She’d wake in the middle of the night to hear Frankie Avalon give way to Frankie Lane then Frank Sinatra and finally Frank Zappa.

She’d learned her alphabet organizing her mother’s massive collection by the artist’s first name (though she hadn’t quite known what to do with Frank versus Frankie at the time), and her mother had played them in order from one end of the collection to the other ever since. For the rest of her life Tina Turner’s pelvis-thumping tones were a natural segue into Tiny Tim’s ukulele. When they reached Zydeco, the Last Twenty Years, she knew that dancing together to ABBA was not far away.

Dana never got over the foreign feel of libraries, as if she’d walked into a world where the last-name-first shelving order had been designed by Salvador Dali.

No, what was really different about her mom was the quiet stream of people who came to visit her. Whispered counseling sessions in the back room that had been converted to a cozy office.

Dana’d learned early on, short of arterial hemorrhage or a significant outbreak of fire, she wasn’t supposed to enter the rose-colored office when the door was closed.

That didn’t mean she was above spying.

The old house had simple floor vents to heat the upstairs bedroom. The metal grates created a hole into the ceiling of the room below for heat to rise into the upstairs room. Dana would lie for hour upon hour on the hardwood floor spying down on her mother’s treatment sessions. Buried beneath the big black quilt from her bed, Dana would stare down through the grate, enjoying the vague puff of warm air on her face.

All the scents her mother used would waft upward. Lavender candles. Almond massage oil. Incense. The sharp nose-tickling bite of burning sage between sessions.

Sometimes Mama’s patients were partly clothed. Sometimes naked. Sometimes they were poked with needles. Sometimes smeared with salves. And sometimes, which were Dana’s favorites, they lay there, fully clothed with a cloth over their eyes.

Mama would stand in her flowing caftan all radiant and beautiful at their side. The candlelight would make her pale skin and freckles all rich and warm. No jewelry. Her hair in its usual snarled ponytail behind her like a chestnut mare’s mane teased bouffant by the wind, and she would wave her hands slowly above the person. Never touching them.

The people would relax, tense, twitch, just like Dana’s string puppets, but she couldn’t ever see the strings no matter how she squinted. Not until one night when her eyes had been really tired from a long afternoon of whipping Theresa’s behind on Doom did she see the strings.

Her mother was unsnarling a long line of snagged white light above Mrs. Crane’s left hip. Dana could see how it was all stuck right where there was a visual break of light in the bone. But she knew the real bone was whole because the woman had limped through the door just fine.

When she’d asked Mama later, she’d tried to change the subject. But five-year old persistence paid off.

Mrs. Crane had never gotten over a hip that she’d broken as a little girl and had healed wrong. Mama was straightening out the mess it had made in her energy. She pointed to a whole shelf of books with titles like: Hands of Light, Energy Medicine, and The Subtle Body. She wasn’t sure what “subtle” meant, but they had really pretty covers and lots of pictures illustrating how to fix people without having to cut big holes in them. It made Dana proud of her mother. They were also the books she’d learned to read from.

But she knew that Theresa’s mom, who served healthy snacks and whose dinners always tasted dinnerish, would never understand. And after Theresa had called her a liar and her mother a faker, she hadn’t mentioned her mother again.

To anyone.