Friday, June 29, 2007

570 days, 11 hours, 35 minutes, 28 seconds

She washes her hair with Suave Kids' Dragon Fruit shampoo. All she could find up here. And she thinks of Dungeons and Dragons. All the roles we play. And she thinks of the museum last week – was it just a week ago? It was exactly a week ago. – how she looked at the unicorns and mermaids but skipped the dragons. Still confusing dragons with dinosaurs, boys' toys. And this is, she supposes, a shampoo for little boys, nothing like she expected, her hair wild, sticking out every direction. For all types of hair, they said. And she believed them.

570 days, 11 hours, 37 minutes, 27 seconds

Yesterday, she swears, the Backwards Bush site headlined The End of an Error. Today that's gone again.

570 days, 11 hours, 47 minutes, 32.5 seconds

Devil, be gone! In Borders yesterday, she found a George Bush voodoo doll – he stuck it to you, now you stick it to him! She was on the verge of buying it until she noticed, two shelves up, a Hillary Clinton voodoo doll. Nothing but a slick marketing gimmick.

She thinks of one of her students, a former teacher. The assignment was to write about dolls and stuffed animals, and he wrote about the voodoo doll students made of him. Still haunted by it.

They say be careful where you stick the pins. The curse can cycle back to you.

She bought her own voodoo doll, years ago, when his mother was still alive, from the Voodoo Museum in New Orleans. Or a voodoo doll kit, rather. It was a white doll in a blue robe, used for healing. And she thought to set up a shrine around her headaches, to protect herself from headaches, but she never did. She could always see past headache pain when she needed to.

570 days, 12 hours, 1 minutes, 14 seconds

She's up here pretending this is a normal summer. The temperature down to 54 last night. And when she just looked at the thermometer in the kitchen window, it was 666. Devil, be gone! It was 62.5 outside her bedroom, shaded by the porch.

She remembers fights with him other mornings like this, other summers – her refusing to put on the heat with the windows open. But that was when his mother was still alive. That was before she bought the new windows.