For Christmas, my mother sent me one her Magic Boxes. They arrive during the frigid holiday season, and again around my birthday, in the hottest month of the year (another clue as to my true identity as The Devil). They are filled with every offbeat and bizarre thing I
(more) never knew I wanted until it falls out of its tissue paper into my lap. Antique rosaries. Handmade lace shawls from Mexico. Old books on witchcraft, poetry, quantum physics. Name a strange thing you want. My mother can find it.
This year, she sent me Jeffrey.
He is a purse-sized plastic flamingo, with a look on his face that simultaneously asks 'what, bitch?' and 'are there any tacos left?'
He will be my talisman, my daemon, my familiar. I'll stash him in my magical mystery purse, and whip him out anytime the girl at the video store turns her nose up at me renting '200 Cigarettes' (again), or when a skeevy taxi driver asks me, when I'm utterly blitzed, if I'd like to be stepmom to his collection of children and reptiles, or even when too many tall, pretty girls step in front of me in the bus queue. And especially, especially, when the crows come out.
Seriously, they don't like me. They lurk on power lines, on rooftops, on low-hanging branches and swear at me in rough voices as I pass. Big-ass, arrogant birds. And in these moments, when the whole world seems out to get me and tie me to the path it thinks is right for me, Jeffrey will come to my rescue. He will be unapologeticly pink. He will demand Tacos or Satisfaction.He will be a shield of righteous indignation between me and the world that dresses in black. My hero. Even The Devil needs one. (less)
