The Magic of Moodara -- page 1284

You find a mystery story

Chapter 1. It's only my Shadow.

It all began when someone left the window open. The florescent and roughly curved moon draped its silvery curtain gingerly over the front lawn, basking all our roses in a deep, snowy hue. Our walkway was embedded in darkness, giving the gigantuan Japanese Maple in the front yard every advantage to shed its bitter and sharp leaves, soon to pathetically brittle.

Me? I sat clumsily by the kitchen sink, admiring the beauty of our melancholy street, which seemed to sleep itself that night.

Nothing really bothered me, my mother left a long time ago, and I think all my tears were spent of that knowledge. Of course, I was but a wee baby when she put her high heels out the door. My older sister, well I don't know what happened to her. I never even laid eyes on her. What really bugged me was that no one wore highs �round the house anymore. On our whole big little street.

My name is Janeane Huence. I am seventeen, motherless and hopelessly homely. My hair is of a thick, brown bunch of knotted cornrows, that usually slump in front of my green eyes which surprisingly carry small cargos of delicate gold spills. My face is a creamy white, and my lips shame Miss Piggy's dress. But I am absolutely not a frail porcelain doll.

I am more like a voodoo doll. Bad luck usually stalks me around the most unexpected places, and it obviously grabbed me by the neck when my mother kissed us goodbye. Maybe the voodoo reached out of my throat and moved my moms legs forcibly out the antique old wood door.

I tightened my coarse and thin little robe and tiredly lurched toward my room. I stared around my limp, old, tired and small little room. Please. One small blanket on my bed, and one couch pillow. A tassel hung from the curtains in my room, which were the only valuable tangible things in the whole house. Maybe half the town.

Except the wall paper. It was sooooo goofy. When I was two, my mother gave me a �special present'. A wallpaper job. We went searching through what it seemed about five billion stores, my mother doing a balancing act from breast-feeding me through her beige worksuit while telling the repulsive store owner that the pink and blue �Bunnie-Wunnies' on the wallpaper were too mentally disturbing. Please again.

So what did we do if the Bunnie Wunnies drove me to phsyciatric evaluation for the rest of my career as a toddler? We replaced it with a bunch of doves on an undescribable tangle of green vines. Like that would stop me from my first words being �Sigmund Freud'. They made my room look like this house was the next best thing from a cardboard box.

The other thing, was that we never got around to decorating the room, so it was like her farewell present to me. Along with a pair of disgusting white overalls that said �Fashion Police' all over them. Hey, my mother wasn't exactally Gianni Versace. In fact she was more like Picasso. Or John. Or Paul. Or George.

Welcome to 473 Arpendal Lane.

The odd thing was, the doves seemed to have a life of there own. Funny, when you have no mom, you seem to go absolutely nuts. No one to talk to you about the most embarrassing aspects of life as we know it. Or as I know it. The doves were my friends. I talked to them, looked at them, even seemed to soothe their fiery paint job. Some other bound of odd and crazy knowledge to add to my tediously full repertoire`.

Every time I woke up, the doves seemed rearranged. I would rub the flecks of sleep out of my blue gold-green eyes and brush my eyelashes away from my face, but the doves stayed in their orderly, yet slightly different pattern of military-like marches and softly swaying feathers. Maybe they pointed different ways each time. Weird and unusual, yes. A soap opera? No.

I know just what your thinking. I'm crazy. True sometimes, but I cannot be defined as fully insane just yet. It's like my body. I'm about 60% water, 100% inside blood, but only 30% crazy. My madre` defined me quite often as �pootie pie', a name that affected my stomach MUCH more than my heart,

and I think that's what did it. Why were the doves doing this?

Chapter 2

If these wings could fly

7:30 a.m., Mona Jolapa Crinalsa stumbles through the glass door on 981 Retyu Street, and trips over the rug. Her mascara is running through her red cheeks, making her look like a racoon, and her sunflower adorned dress blows through her legs. Her honey red hair is twisted around her neck and mouth, and a bottle of heaven high perfume is run against her star-stickered nails.

She slumps upstairs into her bedroom, and lies on her bed. Mona is a student at Princeton, quite a commute from St. Coroba. Her classes seem like days to her, for much of her intellect is slowly slipping into socialization. Mona had never smoked, never had drank, and didn't plan on it. Her mother was old, very. She seemed like she was never young, her gray hair got the better of her brown �Marie Claire' hair.

Mona reached into her bookbag to get her notebook. She plunged relentlessly through her papers and books, until her knukles cracked at least five times. She pried her notebook out of her bookbag, and lightly brushed her eraser shavings off it. She jotted down reports and once in a while, glanced at her wall.

"Direction, swift. Diagonal, white as usual, and Peatrees is leading brigade. Diagonal direction might predict troubles in school, friends and/or relationships"

She put away her notebook, and laid down. Her eyelids were quite a burden on her face at this time of morning. She rolled herself up in her blanket and dove her face into her pillow. She never really thought of sleeping this late on a Saturday, she would write a letter to her uncle if she could. Chapter 3

Hush, sweet Child

I didn't ever fake illness to skip school, although a day off would make me very much obliged. My dad was too firm, and he always said that he new when my illness was faux or true blue fever. All my classes were filled with long-winded science speeches, and or makeuped, gum-chewing �Glamour Gals' who would sit in the locker rooms with their high-class friends and chat about who's date has a Ferrari.

School must've been the other thing that made me crazy, so many books and papers, yet so many bossy ol' bats for a cheap excuse of teachers. Amina Perlam was my only friend. The rest of the girls looked at me with looks that just plain said; "I'm looking at you in spite of myself."

All the Glamour Galls at school called me and Amina terrible names. They would through paper airplanes notes at me, that were written in a familiar loopy and feintly understandably handwriting;

"Say hi to Amino Oil for me, Papeane!"

I would look up at Jainey Rochelle, and she would laugh in a girlish, "I'm such a darn priss" way. As she laughed, I fantisized about her hair extentions, and then her beauty mole flying off her "dollface."

Jeez.

Chapter 4

Kentucky Blue

"Look, Amina, I don't care HOW crazy you think I am, the doves are real. I know it."

Amina organized her papers. She sat obediently on my bed, her black eyes looking at me in wonder.

"You don't have to be so rash, Janeane. I know you are hallucinating."

"WHAT?"

Amina always talked and acted like some sort of physciatrist. Maybe her mother bought her Bunnie Wunnie wallpaper.

"I just know it, Janeane. This is a very interesting dillemna you have to face."

"ME have to face?"

"Yes, you. I can see why you would wonder why your wallpaper is driving you to such extensive proportions. I mean, I can put myself in your shoes, if I didn't have a mother, I would probably see such hallucinations."

Amina suddenly stopped herself, and her eyes grew wide. I knew it. Everybody was scared about ticking me off by mentioning my lost mother.

"Then we'll find her."

Chapter 1

Operation; Operation.

Mona walked over to the wallpaper store, and stepped through the unattractive fuscia rug that was strewn upon the floor in numerous pieces. She walked over to the manager over the store, Lloyd Satchell. Mona was somewhat famous for making anyone of the opposite gender seem to fix his eyes upon her. So, here goes.

"Yes, ma'am may I help you?"

"Yes. I'm looking for rearrangable wallpaper?"

"In �da back, miss."

Mona was disgusted. The store owner was a fat, pomous, digusting pig who always though women were for cooking and taping David Lettermen.

"Thank you."

" �tank yaz' SIR."

"Whatever."

Mona delayed her often melidous way of walking to a slow, down to earth pace. Her high heels often got caught on nails and other miscellany, un namable. "When the store owner of a rug store," she thought, says "�in the back,' he means all the way in *pant* Arabia."

Mona finally reached her long, tiring destionation, after a long period of walking, and still managing to keep a steady pace. A cheap white plastic shelf surrounded her, and on them were rolls after infinite rolls of cheap wallpaper. Fit for a cheap wall.

Mona, searched the wallpapers, looking, searching, for a simple keepsake that ran in the family ever since her mothers grandmother.

"Ah, here it is. The cheap stuff with the doves."

Chapter 5

Room of Nothing

Amina and I didn't remember my mothers name. Why would we? It was never spoken to us since the day she left. So why the phonebook? We thought it would be better to consult my father, since he was probably the only one who knew her name. Now all we had to do was to find him.

"YOU? Not know where your DAD is?"

" Amina, stuff it."

We crept around the hallway, stumbling around the walls quite a bit. Amina even made a painting come off the wall, not nearly enough noise to stir a soul, perhaps they be sleeping.

"He's SLEEPING!!"

Amina turned around swiftly. Now I KNOW she thought that I was crazy.

"Well, he WAS."

We took off our shoes to make less noise, may he still be sleeping. I was a little ashamed. I wished I could solve the mystery of my OWN mother, and my OWN insanity. But hey, he's my dad.

"Dont you think we shouldn't wake him?"

"Please, Amina. Dont be so yellow!"

"Man, what's with you Janeane?"

We quietly trudged up the stairs, heart in hand. When we opened my fathers door, he was fully dressed, sitting in Moms old rocking chair. This was it. I walked over to him. "Daddy, tell me about Mom."

Chapter 6

Rosary

My dad just sat there. He had watery eyes and his head in his hands. I stared at him. Amina stared at me. My dad stared at the floor. I couldn't stand the silence.

"Dad. Tell me about mom."

Dad still stared. I think he was reminescing. Swimming in his own thoughts. I sat on the bed, and breathed in a deep, familiar smell of heaven high perfume. The silk curtains flapped up and down in the wind. The violent, painful wind.

"Why, why, do you bring this up, Janeane?"

"I told you. I want to know about mom. Can I make it any clearer? She has remained a mystery my whole life, and I don't think that is right. I have the right to know about her, I am her DAUGHTER for crying out loud! She was supposed to be a role model in my life. Where is she? Who was she? Why Why. WHY???"

All of us were drowned in silence again. My dads eyes watered even more. I even though Amina was tearing up.

"W-w-well, she was quiet. Elegant, graceful..."

Dad, no what was her NAME?

"Geneva, I think."

"Dad, if she is anywhere, she is probably going by her old last name. Not Huence, it's a dumb name anyway.

"Uh, Crinalsa I think?" Chapter 7

Anywhere the Wind Blows

There was no other choice now.

We HAD to check to phonebook.

Amina and I had never heard of the Crinalsa bloodline, it always remained ellusive. But, so did probably a million other names in my family. My uncle, I never forgot. Uncle Rimard. Great guy, but it puzzled me that he didn't have the Huence or Crinalsa last name.

"Okay, we're looking for a Crinalsa?"

"Yeah, I think it's spelled C-R-I-N-A-L-S-A."

"Probably."

My fingers graced the bright yellow pages of the phonebook. They always felt so sharp and rough. So many names just waiting to be acsessed. It always made feel uncomfortable.

"Ah! I think I've found it!"

"Really!!???"

"Man, this is our day. It has an address!"

I bent over Amina's shoulder, and read the address out loud. . .

"981 Retyu Street"

My heart skipped a beat.

"Oh....My...God.... Shes on the next block!!!"

Chapter 8

From the Outside

I just ran.

That was all I could do.

All the answers I have ever wanted are beyond the block. Just beyond the lousy block! This was more than I could handle!

But I still ran.

Amina stopped to catch a breath, you could even see her rapid heartbeat through her chest.

"Can we stop for a second, Janeane? My lungs are about to collapse."

I was outraged, and I couldn't help it.

"WHAT? Amina, I have been literally going crazy my whole life, I've never gotten a decent answer in as long as I can remember, and I've been talking to my WALLPAPER for assistance! Look, if we don't stop, you get exhausted, if we do, I will probably die. Do YOU want ME to suffer for the rest of my pathetic life in silence?? WELLL???

Amina just stood there. Her eyes wide and astonished. Her blonde hair oily and shiny from sweat. I couldn't help but shield my eyes from her.

"Janeane. . .I. . .I. .'m lost."

I didn't know what she was saying, but I didn't care. I ran. I saw Amina get smaller, and smaller.

*

I finally arrived. I finally arived. It was the right address. She was just behind the door.

I rang the doorbell.

The door opened with a rusty creak. Only so far that I could see the solemn wrinkles around her eyes.

"Hello?"

I tried desperatley to clear the lump in my throat. But it was impossible.

"M. . Ms. Crinalsa?

"Yes. . . Why?"

"M. . .Mom?"

Geneva Crinalsa just stood there. I had no idea what she was going to do. She would either shoo me from her abode, or. . . I have no idea.

"J..J..aneane?"

I silently nodded.

"Oh my God...My Baby!!"

Geneva threw her large arms around me and pulled me close. I swore, she cried. She cried so hard.

Chapter 8

All I ever wanted

Mona was the most dazzling young woman I had ever seen. She had beautiful curly neon-red hair, and the most delicate yet colorful face that the world possibly could've produced naturally. She showed me her array of dresses that she had, all beautiful beyond belief.

"You know, I thought that I would go NUTS, knowing my mom left.:

Mona turned from her frilly vanity mirror and faced me.

"Anything, unusual ever happen?"

I shook my head, holding back the truth until she could be more specific.

"Well, I have this wallpaper. . ."

Mona immediantly looked up. It scared me a bit.

"And it has doves on it. Every time I woke up, the doves changed. They faced different patterns, things like that. I thought I was going nuts."

Mona sat on the bed and put her mouth close to my ear.

"I knew where you lived, little sis. I would crawl through the window at night and rearrange the doves. They are stickers, you know."

"Uh, Janeane? Are you all right? Wake up!!!"

The End

Chapter 1. It's only my Shadow.

It all began when someone left the window open. The florescent and roughly curved moon draped its silvery curtain gingerly over the front lawn, basking all our roses in a deep, snowy hue. Our walkway was embedded in darkness, giving the gigantuan Japanese Maple in the front yard every advantage to shed its bitter and sharp leaves, soon to pathetically brittle.

Me? I sat clumsily by the kitchen sink, admiring the beauty of our melancholy street, which seemed to sleep itself that night.

Nothing really bothered me, my mother left a long time ago, and I think all my tears were spent of that knowledge. Of course, I was but a wee baby when she put her high heels out the door. My older sister, well I don't know what happened to her. I never even laid eyes on her. What really bugged me was that no one wore highs �round the house anymore. On our whole big little street.

My name is Janeane Huence. I am seventeen, motherless and hopelessly homely. My hair is of a thick, brown bunch of knotted cornrows, that usually slump in front of my green eyes which surprisingly carry small cargos of delicate gold spills. My face is a creamy white, and my lips shame Miss Piggy's dress. But I am absolutely not a frail porcelain doll.

I am more like a voodoo doll. Bad luck usually stalks me around the most unexpected places, and it obviously grabbed me by the neck when my mother kissed us goodbye. Maybe the voodoo reached out of my throat and moved my moms legs forcibly out the antique old wood door.

I tightened my coarse and thin little robe and tiredly lurched toward my room. I stared around my limp, old, tired and small little room. Please. One small blanket on my bed, and one couch pillow. A tassel hung from the curtains in my room, which were the only valuable tangible things in the whole house. Maybe half the town.

Except the wall paper. It was sooooo goofy. When I was two, my mother gave me a �special present'. A wallpaper job. We went searching through what it seemed about five billion stores, my mother doing a balancing act from breast-feeding me through her beige worksuit while telling the repulsive store owner that the pink and blue �Bunnie-Wunnies' on the wallpaper were too mentally disturbing. Please again.

So what did we do if the Bunnie Wunnies drove me to phsyciatric evaluation for the rest of my career as a toddler? We replaced it with a bunch of doves on an undescribable tangle of green vines. Like that would stop me from my first words being �Sigmund Freud'. They made my room look like this house was the next best thing from a cardboard box.

The other thing, was that we never got around to decorating the room, so it was like her farewell present to me. Along with a pair of disgusting white overalls that said �Fashion Police' all over them. Hey, my mother wasn't exactally Gianni Versace. In fact she was more like Picasso. Or John. Or Paul. Or George.

Welcome to 473 Arpendal Lane.

The odd thing was, the doves seemed to have a life of there own. Funny, when you have no mom, you seem to go absolutely nuts. No one to talk to you about the most embarrassing aspects of life as we know it. Or as I know it. The doves were my friends. I talked to them, looked at them, even seemed to soothe their fiery paint job. Some other bound of odd and crazy knowledge to add to my tediously full repertoire`.

Every time I woke up, the doves seemed rearranged. I would rub the flecks of sleep out of my blue gold-green eyes and brush my eyelashes away from my face, but the doves stayed in their orderly, yet slightly different pattern of military-like marches and softly swaying feathers. Maybe they pointed different ways each time. Weird and unusual, yes. A soap opera? No.

I know just what your thinking. I'm crazy. True sometimes, but I cannot be defined as fully insane just yet. It's like my body. I'm about 60% water, 100% inside blood, but only 30% crazy. My madre` defined me quite often as �pootie pie', a name that affected my stomach MUCH more than my heart,

and I think that's what did it. Why were the doves doing this?

Chapter 2

If these wings could fly

7:30 a.m., Mona Jolapa Crinalsa stumbles through the glass door on 981 Retyu Street, and trips over the rug. Her mascara is running through her red cheeks, making her look like a racoon, and her sunflower adorned dress blows through her legs. Her honey red hair is twisted around her neck and mouth, and a bottle of heaven high perfume is run against her star-stickered nails.

She slumps upstairs into her bedroom, and lies on her bed. Mona is a student at Princeton, quite a commute from St. Coroba. Her classes seem like days to her, for much of her intellect is slowly slipping into socialization. Mona had never smoked, never had drank, and didn't plan on it. Her mother was old, very. She seemed like she was never young, her gray hair got the better of her brown �Marie Claire' hair.

Mona reached into her bookbag to get her notebook. She plunged relentlessly through her papers and books, until her knukles cracked at least five times. She pried her notebook out of her bookbag, and lightly brushed her eraser shavings off it. She jotted down reports and once in a while, glanced at her wall.

"Direction, swift. Diagonal, white as usual, and Peatrees is leading brigade. Diagonal direction might predict troubles in school, friends and/or relationships"

She put away her notebook, and laid down. Her eyelids were quite a burden on her face at this time of morning. She rolled herself up in her blanket and dove her face into her pillow. She never really thought of sleeping this late on a Saturday, she would write a letter to her uncle if she could. Chapter 3

Hush, sweet Child

I didn't ever fake illness to skip school, although a day off would make me very much obliged. My dad was too firm, and he always said that he new when my illness was faux or true blue fever. All my classes were filled with long-winded science speeches, and or makeuped, gum-chewing �Glamour Gals' who would sit in the locker rooms with their high-class friends and chat about who's date has a Ferrari.

School must've been the other thing that made me crazy, so many books and papers, yet so many bossy ol' bats for a cheap excuse of teachers. Amina Perlam was my only friend. The rest of the girls looked at me with looks that just plain said; "I'm looking at you in spite of myself."

All the Glamour Galls at school called me and Amina terrible names. They would through paper airplanes notes at me, that were written in a familiar loopy and feintly understandably handwriting;

"Say hi to Amino Oil for me, Papeane!"

I would look up at Jainey Rochelle, and she would laugh in a girlish, "I'm such a darn priss" way. As she laughed, I fantisized about her hair extentions, and then her beauty mole flying off her "dollface."

Jeez.

Chapter 4

Kentucky Blue

"Look, Amina, I don't care HOW crazy you think I am, the doves are real. I know it."

Amina organized her papers. She sat obediently on my bed, her black eyes looking at me in wonder.

"You don't have to be so rash, Janeane. I know you are hallucinating."

"WHAT?"

Amina always talked and acted like some sort of physciatrist. Maybe her mother bought her Bunnie Wunnie wallpaper.

"I just know it, Janeane. This is a very interesting dillemna you have to face."

"ME have to face?"

"Yes, you. I can see why you would wonder why your wallpaper is driving you to such extensive proportions. I mean, I can put myself in your shoes, if I didn't have a mother, I would probably see such hallucinations."

Amina suddenly stopped herself, and her eyes grew wide. I knew it. Everybody was scared about ticking me off by mentioning my lost mother.

"Then we'll find her."

Chapter 1

Operation; Operation.

Mona walked over to the wallpaper store, and stepped through the unattractive fuscia rug that was strewn upon the floor in numerous pieces. She walked over to the manager over the store, Lloyd Satchell. Mona was somewhat famous for making anyone of the opposite gender seem to fix his eyes upon her. So, here goes.

"Yes, ma'am may I help you?"

"Yes. I'm looking for rearrangable wallpaper?"

"In �da back, miss."

Mona was disgusted. The store owner was a fat, pomous, digusting pig who always though women were for cooking and taping David Lettermen.

"Thank you."

" �tank yaz' SIR."

"Whatever."

Mona delayed her often melidous way of walking to a slow, down to earth pace. Her high heels often got caught on nails and other miscellany, un namable. "When the store owner of a rug store," she thought, says "�in the back,' he means all the way in *pant* Arabia."

Mona finally reached her long, tiring destionation, after a long period of walking, and still managing to keep a steady pace. A cheap white plastic shelf surrounded her, and on them were rolls after infinite rolls of cheap wallpaper. Fit for a cheap wall.

Mona, searched the wallpapers, looking, searching, for a simple keepsake that ran in the family ever since her mothers grandmother.

"Ah, here it is. The cheap stuff with the doves."

Chapter 5

Room of Nothing

Amina and I didn't remember my mothers name. Why would we? It was never spoken to us since the day she left. So why the phonebook? We thought it would be better to consult my father, since he was probably the only one who knew her name. Now all we had to do was to find him.

"YOU? Not know where your DAD is?"

" Amina, stuff it."

We crept around the hallway, stumbling around the walls quite a bit. Amina even made a painting come off the wall, not nearly enough noise to stir a soul, perhaps they be sleeping.

"He's SLEEPING!!"

Amina turned around swiftly. Now I KNOW she thought that I was crazy.

"Well, he WAS."

We took off our shoes to make less noise, may he still be sleeping. I was a little ashamed. I wished I could solve the mystery of my OWN mother, and my OWN insanity. But hey, he's my dad.

"Dont you think we shouldn't wake him?"

"Please, Amina. Dont be so yellow!"

"Man, what's with you Janeane?"

We quietly trudged up the stairs, heart in hand. When we opened my fathers door, he was fully dressed, sitting in Moms old rocking chair. This was it. I walked over to him. "Daddy, tell me about Mom."

Chapter 6

Rosary

My dad just sat there. He had watery eyes and his head in his hands. I stared at him. Amina stared at me. My dad stared at the floor. I couldn't stand the silence.

"Dad. Tell me about mom."

Dad still stared. I think he was reminescing. Swimming in his own thoughts. I sat on the bed, and breathed in a deep, familiar smell of heaven high perfume. The silk curtains flapped up and down in the wind. The violent, painful wind.

"Why, why, do you bring this up, Janeane?"

"I told you. I want to know about mom. Can I make it any clearer? She has remained a mystery my whole life, and I don't think that is right. I have the right to know about her, I am her DAUGHTER for crying out loud! She was supposed to be a role model in my life. Where is she