“Tell me right now to whom I am speaking,” a voice like poisoned sour apple candy demanded at the other end of the phone line. “And curtsey when you talk to me. It saves time.”
Lulu was taken aback by this rather rude-seeming opening, and wasn’t sure how to respond. She'd never been told to curtsy while on the phone.
“Uhh,” Lulu hesitated, “this is Lulu. May I ask who’s calling?” She replied as her dad, Jake, had taught her, still trying to be at least semi-politish, but she was sure she was only partly successful.
“The Wicked Witch of West Texas, that’s who, you little fool, and I’ll get you, and your little dog Bob, too,” the poison sour apple voice replied. “I’m coming for you through my trans-multi-dimensional portal, so get ready. Y’all are comin’ to Texas. Tell that brother of yours to get ready, too, because he may as well come along. I can always use more taco slaves.”
“I don’t want to go to Texas, you stupid wicked witch," Lulu replied, using her defiant tone to disguise her confusion, “and you can’t make me,” she added, without curtsying. She stuck out her tongue at the phone, even though the supposed witch couldn’t see her. Then, she hung up, another thing Jake had told her to do if a “weirdo” called.
“If you answer the phone and some weirdo is saying something rude or that doesn’t make sense, just hang up,” was what Jake told her. This is always[1]good advice and Lulu was right to follow it. Weirdos, incidentally, were a subject upon which Jake often weighed in, priding himself, as he did, on his highly developed normalcy sensibility.
Lulu wondered if this was someone's idea of a joke. If so, that person didn't really understand humor very well, and had seen too many movies featuring witches. The fact was, she'd never been anywhere near Texas, and she’d never heard of a wicked witch from there. Certainly, someone calling herself “The Wicked Witch of West Texas,” who was threatening to kidnap her qualified as a weirdo—even by the rather lax standards of Walla Walla, where she’d recently seen a neighbor walking his goats on leashes, while his dogs were unleashed. This, obviously, was the exact opposite of local statutes, which would have required the dogs be leashed.
Of course, Lulu didn’t know that the witch had seen her stick out her tongue and she had also seen Lulu’s failure to curtsy. Lulu could be forgiven for not knowing because she also didn’t know that the witch was calling on her crystal ball. Lulu could also be forgiven, by most, for not complying with such a rude demand issued by an unknown caller. Most people who answered such a creepy phone call would react exactly the same way.
Even so, the witch was unaccustomed to defiance, particularly since she'd gone into hiding in West Texas.[2]Again, Lulu had no way of knowing this, having been spared the knowledge of the witch’s very existence. Said witch’s minions and lackeys were too terrified of her, fearing transformation by magical means into an albino sea slug (or something even worse) if they annoyed her, such that nobody dared even speak in her presence, so you see, she was quite surprised by Lulu’s attitude and she was even more determined to do something very bad. If there’s one thing nobody needs, it’s a nemesis, or worst enemy for that matter, whose first name is “Wicked.” It might have been better if someone had told Lulu some of the family secrets before that call came, because had she known the story she may have been more careful.
Jake would later remark that “hindsight is twenty-twenty,” when her mom, Anne, pointed this out.
“What's twenty-twenty?” Lulu asked.
“It means perfect vision, or perfectly okay, at least,” Jake explained.
Lulu figured out he meant that you could always see reasonably well what you should have done in the past, but without the option of time-travel, there wasn’t much you could do about it, while with the option of time-travel, one could never be sure that what was done in the past was done at all. Not that she had thought about time-travel at that moment, or that Jake knew about it, but after her experience with the witch, Jake’s statement would come to mean more to her[3], so when thinking back on the subject after learning of time-travel, she had to assume Jake was also considering the possibility of going back in time to warn Lulu of the call before it came. For the record, that would be giving Jake way too much credit for forethought, afterthought and hindsight. Second sight and precognition were both blind spots and remain so. He was also in need of bifocals and a colonoscopy, but that’s beyond the purview of this tale.
“The day of the freaky phone call,” was what Lulu would later call it. It was the phone call that would change everything, like when the guy calls to tell you you’ve just won six million dollars and you can also eat all the ice cream you want, except that this was bad. It was more like if the guy called and told you that you won a trip to the beach, but the beach was home to a herd of Komodo Dragons and you couldn’t get out of going[4]and there were no weapons allowed because Komodo Dragons are a protected species and that ice cream no longer existed. As a Komodo Dragon is a killer 150 pound venomous lizard with a nasty habit of eating people, you can see why this would be an undesirable situation.[5]
Lulu liked Komodo Dragons quite a bit, because they were gross and dangerous and she liked to picture strange bad things happening. Particularly if the strange bad things were gory and horrible and befell people who had irked her. She once imagined a Komodo Dragon showing up in the school cafeteria and eating her math teacher, for instance. That was after the math teacher made a joke about a dog eating Lulu's homework when she forgot it at home. Bob didn’t eat paper, nor did any dog Lulu knew. Then, as sometimes happens, the imaginary bad thing got out of control in her imagination and she imagined that the Komodo Dragon finished her math teacher and then started eating everyone in the school, so she had to imagine that she locked herself in the bathroom to avoid being eaten until the police showed up and killed the Komodo Dragon -- even though it's protected-- and she came out of the bathroom to find body parts and blood and guts everywhere, which was a little more than she had wanted to imagine and she was kinda sorry she'd started the imagining. Once you imagine something it's really hard to un-imagine it, so it's good to be careful what you imagine. This was the advice Lulu always gave herself after an imagining gone bad, and then she immediately forgot the advice until the next imagination mess. Imagination messes were often, she’d found, the hardest sort to clean up. Time-travel, it would seem, might also be a good thing when it came to the mind-mess of too much imagination. That would really be adding a second layer of imagining, in a sense, which could complicate the matter nearly infinitely.
But that has nothing to do with the horrible phone call, which was the phone call that changed everything.
Up until that very moment, Lulu was a normal, if slightly morbid, twelve-year-old girl from a perfectly normal Walla Walla family. Well, to be fair, her family only appeared to be normal to those who were young enough, or forgetful enough to not recall a few unfortunate events of decades past, but to also be fair, the family had done a fair bit of obfuscation regarding those events in an attempt to seem perfectly Walla Walla normal. The dark secrets they buried on foggy nights under moonless skies would come to shock and haunt and bedevil, vex and bewitch the town, in that order. It has been said that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Lulu, for one, won’t be forgetting her aunt any time soon, nor the horrible experiences related here. Though, after the phone call, her life would become vastly more complicated and way more confusing in ways she might like to forget. And her family would become way less normal, or rather, they would have their real weirdness revealed, or not, depending on Walla Walla’s collective memory. Maybe that conclusion has yet to be reached.
If it hadn’t been for that dreadful phone call, Lulu could have gone right on not knowing about the witch.
As it happened, Lulu and her brother Reggie learned that wickidity ran in their family. In fact, it practically galloped.
[1]This is not applicable in cases where the device is being used for spirit/cross-dimensional communication, in which the party at the other end will necessarily be a weirdo by conventional definitions, but not occasion immediate disconnection. This case is, in a sense, ambiguous in terms of the appropriateness of Lulu's response.
[2]Wicked portmanteau: Texile- when one is exiled to Texas after committing too many evil acts in a more civilized locale. Usually serves said evil-doer well.
[3]Though it has not yet been revealed, this writer has discovered the secret to time-travel; that which overcomes every paradox known to fiction: slime.
[4]Obviously not a problem for the multi-dimensional set.
[5]It was only recently discovered that Komodo Dragons are venomous. Before it was assumed that their mouths were so dirty and bacteria laden their victims died of massive infection after being bitten. That's how gross they are.
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