Free Spirit
By
Phil Penner
Her heart begins
hammering and her breathing is picking up fast. She replaces the cork on the test tube and decides to meditate
her way down to the Earth’s natural frequency of 7.8 hertz, the Schumann
Resonance.
“Beloved presence
of spirit,” she says, sitting cross-leg with open heart and palms supine, on her
bunk in her travel van. “Connect me to your infinite wisdom, show me the
natural path.”
She has a small shrine mounted on her dashboard that
helps keep her mother close at heart. The photo was taken at a Native American
dance festival. Mother’s tan was a caramel glaze. Her headdress employed a
prominent quartz crystal for her third eye. The crystal was held by a snake’s
tail. From there the serpent wrapped her head like a tiara with fangs, recoiled
and ready to strike from above her forehead. Aponi shares her mother’s jaguar
like physique.
Outside of Aponi’s van, drums are amplified
to distortion. The walls of her van add metallic vibrations to the Aztec music
in Chicano Park. The sounds of Flageolet flutes seduce her meditation as she
turns her mindset to being one with the music, rather than blocking it out.
Aponi senses her
self-awareness and thinks, Yaahoo, this is so wicked! Infrared images. Bank
hard left, pirouette up and… float down like an oversized parachute in
marshmallow clouds.
Aponi
is moving like a sloth while being impeded by sponge-like grass. It saps her
ectoplasm like walking in sand. She propels her tiny cloud up to the top of the
bronze head of General Zapata’s statue. She thinks, I was right, every plant and animal is like sonar that’s sending me DMT
signals. This is because her knowledge of the surroundings comes directly
from The Akashic Field, the intelligence that drives creation.
Beyond Aponi’s
immediate perception, yet present in the spirit energy field is a young Latina
who’s headed for the restroom. Both restrooms have been closed for maintenance.
A disgusting man is picking the lock on the steel restroom gate. His squalid
appearance is accentuated by his odor, mostly alcohol and urine soaked
clothing. There’s a brown malignant growth on his nose that’s the size of a
penny, an ominous badge, warning of his anatomical meltdown. He quietly swings
the steel door open then slips in and around the corner.
Latina girl is
intoxicated and has no inkling of the impending danger inside the restroom
while she’s swallowed into the darkness.
The man lurches
and grabs the girl from behind. He slaps his filthy hand over her mouth and
brandishes a handgun which he jams into her temple and growls,
“Any noise and yer
dead.”
He spins her like
a top and shoves her back against the wall. Latina girl sees his face like a
horror flick. The overall stench of the man and the restroom have brought the
girl to the point of projectile vomiting, but she’s mortified to paralysis.
Aponi senses the
Latina girl’s distress from her bronze
perch and races into the restroom. Patches of dull light penetrate from
high wall vents creating illumination equal to a candle flickering in a
dungeon.
Aponi races up
into his sinuses. Her voice rumbles through his head like an angry god,
“If you don’t
stop now you will suffer.”
The man shakes his
head as if to throw off the foreign entity and ignores it.
Aponi calls on
angels and breaks into a Navajo war chant,
“Hey
ah na na hey ah na na hey ah na na HEY.”
To his amazement,
the man is fighting his right arm with his left and the left arm now begins to
win. His wrist and elbow turn the gun back on himself.
“Hey ah na na
hey ah na na hey ah na na HEY.”
The
man struggles mightily with Aponi’s control over him. Latina girl sees a chance
and knees him in the nuts for all she’s worth. Aponi feels the pain exploding
through his body and doesn’t know if she can keep him under control. She snaps
all of the man’s energy she can muster to the trigger finger of his gun hand.
Aponi’s
perception goes slow motion. She can see the fire chasing the bullet and its accompanying atmospheric shock waves.
The thunderous explosion screams of finality.
The flash
illuminates the bathroom. Aponi freeze frames the girl’s face with mouth
aghast. The girl begins to reach for the man’s hands. The bullet eclipses
everything else and BAM, lights out, and the man collapses to the floor.
Latina
girl screams and claws her way out of the bathroom. Aponi feels no particular
urgency to exit the man’s head. She senses to him, Can you say cockroach?
The man’s unconscious spirit responds to her with a
murmur, “Go fu.”
Aponi senses to
him, Coachroach may be all you can attain in your next incarnation after
this stunt. You will live to die another day. If you even think of hurting
anyone again I will cause you to be crushed by a bus.
Aponi is blasted to awareness of time by the high
frequency beacon going off in her van. She quickly and efficiently propels her
spirit cloud back to her van. While hovering next to her hibernating body she
senses a scary chill in her ectoplasm. She dives into her test tube hoping to
stimulate the spirit juice.
Fortunately her body is jolted by her stress and
becomes ready to receive her. With all of the energy she can muster she shoots
back out of the test-tube and up into her sinuses. Aponi tells her body to
breathe deeply and relax while she melds back
into her seat of
consciousness.
BAM – she snaps
from slumber and views the note she had taped to the ceiling of her van, CHECK
PH NOW. She shuts off the annoying high frequency alarm and pulls a short piece
of test paper from the dispenser. While holding it against her nostril she
shss’s hard to expel traces of ectoplasm.
+
The following
morning Aponi plummets her van into Parking Structure One at San Diego State
University. At age 29 she’s been doing contract research for Taiwonon
Pharmaceuticals.
Crap, not this damn sign again, she
thinks.
Aponi is frequently annoyed when driving under the
6’-8” clearance panel. It’s fabricated with sharp edged aluminum skins over a
foam core. A short section of rubber trim is detached and the exposed aluminum scrapes paint off the
roof of her van. She anticipates the day when rust eats through causing a leak.
Gliding into a
space, she checks for her special parking permit and smiles warmly at the
picture of her mother. Suddenly she gets one of those annoying guilt pangs and
feels she must deal with it now. She flashes back on the accident, the one that
changed everything. She was seven years old and mommy was tired again. They
were in the faded blue Civic with dented fenders, a broken tail light lens, and
a dream catcher dangling from the mirror.
Aponi wants her mental tapes to stop but she needs
to keep going. She tells herself,
You’re
going to break down that wall of fear and make
friends with or conquer
this demon.
Soon her mind’s
eye is back in the front seat of the Civic when little Aponi said,
“Mommy, I want a
bow and arrow,”
“You already have
them.”
“I want real
arrows,” screams little Aponi. She was near tears and reached behind the seat
for an arrow so she could show mommy the stupid suction cup on the end. The arrow’s shaft was lodged between the
seats. She twisted in her seat and pulled the arrow with all her little might.
The arrow broke free and struck mommy in the side of her temple.
“What
in the,” blurted Mom. She looked over and was distracted a moment too long.
Aponi
snaps back to lucidity. Her mind is tortured by this tape and shuts it down.
She tries harder to meditate her way back into the nightmare that happened that
day and succeeds.
Aponi’s mom had
run a red light and was still looking at Aponi when her little girl gasped. An
SUV, like a charging rhinoceros, glared its headlight and grill on the driver’s
side of the car. Her mother’s head suddenly slammed against the shattering
glass and steel. Just as she saw her Mother’s scary clown face; Aponi’s little
torso was ripped sideways so hard it snapped Aponi’s lower back and she was out
like a light.
By the age of
twenty two Aponi began to realize that she was acting out with
self-destructively behaviors. Her Father tried to persuade her to know herself
better, though he himself had no pristine record regarding perfect behavior.
She may never completely eliminate all moments of shame and loss. She has
consciously forgiven herself, after all: she was a little girl who didn’t
understand the dangerous environment of the vehicle she was in. Early
experiences are like main arteries of our personality, these old habits are the
hardest to break.
Aponi also decided
that her spindly legs, the broken wings that remind her of that day are one of
the most beautiful things about her. Aponi committed herself to honoring her
Mother by living large enough for both of them.
