Red Earrings and Other Curiosities

by Daddy X

I can be pretty skeptical when it comes to New Age thought, paranormal activity, religion, miracles, etc. but I’ve had enough unexplained experiences to understand that we don’t know it all. Someday, I think most of these phenomena will be understood as simple physics. For ages, throughout the history of humankind, our greatest thinkers thought the earth was flat and that the sun orbited around us. It’s all in one’s perspective.

In a previous OGG post “The Great White Whale”, I mentioned how Momma X and I were able to keep the ice off the windshield of our ‘48 Chevy pickup on our cross-country adventure. The vehicle was never equipped with an exotic feature such as a defroster, but we were able to keep the windshield free of ice by psychic power, concentrating our energy on melting the ice when the weather turned bad.

Another experience, preceding that, occurred in our first apartment.  

The three-room flat was completely empty. Another couple had come over the Saturday before we moved to help paint the place. We’d just finished the ceiling in the kitchen, and were cleaning up to go, when our friend said, “They’re falling!”

Lo and behold, there in plain sight on the drop cloth lay a pair of large red plastic earrings, engineered for pierced ears, about three inch flat ovals. Not something we’d be likely to miss, considering the number of hours we’d been working.  None of the four of us had ever seen them before. Now, you have to imagine a completely clean, bare apartment, freshly painted. No space existed above the cupboards, which went right up to the ceiling. And we still have those earrings. Every few years we send them back to one of the folks involved; she keeps them a while then sends them back to us.

The next place we moved to was an old Victorian in Trenton, New Jersey, which had been divided into apartments years before. Our place occupied the top two floors. When we came home, no matter what time of day or season, we’d always feel a certain frigid sensation at the bottom of the stairs. Not only did Momma and I feel it, but visitors too. They’d get nervous waiting for us to buzz them up. In those years, the neighborhood wasn’t too bad, so the fear wasn’t related to anything tangible.

One day, I was speaking casually to the landlord about another matter and he mentioned that he’d lived in the house as a kid when it was a single-family residence. His mother had died in that foyer.

More recently, as an antiques dealer, I learned to pay attention to intuition. After working in the trade for a few years, I tripped over a talent I was apparently endowed with but realized only after putting two and two together. I became aware that when at a flea market or antiques store, I could almost ‘sniff’ out some esoteric bargain that I knew something about but few others would.

If I had trouble leaving someone’s booth, shop or garage sale, chances were it was because something wonderful lurked just below the surface. Sometimes, I’d try and try to leave a booth but couldn’t quite get away for some reason. A situation would hold me back, either running into someone I knew or stopping to look at a piece I had little interest in. It was like I couldn’t move. Until I found the special object. The number of times it happened removed the occurrences from the realm of coincidence.

In the trade, someone with that talent would be known as a ‘divi’. If any of you has read the “Lovejoy” mysteries, you’ll have seen the ‘divi’ in action.

But, as I’ve said before on these pages, phenomena that we hold so mysterious and strange someday will be considered simply part and parcel of physics studies. After all, not that long ago—and for quite a while, as the world twirls—everybody thought some big white guy in the sky built the universe and everything in it. Then came Copernicus. Then Galileo. Then Darwin. Then modern science.

But that’s not to say that paranormal, ghosts, goblins and other entities that go bump in the night aren’t fun to write.

To wit:

                           

                                    Playing With Dolls     by Daddy X

                                         (ERWA Treasure Chest)

Fred Grogan tucked the kids in bed and stashed the Halloween candy. Little Freddie and Kate had scored plenty of treats dressed as tiny angels. Jean, his wife, wasn’t back yet and he’d figured on that. She said she’d stay home waiting on trick-or-treaters but Fred knew better. He withdrew into his workshop to be alone.

Meanwhile, in a bedroom a block away:

“Jeanie, you’re some kinda doll. What a handful of pussy you got.”

“You bet, you big fucking hunk o’ cock you. Do me before Fred gets home with the brats.”

“He doesn’t suspect?”

“Fucking wimp. He wouldn’t say anything anyway. You're twice his size and twice the man. What’s that pencil dick gonna do?”

Jean’s neighbor stood over her tipped-up ass at the foot of the bed then entered her violently from behind. “How’s that, bitch? Want it hard?”

“Is that all? Harder, fucker! … Oh! Oh my god! Harry stop. … I’m bleeding!”

“Fuck. What’s wrong? Me too!”

An hour later, Fred’s phone rang.

“Mr. Grogan?”

  

“Yes?”

“County hospital, sir. It’s your wife. Massive hemorrhaging I’m afraid.”

Fred grinned and hung up. He brushed the ground glass from his worktable and placed the simply tied straw dolls in a drawer.