KELSI'S SOMETIME

By

Betsy Jorgensen

Kelsi lifted the pencil off of the paper. She was trying desperately to get the image that was in her memory onto that piece of paper. Why was it so hard? It was a simple image. A nose. An ear. An eye. A horn.....
"What are you drawing, Kelsi?" said the voice of a falsely concerned young girl.
"I..am...drawing........," mumbled Kelsi.
"Yes, what are you drawing?" said another voice, trampling over her explanation. This one was male.
"I think she's drawing nothing," answered a third voice. "Nothing at all."
"But that would mean...that she's mad." said the girl, sarcastically.
"Mad or angry or happy or sad, she's still drawing. What are you drawing Kelsi?"
Kelsi tried to shut out the hideous voices. She knew that they were mocking her. She felt their eyes follow her down the hall. The comments behind open palms. The quiet snickering that always soon followed. She tried to ignore it . She tried to laugh with them. But her energy was so low, so gone.
Now, she just took it. And kept taking it. When they pushed her down and tried to steal her note book, she didn't report them, didn't care. All she did know, was how to react. How to survive. But soon, she knew she would know something more, how to show them all that she knew more...
"Hey you guys, I think I found something in her bag!" said the boy. "Jenny, Paul, come look at this!"
Kelsi reached down to take her possession back, but the malicious intentions of her peers won though.
"It's a jar!" said Jenny. "A jar of MOLD. EWW!"
"What to ya think this is for, Jim?" said Paul, grabbing the jar and holding it up to the light.
"I don't know.." said Jim. "Maybe that's her only friend."
"Come one, Jim," said Jenny. "I think it's her family. You know, the one that she's been breeding in her basement. It's the only way she could have one."
"NO, I've figured it out!" said Paul. "It's her BOYFRIEND!'
The three kids started to laugh. But not the 'oh that's funny ha ha' sort of laugh, but the biting, malicious, EVIL sort of laugh. The laugh that with each repeating tears another chunk out of a persons soul. And all of that laugh, that cruel and sinister laugh, was aimed directly at Kelsi.
Kelsi looked up. She looked at the three children trying to tear pieces of her away. In a slow, fluid motion, she reached up into her brown hair, and took out a hair clip. In the hair of someone like Jenny, the large, dark clip would be like a black circle on a white piece of paper. But in Kelsi's hair, they never saw it, until she placed it on the her drawing.
Upon looking at it, the jar of weird material was forgotten, placed on the desk next to Kelsi. Right in her reach.
"What a pretty comb." said Jenny. "I wonder if she stole it."
"I've never seen anything like it..." said Jim.
"Where did you get it?" said Paul.
"I made it." said Kelsi.
"What?" said Jenny, looking up. "I can't believe you made it."
"No, I'm lying to you." said Kelsi, sarcastically. "Of course I made it you moron."
"Whoa." said Paul, but Kelsi was not to be stopped.
"Actually, I made them for a craft show."
"THEM?" said Jenny. "Where are the other ones?"
"Here." Kelsi pulled two more clips out of her bag. They all were completely identical, from the intricate curves, to the simple star-like pattern in the middle.
"How much are they?" asked Paul, becoming, like the other two, fascinated with the complex clips.
"Yeah, like, how much would we have to pay?" asked Jim.
Kelsi smiled. "They were going to be 3 dollars a piece, but if you guys are all going to buy them now, I think I can part with them for 6 dollars."
The three of them dug into their pockets. With one motion, they all dumped 2 dollars onto the desk, onto the paper. Kelsi handed them their clips.
"Now humor me," said Kelsi. "Why don't you all put them in. I've not yet seen them in another persons hair."
As the three customers worked with the clips, Kelsi reached out and grabbed her jar from the opposite desk. She slowly unscrewed the top. There was no odor to the mixture, but the memories of it's making were sharp. The sacrifice of a dream. The hoping of a lost soul. The promise of a feast...
"There!" said Jenny. "How do they look?"
"They look...heavenly, like a, I don't know. I think the French said it best when they said, 'litenkia en mortera en mon kia avec la progenitor du diablia '" with that, Kelsi threw a handful of the moss at them.
All of them froze. The moss had stolen their freedom of movement. She mumbled more archaic words, and a red glow filled the room, and the door slammed shut. The middle of the room turned black, and out of the point that the light seemed to sink into the room, something that could only be described as demonic, stepped into the room.
"Oh great demon of the Netherworlds." cried Kelsi, falling to her knees. "As described in our deal before, here are three worthy sacrifices. They have against sinned and tormented those that they thought weaker than them. For their three eternal souls, I hope that our bargain will be honored. I hope that you bring me the magic that has been denied to me. By my parentage of the elder races, give me the power of the great ones."
The demon looked at Kelsi, and then looked at the horror filled eyes of the three sacrifices. The demon smiled, and as he left, he said but one thing.
"You wish is my command."

As the police came into the room, they looked at the poor girl crying on the floor. Their hearts wrenched in pity. It was not every day you saw three classmates get into a fight and push each other out the window, their corpses in a unidentifiable mess at the end of the fall. They walked in, the last of many police men to come in, and they saw her leave, her steps heavy, her eyes filled with tears. But as she left, with all of her possessions, a single piece of paper landed on the floor. One of the police men, who's name was Joe, picked it up, just stared.
"What is it Joe?" asked his partner.
He couldn't answer. On the page where the most frightening eyes he had every seen. The eyes were not disturbing for the fact that they almost seemed to glow red in the black and white of the pencil on paper, but for the fact that they were so demonic, and they were put onto the face of an innocent looking girl, a face like Kelsi's.