Chapter One

Respect

 

The following is an excerpt from Chapter One of Mama Root: The Old Woman of Loop Road

 

 

~~~To his left an aging frame structure struggled up out of the swamp.  The skeletal remains of a white picket fence lay strewn around the front and a walkway of rough-hewn cypress planks led to the house.  The traveler shut off the engine and watched a thin curl of steam escape from beneath the hood as the scalding water of the radiator loosened the electrical tape.  Apprehensive in this alien environment he glanced out the driver’s side window, making sure that he wasn’t about to step on a rattlesnake or whatever the hell else they had out here that was poisonous.  Stepping from the car he trotted across the expanse of ground between the parking area and the stairs leading up to the boardwalk.  He climbed the steps, navigated the expanse of cypress planks that comprised the walkway and broad front porch and entered the structure.  There he found an old woman – old in the most extreme sense of the word – arranging tins of chewing tobacco behind the counter.
    “Hey, you Mama Root?”
    The old woman continued about her work.
    “Yo, Mama Root?”
    The tins were arranged to her liking and she turned her attention to plastic packets of fish hooks and several pairs of cheap sunglasses hanging from a minnow snare.
    “Excuse me, ma’am?”
    She turned and smiled.  “Sorry, hearin' ain’t what it useta’ be.  Must notta’ heard you twice’t calling my name.”
    He recoiled upon seeing her face.  She bore few similarities to the living; her features more closely resembled those of a mummy.  A thin layer of translucent skin stretched across her skull, with blue veins visible beneath the surface.  Dark holes of eyes were sunken into her head, and such teeth as remained her were yellowed and misaligned.  Her bone-white hair was thin and long, hanging in tangled filaments like Spanish moss.  She spoke again in a voice not unlike the sound of a child’s first violin lesson.~~