The Witch at the Park (part 2)

There comes a time in life when the simple memory of playing with your child becomes our biggest desire when we grow old. "Maria, remember when we went to the park that one time when you were 3 and all you wanted to do was play on the swings?" As my daughter responds like she always does when she thinks I saw something stupid, "Mom, of course not, I was 3!" Then she gets up from the breakfast table to finish getting ready for school, rolling her eyes and mumbling to herself. I just laugh, "Typical teenager."

Although, I've known from a very early age that Maria wasn't a typical child. Maria is...how do you say it...Psychic but not. The thing is, the day she turned 3 and we went to the park for her birthday, a witch put some sort of curse on her. She'll have these moments where she'll go into a total trance and start talking about things that she has no prior knowledge of or predict events in the future. One event that she seems to repeat on occasion though is that day at the park, she says she doesn't remember it but she's gone into this trance time and time again and said this one instance several times. She has also predicted major events such as 9/11, Obama being elected, major natural disasters, the oil spill, you name it, and she's probably said something about it yet she never remembers these random spells. We've been to doctor after doctor and all said that everything was, well, normal. The only thing we can figure is the witch at the park on her 3^rd birthday.

Of course we have learned to deal with it as best we can but it has happened several times as school. She has had teacher's that have been very understanding of the situation and they have another student help her to the nurse's office until the trance passes and she heads back to class. Then of course there are other teacher's that don't believe anything is wrong and she is just doing it for the attention and trying to get out of class. So, she ends up getting detention over something she can't control.

The scariest thing though, is every year on Halloween, something happens to her that is absolutely horrifying. Even a person's worst nightmare cannot compare to this and it gets worse every single year. As she recently predicted, this one is going to be the deadliest...literally.

Halloween comes and Maria's school day, thankfully, goes smoothly. When she got home from school, she started to prepare her typical snack as she always does when she gets home but there was something different about it this time. Over the last couple of years, Maria has insisted that we always keep sandwich stuff and turkey lunch meat in the house for her after school snack but today, she made a bologna sandwich. Which to most people may think "finally, she's eating something different for once" but the thing is...I never bought a pack of bologna in my life. Nor has my husband or any of my other children. I know that Maria wouldn't have gotten it because she isn't allowed off campus during school hours and I would have grounded her till she moved out if I found out she left. So I was in complete shock and fear from this simple mundane task. I try to brush it off; maybe I accidentally grabbed the pack of bologna when I went to the grocery store last night.

What happened next is when I remembered what she had predicted. As she was eating her bologna sandwich and starting her homework, her face and her mannerisms were completely different. I mean she still looked like Maria but not. Then I had a flashback to what the witch said on her 3^rd birthday. The witch said "On her 16^th Halloween, she will start to change, first her minor mannerisms, then her personality, slowly but surely she will change for the worst and become possessed by the devil himself." As fear overwhelmed me, I told her to finish up her homework as quickly as she could because I didn't know how much time we had before this transformation was complete. Considering it was a Friday night, she gave me a confused look but decided to finish it the next night. As we drove up to St. Mary's Catholic Church, she instantly got a migraine headache but she didn't think anything of it and took some Excedrin. Now I have been going to this church since I was a child, and Maria has gone there her entire life. She never missed a service unless she was sick, so it was strange that she was getting ill and not wanting to go in because this church was her home away from home.

As we were walking In, I noticed her eyes weren't the bright blue they always had been, they were completely black. At this point I realized that she didn't have much time left at all. The priest met us in the sanctuary as I was praying over Maria and I told him what was going on. Maria was very uncomfortable within the walls of the church, which was very abnormal for her. She definitely wasn't the Maria that I knew. Our priest started asking Maria some questions about what was going on and she was acting like she had never seen him in his life and didn't know her own history of her psychic abilities and prior Halloween events. I knew at this point it could probably be too late for my baby girl. I tried to hold on to what little hope I had left though because if I looked deep enough into her eyes, I could still see the girl I knew so well.