The IX of Dead Sticks
It began around 5 AM, when Sister Madly was awakened by this cryptic message:
“Err n and I want to ws ‘ll err I’m here to westv xxx and bj ask.”
Apparently, auto-correct couldn’t be bothered to interpret the Professors’ fantastic twaddle- that or, as Sister Madly suspected, just didn’t dare.
As it turned out, the Professors wanted to lay out itinerary for the day, consisting of a leisurely salad, followed by an advanced yoga class, after which they would be hitting up every Happy Hour between the studio and the drunk tank.
Yeah, Sister Madly doesn’t quite understand the logic behind the Professors, either. To begin with, Sister Madly does not do this thing called ‘salad’- in fact, the very sight of a leafy vegetable is enough to send her into fits. As for yoga- she has this thing called a spine, which is determined to prevent Sister Madly from bending herself into a pretzel.
Besides- yoga poses are for mountain tops.
But she’s totally down for the Happy Hour part.
As she was politely declining the salad and the yoga (i.e., Salad? Hello, have we met?!) there came a knock on her door, which she decided to confront while wrapped in her leopard-print bed sheet (not as sexy as it sounds.)
There are few things more terrifying than finding a man in a HAZMAT suit at your door. This post-apocalyptic missionary’s message was regarding the upcoming window-replacement that afternoon, and how Sister Madly was to vacate the apartment for the duration due to something called ‘Lead Paint.’ Apparently, it is not the most nutritious substance to inhale.
Society is always warning us of the dangers of inhaling substances other than air- even water has gotten a bad rap. Surely these fears are greatly exaggerated!
Take, for example, the first time Sister Madly tried cooking with wine: she got quite a buzz just standing over the skillet. Seriously, inhaling the steam was almost more fun than drinking the wine- almost. But she made it through the incident without much damage to body and soul, and ended up writing a very lovely email to a friend. What if it’s the same with Lead Paint? It could be the key to unlocking one’s creative genius! Yet Sister Madly will never find out; no, she’ll be whimpering through salads and sprawled out dead on a yoga mat while the HAZMAT Missionary returns home and paints some masterpiece worthy of Michelangelo.
After being shooed from her apartment, Sister Madly began the death march towards the Leisurely Salad- and was waylaid by a cackling crow, who pitched a dead bird at her from the tree branch overhead.
For heaven’s sake- what did Sister Madly ever do to you? Not only was this act deliberate, it was executed with force. And yet the incident wasn’t a total surprise, for she had recently come across a crow in the most peculiar way: having found a Tarot Deck in a free bin nearby, Sister Madly was naturally curious as to what this deck was all about.
And the first card she drew was The IX of Dead Sticks.
Ok, so ‘crow’ wasn’t the first creature
that came to mind…
It’s said that there are different methods of interpreting Tarot cards, one of these being intuitively. In retrospect, Sister Madly’s intuition had revealed that The IX of Dead Sticks meant that even though she would be flirting with a vegan lifestyle, the crows would not fooled by this pretense will pelt her with the corpses of their kin.
This is why The IX of Dead Sticks never turns up in horror stories: such a plot would only sell on the West Coast.
You know, Sister Madly, Leisurely Salads and Yoga are only in your future if you permit it. You are at liberty to change that future if it’s heading in a direction you don’t wish to go- maybe that’s what The XI of Dead Sticks is really trying to tell you.
And so Sister Madly informed the Professors that she will not be participating in the pre-Happy Hour Vegan Extravaganza; she’ll be eating dumplings and General’s Chicken* at the Chinese Restaurant, the one with the palm trees painted willy-nilly on the walls.
* With a fork, which caused the Professors to have a meltdown.
Fortunately, they do not know where that is.
The IX of Dead Sticks. Sister Madly is not fooled; she knows exactly who’s behind all this:
THEME SONG: Black Crow, Peter Murphy’s Carver Combo
Sister Madly
The Sixpence at Her Feet 