Mother Goose

Mother Goose is...

I don't know how to describe her.

She helps people.

She runs a homeless shelter, though if you looked at her you'd think she belonged in it herself. I don't know exactly how old she is, but she says she's around one hundred and ten. She says that every year, too - I've known her for at least nine years and she's always said she's around one hundred and ten.

Mother Goose is my grandmother.

Or maybe it would be more accurate to say she's my godmother? How I'm connected to her I never really bothered figuring out. I only knew her for a few months in college before I was finished and moved out with Beauty Helen, and she seemed to forget all our interactions every time I visited her. The last time I saw her, she gave me a check for something like a hundred thousand dollars and told me to live my life to its fullest. I promised her I would.

That's going well.

After that I managed to talk to her over the phone or through email sometimes, but after the Creature invaded my life I gave up on everything else besides getting Beauty Helen back. I never found out Mother Goose's real name; maybe "Goose" really is her name but something makes me doubt it. Anyway, I hitchhiked to her city of residence and put down money enough for three nights at a cheap hotel. It had a bed, a shower, and free wifi in the lobby, which was all I needed.

Sometimes I don't eat for weeks. It's never even slowed me down.

Actually I'm still squatting in the parking lot of that same hotel, because Mother Goose told me she'd need some time before she could get what I wanted, and it's been, what, two weeks since she said that? I needed her special talents. She calls her self an alchemist; her friends say she's a chemist, and I say she has what I need. I don't mean lead into gold or anything like that, no, Mother Goose whips up these...concoctions that affect your emotions. She can wipe away fear or erase regret, if only for a short time. I didn't need either of those. What I need is to remove any rational thought.

She sounds like a drug dealer, but it's more complicated than that, and not illegal, as far as the fact that she hasn't been stopped or even confronted yet. As far as she or I can tell there's no side effects of her - of her potions, I guess. If I'm going to go after Bambi Mary I can't think about it too much or I'll realize what an idiotic idea it is.

Maybe I got lucky in my choice of middle school extra-curriculars, but I know good meditation techniques. I know the standard stuff you'd find in any cheap back-of-the-store pharmacy book, but I also know one or two tricks that can...make me forget. And the most difficult part about a plan like this is remembering how idiotic it is. There's at least two levels of idiocy here; the idiocy of my plan to deal with Bambi Mary, and the idiocy of my plan to enact that plan. I need to forget about the second idiocy, which will allow me to go through with the first idiocy without any hesitations or further accusations of idiocy.

God, I'm such an idiot.