Sparkle

It was a glorious Sunday morning at the outdoor flea market. May weather really brought out both the sellers and the buyers in droves. Some sellers were still busy setting up their card tables on the parking lot which had been repurposed as a temporary market. Amber looked for her favorite seller, who offered a bewildering array of costume jewelry from decades and lifetimes past. The old tonsured man whom she knew only as “Jewelry Jim” smiled at her across the lot. Cornily, cutely, he waved one arm over his shoeboxes and jewelry cases of sparkly brooches, rings, bangle bracelets and those anachronistic watches that almost nobody wanted these days. The wave of his arm was an invitation to the treasure hunt Amber always enjoyed. She could easily spend nearly an hour going over Jim’s several card tables of costume jewelry, seeking what she called “that grandma bling.” She loved brooches on her cardigans. She’d even go in for the occasional cameo pin, especially if it was a mythological theme.

Jim handed her a little plastic box she could load up with her preliminary selections before the final cull. Many of her favorite pieces were only a dollar. Jim was always buying job lots and he liked quick turnovers on his merchandise. Sometimes you could find a really nice signed piece for a steal. Amber had always said she wasn’t the biggest fan of the classic sunburst rhinestone brooch (it struck her as such a design cliche) but today she found one that would simply not let her look away.

It was still early and the sun had not risen so high in the sky, but this brooch that fit so easily into the palm of her hand was dazzling her with its hidden spectra, little slivers of rainbows flying off. After a cozy half hour of winnowing stand-out pieces, she settled her bill with Jim. She wished him good luck with sales and headed towards her car. She had only spent fourteen dollars and could not wait to share her little vintage treasures on social media in the following week. She looked down at the pin consisting of two mice, presumably married, Mr. and Mrs. Mouse, nestling each other, their blue eyes and red eyes (respectively) aglow. She was sure that one was from the late sixties or early seventies at the latest. She was already modeling it with various outfits of different colors in her mind’s eye.

She climbed into her little red Sonata and placed the bag of pins (Jim always poured the final selections into a little white bag of the sort candy shops use) on the empty passenger seat. But not before removing the starburst brooch and affixing it to her rather dingy grey Disney parody t-shirt. She adjusted her rear view mirror to admire it briefly. It still sparkled with the morning light but she noticed that a blue sparkle now alternated with a red shift of light. How lovely. How strange.

It was on a country backroad which led to the highway which took her home where she felt the strange sensation of something burning into her skin. It was right where the brooch was pinned. She wondered if this was some new allergy to cheap jewelry that was announcing itself. When she grasped the pin while continuing to drive with her dominant right hand, she happened to look up and see in her rearview mirror that it was no longer her own face reflected there. It was a woman at least sixty-five years old, wearing a completely different outfit. Her hair was a frosted brunette and in a style that one rarely saw anymore. Amber did not scream. She smiled at the woman’s stylish poplin raincoat.

“Acid!” was all she thought. “The pin must have had l.s.d. on it and when I pricked myself…” Could lysergic acid linger on a pin for a lifetime? Of course not.

She laughed. And then she realized she had just missed her turn off to reach the highways which would take her home. She didn’t care any longer. She would steal glances at the old woman in the rear view mirror, who was now smiling back at her, knowingly. Unless that was just Amber’s smile that somehow translated to the other face. The pin was sparkling. She felt weirdly elated.

“We’re going somewhere,” Amber thought. “Yes,” the head in the rear view mirror nodded, and smiled, without saying a word.

Amber found the car had reached a rather old suburb she had never visited before, though it was only ten miles or so from where she lived. The development was filled with houses dating from the thirties or forties, larger Colonial homes mostly, and the trees were mostly sycamores and very tall, offering significant shade. She parked her Sonata where she felt she should. Then she glanced one last time in the mirror to see the woman in the rear view mirror nodding her head again and smiling. “Yes,” she seemed to say, “the perfect parking spot.”

After walking for a block and a half, Amber found herself going around the back of a particularly nice Colonial style home and entering the kitchen through the unlocked screen door. With his back turned to her, an old man sat eating a bowl of oatmeal and grumbling about the president. He must have been nearly eighty. Beside him sat a woman perhaps twenty years his junior and she looked so tired and sickly. But Amber knew she must have been quite a beauty once. You could just tell. She was mopping eggs up with burnt toast.

Amber found herself quite surprised when she picked a long knife from the butcher’s block on the counter and plunged it into the back of the old man. She moved so quickly she shocked herself. The woman screamed as the knife sank deeply into flesh. The old man only gurgled a smoker’s death rasp and then began choking on his oatmeal. The woman struggled to get up from her chair. She made it as far as the ridiculously old school phone on the wall, but no further. After she had them both down on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, Amber found herself ending their misery with a coup de grace delivered to the fleshy wattles of each throat. She remembered the way the old man’s eyes grew large as he reached out to grab and tear at her sparkly brooch. Now it was covered in blood. She threw it into the sink and ran a torrent of tap water over it. She left it there and fled.

She had a change of clothes in her trunk from a recent camping excursion so she quickly got out of her bloodstained clothes and back into her car. She was standing there barefoot in bra and undies on the asphalt for a few seconds. But she had not seen another living soul and the neighborhood seemed sleepy. Probably mostly seniors who did not stir much at this time of the morning. She hoped there were no security cameras watching her. She felt weirdly lucky. Still elated. She did not see the woman when she looked in the rearview mirror on the drive home. She was only brave enough to check twice. Then she bent it away, out of her vision.

Amber wept only after she had made it home and was safely in her bed. She told herself she would confess. At first. Then she knew she would never tell a soul. She was home. Perhaps home free. She felt such terror. But she felt a weird little calm inside that terror. Something which had needed to be done had been done. She had been of service.

“They must have been terrible people,” she whispered to herself in the mirror. “Monsters. They had to have been monsters.” She must be right about that, she knew. If she were to live with herself. She knew it must be true.

“The way he grabbed the brooch,” she reasoned. “He knew. He knew who it was who had come for him. He expected it even. That look in his eyes,” she told herself. “And the woman. She did too. She was just as guilty, whatever the hell it was.”

What was the name they had screamed at her as the blade would complete each arc coming down, as the blood flew up to the ceiling and covered it with spatters like a sick Easter egg?

Oh yes. “Caroline.”

They had groaned it multiple times as the life ebbed from them: “Caroline, no!” They knew who she was.

“Amber didn’t do that,” Amber promised herself.

“What lovely taste in costume jewelry you had, Caroline,” the young woman whispered into her pillow and clutched it tighter.

Then she noticed she had not scrubbed the blood entirely from her fingernails as she had at first reassued herself. So she went off to take care of that. Afterwards, she would try to find something else to do for the rest of the day. Perhaps a movie. Perhaps a nature walk with her new DSLR.

Hopefully it would be something distracting and light-hearted.