Inbetween

Chapter Two

Her apartment was dark and quiet when Willow returned home, just the way she liked it. She was still new enough to living on her own to savor every moment of it. She loved that she knew no one had touched her things or moved anything around while she was gone. It was not as though her parents had gone through her stuff all the time while she was living at home, at least not as far as she knew and she would like to keep on not knowing if it turned out that she was wrong. Knowing that she did not have to hide was enough to make her feel freer.

For now, she just wanted to relax at home. With her obligations for the day fulfilled, she could take it easy until tomorrow. She needed to unwind while she could because she had a feeling tomorrow would be less than fun at her part-time job after she missed her shift today. She could not do anything about it now so she tried to push it to the side until later.

She was glad that the calls for field work were relatively infrequent these days. At most her family might get one call a week. Some of those were still handled by her parents, but she suspected they were taking less and less of the calls themselves these days in a bid to keep her involved in the business.

Overall it was not too much of an inconvenience. Most of the time she could fit these exorcism gigs in around her other obligations and even since she started working fewer and fewer people required their services.

She considered it a product of the changing times. To her, it seemed like a positive change. Superstition held people in their area back and they would need to leave it behind if they were going to move into the modern era along with the rest of the world. At the rate the calls were decreasing, she hoped that they would stop altogether before her parents were ready to retire.

She read the old log books from her grandparents' time and even earlier. There had been a time when her ancestors had spent every day traveling door to door cleansing homes and businesses of evil. Back then their services were sometimes required for barns and even storehouses. It seemed ridiculous to Willow now, expelling evil from places occupied by livestock and food, but it seemed like people back then were very, very afraid and needed all the help they could get. Now most of the people that were left that called on their services were older. A lot of them had been around when her grandparents were still on the job, maybe not as the ones calling them in, but at least as children on the farms and in the small towns where they traveled. The younger generations either lacked the beliefs of their elders or were not from around here and did not have any knowledge of this sort of thing at all. Most of the rest of the world did not believe in this sort of thing anyway which only made it seem that much more backward to Willow.

Even the shop was suffering a bit from the lack of belief in the area. Aspen had saved that aspect of their business from going under. Tourists just loved to visit the shop and soak in the old, folksy atmosphere. As long as Aspen kept everything as old-timey as possible she would be just fine for years to come.

Willow just wanted to be separated from it all. She did not want the exorcisms. She did not want the shop. She wanted to be indistinguishable from masses. She wanted to blend in along with the crowds of young people that were leaving the cities and slowly turning the countryside into an extension of the suburbs. She hated that she stood out. She hated that she still lived in a small town where everyone knew who she was and what she did. She wanted to save up and move far, far away. Then she would not have to face people every day that knew that she was struggling to make ends meet because her greatest academic accomplishment was half a degree from a community college that she would never complete unless she got out of this town.

She realized that she was stuck in a cycle of negative thinking. Exorcism excursions always seemed to bring out the darkest thoughts in her. She just needed to do her best to break the cycle. For that, she needed bright, happy thoughts to replace the annoying unhappy ones.