A while back, I wrote a story that was inspired by something a friend of mine told me about her childhood.

I never published the short story, because it was so completely personal to her, and I took a few liberties with details to fit it neatly into the short story form, and also to set the story in a time closer to the time-period I was most familiar with.    This woman was about ten years older than me, the youngest of several children in a Catholic immigrant family.

The family was from Poland.  My friend was the youngest because her mother had died while giving birth to her.

The father’s sister came from Poland to care for the children and help their father run his household.

This aunt was apparently a perfectly sufficient care-taker for all of the other children…but she believed that my friend was touched by evil, and possessed by demons, which had killed the mother.

So she tortured the little girl for the duration of her childhood.

I only learned of this story because of my blundering and often insensitive big mouth.

My friend had lost her first child in utero.  She had given birth to her second child with great difficulty, and he was three weeks pre-mature and struggled through infancy.  Her third child came along and this is where the story actually picks up.

My friend’s little toddler had fallen face-first into the wading pool while her back was turned.  Only the quick action of the older child (who was all of four years old) saved the little girl.  It was one of those momentary lapses that every parent has, every parent knows they have, and every parent know it is only by luck or provenance (whichever you prefer) that it turns out well.

There were a few other small bizarre mishaps, which I don’t even recall exactly what they were now, ten years later.

A few months later, my friend was stalled in a residential neighborhood.  Her old van had stopped running, and she had no idea why.  Her two children were sleeping in the back seat, and there was a house right there.  So my friend decided to ask to use the phone.  (this is before cell phones were as ubiquitous as they are now)  The woman who answered the door said “Is that your van that’s burning?”

My friend turned, and sure enough, there was smoke and flames shooting out from under the hood of her van.

She managed to pull her children out, they were treated and released from the hospital, the fire was put out, and except for some minor concerns associated with smoke inhalation, the kids were OK.

I couldn’t believe her run of bad luck.  We were sort of sitting around doing the “Now that everything’s OK, let’s try to make light of it to make ourselves feel better” thing, and I said “If I didn’t know better, I’d say there was some supernatural force after your kids.  It’s like the last few months it’s been one freak accident after another.”

She looked as though I had slapped her hard across the face.

Now, in my defense, this was completely in keeping with the tone of “I can’t believe it, how bad can my luck get” quipping that SHE had set for the conversation, and I had never had an inkling that she was tortured by a religious nut for her whole childhood…

…but the whole story came pouring out then and there.

Some of the most horrifying things I’d ever heard.  And the last thing was that apparently this evil aunt had told my friend that if my friend died first, the aunt would urinate on her grave…and if the aunt died first, she would haunt my friend and make her life miserable because of the pain and evil she had brought to the family.

So, you can see why it sort of bothers me to read this story.

The punch-line is, of course, that my friend’s husband is a Protestant Fundamentalist, and they send their kids to a Catholic school.

I don’t understand people sometimes, and I don’t know why someone who was tortured by religion, who’s misery was caused by superstition, who felt shame and terror over some bizarre belief that she was responsible for something she had no control over, would ever subject her children to the same philosophy and raise them with the same view…

…or why huge segments of the population would turn away from reason and make a mad-dash back to the Demon-haunted world.

Then again, some run the other way, and thank goodness for that.