Disclaimer
This story is rated PG and contains no material out of character of Animaniacs.
This is an independent work of fiction with
no connection whatsoever to WB. The artists and creators disavow any knowledge
of and do no officially sanction the events in this story. This work is meant
to be the owners own personal look into what may have become of Minerva Mink.
Minerva is trademark WB. Meggie is (C) Shelly P. All other characters are
(C) the owner of this page. This story is Copyright © 2002 by Ross Snyder.
This story may not be sold or used for commercial profit in any form or fashion.
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or optical mediums.
THE MINERVA MINK STORY
"Ghosts in Our Shells"
Chapter 18
Wednesday Night:
As the hospital began to wind down for the night, Corrie, his eyes still wrapped in their protective gauze, couldn’t help but feel the specter of anxiousness float over him.
Even though it was only one more day before his bandages would be removed, and he would finally know if the surgery had worked or not, this fact really wasn’t the cause of his unease. He had come to grips with that cold hard reality a very long time ago.
It had occurred to Minerva’s older brother, in the past few days that he had been trapped, sightless in his hospital bed, why solitary confinement was considered such a punishment.
With no visual stimulus to occupy his mind, and only the sheepish nurse and straight laced doctor to occasionally talk to, Corrie found himself trapped with the last person in the world he wanted to interact with.
Himself.
********************
The dark clouds that had been forming over head all day, brewing themselves into one gray, shifting mass, finally gave a ripping grumble before pouring out the rain.
Corrie hardly noticed as it formed into a steady drizzle, then a pounding downpour, soaking him to the skin and flattening his McSqueeb hairdo onto his face.
“No.......”
The old chestnut tree that sat just nest to the small plot of land where the young mink now stood gave a shiver as the rain slammed against it, stripping of a few leaves and knocking lose several sick twigs from it’s branches.
One of these twigs spun forward in the wind a struck Corries shoulder, but he didn’t notice. The entire world was gone. The tree, the ground, his car, the small dirt road that had brought him here, even the rain. None of it existed.
Only the large marble slab set in the churned up dirt at his feet existed, and he stared at it with a fixated glare, as if not really looking at it, but through it.
“No....”
He croaked the word again, his eyes not leaving the slab, the world still not existing. Only that marble, and the words printed on it. Only they were real, and every shred of his being denied it.
“No!”
His eyes quivered in their sockets, just as a fresh bolt of lightning tore through the cloud cover, followed by a crack of thunder.
‘Here lies......’
“NO!”
Corrie spat the word as if to silence the stone from talking. But it had already spoken, and it’s proclamation was there for everyone to see.
‘Here lies Rebecca Anne Moore/Mink 1971-1994 Devoted Wife - Cherished Daughter -Loving Mother, Gone from our lives, but never from our hearts.’
And all at once, the world came back into existence with an audible bang, the rain, the wind, the earth, everything. Everything but Rebecca.
“RRRRRRHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Corrie tossed his head back, blonde hair flying about his head in mad tangles, and released a bitter, frustrated scream. The veins in his neck throbbed as he bellowed into the moist air, and he could feel his nails digging into the palms of his hands as he clenched them into fists.
Then he flung himself down onto his knees into the dug up dirt on the ground, now thick slick mud, and pounded his fists into it, screaming at the top of his lungs.
“NO! NO! NO! NO! THIS ISN’T HAPPENING!”
His fists sunk wrist deep into the mud, splattering it across his drenched shirt and taught face. But, just as easily as the world had come back into existence, Corrie forced it out again, and not nothing was real, even the stone. Especially the stone.
“NO! NO! NOOOOOOO! THIS ISN’T REAL! SHE’S NOT GONE!”
He continued to beat the earth and scream till he felt a copper-ish taste in his mouth and the muscles in his arms start to groan. His thrashing slowed, along with the screams, till he plopped both hands into the mud, panting.
“No..... She’s not.... Not dead..... No.... Not real.... Not happing....”
As the rain continued to pour down, Corrie’s body began to quake with the sudden rush of adrenalin coursing through his veins. He wasn’t cold, but all the pent up anger and denial that had been building inside him, that he had kept bottled up for the last eleven months, all came exploding out of him in some mixture of bitter rage and hatred at what was beyond his control.
The sky above Pleasant View cemetery was lit up with another brilliant flash followed by the rumble of thunder. Corrie lifted his head to it, face covered with mud splatters, and snarled.
To him, the thunder sounded like laughter. Cruel, sick, twisted laughter. This situation was funny, it said, like watching a fly trying desperately to get out of a spider web. That kind of funny.
“SHUT UP!” He screamed, feeling another shock of adrenalin pour through him.
And as if to answer him, the sky again flashed with blinding light and it’s crackling sound of laughter.
“I SAID SHUT UP!” He leapt to his feet, slipping slightly in the mud and knocking over a small stone vase of flowers next to the grave.
The storm raged on, oblivious to his shouted demands, and more lightning followed. It rippled across the sky, like a twisted vein before disappearing, the thunder afterward sounding more like a low growl than a laugh this time.
This seemed to anger Corrie far more than the laugh had, and his face contorted into a hateful mask. He pealed his lips away from his teeth and growled back, the fur on his neck sitting up despite the rain.
“WHAT’S THAT? HUH? HUH? WHAT’S THE MATTER? I’M NOT FUNNY TO YOU ANYMORE?”
More thunder, angry in itself this time, and directly over Corrie’s head.
“YEAH? YEAH? REAL TOUGH! WHY DON’T YOU COME DOWN HERE BIG MAN AND SHOW ME HOW TOUGH YOU ARE!?”
In a sudden fit of rage, Corrie scooped up the stone pot of flowers he had knocked over and hurled it into the wall of a near by mausoleum. It had taken his mother both hands, shaky with sadness and tears, to place the little pot there a week ago. But in his juiced up state, the concrete pot hadn’t weighed more than a small creek stone.
The pot struck the brick wall with a loud bang, spitting bits of red stone into the air and busting the pot into pieces. The flowers his mother had put in it fell to the ground with the force of the rain and the dirt the clung to, before they were smashed by the large chunks of stone from the broken pot.
That had been great! Corrie felt some feral part of his being let out a triumphant howl. He had broken something, caused some damage! Now that pot and that wall knew how he felt, or rather a little like he felt. And this one action was all it took to let out the all of his pent up anger.
“COME DOWN HERE AND GET ME BIG MAN! YOU LIKE KILLING PEOPLE WIVES? HUH?! WAS IT FUN TO MESS UP MY LIFE!? COME ON DOWN MAN! I HAVE PLENTY MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM!”
He reached into his mud stained shirt and pulled out the small golden crucifix that Diana had bought him when he was five and first attended church. Snapping it off from his neck with a jerk, he held it up as if to show it off.
“COME ON! COME GET ME! I HAVE NOTHING LEFT! NOTHING! YOU TAKE MY WIFE, THE FUZZ IS GOING TO TAKE MY KID, I HAVE NOTHING LEFT MAN! IF THIS IS HOW YOU RUN THINGS, I DON’T WANT ANY PART OF IT!”
Corrie flung the cross into air with everything he had, it glinted sorrowfully as another brilliant flash of lighting bloomed then disappeared into the dark.
But before he had even brought his hand forward to fling the small gold necklace, he noticed that something was wrong. It only took his hyper sensitive awareness one fleeting second to realize what it was before the world winked out again.
Suddenly, as the cross left his hand and whistled through the rain, the ground Corrie had been standing on, was now above his head. He got one good look at the British Knight logo on his shoes before he hit the ground in a spray of mud.
*****************
The rain had stopped, or he thought it had. Had it? He could hear it, still howling, but couldn’t feel it anymore, pounding on his face or chest. But, that couldn’t be right. Could it?
He struggled to open his eyes, and as they began to focus he noticed almost instantly that something was very wrong.
The first wrong thing was that the sun was out, and that couldn’t be because it had been almost eight at night when he had driven to the cemetery. Unless he had fallen asleep and spent the whole night there.
The second wrong thing was that, he couldn’t see any other grave stones. The mausoleum was gone, and the small hill past the one he lay on was vacant of any other graves.
Only one stone was there, and it was Rebecca’s.
He groaned inwardly and suddenly wanted to close his eyes again. Go back to sleep or whatever and never wake up again.
But before he could close his eyes again, a shadow fell over his face, and blocked out the sun.
It took him a moment to focus on what was making the shadow, but when he did, it caused his breath to catch in his throat.
“B-Becky?!”
Rebecca stood over her husband, arms crossed and a look of pure disappointment on her face. She shook her head and let out a frustrated sigh.
“Becky!?”
“Oh shut up you goon.” She spat angrily, still looking down on him, her arms crossed on her chest.
The words stung, but he didn’t care. It was Becky, right here, right now, alive, and even the most venomous words she could produce would be like pure gold to him.
He struggled to get up, and found he was glued to the ground. Still, he desperately tried to raise his hand, to touch her if only for a second.
“Don’t even think about it! Don’t you dare touch me Corrie.”
“But....”
She stomped her foot to silence him and dropped her arms to her sides in a pouting stance he had seen many times before. “I just don’t believe you Corrie Mink! Ohhh! You make me so mad sometimes!”
“But....”
“I said hush up!”
Corrie shut his mouth quickly, half from conditioning that comes with marriage and the other half for fear she would leave again if he didn’t.
She leaned forward, over the head stone, laying both of her little hand on it and looking down on Corrie. A cascade of curly red hair fell over her shoulder and framed her face, and this brought fresh pain surging into him, as every cell in his body screamed to hold her again.
But it was in this motion, her bending over the head stone to look at him that he noticed something odd about her. Something that made the pain of her death all the more vivid, and this bizarre experience a little more frightening.
For the Rebecca that stood over him wasn’t the Rebecca that had buried only over a week ago. She wasn’t even the Rebecca that he had married. Rather, she was the Rebecca that he had so desperately crushed on in high school. Only a girl, not yet in full womanhood, still shrugging off the awkwardness of adolescence.
This was the same ‘Becky’ who had not only helped his sister put him in rehabilitation, but keep him there through the entire program. Who had promised him that she ‘might’ go out with him if he promised to clean up for good. ‘Your just too cute to be wasted all the time Corrie.’
The same girl who had inspired him to spend two months at Muscle Beach, working himself back into a shape that resembled a young man, undoing some of the damage to much drugs and booze can have on the body.
The same girl who he had hid behind the bleachers at the high school, watching her and his sister do goofy cheers for the football team, so he could sneak a kiss from her when she left the field after practice. She had cased him half heartedly down the track that day, throwing her poms at him and giggling.
This was the Rebecca who was looking so disappointedly at him.
“I don’t have a lot of time Corrie, so I’m only going to tell you all this once. So clean the mud out of your pointy ears and listen good.”
Her face softened a bit, but that same look of pity and disappointment remained.
“You lied to me Corrie. You broke your promise.”
These words hit him like a smack across the face. If it had been one thing that Corrie hadn’t done to Rebecca, ever, was lie to her. He opened his mouth to deny this but she cut him off.
“You promised me you would clean up. That you would never, NEVER touch any of that stuff again. But you did, and because of it, they’re going to take our daughter away. How could you Corrie!?”
“Y-you died....” He croaked, but as soon as it had left his mouth he wished he had kept quiet.
“Oh okay, that makes a ton of sense! We’ll when you put it that way dear, that makes it okay! Why don’t you try telling that one to the judge that!? ‘Oh sorry, my wife just died, so I felt it was okay to drop my infant daughter off with my parents and go get higher than a kite!”
He wanted to shout back at her, tell her that she didn’t know, couldn’t understand what he had been through, but then, she had, and even worse, she was right.
“Now listen up buster!” She pointed a finger at him. “Those idiots with social services are going to try and take our baby away, do you understand that? Away Corrie, forever.” She paused to let it sink in.
“If you don’t pick yourself up, clean up, and straighten up, you are going to lose Stephanie, and if you do.....” She grit her teeth and shook a fist at him. “Ohhh, you don’t even want to know what I’m going to do to you Corrie Mink!”
He had a sinking feeling that he really didn’t want to know. Becky had always been a very mild tempered girl, never yelled much, and certainly never struck him or anyone else that he could think of. But when it came to Stephanie, she could be a surly as a mother bear, and just a vicious.
“And your little cross tossing contest, very cute. But don’t you think it’s about time you grew up?”
He felt his blood start to run hot and thump into his brain now. He clenched his fists, even if he couldn’t move, and glowered back at her. “Don’t you start preaching to me...”
“Well it looks like somebody better! It’s always about you Corrie! What? You honestly think, that with everything going on in the infinite galaxy, that God just decided to smite me with cancer, just to piss you off?!”
“YES!” He bellowed, surprising himself with anger in his voice.
“What kind of an ego does that take?! You know, ever since we met, you’ve been looking for some excuse to hate God, and I’ve never understood it. I tried to help you work through it Corrie, but then I just backed off. But I will tell you this, I’m not going to let you use my death as a reason to turn your back on what you know is right. I wont let you.”
Suddenly, Corrie felt the thumping in his head get worse, and a bolt of pain rippled from one temple to another. Rebecca’s face began to fade out for a moment, along with the vacant cemetery, then slowly fade back in.
“My times almost up Corrie. Do you understand what I’ve told you? Are you going to do what it takes to get Stephanie back?”
She gazed down at him again, this time with an expectant look that made him feel all the more pitiful. Here he was, Corrie Mink, slathered in mud like dirty bum, looking up into the face of his deceased wife. The tears came with surprising ease.
“Yes.” Was all he could blubber out.
At this, Rebecca’s face finally softened, and she stepped out from behind the head stone and knelt beside him. He noticed that she was even wearing the little blue and gold cheerleading outfit she had on the first time they met.
“Oh Corrie...... Please do this. For me? I love you so....”
She touched his cheek gently with the tips of her fingers and Corrie suddenly felt very tired. His eyes drooped, and suddenly, he was sleeping again.
**********************
“Mistah? Mistah? You alright? Hey, wake up!”
Corrie’s eye shop open and he jumped, almost smacking away the elderly man that was shaking his shoulder.
“Hey now, take it easy therah. Looks like yah had yaself a pity nasty fall.”
With that, the elderly man, who Corrie identified as the old racoon cemetery groundskeeper, took a hold of his shoulder and helped him to his feet.
“You feelin’ ahright son?”
“Uhh, ya. I think so.” But that was far from the truth. His head throbbed, partly from the fall here, and partly from bashing his head on the surf board now two weeks ago. Not only that, but his eyes were hurting too. And the fuzzy tunnel vision he was getting, came with more frequency than he wanted to admit.
The groundskeeper looked about as Corrie got his head together. The mud pit that had been a new grave a few days ago, the broken pot, and smashed bricks. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure things out.
“Pretty bad starm last night. Would have believed it to be a ‘Noreastah if I wasn’t in Calafornah.” His thick Maine accent could have been cut with a knife. “Can’t believe you managed to sleep right through it.”
Corrie opened his mouth and shut it a few times, before he got out, “Vandals. I uh, was coming to check on things and caught them messing around. Must have got the better of me though.”
He panicked a little, trying to think up some descriptions for his phantom vandals if the old man asked, but he didn’t.
“Shaw, shaw. Lot of that round herah. Kids with too much free time on their hands I always say. Looks like one of them gave you a pretty nice thump on the head. You want to come sit down at the shack and have a cup?”
This was tempting, the night rain had soaked him good, and he felt chilled to the bone, but the last thing he wanted to do was be there now. He wanted to go home and changes his cloths.
“No thanks sir. Sorry about the mess, but I need to be getting home. My folks will be worried about me.” This was only half a lie.
“You Becky’s husband I take?” He said in a casual tone, but it was enough to make the younger man stop in his tracks. “She use to come work fah me in the spring time, oh say getting on thaateen years now. Said she liked how quite it was, and the view over tha hill. Use to sit undah that tree there and read. Nice girl, shap as a whip, damn shame. I’m sorry for yah loss.”
Corrie nodded slightly in his direction, and lumbered off to his car.
**********************
It struck him almost funny how quickly the mind can conjure up thoughts that you had believed to be lost forever. Like one of Scrooge’s ghosts, a memory could just come bubbling up from the dark recesses of the mind with almost startling celerity.
After all these years, he hadn’t once thought about that day much more than a week after it happened. With some fresh cloths, a shower, and a refreshing dose of reality, it was far easier to believe that what was left of Becky’s personality in himself had come out to scold him that night, than the supernatural specter of his dead wife.
But that didn’t matter as much as the effect it had on him. He stopped the pity party that very next day, and poured himself into beating the state at it’s own game, giving them a one-two heave out of his life and away from his daughter for good.
And perhaps, like his screaming fit in the storm that night, his stay in the hospital was intended to have the same sobering effect on him. Hadn’t he heard all his life that things happen for a reason?
So far, one bitter truth had come forward into the light while he had sat in bed this week. The truth that he had never really excepted what happened to Becky. And in not excepting it, he had simply removed everything about her that made him uncomfortable from his life, and did his best to forget. Better to forget than to heal, easier too.
Everything that was, except for Stephanie. And perhaps, he thought, nestling back into his pillows to try and get some rest, that it would be through Stephanie that he would finally have to heal up this particular wound.
“You have a lot of work ahead of you buddy boy. Either way this turns out.....” And the empty room replied with a silent acknowledgment.
*********************
“.... And so Sarah and Patty decided to go down to the big yellow tent and watch the Stella the Amazing Flying Woman, ride bare back on spotted pony in preparation for that night’s show.
“Do you think that Stella will let us ride one of the ponies?” Sarah asked excitedly.
“I don’t know,” Patty said with a smile, “But she did say she would give us some pointers so that we could help her with her act. And who knows? Maybe we might catch a glimpse of that creepy grounds keeper sulking around too!”
“And so, both girls walked under the tent’s big flap, hand in hand, to help the gypsy woman prepare her act.”
Diana stuck a cloth bookmark into the book she was reading and closed it, setting it on the night stand next to Stephanie’s bed. “I think we’ll stop theaya tonight darlin’. We can finish the rest tomorrow.”
“But who stole the money Grammy? It had to be the Strongman! The groundskeeper is to small to have stole all of it! Was it him?”
The elder woman helped her granddaughter off the bed and wiggle out of her cloths. “If I told you that, theaya wouldn’t be any reason for me to finish the story naw would theaya?”
“I guess not.” Stephanie said folding up her jeans and putting them back in her suitcase. She was about to put on her pajama’s when her grandmother produced a long cotton nightgown from the big oak dresser in the corner and offered it to her.
“It can get stuffy up here sometimes darlin’, but I think this will be a lot more comfortable that some ol’ pajamas.”
Stephanie looked at the nightgown with a quizzical expression. She still wasn’t all that keen on girly things like dresses and such, but she also wasn’t unknown to wear them. Diana must have seen the conflict in her granddaughter’s eyes.
“It use’ta be your aunt Minerva’s when she was a little girl, so it should be about yoah size.”
This sealed the deal, and Stephanie pulled it over her head with a little help from Diana to untangle her pig tails from it.
“Theaya now, you look fine. If you need, you know, durrin’ the night, theaya is a pot under the bed and....”
Stephanie’s eyes got the size of dinner plates and she let out a little scream. “Grammy!! EWWW!”
Diana only laughed and ruffled her hair. “I was only kiddin’ hunny. WC’s down the hall a bit, I’ll show ya.”
They proceed down the hall a few steps to two doors across the hall from one another. “Girls room on the left, Grandpa’s room on the right. You can use either, but our room has the light down the wall fawtha so us delicate little girls can reach.”
There was a tug on Diana’s gown and she looked down to meet the confused face of Stephanie looking up. “Grammy? What’s a ‘WC’?”
The little girls look of confusion was mirrored back for a moment, before the elder mink broke into a smile and giggle. “Did I call it that? Oh hunny, that’s ya grandmatha’s age showin’.”
She let the little girl back to bed, and helped her hop up in. “When I was justa little girl, that was sometime befowa the Civil War,” she winked and Stephanie giggled, wiggling down into the sheets, “the polite term for the bathroom was the ‘Watah Closet’. So we useta call it the WC for short.”
The little girl gave her a dismissive wave. “You aren’t that old Grammy! You’re like them movie stars in those black and white movies they show on the weekend!”
“How’s that hun?”
“You’ll never get old. They stayed pretty and young forever. Like a nice Dorian Gray!”
Diana smiled and kissed Steph on the nose. “That’s a sweat thang to say hun. Now you need anythang before I turn off the light?”
“Just my stufftee please. He’s in the pocket on my suitcase.”
Going over to the Baribe case, Diana found a large lump in one of the pockets and produced a large stuffed TY Bumble Bee. “Now, just who might this be?”
“That’s Mr. Bumbles!” The little girl said, outstretching her arms. “He’s my very best friend. Daddy and Aunt Nerva got him for me.”
She placed the stuffed bee into the little girls arms and watched a she squeezed it tightly, one of it’s cloth wings poking out from under her arm, then settled down into bed.
Diana knew that Becky had been a big Winnie the Pooh fan growing up, and had rubbed a little of that off on her daughter. Bumble bees and butterflies had been the things of Stephanie’s childhood, and would always be.
“Goodnight Stephanie, sleep tight. Get lotsa sleep, so we can go out and do some thangs tomorrah.”
“Okay. Night *YAWN* Grammy.”
And she was asleep, no more complicated than that. Dreams came quickly, mostly of her and her father playing on a sunny hill, tossing a ball back and forth, then with a kite that flew so high into the sky that she almost couldn’t see it. When Corrie pulled it in closer, to keep it from flying away, Stephanie could see the face of a smiling woman painted on
the belly of the kite, her long red hair the tail.
Then the kite was gone, sucked up into the bright blue sky.
The rest of the night was taken by the stuff of little girls dreams.
End Of Chapter 18