The Many Lives of Mrs Murphy

Reading and writing came very easily to me

but math made no sense whatsoever.

I also had a really bad stutter.

The kind where I'd get stuck on a word

or just couldn't get my sentence started

my Dad yelling at me, "Start your car, boy!".

So when I was in the fifth grade

I was sent to a special tutor

in a little room

with two other kids

to work on our math and speech.

The tutor was a lady with long grey hair

thick glasses in old school

1960's wing-tipped silver frames.

a thick build and two round cheeks

that were always smiling & red

warm and inviting.

She'd have us work on an

old, tan, used-to-be-white, computer

the kind where the only colors on the screen were

bright green & black.

We played math-based computer games on it

shoving large floppy disks into the huge thing

circus themed green math problems.

A lot of the time

the other two kids didn't show up

so her and I talked a lot

about commonplace stuff, most of the time,

but one day

she started telling me about

her previous lives

her numerous encounters with extraterrestrials

the strange tests and experiments that were performed on her body.

She told me that she

gave birth to an alien-human hybrid.

My little ten year-old ears

couldn't believe what this grown-up was telling me

holy shit man,

"Well, where is your baby now?" I asked, on the edge of my little plastic seat.

"I don't know. They took him away from me and sent me back to Earth..."

"Really?"

"Yup. And that was the last time that I was ever abducted, they've left me alone ever since."

The next day Mrs. Murphy explained to me, reincarnation

and told me all about her past lives.

In one of them

she was a man

Mrs Murphy said,

playing with her long grey hair

which sat on her shoulders

braided in pigtails

probably the same way

she had been playing with her hair, since she was little.

Mrs Murphy told me about being a monk in a Buddhist temple

one of her other lives.

Now, an alien-baby....okay. I get that.

As a ten year-old boy in 1995, I could at least, wrap my head around that one.

However, the past lives thing, really confused me.

I was an American-Christian boy, with no knowledge of such Eastern things.

So I asked my Mom about it.

Told her what Mrs Murphy had said.

My Mom got really mad

I remember, it really surprising me

that she would get so mad, about Mrs Murphy telling me that.

Mom said, she was gonna go talk to the principal tomorrow and

have something done about her.

"Crazy fuckin' bitch, be telling my kid all that fucked up crazy shit?! She's sick, Mijo! Something has to be done!"

I begged and cried

pleaded for her to please not say anything

and just leave her alone.

But she went to the school anyways.

After that day

I never saw Mrs Murphy again.

I couldn't help but feel guilty.

Even though my Mom, the principal, and all the other adults

told me that Mrs Murphy was mentally ill

and had just made it all up

but I still wished I never said anything about it.

She was nice to me

she always listened to what I had to say

and treated me like an equal.

Didn't tell me to shut the fuck up

or to go to the corner of the room

or to focus more on my work

she was good to me.

And I hated to think

of Mrs Murphy

unemployed

siting at home

just playing with her long gray hair

all braided in pigtails

crazy as a shit house rat.