“A child full of woe, born on the thirteenth… Wednesday Friday Addams, that must be her name!”
Thunder cpped suddenly, and I gasped as I came to full awareness with a bright fsh that seared into my sensitive retinas.
“Ooooooh yes! More!” A woman moaned so sensually that it nearly made her blush, and the smell of ozone and burning flesh filled the air. A deep voice, seemingly belonging to the one holding her, moaned with delight in response, and my only coherent thought was the desire that I wanted to be anywhere but here.
“Struck by lightning indoors simultaneously with the pain of childbirth…! Oh how I sorrow for not being the proper sex to experience such delights!”
Lightning? Childbirth? And what the- what the fuck is wrong with this guy and his wife!? My head was swimming with sensory overload, trying to recall what got me into this situation, and what exactly this situation even is.
“It’s a sign, dear! Oh and I just knew our daughters would be an unlucky one!” The woman said between hot breaths.
“Do you think she’s like me!?” A third voice joined in, higher pitched and raspier than the one holding her.
“I don’t feel electricity while holding her, but we shall certainly test the little one when we get home, brother!”
The woman interrupted with two words, “Little ones.” The one holding me gasped and handed me over to the third voice whose arms and chest felt staticy like rubbing a balloon, when I paid attention to it. He was making little whimpering noises of delight and fear as he held me carefully like a doll. Ugh, my body was all gooey and gross and cold, what the hell!?
“Twins!? Where? Are you still giving birth- doctors, come back!”
“There isn’t a second body, querida, only a second mind; I saw it when the lightning struck.”
The man holding me looked down at her in awe, from what little she could make out with my shitty eyes. “Two for one, what a horrible deal! What do we call the second one?”
“I’ve already named them both, even if I didn’t realize it at the time. Give a warm welcome to Wednesday and Friday Addams!”
The memories finally slotted into pce, and I realized what was happening. My reincarnation ritual had worked, and now I was born into a body already housing another consciousness, to a family of nutjobs. Well, fuck.
*
After a handful of months falling in and out of sleep ter, and I was certain of a few things. For one, this family is way richer, way crazier than I’e thought! There were three more members living in the house -which I was still unsure if it was a gothic mansion or not- and one of them is disembodied hand! An animate disembodied hand named Thing, of all things. Connecting the dots on that one for the first time when I blindly touched the fleshy severed wrist had freaked me the fuck out.
The second member took a little longer for me to notice because he was so silent, and vision was spotty for awhile. Lurch was a tall man judging from the height he’d raised her up when she was picked up by him. He was silent as a grave and she was always caught off guard when she realized he was in the room, but that only happened when someone called for him specifically, and he didn’t talk to us at all.
The third, however, was someone I’d been meeting the most. “Grandmama” was by our side more often than not, an old hag who looked like she walked straight out of a random cabin in the wilderness. She was also a bit too enthusiastic about our health, if you asked me.
Yes, our health, because Morticia -our mother- wasn’t kidding about the whole two minds bit. There was a whole ‘nother baby in this body! Sadly, they don’t seem reincarnated like me though.
“It’s okay little sis, remembering everything isn’t as great as it’s made up to be anyways.”
“?”
Wednesday was a quiet baby when she didn’t need to eat or change diapers, but I could feel that she had more emotion under the surface than she let on. She loved it when Grandmama read her stories, or when our father Gomez and uncle Fester pyed catch with our body over the boiling cauldron. And when she got irritated, she would immediately let it be known via swiping at the family with her nails.
But if I were to say, her most noticeable trait is her horrible, no-good, inexplicable death wish. If I zoned out for even a little bit -which happened a lot with our muddled baby brain- I would suddenly notice we were crawling headfirst into a lion’s mouth, climbing up to the top shelf of the pantry and covered in leeches from a spilled jar, or three feet away from the edge of the diving board into the pool.
I’d never really understood the phrase curiosity killed the cat before, and now I wish I didn’t know.
I’d like to say I contributed to our survival, but honestly, it was the exact opposite. Wednesday seemed to have the inverse of my bad luck curse. Whenever something truly bad was going to happen to her, some stroke of “bad luck” would happen to the thing that was about to kill us. Uncle Fester stepped on the lion’s tail, a bottle of some kind of pesticides spilled over our body to kill the leeches, and a bald eagle nded in the pool to act as our floatation device after it was shot by Lurch for dinner.
Me, on the other hand… this family freaked me out, and the house was full of dangerous secrets, so I tried to huddle our body up in our crib as much as possible. But instead of finding trouble, trouble always found me.
In just one example, a condor tried to fly in through our window and snatch us away, and I had to throw my body and tip the crib over on its side, to draw attention from Morticia who fended the bird away with a thorny potted pnt. Then, when she tried to put that same pnt on the windowsill to defend from further attacks, it tipped over and fell onto the floor, where I had to crawl away from its slithering form and duck under a swiveling floor pnk hidden under the rug. Then that ceiling broke and I was forced to spray the highly lethal herbicides I had gone through the effort of stashing away down there.
Gd my habit of stashing useful stuff everywhere came in handy, but this incident probably wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for me getting overly stressed with my sister’s escapades.
So, yeah, from then on I never took control unless it looked like Wednesday found something useful or when we were in too much danger to trust my sister’s supernatural luck. By that, I mostly meant when it looked like something exceptionally painful was about to happen. Luck or no, we could still get hurt, and did so very often. It was to the point where we probably would have died of an accumution of multiple small things by now if it weren’t for this body’s crazy constitution.
If I were being honest, this was actually the deciding factor in limiting my “body time”. The pain wasn’t completely numbed when I wasn’t in charge, but it was at least distanced from me, as if it wasn’t my pain. I’d always hated pain, and this family seemed to welcome it with open arms, so it was often mentally taxing even to just be present in our body a decent amount of the time.
At least it was entertaining, I supposed. A small part of my overheated mind that hadn’t been occupied with the fear of death had been worried about being reduced to a stinky crying potted pnt for a few years with nothing to do, but as it stood, I was too consumed by stress and anxiety to have the luxury of being bored. Every waking moment was spent trying to wrack my brain about how to record proof of child neglect or find evidence of the many crimes the family bragged about both ambiguously and openly.
If I could only find some sort of proof that the Adamms were horribly suited to raising children before this body turns ten, there was a significant chance I could be adopted as an adorable little girl to a nice family. But once I get past a certain point, even being a cute girl won’t get me past a couple’s unwillingness to adopt an old kid with baggage. I knew from experience.
And so, whenever I felt the surroundings safe enough, I wiggled and babbled like there was no tomorrow. The sooner I could move and talk, the faster I could find a way out of this hell family for me and Wednesday both.
