Things of Mine

Lonely five-year-old Tessa has learned that her imaginary friends are real. The ponies from her cartoons fill the vacuum that the mother who abandoned her and the father who is too busy building his career can't give her. To the longing for the mother who abandoned her, Tessa adds the memories of her kitten, whom, without her knowing it, his father took to an animal shelter in hard times before Georgetown, when the alternative for them was going homeless. Then, when Tessa is bullied in kindergarten, his friends take care of the boy and traumatize him with horrific nightmares of zombies and rattlesnakes from which he can't wake up. Yet, when, after a visit to the zoo, the animals and the four-year-old son of his girlfriend's assistant seem afraid of Tezza, and after the mysterious disappearance of Tezza's mother, the girl's father, Esteban begins to suspect something is off, especially when the traumatized's father comes to bang on his door in clear distress and informs him that his son keeps repeating Tessa's name in his ordeal. Heather, Tessa's mother, has been sent by Tessa's friends to a world where she would keep drowning indefinitely, maybe forever. On the other hand, when Olenka, Esteban's girlfriend, who, like Esteban, is an academic at Georgetown, receives the visit of her grandmother Marie from Haiti, she learns of her grandma's nightmares about a girl and a man who happens to be Tessa and Esteban. Marie tells Olenka that, according to her houngan, the girl and the man of her nightmares have been marked by spirits worse than the Congo Orisas and have no salvation. Trying to convince her grandmother that her houngan's words are the result of superstition, she facilitates a phone conference with her assistant's father-in-law, a Babalawo priest from Congo. To her surprise, the Babalawo priest confirms Marie's warnings before the communication is interrupted by eerie circumstances. By the next day, her assistant and her son also have disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, Tessa is visited every night by her friends in her dreams and taken to Equestria, where life is nice and friendship is sweet. She even gets to meet Princess Celestia. By then they are irreplaceable in her life. And when Princess Celestia trusts her with a mission, like the mission she entrusted Twilight Sparkle in the cartoons, Tessa can't be happier. They would have to discover the meaning of friendship among humans. But that's also when she starts to discover the dark side of her friends: They feed in the pain and sadness of those who, like her mother now, are trapped in their universe. Then the ponies show them the dark side of humans and Tessa, unwilling to return to her solitude, accepts them as they are. As this happens, Marie decides to return to Haiti to try something with the houngan to keep the curse away from Olenka, but, as her plane leaves Washington and she goes to the bathroom, she discovers she has returned to the nightmare she had escaped from years ago, the nightmare of the Tonton Macoutes. To the rest of the world, she simply disappears. Devastated, Olenka takes Esteban to the catholic priest whom Marie and she visited before her departure. Father Harris offers them to try a liberation, a rite similar to an exorcism, if only to discard the presence of the supernatural. Still skeptical, Esteban dismisses the offer in the end, and when, under Olenka's pressure, he accepts it again, Harris is on a trip. The next night, Tessa will have to pass her final test with the ponies, who let her see the images of the day Esteban took her kitten to the animal shelter and of how it was euthanized. Heartbroken, Tessa decides to execute the vet and his assistant, which means the end of her humanity. As this happens, Olenka, visibly afraid, comes to visit Esteban at his apartment: Her mother is suffering the same nightmares that tormented Marie before her trip to Washington. And, as she leaves the apartment and takes the elevator back to the lobby, she finds an odd, giggling girl whose face starts to melt as the elevator keeps descending beyond the ground level. Inside his apartment, tired of anything related to the ponies that had absorbed her daughter's life, he goes straight to Tessa's bedroom only to find the horrid creatures watching as Tessa sinks in her bed with a malevolent smile on her face. Esteban can't assimilate the terrible spectacle, steps back in dread, and slides to the floor with the wall against his back as a malignant catatonia turns him into a vegetable. Things of Mine presents the science (physics and neurology) to make credible a universe where hell exists devoid of all morality and even the innocent can be damned.