Young Jody Alpha 12-16-1990

Young Jody Alpha 12-16-1990 (working tittle)

Young Jody Alpha with her hair of shimmering sunlight, peered through the chewed and rotten railings of the auction yard. Her huge blue eyes leaked salty tears not only from the stench of excrement covered animals, but from the tortured silent cries of dignity dying.

Her father placed a hand upon her shoulder and knelt next to her. “An awful shame these beasts  half to go through this.”

“Oh Pappa, lets buy them all and set them free.” She said without taking her eyes from the animals.

Casting a glance at the butchers and kill buyers he replied. “In a way Jody someone will.”

A towering white ghost of a horse walked unevenly through the knee deep mire and awkwardly thrust his ancient muzzle through the gap in the fence and smelled Jody and then drew it back in and began to chew on the rail in one last attempt to regain freedom.

“why does he limp so Pappa?” ask Jody reaching out a hand to stroke his stubbly one white nose.

He caught  her hand and returned it to her side. “He’s a pacer that is his natural gate….why I bet this old man was quite a racer in his day.”

Again she reached up a hand to touch the haunting apparition of a once great horse. Again her father caught her chubby hand and held it tight.

The sunken horse drew up his head and peered down at the child with one of his smoky blue eyes. For a few seconds, or an eternity, no one knows which, Jody’s heart beat in the primordial rhythm of racing hooves. Swept through a crack in time to join as one with this phantom pacer. Her hand rebelled against her father’s restraining grasp.

“Jody.” Her father said sternly, with his one word saying a speech.

“It’s okay Pappa!” she excitedly exclaimed “He’s come for me!”

…and  her eyes burned as the radiation blasted across the land. She blinked frantically to clear the gritty dust from her eyes only to drowned by the sickly sweet warm air…

There was seven of them, always seven, a number preordained  by voices long since hushed. Five of them perched on the edge of adulthood yet still tangled among the threads of childhood. And two of them immersed in the multi-hued world of childish wonder. None of them numbered past one decade and six years of age.

A group of highly skilled horsemen living in a time of half a reality half a fantasy. Time split in two different dimensions by the force of the modern civilized man…a nuclear reaction going supernova.  Causing earth ways to overlap and beings from one existence to spill over into a newly formed land of strangeness. It was as if the shadows had changed places with the sunlight.

They would call this new land Treekinin and within this world is where I dwell forever and ever always out of sync. My name has long since ceased to mean anything. They call me Jilinchi and I am the keeper of the dead. My form I’m free to change, yet I mostly stay within the form of a horse. A pure white mare with black Chackta burns around my eyes the radiation. The humans say my Chackta marks resemble the makeup of the ancient Egyptians. I laugh causing my Chackta marks to curl. I know not of what they speak, yet they know nothing of belly bands and Chando staffs. We have a lot to teach each other. Perhaps we’ll find we are the same.

There was seven of them, always seven. The eldest was Richards’s daughter, her name is Jacy. This child-woman was persistently followed by a brown pony tail bobbing in her wake. She was strong yet gentle and had a compelling aura about her. She is teetering on the edge of knowing and understanding….a place where many has fallen. She is the daughter of the impish MaryQueen, an alabaster beauty with raven black hair. Many a man has drowned in MQ’s beauty.

They tell me of my journey to become the keeper of the dead. The guardians of Always have spoken of a child called Jody who was summons by the phantom pacer with smoke-blue eyes. The pacer pulled me in through a leak in time and kept me from perishing in the searing heat of the blast, but in doing so my human body, unable to make the journey, was destroyed .  I was given the echo of the pacers form to dwell in forever more. I can transform myself to any creatures echo, even those that only exist in the minds of mad men.

There was seven, always seven. Then there was Jennifer. Small yet strong. Strawberry blond hair capped this tomboyish lass with violet eyes. In her nine years of living amongst us in this world she’d acquired the knowledge that all men dream about, yet dare not seek. Her mother a mortal mettling among the spirits has gifted her with the sense of Gumwallyea-dew, this is nothing for a child to possess.

  

We live in the land called Treekinin, who’s name nothing to those who will not listen. Surrounded and encased in a gelatinous dome made of sunlight and air and dust fused by the blast.

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End here unfinished. Dayammmmm, looks like I am a serial leave-um-hangin' writer.

This is actually an attempt to re-frame/rewrite my Novel The Children of Starr. It had morphed into a bloated beast that needed culling/pruning/amputating. I picked the angle of setting it all through the eyes of Jody/Jilinchi.