Animaton by Judy Colella (online e book reader TXT) 📖

I don’t know what I am. When I went to bed last night I was human. I breathed, felt pain, had a heartbeat, got hungry – this morning, I can do none of those things. My skin is neither hot nor cold, but it feels strange. Dead, maybe. There are no unusual marks on my body that I can see, no holes, scratches or incisions. My teeth look the same, I have a reflection, and sunlight has no abnormal affect on me. I am not a vampire, a werewolf, a zombie, the victim of any kind of abduction (alien or otherwise) and there are no pods anywhere in my house.

When I went to bed last night, I was an unremarkable 21-year-old female human being. No...I’m something different.

Like everything else in Texas, the expanse of sky was huge. Outside of town of Bloodstone, the desert splayed out across the horizon to horizon, and due north to the base of a long tumble of hills. Scruffy west Texas pines and brush sharing space in the hot-cold sandy earth provided occasional shade for occasional animals venturing at top speed across its dry floor. Above, the brilliant blue was blinding, peaceful, unbroken by even a single cloud, providing an awe-inspiring backdrop, a celestial curtain that was never quite the same shade from one day to the next. To Shane Collier, whose heartbeat was this vast with its subtle treasures, the changes were a source of constant, profound joy.

Only one feature marred the otherwise perfect panorama – a long, black line thinning into the distance that bisected the flow of desert. As far as Shane was concerned, this road had no more business being there than the town to which it was connected, or the motorcycle on which he sat, staring at the sweltering blacktop and wishing he was on his horse instead. But horses had been outlawed in Bloodstone – too many outsiders had moved in, people who didn’t want large animals snarling its minimal amount of traffic, who couldn’t seem to deal with the fact that horses didn’t use litter boxes, or even get the whole leave-the-land-alone-it-isn’t-yours thing.

Shane did. He’d grown up on a ranch less than a mile beyond the line of hills. The idea that man could ever own something so vast never even occurred to him when he was younger. And later, when someone had suggested otherwise, he’d laughed in disbelief.

He wasn’t laughing at the moment, though; he was disgusted. At 21 years of age, he owned 3 vehicles – a pickup truck he and his father had built together when Shane was fourteen (and which still ran well), the Harley he was riding at the moment that his father, Austin Collier, had bought him when he’d started college, and his horse. His dad, on the other hand, had long since traded in his own flatbed for a huge SUV, a decision his son had seen as a kind of betrayal. But the man still had his horse, since herding cattle with an SUV would have been ridiculous.

Shane adjusted the straps of his backpack, an item he absolutely loathed but had to wear when he rode his bike. It wasn’t like he could strap large enough saddlebags on the damned machine, and he needed to put his school books somewhere. In two weeks the semester would be over, and he’d have his degree in business management, a course suggested by his father who had said it would help Shane run the ranch when it became his, and even before that, when he would start taking over as the older man eased into retirement.

“Damn it, Clayton,” Shane muttered, thinking about his older brother who was supposed to inherit the family’s cattle business, but had more or less abdicated the year before to go marry some girl who lived in Tennessee. “You had to go sign up with that stupid dating service…never thought about how you were hurting Dad.” While Shane was okay with taking over the business instead, he still would have preferred to have Clay around, wouldn’t have minded working for him, but no. Ol’ Clay wasn’t satisfied with any of the local girls. “Shoot.”

Pulling a bottle of water from one of the deep pockets of his leather jacket, Shane took a long drink as he eyed the heat mirage-puddles further ahead on the blacktop. Part of him wanted to take out his cell phone and call Clay, tell him what an ass he was. But then he shrugged. Guess I’m more like Dad than I like to admit. Keep my feelings in too much.

Unless Austin’s emotions got too raw, he would shield his family from his own sorrows, a habit he admitted to Shane not long ago. This reminded Shane of his mother, somethone he didn’t allow himself to think about too often. “Thanks, Mom. Wish you knew how you messed us all up, selfish witch.” Sighing, he finished the water, shoving the empty bottle back into his pocket.

As he picked up the helmet resting on the handlebars, he glanced back at the town behind him. Once he was done with school, he’d have no reason to come back except for an occasional trip in for supplies and groceries once every week or two. A visit to the bar on a Friday or Saturday night was the only other reason to make a run across the black umbilical cord, and that was plenty for him.

He shook his head at the road and slid the helmet over his head, its dark tinted visor blocking out most of the hot sun’s glare. A useful bit of technology, but he always felt like he was on the verge of suffocating when he wore it.

“Whatever.” His voice sounded like he was talking into a drinking glass; he kicked his bike to life, and took off across the desert, driving in and out of heat waves rising from the tar, through and past the mirages on its arrow- straight surface.

His horse would have been so much nicer.

x-x-x-x-x-x-x

Sunlight pierced the mossy clearing around the old cottage, gold daggers slicing into a green heart. The cottage, dappled with unexpected honey-mellow brilliance, glowed in this bath, suddenly a place of fairy-tales, happy-ending legends, beautiful now, even if only for a brief while.

Inside, sweeping early summer dust from the corners, Samantha Cowles smiled at the bars of peaceful yellow, welcoming their source with a sigh of delight. The young woman put her broom aside and went out into the transformed woodland where she began to twirl in the speck-sized spotlights peppering the moss carpet beneath her bare feet. Then, raising arms and face as she turned, laughing, she was blessed that only nature and its God could see her.

Spring had been a long sentence of rain that had permitted no visitation from earth’s star. Moth grey and unbroken had been the celestial mantle for far too long.

A poet and artist, Samantha had purchased this atmospheric bit of British real estate a year earlier for its solitude and ambience, loving it at first sight. But the recent lack of sunshine had begun to affect her work in ways that were becoming tiresome, her efforts almost meaningless. Gloomy and dripping with despair, her paintings looked haunted, while her poetry needed a different muse. And nature had just supplied one.

She began twirling in the opposite direction, too elated to consider how all this spinning was going to end.

Less than a minute later it did, when she lost her balance and fell down. After a quick, involuntary shriek, she started laughing again, rolling onto her back and staring up at young summer leaves that shifted and spun as she waited for her vision to stop swirling.

“I need paper!” she exclaimed, still spread-eagled on the ground. “And my best pen! Ha!”

Those who knew her had often wondered what would become of her – at 21, she was already well on the wrong side of eccentric. She knew this, too, and didn’t care one bit. But she was getting a little tired of the constant frowns and the way people sometimes spoke slowly to her, as if afraid she couldn’t understand them otherwise. So she’d sought – and found – her own place, a hidden niche in the world where she could be herself and not worry about who thought what. An easy out for her parents who gave her the down-payment perhaps a mite too much enthusiasm.

She’d owned a laptop, but it seemed too out of place in the cottage, even though the small structure had been wired for electricity. Before moving in, she had donated it to a school and stocked up on paper, pens, and an old-fashioned type-writer.

On an ancient wooden table beneath one of the diamond-paned casement windows, Samantha had set up her work space, liking it as much as the other things with which she’d furnished the two-room dwelling. Her easel and boxes of paints enjoyed a corner of their own opposite the large windows, so that on dreary, wet days she could stand with her back to the skim-milk shade of daylight while she painted. On days like this one, of course, she would sometimes, if so urged by her inner DaVinci, bring it all outside.

But today felt like a poetry day, so when the world had settled back into place, she got up and went inside for her notebook and pen, then rushed back out and sat on a large boulder to the right of the cottage. Closing her eyes for a moment to the thoughts come, she soon began to write.

A poem of happiness and relief, the two stanzas rhymed only at the very end of each; she read it several times, changed a word or two, then scribbled her name at the bottom. Then, jumping to her feet, she cleared her throat, and read it aloud:

“Would a clouded heaven despoil my core of joy?

Tuck it away into its own breast,

Jealous of that which was never its own

And keep it from its rightful tabernacle,

The place of its birth?

“Ah, no, but the sun, too strong for thee, oh lowering firmament,

Has snatched it back,

Replacing it in its rightful depths,

Where now joy re-joys at its return,

Overflowing with indigenous mirth!

“How‟s that, sweet birds? Am I the only one who likes it?” She sighed, read it through once more without finding any glaring flaws. So far, all of her work had been accepted by various publications, and now this one would be added to her latest batch. At some point, she hoped, her royalties would total enough to enable her to put them all into one volume, a compendium that would make it unnecessary to sell individual poems, a book that she would illustrate in the margins herself.

The continuing cascade of birdsong and the ebb and flow of cricket-talk in the lush undergrowth was her answer. She smiled, happy with the sun, with the wildlife around her, with her sweet little home, and decided to stay outdoors until the day flowed down over the unseen horizon behind the trees.

Sweeping was a necessity,