Excerpt...or Why I've been Absent

Besides the fact that January is the absolutely dullest month of the entire year I haven't been blogging because I've been writing.  Over the years I've started several stories and never finished them because of one excuse or another.  The idea for this story has been kicking around in my head for the past three years and I've outlined it several times but never did any serious writing on it.  When we moved down here in July I started writing on it.  Reading has always been a great escape from reality for me, and writing proves to be even more so because you can actively shape and mold the story and the characters to your will.  It's wonderful and I love doing it.  I don't know if the story I'm writing will ever be published but the experience of researching and writing and pouring my thoughts into a story I'm passionate about has been extremely therapeutic.

Set against the backdrop of WWII, the story begins in Northern Minnesota near the Canadian border.  Mina, short for Wilhelmina is the main character.  As America is called to war, Mina faces her own trials at home as her brother and her boyfriend are both sent to fight in the Pacific and the European theaters of the war.  Essentially a love story about two people who leave such a deep impression on one another that their love endures through war, lies, terror and heartbreak.  The story also touches on the worth of women, the valor of good men, they tyranny of bad men or in this case a bad man, loving God through hardships,  and finding a way to live through tragedy.

I usually only share my writing with trusted members of my family because I feel that my writing is so personal and it reflects on myself.  Seeing as the only people who read my blog are friends and family I do feel pretty safe and I know if I ever want to get published I will have to be willing to show my work to complete strangers.  So if you have some time to kill I am posting a excerpt from my story below, tentatively titled Sky Colored Water.

November 20, 1943

A melancholy sadness swept down on the north wind, scouring Mina’s cheeks with icy claws.  Mina kept her head up.  The crunch of her snowshoes hardly registered in the late wintry afternoon.  A sudden storm brewed overhead and the crying of the wind in the trees sounded alarmingly like a wailing child.  It gathered milk from Mina’s swollen breasts and a steady stream of milk trickled into Mina’s bra.  It created an uncomfortable mixture of sticky warmth and cooling milk.  It soaked quickly through her shirt. 
   
Faith would be hungry.  She had lost track of time.  The burning in her muscles had been a welcome affliction as she had walked up and over the ridge and wandered through the woods earlier that day.  The woods had been unusually quiet, it suited Mina’s somber mood.  A year before her brother had died on the beach at Tarawa, like thousands of other American boys far east in the Pacific. 
   
Mina had let her mind drift darkly into morbid territory.  How long had Johnny lay conscious on the beach as his lifeblood flowed out of him?  Long enough to see friends and comrades fall, the beach a wasteland of dying young men?  A sob had escaped her lips and she sat down in the snow directly as if her body were suddenly made of lead and a heavy grief that would not leave.  She leaned her head against a pale Aspen in a bid for support.  She screamed and railed until her voice gave out.  She had stood slowly and glanced up at the naked branches of the tree as a sudden gust had torn through them.  The tree having served its purpose as her confidante fell silent once more and she walked on through the rise and fall of woodland and stream feeling as drained as the empty vessel she was afraid she was becoming. 
   
Flakes of snow descended like the feathers of a thousand angel’s wings being plucked out and scattered brutally on the breeze.  They fell fast to earth quickly forming a soft blanket over the crust-laden snow.  Keep moving.  Keep moving.  Keep moving.  The refrain sounded in Mina’s mind.  Her breath came in and out in ghostly expulsions.  Mina kept her eyes on the ground beneath her, her eyes continually sweeping the snow for the slight depressions where her footprints had fallen earlier. 
   
The conditions worsened and Mina became enveloped in an angry wall of white.  She couldn’t be sure she was on the right course now.  The snowflakes stuck to her fair lashes and blurred her vision.  The trail covered over as if it had never been.  A small dark sliver of her mind wished her entire being had never been.  She stumbled and fell to her knees as her mind clouded over with memories of terror and blood. 
   
Images flashed in her mind, like bursting fireworks on Independence Day.  She screamed as Gol struck her and her head ricocheted against the lichen-covered granite.  Time and space warped crazily in her mind.  She fell through the air, the summer sun warming her limbs before she struck the cold water below.  Mick’s hand on her waist as they swam to the surface.  Gol's dispassionate command to wash herself in the lake after he had violated her.  Micks dark eyes piercing, and full of love right before he closed them to kiss her.  Mick’s finger tips brushing her own from the window of the train that would take him from her, across the ocean and into a world of war.  Gol’s sadistic eyes upturned in amusement and on her as she tried to cover over the bruises on her face with makeup.  She sobbed as she fell back into herself.  For a moment she laid still, her cheek pressed to the snow like a shipwrecked survivor on a beach.  She was too tired to go on. 
   
Shame burned in her chest as a thousand scenes of abuse and humiliation stung her skin like so many hot needles.  She hadn’t been able to stop him.  Each morning she raised her head off her pillow only for him to smack it down again.  Another scream of loss and grief tore from her throat.  She hadn’t been able to stop her father’s death, or Johnny’s.  She hadn’t been able to stop Mick’s heart from breaking as he read the few inadequate lines she had written to try to explain away all the love and promises they had once made to one another.  She hadn’t been able to do anything.  As her body cooled in the snow and biting wind she relished the beginning numbness overtaking her.
   
“Keep moving!”  Mina heard called clearly through the blizzard.  Her head snapped up as she peered over the vast crust of snow.  She saw no one.  “Keep moving!” the voice called closer.  It wasn’t just any voice but Johnny’s.  The snow blurred beneath her and a dark sandy beach replaced it briefly.  I’m going crazy, Mina thought sanely.  Men ran around her, heavily armed.  “Keep moving, Gosh damn it!” Johnny yelled as he flattened himself next to her.  Men fell all around them, so much blood soaking the sand like a scarlet oil slick. 
   
“Johnny?” Mina whispered unbelievingly.  Her brother's face the mask of a hardened warrior, an expression Mina had never seen before.  Determination mingled with fear in the clear blue eyes that so closely matched her own.  He glanced at her, his eyes failing to register any recognition.
   
“This way!” Johnny yelled.  She saw a rise on the beach.  A dark gloom hovered over whatever lie beneath it.  Mina’s heart stopped. 
   
“Don’t!” She yelled grabbing for his arm but it was too late.  He had risen and he was already climbing the rise, his gun working back and forth in his hands as he ran.  Mina jumped to her feet and began following.  Johnny crested the rise and a bright white light saturated her vision so she fell to the ground blinded and stunned.  The world around her shed its artifice and the blizzard returned, pounding the countryside with fat flakes.  She rose shakily, tears streaming from her eyes as she ran. 
   
“Keep moving!” Sounded ahead of her from time to time as she ran chasing a ghost through a snowstorm.  She fled towards the echoing words.  Soon she was on a town street and still she ran on as if driven by some otherworldly prompting.  She didn’t stop until she burst through her front door.  The sound of angry squalling assaulted her ears. 
   
“Faith!” Mina called frantically removing her snowshoes, taking off her coat and unbuttoning her soggy shirt. 
   
Evelyn stood at the window trying to soothe Mina’s daughter.  “I’m so glad you’re back.  I was really getting worried,” Evie said passing the inconsolable child to Mina.  Mina whispered endearments as she sat to feed the child.  Mina struggled to get Faith calm enough to feed.  Her fair face was a mottled red, tears streamed from the corner of her eyes.
   
“It’s alright.  Mama’s here,” Mina cooed, struggling herself to keep from crying.  Evelyn had left the room to attend to Don.  The cries of Mina’s child sounded shrilly like a steady stream of accusations of abandonment.  Finally Faith latched on, the tug of her little mouth made Mina wince inwardly and then little by little as Faith drank Mina sighed in relief.
   
She watched the storm through the darkened window.  The only light in the room came from the glow of the white without.  Streams of water trickled from her sopping hair into the neck of her equally wet flannel shirt.  She shook with exhaustion and cold.  She switched Faith to the other side, which needed draining badly.  A drowsy feeling overcame her and she lay down on the couch positioning Faith next to her.
   
How long she slept she knew not.  When she opened her eyes again a blanket had been placed over the two of them.   As her eyes adjusted to the lightened room they came to rest on the outline of her brother sitting in the chair opposite her.  She blinked wondering what sort of magic had occurred on her strange flight home.  He appeared as he had when she saw him last, nearly two years before.  His golden hair parted on the side and smoothed back, a stray strand or two flopping forward onto his forehead.  His light eyes focused intently on her.  He was dressed in his marine dress blues, his white cap in his hands.  He leaned forward in the chair.  She resisted the urge to reach out and touch him.  Surely this was just a figment of her frazzled mind. 
   
“Mina,” Johnny said his elbows resting casually on his knees.  “She’s beautiful, so much like her mother,” He said observing the two of them.
   
“Am I dreaming?” Mina asked hesitantly, a shiver rippling through her. 
   
“Perhaps.  Perhaps not,” Johnny said quizzically smiling broadly.
   
“But you’re…you’re….” Mina stuttered
   
“Dead.  I know,” Johnny confirmed matter-of-factly.
   
“But then how?”
   
“It doesn’t matter.  What matters, is I’m here.  And I always will be.  Like I promised.”
   
“You promised me you wouldn’t die, Johnny.  You have a son you never even got to hold,” Mina gasped as her breath came rapidly and salty tears ran into her trembling mouth.  “I miss you so much,” Mina added earnestly.
   
“I know.  I miss you, too.  Mina, sometimes we can’t keep our promises,” Johnny smiled sadly.  “In this life we do the best that we can with what we know.”
   
“Your son.  Johnny, have you seen him?" Mina asked.
   
“Yes.  Everyday that I can.  He’s perfect,” Johnny said grinning genuinely. 
   
“And Evelyn?”
   
“Her too.  She’s going to be just fine, Mina.  You wait and see.  It’s you I worry about.  It’s you I came to talk to.”
   
Mina cast her eyes down wishing she could say anything positive to that.  The words I’m fine gathered on her tongue but tasted bitterly of the lie that it was.
   
“What Gol does to you, Mina, it’s not who you are.  Do you understand that?”
   
Hot shame flowed through her and she closed her eyes against the pain.  Of course Johnny knew.  Wherever he was now he had been watching. “I’m afraid of the person I’m becoming.  I feel dead inside.  I have nothing left to give anyone.  All my love, all my hope was…taken from me,” Mina said tears rolling from her eyes.
   
Johnny's blue eyes blazed brightly in the gloom.  “I know you feel that way.  You will come to realize that you have plenty of love left to give but right now what you have, you give to your daughter.  She is your lifeline, and you are hers.  You will know it in a matter of time.  It’s not your fault, either Mina...what happened to you.  I hope you truly believe that,” Johnny said.
   
A dam slowly burst somewhere inside of Mina.  She bowed her head letting the tears fall silently.
   
“What can I do?” Mina asked in anguish.
   
“Keep moving.  Onward, as best you can.  Some days you may have to keep still, to preserve your strength.  But don’t you dare go backwards.  Don’t go back and wonder.  Don’t revisit what Gol did to you until you can look at it for what it was, without any false expectations put on the girl that you were,” Johnny said steel underlying his words.
   
Mina nodded, emotions tumbling inside of her.
   
“I love you,” She said when she was finally able to speak.
   
“I love you, too sister,” Johnny said.  He stood then and bent to kiss her tear stained cheek.  “Find peace,” He whispered.  Mina blinked and he was gone. 
   
A gasp came from the kitchen.  Mina cleared her throat and tried to hold onto her brother’s presence.  Like a warm breeze leaving the room it slowly dissipated.  She sighed deeply and Faith stirred next to her, her tiny mouth open and her breath smelling of sweet milk.
  
Evelyn floated into the room as if in a trance.  She carried Don on her hip.  The flying snow outside the window fascinated Don.  He clapped his chubby hands and giggled.  Mina smiled at him. 
   
“Mina,” Evelyn said her voice high and strange.
   
“Yes?”
   
“Do you ever wonder if the dead walk the earth as spirits?  I didn’t believe in ghosts until….”
   
“Until what?” Mina asked goosebumps rising on her forearms.
   
“It happens at random moments.  I’ll feel as if Johnny’s brushing my hair off my shoulder, or touching my face.  Sometimes Don will smile into empty air as if he is seeing someone.   In the kitchen just now I swear Johnny kissed my cheek, even the scruff of his face felt real.  Crazy huh?” Evelyn laughed nervously.
   
“Not as crazy as you’d think,” Mina smiled, the memory of her brother’s voice still echoing her ears.