Shadowlawn

Around midday I revisited the a moment from the weather of my youth, and in it I researched the sky for the seeds of my fierce rebellion -- for evidence of my inability to slide unfettered into the cylinders of the glove of the American experiment. Where within the history of the cloudbanks did my hatred of religion arise, or the sentence, "mom made for trading fruit for boiled eggs at table two." Where within the amalgam of bleached white, cold grey and the bright blue did my trajectory veer to the very left? But just then as I shut my eyes in favor of the geometrical patters that lay beneath their nervous lids, I was again reminded of the path that led down to the box in the deep of the woods of my youth on the edge of the thick plateau where I was younger than the other two.

The Baroness Erlanger was long dead and I very much resembled one of the living. I was visibly upset at being deposited in the bloody filth in Ms. Erlanger's maternity ward. I was big; too big for my mother's portal. But both of us struggled mightily to complete the tense arrival even though we dreaded every facet of its history and the effect it would drape over our mutual and individual American dreams of posterity, and in her case, prosperity. My daddy was invisible, and my mother a shade of Appalachian ivory that seldom shown beneath the sun. The shade had left her skin the hue of those babies that adorned the baronesses long corridor. Both my mother and my screaming colleagues were protected by thin sheaths of Appalachian skin that ensured that my birth mother had an ostensibly closer kinship with these alien strangers than I would ever have with her.