Unfinished Fragments.

Fragment 1: untitled

[Michelle Chapman ©2001]

I remember a time when golden primroses flooded the paddocks around our village, carefully grown and harvested for their medicinal properties. Today those pastures are bare and dry, the soil hard and parched, its surface cracked like crazy patchwork. Clutching my memory of those sunshine yellow fields rippling in the breeze, I crossed the withered landscape, stepping carefully around the few wilted, struggling weeds which were managing, somehow, to survive. I remember when this world was beautiful, I repeated over and over again, as a talisman against the awful devastation I expected to find, once I reached the village itself. ...

Fragment 2: Dawndancer

[Michelle Chapman ©2001]

The sky was dark, the moon long gone. All the tribe, even MoonSinger and StarGazer, were soundly asleep in their small huts by now, safely snuggled in WoolWeaver's blankets. In the east the faintest touch of light tinged the horizon with an unfathomably deep blue.

As the predawn sky grew imperceptibly lighter, a figure became visible on the mist shrouded summit of MeadowHill. She wore a long hooded woollen cloak and full woollen skirt, both pristine white from careful bleaching on the sunny sands of RiverRaspfish. Her feet were bare.

The long grass of the hillside showed the winding path of her climb. Only where she stood was clear of the thick sweet grass, a bare spot worn into the hill by her bare feet, every morning for the last nine years, and by her predecessor before her, and back through a long line of tribal sisters. She was DawnDancer, and it was her duty and her joy to welcome the sunrise to her village, asking for a blessing on the new day.

Wriggling her bare toes in the damp soft soil, DawnDancer remembered the first time she had woken before dawn ... five years old, barely able to push aside the heavy skin that closed the dormitory door. It was chilly, and oh, so dark, but for the first time she was not afraid to be out at night alone.

She had been 'child' then, like all the other village children, loved and cared for, happy and playful, yet to choose their place in the busy flow of life around them. Not that DawnDancer remembered ever making a conscious choice. It had just seemed so natural in the clear, cool, mystical light before dawn, to find the gate of MeadowHill open, and a basket containing a costume that glowed with the glow of the sky.

For the first time she had pulled on the heavy, soft, white woollen skirt (tied around her waist with some rope to stop it slipping) and cloak (it was four years before she grew into the cloak's hood, and could wear it without being blinded by its thick, soft folds). Just as she finished donning her new costume, an older girl stumbled, bleary-eyed, from a nearby hut, her mouth an astonished 'O' as she saw the child in her clothes. 'But ...' The protest was only weakly stuttered. The pull of warm bed and warmer dreams was strong upon her. ...