[Here’s Chapter 1]

Jeep never got used to the hospital bed in the living room, against the wall where the Christmas tree stood every December. Mom, who always had been full of life and energy,  had aged daily, it sometimes seemed, until now she looked like a shriveled little imitation of herself lying there, hooked up to monitors with an I.V. inserted in the back of her hand to keep her hydrated or something.

The visiting nurse finished taking Mom’s vital statistics, double-checked the intravenous drip, and smiled blankly at Jeep.

“Sorry to interrupt,” the nurse said, a hand brushing back Mom’s hair. “I’ll be in the kitchen for a while before I have to go, so holler if you need me.”

“Thank you,” Mom said, and after the nurse was out of earshot, added to Jeep, “She’s one of the good ones. I wish they were all like her.”

“She does seem nice,” Jeep said, although she couldn’t really tell the difference between this nurse and any of the others who came to the house twice a day to monitor her mother’s deterioration.

She managed to laugh at one of Jeep’s lame jokes and then something dark seemed to pass over her eyes.

“Honey,” Mom said, “you need to know something, something important.” 

Continue reading “Chapter 2 – Mom has a secret” →

Once upon a time in a land not unlike our own, there lived a young woman who wanted to see the stars.

“I gotta tell you, it’s pretty darn boring around here sometimes,” the young woman would say, even though her best friend, Blaine, was a vampire, which would make anyone else’s life interesting.

Blaine wasn’t a dangerous vampire, and that is one of the ways the land where she and Blaine lived WAS unlike our own. In this civilized land, vampires could go to the grocery store and buy pasteurized blood in bottles, some of them flavored with flavors no one ever thought of until they did, some as obvious as cherry vanilla and others not as obvious.

But about the young woman being bored: It was because her mother had been an explorer, although how much of one wasn’t clear until the day they found The Traveler.

“Guinevere,” Mom would say, “this is a vast and wonderful place, and there’s more to reality than these four walls and the sky above.”

And so the young woman wanted to see beyond these four walls and the sky above. That’s where all the trouble began, although years later she would tell people it was also where her real life began.

But she would not ever tell anyone else that her name was Guinevere. The only reason Blaine knew was because he heard Mom call her that once, earning an embarrassed roll of the eyes and a glare that would have made Mom’s blood curdle if it hadn’t made her laugh out loud instead.

Guinevere Prudence Thompson hated her name. Hated it. Never mind that she was named after an Arthurian queen and a Beatles song. 

Continue reading “Chapter 1 – Once upon a time” →