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Jenni Button's Journey Home
Little Jenni Button dreamed of fitting in at her new school. She dreamed of seeing her parents reunited, and being a family again. Most of all, it seemed Jenni dreamed of being noticed by her girlhood crush.
Some dreams have a way of coming unhappily true.
When the little girl in love meets tragedy at her private school, she discovers a place between life and death. Trapped in an endless realm of dream and song, she carries with her a little gray stone that keeps a secret all its own.
Excerpt:
IV: Forces
Things had a way of turning in this place. Logic was a malleable constant. It made no sense in hindsight or foresight, but at present would coalesce into a perfectly sensible harmony.
Crossing through a prodigious wildflower garden, Jenni had spied a trio of crudely sketched crows frozen overhead. Upon notice they were crows no longer and were instead great spires of radiant ocherous flame. They scintillated canorously. Their music welled over her from nowhere and everywhere. The melody was a solar light without a star. The light, a vibration in the trees and in the ground. The vibration climaxed in horns, in string, in reed. It twirled around her as she cavorted gleeful spirals along the pearls. The timbre of mountains hummed solemnly, as if rousing from deep slumber amidst paltry mortals to at last bestow their hymnal reverence to its rightful due. She had cried out in its glory; herself exalted by it, overjoyed with it. It twined fever round her bones and was mellifluous on her tongue. The perfume of roses, of cinnamon, of seawater overtook her and she breathed deep the aroma of this grand orchestral score. A final crescendo. She realized airily that she was the song, and it was the euphony of life.
Then, all at once, it ended. The moment departed from her as faded dreams past. Forgotten utterly, forever lost.
She continued, a lone figure traversing the pearls. Through veldt, around mountainous ridge, into a vast sanguine desert stitched with enormous obsidian quills. The pearl path clicked metronomically in her brisk footfalls. There was a rhythm to it and in all, through all, binding all. As sea was sky so sky was earth, and earth creature, and creature melody. Moments of song rushed upon her now and again and to this she was a tireless consort. It moved her in skittering dreamscapes and waxed fervid in her blood. She would retain nothing, her joy was an ephemeral shade purged by time’s impetuous strokes.
Thus eons swept a pendulous course.
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