STORM DWELLERS

Chapter 4, excerpt

It was quiet again in the SUV. Lynn turned to check on Darcy and found dozing; her head bobbing from the motion of the vehicle.

Lynn yawned. She was sure they had been driving the same road for hours, maybe even passing a few places twice. Round and round.

Something doesn’t want us to make it home, Lynn thought to herself. Damn rooster! Again?

For the third time, Lynn soared passed by a stationary red and black rooster, rooted in place like statue with the exception of a few feathers tousled by the wind.

Immediately after, she whizzed by a welcoming sight, a sign that read: Black Willow 10 Miles. Overcome with a sense of immense relief, her heart rate slowed as her hands loosened on the steering wheel.

“Finally! We’re almost home, Darce,” she whispered as she patted Darcy’s arm.

Lynn and Darcy spent most of their lives in Cameron County, Texas. Meeting in the first grade, they hit it off immediately as if they were meant to be friends.

Darcy walked up to join the line accumulating outside to enter Miss Julie’s first-grade classroom, and her eyes landed on Lynn. She was drawn straight to her, and she crossed the grass like a boss, jumping the line as she bounded up to Lynn.

“Hello, I’m Darcy. I think I know you.”

Lynn studied Darcy; head tilted. She smiled.

“I’m Lynn. I think you’re right.”

A gust of wind blew, shaking the tree leaves. Some children, parents and teachers alike lost their grip on papers and took off chasing them around the grounds. Girls and ladies giggled or hollered out as they fought to control fluffing skirt tails.

Darcy and Lynn watched the chaotic sight on the school grounds.

“I wonder why the grownups are so frustrated and chasing papers,” Lynn said. “They just need to calm down. Let those papers fly away!”

They laughed and had been inseparable since that day.

“I saw your mommy in my dream,” Darcy told Lynn the morning they met. “She sang to me in words I never heard before.”

“Nope. That ain’t right,” Lynn said. “You didn’t even meet Mommy yet. And she doesn’t sing in anything but English, silly.”

However, when Darcy met Lynn’s mother, Angela, she told Lynn that Angela was not the lady she had seen in her dream; she did not look anything like that woman.

“I told you so,” the young Lynn stated.

“Yes, but,” Darcy persisted, “she told me that she’s your mother. I promise.”

Lynn was unable to wrap her young mind around it at the time, but she never forgot that day, and she was always curious about the woman Darcy dreamed. They talked about it a few times over the years, but never in depth and they never wholeheartedly pursued the dream woman’s identity.

When they were older, they searched Lynn’s old family photographs to see if they could find the woman among them. Lynn and Darcy made plans to save money and have an artist draw the likeness of the woman from Darcy’s memory of the dream since she had no drawing skills of her own.

One day, right before they entered the eighth grade, Darcy and Lynn took an introduction to French class at the library.

“That’s the language the woman sang to me in!” Darcy exclaimed.

***

Sybil and Terry Mendez’s mother, Adelina, claimed a lineage dating back to the Texas statesman, Jose Antonio Navarro. Their father, Richard, on the other hand, did not talk much about his ancestry, in fact, he went out of his way to avoid discussion of his ancestry so often that even it left Adelina and her daughters wondering about it. When they would inquire about their paternal ancestry to their father’s parents and other relatives, they always got jokes and snarky remarks in return.

Their father’s maternal grandmother, Paz – who was still alive and kicking at ninety-four, always told them that their father enjoyed rebuffing the ‘ooga-booga’ side of the family.

As kids Sybil and Terry would run around hollering, “ooga-booga!” which in turn made their dad, Richard, quite unnerved.

Copyright 2023 Wanda S. Paryla