Assignment #1

We've decided to share with you all excerpts from our Journey School Stories character development workshop. Zoe is first up with her response to Assignment #1, Childhood Memories. Best wishes, Lisa.

by Zoe Mathias

My name is Ilona Evenfrese.

When I was but a tiny infant, I remember being warm, and my mother was singing to me. Rocking back and forth, humming a soft lulling lullaby. Whenever I hear her singing it now I cannot understand the smooth guttural growling words, but though I can't quite recall the words I know I understood them then.

Smells waft through the warm air, isolated to the house by bars of icicles.

Nana and Inga are making bread. Sweet ginger bread with just a pinch of grape root ,"Shh Ilona, don't tell anyone. It's an Evenfrese secret.”

Let's see, a touch memory. Ah, that's it. When I was five years old my baby sister Maeve was born. That morning my Nana and Papa gave me a beautiful purple wool dress. I could feel the springy hairs of wool itching gently against my skin. That night Papa took me in to see Mama and baby Maeve. The baby had the softest skin, so soft I could hardly tell she was real.

I was just old enough to pull the string back on my little bow the first time Papa took me out with him and my big brothers. My father hunts at night, like the big cats. I met an owl that first time, as my Papa and brothers crept ahead. He caught me with his yellow gaze, and he whispered his name to me, the small word floated by my ears, carried by a silent wind.

For as long as I can remember that fleeting time that is between winter and spring is my favorite season. It seems like such a magical time, where life is waking up from a cold, death like sleep. The trees are stretching and reaching from skeletons in to lovely flowing creatures. When every gray has a tinge of pink, green, orange, red, purple, and yellow.

The bees buzz, and my tongue tastes again the absent flavor of gold, mellow reassurance that is honey.

I was eleven when they came. It was a clear October day, the kind of day that gets people ready for frost. They wore black coats with the insignia of a powerful, bloody house. A red boar with a long jagged scar carved into its shoulder. They threatened death if we didn't leave, and as good with a knife as my father was, he was a peaceful man. We left with one wagon filled with us, my brothers' dogs, my sister's cat, and a few dear things.

A month after we were exiled, my Nana disappeared. We looked high and low, but we did not find her. A week later I dreamed my Nana was in our ancestral graveyard. She was fighting one, two, three, four guards. As she put her old kitchen knife in one guard's belly, another drove a long bladed hunting knife in her side. Her red blood stained the snow over my grandfather's grave.

The next day a loyal family friend gave us the news that my Nana was dead, killed in our graveyard, but not before she gutted one of her attackers.

From that night on I have asked every god in the other world for a dreamless sleep.

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